Hayes Historical Journal: Very Victorian

The Very Victorian Rutherford B. Hayes 

By LESLIE H. FISHEL JR.

Volume V, Number 4
Summer, 1986

If there were a verifiable measure of the degrees of caustic condemnation of presidents, the name-calling directed at Rutherford B. Hayes would undoubtedly appear high on the list. From his June 1876 nomination, the breadth of the critics’ views and vocabulary demonstrated, at the very least, an imaginative array of words and phrases. The acerb Henry Adams, in transition from the Harvard Yard to President’s (now Lafayette) Square, first referred to Hayes as “a third rate nonentity,” that was before Adams knew anything about Hayes; when his wife, Clover, met the president a year later at a White House reception, she accorded him the compliment of being “amiable and respectable,” but added that there was “not a ray of force or intellect in forehead, eye or mouth.” Over a four year period, it should be recorded, the Adams’s views shifted to complimentary condescension.1 

At Princeton, where his mother counseled him not to defend his southern Democratic views physically, young Woodrow Wilson believed Hayes to be “that weak instrument of the corrupt Republicans.” After the disputed election had settled in Hayes’ favor and his inauguration had become history, the editorial writers had their field day. He was addressed as “His Fraudulency,” described as the “de facto President,” and the “acting President,” and dismissed as “The Pretender.” The Greensboro, N.C. Patriot combined some adjectives and came up with “the bogus, fraudulent, so called President.” Of course, there were encomiums, too, with notable hyperbole. Hayes, the Bismarck Tribune of the Dakota Territory asserted, was “winning golden opinions on every hand,” and the Greensboro (PA) Tribune and Herald admitted some “impolitic appointments” but thought Hayes’ “plans and purposes…patriotic, high-minded and honorable.”2 

These examples emerged just after his nomination and in the six weeks after his inauguration. The drumbeat kept up during Hayes’ full term, now exacerbated by a tense issue, now mollified by a workable solution. They stemmed from several conditions which were peculiar to the period, his nomination and his presidency. At a time when politics was the national pastime, actively for most men and vicariously for many women, political parties were significant organizations. The roots of each party in its own strongholds penetrated deeply into communities and social organizations. Party commitments were as loud and compelling as alumni dedication to bigtime football universities. In a manner similar to alumni pregame and postgame celebrations, the party generated torchlight parades, soirees and beer parties, entertainment and camaraderie. In such an atmosphere, the nominee of the other party was a natural target.3 

If, as in Hayes’ case, the party’s own nominee was a compromise choice between two hostile wings and if, as in Hayes’s case, he was essentially an unknown, a cipher on the national scene, emotional excrescences were sure to swell. Add to that the great distaste with which the nation appeared to tolerate U.S. Grant as president, and the fear that his successor would be equally casual in the face of corruption, equally ambivalent in the face of decisions or, what for some would have been worse, more assiduous in pursuing corruption and implementing decisions.4 

There were still more reasons for name-calling, but one obvious circumstance loomed large. The presidential elections of the Centennial Year was too close to call. The Democratic party had made serious inroads in Northern states like New York, Ohio and Indiana during the first half of the seventies as a Reconstruction governments gave way in some states of the former Confederacy, the Democrats came to power. North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and the border states had been “redeemed,” and the party match was close to being equal. With the Democrats in control of the House of Representatives, the Presidency was crucial to their total redemption, political and emotional. From the Republican side, the loss of the Presidency could mean a death blow to party power, and the chilling perception that perhaps, after all, the Civil War had become a lost cause. 

The nominee and future president was well-equipped for this hot spot. Ohio-born, he was raised by his mother and her brother, since his father died just before his birth.5 He attended private preparatory schools in Ohio and New England and matriculated at Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio. Here he developed a coterie of friends, some of whom sustained a close relationship with him during their lifetimes. Here, too, one biographer point out, his capacity of mediation flowered. At a time when national issues of slavery and manifest destiny accelerated the normal run of college tensions, Rutherford B. Hayes stood out as one who could generally reach and talk effectively with disputants on both sides of a quarrel.6 

After Kenyon, Hayes studies law at Harvard and returned to Ohio to practice in the little town or Lower Sandusky. He found life dull and unresponsive, even though his uncle was a leading, and prosperous, citizen and landowner. Hayes participated in the move to change the town’s name to Fremont, in honor of the explorer. Moving to Cincinnati where he lived during the decade of the 1850s, Hayes found a growing city, and enlarging practice, a congenial social set, a wife, and a sense of purpose. He was appointed city solicitor in 1858, reelected the next year, and then defeated when he ran again. Shortly after leaving office in 1861, he enlisted in the Union Army.

Hayes served with the regiment which he helped to form, the 23^rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, rising from the rank of major to brigadier general and brevet major-general. Wounded six times, once seriously, and having four horses shot from under him, Hayes was a front line officer. In a strange reversal from the stolid, stable image which he projected, he entered the conflict with verve, writing in a surprised tone to his uncle on April 12, 1865, “I am more glad to think my fighting days are ended than I had expected.” Hayes’ respect for his comrades-at-arms and the trials they suffered together emerged after the war in his dedicated attention to the reunions of the 23^rd OVI, the state and national Grand Army of the Republic, and the Loyal Legion. Michael Shaara, in his gripping novel of the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels, captures some of Hayes’ unabashed exuberance when the novel’s hero, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Bowdoin professor and future Governor of Maine, muses on top of Cemetery Hill about his presence at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg: “Not love it. Not quite. And yet, I was never so alive.”7 

While Hayes was in the army, the Republicans in the Ohio second district nominated him for Congress, and he was elected. He chose neither to campaign for the seat nor leave the army early as a Congressman-elect. Resigning his commission in June, 1865, Hayes was a freshman in the 39^th Congress which convened in December. He consistently supported the Radical Reconstruction program during the two session of that Congress, was reelected to the next Congress and resigned after the first session to campaign for the gubernatorial spot in Ohio. “I don’t particularly enjoy Congressional life”, he confessed to his uncle before his decision to resign. “I have no ambition for Congressional reputation or influence – not a particle. I would like to be out of it creditably.” He took office as Governor of Ohio on January 13, 1868.8 

Reelected in 1869 for a second gubernatorial term, he was pressured into running for Congress in 1872 in his old district and lost the race. The next year he and Lucy Webb Hayes moved their family to Spiegel Grove, the Fremont estate developed and transferred to Hayes by his uncle. Here the family put down its roots. Pulled away from Fremont for an unprecedented third term as Governor, Hayes was nominated for the presidency during the first year of that term by the Republican National Convention which met in Cincinnati in 1876. 

The drama of the Convention nomination has been crafted by several historians and needs no retelling here. The fit and fiber of the successful candidate may be more to the point. He was, to begin with, a compromise choice: his credentials glowed with principles endorsed by old line Republicans like James G. Blaine, yet he stood foursquare for the basic elements of the reform movement. He believed in Negro suffrage, the need for a bipartisan South, national economic health, and the importance of party discipline; he believed also in sound money, civil service, and honesty in government. Indeed his powers of mediation, of pulling warring sides together, would be put to the test within his party and within the nation.9

The challenge to these skills came even as Hayes and his supporters were basking in their success at Cincinnati. Hayes’ letter of acceptance was to be his chief public statement during the campaign and his office was bombarded with suggestions and ideas from liberals like Carl Schurz and Stalwarts who were friends of James G. Blaine. The statement Hayes produced was short and pithy, standing forthrightly for civil service reform, sound money, a liberal federal posture toward the South, and a promise to serve only one term.10 While there was muted carping from the Stalwart Republicans and cheering from the liberals, Hayes soon confounded both sides when he did not try to block the appointment of the Stalwart senator, Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, as chairman of the Republican National Committee. The liberals wondered, a Washington reporter wrote to Murat Halstead, “precisely how much of a party man Governor Hayes is.” With more firsthand knowledge, Hayes’ brother-in-law, Joseph T. Webb, informed an inquiring Virginian that “While he [Hayes] has positive [sic] opinions, I don’t think him a Partisan….” Webb added that Hayes was “quite conservative in all things,” and concluded that “his letter of Acceptance is characteristic.”11 

His silent posture during the campaign was equally characteristic but this was a common stance for presidential candidates. Since his opponent, Samuel J. Tilden, did not make public appearances, his absence was not particularly noted. The strategy allowed Hayes to disassociate himself from campaign statements, and in certain areas of the South, campaign and election tactics. He could honestly say that he was unaware of and not remotely responsible for the fraud which characterized some Republican voting activity in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina. 

