senate for Fauquier and Rappahannock counties after the war, and may have been elected after the war, but unable to take his seat. With his disability removed by Presidential pardon, Hunton was elected as a Democrat from Virginia in November 1872, and served in the 43rd and the three succeeding Congresses (March 4, 1873 – March 4, 1881). He defeated Republican Edward Daniels, a former abolitionist from Massachusetts who had moved into Gunston Hall and who later would become a Democrat. During his years as a Representative, Hunton served on the Committee on Military Affairs and voted to exonerate Gen. Custer, who had been kind to him. He noted the "Democratic wave" in the 1874 election, and that while Virginia only sent one other Democrat in 1872, he had seven democratic colleagues in the state delegation in 1874. Hunton became chairman of the Committee on Revolutionary Pensions (44th Congress). In the 46th Congress, he became chairman of the Committee on the District of Columbia(although he was disappointed at his removal from the House Judiciary Committee by the new Speaker in the 45th Congress, whom he had supported), and worked across the aisle with Joseph C.S. Blackburn of Kentucky to improve governance of the federal city, both securing passage of a new 3-commissioner system as well as payment of tax arrearages by corporations and others seeking favors from his committee. Hunton was also appointed to lead a committee investigating allegations of corruption involving former Speaker James Blaine, but the controversial investigation ended after Blaine secured possession of some incriminating letters, and soon was elected to the U.S. Senate, thus giving up his House seat and removing the committee's jurisdiction, although the scandal probably lost Blaine his chance for his party's presidential nomination in 1876, which went to Rutherford B. Hayes instead. Meanwhile, Hunton was the only southerner appointed to the 15-member Electoral Commission created by an act of Congress in 1877 to decide the contests in various states in the presidential election of 1876. In 1876, Hunton easily defeated Republican J.C. O'Neal, and after a primary challenge by S. Chapman Neale of Alexandria, handily defeated both Republican Mr. Cochran of Culpeper and Greenback Democrat Capt. John R. Carter (his former subordinate, from Loudoun) in 1878. However, he announced that would be his final term in Congress, and declined renomination in 1880, instead resuming his private legal practice, perhaps in part because