Video: 'Rutherford B. Hayes: His Fraudulency (1877 - 1881)'
(Tuesday, January 17, 1893, 11:00 p.m. local time) — Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19th President of the United States (1877-1881), died this evening of complications of a heart attack at his home at Spiegel Grove in Fremont, Ohio. He was 70.
Before the American Civil War, Hayes was a lawyer and staunch abolitionist who defended refugee slaves in court proceedings.
He served in the Union Army and the House of Representatives before assuming the presidency.
Hayes 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.
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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.
Hayes, a prominent member of the Republican “Half-Breed” faction, placated both Southern Democrats and Whiggish Republican businessmen by ending the federal government’s involvement in attempting to bring racial equality to the South.
One of the defining events of his presidency was the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, which he resolved by calling in the US Army against the railroad workers. It remains the deadliest conflict between workers and strikebreakers in American history.
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As president, Hayes implemented modest civil service reforms that laid the groundwork for further reform in the 1880s and 1890s.
He vetoed the Bland–Allison Act of 1878, which put silver money into circulation and raised nominal prices; Hayes saw the maintenance of the gold standard as essential to economic recovery.
His policy toward western Indians anticipated the assimilationist program of the Dawes Act of 1887.
At the end of his term, Hayes kept his pledge not to run for reelection and retired to his home in Ohio.
