Politics & Power Quote by Rutherford B. Hayes

Hayes is praising a kind of freedom that rarely gets carved onto monuments: the right to be left alone. “Independence” here isn’t national self-determination so much as personal insulation from the churn of public life, and the oddly domestic word “bother” does a lot of work. It shrinks politics from grand clashes of principle to a nagging, time-stealing nuisance. Coming from a president, that’s not laziness; it’s a diagnosis. Hayes knew, firsthand, how governance can swallow a person whole - not just through crises, but through the endless drip of patronage demands, factional feuds, and people who mistake proximity to power for entitlement.

The line lands in the shadow of the Gilded Age, when politics was loud, transactional, and relentlessly personal. Hayes’s presidency began with the contested election of 1876 and the Compromise of 1877, which effectively ended Reconstruction - a decision drenched in consequence and controversy. Against that backdrop, the longing for “independence” reads like a retreat, even a self-protective alibi: if politics is only “bother,” then stepping back can be framed as serenity rather than abdication.

The subtext is a weary moral: power corrodes attention. To stay “independent” is to resist being drafted into everyone else’s agenda, the way public life turns your time into public property. Hayes isn’t selling apathy; he’s confessing how costly engagement can be, especially when the system rewards noise over governance. The sentence is short because the exhaustion behind it is long.