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Rutherford B. Hayes: Civil War
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Rutherford B. Hayes had been a Union general in the Civil War, and he won a controversial election by just one electoral vote. His first important act in office was to end Reconstruction by removing the last of the federal troops from the South, which won over his Democratic critics, but alienated many within his own party. Hayes attacked the corrupt patronage system, personally firing future 21st president Chester A. Arthur from a powerful position he had been rewarded with. In 1879, Hayes vetoed Congress's first ban on Chinese immigration.
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The policies of Rutherford B. Hayes, America's nineteenth President, began to heal the nation after the ravages of the Civil War. He was well suited to the task, having earned a steadfast reputation for integrity throughout his career as a soldier and a statesman. Upstanding, moral, and honest, Hayes was elected after the most lengthy, bitterly disputed, and corrupt presidential election in history.
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Rutherford B. Hayes claimed the presidency only after a prolonged investigation into charges of voter fraud. Because the investigation itself was far from unbiased, the legitimacy of Hayes's accession has always been debatable. Still, he proved an able chief executive, and he took some of the first significant steps toward curbing the well-entrenched corruption in the civil service system.
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Hayes had more success with other issues. An advocate of civil service reform, he waged a two-year battle with Sen. Roscoe Conkling of New York over that state's patronage. In the end Hayes won confirmation for his appointees to the New York Custom House, removing Chester A. Arthur from his position there, and ... gave important impetus toward later adoption of civil service reform. On monetary issues Congress passed the mildly inflationary Bland-Allison Act over the president's veto in 1878, but the administration did bring about the resumption of gold payments for Civil War greenback currency on Jan. 1, 1879. When the elections of 1878 produced a Democratic House of Representatives, Hayes resisted opposition efforts to attach crippling riders to appropriation bills that would have weakened the presidency. He also vetoed (1879) Congress's first attempt to ban Chinese immigration.
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As the nineteenth president of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes brought an end to Reconstruction and returned order to the White House. But it was his service as a volunteer officer in the Union army during the Civil War that provided the most glorious years of his life and made his post-war political accomplishments possible.
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On the race issue and the South, Hayes attempted to carry out his policy "to wipe out the color line, to abolish sectionalism, to end the war and bring peace." He named a southerner—David M. Key from Tennessee—as postmaster general and withdrew the federal army from the South. Republicans assailed him, and the South repudiated his initiative. The last two Republican governments in the South—Louisiana and South Carolina—fell, and by 1878 the solidly Democratic South had emerged. "I am reluctantly forced to admit that the experiment was a failure," Hayes said. Like most of American society in the 1870s, the president believed that blacks would have to survive in the South and complete the journey to freedom through their personal efforts without government support.
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