17. Hayes was finally elected through backroom deals in Congress
As the date for Hayes’s inauguration loomed, leaders of both parties caucused in Washington, arranging a deal through which the Democrats would accept Hayes as president. The deal was never documented or voted upon by Congress. It was agreed that the incoming administration would remove the federal troops still in the South and end Reconstruction, in return for the Democrats in the House dropping their resistance to counting the electoral ballots and certifying the election of Rutherford B. Hayes. They also agreed to allow the Commission to state that Hayes had carried South Carolina by 889 votes.
The deal thus struck led to the Democrats seizing power in the southern states, the establishment of Jim Crow laws in the former Confederacy, and a solidly Democratic south for decades. Not until 1964 would a Republican candidate for president carry the state of South Carolina. Rutherford B. Hayes was identified as “His Fraudulency” in the Democratic press for the remainder of his single term. In the end, the election was decided in the House, but through backroom deals rather than the contingent election ordained by the Founders when they created the Constitution.