THE ADMINISTRATION OF PRESIDENT HAYES JOHN W. BURGESS GopyiightN°___i:^ COPYRIGHT DEPOSnV BOOKS BY PROFESSOR BURGESS PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS THE ADMmiSTRATION OF PRESIDENT HAYES. 8vo net $i.oo THE RECONCILIATION OF GOVERNMENT WITH LIBERTY. 8vo net $3.50 AMERICAN HISTORY SERIES: THE MIDDLE PERIOD. i2mo . . net Si.oo THE CIVIL WAR AND THE CONSTI- TUTION. 2 vols. i2mo .... net $2.00 RECONSTRUCTION AND THE CONSTI- TUTION. i2mo ««/ $1.00 THE ADMINISTRATION OF PRESIDENT HAYES (&<^M^e^rr^cl /5^ Hc^^^^ THE ADMINISTRATION OF PRESIDENT HAYES THE LARWILL LECTURES, 1915, DELIVERED AT KENYON COLLEaE • BY JOHN W. burgess; Ph.D., Ju.D., LL.D. FOEMEKLY PBOFESSOB OP POLITICAL SCIENCE AND CONSTITUTIONAL LAW, AND DEAN OF THE FACULTIES OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHy AND PURE SCIENCE, IN COLUMBIA UNIVEB8ITT NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1916 coptright, 1916, bt Charles Scribner's Sonb PubUshed April. 1916 APR 13 1916 ^GI.A4276(53 K t V CONTENTS PAGG Introduction vn LiX;TUBK I. The Political, Economic, and Social Sit- uation IN THE Year 1876 1 II. The Election of 1876 and the Inaugu- ration 37 III. The Southern Policy and the Financial Policy 70 IV. The Re-establishment of the Govern- ment upon Its Constitutional Founda- tion f Ill INTRODUCTION FOR more than a quarter of a century it has been my constant, growing, and strengthening conviction that the per- sonahty and administration of Rutherford B. Hayes, the nineteenth President of the United States of America, have not been duly and suf- ficiently estimated and appreciated by his coun- trymen and the world. About a dozen years ago I suggested this view, or rather, as I con- sider it, pointed out this fact, in a volume in the Scribner's American History Series, en- titled "Reconstruction and the Constitution,'* and I have been waiting all these years for a proper opportimity to amplify this opinion and state with some fulness the basis upon which it rests.^ When, therefore, in the autumn of 1914, the invitation came to me from Doctor Peirce, the President of Kenyon College, the Alma Mater of President Hayes, to deliver, as the Larwill Lectures of 1915, a short course of lectures before the authorities and students of vii viii INTRODUCTION that historic institution upon the administration of President Hayes, I felt that the occasion had at last presented itself for realizing my long- cherished hope, and, although I had not for several years undertaken so long a journey or assumed so serious a task, I did not hesitate to accept the invitation and to enter upon the work of preparation for the discharge of the duty which it involved. On the 25th of October, 1915, we arrived in Gambier, the seat of Kenyon College, a village of less than one thousand inhabitants, situated upon a ridge of about a mile in length in the hill-country of Ohio, at the south end of which is located the original building called Old Ken- yon and at the north end the Theological Hall, connected by the beautiful Scholars Walk, which is lined with grand forest trees, broken here and there with the other college buildings and the residences of the members of the faculty, a place, one could discover with a glance, for simple living and high thinking. We were entertained most hospitably and interestingly by President and Mrs. Peirce and by Bishop and Mrs. Leonard, who came from INTRODUCTION ix Cleveland to open the Bishop's residence in Gambier for this purpose and in order to be present at the lectures, and brought with them those stanch friends and supporters of Kenyon, Mr. and Mrs. David Norton. The members of the faculty, the students, and the people of the village showed their great respect for, and interest in, Kenyon's most celebrated alumnus by attending en masse the recital of his great contributions to the welfare of his country and the upbuilding of its institutions. For four full hours they Hstened with unflagging atten- tion, and with a reverence which manifested that they were consciously joining with the speaker in a service of piety due from their college and country to the memory of that grad- uate of their institution who, more than any other, has made it famous in the history of edu- cation and in the annals of public achievement. From Gambier we went, on invitation from Colonel and Mrs. Webb C. Hayes and in the company of President and Mrs. Peirce, to visit the Hayes Mansion, Museum, and Mausoleum at Fremont. We were met at the station by the friendly, big-hearted Colonel who con- X INTRODUCTION ducted us to Spiegel Grove. At the main por- tal of the great house stood Mrs. Hayes to wel- come us and extend to us the genial hospitality of her beautiful home, which proved to be one of the rarest, most interesting, and most in- structive experiences of our lives. The Man- sion is very large and commodious, filled with furnishings, pictures, statuary, and curios gathered by Colonel and Mrs. Hayes from all parts of the world. It is situated in a magnif- icent grove of huge forest trees of every de- scription, through which runs for over half a mile the old Indian trail from Lake Erie to the Mississippi, marked and preserved by Colonel Hayes with the greatest care. The Mausoleum and Museum are located within the same grounds. The Hayes Museum erected by the State of Ohio, to which the entire Spiegel Grove property has been