Rutherford B. Hayes , in full Rutherford Birchard Hayes , (born October 4, 1822, Delaware , Ohio , U.S.—died January 17, 1893, Fremont, Ohio), 19th president of the United States (1877–81), who brought post-Civil War Reconstruction to an end in the South and who tried to establish new standards of official integrity after eight years of corruption in Washington, D.C. He was the only president to hold office by decision of an extraordinary commission of congressmen and Supreme Court justices appointed to rule on contested electoral ballots.

Early political life

Hayes was the son of Rutherford Hayes, a farmer, and Sophia Birchard. After graduating from Kenyon College at the head of his class in 1842, Hayes studied law at Harvard, where he took a bachelor of laws degree in 1845. Returning to Ohio, he established a successful legal practice in Cincinnati, where he represented defendants in several fugitive-slave cases and became associated with the newly formed Republican Party. In 1852 he married Lucy Ware Webb (Lucy Hayes), a cultured and unusually well-educated woman for her time. After combat service with the Union army, he was elected to Congress (1865–67) and then to the Ohio governorship (1868–76).

Rutherford B. Hayes and his wife, Lucy, on their wedding day, December 30, 1852. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (file no. LC-USZ61-900)

In 1875, during his third gubernatorial campaign, Hayes attracted national attention by his uncompromising advocacy of a sound currency backed by gold. The following year he became his state’s favourite son at the national Republican nominating convention, where a shrewdly managed campaign won him the presidential nomination. Hayes’s unblemished public record and high moral tone offered a striking contrast to widely publicized accusations of corruption in the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant (1869–77). An economic depression, however, and Northern disenchantment with Reconstruction policies in the South combined to give Hayes’s Democratic opponent, Samuel J. Tilden, a popular majority, and early returns indicated a Democratic victory in the electoral college as well. Hayes’s campaign managers challenged the validity of the returns from South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, and as a result two sets of ballots were submitted from the three states. The ensuing electoral dispute became known as the Tilden-Hayes affair. Eventually a bipartisan majority of Congress created a special Electoral Commission to decide which votes should be counted. As originally conceived, the commission was to comprise seven Democrats, seven Republicans, and one independent, the Supreme Court justice David Davis. Davis refused to serve, however, and the Republican Joseph P. Bradley was named in his place. While the commission was deliberating, Republican allies of Hayes engaged in secret negotiations with moderate Southern Democrats aimed at securing acquiescence to Hayes’s election. On March 2, 1877, the commission voted along strict party lines to award all the contested electoral votes to Hayes, who was thus elected with 185 electoral votes to Tilden’s 184. The result was greeted with outrage and bitterness by some Northern Democrats, who thereafter referred to Hayes as “His Fraudulency.”