October 1, 2019 (Tuesday)
A bit of trivia: A telephone was installed in the White House during the Hayes administration. It was virtually useless because hardly anyone else had one.
Rutherford B. Hayes was born October 4, 1822, in Delaware, Ohio. He died January 17, 1893, in Fremont, Ohio. He was the 19th president of the United States (1877-81).
After graduating from Kenyon College at the head of his class in 1842, Hayes studied law at Harvard, where he graduated in 1845. Returning to Ohio, he became a successful attorney in Cincinatti. In 1852 he married Lucy Ware Webb), a cultured and unusually well-educated woman for her time. After combat service with the Union army, he was elected to Congress (1865-67) and then to the Ohio governorship (1868-76).
In 1875, running for governor the third time, people throughout the nation took notice of his promoting the idea of a sound currency backed by gold. The following year he became his state’s favorite son at the national Republican nominating convention, and won the presidential nomination. Hayes’s unblemished public record and high moral tone offered a striking contrast to widely publicized accusations of corruption in the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77).
After the election, Hayes’s campaign managers challenged the validity of the returns from South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, and as a result two sets of ballots were submitted from the three states and an electoral dispute commanded attention. Eventually a bipartisan majority of Congress created a special Electoral Commission to decide which votes should be counted. While the commission was deliberating, Republican allies of Hayes engaged in secret negotiations with moderate Southern Democrats aimed at securing acquiescence to Hayes’s election. On March 2, 1877, the commission voted along strict party lines to award all the contested electoral votes to Hayes, who was thus elected with 185 electoral votes to opponent Tilden’s 184. The result was greeted with outrage and bitterness by some Northern Democrats, who thereafter referred to Hayes as “His Fraudulency.”
As president, Hayes promptly made good on the secret pledges made during the electoral dispute. He withdrew federal troops from states still under military occupation, thus ending the era of Reconstruction (1865-77). He promised not to interfere with elections in the former Confederacy. He appointed Southerners to federal positions, and he made financial appropriations for Southern improvements. These policies aroused opposition by conservantives. He reformed the civil service by substituting nonpartisan examinations for political patronage. He demanded the resignations of two top officials in the New York Customhouse (including Chester Arthur, the future president) provoking a bitter struggle with powerful people.
During the national railroad strikes of 1877, Hayes sent federal troops to suppress rioting. His administration was under continual pressure from the South and West to resume silver coinage, outlawed in 1873. Many considered this proposal inflationary, and Hayes sided with the Eastern, hard-money (gold) interests. Congress, however, overrode his veto of the Bland-Allison Act (1878), which provided for government purchase of silver bullion and restoration of the silver dollar as legal tender. In 1879 Hayes signed an act permitting women lawyers to practice before the Supreme Court.
Hayes refused renomination by the Republican Party in 1880, contenting himself with one term as president. In retirement he devoted himself to humanitarian causes, notably prison reform and educational opportunities for Black young people in the South.
Rutherford B. Hayes – President 1877-1881