conveyed by the Hayes heirs, is a noble memorial to Ohio's great son, and is the point of central interest of the domain. It contains the President's correspondence, note-books, diaries, and his splendid library of Americana, together with the relics and mementos of his entire public INTRODUCTION xi life, both civil and military, and of the life of Mrs. Hayes as mistress of the White House of the nation. To the Museum, therefore, we soon gravitated and spent within its massive walls the larger part of the time of our visit in viewing its most interesting contents. While there Colonel Hayes asked me for the original manuscript copy of the lectures which I had just dehvered at Gambler. Happily, I had taken it with me to Ohio, and it was lying at that moment in my trunk in the Mansion. We immediately composed a dedicatory page, fas- tened it upon the front of the manuscript and deposited the manuscript in the Museum, there to remain forever as my modest tribute to the man and woman whom I have long revered as among the noblest and the best which our great country has ever produced, and with this I felt that my pilgrimage to their shrine was complete. John W. Burgess. "Athbnwood," Newport, R. I., March 4, 1916. THE ADMINISTRATION OF PRESIDENT HAYES LECTURE I THE POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, AND SOCIAL SITUATION IN THE YEAR 1876. KENYON College has called me here to give a brief account of the administration of the national government by your fel- low citizen and fellow alumnus, Mr. Hayes, during his presidency, from 1877 to 1881. It is, therefore, no part of my task to delineate the personal character of Mr. Hayes. And yet I can- not help relating to you the incident of my one and only meeting with Mr. Hayes and with Mrs. Hayes — for one who ever saw them together could never think of speaking of them apart. It was in the summer of 1877, at the Fabyan House, in the White Mountains of New Hamp- shire, when Mr. Evarts, the Secretary of State, « THE ADMINISTRATION OF was conducting the President on his tour through New England. The guests of the Fabyan House, and of all the hotels near it, gathered at Fabyan station to see the President and, in Yankee fashion, to size him up. It was a very hot day even in the mountains, and the presi- dential party issued from the cars limp, travel- stained, and weary. Of them all only Mrs. Hayes seemed to have preserved vigor and vi- vacity. On invitation of my old friend Judge Horace Gray, who was of the party, I went into the parlor of the hotel and was introduced by him to the President and Mrs. Hayes, and the quarter of an hour of conversation which I was privileged to have with them was one of the most pleasant, profitable, and instructive of my whole life. I had voted for Mr. Hayes, but from the moment of that short interview I was a Hayes man, and also a Mrs. Hayes man, as never before. Clear, sparkling intelligence, sound judgment, spotless character, and charm are a rare combination, but fifteen minutes of personal contact with Mr. and Mrs. Hayes con- stituted an ample period in which to discover that one stood face to face with such a com- PRESIDENT HAYES 3 bination, if never before. It was a great priv- ilege to have known them even thus shghtly. The social, political, governmental, and eco- nomic condition of the United States in 1876 was very far from satisfactory. Really, it seemed as if the American system was in decay — had been tried and found wanting. The re- construction of the Southern States had proved a dismal failure and had produced an appalling situation. The Lincoln- Johnson scheme of re- construction, the so-called executive scheme, according to which, by executive pardon and amnesty, a loyal electorate should be created out of a part of the old electorate in the Southern communities, upon the basis of which loyal States should be reconstructed, had been con- demned by Congress as seating the rebel lead- ers in power again and as thus making the re-establishment of slavery, or something very like it, probable. Moreover, Congress had asserted, and rightly so, that the rebuilding of States of the Union within the rebellious districts was a legislative function, not an ex- ecutive, and that the Constitution had, in the clause conferring upon Congress the sole power 4 THE ADMINISTRATION OF of admitting new States into the Union, settled that point against the executive claim. Fol- lowing this principle, Congress had set aside the Lincoln-Johnson creations, except in the case of Tennessee, had thrown the Southern country into military districts governed by gen- erals of the army under martial law, and had finally created new States with the boundaries of the old ante-bellum States, except in the case of Virginia, upon the basis of the new negro citizenship and electorate provided in the Four- teenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the na- tional Constitution. While the sincerity of Congress in these mea- sures could not be well doubted, the result had been most deplorable. For the first time in American history, States of the Union had been erected upon the basis of the democracy of the worst, upon the basis of a kakistocracy instead of a democracy, and State governments were administered by adventurers from the North, chosen by the negro electorate, and supported by the military power of the United States. The corruption