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Rutherford B. Hayes

19th President of the United States
1877–1881
Republican Party (Half-Breeds)
President Rutherford B. Hayes

The Compromise of 1877

The presidential election of 1876 was held at the tail end of Reconstruction, the twelve-year period immediately following the Civil War during which the defeated South was subjected to extensive social and political reform by the North, particularly concerning the rights of its four million black freedmen. Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican nominee, intended to maintain the commitment of incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant to preserve black rights, while New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden, the Democratic nominee, did not. In most other respects, the two candidates were very similar, both favoring civil service reform and the continuation of the gold standard.
The 1876 election was held on November 7, 1876. The winners in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana were not immediately clear, as all three states experienced rampant fraud and violent voter suppression, respectively in favor of Governor Tilden and against black Republican voters. In December, the Electoral College received conflicting sets of results from those three states, amounting to 19 disputed electoral votes; additionally, inconsistent results were received for a single electoral vote from Oregon. These 20 votes would be decisive in determining the winner of the election, as Tilden was one vote short of the necessary 185, and Hayes was exactly twenty.
Congress had difficulty agreeing exactly how the proper winners of these votes should be determined. The Republicans, who controlled the Senate, desired that the Senate or president pro tempore determine the winner, but the Democrats (and some Republicans) disagreed. On January 26, 1877, both houses of Congress agreed to pass an act establishing a bipartisan electoral commission to determine the winners of the disputed votes. The commission would consist of five members of the House, five senators, and five Supreme Court justices, the ten congressmen being appointed by their respective houses. Four of the five justices were predetermined by the bill, with a fifth “independent” justice (intended to be Associate Justice David Davis) to be chosen by the other four. Ultimately, five of the congressmen were Republicans, and five were Democrats; two of the justices were aligned with the Democrats, and the other two with the Republicans. The Democratic legislature of Illinois attempted to secure Davis’s vote by electing him to the Senate, but Davis responded by resigning from both the Court and the commission so as to avoid threatening the impartiality of the decision. As the remaining justices on the Court were aligned with a party, the four justices could no longer choose an independent; instead, Republican-aligned Associate Justice Joseph P. Bradley was appointed to the committee.
Beginning February 1, 1877, and continuing for several weeks, arguments were held in the Supreme Court by teams of lawyers representing both candidates. But these arguments failed to sway any of the commission members, who ultimately voted along party lines on each disputed vote. Governor Hayes, by the commission’s one-vote Republican majority, was thus granted all twenty of the disputed electoral votes, enough to win the presidency by a margin of 185 to 184. The House’s Democratic majority refused to accept these results, instead initiating a filibuster on March 1 over dubious claims that the electoral votes from Vermont and Wisconsin were invalid. It is generally accepted that the House’s Democratic leadership finally ended the filibuster due to a series of backroom negotiations—in which Hayes played no part—with Democrats agreeing to accept Hayes’s victory on the condition that the military, which had enforced Reconstruction policy over the preceding decade, be fully withdrawn from the South. Although the influence of this “Compromise of 1877” remains disputed by some historians due to a lack of written records, it is known that, for one reason or another, the Democrats ended their filibuster and certified the election’s results on March 2. Hayes was inaugurated peacefully on March 4.