When it developed early in November that electoral count was in dispute, party leaders and others began to look at Hayes for support of the various tactics which they proposed in order to resolve the deadlock. In the spectrum of interpretations which have tried to disentangle and explain the process which led to Hayes’ eventual victory by one electoral vote, Hayes’ own role has been somewhat muted. The most persuasive approach, advanced by C. Vann Woodward in 1951, suggests a bargain between southern Democrats and Republicans which would give Hayes the needed electoral votes in dispute in three southern states and Oregon in return for the withdrawal of troops from state government support in two of those states (Louisiana and South Carolina), the appointment of one or more Southerner to the cabinet and the opening up of patronage positions to Southerners, federal subsidies for the Texas and Pacific Railroad, and for other internal improvements in the South. The Southerners also promised, the view holds, to swing the election to the Speaker of the House to the Republican James A. Garfield.12 

The interpretation was generally accepted and not seriously challenged for over two decades. During the 1970s, four historians began to raise questions. Although none of their efforts to date have dislodged the Woodward thesis, some of the bedrock has begun to chip. Two critiques questioned whether a “bargain” as such was necessary, while another primarily wondered if a “bargain” which was not fulfilled can really be identified as a bargain.13 The fourth critique argued with some authority that there was no bargain, only efforts by southern Democrats to undermine their northern counterparts, whom they regarded, in Benjamin Hill’s notable phrase as “invincible in peace and invisible in war” as well as spineless in the struggle to claim electoral voters for Tilden.14 

In all of these accounts, the role which Hayes played in negotiations is somewhat fuzzy, primarily because there is no specific evidence, no “smoking gun,” to pin down Hayes’ acquiescence in the discussions which his representatives carried on. That he was informed about these discussions directly and indirectly there is no doubt, but his response has only been inferred. Woodward paints Hayes as a naively narrow Victorian who, when the chips were down, went along with the chicanery in order to carry out his reform program. Woodward raises and leaves unanswered, for lack of evidence, the issue of Hayes’ political ethics.15 

There is another way to look at the available documentation. Hayes repeatedly rejected invitations to send representatives to Washington, that is, men who would carry his message and speak for him, commit to him to specific programs. He preferred to let a few of his friends, including General James Comly of Columbus, Garfield, Rep. Samuel Shellabarger, John Sherman, and some others, represent what they thought his view might be. Garfield’s letters of December 9 and 12, 1876, particularly the latter, suggested responding to the overtures which he had received from moderate Southerners. “The Democratic businessmen of the country are more anxious for quiet than for Tilden…,” he noted and he laid down three principles which he hoped to advance in a future speech. These included an insistence that Hayes had been legally elected, that the Republicans would be a national party devoted to the interests of all sections, and that the liberal tone toward the South which characterized Hayes’ letter of acceptance would be implemented. Buried in the letter was an additional word of advice: “I don’t think anybody would be the custodian of your policy and purposes at present, or have any power to commit you in any way…” Garfield added that the Southern moderates should learn, “in some discreet way” that Hayes was going to deal fairly with their section.16 

Hayes’ response to this was a brief: “Your views are so nearly the same as mine that I need not say a word.” He went on to add a sentiment which he repeated in mid-December to several of his correspondents, including John Sherman, Richard Henry Dana, William Henry Smith and William K. Rogers. “I am wholly uncommitted on persons and policies,” he told Garfield and others, “except as my public letter and other public utterances show. There is nothing private.” In a Christmas Day letter to Sherman he authorized him “to speak in pretty decided terms for me whenever it seems advisable,” not with a commission,” but from your knowledge of my general methods of action.” The issue was the possible alienation of President Grant, Roscoe Conkling. Hayes' authority was offered in a narrow context, not in terms of the larger sectional tensions.17 

From mid-December, when the early shoots of comprise first sprouted, Hayes adopted a policy of not endorsing, except in the most general way, and not denying, except where a policy was clearly contrary to his wishes, any correspondent’s views. Jacob D. Cox’s lengthy analysis of the Republican position on the South since the war was endorsed with words similar to those that he addressed to Garfield six weeks earlier. William E. Chandler’s mid-January letter balancing off the strengths against the weaknesses of Hayes’ position, quoted Lincoln’s to the effect that “honest statesmanship’ had to control “individual meanness for the public good” and pointedly cited Louisiana as an instance in which statesmanship should come to grips with meanness. Hayes demurred politely; he appreciated Lincoln’s “wit and wisdom,” he wrote Chandler, adding significantly, “I take the hint, but you must excuse me if I still stick to my own text.”18

And just what his “own text” was, and would be, confounded his critics and his constituents. Indeed, this was his strength and his strategy – to stay informed, but removed, to keep his tactical options open, to insure that noncommitment to any specific arrangement would give him a freer hand after he, by oath of office, accepted the ultimate responsibility. On the last day of December, he responded to an earnest plea from Chandler to send an “authorized representative” to Washington by noting “There are several Ohio men in W[ashington] who know my methods of thinking and acting in public affairs.” 

They can [he went on], of their own motion speak confidently. Such men as Shellabarger, Comly, Noyes, Little, &c &c not in official position at Washington can perhaps do and say all that can properly be said. All this must, I am confident, be left to volunteers, such as the men I name or allude to. Don’t misunderstand me, I am ready to hear and to heed the suggestions of friends,... 

To this Hayes scribbled a postscript: “You now see the troubles which an authorized friend could remove. If you had such a friend in W[ashington],” he asked, “what other and greater troubles might you not then see?” Hayes active participation, he seemed to be saying, could tie his hands, lead to entrapment, encourage the wrong elements, and other sorts of trouble.” Remaining aloof, with unauthorized hints and interpretations, but not commitments, Hayes would enter the White House in an unmarked slate.19 

There were a number of Hayes men who appreciated this position, whether or not they understood it. Charles Foster, Hayes’ own congressman, who spoke out more than once advancing what he believed Hayes would do or say, wrote a long report toward the end of January, worrying about the possible defection of Senators Conkling and Edumunds and their friends. Yet he emphasized his support of the Hayes strategy in a one-sentence paragraph: “I heartily commend your course in refusing to take position as to policy or persons.” On the very same day, Hayes confirmed to George W. Jones, his determination to “to keep my own counsels as to Cabinet, policy, &c &c &c.” And when the “compromise” bill passed setting up a special Congressional committee to investigate the electoral count and report, Hayes wrote to Carl Schurz that, “I hope it will turn out well. I shall do nothing to influence the result.”20 

Late in January, Hayes had begun to think of an inaugural address and received some suggestions from Schurz. He replied with some ideas of his own relative to improving the Southern “condition”. “…I feel like saying”, he wrote, “that the Nation will aid the people of the section 1. to the means of education, 2. to internal improvements of a national character…” and then without breaking the sentence, asked Schurz if it would be appropriate to suggest a constitutional amendment limiting the presidential term to one of six years. He repeated his desire to keep himself uncommitted: “I want also to be ready to make a cabinet – remaining to the last free to choose as may at the time seem advisable.”21

But as Hayes admitted to Schurz early in February, “the South is more on my mind than anything else.” He was not specific, talking about promoting “prosperity, education, improvements…..” as those subjects which came to mind. Wanting to “do” something, he said, he realized the need to be cautious and in the last section of the letter made it clear he was thinking ahead to federal policies emanating from Washington and not political policies aimed at Washington. As he told John Sherman in mid-February, “I prefer to make no new declarations.” He was still uncommitted beyond his letter of acceptance of eight months earlier, “the friendly and encouraging words of that letter and all that they imply.” was the way he put it.22 

Charles Foster and Stanley Matthews were two among many who had begun to suggest Cabinet possibilities to Hayes. Foster prefaced his listening with his view that, as President, Hayes could capture a measurable cadre of Southern supporters “without bargaining of any sort,” adding parenthetically, ‘I hate bargains.” Matthews, an old friend and one of the attorneys who argued several of the disputed electoral cases before the Congressional commission, introduced his Cabinet suggestions with the announcement that “The Democrats have given up the idea of defeating the election by delays. It was discussed Saturday night, urged and abandoned.”23 

While Matthews’ judgement on the Democrats capitulation was premature, since there was a sustained effort by southern Democrats to delay the actual electoral count, once the reports of the electoral Commission had been received, Hayes nevertheless remained aloof. Sherman praised him for his reserve: “You have gained largely by your silence and caution since the election….,” adding in a letter on the following day that he thought Hayes should plan to be in Washington the week prior to the inaugural. Hayes parried the idea, asking “Why can’t friends be sent or come here?” To some the query might appear plaintive or downright naïve, but it was more likely conceived as a means of keeping in touch without being committed. In the capital city, Hayes would have had to make quick decisions, fast commitments; in Columbus or through “friends”, all responses could be suggestive and unspecific. Hayes maintained his control of an uncontrolled situation by what Sherman had called his “silence and his caution”.24

During the last ten days of February, when, as Matthews wrote, Democratic efforts to delay the count loomed large, the pressures on Hayes to make commitments became intense. While Co. Andrew Kellar of Tennessee called Hayes’ silence “the chief embarrassment in the way of a victory over Tammany Hall…” William Henry Smith, a chief architect in Hayes’ candidacy, advised Hayes that “I think I made clear the impropriety at this time,” of saying something in addition to your letter of Acceptance.” Hayes himself expostulated over a long letter from Joseph Medill which wondered about his Southern policy: “my paragraph,” Hayes wrote Murat Halstead, “was short, but his eighteen pages haven’t added an idea to it.”25 

There is no documentary support for the contention that Hayes ever moved away from that position. Bargains may have been understood, perhaps as Michael Les Benedict suggested, to permit southern Democrats to control their own party, or perhaps, as the Woodward thesis holds, to extract substantive federal support for the south, but if Hayes was not an official party to those bargains, as seems likely, were they indeed bargains? Hayes was aware of the immense variety of ideas which filled conversations and letters during the first two months of 1877, but he strictly maintained that he alone would make the final decisions. In looking at Cabinet posts, for example, he received a plethora of suggestions from a spectrum of supporters and would-be supporters, including the name of David Key of Tennessee. Key ended up as Postmaster General, the only Southerner in the Cabinet, and his name came to Hayes in a letter from Colonel Kellar, forwarded with an endorsement by William Henry Smith. That letter was written on February 20, yet seven days later, Hayes was still considering possible candidates for that particular Cabinet spot. “My idea is,” he wrote Schurz on February 27, “to leave undecided, or rather uncommitted, some place until I reach W[ashington] Say war, Navy or Post Master General.” It is difficult to visualize Hayes except as one who, while encouraging discussion and even mediation between the Republican and southern Democrats, was at the same time making plain that he would decide in due time, once he had taken the oath of office.26 

That ceremony first took place on Saturday night March 3 in the Red Room of the White House. Tensions were high in Washington, with rumors of military groups forming or on the march. Lucius Q.C. Lamar later called the electoral contest “the most dangerous event in our History,” intimating how close the nation was to determining the election’s result by force. Whether the reality was as extreme as the rumors, leaders in Washington were edgy and did not want to chance one day (Sunday) without constitutional leadership. On Monday, March 5, the public inauguration went off as scheduled.27 

For the first time in decades, the Executive Mansion housed a family whose close ties and unpretentious airs created a common bond with families across the land. “I can hardly realize” Lucy Hayes confessed to her oldest son after two-and-a-half months, “that really and truly I am the same person that lead [sic] an humble happy life in Ohio….”28

She and her husband had five surviving children, the two youngest of whom came with them to Washington; Fanny was almost ten and Scott six when the left Spiegel Grove. The second son, Webb Cook Hayes, lived in the White House and served as his father’s confidential secretary and general assistant. The other two boys lived away from home, Rutherford a Cornell undergraduate and Birchard at Harvard Law School.

