Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes
The presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes began on March 4, 1877, when Rutherford B. Hayes was inaugurated as President of the United States, and ended on March 4, 1881. Hayes became the 19th president, after being awarded the closely contested 1876 presidential election by Republicans in Congress who agreed to the Compromise of 1877. That Compromise promised to pull federal troops out of the South, thus ending Reconstruction. He refused to seek re-election and was succeeded by James A. Garfield, a fellow Republican and ally.
Cabinet
In general he was a moderate and a pragmatist. He kept the promise to withdraw the last federal troops from the South, as Democrats took control of the last three Republican states. A paragon of honesty, he sponsored civil service reform, where he challenged the patronage hungry Republican politicians. Though he failed to enact long-term reform, he helped generate public support for the eventual passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act in 1883. The Republican Party in the South grew steadily weaker as his efforts to support the civil rights of blacks in the South were largely stymied by Democrats in Congress.
Insisting that maintenance of the gold standard was essential to economic recovery, he opposed Greenbacks (paper money not backed by gold or silver) and vetoed the Bland–Allison Act that called for more silver in the money supply. Congress overrode his veto, but Hayes's monetary policy forged a compromise between inflationists and advocates of hard money. He used federal troops cautiously to avoid violence in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, one of the largest labor strikes in U.S. history. It marked the end of the economic depression called the "Panic of 1873". Prosperity marked the rest of his term. His policy toward Native Americans emphasized minimizing fraud. He continued Grant's "peace plan" and anticipated the assimilationist program of the Dawes Act of 1887. In foreign policy, he was a moderate who took few initiatives. He unsuccessfully opposed the De Lesseps plan for building a Panama Canal, which he thought should be an American only program, Hayes asserted U.S. influence in Latin America and the continuing primacy of the Monroe Doctrine. Polls of historians and political scientists generally rank Hayes as an average president.
End of Reconstruction[edit]
Withdrawal from the South[edit]
When Hayes assumed office, only two Republican state governments remained, in South Carolina and Louisiana. They were both propped up by federal troops. Hayes had been a firm supporter of Republican Reconstruction policies throughout his political career, but the first major act of his presidency was to end Reconstruction and return the South to "home rule." In South Carolina, Hayes withdrew federal soldiers on April 10, 1877, after Governor Wade Hampton III promised to respect the civil rights of African Americans. In Louisiana, Hayes appointed a commission to mediate between the rival governments of Republican Stephen B. Packard and Democrat Francis T. Nicholls. The commission chose to support Nicholls's government, and Hayes ended Reconstruction in Louisiana, and the country as a whole, on April 29, 1877.[45]
Some Republicans, such as Blaine, strongly criticized the end of Reconstruction.[46] However, even without the conditions of the disputed 1876 election, Hayes would have been hard-pressed to continue the policies of his predecessors. The House of Representatives in the 45th Congress was controlled by the Democratic Party, and the Democrats refused to appropriate enough funds for the army to continue to garrison the South.[47] Even among Republicans, devotion to continued military Reconstruction was fading in the face of persistent Southern insurgency and violence.[48]
Voting Rights[edit]
Democrats consolidated their control in the South in the 1878 mid-term elections, creating a voting bloc known as the Solid South. Just three of the 73 Representatives elected by the former Confederate states were members of the Republican Party. Democrats also took control of the Senate in the 1878 elections, and the new Democratic Congress immediately sought to strip away the remaining federal influence in the South.[49]
The Democratic Congress passed an army appropriations bill in 1879 with a rider that repealed the Enforcement Acts, which had been used to suppress the Ku Klux Klan.[50] Those acts, passed during Reconstruction, made it a crime to prevent someone from voting because of his race. Hayes was determined to preserve the law protecting black voters, and he vetoed the appropriation. The Democrats did not have enough votes to override the veto, but they passed a new bill with the same rider. Hayes vetoed this as well, and the process was repeated three times more. Finally, Hayes signed an appropriation without the offensive rider.[51] Congress refused to pass another bill to fund federal marshals, who were vital to the enforcement of the Enforcement Acts.[50] The election laws remained in effect, though the funds to enforce them were curtailed.[52] Hayes's strong stance against the Democratic attempts to repeal the election laws earned him the support of civil rights advocates in the North and boosted his popularity among some Republicans who had been alienated by his civil service reform efforts.[53][50]