The End of Reconstruction

Since the end of the Civil War, a Republican-dominated Congress had imposed radical civil rights policies upon the South, guaranteeing for African Americans many of the same rights afforded to their white neighbors. New amendments to the Constitution enfranchised and made citizens of black Americans. For the first time in American history, black senators and representatives served in Congress. African Americans purchased firearms, owned private property, and served as jurors. But many white Southerners opposed racial equality, with local and state governments turning a blind eye as domestic terrorist groups conducted violent campaigns of rape and murder against thousands of innocent black Americans. Against such unending resistance, the rights granted to African Americans could only exist so long as a military existed to enforce them.
In the 1874 midterm elections, the Democrats finally regained control of the House of Representatives, breaking a fourteen-year Republican trifecta and blocking further efforts to legislate new civil rights laws. The Democrats retained this hold through the 1876 election, refusing to appropriate the funding necessary to keep an active military stationed in the South. Some Republicans, too, became disillusioned with the interventionist policies which had sapped their support and encouraged violent Southern resistance. Northerners, Democrat and Republican alike, were now far too concerned with the state of the economy to vigorously support diverting any further attention to black civil rights. By the time President Hayes took office, Reconstruction was already on its last legs; federal troops only remained at the state houses of New Orleans, Louisiana, and Columbia, South Carolina. With both congressional and popular support dwindling, and financial resources lacking, President Hayes was left with little choice but to withdraw the military from the two cities. Reconstruction officially ended on April 24, 1877, when the last federal troops left Louisiana for home.
The end of Reconstruction would be the end of civil rights for this generation of African Americans, closing a brief era of limited political freedom that would not return until the mid-twentieth century. The white South, free to impose its own will unobstructed, would inaugurate an era of racial repression reminiscent to its black subjects of antebellum America. State and local governments would enable the lynchings, rapes, and murders of black men, women, and children for many decades. The Supreme Court would join them in their campaign for white supremacy, overturning the civil rights acts passed under Reconstruction and guaranteeing protection for racial discrimination from federal law.
But Reconstruction was already over before President Hayes took office. By the time of his inauguration there had only been federal troops left in two Southern cities, who effectively enforced no laws and to whom no funding would be appropriated by the Democratic House. Too many Republicans in the North ceased supporting interventionism as their constituents, apathetic and detached from the goings on of the South, began to vote Democrat. And Hayes was too powerless to do anything.