The boys came home frequently, but whether they were there or not, family activities dominated the scene. Lucy had a set routine, as social manager of the Executive Mansion, but her schedule included family times. The President, too, participated whether the occasion was the brief morning scripture reading and prayer or an evening family sing. The family often went out target shooting or riding, Scott and Fanny sometimes in tow. Fanny was the mischievous imp of the White House, exacting Patience from staff and parents alike and earning love from all. On occasion she’d climb on her father’s lap or clump along the second floor corridors, shaking the chandeliers below. Intermingled with the family was a constant stream of guests, often relatives of Rutherford or Lucy, some of whom stayed on for weeks and joined the family circle as well as the formal entertainment.29

Formal entertainment was as much a part of the Hayes administration as family gatherings. Hidden beneath the twentieth century caricature of “Lemonade Lucy” was the fact of a vibrant, charming hostess and her reserved, yet magnetic consort in succession of receptions, dinners, soirees, teas, and invitation-only affairs which far exceeded in number and quality the efforts of recent earlier administrations. When a guest commented to Lucy Hayes about the heavy burden of White House social events, she replied that she liked giving parties and enjoyed herself immensely. “I have had a particularly happy life here…” she wrote to a niece in July, 1880, adding that she would be glad to get home to Spiegel Grove. “…four years is long enough for a woman like this one.”30 

For President Rutherford B. Hayes, it was a long, hard four years. Having established himself as a person to be reckoned, not trifled with during the campaign, and having laid out the general outlines of a middle-of-the-road program which sought resolution for the major issues of the day, Hayes now faced a party which was split three ways. The Stalwarts embraced the old ways of doing things, particularly counting on patronage, North and South, and the Reformers who looked to civil service reform and sound money as a means of wiping out corruption. The Regulars, for lack of a better name, who were enamored of the bloody shirt tactic, wavered on civil service reform and were far from united on the money issue. Obviously, politicians, editors, industrialists, and others moved around within these three categories, and there were some who refused to be categorized. To this breakdown of party discipline, add an opposition party growing in strength in both houses of Congress – the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives in 1877 and added the Senate in 1879. Splinter groups like the emerging Greenbackers were a further complication for a political leader whose right to lead was reluctantly, if not skeptically granted. 

Hayes took on the Southern dilemma first; indeed it was the most intrusive issue on the nation’s agenda in 1877. Whatever his friends had promised in his behalf, Hayes’ public statements were few and clear, while those letters to friends which are extant amplify only slightly his public statements: he was going to treat the South as an equal component within the Union, trusting to the good will and economic hard sense of southern whites to encourage southern Blacks to improve themselves through education and land ownership. The specific steps he took to remove the Southern question from its agitating prominence are detailed elsewhere in admirable accounts. In 1982, Vincent DeSantis raised the question of why Hayes acted as he did, and provided a useful summary of historians’ views as well as a comprehensive evaluation of his own, concluding that Hayes himself made the decision. Hayes ordered the troops back to their barracks in two contested states (South Carolina and Louisiana) and allowed Democratic regimes to take over, for reasons other than the so-called bargain struck by his friends, reasons which DeSantis believes are of varying plausibility.31 

The evidence and the rationale are reasonably clear; the choices before Hayes were limited, indeed. If he did nothing, chaos would surely continue to the detriment of the party, the nation and the section, and eventually, as in the states which had been redeemed earlier, southern whites would take over without any check-rein. If he looked to the existing governments to resolve the crisis, he faced a record of deteriorating efficiency and decaying integrity that also seemed headed for chaos. If he took a stronger stand and tried to reassert the dominance of the military in these two and other states, he would be fighting a rearguard action in what he regarded as an unconstitutional way. Finally, he had to take into consideration a certain fatigue in the north with “southern” issues, an unwillingness to stand up for racial justice, and a hunger for release from the memories of war.32 

From Hayes’ perspective, in 1877, the only sensible course was to try local self-government in the south, trusting southern white leaders to respond faithfully to this substantive overture for a unified nation. He anticipated that they would secure “safety and prosperity for the colored people,” that they would move toward a division between the two major political parties, that they would stabilize their local economies and respond positively to private and federal capital incursions. He anticipated, in short, an era of good feelings, a period of peace.33 

At first, the signs that he read convinced him that, as he wrote “the better class of citizens cordially approve” in New York and New England. His trips to these states and sections, as well as to the border states confirmed his impressions that what he called his “pacification policy” was succeeding. After returning from Richmond, Virginia early in November, he recorded in his diary that “There are thousands of intelligent people who are not Democrats, & who would like to unite with the Conservative Republicans of the North.”34 

Hayes was even aware of the political risks involved in establishing this policy; to several correspondents and to his diary he identified the bitter opposition which he faced, particularly within his party. Intra-party squabbles did not help his southern policy, but they were not responsible for its undoing.

Race was a major contributor to its weakness. As the atrocities and acts of physical and economic violence mounted against southern Blacks, it became clear that Hayes’ integrity and declarations of good intention were not enough. Black protests mounted, impelled in large part by anger and fear. Petitions, resolutions, and letters came to Hayes and others from individuals and organizations in the Black community, recounting the attacks and asking for assistance. Emigration and migration were two of the safety valves which Blacks examined. While Hayes apparently did not respond to several petitions and letters, he did answer the Rev. Mr. Sturks and discouraged his idea of a Black community in San Domingo. “…The evils which now affect you,” he told the minister in January, 1878, “are likely steadily, and I hope, rapidly to diminish.” The migration fever, particularly in Mississippi and Louisiana, would not down, and slowly the Exodus of 1879-1880 took shape. Blacks came up the Mississippi River heading for Kansas and free soil only to find a welcome less than warm and economic conditions less than supportive. Hayes did not directly involve himself in the Exodus, although a Congressional investigation aired the southern causes as well as the treatment which the western states offered the migrants. He noted in his diary that he thought its “effect is altogether favorable,” and counseled that the Blacks should be spread around the upper Midwest and settle down to the be homeowners. But he did not try to see that his counsel was heard.35 

The problem was larger than migration. Signs of underlying distaste for Blacks were easy to see in the North long before the Exodus helped to rekindle it. When Hayes appointed Frederick Douglass as Marshal of the District of Columbia at the start of his administration, he complained about the uproar this action caused. At the same time, he stripped that position of the social responsibilities which were attached to it and gave them to “a gentleman who was officially intimately connected with the President’s House and family….” Even those whites who considered themselves to be “friends of the race,” looked at their illiteracy and different mores with contempt or condescension. “Just how the two races are to get along together by-and-by when the colored rises in the scale,” mused the Washington correspondent in the Springfield Republican, “is not easy to see.”36 

Some Blacks blamed the racial situation in the late 1870s on the loss of political leverage, and they pointed the accusing finger at Hayes’ southern policy. P.S.B. Pinchback wrote Hayes early in 1878 comparing the number and prestige of Black federal appointments in New Orleans under Grant with those under Hayes and characterized the difference as “this apparent neglect of the colored people of the state….” Hayes was not yet willing to admit that his southern policy was in error. “I am confident,” he wrote an old college friend a month later, “and my confidence grows stronger, that I decided wisely at the beginning.”37 

Later in the year, his confidence was shaken, but it did not falter. “The bother in the South is ugly in many ways,” he told the same friend, referring to the increase in violence and repression against Blacks, adding “but even there we are making progress.” A month later, a published interview following close on the heels of a conference with Stalwart leaders Zachariah Chandler and Donald Cameron headlined Hayes’ admission that his southern policy was a failure and that he was changing course. Stalwart papers picked this up with a vengeance and the Republican reform element was hard put to refute what they called the “purported” interview in a newspaper “which has very frequently depended on its imagination for its facts.” Historians have tended to accept this post-election November headline as a departure from Hayes’ southern policy, a radical change of course at midterm.38

That there was movement within his established southern policy is irrefutable, but the policy remained and Hayes maintained his faith in it. What he proposed to do, and within narrow limits did do, was to use marshals to seek out and bring to trial violations of the law. His 1878 annual message called attention to these in muted terms; in South Carolina and Louisiana and some voting districts of other states, he wrote, “the rights of the colored voters have been overridden and their participation in the elections not permitted to be either general or free.” Repeating his warning of a year earlier, he pledged to use “whatever authority rests with me” to see that justice is done within the law after a “full and fair investigation of the alleged crimes….” In a letter to a college friend, a southerner, a month later, Hayes was more explicit: 

My theory of the Southern situation is this. Let the rights of the colored people be secured and the laws enforced only by the usual peaceful methods – by the action of civil tribunals and wait for the healing influences of time and reflection to solve and remove the remaining difficulties. 

Hayes recognized that this was an evolutionary process but he argued that the selfish politicians who kept things stirred up were “losing rapidly their hold.” 

It was clear that Hayes tried to tighten up enforcement within the stated limits of his southern policy. As he wrote in May, 1879, the political battle cry of his opponents, “’the use of troops at the polls’,” was pure fantasy but most like fiction “if not fully understood capable of mischief.” There was no turning back the clock. Hayes’ increased enforcement activity, somewhat impeded by Democratic moves to withhold army appropriations, was sporadic at best; it was not carried out with the conviction with which it had been pledged and fell short of results which could be called successful.39 

The hard fact is that the crystallization of southern opinion into a politically solid state which permitted and even encouraged the repression and subordination of Blacks had begun a decade earlier and Hayes was in no position to confront that process. His party was split and the Democrats controlled the Congress.40 Troops did not work, and most of them had been withdrawn before he took office. Officeholders opposed to solidification of southern views were ineffective. The other major section – the north – had set a crude example by accepting the near-dominance of the opposing political party. In short, conciliation and trust was not only a smart policy, which had not been tried before, it was the only practical policy open to Hayes. Unhappily, it did not work. 

