Some time after midnight, however, the Democrats sent a message to the New York Times, then a partisan Republican paper, to check its record of the vote. Alerted to the possibility of discrepancies, the paper's editor, John Reed, hurried round to the Fifth Avenue hotel.
There, in the middle of the night, he roused Chandler and persuaded him that the Democratic victories in Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida could be challenged. At the crack of dawn, emissaries were packed off by train, well-furnished, a contemporary recorded, with "the sinews of war": money.
In due course, with the help of money and legal challenges, the "carpetbagger" Republican regimes in the South, installed by the Union army a dozen years earlier, succeeded in overturning the Democrat victories in those three states.
The election was thrown into doubt. After three months of legal wrangles and political intrigue (Presidents were not inaugurated until March in those days) the election was finally decided by a partisan vote in the House of Representatives.
At the last possible moment before the inauguration, the House voted 184 for Tilden, 185 for Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican, who duly became the President of the United States, widely known as "Rutherfraud". Even in those days, the journalists and the lawyers had parts to play in operating the complex rigidities of the constitutional mechanism.
Even then, money counted for a good deal. But the most relevant lesson of 1876 is perhaps that, once the result enters the dark realm of serious doubt, it can be a long and politically dangerous business to resolve it.
There are at least three stages that a challenge by Al Gore and his advisers to George W. Bush's apparent victory must go through. The first is a legal challenge in individual Florida counties, most promisingly in Palm Beach.
It is possible, but on balance not likely, that they will succeed. The situation would then be further confused by the absentee ballots, which may or may not go in the main to Bush.
Next there is the Electoral College. Most Americans assume the President is elected by the popular vote. In fact, he is elected by the Electoral College. This eighteenth-century device reflects the "Great Compromise" negotiated by the framers [of the Constitution] between big and small states.
Each state sends a number of electors to the college corresponding to its two senators (reflecting the state's quasi-sovereign nature), and the number of its representatives, reflecting its population.
So delegates can run from three (two senators and a single congressman), for half a dozen small states with fewer people than many English counties, to 54 for California with its 38 million people.
However narrow the margin in the popular vote in any individual state, the state's whole tally in the college is supposed to go to the winner.
If he holds off the Florida challenges, Bush would win with 270 votes in the college unless more than a single college member were, as the phrase goes, "faithless". And in fact a certain number of electors in comparatively recent times have switched, as a Richard Nixon elector switched to George Wallace in 1968 and in 1976 a Gerald Ford elector switched to Ronald Reagan, then a "write-in" candidate.
Some states, however, enforce the electors' mandate, and a federal statute gives Congress the right to reject a vote not "regularly given". Arguably, if Gore proves to have won the popular vote, more than one elector might feel obliged to reflect the popular plurality.
If that happened, it would trigger a mountainous constitutional and legal, as well as political, row. If, for whatever reason, the Electoral College were to fail to come up with a decisive result, then, as in 1876, the issue would go to the House of Representatives, that is, to the new House, in which the Republican majority is down to 10, with two independents and one seat undecided.
So on the face of the constitutional rules it is unlikely, though still conceivable, that Gore could win. Politically, however, Gore could be faced with a tough decision. In 1