The Great Railroad Strike

In September 1873, a series of bank runs beginning with the failure of Jay Cooke and Company initiated a six-year economic contraction that would continue throughout the first half of Hayes’s term. Unemployment rose to at least eight percent (one million people), and wages for those still employed plummeted. The output of American manufacturing declined by ten percent, with some sectors declining by as much as 45%.
The postwar railroad-building craze was brought to a screeching halt as investors ceased pouring capital into further construction. The major railroad companies, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, were left with little choice but to cut wages for their employees, who worked twelve-hour shifts, spent days away from home, and frequently died on the job due to a lack of safety procedures and the dangerous nature of railroad work. On July 14, 1877—after experiencing three consecutive wage cuts in three years, and without any pay for the past two months of labor—angry workers for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad began striking in Martinsburg, West Virginia, halting the movement of freight trains. The company was easily able to replace these workers due to the large pool of job-seekers. But, not giving up, the strikers moved to physically block the railroads.
The unrest spread to Baltimore, where, two days later, hundreds of manufacturers began striking for higher wages. Stations were occupied by protestors in several cities across West Virginia and Maryland, with over a thousand rail cars stuck in Martinsburg alone. The strikes soon descended into violence, first with a train being thrown off its tracks in Baltimore due to malicious interference at a railroad switch, and then with strikers in Martinsburg attacking militiamen who were defending a train. On July 18, West Virginia Governor Henry M. Mathews formally requested several hundred federal troops, citing the inability of the state militia to put down the strike; President Hayes responded by sending 312 soldiers to Martinsburg along the B&O railroad. By the next morning, the situation in Martinsburg was pacified, but strikes in other cities continued to grow.
On July 20, Maryland Governor John Lee Carroll mobilized the 5th and 6th Regiments of the Maryland National Guard, armed with bayoneted rifles, who began marching toward Camden Station in Baltimore. Mobs of several thousand strikers threw bricks and stones at the soldiers, who responded by firing into the crowds. Upon reaching Camden Station, the train they had prepared was damaged beyond use by the crowd’s stones. Most of the militiamen in both regiments deserted as the mob grew to some 15,000 people, at which point it began burning trains and nearby buildings. As the chaos became unsustainable for the National Guard, Carroll requested federal assistance, and President Hayes responded by sending about 120 marines to intervene. By the end of July 21, order was mostly restored in Baltimore. Some violence continued into July 22, with fires being set at the Mount Clare Shops—which were extinguished by the marines—and the lumber yard of J. Turner & Cate, which burned down a city block. General Winfield Scott Hancock arrived that morning with some 360 reinforcements to Camden Station, and most of the remaining anarchy was suppressed by the end of the day.
Meanwhile, the most violent riots of the strike were unfolding in Pittsburgh, in which 61 people would die, 39 buildings would burn, and more than one thousand rail cars would be destroyed. The city had been frustrated for months with the higher prices of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which were stifling the transport of goods to and from Pittsburgh, and then further agitated by a ten percent wage cut in June. On July 19, company policy changes threatening to reduce the railroad’s workforce by half, combined with the growing unrest in Baltimore, pushed the workers in Pittsburgh to initiate a strike of their own. That morning, a group of strikers began an occupation of the main railway, which grew throughout the day into a full blockade of all railroad traffic by more than a thousand strikers.
The crowd grew by another thousand strikers the next day. Local law enforcement, sympathetic with the workers, refused to suppress the strikes. On the afternoon of July 21, about 600 men from the Pennsylvania National Guard’s First Division arrived in Pittsburgh with bayoneted rifles and two Gatling guns; by now, the mobs had grown to have more than 10,000 rioters. Some of the soldiers, after being attacked with rocks and fired upon by armed strikers, began firing into the crowd, killing at least ten people. But this only further angered the mob, which began to loot shops and armories as the soldiers retreated. Troops stationed at a railway roundhouse were fired upon while escaping the massive fires set by rioters. The next day, as rioters destroyed more than 100 locomotives, 2,000 railroad cars, and numerous buildings, Pennsylvania Governor John Hartranft requested federal assistance from President Hayes; the president responded with reinforcements only after receiving confirmation that the state’s ability to suppress the strikes had been exhausted. On July 23, the troops were reorganized under General James S. Negley, with President Hayes sending several thousand more federal troops over the following week as order was gradually restored.
News of the strikes began to spread westward, inspiring further unrest. On July 24, a strike organized by the socialist Workingmen’s Party of the United States began in St. Louis, demanding increased wages and eight-hour work days. Several thousand strikers gathered as workers across multiple railway companies stopped working. Mobs of strikers dismantled more than forty factories around the city to prevent people from working. Thousands of citizens agitated by the strikes, in conjunction with local law enforcement and the state militia, worked to suppress the strikes over the next several days. President Hayes rejected requests to supply troops, believing the local and state forces sufficient. He did deploy troops to Chicago, where tens of thousands of strikers were exchanging stones for bullets from overwhelmed law enforcement, restoring peace in the city by July 25.
On July 27, B&O freight trains again left Camden Station. After several days of anarchy, the chaotic mobs of strikers—which had started miles of conflagrations, caused millions of dollars in property damage, and resulted in about one hundred deaths across several states—had finally been dispersed. President Hayes had dispatched his troops carefully and conservatively, and only when certain that the local and state governments could not handle the strikes themselves. Federal troops, unlike some of their state counterparts, had not caused any harm to protestors or damage to property, largely ending the strikes through their presence alone. And Hayes himself received much backlash from pro-business politicians for his cautious and restrained response. Despite his moderate interest in supporting workers, however, Hayes never developed a meaningful pro-labor policy to implement.
None of the strikers’ demands were immediately met, with the B&O Railroad maintaining that it did not have enough work to give the large number of workers it had employed, and thus needed to spread work and wages thin to avoid laying them off. But, over the next three years, most of the wage cuts were reversed, and working conditions were improved. B&O made additional concessions, permitting a quarter day’s pay for workers whose trains did not arrive, and agreeing not to call workers until an hour before their train departed. But this was only the beginning for the labor movement, just having found its power, and the first of several major strikes over the following decades. While the Posse Comitatus Act, signed a year later, would inhibit the capacity for future presidents to intervene so directly, private companies and local law enforcement would be much better prepared.