Long before Hayes acknowledged that his southern policy had collapsed, he was ready to turn to a second reform to which he had publicly committed since his letter of acceptance of the nomination. The southern men, he believed in April, 1877, were not yet ready to bolt their party, but they were well disposed toward him and, he added, “will look kindly, I think, on my plans for civil service reform.” He promised to do some homework on the subject and come up with a bill for the Congress. The steps he took and the reactions which those steps generated have been carefully detailed in Ari Hoogenboom’s fine monograph and need no repetition. The picture of Hayes which emerges from Hoogenboom’s study resembles those evoked by historians of the pre-election bargain, a mild-mannered man of integrity with the resolve and the staying power of a strong executive.41 

Given the political structure in the late 1870s, with reformers pushing for civil service reform and politicians for or against it, depending upon whether they were in or out of power, it was too much to expect any President to push persistently for this reform. Hayes made haste slowly. “I have heard it said,” Benjamin Harrison wrote Secretary of the Navy Richard Thompson in May of 1877, “Pres. Hayes was not giving us much Civil Service reform in Indiana very often.” Nevertheless, as the Detroit Tribune summarized late in April, the President’s program was public knowledge: the office was not a Congressional privilege of patronage, that appointments in the South will made without reference to party, that changes in administration will not create massive federal job changes, and that the President’s own appointments will be offered primarily to qualified persons. It was on the basis of this program that several departments in the Hayes administration, including Interior, Treasury, and the Navy made measurable efforts to establish honest criteria for appointments, to use competitive examinations, and to eradicate fraud.42 

Hayes admitted that he had made some mistakes in his appointments and his sanguine prediction of a Congress which would happily concur in a civil service bill never came to pass. What Hayes did do, with some tactical advances and retreats, was to call attention with compelling consistency to the need for civil service reform and to use his presidential power to that end. Since presidential power is finite, particularly when multiple interests converge and disperse like an erratic ocean tide, what Hayes wanted to do and what he was able to do did not always coincide. He was forced by lack of support or lack of information to vary the reform course.43 

The most dramatic event of his administration in confronting patronage was his attack on the New York Custom House, a fortress protected by New York’s Senator Roscoe Conkling and manned by the Collector Chester Arthur and Naval Officer Alonzo Cornell. Hayes had several reasons for moving against the Custom House and removing these two officials, not the least of which were the antagonism of Conkling and the fears of William Henry Smith, a Hayes friend and advisor who relayed to Hayes the anger of Chicago businessmen who were bilked by the New York Custom House practices. Among Hayes’ other reasons was the possibility of making an example of the most prominent but not the only corrupt federal authority.44 Hayes’ battle with Conkling would have more rounds than one and, in accord with most of what Hayes did, rested on a principle. Hayes believed that the executive branch was charged with the power of appointments with the advice and consent of the Senate, and not the other way around. He launched his attack on the New York Custom House for all of these reasons, yet his desire to reestablish the strength of the office of the Presidency is more in keeping with his character and beliefs than the more petty excursions of political revenge. 

Hayes’ success in the New York battle was conditional. The rules promulgated by the new, reform-minded appointments were models of their kind, and imitated in Boston and Philadelphia. Other custom houses were also moved toward reform as a result of the ouster of Arthur and Cornell, but the New York institution needed more than a change at the top to insure against fraud. Nevertheless, even though New York backslid and Arthur and Cornell went on to prestigious elective posts, Hayes’ civil service reforms demonstrated that Hayes had both the strength and the courage of his convictions. A cartoon in Puck summed up the results. Conkling and Hayes are looking through different ends of the same telescope, Conkling through the proper end and Hayes through the far end. “How small he looks,” says Hayes.   “By Jove,” says Conkling, “he’s a bigger man than I thought he was.”45 

Federal employees were not then looked upon as “labor” in the same sense that industrial workers, miners and railroad workers were laborers, yet labor’s troubles in the public arena paralleled those of labor in the private sector. Where corruption brought reform efforts to the first, corruption of a different sort brought strikes to the other, and eventually involved the President. The absence of labor unions permitted the railroads, most of which were in federal receivership, to exploit their workers with low pay, layovers without pay or expenses, and arbitrary wage cuts. In mid-July, B&O workers in Maryland could take no more and went on strike. The strike quickly spread to West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and the governors of these states turned to the White House for assistance. Hayes’ response was typical; he requested information on the continuing basis and met with his Cabinet daily to determine what the federal government could do within constitutional limits. Finally, but in time to prevent widespread rioting and bloodshed, Hayes authorized federal troops to restore order, citing specific constitutional authority. By the end of July, the general strike had collapsed, the trains were moving and, significantly, the strikers had made their point. Wages were not reduced further and some cuts were rescinded. In many cases, wages lost because of the strike were earned back as the railroads worked overtime to catch up on delayed orders.46 

Hayes’ concern for the strikers was expressed as a diary entry and, as his biographer notes, never made public; it reflected his belief in education and his suspicions of the excesses of capitalism, but his diary entry also manifests his confusion on the issue of strikes. Five times he redrafted a line affirming a man’s right to determine for himself whether or not he will work, but questioning whether that right can interfere with the rights of others: “no man,” he concludes in his fifth version, “has a right to decide that question for other men.”47 

In microcosm, the strike – heralded by historians as the Great Railway Strike – emphasized the transitional process of Hayes’ thinking; to a certain extent the same holds true for other major issues which he confronted. What are the limits to individualism and to individual rights? What are the keys to societal tranquility and what impulses will move society, progressively and tranquilly? Where are the inequities in society and how can society resolve them? Hayes’ thoughts had not yet set; there was not time for that in the presidency. His post-presidential years would demonstrate his efforts to grapple substantively with these questions. 

On a more material level, the economic health of society was a tenacious dilemma. Prosperity in the latter years of the 1870s came, but ever so slowly, and its pace puzzled the politicians. Men divided on the issue of “sound money”, i.e. a currency based on a stable metal, like gold. Hayes had been elected to his third gubernatorial term on that issue; he was as strong a sound money man when he entered the White House as when he left it. There were essentially two attacks on Hayes’ version of sound money. The first was an effort by Greenbacker Thomas Ewing, an Ohio Congressman, to repeal the resumption clause in the Resumption Act of 1875 by which paper currency would be redeemed in metal on or after January 1, 1879. James A. Garfield argued against repeal; with a sound metal base, “there is no longer one money for the rich and another for the poor,” he told the House of Representatives in the fall of 1877.

As Hayes began preparing his first annual message to the Congress, he worried about an inflation caused by the introduction of silver currency. His belief was that circulating currency had “to have intrinsic value – to be money, & not a mere promise.” Early in 1878, the Bland-Allison Silver bill, enlarging, within limits, the amount of silver to be coined, passed both houses of the Congress. As the bill bulled its way through Congress, Hayes made up his mind to veto it. He was concerned lest an inflated currency hike interest rates, realizing what that would do to the nation’s “vast indebtedness.” Before the bill reached his desk, he knew that his veto would be overridden. His Cabinet raised some doubts about the proposed veto when he discussed it with them but in the end, the Bland-Allison bill became law over Hayes’ veto.48 

He had received a lot of pressure from men in the east and Midwest who ordinarily would have stood firm for hard money, he told William Henry Smith. And the issue of the future, he predicted to two correspondents, was going to be “Hard money against cabbage leaves,” a sound currency, redeemable in metal vs. “irredeemable government paper.” Hayes’ forecast was correct; in less than twenty years a heated debate over free silver coining marked the 1896 presidential canvass, with his young friend William McKinley standing solid for Hayes’ position against the flamboyant William Jennings Bryan.49 If Hayes had a strategy to deal with fiscal problems at the midpoint of his administration, it was best stated in his December 2, 1878 annual message to the Congress. Prosperity and “the welfare of legitimate business and industry” can grow best if the government refrains from attempting “radical changes in the existing financial legislation.” No more fiddling with silver coinage and unsupported greenbacks, he was saying, and added that the programed resumption of specie payments – making paper currency redeemable in coin, effective January 1, 1879, would take place on schedule.50     

To protect specie resumption, his tactics were conventionally political: he sent or encouraged his subordinates to beat the drum for hard money. John Sherman’s strenuous efforts were challenged without reference to party alignment by labor, small businessmen, farmers, and others who needed an easier exchange medium to relieve their debt burden. Even friendly newspapers were not above taking shots at Sherman and others.   The Rochester Evening Express pointedly suggested that Republicans not try to show “that the entire policy of the party, financial and otherwise, since 1860, is the best conceivable,” – this in a thoughtful editorial commending some parts of Sherman’s position and questioning some others.51 

Specie resumption went off as planned and without incident at the start of 1879; there was no run on the Treasury. As the year progressed and sentiment for greenbacks became more pronounced, both political parties had difficulty in determining where they stood on paper money. New England businessmen did not want to “have Congress meddle with the subject at all, for fear it will muddle.” The upshot was inaction in the Congress and a cold shoulder to Hayes’ pleas, in his annual messages of 1879 and 1880, to suspend the limited coinage of silver and return to a single, strict gold standard.52 In his last annual message, Hayes did not fail to point out, however, that the depression of the 1870s was over: 

All our industries are thriving; the rate of interest is low;
new railroads are being constructed; a vast immigration
is increasing our population, capital, and labor; new
enterprises in great number are in progress, and our
commercial relations with other countries are improving.53 

When Hayes stressed that “our commercial relations with other countries are improving,” he was underlining both the major purpose and major accomplishment of American foreign policy during his tenure. It was a quiet time; Grant’s Secretary of State had passed on a smooth running organization to his successor, William M. Evarts, and outside of trying to win markets for our agricultural and industrial products, very little of lasting significance took place. The United States-Mexican border was the scene of incursions from both sides until Mexico took the initiative and eased the tension. The abortive French effort to build an isthmus canal across Panama was scheduled to begin in 1881 under the direction of Ferdinand de Lesseps, evoking from Hayes a strong statement that our national policy “is a canal under American control.” This was a useful increment to the Monroe Doctrine. 

