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Rutherford B. Hayes
One of the Good Colonels
by Ari Hoogenboom
"an excellent series [that] should be in every Texas school!"—Empire Books". . . what is so inviting about the entire series is the depth and length to which Civil War Campaign and Commanders writers go to tell more than just battlefield statistics."—Eclectic Homeschool Online
As the nineteenth president of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes brought an end to Reconstruction and returned order to the White House. But it was his service as a volunteer officer in the Union army during the Civil War that provided the most glorious years of his life and made his post-war political accomplishments possible.
Although he spent much of the war on the periphery, away from the major centers of activity, Hayes performed conspicuously whenever called upon. He participated in the repulse of dreaded Confederate raider John Hunt Morgan’s Ohio Raid and, although only a colonel, commanded a division in General Philip Sheridan’s devastating Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864. No professional soldier, Hayes was nonetheless a natural warrior. Another future president, William McKinley, wrote of his fellow Ohioan, “His whole nature seemed to change when in battle.” Normally kind and agreeable, Hayes grew “intense and ferocious” during a fight. In all, he was wounded five times and had four horses shot from under him. And while he ended the war as a brevet major general, Hayes noted that he “never fought a battle as a general.” He was, by his own reckoning, simply “one of the good colonels in the great army.”
ARI HOOGENBOOM is professor of history at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is the author of Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President, The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes, and Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865–1883.
Other Biographies in the Civil War Campaigns & Commanders Series
GEORGE GORDON MEADE
1-893114-36-8 CLOTH
$29.95ALBERT SIDNEY JOHNSTON
1-893114-21-X CLOTH
$19.95
1-893114-20-1 PAPER
$12.95JOHN BELL HOOD
1-886661-17-0 PAPER
$12.95JAMES JOHNSTON PETTIGREW
1-886661-18-9 PAPER
$12.95RAPHAEL SEMMES AND THE ALABAMA
1-886661-11-1 PAPER
$11.95SAM BELL MAXEY
1-886661-03-0 PAPER
$11.95SHERMAN'S MARCH TO THE SEA
1-893114-16-3 PAPER
$14.95WINFIELD SCOTT HANCOCK
1-893114-39-2 CLOTH
$29.95
For a complete list of the books in the Civil War Campaigns and Commanders Series
Rutherford B. Hayes
1-893114-03-1 cloth $19.95
1-893114-02-3 paper $12.95LC 98-067605. 6x9. 120 pp. 15 b&w photos. 2 illus. 14 biographical sketches. 13 maps. App. Bib. Index.
Civil War. Military History.Publication Date: October 1999.
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