Lived

October 4, 1822 – January 17, 1893

Home State

Ohio

Party

Republican

Vice President

William A. Wheeler

Rutherford B. Hayes won the disputed election of 1876 through the Compromise of 1877, in which he received Southern electoral votes in exchange for withdrawing federal troops from the South. A Union general and reformist governor of Ohio, he restored merit-based civil service and vetoed patronage-driven spending. But the Compromise ended Reconstruction and abandoned Southern Black citizens to the violence and disenfranchisement of the Redeemer governments, a decision that scarred American democracy for nearly a century. Cincinnati lawyer, Union Army general (wounded five times), U.S. Representative, three-term Governor of Ohio.

Kenyon College, 1842; Harvard Law School, 1845.

Restored the merit-based civil service and vetoed patronage-driven appropriation riders. Sent federal troops to end the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Vetoed the Bland–Allison Act; Congress overrode. Signed the Timber Cutting Act (1878).

The Compromise of 1877, in which he received the disputed electoral votes in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, ended the federal defense of Black civil rights and enabled the rise of Jim Crow.