In his final weeks in the White House, President Ulysses S. Grant faced a crisis that threatened to undo his life's work. The contested presidential election of 1876 produced no clear victory for either Republican Rutherford B. Hayes or Democrat Samuel Tilden, who carried most of the former Confederacy. With the risk of a new civil war looming, Grant brokered a bargain that kept a Republican in the oval office, but as the author of Three Days in Moscow points out, his willingness to end Reconstruction condemned the South to another century of civil-rights oppression.