Rutherford B. Hayes Represented Escaped Slaves, Civil War General, and President

President Rutherford B. Hayes was born on October 2, 1822. Hayes, the 19th President of the United States, succeeded Ulysses S. Grant in office. Born in Delaware, Ohio, Hayes had a severe disadvantage from the start. His father, a storekeeper from Vermont, had died just two months before Hayes was born. His mother’s brother, Sardis Birchard, stepped in to help raise Rutherford.

The future president was a good student and he went to Kenyon College and then to Harvard Law School. He moved to Cincinnati to practice law and he soon thereafter married Lucy Webb. She was a committed abolitionist and she seems to have influenced Rutherford’s decision to represent escaped slaved in the Ohio city on the Kentucky border. His work on behalf of the enslaved made him a hero to Republicans in the late 1850s and in 1858 he became a Republican officeholder in Cincinnati.

After the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, Hayes enlisted in a company that became part of the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment. He was soon promoted to major. Another future president, William McKinley was also in the regiment. In 1862 Hayes was wounded leading his men at the September 14 Battle of South Mountain. After he returned to service in October he was promoted to colonel and given command of the First Brigade of the Kanawha Division. After many displays of bravery and intelligence, Hayes was promoted to Brigadier General in October, 1864. While still in the army, Hayes was elected to Congress in 1864.

In Congress Hayes supported the 14th Amendment, recognizing the citizenship of African Americans, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. In 1867, he left Congress to run for governor of Ohio. Although the Democrats took control of the Ohio legislature that year, Hayes won the governor’s race by less than 1% of the vote. In 1869, he won reelection by a more comfortable margin, defeating Democrat George Pendleton. The Democrat Pendleton had been the “Copperhead” Vice Presidential nominee on George McClellan’s 1864 ticket. Hayes retired from politics in 1872…at least for a while.

In 1875 Hayes ran yet again for governor. He won the election in part because the Ohio Republicans took up the anti-Catholic cause to secure votes. The next year he was the Republican nominee for president. In what would be the most disputed election of the 19th Century, Hayes would himself initially believe he had lost the election. I have written extensively about the 1876 Election here.

In March, 1877, Hayes was inaugurated president with half the country swearing he had lost the election. To secure his taking office, Republicans reportedly agreed to end the use of the military to protect the civil rights of African Americans.  Democrats in Congress succeeded in defunding Federal enforcement of the Civil Rights Acts and Hayes withdrew Federal troops from the two states still under Reconstruction in 1877. Black power declined throughout the South steadily until it was finally overwhelmed in the 1890s.

While Hayes had some genuine accomplishments as president, working to reduce corruption in the Federal government, for example, his presidency saw an erosion of respect for the civil rights of Blacks, the use of Federal troops to undermine the 1877 Great Strike, and policies towards the Native American population that further undermined Native communities.

Hayes recognized that the Gilded Age industrialization of the American economy was concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a few millionaires while more Americans were marginalized by the late 19th Century capitalism dominating the country, but he did little to alleviate its abuses. After he left office, he wrote in his diary in 1887:

In church it occurred to me that it is time for the public to hear that the giant evil and danger in this country, the danger which transcends all others, is the vast wealth owned or controlled by a few persons. Money is power. In Congress, in state legislatures, in city councils, in the courts, in the political conventions, in the press, in the pulpit, in the circles of the educated and the talented, its influence is growing greater and greater. Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many. It is not yet time to debate about the remedy. The previous question is as to the danger—the evil. Let the people be fully informed and convinced as to the evil.

Source of Quote: Hayes, Rutherford B. (1922). Williams, Charles Richard (ed.). The Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, Nineteenth President of the United States. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State Archeological and Historical Society p. 354.

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