The current National election for various offices including the presidency has constantly been at the front with the liberal Democrat-controlled  media preaching doomsday if Trump is reelected.  However, contention and chaos during the current election pales in magnitude and secretive underhand tactics when compared to one of  Americas' most controversial past elections.  The subject controversial  and questionable election  occurred during the presidential election of 1876 which is known as the Compromise of !877 and resulted in Republican Ohio governor and wounded Civil War veteran  Rutherford Hayes defeating New York Democrat  governor  Samuel Tiden. 

Eerily analogous to our current upcoming election after the highly contested  election was finally decided in March, 1877,  the media and the distraught elite Democrats referred to Hays as 'His Fraudulency.'  Not quite up to par on how current leaderless Democrats refer to Trump, but campaigns for both side during this election were fraught with the vilest name calling and allegations every posted on Americas' scene and today's political rhetoric is actually tame in comparison.

By midnight on election day, Tuesday November 7, 1876, it appeared that Tiden with 184 electoral votes to Hayes' 165. (185 needed to win in 1876) and a majority of 250,000 popular votes had won the election.  However, the Republicans refused to concede and rightfully accused the Democrats of bribing and intimidating Black voters in the Southern States of Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina; at the time the only Southern states with Republican governments and a large Black electorate almost assuredly would have voted for Hayes.

Also a single Republican electoral vote was ruled illegal by Oregon's Democrat governor. But chaos, intimidation  and armed violence ruled the day with some deaths reported at polling places.  To show the extent of the fraud that occurred among the democrats, a polling place in South Carolina reported  a "101% turn-out of registered voters all for Tiden!" Only a Democrat could concoct such a blatant lie and it be dutifully reported by the media.  Apparently  the media had their biased and untruthful CNN's in 1876.

Consequently, the Republicans refused to accept the results of Tiden's apparent victory  asserting  that should the 20 contested electoral votes of the four  states in question  be awarded Hayes, he would win with 185 electoral votes to Tiden's 184.  Thus the Nation was at a standstill with the presidential election at an impasse.

To resolve the issue the US Congress passed a law on January 29, 1887, that formed a highly questionable (Constitution wise) electoral commission.  The commission consisted of fifteen members;  five Democrat Congressmen,  five Republican  Senators and five  Supreme Court justices — two Republican and two Democrat — with one independent Justice, David Davis. Davis, however, declined  to serve and was replaced by a moderate Republican Justice, Joseph Bradley. Thus this quasi commission was geared up to select the President of the United States by a highly questionably methodology  and even today by those historically knowledgeable  (a category which pretty much eliminates a majority of US politicians; especially the clueless Biden and Harris)  is still  debated.

During the commission's  sessions, the deliberation continued, but to this day history has no record of what actually transpired in the final  illegal secret session in deciding who was officially the  United States president other than the outcome, and no doubt the Founding Fathers would have shouted "nay" at such shenanigans in prostituting the hallowed Constitution  fought for and bled for by America a short 100 years prior.

As for today's political miscreants and crooks of a like bent, so much for the heralded "transparency of US politics." Wonder why the Democrat  presidential  candidate didn't have cameras  in his darkened basement  lair,  since he, too, is  a strong proponent for "open transparency" That is, if it doesn't involve his addicted crooked  offspring.

In February, 1877 at a final secret  meeting of the commission in a Washington hotel room, a final conclusion was reached.  Hayes was declared the winner of the presidential race by being awarded the  20 electoral votes  ending  up with with a total of 185 electoral votes to Tiden's 184. The final vote was 8 in favor and 7 opposed. The final deciding swing vote was cast by Justice Bradly who had the night before after a visit from Democrat politicians, given an opinion that all three of Florida's votes should go to Tiden, but then, when later that night visited by two prominent Republicans who were sided by his wife,  changed his mind and voted to give the votes to Hayes.

Since Justice Bradley was a moderate Republican, there will always be controversial debate on his mind-changing decision.  Of course, to appease the Democrats; especially the Southern wing of the party, the Hayes administration had to agree to a certain number  of compromising conditions, among which was the withdrawal of all federal soldiers from the remaining affected  Southern states and thus end the nefarious and abject failure, the Reconstruction Era, and the appointing of a prominent Democrat to his staff.

However, with the end of the Reconstruction Era  all the Republican politicians ( carpet baggers) more or less fled en masse back North  and the gleeful Democrats moved back in taking total political control of the South for the next hundred years more or less  and to the dismay of their Northern Democrat counterparts ( but without their condemnation or elimination) established the harsh disenfranchising movement for black voters and the darling brainchild of the Southern Democrat party  -  the infamous  "Jim Crow" laws. An era all Southern Democrats should remember when spouting their racist rhetoric.

In hindsight Could a similar 1877 Compromise scenario occur this year on November 3rd during our upcoming National elections?  God forbid we ever return to that political corrupt era, but with the ongoing dirty, name slinging corrupt  politics and the abject lawlessness and violence dominating America's major cities, and the covid pandemic running amok who can predict.

The author, Charles David Sliger, lives in Shelbyville.