Saving the Enforcement Acts

Republican support for curbing the president’s strikebreaking powers in the wake of the Great Railroad Strike allowed a relatively bipartisan Congress to pass the Posse Comitatus Act on June 15, 1878. The act would block the president from using the military for domestic purposes except when enforcing federal laws or otherwise authorized by Congress. President Hayes, who had favored a limited response to the railroad strikes, signed the act three days later.
In the November 1878 midterm elections, the Democrats won a majority in the Senate, gaining control of both houses of Congress for the first time since the 1856 elections. Although they now only held a plurality in the House—their majority having been frustrated somewhat by the inflationary Greenback Party—the Democrats had finally attained a position of sufficient power to begin pushing their own bills through Congress. Only the president could foil them.
In 1870 and 1871, a heavily Republican Congress had passed several Enforcement Acts, banning domestic terrorist organizations from engaging in violent voter suppression efforts, as was then common against black voters, while authorizing the president to respond to such efforts militarily. But the Democratic Congress of Hayes’s era was past those obsolete Reconstructionist statutes, and resolved to repeal it. The Posse Comitatus Act, though not itself a threat to the already codified Enforcement Acts, opened the opportunity upon which the Democrats would try to capitalize; if the Enforcement Acts could be successfully repealed, the Posse Comitatus Act would block the president from protecting black voters threatened by terror and violence.
In his second annual address to Congress on December 2, 1878, following the widespread racial violence of the midterm elections, President Hayes called for sufficient military funding to execute the Enforcement Acts. Instead, on April 25, 1879, the Democratic Congress passed an army spending bill with an attached provision repealing the acts. Hayes responded with a veto, which the Democrats failed to override. Days later, Congress passed a full bill restricting the president from enforcing the acts except when asked by a state’s government; knowing the Southern state governments would never request such enforcement, Hayes vetoed the bill. Congress tried a third time, adding a similar provision to an appropriations bill, but was met with a third veto. In June, Congress passed a bill blocking payments to the deputy marshals who enforced voting protections, which Hayes again vetoed. Finally, Congress passed appropriations bills without any provisions relating to the Enforcement Acts, which Hayes promptly signed before vetoing a fifth bill with another provision defunding the deputy marshals. Two years later, in 1881, Hayes would block two more acts that would have weakened voting protections in the South. Although the law would rarely be invoked over the following decades as Hayes desired, he had done as much as his power permitted; the Enforcement Acts would stay in place, remaining a basis for civil rights enforcement to the present day.

The Nez Percé War

On June 9, 1855, the Nez Percé tribe signed a treaty with the U.S. government, granting them 7.7 million acres of land within the Oregon, Idaho, and Washington territories. The treaty forbade white settlement in Nez Percé land, but, when several thousand miners began flocking to a newly discovered Idaho gold site in 1860, the government did nothing to stop them. Instead, federal agents coerced the Nez Percé into another treaty, shrinking their share of the land to only 760,000 acres in Idaho. Chief Lawyer, the primary signatory of that 1863 treaty, was not a proper representative of the Nez Percé, who coexisted as a system of disjoint bands rather than a unified Indian tribe with one leader. Many Nez Percé rejected the treaty, such as Chief Joseph, who tried in vain to retain his ancestral lands in the Wallowa Valley. On May 14, 1877, U.S. General Oliver Otis Howard ordered the remaining Nez Percé to move to the Idaho reservation.
While Chief Joseph and the other chiefs—Looking Glass and White Bird—initially acquiesced, a violent attack by some rogue Nez Percé which killed nearly twenty white settlers abruptly changed the character of the situation. General Howard ordered a retaliatory attack on June 17, which was unexpectedly repelled by the outnumbered Nez Percé in the Battle of White Bird Canyon. Over the next five months, the roughly 750 Nez Percé retreated more than one thousand miles through Idaho and Montana, fending off a combined 2,000 American soldiers over a series of major battles and engagements. The Nez Percé finally surrendered on October 5 after succumbing to a surprise attack at the Battle of Bear Paw. U.S. General William T. Sherman forcibly relocated the Nez Percé to the swamps at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas—riddled with diseases like malaria and cholera—nearly 2,000 miles from their homeland. Chief Joseph would never return to live in the Wallowa Valley, dying instead at the Colville Indian Reservation in 1904.
Under preceding administrations, innumerable Native American tribes had been marched from their lands to reservations—for some, to protect them from the tides of westward white settlers; for others, to free up land from “barbaric” Indians for “civilized” white settlers. The War Department brutally believed the latter, and the Nez Percé War was no exception to its relentless pursuit of Indian removal. President Hayes, though lacking the belligerence of his generals, privately believed the Nez Percé should surrender and submit to relocation, and so a peaceful solution was never realized.
But the president later adopted a more sympathetic stance. In December 1877, President Hayes began pushing Congress to supply livestock and agricultural goods to Indian reservations while openly labeling most of the country’s Indian wars unjust. The Interior Department, under Interior Secretary Carl Schurz, launched successful investigations into the Bureau of Indian Affairs, cleansing it of officials who had been bribed by contractors into allowing the injustices like those which had precipitated the Nez Percé War. Hayes blocked efforts by the Union Pacific Railroad to construct tracks through the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho. In the Washington Territory, Hayes ordered the military to protect the Sinkiuse-Columbia from white settlers, although they were later relocated about a hundred miles northwest. In 1878, Hayes signed legislation allowing Native Americans to serve as police on their own reservations, an act that noticeably reduced crime between Indians. And, in 1880, Hayes returned Nebraska land to the Ponca tribe, which had previously been forced by Congress onto the Indian Territory in modern-day Oklahoma.

