Episode 2 of 2

Republican Loss

When: 1874–1875
Where: various states
Part of: Democrats gain control of the U.S. House in the 1874 elections

Republicans lost their House majority and almost half their seats to the Democratic Party, ending Republican control of the chamber held since 1861.

Since 1861 the Republicans had controlled the House, and with its loss their long dominance of the chamber ended. The Democrats had won a signal victory, obtaining control of the next House of Representatives, which would stand Democrats 168, Liberals and Independents 14, Republicans 108, as against the two-thirds Republican majority secured by the election of 1872.

Sources

1874–75 United States House of Representatives elections Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-20

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.