Rutherford B. Hayes Research Paper

Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States, and Rutherford B. Hayes, the nineteenth president of the United States, were both Republicans who pursued a career in law prior to their presidency. Lincoln was an American politician who severed the United States until his assassination by John Wilkes Booth in 1865. In 1846, Lincoln ran for the United States House of Representatives and during his term he became known as an advocate for civil rights amongst those of color. Rutherford B. Hayes was an Ohio governor, Congressman, and a general aside from his presidency. Unlike Lincoln, Hayes suffered a heart attack and died in 1893. Through their term as president, they both aspired to prompt civil rights reform. They both believed …show more content…
Hayes did not win by popular vote but by electoral votes; meanwhile, Abraham Lincoln won both, popular and electoral vote. During the 1860 presidential election, Abraham Lincoln succeeded in running against four other presidential candidates. He had won 180 out of the 303 electoral votes, exceeding his competitors. He was elected president “over a deeply divided Democratic party, becoming the first Republican to win the presidency. Lincoln received only forty percent of the popular vote but handily defeated the three other candidates: Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Constitutional candidate John Bell, and Northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, a U.S. senator for Illinois” (History.com). Prior to competing against one another for presidency, Lincoln had campaigned against Stephen Douglas for U.S. Senate in 1858. Though Lincoln ended up losing the race, from it he gained the party’s presidential nomination in 1860. This nomination brought notice to the new Republican Party. On the contrary, Rutherford B. Hayes did not win by popular vote. During the 1876 presidential election, Rutherford B. Hayes had only ran against one other presidential candidate, Samuel J. Tilden. When they first counted votes, Hayes only had one hundred and sixty-five electoral votes, while Tilden won one hundred and eighty-five electoral votes. Upon calculation, twenty votes had not been counted for. For this reason, The Compromise of 1877 was used to resolve the problem which gave Hayes the twenty electoral votes needed to win and become the President of the United States. By receiving these twenty votes it placed him only one electoral vote away from Samuel J. Tilden. Even though Abraham Lincoln had a less percentage of popular vote, amounting to forty; Hayes’s popular vote had totaled to about forty eight percent. Although Hayes’s popular vote was larger, he did not ultimately win the popular vote during his