Rutherford B. Hayes - Wikipedia

Thank you my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that October 5 is the anniversary of the birth of Federal Civil War Officer veteran who was wounded at South Mountain in 1862 and notably nineteenth president of the United States Rutherford B. Hayes.

POTUS number 19 Rutherford B Hayes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85AgydJebA0

Images:
1. Rutherford B. Hayes Civil War Tall.
2. Rutherford B. Hayes and Lucy Hale Hayes in the 1850s. (Hayes Presidential Library)
3. Let me assure my countrymen of the Southern States that it is my earnest desire to regard and promote their truest interest — the interests of the white and of the colored people both and equally — and to put forth my best efforts in behalf of a civil policy which will forever wipe out in our political affairs the color line and the distinction between North and South, to the end that we may have not merely a united North or a united South, but a united country.
Inaugural Address (5 March 1877)
4. 1884 Daniel Huntington was one of the most fashionable portraitists of his generation. He accepted Lucy Hayes’ invitation to paint her portrait after the National Women’s Christian Temperance Union offered to fund this memorial for her. After her husband retired from the Presidency, Huntington was selected by the President to paint a companion piece, which was to be his official portrait. It was completed in 1884, three years after Hayes left office.
1884 Official portrait of President Rutherford B Hayes painted by Daniel Huntington, three years after Hayes left office.

Biography
1. civilwarmed.org/hayes/
2. history.com/topics/us-presidents/rutherford-b-hayes
3. whitehouse.gov

1. Background from civilwarmed.org/hayes/
"All the President’s Medicine: Rutherford B. Hayes at the Battle of South Mountain
Posted on: May 3rd, 2017
When the 23rd Ohio climbed the steep slopes of Maryland’s South Mountain in the morning of September 14, 1862, they were led by their 39-year-old regimental commander: Lt. Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes. Fifteen years before he would become president, the young commander took his unit toward the echoing sounds of the Confederate guns in Fox’s Gap, a mountain pass that carried a small road over the 1,000+ foot ridgeline.

This regiment would years later become known as the “President’s Regiment.” In addition to Hayes, there was a young commissary sergeant named William McKinley also assigned to the unit. Political ambition must have been far from their minds as the men of the 23rd struggled up the mountain toward battle on that bloody Sunday in September 1862.

Hayes led his Ohioans into battle at 9:00 A.M., attacking against the southern flank of Confederate forces in Fox’s Gap. “I feared confusion; exhorted, swore, and threatened,” Hayes wrote of his regiment’s arrival on the field of battle in relative disarray. He ordered an advance against Confederates behind a stone wall on top of the ridgeline. Union commanders needed Hayes’ men to pressure a regiment from North Carolina, which lay across an expanse of cornfield.
Shortly after giving the command for his unit to advance, Hayes “felt a stunning blow and found a musket ball had struck my left arm just above the elbow.” The stricken officer described what happened next in an entry in his diary:
Fearing that an artery might be cut, I asked a soldier near me to tie my handkerchief above the wound. I soon felt weak, faint, and sick at the stomach. I laid down and was pretty comfortable. I was perhaps twenty feet behind the line of my men, and could form a pretty accurate notion of the way the fight was going. The enemy’s fire was occasionally very heavy; balls passed near my face and hit the ground all around me. I could see wounded men staggering or carried to the rear; but I felt sure our men were holding their own. I listened anxiously to hear the approach of reinforcements; wondered they did not come.
Hayes had fallen wounded, stranded helplessly between Union and Confederate lines for about 20 minutes, when suddenly the shooting slackened. Hayes called back toward Union lines: “Hallo Twenty-third men, are you going to leave your colonel here for the enemy?”

Battle of South Mountain
Amid a renewed volley of Confederate musketry, the men of the 23rd Ohio rescued their leader from the field of battle. Behind the lines, Hayes’ brother-in-law and regimental surgeon Dr. Joseph Webb dressed his gunshot wound, administered opium and alcohol, and sent him off to the rear. An ambulance evacuated Hayes to Middletown, MD in the afternoon of September 14.
Hayes’ experience while being wounded and his relatively speedy medical attention resulted from the Army of the Potomac’s utilization of Medical Director Jonathan Letterman’s revolutionary system of evacuation. Back in Middletown, the medical authorities under Letterman adapted what they could for use as makeshift hospital wards. “Churches and other buildings were taken as far as were considered necessary, and yet causing as little inconvenience as possible to the citizens residing there,” Letterman reported in his official after-action report following the campaign.
The Army surgeon also detailed the organized system by which Hayes and more than 1,800 wounded Union soldiers were removed from the field of battle in that same report.
Houses and barns, the latter large and commodious, were selected, in the most sheltered places on the right and left of the field, by the medical directors of the corps engaged, where the wounded were first received, whence they were removed to Middletown, the Confederate wounded as well as our own. The battle lasted until some time after dark, and as soon as the firing ceased I returned to Middletown and visited all the hospitals, and gave such directions as were necessary for the better care of the wounded.

