After his service in the Union Army, Rutherford B. Hayes would go on to become the only U.S. president who was wounded in the Civil War. Although he was elected as the 19th president due to the questionable Compromise of 1877, Hayes would end the Reconstruction Era and make major moves towards civil service reform in the nation.
Hayes was born in Ohio in 1822 to Rutherford Hayes, Jr. and Sophia Birchard. Hayes’s father died 10 weeks before he was born, so Hayes was partially raised by his uncle Sardis Birchard.
Hayes’s mother and uncle pushed him to further his education by going into law school. In 1845, Hayes graduated from Harvard Law School and he was admitted to the Ohio bar shortly after.
After practicing law for a short time in Cincinnati, he married Lucy Webb, a Methodist and an abolitionist. Hayes attended church regularly with his wife and soon joined the Republican Party and abolitionist movement. He then gained a bigger name for himself by defending fugitive slaves in court.
As soon as the Civil War started, Hayes knew he needed to serve his country. He volunteered to fight for the Union Army and the governor of Ohio signed him up as a major in the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry.
During the war, Hayes fought in several battles, was wounded four times, and had several horses shot out from under him. Just before the war ended, Hayes was promoted to brigadier general, but he would never fight in a battle at the top rank.
In 1864, a group of his Republican friends nominated Hayes to take a seat in the House of Representatives. However, Hayes refused to leave his military post to campaign for the seat. Hayes was elected to the House, anyway.
In 1866, Hayes was re-elected to serve in the House, but he resigned to run for governor of Ohio. Hayes would serve as governor until 1876. His most important accomplishment as governor was ratifying the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in the state of Ohio, which eliminated race as a qualification for voting. By 1871, only 31 out of 37 states had ratified the amendment.
Hayes expected to retire from politics when he lost a bid for congress, but fate led him down a different path. His political career came back to life when he was nominated as the Republican candidate for the president of the United States in the 1876 Republican Convention. Hayes ran against the Democrat governor of New York, Samuel Tilden.
The 1876 presidential election proved to be one of the closest, longest, and most controversial elections of that time. On the day of the election, Tilden was winning the popular vote by such a large margin that Hayes thought he had lost and went to bed before the count was finalized.
However, the election would prove to be not so simple. Tilden had significantly won the popular vote, but he was one tally short of taking the Electoral College. Corruption had riddled the election, and both parties claimed victories in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina.
Congress then came up with a solution. The Electoral Commission Act established a commission consisting of lawmakers and Supreme Court justices with seven Republicans, seven Democrats and Independent Justice David Davis, who would decide who won each contested state. Davis, though, disqualified himself from the commission appointment and a Republican colleague was chosen in his stead, leading to Hayes winning the vote of the commission eight to seven.
Return to Good Government
Because of the election controversy, during his inaugural address Hayes promised he would only serve one term. In his first year in office, one of Hayes’s main goals was to restore the citizens’ faith in the presidential office. Faith in government suffered when the country was riddled with corruption during President Ulysses Grant’s term.One of Hayes’s first moves was to officially end the Reconstruction Era in which federal troops were tasked with enforcing the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution. Although Union troops remained in only a few states once Hayes took office, he removed the rest of them from all the southern states after the state governments promised to uphold the new amendments to the constitution. But the southern states’ promise would prove to be short-lived as the voting rights for freed slaves wouldn’t be officially allowed until much later.
Hayes also reformed civil service because he believed that positions should be awarded based on merit instead of political affiliation. He also took steps to return the country to the gold standard of currency.
When his term was up in 1881, Hayes stood true to his promise and didn’t seek a second term. When he retired from politics, Hayes actively fought for the right to education for everyone and for prison reform.
According to Hayes’s presidential library and museum website, Hayes always thought a former president should be “like every good American citizen, [and] be willing and prompt to bear his part in every useful work that will promote the welfare and happiness of his family, his town, his state, and his country.”
