Rutherford B. Hayes

President of the United States (1877–1881)

• Born: October 4, 1822
• Birthplace: Delaware, Ohio
• Died: January 17, 1893
• Place of death: Fremont, Ohio

Though an ardent Radical Republican early in the Reconstruction era, Hayes moderated his views and as president ended that era by withdrawing military support for Republican state governments in the South. He also opposed inflation, defended the presidency from congressional attacks, and fought for civil service reform.

Early Life

The posthumous son of Rutherford Hayes, Rutherford Birchard Hayes was so weak at his birth that his mother, Sophia Birchard Hayes, did not expect him to survive. His parents were of old New England stock and had migrated to Ohio from Vermont in 1817. On his death, his father left his mother a farm that she rented, some additional land, and a house in town, where she kept two lodgers. Her sorrow was deepened in January, 1825, when Hayes’s older brother, a sturdy nine-year-old, drowned while ice skating, leaving only Hayes, a feeble two-year-old, and his four-year-old sister, Fanny. She was his constant companion, whom he adored and whose dolls he played with until he grew older and replaced them with toy soldiers. His understandably protective mother allowed him neither to do household chores nor to play games with boys until he was nine. A friendly, cheerful child, Hayes admired his mother’s carefree, younger bachelor brother, Sardis Birchard, who left their household when Hayes was four but returned often for visits and paid for Hayes’s education.

After Hayes’s mother had taught him to read, spell, and write, he attended a private grade school and later was tutored by a local lawyer. When nearly fourteen, Hayes left home to attend Norwalk (Ohio) Academy, and the next year he attended Isaac Webb’s Preparatory School in Middletown, Connecticut. In 1838, at the age of sixteen, Hayes entered Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and in 1842, he was graduated at the head of his class. After studying law for a year with a lawyer in Columbus, Ohio, Hayes entered Harvard Law School; he received his bachelor of law degree in 1845.

Life’s Work

From 1845 to 1849, Hayes practiced law in his Uncle Sardis’s town of Upper Sandusky, Ohio, and was largely responsible for changing its name to Fremont. Eager to be on his own in a challenging city, Hayes in January, 1850, opened an office in Cincinnati, Ohio, achieved prominence, and on December 30, 1852, married Lucy Ware Webb, a recent graduate of Wesleyan Female College. She was religious and a reformer with strong temperance and ardent abolitionist beliefs. In contrast, Hayes, a lifelong disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson, never joined a church and before his marriage had shown little interest in organized reform.

In September, 1853, Hayes defended captured runaway slaves free of charge and soon helped found the Republican Party in Ohio. From 1858 to 1861, he held his first public office as Cincinnati’s city solicitor. When the lower southern states seceded (1860–1861), he was inclined to “Let them go,” but he was outraged when on April 12, 1861, their new Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter at Charleston, South Carolina. He organized half the Literary Club of Cincinnati into a drilling company of which he was captain, and on June 27, he was commissioned a major in the Twenty-third Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Hayes served throughout the war, was wounded four times, and emerged from the struggle a major general and a member-elect of Congress.

Serving from 1865 to 1867, Hayes consistently supported Radical Republican Reconstruction measures, but, as chairman of the Joint Committee on the Library, he worked hardest in developing the Library of Congress into a great institution. Unhappy in Congress, he resigned to run successfully for governor of Ohio and was reelected in 1869. His greatest achievements in his first two terms as governor (1868–1872) were Ohio’s ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment and the establishment of Ohio State University. Returning to Cincinnati in early 1872, he loyally supported President Ulysses S. Grant for a second term and ran for Congress to help the ticket. Although Hayes lost, Grant won, and Hayes’s services in a pivotal state placed him in line for a major appointment. When he was asked merely to be assistant treasurer at Cincinnati, he refused and retired from politics “definitely, absolutely, positively.” With Lucy and their five children, he returned to Fremont to live with Uncle Sardis, who died in January 1874, leaving Hayes the bulk of his estate.

The Panic of 1873 reversed the Republican Party’s fortunes, while the “corruptionists around Grant” tarnished its reputation in the eyes of Hayes and other respectable Republicans. By 1875, Ohio Republicans, eager to save their state for their party, nominated a reluctant Hayes for a third term as governor. He won by a narrow margin and became a contender for the 1876 presidential nomination, which he also won because his rivals were either too corrupt, too ill, too radical, or too reformist. In contrast, Hayes was a fearless soldier, who was impeccably honest and from a crucial state, and, though both a Radical and a reformer, he was by nature moderate and conciliatory. To oppose him, the Democrats nominated Samuel Jones Tilden, New York’s reforming governor. They campaigned for white supremacy and the removal of the federal troops that upheld Republican regimes in the South and attacked the Grant administration as corrupt. Republican orators warned voters not to let the rebels capture the federal government through a Democratic victory and promised that Hayes would reform the civil service.

When the election of 1876 was over, both Republicans and Democrats disputed its result. Tilden had at least 250,000 more popular votes than Hayes, but Republicans, after some election night computations, claimed to have carried Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina (states that Republicans, supported by federal troops, controlled, but which Tilden appeared to have won), giving Hayes 185 electoral votes and Tilden, 184.