of government and the degra- dation of society resulting from such a situation PRESIDENT HAYES 5 were indescribably appalling. Those naturally fitted for tilling the fields and doing the menial work of life, and only that, were artificially placed in part in the positions of legislators, ad- ministrators, teachers, politicians, and iiL part formed the proletariat of heelers sustaining these pseudo-leaders in power and receiving from them such portion of the public plunder as would maintain a miserable loafing existence; while the natural leaders, disfranchised, poverty- stricken, discouraged by defeat, and dispirited by their subjection to barbarism, robbery, and vulgarity, sat confused, benumbed, and hopeless around their ruined firesides. The political so- ciety was turned upside down, and government was debased into a means of revenge, theft, and debauchery. Taxes and debt were heaped upon these unhappy communities until they became tantamount to confiscation, and the proceeds from them could hardly be said to have been expended at all. They were simply stolen. Then came the movement of the white men of the South to free themselves, through secret or- ganization and the employment of intimidation and violence, from the unbearable and shameful 6 THE ADMINISTRATION OF condition, a movement which was, for a time at least, productive of almost as much demorali- zation as the negro-carpetbag-military domina- tion which it aimed to supplant. The so-called Ku-Klux conspiracy against the existing order of things was by no means unnatural or unprec- edented. Whenever and wherever a tyranny, such as that established in the South by negro- carpetbag-military rule, has existed, a tyranny which cannot be shaken by regular means, re- sort to secret and unlawful movements has al- most always been had. The trouble is that such movements do not stop with the over- throw of the tyranny against which they are directed, but those engaged in them use their triumph for the revenge of the grievances they have suffered, and then for the establishment of a new tyranny almost, if not fully, as galling over their former rulers. Moreover, the neces- sarily reckless and unconscionable means em- ployed destroy conscience, character, and self- respect in those who practise them. The pur- poses of the Ku-Klux movement and kindred movements were to suppress the negro vote, to frighten the negroes from the eommission PRESIDENT HAYES 7 of crime, and to keep them in their place and make them work. This was all necessary for the rescue of civilization from the decay which threatened to consume it, but the con- sciousness that the methods employed were, from a legal point of view, wrongful demoral- ized those employing them, and kept alive the apprehension in their minds that, at any mo- ment, what had been won might be again taken from them by the military power of the national government. In other words, they themselves became inoculated with the terror with which they had conquered the negro, and this bred increasing hatred of the national government and increasing oppression of the negro. It must be also kept in mind that three of the newly established Southern States had not, in 1876, escaped by the employment of these means, or in any other way, from the ne- gro-carpetbag-military domination, viz.: South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. So long as such domination remained in these it was more likely, as it was felt, to be restored elsewhere, and even though it might not be, it still kept the abomination ever present in the minds of 8 THE ADMINISTRATION OF the people of the South. It seemed to me, a son of the South, but a resident of the North, that the feehng between the North and the South, or rather the feehng of the South against the North, was more bitter in the year 1876 than in the year 1866. The great problem of preserving the fruits of the victory in the war, and at the same time reconciling the vanquished to their lot, was still to be solved. In fact, it looked as if a new revolt might break out at any moment. Moreover, the course of reconstruction had been no less demoralizing upon the internal structure of the national government than upon the relations of the political society. In the first place, it had bred in Congress a new spirit of ruthless domination. This was manifest not only in the rigor of the laws passed by it im- posing poUtical and civil equahty, especially upon the Southern society, and in many respects social equality, as in the use of schools, public conveyances, hotels, inns, theatres, etc., but also in the supremacy asserted by it over the execu- tive power and in the control of both the civil and military service in the administration. PRESIDENT HAYES 9 The struggle began, as we have seen, between President Johnson and Congress over the method of the reconstruction of States in the South, but did not end with the Congress's victory in this matter. It went much further, both while the Repubhcan party still held the majority in both houses of Congress, and also after the Democratic party had secured the control of the House of Representatives by the elections of 1874. During Johnson's term, it manifested itself chiefly by overcoming the President's veto upon legislation, and by the adoption, in the Tenure of OflBce Acts, of the principle that all ofl&cers appointed by and with the advice and