Before the presidency, Rutherford Hayes defended fugitive slaves and took five wounds
Rutherford Hayes once formed a law partnership that lasted three days, ended by the shots at Fort Sumter. He joined a volunteer company of friends from his literary club, was wounded five times, and saw a young private in his regiment, William McKinley, later follow him to the White House.
His father died ten weeks before his birth on October 4, 1822, in Delaware, Ohio. His mother Sophia raised him and his sister, the only two of her four children to reach adulthood, with help from her brother Sardis Birchard, who became a father figure. Hayes graduated from Kenyon College in 1842 as valedictorian, took a law degree at Harvard, and opened an office in Lower Sandusky, now Fremont, where clients were slow to come.
Cincinnati suited him better. Sitting across the Ohio River from slaveholding Kentucky, the city saw many escaped slaves tried under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and Hayes, a firm abolitionist, defended them, which also raised his standing with the new Republican Party. He married Lucy Webb, a Methodist teetotaller who shared and sharpened his views, on December 30, 1852. Voters made him city solicitor, then threw him out in April 1861 when Democrats and Know-Nothings swept the city.
His doubts about fighting to hold the Union faded after Fort Sumter. Commissioned a major in the 23rd Ohio, alongside college classmate Stanley Matthews, he suffered his worst wound at South Mountain in 1862 and rose to brevet major general. Congress and two terms as Ohio governor followed.
Hayes lost the popular vote in 1876 to Samuel Tilden but became the 19th president after a congressional commission gave him 20 disputed electoral votes, amid a still-debated claim that Reconstruction was traded away in the settlement. In office from 1877 to 1881, he sent the Army against the Great Railroad Strike, the deadliest clash between strikers and strikebreakers in the country's history. He also began modest civil service reform, saw Congress override his veto of the Bland–Allison silver act, put John Marshall Harlan on the Supreme Court, and arbitrated a border dispute between Argentina and Paraguay. True to his pledge, he served a single term and went home to Ohio, dying on January 17, 1893.
Source: Rutherford B. Hayes
