Charles Hays

Charles Hays (February 2, 1834 – June 24, 1879) was a U.S. Representative from Alabama.

Hays was born at "Hays Mount," in Greene County, Alabama near Boligee where he completed preparatory studies under private teachers.

He attended the University of Georgia at Athens and the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

He was a cotton planter and also engaged in other agricultural pursuits before becoming a delegate to the Democratic National Convention at Baltimore in 1860.

During the Civil War he was a major in the Confederate States Army but returned to politics after the war serving first as member of the constitutional convention of Alabama in 1867 and then in the State senate in 1868.

Hays was elected as a Republican to the Forty-first and to the three succeeding Congresses (March 4, 1869 – March 3, 1877) and served as chairman of the Committee on Agriculture (Forty-third Congress).

He died at his home, "Myrtle Hall," in Greene County, Alabama, June 24, 1879 and was interred in the family cemetery, "Hays Mount" plantation.

Book on him is "Black Belt Scalawag, Charles Hayes and the Southern Republicans in the Era of Reconstruction" by William Warren Rodgers, Jr. - 1993