Video: 'Rutherford B. Hayes: His Fraudulency (1877 - 1881)'

(Friday, October 4, 1822) — Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19th president of the United States from 1877 to 1881, was born Rutherford Birchard Hayes today in Delaware, Ohio.

Hayes’s father, Rutherford, had died ten weeks before his son’s birth.

In 1877, Hayes, a Republican, assumed the presidency following the 1876 United States presidential election, one of the most contentious in U.S. history. Hayes lost the popular vote to Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, and neither candidate secured enough electoral votes.

Hayes secured a victory when a Congressional Commission awarded him 20 contested electoral votes in the Compromise of 1877.

The electoral dispute was resolved with a backroom deal whereby the southern Democrats acquiesced to Hayes’s election on the condition that he end both federal support for Reconstruction and the military occupation in the former Confederate States.