The Guard of Gold

The enactment of the 1873 Coinage Act—which had effectively ended the minting of silver currency in an effort to reduce inflation—briefly worsened economic conditions for many Americans in the midst of the Long Depression. In the West, silver miners were troubled by the accelerating decline of silver’s market value. In the South, farmers suffered from low crop prices as the growth of the nation’s money supply slowed down. Debtors everywhere could no longer rely so much on inflation to ease the debts they owed. The 1875 Specie Payment Resumption Act, which mandated the government buyback of more than twenty percent of the country’s inflationary greenbacks for gold, further exacerbated the currency issue.
On February 21, 1878, Congress passed the 1878 Bland-Allison Act, requiring the U.S. Treasury to purchase between $2 and $4 million in silver each month for immediate release into circulation. The act was inherently inflationary, expanding the money supply and standardizing a silver dollar worth only 90 cents on the market. President Hayes was wary of the measure, fearing the consequences higher inflation would have on the foreign investments critical to America’s growing industrial development. Creditors from Europe (which was mostly on the gold standard) would not be so willing to invest in American railroads, for example, if they knew they would be paid back later in less valuable money. Furthermore, while the Resumption Act had encouraged investors confident in the nation’s sound-money economy to lower their interest rates, the president believed an inflationary act would reverse those rates and worsen the ongoing depression. Hayes therefore chose to veto the bill on February 28, but Congress overrode it later that day. Still, Hayes directed Treasury Secretary John Sherman to purchase no more than the minimum required amount of gold, keeping the act’s inflationary consequences as low as Congress had allowed.
Before the silver purchases began, the economy had already visibly recovered from the Long Depression. Six years of fiscal responsibility and sound-money policy had allowed the government to gradually recover from a major global recession without any substantially inflationary policies. The mileage of new railroad tracks more than quadrupled between 1878 and 1882, as controlled inflation allowed investors to lend money to railroad companies at low interest rates. Although Southern farmers and Western miners would continue to clamor for inflationary policy amid declining prices, President Hayes, wisely continuing the fiscal austerity of his predecessor, would leave the American economy in a state far more prosperous overall than any since the Civil War.

