Rutherford B. Hayes: The Stolen Election

Early Life and Military Career

Rutherford Birchard Hayes was born on October 4, 1822 in Delaware, Ohio, two months after his father's death. Raised by his mother and uncle, he graduated from Kenyon College in 1842 and Harvard Law School in 1845. He became a successful Cincinnati lawyer noted for defending escaped slaves in freedom suits — an early sign of his genuine, if limited, commitment to racial equality.

He served in the Civil War with distinction, rising to brevet major general. He was wounded four times. His military record gave him the political credentials to win three terms as Governor of Ohio and his 1876 presidential nomination.

The Election of 1876

The election of 1876 between Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden produced the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. Tilden won the popular vote by 250,000 votes. But the electoral vote was disputed in three Southern states — Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina — each of which submitted competing sets of electoral votes. With 185 needed to win, Tilden had 184 undisputed; Hayes had 165. All 20 disputed votes were needed by Hayes.

Congress created a special Electoral Commission of 15 members — five senators, five representatives, five Supreme Court justices — to adjudicate the dispute. The commission split 8–7 along party lines on every contested vote, awarding all 20 to Hayes. Democrats threatened to filibuster the final count. The crisis was resolved by the informal Compromise of 1877: Hayes would become president; in exchange, federal troops would be withdrawn from the remaining occupied Southern states, effectively ending Reconstruction.

The Presidency (1877–1881)

Hayes kept his bargain. Federal troops were withdrawn from South Carolina and Louisiana in April 1877. Without Union military protection, Republican state governments collapsed, and former Confederates regained control of Southern politics. The era of Jim Crow — state-sanctioned racial segregation and disenfranchisement — began. Black Americans who had briefly exercised political rights during Reconstruction would not regain them in meaningful numbers for nearly a century.

Hayes pursued civil service reform, ending the practice of appointing party loyalists to federal jobs — most dramatically by firing Chester Arthur from his patronage post as Collector of the Port of New York (Arthur would later become his successor). He navigated the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 — the first major national labor unrest — by deploying federal troops, a controversial use of military force against workers.

He served one term as pledged, and his wife Lucy — the first college-educated First Lady — earned the nickname "Lemonade Lucy" by banning alcohol from White House functions (to the dismay of the diplomatic corps).