Joseph Hayes Acklen (May 20, 1850 – September 28, 1938) was an American lawyer, plantation owner and politician who served two terms as a U.S. Representative from Louisiana from 1878 to 1881.

Joseph Hayes Acklen was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to Adelicia and Joseph Alexander Smith Acklen, a wealthy couple whose summer home was located in Nashville, while he also grew up on plantations in Louisiana. He had a brother, William Hayes Ackland.

During the American Civil War, his parents sided with the Confederacy, and the father fled to the family's Louisiana plantation, where he died in 1863.

He was educated by private tutors. He attended Burlington Military College, near Burlington, New Jersey, in 1864 and 1865, and graduated from two foreign institutions (École de Neuilly, Paris, and Swiss University, Vevey). He returned to the United States and graduated from Cumberland University's law school in Lebanon, Tennessee in 1871.

He began practicing law in Nashville and later practiced in Memphis, Tennessee, but abandoned the practice of law and moved to Louisiana to superintend the family's sugar plantations near Pattersonville (now Patterson) in Saint Mary Parish.

He served as colonel in the Louisiana Militia in 1876.

In November of that year, claiming voting fraud, he and other Democrats objected to the reelection of Republican Chester Bidwell Darrall to represent Louisiana's 3rd congressional district; after protracted settlement of the various controversies surrounding the 1876 presidential election, on February 20, 1878, Darrall left the seat and was replaced by Acklen, for the remaining half of the Forty-fifth Congress. Acklen was reelected, to the Forty-sixth Congress, and served from 20 February 1878 to 4 March 1881. He was not a candidate for renomination in 1880, and Darrall regained the seat for one term (the Forty-seventh Congress).

He was an unsuccessful candidate for election in 1882 to the Forty-eighth Congress.