How Rutherford B. Hayes broke America

Yes, it’s half-forgotten presidents, volume III.

For some reason this weekend thoughts of truly terrible US presidents are on my mind. This went out to paying subscribers back in September, back when I still had hope.

Photography! So lifelike! Hayes in 1870. Image: Library of Congress/public domain.

Lived: 1822-1893

19th President: 1877-1881

I can’t quite shake the sense that Rutherford Birchard Hayes was not actually that fussed about becoming president. He refused to campaign when nominated as a Congressman, on the grounds that he was too busy helping finish off the Civil War. When he ran for president in 1876, he went to bed early on election night. He said he’d only serve one term and didn’t even change his mind. It feels weirdly like he didn’t want it.

It’s striking, then, that the main thing he’s remembered for – to the extent he’s remembered at all – is coming to power through a distinctly shady deal, and setting back the cause of racial equality in the United States for nearly a century in the process. The official White House page on Hayes says he “oversaw the end of Reconstruction, began the efforts that led to civil service reform, and attempted to reconcile the divisions left over from the Civil War”. But the first and third of these are really the same thing – abandoning reconstruction and thus letting southern states continue to treat their black residents like shit was how he reconciled the division – and it’s a weirdly euphemistic way of saying he threw a racial minority under the bus. It all makes “civil service reform” a rather strange addition to that sentence, like saying that Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, threw excellent dinner parties, and marched an army on Rome thus precipitating the end of the Roman Republic. It doesn’t quite fit.

Like an unnerving number of early US presidents, Rutherford B. Hayes was a) a lawyer b) from Ohio. He fought in the civil war, was wounded in action, rose to the rank of Brevet¹ Major General, and became so popular that the Republican party in Cincinnati basically press-ganged him to run for Congress in 1864.² Hayes heroically refused to campaign – “an officer fit for duty who at this crisis would abandon his post to electioneer… ought to be scalped”, he said, which is very noble – but was elected all the same. He served only a single term, then three as governor of his state.

In 1876, Hayes won the Republican party nomination on a moderate liberal platform, and secured the backing of Mark Twain, very much the Taylor Swift³ of his day. But his opponent that year was Samuel J. Tilden, the Democratic governor of New York, at the time the biggest state in the union by far. That, plus the Democrats’ strength in the formerly confederate south, made Tilden the favourite: the reason Hayes went to bed early on election night is he didn’t expect to win, and early returns suggested he’d been right. Tilden won a significant margin in the popular vote, around 51% to 48%.

But as anyone who still remembers the horrors of 2016 will know, the US doesn’t decide presidential elections using the popular vote: it uses an electoral college, based on who wins each state. In 1876, Hayes clearly carried 18 states, giving him 165 votes; Tilden only carried 17, but that gave him 184.

That left three states (Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida) with 19 votes between them which both parties claimed to have won. Add these to the one of Oregon’s three voters who’d been declared illegal for some reason, and it’d be enough to put Hayes over the top, just so long as he won literally of them. The Republic party publicly declared victory, and got its candidate out of bed again.

The 1876 election result, courtesy of Wikipedia.

The dispute went on for months. In January 1877, Congress stepped in and established an Electoral Commission to sort it out, composed of five men apiece from the Senate, House of Representatives, and Supreme Court. Seven of these were Democrats; seven were Republicans. The eighth was the independent Justice David Davis (not that one), who was supposed to be the swing voter. So the Democrats in the Illinois legislature came up with a wheeze: make Davis their candidate for the Senate, which until 1913 was indirectly elected, and he’d vote for Tilden, right?

Wrong: what actually happened is that he resigned from the court and commission alike, to take up his senate seat, forcing one of the remaining justices – all Republicans – to replace him on the commission. That meant it now had seven Democrats to eight Republicans, and would you believe it? It awarded all the disputed electors to the Republican candidate, giving Hayes 185 to Tilden’s 184.

That wasn’t the end of the matter: Democrats in congress moved to filibuster to stop commission recommendations from taking effect, so that as inauguration day (4 March) approached it was still entirely unclear who was getting inaugurated. Eventually the two sides appear to have agreed the aforementioned deal, which historian C. Vann Woodward would later call the “Compromise of 1877”, and which others have called the Corrupt Bargain. Democrats would stop filibustering and accept Hayes as president. In exchange, they’d get a package of policies including at least one cabinet post, their desired result in some disputed state elections, and (this is the big one) an end to northern interference in the south. That meant an end to civil rights. No matter: both outgoing President Grant, and incoming President Hayes, began pulling out federal troops in the former confederate states. Reconstruction was over.⁴

A political cartoon by Joseph Keppler (Puck, 1877) depicts a Republican named Roscoe Conkling as Mephistopheles, watching Hayes stroll off with the “Solid South,” personified as a woman, implying a deal with the devil. The caption quotes Goethe. Love a bit of satire. Image: Wikipedia/public domain.

If the Republicans had hoped this would win them more southern support in future elections, they were to be disappointed: the solid south stayed solid for several more decades, and they’d betrayed their allies and abandoned civil rights for four unmemorable years of Rutherford B. Hayes before he declined to run again. In that time he banished alcohol from the White House; set in train policies that’d force Native Americans to integrate, whether they wanted to or not; and called in the army to break the National Railroad strike of 1877, the most violent bit of strike breaking in US history, which left over 100 dead. That’s pretty much it.

There’s something of Hayes that reminds me of Ronald Reagan. He came to power via celebrity and a governorship, and his supporters claimed he believed in meritocracy and equal treatment without regard to wealth, social standing, or race. All the same, he screwed over those who stood in his way, and then stamped on the working man. And he reunited white America by screwing over minorities.

I’m not sure a few civil service reforms are quite enough to make up for all that.

If you enjoyed that, you might also enjoy Volume I (The Notorious JQA x John “granddad” Tyler) and Volume II (This time it’s war! feat. James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson). Alternatively, you can:

1. Basically he got the title, but not the actual powers.

2. At this point, it’s important to remember, the Republicans are the more northern, more liberal party, and the Democrats the more southern, more racist one.

3. At the point I wrote this, it felt like the Swifties might save us all. Oh well.

4. A striking sentence from Wikipedia on the inauguration: “There was talk of forming armed units that would march on Washington, but President Grant tightened military security, and nobody marched on Washington.” Those were the days, weren’t they?