Rutherford Birchard Hayes

Birth-Death: (1822 - 1893 ) Term: (1877-1881 )

One of the first things Hayes did as President was to remove federal occupation forces from the South, as he had previously promised. He hoped the end of reconstruction would bring the two-party system back to the South. Hayes strove for civil service reform. He based appointments to his cabinet on worthiness, not on the spoils system. One of his Cabinet members was even a southern Democrat. The 1870's depression brought farmers crying for "cheap money." They wanted the government to throw more money into circulation, even though there wouldn't be gold to back it. Hayes favored a more conservative policy and refused their ideas. In 1879, the Hayes Administration restored financial confidence by allowing people to trade in their greenbacks (paper money) for specie (metal coin).

Domestic Events of Rutherford Hayes

    Reconstruction was officially ended with the controversial election of 1876. The republicans nominated Rutherford Hayes to oppose the Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden. In the election, Tilden received 184 electoral votes, Hayes 169, and three states (Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina) sent in two sets of electoral votes, one favoring the Republicans, one favoring the Democrats. The compromise of 1876 that followed assigned all of the disputed votes to Hayes in return for the withdrawal of federal troops from the Southern states. This marked the official end of Reconstruction, but just days after federal troops were pulled out blacks were disenfranchised as southern leaders ignored the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments.

    Near the end of Grant's presidency large deposits of silver were found in the west. When the miners took the silver to the mints, they saw that with the Bill of 1873 the United States had become a monometallic country and silver could no longer be coined. Cries of the "Crime of '73" swept across the nation, especially the rural west. Congress, under the leadership of Representative Bland and Senator Allison, passed a bill which required the government to buy from two to four billion dollars worth of silver every month and mint it at the ratio of sixteen to one.