Andrew Johnson National Union Ulysses S. Grant Republican Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 3, 1868.

In the first election of the Reconstruction Era, Republican nominee Ulysses S. Grant defeated Horatio Seymour of the Democratic Party.

The 1868 Republican National Convention unanimously nominated Grant, who had been the highest-ranking Union general at the end of the Civil War.

In addition to his appeal in the North, Grant benefited from votes among the newly enfranchised freedmen in the South, while the temporary political disfranchisement of many Southern whites helped Republican margins.

By 1868, the Republicans felt strong enough to drop the Union Party label, but wanted to nominate a popular hero for their presidential candidate.

House Speaker Schuyler Colfax, a Radical Republican from Indiana, was nominated for vice president on the sixth ballot, beating out early favorite, Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio.

It opposed using greenbacks to redeem U.S. bonds, encouraged immigration, endorsed full rights for naturalized citizens, and favored Radical Reconstruction as distinct from the more lenient policies of President Andrew Johnson.

[3] The Democratic National Convention was held in New York City on July 4–9, 1868 and party leaders were badly divided with little else to agree on outside ending Reconstruction.

Western Democrats on the other hand called for the "Ohio Idea"--redemption in greenbacks as indebted farmers considered that more money in circulation would make repayment of their debts easier.

The front-runner in the early balloting was George H. Pendleton (1864 Democratic vice presidential nominee), who led on the first 15 ballots, followed in varying order by President Johnson, Winfield Scott Hancock, Sanford Church, Asa Packer, Joel Parker, James E. English, James Rood Doolittle, and Thomas A. Hendricks.

The unpopular Johnson, having narrowly survived impeachment, won 65 votes on the first ballot, less than one-third of the total necessary for nomination, and thus lost his bid for election as president in his own right.

Meanwhile, the convention chairman Horatio Seymour, former governor of New York, received nine votes on the fourth ballot from the state of North Carolina.

After numerous indecisive ballots, the names of John T. Hoffman, Francis P. Blair, and Stephen Johnson Field were placed in nomination, but none of these candidates gained substantial support.

Exhausted, the delegates unanimously nominated General Francis Preston Blair Jr., for vice president on the first ballot after John A. McClernand, Augustus C. Dodge, and Thomas Ewing Jr., withdrew their names from consideration.

[6] Blair had worked hard for the Democratic vice presidential nomination and accepted second place on the ticket, finding himself in controversy.

[7] He had gained attention for an inflammatory letter addressed to Colonel James O. Broadhead, dated a few days before the convention met, in which he wrote that the "real and only issue in this contest was the overthrow of Reconstruction, as the radical Republicans had forced it in the South.

He apologized in a letter for the controversial order, stating "I have no prejudice against sect or race, but want each individual to be judged by his own merit.

In his army days he had traded at a local store operated by the Seligman brothers, two Jewish merchants who became Grant's lifelong friends.

Blair went on a national speaking tour in which he framed the contest with Ulysses S. Grant and the pro-Reconstruction Republicans in stark racial terms, warning of the rule of "a semi-barbarous race of blacks who are worshipers of fetishes and poligamists" and wanted to "subject the white women to their unbridled lust."

[12] Samuel J. Tilden, a member of the national committee, asked Blair to confine his campaigning to Missouri and Illinois for fear he "would hurt the ticket" because of his stance on Reconstruction.

[15] As an Eastern "gold" Democrat, Seymour also rejected the Ohio Idea and thus lost the support of the party's Western contingent, which contributed to his ultimate defeat at the ballot box.

Republicans carried every southern state except Georgia and Louisiana, where violence by the Ku Klux Klan and Knights of the White Camelia and fraud delivered Democratic majorities.

[23] No Democratic presidential candidate before or since has attained a higher percentage of the vote in Kentucky[24] or Maryland,[25] where hostility toward black suffrage was very widespread.

Two border states, Missouri and West Virginia, both under Republican control, gave their electoral votes to Grant.

[19] According to Seymour's biographer, Stewart Mitchell, the Republican Party claimed credit for saving the Union and was bound, bent, and determined to continue to rule it.

[36] The margin of Grant's popular majority resulted largely from winning a high percentage of the half-million newly enfranchised men of color.

Source: Data from Walter Dean Burnham, Presidential ballots, 1836–1892 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1955) pp 247–57.