consent of the Senate could be dismissed only with the consent of the Senate. It was certainly the constitutional right of the houses of Congress to overcome the President's objection to legis- lative projects passed by them, whenever they could unite two-thirds of the members voting in each house, a majority being present in each, against the President's veto. The Presi- dent did not dispute this, but his contention upon this point was that the houses, by refus- 10 THE ADMINISTRATION OF ing to admit members from the States recon- structed by him, had been able to command a majority against his vetoes, which they could not have done had all the persons lawfully elected been admitted to seats. The President substantially claimed that Congress was a rump parliament, although he did not express his con- tention exactly in these words. He did, how- ever, contend that the Tenure of Office Acts were unconstitutional, since, although the Con- stitution was silent in regard to dismissal from oflSce, the exclusive responsibility of the Presi- dent for the execution of the laws made it nec- essary that he should exercise the power of dismissal at his own discretion, and that such had been the usage of the government from the beginning. In this he was entirely right, and the triumph of Congress over him upon this most important subject introduced a demoral- ization into the civil and military service which spread rapidly in all directions. Congress was, however, not even satisfied with this. It now assumed to limit the military power of the President by incorporating into the Army Appropriation Bill of the year 1867 PRESIDENT HAYES 11 provisions fixing the residence of the command- ing general of the army at Washington, pro- tecting him from being assigned elsewhere except at his own request, requiring the President or Secretary of War to issue all orders and instruc- tions relating to military operations through him, making all orders and instructions issued in any other way null and void, and requiring the infliction of punishment upon any officer dis- obeying this regulation. It is true that the Presi- dent approved the Bill, including these provi- sions, in order to save the appropriation for the army, but they, nevertheless, meant the curtail- ment of the constitutional powers of the execu- tive by an altogether unconstitutional legislative encroachment, and that, too, at the most vital point, viz.: the function of commandership-in- chief of the armed forces. This control now assumed by Congress over the civil and military service advanced rapidly towards its logical results. These results were of two general kinds. The first was the over- turning of the check-and-balance system of gov- ernment provided in the Constitution, and the substitution of the parliamentary system for it. 12 THE ADMINISTRATION OF The Tenure of OflSce Acts provided, among other things, that the members of the Cabinet should hold their offices during the term of the President appointing them, and for one month after, unless sooner removed by and with the consent of the Senate. Inasmuch as the Senate now claimed also a real discretionary power in the ratification of the appointments to the Cab- inet, the Tenure of Office Acts made the Cabinet something more like the ministry in parliamen- tary government than an informal body of the heads of departments subject entirely to the President's commands, which was its constitu- tional character. The struggle of Stanton to hold on to the secretaryship of war by the support of Con- gress, but against the will of the President, threatened for a time to completely subordinate the executive to the legislature. The move- ment culminated in the attempt to remove the President from office by impeachment. Had this succeeded, and it came dangerously near to it, the check-and-balance system provided by the Constitution, the American system of inde- pendent and co-ordinate departments in gov- PRESIDENT HAYES 13 eminent, would have been completely set aside, and Congress would have changed the Cabinet into a ministry, subject to the will of the Con- gressional majority in the administration of the government. As it was. President Johnson never recovered thereafter the exercise of the full constitutional powers of the executive. He went out of office with the distinct knowledge that the constitutional position of the executive had been degraded through the arbitrary tyranny exercised over it by the extraordinary Repub- lican majority in Congress, bent upon robbing him of all power to limit their control over the administration. Naturally, upon the accession of President Grant, Congress modified some- what its attitude towards the executive, and the diminishing Republican majority in Congress ultimately deprived the dominant party of the strength to carry out its policy of parliamentary control over the administration. Nevertheless the precedents established during the term of President Johnson exerted a baleful influence during the entire eight years of the presidency of General Grant. It was, however, in the other direction, in the 14 THE ADMINISTRATION OF control of the tenure of the officials, both as to its origin and termination, that the sway of Congress, or rather of the members of Congress, developed during the presidency of General Grant into most harmful and corrupting pro- portions. President Grant was a