President Rutherford B Hayes
Megan Gnekow
The Republican presidential hopeful of 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes, went to bed on election night thinking that he had lost his bid for the White House. But charges of ballot-box tampering led to a prolonged investigation of the vote count in several states. This inquiry was marked by much backstairs chicanery, but Hayes finally emerged triumphant over Samuel L. Tilden by one electoral vote. Given the irregularities surrounding his election, Hayes became known in many quarters as "His Fraudulency." But looming questions about his legitimacy did not prevent this congenial former governor of Ohio from being an able Chief Executive. Numbered among his presidential accomplishments were the termination of the harsh policies that had been imposed in the South following the Civil War and the first significant steps toward curbing a pattern of rampant corruption in the nation’s civil service.
July 11, 1878: President Rutherford B. Hayes, in his effort to reform the civil service, defies the directives of Republican party boss Senator Roscoe Conkling, by removing Chester A. Arthur from his job as collector for the Port of New York. President Hayes installs Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., as Arthur’s replacement. Conkling claims that the president has usurped the right of the senator to control his own state’s federal patronage.
March 4, 1880: Reflecting on the preceding years of his presidency, Rutherford B. Hayes writes in his diary, "Three years of my term gone today. Only one year of it remains. The past has been on the whole more satisfactory, as I now look back, than I hoped it would be. For the future more care, more determined adherence to strict duty, and all will be well."
January 1, 1881: Writing to his friend Guy Bryan, outgoing President Rutherford B. Hayes states: "Nobody ever left the presidency with less regret, less disappointment, fewer heartburnings, or more general content with the result of his term (in his own heart, I mean) than I do."