A major difference between the care for officers versus the enlisted men emerges when looking at the case of Lt. Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes. The ambulance that took Hayes to Middletown dropped him off at the home of Jacob Rudy. Officers like Hayes were often treated in private homes at their own expense, while enlisted men found treatment in communal wards located in churches, schools, and other large public buildings.
Shortly after his evacuation to the Rudy home in Middletown, Hayes endeavored to let his family know of his circumstance. He telegraphed home to Ohio to inform his wife, Lucy Webb Hayes, that he had been wounded. She left for Maryland immediately.
In a letter to his mother, Hayes described the nature of his injury as it began to recover. “I am steadily getting along,” he wrote. “For the most part, the pain is not severe, but occasionally an unlucky move of the shattered arm causes a good deal of distress.”
Lucy Hayes ventured toward the front in Maryland without having heard exactly where her husband was being treated. She scoured Army hospitals in Baltimore before heading toward the Rudy home in Middletown. Hayes fretted over whether or not she would find him. “This hurts me worse than the bullet did,” he jotted in his diary on September 20.

Lucy Hayes
Mrs. Hayes arrived in Middletown on September 26, and began to nurse her ailing husband at once. In a letter to his uncle, Hayes wrote: “Lucy is here and we are pretty jolly,” he wrote. “She visits the wounded and comes back in tears, then we take a little refreshment and get over it.”
With help from his wife and the Rudy family, Rutherford B. Hayes quickly began to recuperate. By October 4, he had recovered enough to visit the South Mountain battlefield where he had been shot down. About two weeks later, he and Lucy headed home to Ohio to finish his convalescence.

His 23rd Ohio suffered badly at Fox’s Gap. Along with their commander, the regiment took another 130 casualties including 32 men killed, 95 wounded, and 3 missing. Most of the wounded were evacuated first to Middletown, and were later moved to hospitals in Frederick.

If not for the work of the surgeons and medical authorities under the command of Medical Director Jonathan Letterman, the suffering of those like Hayes and the men of the 23rd Ohio would have surely been greater. Though battles and campaigns continued to be chaotic affairs for the medical personnel of the Union Army, Letterman’s reforms sought to bring order and structure to medical treatment on the battlefield.

The Battle of South Mountain on September 14, 1862 proved an early test for Letterman and his newly trained personnel and can be considered largely successful. Letterman and his Medical Department built upon their accumulated knowledge at the subsequent Battle of Antietam and at subsequent engagements until the end of the war in the spring of 1865.

Promoted to colonel of the 23rd Ohio while recovering from his wounds, Rutherford B. Hayes returned to the regiment in December 1862. He suffered two more wounds during his service in the American Civil War. He was mustered out of Federal service in 1865 as a brevetted major general.
In March 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes became the 19th President of the United States."

2. Background from history.com/topics/us-presidents/rutherford-b-hayes
"Rutherford B. Hayes
UPDATED: AUG 21, 2018
1. Childhood and Education
2. Legal Career and Military Service
3. Early Political Career
4. A Controversial Presidential Election
5. In the White House: 1877-81
6. Post-presidential Years
Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-1893), the 19th president of the United States, won a controversial and fiercely disputed election against Samuel Tilden. He withdrew troops from the Reconstruction states in order to restore local control and good will, a decision that many perceived as a betrayal of African Americans in the South. He served a single term, as he had promised in his inaugural address.
Childhood and Education
Rutherford Birchard Hayes was born in Delaware, Ohio, on October 4, 1822, to Sophia Birchard Hayes (1792-1866). His father, Rutherford Hayes Jr. (1787-1822), was a farmer who died shortly before his son’s birth. The young Hayes, known as “Rud,” and his sister Fanny (1820-56) were raised in Lower Sandusky (later called Fremont), Ohio, by their mother and their uncle Sardis Birchard (1801-74), a successful businessman.
Did you know? In 1879, President Rutherford Hayes signed the Act to Relieve Certain Legal Disabilities of Women, which cleared the way for female attorneys to argue cases in any U.S. federal court. In 1880, Belva Lockwood (1830-1917) became the first female lawyer to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Hayes was educated at schools in Delaware and Norwalk, Ohio, and Middletown, Connecticut. In 1842, he graduated at the top of his class from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Three years later, in 1845, he earned a law degree from Harvard University.