Republican-dominated returning boards reviewed the vote in those states, legally eliminating the entire vote in districts where they believed black people were intimidated into not voting, and certified that Hayes had carried all three states. Charging the returning boards with fraud, Democrats certified that Tilden had carried those three states. To decide which electoral votes to count, the Democratic House of Representatives and the Republican Senate in January 1877, agreed on the Electoral Count Act, creating the fifteen-member Electoral Commission, drawn from both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court and comprising seven Republicans, seven Democrats, and one independent. The independent, who was a Supreme Court justice, resigned to become a senator and was replaced on the commission by a Republican. By a strict eight-to-seven party vote, the Electoral Commission decided the disputed election in favor of the Republicans and Hayes.

The commission failed to end the crisis. The electoral votes had to be counted in a joint session of Congress, and its angry Democratic majority obstructed the count with repeated adjournments. Some southern Democrats, who had belonged to the pre-Civil War Whig party, while meeting with Republicans close to Hayes (who were also of Whig extraction), offered to cooperate in completing the count and suggested that they would desert their party to help Republicans organize the next House of Representatives (which the Democrats appeared to have won) and even join the Republican Party. In return, they wanted Hayes to withdraw the federal troops from Louisiana and South Carolina (the Florida Republican government had collapsed) and in effect complete the restoration of white supremacy governments in the South, and to appoint to his cabinet one of their political persuasion to augment their strength with federal patronage. A few of them pressed for a federal subsidy to construct the Texas and Pacific Railroad. There is no doubt that these negotiations took place, but how crucial they were in changing the Democratic votes that permitted completing the count is debated.

Hayes was inaugurated on schedule, becoming the nineteenth president of the United States. He appointed a southern Democrat with a Whig background to his cabinet and in April 1877, ended the Reconstruction era by removing the federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana, after receiving assurances from their incoming Democrat regimes that they would observe the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, granting civil and voting rights to black men. The amendments were not faithfully observed, southern Democrats neither helped Republicans organize the House nor joined their party, and Hayes ignored the Texas and Pacific Railroad.

Having disposed of the southern question, Hayes moved on two fronts to reform the civil service. Because it suffered because political parties depended on government workers to finance and organize the nomination and election of candidates, Hayes ordered that civil servants not be assessed a portion of their salaries for political purposes and that they not manage “political organizations, caucuses, conventions, or election campaigns.” He also determined to make the New York Customhouse, the largest federal office in the land, where more than half the nation’s revenue was collected, a showcase to prove that civil service reform was practical. That effort led to a spectacular but successful struggle with New York Senator Roscoe Conkling, who regarded the Customhouse as part of his political machine. Hayes’s victory struck twin blows to promote reform and to restore executive power over appointments.

Despite enormous pressure to inflate the currency, Hayes was a consistent hard-money advocate. In February 1878, he would not approve the mildly inflationary Bland-Allison Act (requiring the government monthly to purchase and coin two to four million dollars worth of silver), but Congress overrode his veto. In January 1879, he was pleased when the Treasury Department began to pay gold for greenbacks (paper money issued during the Civil War without gold backing).

The Democrats challenged Hayes during the second half of his administration, when they controlled both houses of Congress. To necessary appropriation bills, they repeatedly attached riders that would repeal the federal election laws (force bills) enforcing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, but Hayes consistently vetoed those bills. He argued that the federal government was justified in preventing intimidation and fraud in the election of its Congress and also that Congress, by attaching these riders, was trying to destroy the executive’s constitutional right to veto legislation. Hayes won the battle of the riders; his vetoes rallied his party and the people outside the South to his side. Responding to political pressure, Congress passed the appropriations without the riders.

Returning prosperity and a united Republican Party bolstered Hayes’s financial and political views and left him in a strong position, but he had vowed to serve only one term. He left office confident that his policies were instrumental in electing as his successor James A. Garfield, a fellow Ohio Republican.

In retirement, Hayes served effectively as a trustee of the Peabody Education Fund and as president of the Slater Fund, both dedicated to further the education of black southerners. He died in Fremont, Ohio, on January 17, 1893.

Significance

Hayes was a man of integrity, courage, and decision, but he was also a man of reason and moderation. He was an uncompromising defender of the Union and an opponent of inflation, but on other issues he was willing to compromise as he worked to achieve his goals. Although he was a reformer, he sought to convince people rather than coerce them. He had, for example, lectured in favor of temperance, but only after becoming president did he totally abstain from alcoholic beverages, and he opposed prohibition legislation and one-issue political parties founded on temperance. His moderate, pragmatic, piecemeal approach often angered those who were impatient to right wrongs. Out of the entire government service, his administration instituted reform in only the Department of the Interior under Secretary Carl Schurz and the New York Customhouse and Post Office, but, in these showcases, reform succeeded and proved its practicality. Had it been universally applied, hostile administrators would have discredited civil service reform.

Hayes, who was in a no-win position, has been criticized for his southern policy. With neither political support nor congressional appropriations, he could not reverse the policy of the preceding Grant administration and reclaim southern states by military force. From an impossible situation, he extracted promises from southern Democrats to uphold Reconstruction amendments if he would remove the troops supporting powerless Republican governments. At the start, he naïvely believed that southern Democrats would keep their word and thought that his policy would attract to his party respectable southern whites who would not interfere with black civil rights. Even though his policy failed, given the bleak prospects for southern blacks and Republicans in April 1877, Hayes took the only feasible course by which their rights might have been protected.

Bibliography

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