Rutherford B. Hayes(1822-1893)

Rutherford Birchard Hayes was one of that small legion of political non-entities who have occupied the post of President and First Magistrate of the Republic since Andrew Jackson, though he was a better man than most. Born on October 4, 1822, in Delaware, Ohio,the former Civil War general served a single term in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1865 and 1867 and then served as Governor of Ohio from 1868 to 1872 and from 1876 to 1877, when he surrendered that office for the presidency. He won the Republican nomination in 1876 because reform-minded Republicans blocked the bid of former President Ulysses S. Grant, whose two terms in office had been marked by unprecedented political corruption, for a non-consecutive third term.

He won the nickname "Rutherfraud" for winning election as the 19th President of the United States by being virtually appointed by an electoral commission adjudicating the disputed 1876 election. (The commission made a deal granting the Republicans the presidency in return for the Democrats' request to end Reconstruction in the former Confederate States. The deal damned black freedmen to quasi-slavery for nearly 100 more years.) It was an electoral anomaly that wouldn't be repeated until 2000, when the right-wing Rhenquist Court virtually anointed GOP contender George W. Bush president, not even going through the motions that the pols of the Bicentennial Year did 124 years earlier.

Hayes proved to be a decent if not spectacular president, committed to civil service reform and cleaning out government corruption. He had little taste for the pretensions of the presidency, saying, "The Presidential mania makes mad every man who is at all prominent in Washington. It never seemed to me worth the cost of self-respect, of independence." He did not stand for reelection in 1880.

Rutherford B. Hayes died on January 17, 1893 in Fremont, Ohio. He was 70 years old.