After the 1876 Republican National Convention settled on Rutherford B. Hayes as the party's presidential nominee after seven ballots, the delegates nominated Wheeler for vice president.

During Wheeler's vice presidency, the Hayes administration abandoned post-Civil War Reconstruction and pursued an alliance between Northern Republicans and Old Southern Whigs.

Hayes hoped former Whigs who made up the South's business and merchant classes would supplant the Democratic plantation owners who dominated politics and government.

This scenario did not materialize, and the end of Republican efforts to ensure civil rights and social equality for former slaves doomed Southern blacks to oppression by white supremacists, who enacted Jim Crow laws that lasted for decades.

William Almon Wheeler was born in Malone, New York, and attended Franklin Academy and the University of Vermont, although monetary concerns forced him to drop out without graduating.

In his speech accepting the position, he made a strong case for racial equality: "[W]e owe it to the cause of universal civil liberty, we owe it to the struggling liberalism of the old world,...that every man within [New York], of whatever race or color, or however poor, helpless, or lowly he may be, in virtue of his manhood, is entitled to the full employment of every right appertaining to the most exalted citizenship.

Wheeler was considered a "safe" choice for the vice presidential nomination, as he had not made many enemies over the course of his political career, though Roscoe Conkling himself supported the former congressman from New York, Stewart L. Woodford.

[10] At the Republican National Convention, Frederick Douglass asked if the GOP would adhere to its pro-civil rights roots.

[11] The advocacy of Hayes and Wheeler, among a faction of Northern Republicans, was to abandon Reconstruction efforts and instead make conciliatory appeals to Southern Whiggery.

[13] During Wheeler's term, the Hayes administration pursued an alliance between Northern Republicans and Old Southern Whigs, effectively abandoning post-Civil War Reconstruction.

Events did not play out as Hayes envisioned, which meant that the end of Reconstruction enabled Democrats, largely former supporters of the Confederacy, to reassert control over black residents, including passage of Jim Crow laws that lasted well into the twentieth century.

[14] Since Wheeler was a recent widower, his wife having died one year before he took office,[1] he was a frequent guest at the White House's alcohol-free luncheons.

The next day, Wheeler and Lucy were traveling back to Malone when a group of children began waving red flags.

The trip lasted eleven days, and when Lucy and her daughter Fanny returned to Washington, she wrote to Wheeler to thank him for "a wild and joyous time".

[15] In January 1881, Wheeler received 10 votes in the New York State Legislature's Republican caucus to determine a nominee for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Francis Kernan.

[17] In May 1881, Platt and Roscoe Conkling resigned their U.S. Senate seats in a dispute with President James A. Garfield over control of patronage in New York, triggering two special elections.