The other international incident involved China. The Burlingame Treaty of 1868 permitted unrestricted immigration at a time when cheap labor was a necessity in the West. As emigrants from the East began to fill that need, agitation grew to abrogate the Burlingame Treaty unilaterally. Early in 1879, Hayes vetoed a bill which, in effect, did just that, and began negotiations with the Chinese government which resulted in their agreement to limit emigration to the United States and widen trade opportunities. Though these proved to be temporary measures, they did ease nettlesome problems at the time.54 

Whatever causes are attributed to Chinese exclusion; one is intimately related to the same genre of racism which contributed to the exploitation of Indians and Blacks. In each situation, a variety of pressures were at work: labor tensions, land ownership and fear, for example, but in all cases, the classic statements about color, inferiority, barbarism, alien cultures, and religious differences flowed freely in the press and in correspondence. The Victorian reformers, among whom can be numbered Rutherford Hayes and his Secretary of the Interior, Carl Schurz, wrestled valiantly and unsuccessfully with the hostilities which racism helped to produce. Schurz's solutions were honest but, in the light of late twentieth century developments, repressive. He worked to remove corruption from the Indian Bureau, with some success. He worked to keep the U.S. Army in a secondary role, without very much success. He persuaded the Indian tribes to move further from their homelands to reservations which were generally of low quality lands and unsuited to the economic and cultural needs of the tribes. He brought Indian Chiefs to Washington to talk with him and the President to make an impression on both the Indians and whites, but promises made in executive offices and the White House were not always fully implemented in the field.55 

Hayes own views paralleled those of Schurz. He recognized that the Indian "problem" had remained unsolved since the coming of the white man. In his diary, he elaborated on two principles. First, he wanted to deal fairly and justly with the Indians, care for their "physical wants", and provide education and religious instruction. Second, he wanted to put a stop to the "intrigues of the Whites" which caused Indian uprisings. "Always," he added with a touch of wonder, "the Numbers and prowess of the Indians have been underrated." Unhappily for the Indians and the nation, neither Hayes nor Schurz nor anyone else had solutions for the tragic erosions of economic and cultural viability which was visited on America's native peoples.56 

As the President tussled with the nation's relationships to native Americans, southern Americans, foreign nations, and other disparate groups at home and abroad, not far from his central focus was his relationship with the major political parties. Hayes sensed what later historians confirmed, that the political process was in transition and the institutions and issues which had blanketed the nation in the mid-nineteenth century were changing. The Democrats, emboldened by their near victory in 1876, tried to create a campaign issue for 1878 and 1880 by establishing a congressional committee, named for its Chairman, Representative Clarkson N. Potter of New York, to investigate the 1876 election. The committee provided headlines during the hot summer of 1878 as it dredged up all manner of men to testify to the corruption which characterized the canvass. 

Hayes remained apparently unperturbed. The Chicago-Tribune reported that a Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania reporter found him "in excellent health, bearing the fatigues of endless speeches, reviews, and handshaking like a veteran." Hayes called the Potter inquiry a "farce...of much cry and little wool; or, more correctly, no wool at all." Privately, Hayes thought the investigation "shabby" and wondered "How men having the instincts, or culture of gentlemen..." could participate or approve. There was blame enough to go around, the New York Times concluded, and properly so, because prevented Samuel Tilden from seeking the Democratic nomination in 1880. Nevertheless, until the Potter Committee reported early in 1879, it was a clattering distraction, chorusing again the challenge to Hayes legitimate right to the office.57 

The Democrats did not hesitate to confront Hayes with another issue almost immediately after the new Congress convened in 1879. Anxious to relieve the South of the possibility of using Federal Marshals in elections, House Democrats attached riders to the army appropriations bill repealing that authority and the test oath for jurors which kept former Confederates from federal jury duty. In a six months period, Democrats used the rider technique seven times only to have Hayes use his veto successfully. For Hayes, this was a legislative intrusion into executive authority. “It is my duty to guard as a trust the powers conferred on the office which has devolved upon me,” he told his diary in April, 1879. Standing steadfast against the Congress, Hayes eventually won his point and vouchsafed for the Presidency the power effectively to exercise the incumbent’s “conscience and judgment.”58

The pressures which even nineteenth century Presidents lived with required safety valves and prominent among the escape used by Hayes was traveling. He literally traveled the breadth of the land, overlooking no section and generally taking the first lady with him. One supporter wrote to Schurz in the middle of 1879 suggesting that Hayes “drift along the New Jersey coast” and, perhaps, build on the sentiment that the President disavow his no-second-term pledge. Such a leisurely trip, in a quiet, unassuming way…….would do good in more ways than one,” Schurz’s correspondent asserted, adding that “Mrs. Hayes fairly captured the ladies……” on her last visit. Traveling, in short, was a tonic for the President and Mrs. Hayes and they were generally well received. Their trip to the West Coast, the first for a sitting chief executive, was a tour de force as the couple traveled by almost every conceivable known conveyance on land and water and met with the Western elite, the politicians, and the plain people. Interspersed with business, the Hayes party, like tourists, traveled to see the beauty spots of the section: Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, the Sequoias, Puget Sound, and many more. Hayes’ schedule called for him to be back in time to cast his vote for James A. Garfield, the successor whom he had hoped would follow him.59 

His hopes about Garfield’s election realized, vindicating, he believed, his own presidential term, Hayes left office in March 1881 and turned his attention to his private life as an ordinary citizen. He returned to Fremont, “this good town”, he told his fellow citizens, “to bear his part in every useful work that will promote the welfare and the happiness of his family, his town, his State, and his country.” The next twelve years made good on his asseveration.60 

The day after Hayes’ death, the vitriolic New York Sun editorialized that he had spent his Fremont years “in the peaceful pursuit of raising chickens.” While it is true that the Hayes had all sorts of domestic and farm animals and fowl, the former President spent more time in Spiegel Grove with his fruit and shade trees, some of the latter of which now tower over the lovely 25 acres. He consumed hours in reading, although his eyes tired easily, and he thoroughly enjoyed discussing the books which he had read, whether the author was Emerson, whose essays he enjoyed, a biographer, or a contemporary novelist. His winter pastime was sleighing and ride around the countryside with friends and family, brashly challenging the crisp, cold air with piles of blankets and heavy warm clothing.61 

Spiegel Grove was rarely without visitors. Whether they were school friends of daughter Fanny or the local minister, old comrades from political and military wars, old friends from Cincinnati or Kenyon, or just family, the stream was continuous and spirited. The Hayes’ were elegant hosts, warm and gracious; and their guests were urged to remain, often extending their stay to a week or two. Spiegel Grove was a busy, bubbling place, yet far enough removed from the urban hubbub to be restful and peaceful. 

Attractive as it was as a place to be, it was also attractive as a place to be from—and to come home to. The Hayes’ traveled extensively, usually to the east, but often inside of Ohio or west to Chicago and beyond. Hayes generally had meetings to attend or speeches to give. He was on the governing boards for four colleges and universities, two grant-making foundations for Black education, and the National Prison Reform Association. He was loyal to the Loyal Legion, the Grand Army of the Republic, and the veterans of his own Civil War regiment. He participated in most of the Lake Mohonk Conferences on the Indians in the 1880s and early 1890s, suggesting and presiding over the two Lake Mohonk Conferences on the Negro in 1890 and 1891. He was a faithful Kenyon College alumnus and a typical one, remarking on the changes and lamenting the deterioration. 

A recital of the organizations which involved him has little point without some of the understanding of the issues about which Hayes felt strongly. Hayes himself listed “three obstacles or dangers in our path” in a brief diary entry in August, 1884: “1. Intemperance. 2. Illiteracy. 3. Monster accumulation of wealth in a few hands.” He often ruminated about the liquor problem, at one point using his temperance stand as a reason for not stumping in 1884 for James G. Blaine, whom Hayes disliked and distrusted intensely. In seeking a culprit for the drunkenness abroad in the land, he blamed the public. It was the public, he held, who raised “fashionable and laudable” drinking to acceptable levels, and while he recognized that human weakness would always be vulnerable to temptation, he felt that drunkenness—today known as alcoholism—could be made as unsavory, and as rare as thievery. “Public opinion could dry it up, could extirpate it, as thoroughly as larceny or burglary are prevented.” Yet neither he nor Lucy actively participated in any temperance movement or organization.62 

As David Thelen notes in his perceptive essay on Hayes as a transitional reformer, Hayes’ credo was that people were differentiated as individuals, not as groups, and that the measuring rod was “character.” “The school, the church and the family,” Thelen writes, “encouraged his faith in unlimited social mobility, the perfectibility of man and the responsiveness of government.” Illiteracy could be wiped out by universal education, and Hayes urged Whitelaw Reid, editor of the New York Tribune, to campaign to have “the whiskey tax go to the States in aid of universal education.” When the Blair bill for federal support of education came before the Senate, Hayes was strongly in favor of it. He believed the education would help laborers see their role in relation to capital, Blacks prepare themselves for the race’s rising, Indians adjust to the whites’ more civilized ways, and criminals see the error of their means of livelihood. Stopping short of calling education a panacea---he served on too many university boards for that---Hayes put his trust in the educability of all beings, and its corollary, the ability of society to educate its citizens.63 

