Pres. Hayes’s Legacy

As an old history major, I found a recent Facebook post about President Rutherford B. Hayes fascinating enough to take a deeper look. What I learned convinced me that emphasizing Hayes’ personal bravery and integrity distracts us from something far more important: Hayes’s decision to withdraw federal troops from the south to end Reconstruction.

Who knows whether the nation would have survived if he hadn’t done this? But it’s a certainty that his decision helped continue our legacy of racial injustice that the Civil War was supposed to end.

Here’s more detail on what I learned from an ai search and the sources of the information:

While Rutherford B. Hayes helped restore integrity and power to the executive branch after the scandals of the Grant administration, historians nonetheless generally view Hayes as an average to below-average president. His legacy is complex, largely defined by the controversial end of Reconstruction and his efforts toward civil service reform. 

The most controversial aspect of his presidency was the withdrawal of federal troops from Louisiana and South Carolina shortly after he took office in 1877, a move associated with the Compromise of 1877. While some recent historians argue the end of Reconstruction was inevitable by that point, this decision effectively abandoned federal protection for African American civil and voting rights in the South, leading to the rise of Jim Crow laws and the "Solid South" for the Democrats.

Sources of this information:

Hayes's own diaries and letters, his Presidential Library & Museums, Contemporary news and political cartoons (see HarpWeek project on the Library of Congress website), Official government records (Presidential messages to Congress, executive orders, and legal documents related to the Compromise of 1877 and civil service debates, which provide a factual basis for analyzing his administration's policies), Hayse biographers, and The Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia (which provides widely accessed essays and resources on the U.S. presidents, offering balanced overviews of Hayes's life and presidency that synthesize much of the available scholarship).