Civil Service Reform

Both the widespread corruption that defined the Gilded Age and the political brawl surrounding it were at full strength when President Hayes took office in 1877. Much of the era’s Republican Party was divided into two factions: the Stalwarts, led by Senator Roscoe Conkling, who favored the old spoils system of granting jobs to party supporters; and the Half-Breeds, their relatively meritocratic opponents. Hayes’s pursuit of civil service reform was repeatedly blocked by Conkling and his Stalwart followers, who sought to protect the patronage system and maintain corruption in government.
Outside Washington, there were few federal jobs more spoiled than the collector of the Port of New York, a lucrative position held since 1871 by Stalwart Republican and Conkling crony Chester A. Arthur. As collector of the busiest port in America—which collected some seventy percent of the nation’s customs revenue—Arthur had the unique privilege of suspiciously earning the federal government’s highest annual compensation: more than $50,000 (before Congress forced him into a fixed $12,000 salary in 1874). To support his Stalwart friends, Arthur regularly forced campaign contributions out of his one thousand subordinates while permitting millions of dollars in goods connected to Conkling’s allies to enter duty-free. All of those subordinates were already supporters of Conkling, of course, for Arthur would allow no one else a job at the port.
On April 23, 1877, the Hayes administration sanctioned a commission under the Treasury Department to investigate the New York Custom House. On May 24, the Jay Commission reported that Collector Arthur’s custom house had hundreds of excess employees, recommending a twenty percent reduction in staff. It also revealed a widespread network of bribery, to which Arthur pleaded ignorance. President Hayes did not immediately act, giving Arthur a chance to reform his office, but the collector made no such effort. On June 22, Hayes issued an executive order prohibiting “assessment[s] for political purposes” on government officials and barring public servants from managing “political organizations, caucuses, conventions, or election campaigns”; Arthur ignored the order. Finally, on September 6, Hayes asked Arthur to resign, but the request was refused. Still, Hayes submitted nominations to replace Arthur and his cronies—surveyor Alonzo B. Cornell and naval officer George H. Sharpe—but was rebuffed by Senator Conkling, who used his power as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee to block the appointments. Hayes tried again in December 1877, but his replacement of Arthur was rejected on a 31-25 vote in the Senate.
Undeterred, the Treasury Department established a second committee to investigate the custom house in March 1878. Unlike the preceding Jay Commission, the new Meredith Committee found evidence of corruption at the highest offices, charging Chief Deputy John Lydecker with fraud and Collector Arthur himself with neglect in a report to President Hayes on June 25. On July 11, with the Senate in recess and Arthur’s appeals to ignorance unconvincing, Hayes fired Arthur, appointing port surveyor Edwin A. Merritt in his place. By the time Congress reconvened in December, Collector Merritt’s reforms had noticeably improved efficiency at the custom house, encouraging a number of senators who had rejected Hayes’s previous nomination to reconsider the issue. Ignoring efforts by Senator Conkling to restore Arthur to the collectorship, the Senate officially confirmed Merritt’s appointment on February 3, 1879, by a 33-24 vote.
The successful replacement of New York’s corrupt port collector was considered a victory by reformers, as the policies implemented by Collector Merritt gradually reversed the declining revenues of the nation’s busiest customs house at the expense of the openly corrupt Stalwarts. But, despite his victory, President Hayes did not pursue further civil service reform at a national level, leaving the effort to future administrations. And, although he asked Merritt not to give special consideration to “recommendation[s]” by Secretary Sherman, Hayes allowed patronage to remain a key instrument of political power in the Treasury Department through the rest of his term.

Foreign Policy

The six-year conflict between Paraguay and the Triple Alliance of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay—known both as the Paraguayan War and the War of the Triple Alliance—ended in 1870 with a decisive victory for the Triple Alliance, long before President Hayes took office in 1877. Territorial disputes between Paraguay and its adversaries continued, however, with the February 1876 Machaín-Irigoyen Treaty failing to settle the border between Paraguay and Argentina; specifically, both countries claimed ownership over a large region between the Verde and Pilcomayo rivers. In 1878, the two parties turned to President Hayes to act as an arbitrator on the issue. Hayes carefully considered arguments from both parties before awarding the territory to Paraguay, which now constitutes some one-fifth of the country’s total area. The grateful Paraguayan government named its third-largest administrative division, which covers much of the awarded area, “Presidente Hayes”, where he remains a larger figure today than he does in the country over which he once presided.
On January 18, 1878, President Hayes signed a treaty establishing a naval base on the Samoan island of Tutuila in northeastern Oceania, strengthening the American presence in Samoa against increasing British and German influence. The naval base was established at Pago Pago Harbor—one of the largest natural harbors in the world—and functioned as a critical fueling station for American vessels in the South Pacific. It remains America’s only inhabited territory below the equator.
In May 1879, at the Congress International d’Etudes du Canal Interoceanique in Paris, French entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps—who had organized the construction of the Suez Canal between the Mediterranean and Red Seas—proposed the construction of a canal across Panama, to be developed over the following decade. France’s effort to acquire such economic power in the Western Hemisphere, especially so soon after its failed invasion of Mexico in the 1860s, concerned President Hayes, who denounced the project before Congress as both a threat to American national security and an unwelcome intervention into American affairs. On January 9, 1880, Hayes sent two ships southward to begin establishing naval bases at both ends of the proposed canal, but Congress refused to appropriate the $200,000 necessary to establish them. The issue was further aggravated for the Hayes administration when, in late 1880, Navy Secretary Richard Thompson accepted the presidency of an American committee for the canal formed by de Lesseps; Hayes immediately fired him. Although construction of the canal would continue beyond his administration, Hayes’s rhetoric in its initial stages of development would prevent de Lesseps from receiving enough funding from American investors, contributing to the eventual failure of the project. It would also influence later interpretations of the Monroe Doctrine, in which the United States would pursue a more direct role in Latin American affairs.

