09/24/26

9/24/2026

This year is the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America. It’s also the 150th anniversary of the closest America has ever come to a constitutional meltdown over the presidential succession (with the possible exception of the most recent presidential election). In light of growing concerns over interference with this year’s November election, the details of the 1876 matchup would be worth recalling.

The crisis of January 6, 2024, centered at the Capitol in Washington, DC. The 1876 uproar played out over a period of several months in several states, and it wasn’t finally settled until March 2, 1877, four months after Election Day in November 1876. The agreement that broke the deadlock has generally been thought to arise from an unholy tradeoff between the two major parties, with newly enfranchised blacks in the South as the pawns. 

The two parties had nominated as their presidential candidates in 1876 Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio, Republican, and Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York, Democrat. Republicans had been in the ascendancy following the North’s 1865 victory in the Civil War, but the Democratic Party was recovering its strength a decade later, and the election was going to be close.

No one knew just how close. Blacks in the South, grateful to President Lincoln and the Republican Party for their freedom, generally supported Republicans after they were granted the vote by the 15th Amendment in 1870. No Democrat in either the U.S. House or the U.S. Senate had voted in favor of the amendment that year.

But by 1876 Republican dominance was waning, for several reasons, among them  widespread acknowledgment of corruption in the current Grant administration, economic discontent from the Panic of 1873, and public fatigue with the Reconstruction postwar policies of the federal government. 

Democratic candidate Tilden had won the popular vote for President by 250,000 votes, with a margin of undisputed electoral votes of 50.9 percent to 47.9 percent for Hayes. But in 1876 it took 185 electoral votes for a majority; Tilden had an unchallenged 184, one electoral vote short. Hayes had 165, and 20 electoral votes—rom Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Oregon—were in dispute.

In the three Southern states, election fraud and irregularities ran rampant on both sides. In South Carolina, the number of popular votes totaled 101 percent of those registered. In addition, many Democratic ballots were printed with the Lincoln symbol on them to confuse illiterate voters into mistakenly voting Democrat.

White supremacist groups like the Red Shirts served as “the military arm of the Democratic Party” in several Southern states. An estimated 150 black Republicans were murdered in South Carolina. But in the end, Republican-leaning state electoral commissions rejected enough Democratic ballots to log South Carolina into the Republican column. 

In Louisiana and Florida, similar confusion prevailed. As in 2024, two sets of electors were submitted to Congress from both states, with different government officials in each state signing the contrasting submissions. Congress decided for the Republican electors in each case.

In Oregon, with its three electoral votes, the dispute centered on one of that state’s three electors, who turned out to be a local former postmaster, therefore a former federal employee, and according to one interpretation, therefore illegal to serve as an elector. He was a Democrat. The two other electors, both Republicans, signed the Oregon election certificate with three Republican votes, but the Democratic Governor appointed a new Democratic elector. Both sets of Oregon electors were submitted to Congress.

Congress accepted the all-Republican Oregon slate, and that gave Hayes 185 electors votes to Tilden’s 184, an apparent victory. 

But tensions across the U.S. ran high. Someone fired a shot into Hayes’s Ohio home as he sat down to dinner. Hayes told supporters who gathered outside on his behalf that the election results remained uncertain. President Grant reinforced military strength around Washington.

Congress, to ease the tension and force a conclusion, resorted to a tried and true procedure. It appointed a committee: the Electoral Commission.

The commission comprised 15 members: five from the House, five from the Senate, and five from the Supreme Court. Republicans controlled the Senate and Democrats the House, so the commission’s congressional members broke even, five to five. From the Supreme Court, two of each party were chosen, with those four to choose the fifth member. They settled on independent Justice David Davis.

So far so good. But the Democratic Illinois Legislature appointed Davis as a U.S. Senator from their state. Davis promptly resigned his judgeship to take the Senate seat, leaving the commission membership high and dry. The remaining four justices settled on Republican Justice Joseph B. Bradley as the likely most independent of the remaining court members.

Starting their deliberations on January 31, 1877, the commission In a series of 8 to 7 decisions declared the Republican electors of each of the four states in dispute to be the true electors, and the body on March 2 finally ruled for Hayes with 185 electoral votes to Tilden’s 184. It remains the closest electoral vote in American history. Hayes was sworn in as President on March 5, 1877.

Democrats did not object to the commission’s decision. Intense back-door negotiations between leaders of the two parties at the Wormley Hotel a block from the White House had been going on while the commission was meeting, and they apparently arrived at “The Compromise of 1877.” 

The agreement provided that Democrats would not contest the election of Republican Hayes, while the Republicans in return would pull federal troops out of South Carolina and Louisiana, the two states remaining under Northern military control. Republicans also promised the South several grants and assurances for economic development and a restoration of some political powe7.

South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida—the three Southern states whose election results were originally in dispute—were the only former slave states to be logged into the Republican column in the 1876 election. It would be a long time before any former slave state once again was carried by a Republican presidential candidate.

The reason? When federal troops left, white supremacists and militias made sure that in future elections, blacks were intimidated, terrorized, or murdered if they appeared to favor Republicans. Jim Crow spread across the South, depriving blacks of their rights for decades going forward.

What Congress and Northern troops after the Civil War had granted to blacks in the South, The Compromise of 1876 erased 11 years later. It wasn’t until enactment of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, nearly 90 years afterward, that blacks regained the real-world right to vote in the South.