Legal Career and Military Service
Upon his graduation from Harvard, Hayes was admitted to the Ohio bar and began practicing law in Lower Sandusky. Hearing that there were greater opportunities in Cincinnati, Hayes moved there in 1849 and eventually developed a successful law practice. An opponent of slavery, he also became active in the newly formed Republican Party, which was organized in the 1850s to oppose the expansion of slavery to U.S. territories.
In 1852, Hayes married Lucy Ware Webb (1831-1889), a graduate of Cincinnati’s Wesleyan Women’s College (she would be the first presidential wife to graduate from college). The couple went on to have eight children, five of whom survived to adulthood. In 1858, the Cincinnati City Council appointed the up-and-coming Rutherford Hayes to fill the position of city solicitor. The following year, he was re-elected to the post, which helped boost his public profile across Ohio.
Shortly after the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, Hayes signed up to fight for the Union. He became a major in the 23rd Ohio Regiment and was seriously wounded during the Battle of South Mountain in Maryland. By the end of the war, Hayes had been promoted to the rank of brevet major general.

Early Political Career
In 1864, when Hayes was still on the battlefield defending the North, the Republican Party in Cincinnati nominated him for Congress. He accepted the nomination but refused to campaign. In a letter to his friend Ohio Secretary of State William Henry Smith (1833–96), Hayes explained, “An officer fit for duty who at this crisis would abandon his post to electioneer for a seat in Congress ought to be scalped.” Hayes left the army after the war ended in 1865, and in December of that year, having won the election, took his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Hayes was re-elected to his congressional seat in 1866, but resigned in 1867 to run for governor of Ohio. He won the race and was re-elected in 1869. At the conclusion of his second term as governor in 1872, he wanted to retire from politics altogether, but the Ohio Republican Party had other plans. The party nominated Hayes to run for Congress in 1872, a race he lost. At that point, Hayes and his growing family moved from Cincinnati back to Fremont, where he had begun his law career. Hayes practiced law for three years before again receiving his party’s nomination for governor.
Hayes was elected governor for the third time in 1875 on a platform focused on the procurement of voting rights for blacks and on economic plans calling for a strong gold-backed currency.

A Controversial Presidential Election
At the Republican national nominating convention in 1876, the party was split between one faction who supported a third term for President Ulysses S. Grant (1822-85) and another faction who supported the nomination of Speaker of the House James G. Blaine (1830-93) of Maine. As a compromise candidate, Hayes earned the party’s nomination on the seventh ballot. His reputation for being honest, loyal and inclusive offered a departure from the charges of impropriety in Grant’s administration.
In the 1876 presidential election between Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, the governor of New York, Tilden won the popular vote by approximately 250,000 votes. However, the Democratic and the Republican parties in Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina each sent their own conflicting ballot results to Washington. Because there were two sets of results from each state– with each party’s tally declaring its own candidate to be the victor–Congress appointed a 15-member commission to determine the winner of each state’s electoral votes.
The commission, which had a Republican majority, chose to award the disputed electoral votes to Hayes. Southern Democrats agreed to back the decision if the Republicans would recall the federal troops that were supporting Reconstruction. At the urging of the Southern Democrats, the Republicans also agreed to appoint at least one Southerner to Hayes’ cabinet. When the commission voted to award all the contested electoral votes to Hayes, he tallied 185 electoral votes to Tilden’s 184. Hayes was declared the winner on March 2, 1877. He took the presidential oath of office in a private ceremony at the White House the next day; a public inauguration followed on March 5. Northern Democrats who were unhappy with the outcome declared that Hayes had stolen the election.

In the White House: 1877-81
As president, Hayes ended Reconstruction within his first year in office by withdrawing federal troops from states still under occupation. He made federal dollars available for infrastructure improvements in the South and appointed Southerners to influential posts in high-level government positions. While these actions satisfied Southern Democrats, they also antagonized some members of Hayes’ own party.
The Republicans who had opposed Hayes’ candidacy at the party convention were even more frustrated by the president’s plans for civil service reform, which focused on ending patronage in favor of appointing civil servants based on merit. Hayes wrangled with U.S. Senator Roscoe Conkling (1829-88) of New York, who contested Hayes’ call for the resignation of two top bureaucrats in the New York customhouse, including the future 21st U.S. president, Chester Arthur (1829-86), who was then collector of the Port of New York. Hayes called for Arthur’s resignation in a symbolic attempt to undo Conkling’s political patronage.In addition to party politics, Hayes experienced policy difficulties that arose outside Washington. Because of the economic downturn following the Civil War, Western and Southern states sought to strengthen the dollar. They wanted to do this through the Bland-Allison Act (1878), sponsored by Representative Richard P. Bland (1835-99) of Missouri and Representative William B. Allison (1829-1908) of Iowa. The act allowed the federal government to resume minting silver coins, which had been halted five years earlier. With inflation a primary concern, Hayes and others who supported a gold standard for the nation’s currency stood against the measure. However, Bland-Allison passed over Hayes’ veto.
Hayes declined to run for the presidency a second time, and retired from politics after his term in the Oval Office ended in 1881. He was succeeded by James Garfield (1831-1881), who was assassinated just six months into his term.

