In 1877, on this day the Electoral Commission adjourned after final agreement on a series of compromises which included a change to US Presidential succession such that Congress came before Cabinet and Senate as senior House came first.

RutherfraudIt was the conclusion to one of the most disputed and controversial presidential elections in American history, an informal, unwritten deal that was widely regarded as the second "corrupt bargain". But certainly "Rutherfraud" as it was known ended Congressional ("Radical") Reconstruction.

But the true significance of this change was revealed thirty-five years later when an anarchist detonated a bomb that killed both President Taft and his VP. His successor Augustus O. Bacon received the Democratic Nomination, but lost the General Election of 1912 to Teddy Roosevelt who brought the US into the Great War after the sinking of the Lusitania.