The election was expected to be close, as recent elections had tended to be. Still, everyone thought it would be decided on election night, not excruciating months later. No one anticipated that it would go down in history not for who won, but for how he won.

But, sure enough, on the morning after Election Day, the candidates and the country woke up to a deeply disturbing and perplexing anomaly: they had voted for a new president but no one could tell them who it was.

The year was 1876, when the nation was shaken by the most bitterly contested and one of the most controversial presidential elections in its history, a distinction that the messy election of 2000 now threatens to claim for itself. The 1876 election saw one candidate capture the majority of the popular vote and another prevail in the electoral count. It was an election that was so acrimonious in its aftermath, with charges of blatant fraud and intimidation, as well as of manipulation of the black vote, that many feared it would incite a second civil war.

An unpopular Ulysses S. Grant, a Republican, was completing his second term as president in these waning days of Reconstruction, and there was little interest in keeping him for a third. The Republicans picked Rutherford B. Hayes, the governor of Ohio, as their candidate. The Democratic Party, out of power since 1861, was making a comeback and believed it had a strong chance with its candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, the governor of New York.