November 2, 1880: James Garfield Wins the Closest Presidential Election

November 2, 1880: James Abram Garfield is elected the 20th President of the United States, in one of the narrowest races ever. In fact, in terms of total popular vote, it remains the closest ever.

The Republican nominee, Garfield, 46, had been elected to Congress from Ohio in 1862, was commissioned a General in the Union Army for the American Civil War without losing his seat. In 1880, the Ohio legislature elected him to a seat in the U.S. Senate. But he never took it, because the Republican Convention nominated him for President.

The Democratic nominee was Winfield Scott Hancock, a 56-year-old native of a small town outside Philadelphia, named for the losing Whig Party candidate of 1852, who had already been a war hero since the War of 1812, 40 years before that. Known as Hancock the Superb, and as The Thunderbolt of the Army of the Potomac for his heroism at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, had never previously held political office.

Winfield Scott Hancock

Hancock received 4,444,260 votes, losing by a margin of 1,898 votes, to Garfield's 4,446,158. But it's Electoral Votes that matter, although that was also close: Garfield won 214 to Hancock's 155. Each man won 19 States. Whether the Republicans stole the votes of any State, as they had for Rutherford B. Hayes 4 years earlier, has never been seriously suggested, or proven.

No one State would have helped Hancock. Garfield won the 21 Electoral Votes of New York, then the largest State, by 21,033 votes. Had Hancock won the State, that would still have left the Electoral Vote at a 193-176 Garfield victory.

Garfield was inaugurated on March 4, 1881. On July 2, he was shot. He could have survived, but his doctors' incompetence led to an inability to find the bullet, and a subsequent infection that killed him on September 19. Only William Henry Harrison died earlier upon his Inauguration than Garfield's 200 days.

Hancock didn't fare a whole lot better. He developed diabetes, chose not to run again in 1884, and died in 1886.

Chester Arthur, Garfield's Vice President and successor, also got sick, with kidney disease, did not run for a term of his own in 1884, and died in 1886. Samuel Tilden, cheated out of the Presidency in 1876, did not run in 1880 or 1884, and he, too, died in 1886. None of them lived to see what would have been the end of the Garfield-Arthur ticket's 2nd term -- or, had they won, that of Hancock and his running mate, former Congressman William H. English of Indiana. He lived until 1896.

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November 2, 1880 was a Tuesday. This was before Saturday was standardized as the day for college football. On this day, the College of New Jersey defeated their arch-rivals, Rutgers, 8-0 in Princeton, New Jersey. The College would rename itself for its town in 1896: Princeton University.

Also on the day, Stevens Institute of Technology beat City College of New York, 6-0 at Stevens' field in Hoboken, New Jersey. CCNY would drop football entirely, while Stevens Tech became an NCAA Division III school.

And Harvard, having hosted Montreal's McGill University in 1875, in a game that changed the course of football in North America, traveled to Montreal, and, on this date, played the Montreal Football Club to a 0-0 tie.