[4] Twenty Years of Congress, II, 185.
[5] July 14, 1900.
[6] See also the Federalist (Lodge’s edition), 452. Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence, 308.
[7] American Commonwealth, I, 80.
[p243]
A REVIEW OF PRESIDENT HAYES’S ADMINISTRATION
Address delivered at the annual meeting of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Graduate Schools of Applied Science and Business Administration, Harvard University, on October 8, 1908; printed in the Century Magazine for October, 1909.
[p245]
A REVIEW OF PRESIDENT HAYES’S ADMINISTRATION
Many of our Presidents have been inaugurated under curious and trying circumstances, but no one of them except Hayes has taken the oath of office when there was a cloud on his title. Every man who had voted for Tilden,—whose popular vote exceeded that of Hayes by 264,000,—believed that Hayes had reached his high place by means of fraud. Indeed, some of the Hayes voters shared this belief, and stigmatized as monstrous the action of the Louisiana returning board in awarding the electoral vote of Louisiana to Hayes. The four men, three of them dishonest and the fourth incompetent, who constituted this returning board, rejected, on the ground of intimidation of negro voters, eleven thousand votes that had been cast in due form for Tilden. In the seventh volume of my history I have told the story of the compromise in the form of the Electoral Commission which passed on the conflicting claims and adjudged the votes of the disputed states, notably Florida and Louisiana, to Hayes, giving him a majority of one in the electoral college, thus making him President. When the count was completed and the usual declaration made, Hayes had no choice but to abide by the decision. Duty to his country and to his party, the Republican, required his acceptance of the office, and there is no reason for thinking that he had any doubts regarding his proper course. His legal title was perfect, but his moral title was unsound, and it added to the difficulty of his situation that the opposition, the Democrats, had a majority in the House of [p246] Representatives. None but a determined optimist could have predicted anything but failure for an administration beginning under such conditions.
Hayes was an Ohio man, and we in Ohio now watched his successive steps with keen interest. We knew him as a man of high character, with a fine sense of honor, but we placed no great faith in his ability. He had added to his reputation by the political campaign that he had made for governor, in 1875, against the Democrats under William Allen, who demanded an inflation of the greenback currency. He took an uncompromising stand for sound money, although that cause was unpopular in Ohio, and he spoke from the stump unremittingly and fearlessly, although overshadowed by the greater ability and power of expression of Senator Sherman and of Carl Schurz, who did yeoman’s service for the Republicans in this campaign. Senator Sherman had suggested Hayes as candidate for President, and the nomination by the Republican national convention had come to him in June, 1876. While his letter of acceptance may not have surprised his intimate friends, it was a revelation to most of us from its outspoken and common-sense advocacy of civil service reform, and it gave us the first glimmering that in Rutherford B. Hayes the Republicans had for standard bearer a man of more than respectable ability.
His inaugural address confirmed this impression. He spoke with dignity and sympathy of the disputed Presidency, promised a liberal policy toward the Southern states, and declared that a reform in our civil service was a “paramount necessity.” He chose for his Cabinet men in sympathy with his high ideals. William M. Evarts, the Secretary of State, was one of the ablest lawyers in the country. He had been one of the leading counsel in the [p247] defense of President Johnson in the impeachment trial, and had managed the Republican cause before the Electoral Commission with adroitness and zeal. John Sherman, the Secretary of the Treasury, was the most capable financier in public life. Carl Schurz, the Secretary of the Interior, was an aggressive and uncompromising reformer, who had served the Republican party well in the campaigns of 1875 and 1876. If these three men could work together under Hayes, the United States need envy the governors of no other country. They were in the brilliant but solid class, were abreast of the best thought of their time, had a solemn sense of duty, and believed in righteous government. Devens, the Attorney-General, had served with credit in the army and had held the honorable position of Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Thompson of Indiana, Secretary of the Navy, was a political appointment due to the influence of Senator Morton, but, all things considered, it was not a bad choice. McCrary of Iowa, as Secretary of War, had been a useful member of the House of Representatives. The Postmaster-General was Key of Tennessee, who had served in the Confederate army and voted for Tilden. This appointment was not so genuine a recognition of the South as would have been made if Hayes could have carried out his first intention, which was the appointment of General Joseph E. Johnston as Secretary of War. Considering that Johnston had surrendered the second great army of the Confederacy only twelve years before, the thought was possible only to a magnanimous nature, and in the inner circle of Hayes’s counselors obvious and grave objections were urged. General Sherman doubted the wisdom of the proposed appointment, although he said that as General of the army he would be entirely content to receive the President’s orders through his old antagonist. Although [p248] the appointment of Johnston would have added strength, the Cabinet as finally made up was strong, and the selection of such advisers created a favorable impression upon the intelligent sentiment of the country; it was spoken of as the ablest Cabinet since Washington’s.