President Rutherford B Hayes

Rutherford B. Hayes was an unusual figure in American history. He was continually drafted into offices he did not seek, yet his Presidential election stirred up controversy over having been stolen. He was an abolitionist, yet he is accused of abandoning Black Americans. Hayes fought for merit-based hiring over political appointments, yet he was elected President only because his party controlled the election results. How did all of these conflicting elements come together in Rutherford B. Hayes?

Fig. 1. Rutherford B. Hayes

Rutherford B. Hayes Life Before Presidency

Rutherford B. Hayes was born in Delaware, Ohio on October 4, 1822. Most of Hayes' life would be rooted in Ohio. After graduating from Kenyon College in Ohio in 1842, he left for Harvard in Boston. There he completed his law degree in 1845, before returning to Ohio to begin his law practice. His practice began in Lower Sandusky, Ohio, before he moved to Cincinnati in 1949, where he joined the new Republican Party.

Civil War Service

Hayes signed on to fight in the Union Army in 1861, at first viewing the war as mainly being about settling the borders of the Union, but then later considering it a crusade against human enslavement. He entered as a Major in the 23rd Ohio Regiment, which saw nineteen battles in Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland. Hayes was considered a war hero after having been wounded in battle five times. He ended his service with the rank of Brigadier General.

Rutherford B. Hayes Political Party

As an abolitionist, Hayes was drawn to the Republican party. Hayes was a moderate, which made him electable in a state where the rights of Black Americans were still a divisive issue. His political career would be marked by constantly being drafted into positions he never asked for.

House of Representatives

While he was off serving in the Union army, Hayes was nominated as a House candidate by the Cincinnati Republican Party. Hayes refused to campaign, citing his commitment to the war, but accepted the nomination. In March 1865, he was elected to the house, but did not take his seat until December due to his ongoing military service. He was reelected to office in 1866 and resigned in 1867, when the Republican Party called on him to run for governor of Ohio.

Fig. 2. Rutherford B. Hayes Political Cartoon

Rutherford B. Hayes and the Ohio Governorship

Hayes won his first term as governor in 1867, but with a Democratic majority in the state legislature, failed to pass his main campaign issue, Black male suffrage. With the election of 1969, Republicans took the state legislature and Hayes was reelected, paving the way to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment and with it, grant Black male suffrage.

In 1872, he announced his retirement from politics. Still, the party nominated him for a failed attempt to recapture his old House seat in 1872 and then for a successful bid for a third gubernatorial term in 1875. With Black male suffrage accomplished, his third term campaign focused on reducing state debt and opposing state funding to Catholic schools.

Fig. 3. 1876 Hayes Campaign Banner

Rutherford B. Hayes and the Election of 1876

After delegates could not agree on the previous front-runner, James G. Blaine, or a third term for the incumbent President Grant, the need for a new candidate was manifest. Riding the success of his third term as Ohio Governor, Hayes was picked as the Republican presidential nominee for 1876. Hayes' opponent was New York Governor Samuel Jones Tilden. The issue of Radical Reconstruction has begun to take a back seat to a depression that was then hitting the nation. The Republican Party had long been in power and Tilden was viewed as a reformer, which was an asset when voters were looking for relief from high unemployment and falling incomes at the time. When the results started coming in on election night, Hayes and his wife went to bed believing that he had lost the presidency.

A Contested Election

With radical reconstruction on the wane, intimidation of Black voters and White Republicans flourished in the South during the 1876 election. Republicans oversaw the election boards in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, where they disqualified many Democratic votes over intimidation charges and reversed elections in favor of their own party. State Democratic parties in those states labelled the actions as fraud, sending their electors to be counted by Congress. A commission of seven Democrats, seven Republicans, and an independent was created to decide the issue. Soon, the independent disqualified himself and was replaced with a Republican. The commission upheld the Republican victory along party lines, and Democrats were appeased with a promise to remove Federal troops from the South in return for a promise that Southern governments would respect the rights of Black Americans.

Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes

Hayes presidency encountered three main issues:

• Reconstruction
• Economic depression
• Civil service reform

From the beginning, the man who had continually been drafted to office after office stated that he would only seek one term. Finally, he was able to make good on his promise to retire after that first term, leaving the presidency his final political office in 1881.

End of Reconstruction

The political reality facing Hayes was that the Democratic party had gained considerable power in Congress, and public opinion was against continued difficulty with Reconstruction. Hayes agreed to remove northern troops from the South in return for promises to protect the rights of Black Americans. Ultimately, Southern governments would not hold to these promises. Hayes didn't have the congressional support to continue paying for federal troops occupying the South, either way. Democrats also attempted to seize repeals of federal election laws–which protected the voting rights of Black Americans–but Hayes was able to defeat these.

Despite clashes over elections, Hayes had a moderate and conciliatory attitude toward the South, even appointing Southerners to certain high-level government positions.

Fig. 4. Hayes Political Cartoon

Civil Service

The Spoils System and civil service reform were important issues during Hayes's presidency. Hayes sought to abolish the Spoils System and staff government jobs based upon merit through standardized testing. He found opponents within his party and could not get Congress to pass legislation on civil service reform. Acting on his own, he used an executive order forbidding federal employees from being required to participate in party politics. One of those fired under the executive order was future President Chester A. Arthur, whose replacement was upheld by Congress in a reform victory.

Hayes blamed the economic problems on instability in the value of greenbacks and declared he would return the country to the gold standard. With Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman, he was able to return to a gold standard. Hayes vetoed but was overridden on the Bland-Allison Silver Purchase Act, which returned the cancelled silver dollar as U.S. legal tender.

A final depression related challenge Hayes faced was riots and destruction of property during the 1877 railroad strikes, after railroads cut pay and piled harsh demands on their workers. Hayes sending out federal troops to break up the strikes against the railroads set the precedent for future federal strike interventions.

Civil Rights and Rutherford B. Hayes

Hayes had a record of standing for civil rights. He was an active member of the Republican Party, which passed the first civil rights legislation with the Civil Rights Act of 1864. In addition to aiding Women and Black Americans, as president, Hayes adopted a new attitude that Indigenous Americans were not foreigners but US citizens.

Abolition

When visiting a plantation in the South, Hayes made several observations that turned him against human enslavement. He was impressed with the abilities of Black people, and also felt that the condition of Southern society had been negatively impacted for both black and white people by a slave system instead of free labor. Hayes volunteered his services as a layer to escaped slaves fighting fugitive slave law cases.

Fig. 5. Lucy Hayes.

Women's Rights

Hayes' wife Lucy was the first wife of a president to have been a college graduate. Hayes signed the Act to Relieve Certain Legal Disabilities of Women in 1879, allowing women to argue cases before any federal court. Despite some of the Hayes's progressive attitudes, neither Rutherford nor Lucy were supporters of women's suffrage. They did once entertain a delegation of women sent by Elizabeth Cady Stanton to discuss the issue. However, Hayes never changed his views.

Fig. 6. Hayes in his later years.

Final Years

In 1880, Hayes refused to nomination for another term and left office. He returned to Ohio, where he had spent most of his life, and focused on humanitarian causes. Two issues that dominated his later years were prison reform and education for children, regardless of race. Hayes passed away in January 1893, the cause of death was a heart attack.