The aim of public instruction, he told a Toledo audience in 1885, is to “fit, or at least tend to fit, the young for the places they are to fill in life.” His special pleading was for manual training or industrial education. He liked to call it “practical education,” arguing “that study of books alone may make a learned man but not an educated man.” He applauded the introduction of industrial education into high schools, and through his work with the Peabody and Slater Funds supported industrial education in Black institutions. “The young of all races and of all conditions should be taught skilled labor---to respect labor…,” he advised President S.T. Mitchell of Wilberforce University, “…not merely as a means of self-support…but for the sake of the mental and moral training it furnishes.”64 

Hayes’ preoccupation with the intimate relationship between education and labor may have been myopic at a time when industrial technology and manufacturing techniques were beginning to change the function of the laborer, but it more clearly revealed a changing relationship between capital and labor. In a word, he began to have some thoughts about the distribution of wealth in the country and what great wealth did to individuals. Unable to focus with any clarity on that issue while in the White House, Hayes came back to it with increasing frequency during his final years. In a series which Hayes titles “Thoughts on Various Topics”, he shared with his diary a number of perceptive sentences, some in the form of aphorisms. The last in the series begins “Vast accumulations of wealth in a few hands are hostile to labor,” and it goes on to rehearse the evils which flow from that condition. One of these evils he articulated after reading an article by Edward Bellamy. “Yes,” Hayes concurred, “pauperism is the shadow of excessive wealth.”65 

Hayes’ growing disaffection with the extremes of wealth and his concern for its debilitating effect on American society were the expressions of a man who himself was well off by contemporary standards. Cash-poor and land rich, he was, humor had it, parsimonious in the White House, yet he calculated later that in his four White House years, he had saved only $1,000 out of a total salary of $200,000. Shortly after returning to Fremont, he borrowed $30,000 and when real estate sales slowed and some business ventures collapsed in the mid-1880’s he felt the pinch. By 1891 he was worried by his rising debt; he had been too easy a mark for people and causes in need. “The interest on my debt now exceeds my income,” he underlined in his diary on September 8, 1891. But his land-holdings were secure and, he thought, would increase in value more rapidly than his obligations. At his death in January, 1893, he was worth close to a million dollars.66 

Death came almost without warning. His last few months were highlighted by a series of trips; beginning in September 1892, his travels took him to Washington, D.C., New York City, Lake Mohonk, Chicago, Indianapolis, Baltimore, and then late in December, Cleveland and Columbus. His final trip in January was to Columbus and Cleveland; his heart signaled the danger in the Cleveland railroad station and he came right home to Spiegel Grove to die.67  

Although some Democratic newspapers used their obituary notice to rehash Hayes’ election and reopen old sores, most of the articles were bland, lacking the freshness and informativeness of the commentary published as Hayes left office 12 years before. The earlier critiques spanned the spectrum from meanness to sycophancy, but those critics who took the middle ground came close to the mark. They questioned the results of his southern policy---a solidly Democratic south, a repressed and exploited Black race and a broken trust---but hovered near the sentiment expressed by the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle “…in retrospect, it is not easy to see how it [Hayes’ southern policy] could have been avoided.” Hayes got good marks for trying to convert the federal bureaucracy to a civil service, even as he was criticized for making some inept appointments. His cabinet was generally rated as excellent; indeed some editors credited him with success only when he listened to his advisors. His financial policy, viewed from the prosperity of 1881, was declared to be a fine achievement, for the most part, attributed to the Secretary of the Treasury, John Sherman. 

Other issues, more marginal in importance, received attention also. Was the White House a dull place and Washington society somnolent during the Hayes tenure? Did Hayes accumulate a fortune while serving as President? These were among the easier queries to resolve, as Mary Clemmer did with enthusiasm, defending the very gracious and hospitable Lucy Hayes and denying with some evidence the charge of fortune-accumulation. The more difficult questions dealt with Hayes’ character. There was universal praise for his integrity, his sincerity and his patriotism, but underlying, sometimes accompanying, these conclusions were hints or assertions of irresoluteness and mediocrity. The Hartford Evening Post accorded him the “good will and respect, if not the admiration, of most people.” The Chicago Tribune withheld “the honor of brilliant ability” even as it lauded Hayes’ “honest and pure administration.” The New York Herald ranked him with “the respectable, commonplace Presidents, like Polk and Pierce”, while the New York Times thought that Hayes administration’s “numerous foibles and absurdities” would soon be forgotten while “its strength and resolution in dealing with some great and vital questions of public policy will be more clearly recognized.” With some latitude of expression, the “middle ground” editors affirmed Hayes’ goodness and, from the perspective of history, his successful presidency, but denied him the accolade of “great” or “brilliant.”68 

Hayes himself was sensitive enough to his accomplishments and his weaknesses to defend his administration, more often in his diary than in correspondence, “I believed that a radical change of policy with respect to the South,” he wrote to a distinguished Black minister-educator in 1883, “would bring ultimate safety and prosperity to the colored people…The change did its work. Not instantly, but slowly and surely.” He believed, too, that he had given civil service a forthright and sustained push in the proper direction, had begun the healing process between the sections, and had restrained the inflationary pressures exerted by the proponents of silver and paper currency. Most significantly, he believed that he had restored to the office of the presidency the potency, resiliency, and dignity which it deserved.   He would claim, also, that he strengthened the Republican party, since he fully subscribed to his own dictum, “He serves his party best who serves his country best.”69 

Historians judging Hayes cover a large territory; although there is one published, brief evaluation of the major interpreters, it is difficult to seduce these into schools and reduce each to one-line summaries.   It is enough to say that from the laudatory early works of Charles R. Williams, the pendulum swung, perhaps erratically, to the more critical views of Woodward, DeSantis, Hoogenboom and Hirshson. The return swing seems now to be in evidence, with new generation flailing away at the Woodward thesis; a recent revisionist essay by DeSantis, an earlier general favorable assessment by Morgan and a hint that Hoogenboom is revising his earlier perceptions of Hayes in his forthcoming biography. From the Hayes whose ethics were an enigma, whose strength was in his vacillation, and whose impact on the office was judged to be like a pebble in a pond, the more independent, more decisive, more alert magistrate.70 

In seeking a sensible judgement on Hayes as President, one can question why he has been called the “forgotten” president. Surely part of the reason that he is not well-remembered, like Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt, is the nature of the crises each man faced; Hayes had no war to fight, no depression to lick. Nor did he have the advantage of a second term, a charismatic personality, a dramatic physical appearance like Lincoln’s height, Cleveland’s bulk, Theodore Roosevelt’s energy, or FDR’s handicap.   The issues of the Hayes term were issues not of confrontation but of convalescence. These called for presidential responses of a restrained, even understated tone, the kind of leadership which Hayes offered. 

Critics point to the number of poor appointments in the face of his civil service reform stance, a certain public reserve beyond the stereotypical Victorian patriarch, a weakness in leadership quality manifested by a lack of aggressiveness, an inability to sustain a working relationship with dissident segments of the Republican party, and a kind of bland blindness, a Pollyanna attitude which seemed to cover every setback with an optimistic glow. 

     Some of these charges are grounded in fact and others in speculation. For every poor appointment, Hayes made several good appointments, beginning with his strong Cabinet. For all his reserve, he and Mrs. Hayes performed gracefully as host and hostess in the White House, and Hayes himself in letters and informal conferences was relaxed, even-tempered, and good humored. He was not jovial or charismatic, nor as a leader was he dynamic. He could act quickly and firmly, but he preferred to move slowly and thoughtfully, not aggressively. 

He carried one cross which has not been fabricated for presidential incumbents before or since: his claim to office was tainted. This made him an easy target tor political enemies and lukewarm friends. The country was wearily and apprehensively divided when he took his oath, and the office itself had cultured a mold of miscreancy. Working with these burdens, making the mistakes allowed to human beings, suffering the insidious jealousies and pernicious rumors which inevitably beset a chief executive, and forced to work with a hostile Congress and a divided party, Hayes laid down the outline of his policies, and proceeded to implement them. The results were startlingly beneficial to all except Blacks and Indians. In ending an era with this qualified success, he was also instrumental in beginning a new era which stretched into the next century. 

This very Victorian President was the epitome of self-control.71 Often provoked, he rarely flew to anger. Often challenged, he rarely laid down the gauntlet. Often frustrated, he rarely gave in to despair. Often victorious, he rarely gloated. Not that he did not experience all of these feelings, but his self-control kept them in check, even when anger, confrontation, despair, and the enjoyment of victory might have helped his cause. He was a self-confident man, yet he accepted advice, sometimes too freely, from those whom he admired, like William M. Evarts. He liked politics, but only the invigorating contest, not the pettiness and patronage which seemed to accompany political conflict. He was not a partisan; he was not even a good Republican. He was an enthusiastic politician. 

He was also an optimist. He believed in progress. He believed, like all good Victorians, that the world was getting better and that he, Rutherford B. Hayes, had made a substantial contribution to that end. Looking back, even a non-Victorian can conclude, “Indeed he had.”

Notes 

1Henry Adams to Charles Milnes Gaskell, June 14, 1876 W. C. Ford, ed., Letters of Henry Adams, 1858-1891 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1930), 388; Otto Friederich, Clover (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 203. 

2Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), I, 142; R. B. Hayes Scrapbooks, XV, 62, 88, 96, 103, 104, 136, Rutherford B. Presidential Center Library (hereinafter HPC). 

3Professor Geoffrey Blodgett of Oberlin College has called my attention to the centrality of political parties in American society in these years. Keith Ian Polakoff, The Politics of Inertia: The Election of 1876 and the End of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1973) focuses on a critical year. Paul Kleppner’s quantitative and interpretive methodology offers a different perspective on what he calls the electoral universe in his The Third Electoral System, 1853-1892 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). 

4See William McFeeley, Grant, A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1981), chapter 25. 

