Historical Essays

by James Ford Rhodes

A wise inaugural address and an able Cabinet made a good beginning, but before the harmonious coöperation of these extraordinary men could be developed a weighty question, which brooked no delay, had to be settled. The Stevens-Sumner plan of the reconstruction of the South on the basis of universal negro suffrage and military support of the governments thus constituted had failed. One by one in various ways the Southern states had recovered home rule until, on the inauguration of Hayes, carpet-bag negro governments existed in only two states, South Carolina and Louisiana. In both of these the Democrats maintained that their candidates for governor had been lawfully elected. The case of South Carolina presented no serious difficulty. Hayes electors had been rightfully chosen, and so had the Democratic governor, Hampton. But Chamberlain, the Republican candidate, had a claim based on the exclusion of the votes of two counties by the board of state canvassers. After conferences between each of the claimants and the President, the question was settled in favor of the Democrat, which was the meaning of the withdrawal of the United States troops from the State House in Columbia.

The case of Louisiana was much more troublesome. Packard, the Republican candidate for governor, had received as many votes as Hayes, and logic seemed to require that, if Hayes be President, Packard should be governor. While the question was pending, Blaine said in the Senate: “You discredit Packard, and you discredit Hayes. You hold that Packard is not the legal governor of Louisiana, [p249] and President Hayes has no title.” And the other leaders of the Republican party, for the most part, held this view. To these and their followers Blaine applied the name “Stalwarts,” stiff partisans, who did not believe in surrendering the hold of the Republicans on the Southern states.

Between the policies of a continuance of the support of the Republican party in Louisiana or its withdrawal, a weak man would have allowed things to drift, while a strong man of the Conkling and Chandler type would have sustained the Packard government with the whole force at his command. Hayes acted slowly and cautiously, asked for and received much good counsel, and in the end determined to withdraw the United States troops from the immediate vicinity of the State House in Louisiana. The Packard government fell, and the Democrats took possession. The lawyers could furnish cogent reasons why Packard was not entitled to the governorship, although the electoral vote of Louisiana had been counted for Hayes; but the Stalwarts maintained that no legal quibble could varnish over so glaring an inconsistency. Indeed, it was one of those illogical acts, so numerous in English and American history, that resolve difficulties, when a rigid adherence to logic would tend to foment trouble.

The inaugural address and the distinctively reform Cabinet did not suit the party workers, and when the President declined to sustain the Packard government in Louisiana, disapproval was succeeded by rage. In six weeks after his inauguration Hayes was without a party; that is to say, the men who carried on the organization were bitterly opposed to his policy, and they made much more noise than the independent thinking voters who believed that a man had arisen after their own hearts. Except from the Southern wing, he received little sympathy from the Democratic [p250] party. In their parlance, fraud was written on his brow. He had the honor and perquisites of office which were rightfully theirs.

Once the troops were withdrawn from South Carolina and Louisiana, no backward step was possible, and although Hayes would have liked congressional support and sympathy for his act, this was not necessary. The next most important question of his administration related to finance. He and his Secretary of the Treasury would have been gratified by an obedient majority in Congress at their back. Presidents before and after Hayes have made a greater or less employment of their patronage to secure the passage of their favorite measures, but Hayes immediately relinquished that power by taking a decided position for a civil service based on merit. In a little over a month after the withdrawal of the troops from the immediate vicinity of the State House in Louisiana, he announced his policy in a letter to his Secretary of the Treasury. “It is my wish,” he wrote, “that the collection of the revenues should be free from partisan control, and organized on a strictly business basis, with the same guaranties for efficiency and fidelity in the selection of the chief and subordinate officers that would be required by a prudent merchant. Party leaders should have no more influence in appointments than other equally respectable citizens. No assessments for political purposes on officers or subordinates should be allowed. No useless officer or employee should be retained. No officer should be required or permitted to take part in the management of political organizations, caucuses, conventions, or election campaigns.” The mandatory parts of this letter he incorporated in an order to Federal office-holders, adding: “This rule is applicable to every department of the civil service. It should be understood by every officer of the general [p251] government that he is expected to conform his conduct to its requirements.”

It must be a source of gratification to the alumni and faculty of Harvard College that its president and governing boards were, in June, 1877, in the judicious minority, and recognized their appreciation of Hayes by conferring upon him its highest honorary degree. Schurz, who had received his LL.D. the year before, accompanied Hayes to Cambridge, and, in his Harvard speech at Commencement, gave his forcible and sympathetic approval of the “famous order of the President,” as it had now come to be called.

A liberal and just Southern policy, the beginning of a genuine reform in the civil service and the resumption of specie payments, are measures which distinguish and glorify President Hayes’s administration, but in July, 1877, public attention was diverted from all these by a movement which partook of the nature of a social uprising. The depression following the panic of 1873 had been widespread and severe. The slight revival of business resulting from the Centennial Exposition of 1876 and the consequent large passenger traffic had been succeeded by a reaction in 1877 that brought business men to the verge of despair. Failures of merchants and manufacturers, stoppage of factories, diminished traffic on the railroads, railroad bankruptcies and receiverships, threw a multitude of laborers out of employment; and those fortunate enough to retain their jobs were less steadily employed, and were subject to reductions in wages.

The state of railroad transportation was deplorable. The competition of the trunk lines, as the railroads running from Chicago to the seaboard were called, was sharp, and, as there was not business enough for all, the cutting of through freight rates caused such business to be done at an actual loss, while the through passenger transportation [p252] afforded little profit. Any freight agent knew the remedy: an increase of freight rates by agreement or through a system of pooling earnings. Agreements were made, but not honestly kept, and, after a breach of faith, the fight was renewed with increased fury. As the railroad managers thought that they could not increase their gross earnings, they resolved on decreasing their expenses, and somewhat hastily and jauntily they announced a reduction of ten per cent in the wages of their employees.

This was resisted. Trouble first began on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, where the men not only struck against the reduction, but prevented other men from taking their places, and stopped by force the running of trains. The militia of West Virginia was inadequate to cope with the situation, and the governor of that state called on the President for troops, which were sent with a beneficial effect. But the trouble spread to Maryland, and a conflict in Baltimore between the militia and rioters in sympathy with the strikers resulted in a number of killed and wounded. The next day, Saturday, July 21, a riot in Pittsburg caused the most profound sensation in the country since the draft riots of the Civil War. The men on the Pennsylvania and the Pittsburg, Fort Wayne and Chicago railroads, had struck, and all freight traffic was arrested. On this day six hundred and fifty men of the first division of the Pennsylvania national guard at Philadelphia arrived in Pittsburg, and, in the attempt to clear the Twenty-eighth Street crossing, they replied to the missiles thrown at them by the mob with volleys of musketry, killing instantly sixteen of the rioters and wounding many.

Here was cause for exasperation, and a furious mob, composed of strikers, idle factory hands, and miners, tramps, communists, and outcasts, began its work of vengeance and [p253] plunder. Possessed of firearms, through breaking into a number of gun shops, they attacked the Philadelphia soldiers, who had withdrawn to the railroad roundhouse, and a fierce battle ensued. Unable to dislodge the soldiers by assault, the rioters attempted to roast them out by setting fire to cars of coke saturated with petroleum and pushing these down the track against the roundhouse. This eventually forced the soldiers to leave the building, but, though pursued by the rioters, they made a good retreat across the Allegheny River. The mob, completely beyond control, began the destruction of railroad property. The torch was applied to two roundhouses, to railroad sheds, shops and offices, cars and locomotives. Barrels of spirits, taken from the freight cars, and opened and drunk, made demons of the men, and the work of plunder and destruction of goods in transit went on with renewed fury.