1876 United States presidential election

An overnight joint session

In an overnight joint session in Washington, Congress completed the electoral count shortly after four in the morning on 2 March 1877 and declared the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes elected president, with 185 electoral votes to the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden's 184.

Wisconsin's ten electoral votes were the last counted. The presiding officer, Thomas W. Ferry, announced the result and dissolved the joint meeting, and the prolonged legislative day that had begun on 1 February adjourned at 4:12 a.m.

What the declaration implemented

The count carried out the Electoral Commission's earlier decisions, which had awarded Hayes all twenty disputed electoral votes from four states, generally by 8–7. The commission had fifteen members: five senators, five representatives and five Supreme Court justices.

House Democrats had kept up procedural delays until Speaker Samuel J. Randall ruled the remaining obstruction out of order. The majority threshold in that count was 185, not 200.

Not the date of a compromise

2 March is the date of the congressional declaration, not a documented date on which any formal Compromise of 1877 was signed. The Wormley's Hotel negotiations happened before it, and no signed compact fixes the bargain to that morning.

Whether Democratic acquiescence came from a coherent quid pro quo is contested; historians including Allan Peskin have challenged C. Vann Woodward's reconstruction of a unified five-part bargain.

Hayes was confirmed so late that he took a precautionary private oath on 3 March, because 4 March — the constitutional start of the term — fell on a Sunday. The public inauguration followed on 5 March.