5The standard biographies of Hayes are Charles R. Williams, The Life of Rutherford B. Hayes, 2 vols. (Columbus: Ohio State Genealogical and Historical Society, 1914); Charles R. Williams, ed., The Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, 5 vols. (Columbus: Ohio State Genealogical and Historical Society, 1922-1926); Harry Barnard, Rutherford B. Hayes and His America (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill Co., 1954).   T. Harry Williams has edited the presidential years of the Hayes diary in Hayes: The Diary of a President, 1875-1881 (New York: David McKay Co., 1964) and written a study of Hayes’ war service, Hayes of the Twenty-Third (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965).   The most recent study of the Hayes presidency is Kenneth E. Davison, The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972). 

6 Barnard, Hayes, 118-121. Cf. Hayes’ description of himself in Rutherford B. Hayes to John Sherman, December 25, 1876, Hayes Papers, HPC (all references to the Hayes Papers are from HPC unless otherwise noted.) 

7(New York: Ballantine Books, 1974), 122; GATH, the signature of Washington correspondent George Alfred Townsend, reported an interview with Hayes in the Cincinnati Enquirer in January, 1879 and quoted Hayes as saying on several occasions that his Civil War experience “was the best and happiest portion of my life.”   Hayes Scrapbooks, CXII, 16-17. 

8C. R. Williams, Diary and Letters, III, 40. 

9Polakoff, Politics of Inertia, ch 2, has the most comprehensive account of the nomination. William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1979), 300-304 and Davison, Presidency, ch 2, call the nomination a “master-stroke” (Gillette, 304) and the result of “shrewd” management (Davison, 35). 

10Carl Schurz to Hayes, June 22, 23, July 5, 14, 1876, Frederic Bancroft, ed., Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz (New York: G. P. Putnam and Son, 1913), III, 248-252, 252-253, 255-258, 260-261; Letter of Acceptance, July 8, 1876 in C. R. Richards, Life, I, 460-462. 

11Ibid., 471nl; Joseph T. Webb to Col. Josiah W. Ware, July 13, 1876, Joseph T. Webb Papers, HPC. 

12C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and reaction: The Compromise of 1877and the End of Reconstruction (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1951). 

13Plakoff, Politics of Inertia, passim; Allan Peskin, “Was There A Compromise of 1877?”, Journal of American History, LX, #1 (June, 1973), 63-75.   Woodward’s response is in the same issue: “Yes, There Was A Compromise of 1877,” ibid., 215-223. In a later essay, George Rable, “Southern Interests and the Election of 1876: A Reappraisal,” Civil War History, XXVI, #4 (December, 1980), 347-361, argues that the overriding tension was in state and local politics in the south and in the efforts of southerners to establish peace, i.e., home rule, be extracting “concessions…from the all but certain victors.” (p. 361). 

14Michael Les Benedict, “Southern Democrats in the Crisis of 1876-1877,” Journal of Southern History, XLVI, #4 (November, 1980), 489-524. Benedict’s essay should be read in conjunction with his earlier article, “Preserving the Constitution: The Conservative Basis of Radical Reconstruction,” Journal of American History, LXI, #1 (June, 1974), 65-90. 

15Woodward, Reunion and Reaction, ch. 5. 

16Garfield to Hayes, December 9, 12, 1876, Hayes Papers. 

17Hayes to Sherman, December 17, 1876, copy in Hayes Papers from John Sherman Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter LC); Hayes to William Henry Smith, December 16, 1876, Hayes to William K. Rogers, December 17, 1876, Hayes Papers; Hayes to Richard H. Dana, December 18, 1876, copy in Hayes Papers from R. H. Dana Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; Hayes to Sherman, December 25, 1876; copy in John Sherman Papers, LC. 

18J. D. Cox to Hayes, January 31, 1877, Hayes to Cox, February 2, 1877, William E. Chandler to Hayes, January 13, 1877, Hayes to Chandler, January 18, 1877, Hayes Papers. 

19Hayes to W. E. Chandler, December 31, 1876, Hayes Papers. 

20Charles Foster to Hayes, January 21, 1877, Hayes to George W. Jones, January 21, 1877, Hayes to Carl Schurz, January 23, 1877, Letterbook IV, Hayes Papers. 

21Hayes to Schurz, January 29, 1877, Letterbook IV, Hayes Papers. 

22Hayes to Schurz, February 4, 1877, Letterbook IV, Hayes to John Sherman, February 15, 1877, Hayes Papers. 

23Charles Foster to Hayes, February 10, 1877, Stanley Matthews to Hayes, February 13, 1877, Hayes Papers. 

24John Sherman to Hayes, February 17, 18, 1877, Hayes to Sherman, February 19, 1877, Hayes Papers. 

25Matthews to Hayes, February 23, 1877, Hayes Papers; Andrew J. Kellar to William Henry Smith, February 20, 1877, William Henry Smith Papers, HPC; William Henry Smith to Hayes, February 21, 1877, Hayes to Murat Halstead, February 18, 1877, Hayes Papers. 

26Michael Les Benedict, “Southern Democrats in the Crisis of 1876-1877,” loc, cit., 518-520; Woodward, Reunion and Reaction, 186-189; Kellar to William Henry Smith, February 20, 1877, Smith Papers, HPC; William Henry Smith to Hayes, February 21,1877, Hayes Papers.   Thomas C. Donaldson, a friend and confident of Hayes, observed privately on February 28, 1877: 

The truth is the little coterie that surrounded Prest. Hayes in
Ohio came to Washington thinking they had an entire mortgage
on Mr. Hayes for all and A deed for the equities. How he has
fooled some of them! And how quickly they left him when he
showed his teeth and [he] did as he liked. 

Watt P. Marchman, ed., “The ‘Memoirs’ of Thomas Donaldson,” Hayes Historical Journal, II, #3-4 (Spring-Fall, 1979), 160. 

27Edward Mayes, Lucius Q. C. Lamar: His Life, Times and Speeches, 1825-1893 (Nashville: M. E. Church South Publishing House, 1895), 297; McFeeley, Grant: A. Biography, 448-449. 

28Lucy Webb Hayes to Birch[ard Austin Hayes], May19 [1877], Lucy Webb Hayes Papers, HPC. 

29Emily Apt Geer, “Lucy Webb Hayes and Her Family,” Ohio History, LXXVII, (Winter, Spring, Summer, 1968), 51-53; William H. Crook, Through Five Administrations: Reminscences of Col. William H. Crook, Margarita Spalding, comp. and ed., (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910), 232, 250-251; Marchman, ed., “Memoirs of Thomas Donaldson,” loc. cit., 214, 221. Some months earlier, in April, 1879, Donaldson remarked to the President’s steward, referring to the Hayes family, “I believe that the happiest [Presidential] family ever in this house,” and the steward heartily agreed, Ibid., 195. 

30Davison, Presidency, 82-86; Geer, “Lucy Webb Hayes and Her Family,” loc. cit., 52-55; Lucy Webb Hayes to ? McCandless, July 19, [1880]. 

31In a lengthy diary entry for April 11, 1880, Hayes contradicts an account of his administration, beginning with his “southern policy,” written for the Philadelphia Times, March 29, 1880, by the newspaperman-cum-president-maker, General H. V. Boynton. Hayes identifies Boynton’s first complaint as a southern policy which was “very different in practice from what ‘his friends’ understood it would be when they supported it. I know, of course,” Hayes told his diary, “very little of what was expected. The truth is I had no confidants in regard to it. My judgement was that the time had come to put an end to bayonet rule.” C. R. Williams, Diary and Letters, III, 594. See also Vincent P. DeSantis; “Rutherford B. Hayes and the Removal of the Troops and the End of Reconstruction,” in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 417-450, esp. 436-445. 

32See his diary entry for February 25 and for March 16, 1877, T. H. Williams, Diary, 76-78, 83 and the April 26, 1877 letter of Thomas Wentworth Higginson to the New York Tribune, Hayes Scrapbook, XIX, 65. John Greenleaf Whittier has a succinct analysis in his March 27, 1877 letter to Harriet Minot, in John B. Parkard, ed., The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1975), III, 374-375. 

33March 21, August 5, 1877, T. H, Williams, Diary, 85, 94. 

34Hayes to Guy M. Bryan, December 27, 1877, copy in Hayes Papers from original in Bryan Papers, University of Texas; Hayes to Major W. D. Bickham, May 3, 1877, C. R. Williams, Diary and Letters, III, 432; November 3, 1877 in T. H. Williams, Diary, 101. 

35Hayes to Rev. Mr. Sturks, January 14, 1878, copy in Hayes Papers from Cincinnati Commercial, January 16, 1878; Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansa after Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), passim; Robert C. Athearn, In Search of Canaan: Black Migration to Kansas, 1879-1880 (Lawrence: Regents Press in Kansas, 1978), passim; May 25, 1879, T. H. Williams, Diary, 221. Painter faults Hayes for ignoring petitions and for his inaction, pp. 89, 94, 170-172, 229; Athearn is somewhat more sympathetic to Hayes but finds no evidence of active support, pp. 145-147. For a critical view of Hayes’ relation to Blacks, as seen by the Black Community, see Bess Beatty, “A Revolution Gone Backward: The Black Response to the Hayes Administration,” Hayes Historical Journal, IV, #1 (Spring, 1983), 5-23. 

36Draft statement by Hayes, undated [March, 1877], Hayes Papers; Springfield Republican, January 5, 1878; New York Tribune, March 20, 1877; diary entry, March 16, 1877, T. H. Williams, Diary, 83-84. 

37P. B. S. Pinchback to Hayes, January 29, 1878, Hayes Papers; Hayes to Guy M. Bryan February 27, 1878, copy in Hayes Papers from Bryan Papers, University of Texas. 

