Rutherford B. Hayes

Hayes never met his father, who died of a fever ten weeks before he was born, and grew up under a mother who had already buried two children and an uncle, Sardis Birchard, who paid the bills. He went to Kenyon, graduated first in his class in 1842, and finished at Harvard Law. In Cincinnati he took the criminal work nobody wanted, including the defense of people seized under the fugitive slave law of 1850. He married Lucy Webb in 1852. When the war came he was 38, with a wife, children and a practice, and he volunteered anyway. He was wounded five times. At South Mountain in 1862 a musket ball shattered his left arm and he went on giving orders.

Two terms as governor of Ohio, then the election of 1876 — lost on the returns, won four months later by commission — and then the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South. One term, as he had promised. A civil service fight that cost him his own party's machinery. The bargain, the troops and the country they left behind are BriefHistory's subject. What is left over is a man who spent the next 12 years arguing, mostly with himself, about what money was doing to the republic.

Four months after he brought the soldiers home from Louisiana and South Carolina, he sent them out again. In July 1877 railroad workers walked off from Baltimore to St. Louis, governors asked Washington for help, and Hayes ordered federal troops into American cities to break the strike. Roughly 100 people died before it ended. The army that had stood between Black officeholders and the men who wanted them gone was now guarding freight cars. The house had its own arithmetic. He and Lucy had eight children and buried three of them before their third birthdays. Lucy, the Methodist who kept liquor out of the White House and was mocked as Lemonade Lucy for it, had spent the war going through Cincinnati hospitals looking for her husband's wounded men.

Lucy died of a stroke at Spiegel Grove in June 1889, and Hayes, who afterward never traveled without her photograph, followed on January 17, 1893, of heart disease. Grover Cleveland and William McKinley walked behind the coffin through Ohio snow. His last diaries had turned on the class he came from — he wanted confiscatory inheritance taxes, feared a government of corporations, and had decided that most crime was a symptom of poverty. Almost none of that attached to his name. What attached was 1876. In 1916 Ohio put up a fireproof stone building over his papers at Spiegel Grove, the first presidential library in the country, and the rankings still place him in the middle or just below it.

Rutherford B. Hayes's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Fugitive slave defenses in Cincinnati case
  He took the cases of people seized under the 1850 law 1853
• Civil service order of June 1877 law
  Barred federal officeholders from running party campaigns 1877
• Veto of the Fifteen Passenger Bill law
  Blocked the first attempt to bar Chinese immigration, on treaty grounds 1879
• Angell Treaty law
  Renegotiated Chinese immigration instead — Congress passed exclusion two years after he left 1880
• Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museums building
  Built over his papers at Spiegel Grove — the first of its kind in the country 1916

• October 4, 1822 aged 0 Born ten weeks after his father's death An uncle, Sardis Birchard, paid for his schooling.
• 1842 aged ~20 Graduates first in his class at Kenyon College
• December 30, 1852 aged 30 Marries Lucy Webb
• 1861 aged ~39 Joins the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry at 38 A private named William McKinley served in the same regiment.
• September 14, 1862 aged 39 Shot through the left arm at South Mountain and keeps command It was the worst of five wounds.
• 1877 aged ~55 Orders federal troops against striking railroad workers Roughly 100 people died in the strike that summer.
• 1879 aged ~57 Vetoes the Fifteen Passenger Bill and blocks Chinese exclusion for three more years
• June 25, 1889 aged 66 Lucy dies of a stroke at Spiegel Grove
• January 17, 1893 aged 70 Dies of heart disease at Spiegel Grove Grover Cleveland and William McKinley followed the coffin.

• Frederick Douglass 1818–1895
  Former slave who became a leading abolitionist, orator, and advocate for equal rights. appointed
• Roscoe Conkling 1829–1888
  Senate boss of the Stalwart patronage machine who resigned in a fight over one customs house. opposed by