For over a century after the Civil War, Tennessee's white citizenry was divided according to partisan loyalties established in that war. Unionist regions covering almost all of East Tennessee, Kentucky Pennyroyal-allied Macon County, and the five West TennesseeHighland Rim counties of Carroll, Henderson, McNairy, Hardin and Wayne[3] voted Republican – generally by landslide margins – as they saw the Democratic Party as the “war party” who had forced them into a war they did not wish to fight.[4] Contrariwise, the rest of Middle and West Tennessee who had supported and driven the state's secession was equally fiercely Democratic as it associated the Republicans with Reconstruction.[5]
In 1868, Ulysses S. Grant easily carried the state due to disfranchisement of former Confederates and the Ku Klux Klan Act.[6] However, in the year after that election, Tennessee was the first state where Reconstruction was ended, and with the aid of the resurgent Klan, white Democrats rewrote the state's constitution to regain some of their lost power.[7] Nevertheless, blacks and Unionist whites forged adequate support for the GOP to create a competitive political system during that decade,[8] although the Democratic Party won all statewide elections. However, at the beginning of the 1880s, a divide in the Democratic Party on this issue of payment of state debt allowed the GOP to claim the governor's mansion,[8] but this did not seriously alter presidential voting and Tennessee was won by General Winfield Scott Hancock (D–Pennsylvania), running with former RepresentativeWilliam Hayden English, with 53.26 percent of the popular vote, against RepresentativeJames A. Garfield (R-Ohio), running with the 10th chairman of the New York State Republican Executive CommitteeChester A. Arthur, with 44.26 percent of the vote.[2]
^ abIn this county where Weaver ran second ahead of Garfield, margin given is Hancock vote minus Weaver vote and percentage margin Hancock percentage minus Weaver percentage.
^Lyons, William; Scheb (II), John M. and Stair Billy; Government and Politics in Tennessee, pp. 183-184 ISBN1572331410
^Bergeron, Paul H.; Ash, Stephen V. and Keith, Jeanette; Tennesseans and Their History, p. 175 ISBN1572330562
^Bergeron; Ash, and Keith; Tennesseans and Their History, pp. 176-178
^ abKousser, J. Morgan; The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910, p. 104 ISBN0-300-01973-4
^Menendez, Albert J.; The Geography of Presidential Elections in the United States, 1868-2004, pp. 298-304 ISBN0786422173
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