Lewis & Clark College

Hayes, Rutherford B.

Rutherford Birchard Hayes was the 19th President of the United States (1877–1881). Hayes, an attorney in Ohio, became city solicitor of Cincinnati from 1858 to 1861. When the Civil War began, he left a fledgling political career to join the Union Army as an officer. Hayes was promoted to the rank of major general. After the war, he served in the U.S. Congress from 1865 to 1867 as a Republican. Hayes left Congress to run for Governor of Ohio and was elected to three terms. In 1876, Hayes was elected president though he lost the popular vote to Democrat Samuel J. Tilden but he won an intensely disputed electoral college vote after a Congressional commission awarded him twenty contested electoral votes. The result was the Compromise of 1877, in which the Democrats acquiesced to Hayes's election and Hayes ended all federal army intervention in Southern politics. That caused the collapse of Republican state governments and, with Democratic disfranchisement of most blacks, first by violence and fraud, and then by law at the turn of the century, led to a one-party Democratic South into the 1960s, giving outsized power for white conservatives. Hayes believed in meritocratic government, equal treatment without regard to race, and improvement through education. He ordered federal troops to quell the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. He implemented modest civil service reforms that laid the groundwork for further reform in the 1880s and 1890s. He vetoed the Bland-Allison Act, which would have put silver money into circulation and raised prices, insisting that maintenance of the gold standard was essential to economic recovery. His policy toward Western Indians anticipated the assimilationist program of the Dawes Act of 1887. Hayes kept his pledge not to run for re-election, retired to his home in Ohio, and became an advocate of social and educational reform.

Politicians

1877

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Nineteenth Century Political Party Photograph Collection