Rutherford B. Hayes

President Rutherford B. Hayes, the first Gilded Age president, began his career as an antislavery Union soldier. Yet the Compromise of 1877, which led to his prevailing in the wake of the hotly contested Hayes-Tilden elec­tion, caused Hayes to abandon Reconstruction and turn his attention to economic priorities such as using federal troops to subdue railroad strikes. By the end of his single term, Hayes—dubbed “His Fraudulency”—had largely permitted the dismantling of civil rights advances achieved dur­ing Reconstruction. He thus paved the way, albeit unintentionally, for an era of white supremacy and Jim Crow laws in the South.

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