Last month in this space we looked at the presidency of John Quincy Adams – forced to take the office in 1825, after being rejected by the voters in 1824. Since no candidate had a majority among the presidential electors, Adams was chosen by the House of Representatives.

The next presidential reject was Rutherford B. Hayes, a Civil War general and governor of Ohio. The electoral college system had messed up the elections of 1796 and 1824, and turned the election of 1800 into a train wreck (even before we had trains). Now it turned the 1876 election into a train wreck with a simultaneous clown show, on top of a heist movie.

Hayes lost the 1876 election to Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York. But Republican bigwigs discerned that if they could grab the electors of three southern states where the count had been extremely close, they would put Hayes over by one electoral vote.

Both parties charged election fraud, and both sides were probably guilty – American elections were staggeringly corrupt at the time. As day after day the inauguration drew nearer, Congress appointed a 15-man commission – five senators, five representatives, five Supreme Court justices – to allocate the disputed electors. The eight Republicans and seven Democrats voted eight to seven and called all disputed electors for Hayes, to the disgust of people from both parties all across the land.

A filibuster began to stop the inauguration, but Hayes finally swayed southern Democrats by agreeing to pull troops out of the south, which was essentially license for the Ku Klux Klan to run riot, crush the biracial governments set up after the Civil War, brutalize the African American population, and open a century of one-party white-power rule. Hayes went to the White House, and America abandoned millions of its children, who would suffer for generations like Jews in Russia.

“Rutherfraud B. Hayes” (as he was soon angrily nicknamed) quickly announced that he would not run for a second term as president, apparently preferring to make a graceful exit rather than trying to overstay a non-existent welcome. He tried to advance civil rights and civil service, but with only indifferent success.

As for Tilden, who had won an out-and-out majority (not just a plurality) of the voters, and who had apparently won the electoral college only to have 20 votes snatched away, he rejected calls to have himself inaugurated, to put crowds into the streets, or to resist the Hayes inauguration by force. “I can retire to private life,” he said, “with the consciousness that I shall receive from posterity the credit of having been elected to the highest position in the gift of the people.” True enough: Tilden had been elected president of the United States, which was more than Hayes, despite his many virtues, could say. Like the other “reject presidents,” Hayes was hobbled by trying to put through a program that the nation had already demonstrated it didn’t want. He was wise enough, and mature enough, to go gently into that good night. Being wounded five times perhaps conferred a certain perspective.