President James K. Polk seemed poised to extend slavery further west by provoking war with Mexico. And Rutherford B. Hayes, following the lead of his political heroes, was opposed to the action. Yet, he determined to enlist in the military anyway.
His reasons were not ideologically based. In the morning of May 31, he woke up to write his mother, “I did not tell you … when I was in Columbus,” but “I have been suffering from a sore throat … I find that it is bleeding again.” Consulting with his doctor, they agreed his best option was to get out of the office and its confinement. Considering his options, Hayes resolved, “I can think of no way of spending that time which is half so tolerable as the life of a soldier.” Yet, he conceded the “principal difficulty will be in obtaining such an appointment as I want…a lieutenancy.”[1]
His mind had not changed about the war. “I have no views about the war other than those of the best Christians,” he explained, “and my opinion of this war with Mexico is that which is common to the Whigs of the North—Tom Corwin and his admirers of whom I am on
e.”
Tom Corwin rose to prominence just a few months earlier. He was a Senator from Ohio, and made a speech on February 11 that became a national sensation. He argued that the perpetuation of the conflict and its potential reward of land west would further divide the United States over the question of slavery, and would “light up the fires of internal war and plunge the sister States of this Union into the bottomless gulf of civil strife.” Heaping the blame upon President Polk, he condemned his “invasion” into Mexico and said only his “retreat will secure peace.”[2]
By singling out Corwin as one whom he admired, Hayes placed himself firmly against the conflict.[3] Image: Thomas Corwin
Hayes never joined the war, however. Seeking a second opinion, Dr. Mussey informed Hayes that the “exposure to the extreme heats of the South” would result in “debility and danger.”
He decided to make a trip to see family in Brattleboro, Vermont, instead.
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Hayes remained consistent in his views, even if his “love of enterprise,” of which he “share[d] in common with other young men of [his] age” compelled him to consider joining a war effort based upon motives of which he disagreed. Yet one Hayes biographer leads us to assume that later in life Hayes had a change of heart upon the subject.[4]
Referencing a speech Hayes gave during a Mexican War soldiers reunion in Fremont, Harry Barnard, in his 1954 Rutherford B. Hayes and His America, stated Hayes had “conclude[d] that the Whigs had ‘misunderstood’ the Mexican War, that in reality ‘the hand of God was in the work of adding a number of grand, rich states to our country, with every acre of American soil better as a result.’”[5]
Barnard is partly correct, Hayes did show, later in life, an approval on the part of the nation to conduct the war to extend its territory. In this speech addressing the old soldiers, Hayes pointed to an “old flag on the wall” and said the modern flag was better for its increased number of stars. “We know that a number of grand, rich, States have been added to our country, that California, stretching along the grand Pacific Ocean, with its mines of wealth, now belongs to us as the fruit of your victories,” Hayes explained.[6]
Barnard gets it wrong, however, when he says that Hayes had rejected Whig ideals at the time as “misunderstood.”[7] While he did say that the “Mexican war is a great deal better understood now after forty years, then at the time you fought it,” he used this war to make a grander argument rather than to reexamine the 1840s argument. He continued, “the lessons of that war are plain enough … the Mexican War was the law of the land … [and the soldiers in attendance were] called upon to maintain the supremacy of the law of the United States, and to uphold its flag which was its representative.” He compared this to his current day when he lamented, “too many men [are] not quite willing to stand by the supremacy of the laws that people make.”[8]
Hayes was making a very pointed argument, partly about divine intervention in affairs. As a man looking back forty years on the war, he saw “the hand of God … plainly visible in the affairs of men,” bringing “Freedom, forever, [to] every inch of American soil.” He concluded,
You, Comrades of the Mexican War, opened the gate; Gen. Buckland and the rest of us marched in, and the result is a free country for free men in the land of Washington and of Lincoln.[9]
Hayes was not saying he and the Whigs were wrong for opposing the Mexican War in the 1840s, he was saying that they could not see how God was expanding freedom to the soil[10] in the west because they did not foresee how the Civil War to end slavery was on the horizon. With slavery out of the mix, the past opposition to the war was erased.
There was more to his message. Going back to Hayes’s argument that men “today” were not willing to obey the “supremacy of the law,” he was pointedly commenting on the South’s unwillingness to abide by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. He argued, “All Americans join in making the laws; they should not, any of them, be excused if they break the laws.”[11]
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This speech from Hayes is profound! It shows a concern that must have weighed heavily upon the former president. He was a believer in the supremacy of the law, and the Americans’ need to abide by that law (including himself), yet a deep resentment for those who would defy that law and bring terror upon Southern Black American voters. He was bemoaning the outcome of the end of Reconstruction (of which he played a part). Witnessing further the degeneration of Black American rights in the South, he showed a powerlessness in how Southern states could not be held in check, unless they chose to obey the laws.
This conflict for Hayes between moral rights and governmental control was readily apparent in his decision-making process as a political leader and his time as a lawyer.
[1] RBH to SBH, May 31, 1847; RBH Diary, June 1, 1847.
[2] RBH Diary, June 1, 1847; Signal of Liberty, April 3, 1847. Found at: https://aadl.org/node/32161
[3] A few months after Hayes’s letter, Corwin gave a speech in Carthage, Ohio attacking abolitionists and the Wilmot Proviso. Hayes makes no mention of this speech.
[4] RBH Diary, June 1, 1847.
[5] Harry Barnard, Rutherford B. Hayes and His America (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1954), 150.
[6] Fremont Democratic Messenger, May 27, 1886.
[7] Hayes never uses this word in his speech! In fact, Barnard later combines various parts of the speech into a single quote within the text. While the essence of the quote is consistent with the tenor of Hayes’s message, the quotation marks around the text misleads the reader to believe these were the exact words of Hayes.
[8] Fremont Democratic Messenger, May 27, 1886.
[9] Ibid.
[10] In fact, his continue usage of the word “soil” is a not-so-subtle reference to the Free Soil party which emerged in the midst of the Mexican War on the single issue of opposing slavery’s extension west.
[11] Ibid.