Post-presidential Years
After leaving the White House, Hayes and his wife Lucy returned to their estate, Spiegel Grove, in Fremont, Ohio, and the former president devoted himself to educational issues and prison reform, among other humanitarian causes.
In addition to serving as a trustee of three universities–Ohio Wesleyan, Western Reserve and Ohio State–Hayes also became the first president of the board of the John F. Slater Education Fund for Freedmen in 1882. The Slater Fund was a $1 million endowment to provide Christian education for Southern blacks. Among the fund’s notable recipients was the sociologist and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963). In 1883, Hayes became the first president of the newly reorganized National Prison Reform Association. For nearly 10 years, he traveled around the country speaking on policy reform topics.
In January 1893, while on business in Cleveland, Hayes fell ill. The ex-president sent for his son Webb C. Hayes (1856-1934) to escort him back home to Fremont, where he died of heart failure at age 70 on January 17, three-and-a-half years after the death of his wife.
After Hayes’ death, Webb established a presidential library in his father’s name at Spiegel Grove, setting the precedent for the construction and dedication of post-term presidential libraries."



2. Background from whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/rutherford-b-hayes/
As the 19th President of the United States (1877-1881), Rutherford B. Hayes oversaw the end of Reconstruction, began the efforts that led to civil service reform, and attempted to reconcile the divisions left over from the Civil War.
Beneficiary of the most fiercely disputed election in American history, Rutherford B. Hayes brought to the Executive Mansion dignity, honesty, and moderate reform.

To the delight of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Lucy Webb Hayes carried out her husband’s orders to banish wines and liquors from the White House.

Born in Ohio in 1822, Hayes was educated at Kenyon College and Harvard Law School. After five years of law practice in Lower Sandusky, he moved to Cincinnati, where he flourished as a young Whig lawyer.

He fought in the Civil War, was wounded in action, and rose to the rank of brevet major general. While he was still in the Army, Cincinnati Republicans ran him for the House of Representatives. He accepted the nomination, but would not campaign, explaining, “an officer fit for duty who at this crisis would abandon his post to electioneer… ought to be scalped.”

Elected by a heavy majority, Hayes entered Congress in December 1865, troubled by the “Rebel influences … ruling the White House.” Between 1867 and 1876 he served three terms as Governor of Ohio.

Safe liberalism, party loyalty, and a good war record made Hayes an acceptable Republican candidate in 1876. He opposed Governor Samuel J. Tilden of New York.

Although a galaxy of famous Republican speakers, and even Mark Twain, stumped for Hayes, he expected the Democrats to win. When the first returns seemed to confirm this, Hayes went to bed, believing he had lost. But in New York, Republican National Chairman Zachariah Chandler, aware of a loophole, wired leaders to stand firm: “Hayes has 185 votes and is elected.” The popular vote apparently was 4,300,000 for Tilden to 4,036,000 for Hayes. Hayes’s election depended upon contested electoral votes in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida. If all the disputed electoral votes went to Hayes, he would win; a single one would elect Tilden.

Months of uncertainty followed. In January 1877 Congress established an Electoral Commission to decide the dispute. The commission, made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats, determined all the contests in favor of Hayes by eight to seven. The final electoral vote: 185 to 184.

Northern Republicans had been promising southern Democrats at least one Cabinet post, Federal patronage, subsidies for internal improvements, and withdrawal of troops from Louisiana and South Carolina.

Hayes insisted that his appointments must be made on merit, not political considerations. For his Cabinet he chose men of high caliber, but outraged many Republicans because one member was an ex-Confederate and another had bolted the party as a Liberal Republican in 1872.

Hayes pledged protection of the rights of Negroes in the South, but at the same time advocated the restoration of “wise, honest, and peaceful local self-government.” This meant the withdrawal of troops. Hayes hoped such conciliatory policies would lead to the building of a “new Republican party” in the South, to which white businessmen and conservatives would rally.

Many of the leaders of the new South did indeed favor Republican economic policies and approved of Hayes’s financial conservatism, but they faced annihilation at the polls if they were to join the party of Reconstruction. Hayes and his Republican successors were persistent in their efforts but could not win over the “solid South.”

Hayes had announced in advance that he would serve only one term, and retired to Spiegel Grove, his home in Fremont, Ohio, in 1881. He died in 1893.

The Presidential biographies on WhiteHouse.gov are from “The Presidents of the United States of America,” by Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey. Copyright 2006 by the White House Historical Association."

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Maj Marty Hogan Didn't know too much about this man. Thank you.

Good POTUS.