Miscellaneous Policies

Violence along the country’s southern border was rampant in 1877 as groups of Mexican bandits repeatedly launched raids into southern Texas. On June 1, President Hayes authorized General Edward Ord to militarily suppress these raids, permitting his troops to cross the border into Mexico if necessary. This angered Mexican President Porfirio Díaz, who responded by sending Mexican troops to the border. Avoiding a violent escalation, Hayes reached an agreement with Díaz to jointly combat the raids. He withdrew the order permitting U.S. troops to enter Mexico in February 1880, as the joint effort between the two presidents had successfully secured the border for the time being.
In 1868, the Johnson administration had signed the Burlingame-Seward Treaty with Qing China, lifting long-time restrictions on Chinese immigration across the Pacific. Over the following decade, the number of Chinese Americans surged from 64,000 to 105,000, the vast majority of whom performed manual labor for lower wages than their white counterparts. Jobless white Westerners became increasingly bitter—especially during the Long Depression—blaming Chinese immigrants for their own economic misfortunes. Discrimination against Chinese Americans often became violent, with nineteen being massacred in an 1871 Los Angeles lynching and another four being killed in an 1877 San Francisco riot. And, in 1875, a federal government reflective of rising Sinophobia entirely banned the immigration of Chinese women. In February 1879, under the Hayes administration, a Congress now seeking to curb the immigration of Chinese men passed an act modifying the Burlingame Treaty by forbidding any ship entering the United States from carrying more than fifteen Chinese immigrants. President Hayes vetoed the “Fifteen Passenger Bill”, publicly citing his disagreement with the illegally one-sided modification of a bilateral treaty instead of any actual opposition to restrictions on Chinese immigration. Privately, Hayes did consider such restrictions “with favor”, attempting to justify his perspective with fear that Chinese immigrants would endanger themselves by living with hostile white oppressors, and so he acted to enable Congress to continue its course. The next year, Hayes sent a formal commission to China, led by University of Michigan President James Burrill Angell, to renegotiate the Burlingame Treaty. The Angell Treaty, signed on November 17, 1880, and ratified in May 1881, permitted the United States to pass legislation limiting immigration for most Chinese laborers, precipitating the much harsher restrictions that would take effect in the 1880s.
On January 25, 1879, President Hayes signed the 1879 Pension Arrears Act, retroactively paying pensions for Civil War veterans from the date of their retirement rather than that of their pension application. On October 15, President Hayes signed the 1879 Lockwood Bill, permitting women to argue cases before the Supreme Court.

Hayes Leaves Office

As a candidate in the 1876 presidential election, Hayes had promised to serve only one term if elected. In 1880, he fulfilled his promise, choosing against running for re-election. The Republican National Convention consequently became an open battleground for the nomination. Former President Grant, Maine Senator James G. Blaine, and Secretary Sherman led the three largest factions for 35 ballots, but none could gain the necessary majority of votes. The deadlocked convention finally broke when, on the thirty-fourth ballot, supporters of both Blaine and Sherman coalesced behind Ohio Representative James A. Garfield, a Half-Breed. Chester Arthur, now the chairman of New York’s Republican Party, was nominated as Garfield’s Stalwart running mate to balance the ticket. Garfield defeated the Democratic nominee, General Winfield Scott Hancock, on November 2, and President Hayes stepped down for his Republican successor on March 4, 1881.
Despite his steady character and principled views, President Hayes did not accomplish much of note during his term. Personifying the caretaker presidency, Hayes sought more to preserve national stability—through his measured response to the Great Railroad Strike, his vetoing of legislation that threatened the gold standard, and his securing of the southern border—than to launch any major initiatives. Hayes’s most influential policies would culminate under his successors, both in the civil service reform he pursued and the future immigration restrictions his treaty enabled. Although forced by Congress to forsake the freedman, whose continuing plight would soon fall out of public awareness, Hayes would leave the rest of the country and its markedly recovered economy in a condition decidedly better than he had gained it.
Next: James A. Garfield