38Hayes to Gen. J. M. Comly, October 29, 1878, Hayes Papers; for press comments on the interview and policy change, see Hayes Scrapbooks, XV, 101-113, especially New York Times, November, 14, 1878 and Philadelphia Enquirer, November 13, 1878. Stanley Hirshson, Farewell to the Bloody Shirt: Northern Republicans and the Southern Negro, 1877-1893 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), 49-51, see Hayes’ stance as an about-face, while Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 354, 362, characterizes it as the dissolution of his grand design into no policy at all. 

39James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897), IX, 4446, Hayes to Guy M. Bryan, January 10, 1878, copy in Hayes Papers from Bryan Papers, University of Texas; Hayes to Governor E. D. Morgan, May 15, 1879, Hayes Papers. 

40Paul Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, 1853-1892, 20-26, argues that a major shift in party power took place prior to 1876, from Republicans back to Democrats. This argument leads to the conclusion that Hayes’ political problems antedated his administration and the initiation of his southern policy. 

41Hayes to William M. Dickson, April 22, 1877 in C. R. Williams, Diary and Letters, III, 431; Ari Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 135-178. 

42See Carl Schurz to W. M. Grosvenor, March 29, 1877 in Bancroft, ed., Speeches…of Carl Schurz, III, 410; Benjamin Harrison to Richard Thompson, May 5, 1877, Harrison Papers, Indiana Historical Society; Detroit Tribune, April 20, 1877, Hayes Scrapbooks, XV, 151; Hayes to Dr. J. D. Hogg, December 5, 1877, Hayes Papers where Hayes notes “Not turning people out gives me few places, and the applicants are a host.”; Diary, August 6, 1878 in T. H. Williams Diary, 158-159. Admiral David D. Porter wrote to Edward C. Caldwell on May 23, 1878 that “The professed role of the Navy Department is to abide by the result of a competitive examination.”, Porter Papers, HPC. 

43Hayes to William M. Dickson, April 22, 1877 in C. R. Williams, Diary and Letters, III, 431; Hayes to Guy M. Bryan, July 4, 1877, Hayes Papers from Bryan Papers, University of Texas; Diary, August 5, 1877, T. H. Williams, Diary, 94. 

44Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils, 155-178. 

45Ibid., 170-174; Puck, IV, #101 (February 12, 1879), 16. 

46Davison, Presidency, 145-154; Barnard, Hayes, 445-447. See Hayes’ notes on his daily Cabinet meetings during the crisis, July 24-28, 31, 1877, Hayes Papers. For a critical view of Hayes’ handling of the strikes, see William M. Goldsmith, The Growth of Presidential Power: A Documented History (New York: Chelsea House Publishing Co., 1974), II, 1139-1143. 

47Diary, August 5, 1877, T. H. Williams, Diary, 93. 

48Murat Halstead, “Recollections and Letters of President Hayes, II” The Independent, LI (February 16, 1899), 486; James D. Norris and Arthur H. Shaffer, eds., Politics and Patronage in the Gilded age: The Correspondence of James A. Garfield and Charles E. Henry (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1970), 200n17; Diary, November 5, 1877, in T. H. Williams, Diary,103; Diary, February 3, 17, 23,28,March 1, 1878, ibid., 115-118, 121-122, 130n1. 

49Hayes to ?, March 5, 1878, copy in Hayes Paper from John S. H. Fogg Autograph Collection, v. 47, Maine Historical Society; Hayes to William Henry Smith, March 6, 1878 in C. R. Williams, Diary and Letters, III, 465-466; John Sherman,Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet (Chicago: The Werner Company, 1895), II, 623. 

50Richardson, Messages and Papers, IX, 4451. 

51Sherman, Recollections, II, 748; Rochester (N.Y.) Evening Express, August 28, 1878, Hayes Scrapbooks, XLVII, 115-116, Robert T. Patterson, Federal Debt-Management Policy, 1865-1879 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1954), 112,140-141, 191-196, credits Sherman with sound and skillful management policies during his tenure as Secretary of the Treasury. 

52Richardson, Messages and Papers, X, 4510-4511, 4566-4569; E. P. C. in Springfield Republican, December 11, 18, 1879. 

53Richardson, Messages and Papers, X, 4566. 

54Davison, Presidency, 194-209, is the major source for this account. For a contemporary view in the midst of the Mexican dispute, see Sol in Vermont Chronicle, July 13, 1878. Hayes comments on his policy in his letter to Lucy Webb Hayes, March 8, 1880, Hayes Papers.   On the Chinese issue, see Baltimore Sun [August 14, 1878], Hayes Scrapbooks, XLVII, 41-42, for a comprehensive recapitulation to that date. For Hayes’ thought after his veto message, see his letter to Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, March 1, 1879, Hayes Papers. 

55Hans L. Trefousse, Carl Schurz: A Biography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), 242-247. 

56Diary, July 1, 1878, T. H. Williams, Diary, 148-149; for an impassioned defense of Indian rights in the Ponca removal case, see Mary Clemmer, The Independent, February 17, 1881. 

57David P. Thelen has an enlightened view of Hayes as a representative transitional reform figure in his “Rutherford B. Hayes and the Reform Tradition in the Gilded Age,” American Quarterly, XXII, #2, pt. 1 (Summer, 1970), 150-165; Chicago Tribune, July [6?], 1878, Hayes Scrapbooks, XLVI, 42; New York Times, August 28, 1878, ibid., XLVII, 74; Hayes to Guy M. Bryan, July 27, 1878 copy in Hayes Papers from Bryan Papers, University of Texas, Davison, Presidency, 165-166. 

58T. H. Williams, Diary, XXXIV-XXXV and diary entry, April 6, 1879, p. 214; Davison, Presidency, 210-223, devotes a chapter to Hayes’ travels. 

59Davison, Presidency, 214. 

60C. R. Williams, Life, II, 335. 

61Journal editors, eds., “Contemporary Estimates of President Hayes,” Hayes Historical Journal, II, #2 (Fall, 1978), 134. In declining an1885 invitation to visit Philadelphia for political purposes, Hayes wrote that he had “withdrawn from public life…My time is well taken up with educational work and my private affairs.”   Hayes to Wharton Barker, February 23, 1885, copy on Hayes Papers from Wharton Barker Papers, LC. On Hayes’ reading, see, for example, diary entries for October 17, 18, 1884, October 24, 1888, December 9, 1892, in C. R. Williams, Diary and Letters, IV, 168,169, 414, V, 128; on trees and shrubs, see his reference in his letter to Guy M. Bryan, April 18, 1887, ibid., IV, 320 for one example of many. On sleighing see his letter to daughter, Fanny, January 1, 1888, ibid., IV, 362, among others. 

62Diary, August 10, 1884, C. R. Williams, Diary and Letters, IV, 57; Hayes to Webb C. Hayes, September 27, 1884, ibid., IV, 163; diary, July 9, 1884, ibid., IV, 155. For the reference to Kenyon see diary, March 16, 1892, ibid., V, 65-66. 

63Thelen, loc. cit., 160; Hayes to Whitelaw Reid, December 2, 1883, Hayes to Guy M. Bryan, November 13, 1884, C. R. Williams, Diary and Letters, IV, 130-131, 175-176. 

64Notes for speeches in Toledo and Cincinnati, November 4, 1887 and December 5, 1885, Messages and Speeches File, Folders 710, 676, Hayes Papers; Hayes to S.T. Mitchell, February 23, 1886, C. R. Williams, Diary and Letters, IV, 270. See also Hayes’ letter to Governor Leland Stanford, December 12, 1885, congratulating him on his gift to create Stanford University and include an industrial education department, copy in Hayes Papers from Special Collection, Stanford University Libraries. 

65Thelen, loc. cit., 160-164; C. R. Williams, Diary and Letters, IV, 367; Diary entry for June 7, 1892, ibid., V, 89. 

66Davison, Presidency, 72, 87n20; Hayes to John Sherman, May 3, 1881, Hayes to Guy Bryan, November 13, 1884, March 3, 1885, C. R. Williams, Diary and Letters, IV, 14, 176, 195-196; diary, September 8, 1891, ibid., V, 22-23. 

67C. R. Williams, Life, II, 393-398. 

68Journal editors, eds., “Contemporary Estimates,” Hayes Historical Journal, II, #2 (Fall, 1978), 132-138.   See Hayes scrapbooks, LXXXVI, 1,20-30, 42-49ff for newspaper evaluations of the Hayes administration in late February and early March, 1881. For quotations in the text: Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, .d., 29, Hartford Evening Post, March 1, 1881, 28, Chicago Tribune, n.d., 42, New York Herald, March 1, 1881, 20, New York Times, February 27, 1881, 1. See also Mary Clemmer, The Independent, January 27, March 3, 1881 and for a detailed analysis by “one of the closest friends of the President,” see the long article in New York Times, March [3?], 1881, Hayes Scrapbooks, LIIIVI, 25-28. 

69Hayes to B. T. Tanner, February 20, 1883 in C. R. Williams, Diary and Letters, IV, 109; Hayes to Guy M. Bryan, March 28, 1880, copy in Hayes Papers from Bryan Papers, University of Texas. 

70Darwin H. Stapleton, “An Assessment of Historians’ Perspectives of Rutherford B. Hayes,” Northwest Ohio Quarterly, XLIV, #4, (Fall, 1972), 79-82.   The Williams works are cited in n5, Woodward in n12, Hirshson in n38, Hoogenboom in n41. The earlier DeSantis book is Vincent P DeSantis, Republicans Face the Southern Question: The New Departure Years, 1877-1897 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959). The younger scholars are cited in n13 andn14, DeSantis’ 1982 essay is cited in n31 and Thelen’s article is cited in n57. H. Wayne Morgan’s book is From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877-1896 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1969). Hoogenboom’s hint came in a telephone conversation, March 10, 1983. 

71General George H. Sheridan called it “serenity.” GATH in Cincinnati Enquirer, December [8?], 1878, Hayes Scrapbook, XLIX, 136-137.