Rutherford Birchard Hayes (October 4, 1822 - January 17, 1893) was the nineteenth President of the United States (1877 - 1881). A Harvard-trained lawyer and a Union general wounded five times in the Civil War, Hayes reached the White House through the most disputed election in American history and left it, as he had promised, after a single term.
Early life and career
Born in Delaware, Ohio, Hayes graduated first in his class at Kenyon College and took a degree from Harvard Law School, the first president to hold a graduate degree. He practiced law in Cincinnati, defending fugitive slaves in the years before the war. He volunteered in 1861, fought at South Mountain and in the Shenandoah Valley, was wounded five times, and ended the war a brevet major general. Elected to Congress while still in the field, he refused to campaign, saying an officer's place was with his troops. He served three terms as governor of Ohio before winning the Republican nomination in 1876.
The disputed election of 1876
Democrat Samuel J. Tilden won the popular vote and led in the electoral count, but the returns of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina were contested. A special Electoral Commission of fifteen members awarded every disputed vote to Hayes, making him president by 185 electoral votes to 184, two days before the inauguration. Behind the outcome lay the informal Compromise of 1877: Democrats accepted Hayes's election, and the new administration withdrew the last federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction. Opponents called him "Rutherfraud" and "His Fraudulency" for the rest of his term.
The Hayes presidency
Hayes fought the patronage system that fueled his own party's machines, ordering that federal employees not be required to do political work and firing the future president Chester A. Arthur from the New York Custom House in the fight against Senator Roscoe Conkling's machine. He vetoed the Bland-Allison silver coinage act (Congress overrode him), used federal troops to suppress the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, and vetoed repeated attempts to restrict Chinese immigration by statute in violation of treaty. Lucy Hayes, the first president's wife with a college degree, banned alcohol from the White House, earning the nickname "Lemonade Lucy," and began the annual Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn.
Retirement
True to his one-term pledge, Hayes retired to Spiegel Grove, his estate in Fremont, Ohio, and spent his remaining years promoting education for Black students in the South, prison reform, and veterans' causes. He died in 1893; his home became the nation's first presidential library.
Highlights of the Hayes presidency
- The Compromise of 1877 and the end of Reconstruction.
- Civil service reform against his own party's machines, laying groundwork for the later Pendleton Act.
- The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the first nationwide labor conflict.
- One term, by his own pledge, kept to the day.
Read his words on this site: Inaugural Address (1877).