Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, February 4th, 1877.

It is the chaotic aftermath of the previous fall's presidential election between Samuel Tilden

and Rutherford B Hayes.

Tilden had won the popular vote by a pretty considerable margin and was one electoral

vote shy of winning with a number of southern states yet to submit their final slate of electors,

which is when things got very, very messy.

These holdout states threatened to send rogue electors to certify the vote are multiple competing

electoral slates, and there wasn't really a system in place by which to deal with this kind of chaos, these kind of contested votes.

So basically, and we'll get into us, that they improvised.

There were lots of twists and turns and at the end of the day, right in this moment that were marking early February, a small group of appointed officials basically hashed it out and they cut a deal, effectively ending reconstruction in the South in return for votes in favor of the Republican Hayes.

And so it was Hayes, not Tilden, who was sworn in as the 19th president of the United States,

succeeding Ulysses S. Grant. Reconstruction basically comes to an end,

changes the course of American history.

So let's talk about this very messy and very resonant moment

of electoral shenanigans, or as our researcher Jacob Feldman put it in the prep

dock it's that time that a secret cabal sort of did decide on election so there you

go here as always Nicole Hammer Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley.

Hello there. Hello Jody. Hey there. Before we get to the shenanigans let's wind it back to that election in the fall of

1876. Someone want to take a crack kind of basically laying out

Tilden's politics, Hayes's politics, what parties they belong to, what those

...