Hayes tried to reconcile the social mores of the South with the civil rights laws by distributing patronage among Southern Democrats. "My task was to wipe out the color line, to abolish sectionalism, to end the war and bring peace," he wrote in his diary. "To do this, I was ready to resort to unusual measures and to risk my own standing and reputation within my party and the country."[54] He also sought to build up a strong Republican Party in the South that appealed to both whites and blacks.[55] All of his efforts were in vain; Hayes failed to convince the South to accept the idea of racial equality and failed to convince Congress to appropriate funds to enforce the civil rights laws.[56] In the ensuing years and decades, African Americans would be almost completely disenfranchised.[57]
National leadership[edit]
In the aftermath of the 1876 presidential election, power in national politics was very closely balanced. The Senate in 1877 contained 39 Republicans, 36 Democrats, and one independent, while the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives by the slim margin of 153 to 140. There were very few troublemakers or demagogues on either side as both parties saw the need to compromise and relax the heightened political tensions following the 1876 election.[58] The economy had now recovered from the harsh depression that ended in 1873, and the nation welcomed economic expansion, farm prosperity, and the entrepreneurship that was building great industries such as iron and steel and petroleum. Historian Richard White most recently has emphasized the "Quest for Prosperity" that characterized the Gilded Age after Reconstruction ended.[59]
Women's Rights[edit]
The suffragette movement had been growing for many years prior to the presidency of Hayes. Although the issue of suffrage would not be resolved during the Hayes's tenure, another, albeit smaller issue would be. Prior to Hayes' ascension, a Belva Lockwood had attempted to be admitted to the supreme court bar.[95] She had been rejected, not on grounds of merit or qualification, but due to her sex. She appealed to members of congress for legislation that, if enacted, would remove this type of barrier and allow for qualified women to submit and argue cases before the Supreme Court.[96] After much debate, in 1879, congress passed, and Hayes signed into law the Act to Relieve Certain Legal Disabilities of Women, popularly known as the Lockwood Bill. Lockwood would go on to argue a number of cases in front of the court, and win one in 1906.[96]
Last year in office[edit]
Western tour, 1880[edit]
In 1880, Hayes embarked on a 71-day tour of the American West, becoming the first sitting president to travel west of the Rocky Mountains. Hayes' traveling party included his wife and General William Tecumseh Sherman, who helped organize the trip. Hayes began his trip in September 1880, departing from Chicago on the transcontinental railroad. He journeyed across the continent, ultimately arriving in California, stopping first in Wyoming and then Utah and Nevada, reaching Sacramento and San Francisco. By railroad and stagecoach, the party traveled north to Oregon, arriving in Portland, and from there to Vancouver, Washington. Going by steamship, they visited Seattle, and then returned to San Francisco. Hayes then toured several southwestern states before returning to Ohio in November, in time to cast a vote in the 1880 presidential election.[125]
Historical reputation[edit]
Historian Ari Hoogenboom argues that Hayes was a shrewd politician and a "patient reformer who attempted what was possible." Hoogenboom contends that Hayes's most serious mistake was choosing not to run for second term, which would have allowed Hayes to more fully implement his agenda.[131] Historian Keith Polakoff basically agrees with Hoogenboom. Hayes accepted the presidency as a personal honor, not as a challenge to introduce new policies. He worked to calm crises, including Reconstruction and the great 1877 railroad strike. Efficiency was his watchword and was the goal of the main reform he promoted, replacing patronage appointees with civil service professionals. However he did not work hard enough to achieve it against the forces of party patronage. He gave his cabinet wide leeway, and did not interfere or guide their major activities. Hayes often clashed with Congress to protect presidential prerogatives, but that was passive activity that led to nothing new. He did take credit for helping elect his old friend James Garfield as his successor.[132] Kenneth Davison emphasizes how hard he worked Hayes, especially through long speaking tours, to promote national unity and an end to sectional and class and racial conflicts of the sort that had generated so much hatred and violence for the previous two decades.[133]
Polls of historians and political scientists have generally ranked Hayes as a below-average president. A 2018 poll of the American Political Science Association’s Presidents and Executive Politics section ranked Hayes as the 28th best president.[134] A 2017 C-SPAN poll of historians ranked Hayes as the 32nd best president.[135]