poor judge of men except only as to military qualifications. He made strong friendships upon insufficient grounds. He was loyal to his friends. And he was trustful of the honesty and purposes of those to whom he had given his confidence. He was just the character to be played upon by design- ing politicians. His experiences in opposition to President Johnson had betrayed him into the hands of the Republican Stalwarts, and had made him amenable to their methods. The scheme of party organization which the Repub- licans had worked out with the purpose of main- taining the permanent supremacy of the party was ingenious and not altogether artificial. It was quite impossible for the President to deter- mine from his own personal acquaintance how to fill properly the thousands and tens of thousands of offices under his power of appointment, and it was an unwritten usage that the federal offi- PRESIDENT HAYES 15 cers should be taken from the respective locali- ties in which they might serve. It was natural, therefore, that the President should turn to his party adherents in Congress, not as a body, but separately, to suggest to him proper persons to fill the federal offices within their respective localities. It is also comprehensible how the members of Congress should gradually come to regard their solicited advice hy and to the Presi- dent as obligatory on the President, and finally to regard the solicitation of such advice by the President as a right of theirs to he consulted, a right attaching to their positions. The Con- gress had the power to make good these claims of its separate members through its power to reduce to a minimum the offices filled without the advice and consent of the Senate, and through the power of the Senate to reject nomi- nations made to it by the President not recom- mended by the respective Congressional mem- bers entitled, in the view of the party majority in the Senate, to be consulted in such nomina- tions. By 1870 the system of appointment to the federal offices had reached a development which 16 THE ADMINISTRATION OF may be roughly stated as follows : The senators from each State, if they happened to be of the same party with the President, and could agree between themselves, furnished the President with the names of the persons to be nominated to the Senate by the President for the higher federal offices within the State. If they could not agree in each and every case, a rough sort of distribution was made between them by the President. If only one of the two senators was of the same party with the President, then the entire patronage of the higher federal offices within his State fell to him. To each member of the House of Representatives, of the same party with the President, fell the patronage of the lower federal offices within his Congressional district. In case of the representation of the district by a member not of the same party with the President, the patronage of the lower federal offices within that district fell to the represen- tatives from other districts of the State in which that district lay, who might be of the same party with the President. In case there should be no representative from a particular State of the same political party with the President, then PRESIDENT HAYES 17 the patronage of the lower federal offices within that State fell to the senators or senator from that State, provided they or one of them might be of the same party with the President. The President's independent power of nomination was thus reduced to the federal offices within States not represented in either house of Con- gress by members of the same political party with himself. The senators had even come to the point of considering that they should be con- sulted in the selection by the President of the members of his Cabinet. This body of federal office-holders had now also become the leading personahties in the party organization. They dominated and con- trolled and officered the caucuses and the local, State, and national conventions of the party. They spent about as much time and energy in managing the party organization and its affairs as in administering the duties of their offices. In fact, the names of many persons were car- ried on the official pay-rolls who did nothing except manage the affairs of the party. It must be, also, kept in mind that at this period of our history party organization and manage- 18 THE ADMINISTRATION OF ' ment had not been subjected to law. It was at that time regarded as a principle of American liberty that it should not be. It was considered that this was a realm of free action. All men of voting age and capacity, it was argued, had the same right of political organization, and if they failed to make use of it, it was their own fault, and that the best way to bring them to a sense of their negligence was to let them suffer the consequences of their negligence. The party managers fixed thus the time of meeting, the place of meeting, and the procedure of the cau- cuses and conventions, and made the common voters simply heelers. The vicious circle was thus completed. The congressmen appointed the federal officers, and fixed and voted their pay, and the federal officers, through their con- trol of the party, elected the congressmen and kept them in position. The federal officers col- lected the party funds by a system of assess- ment among themselves and of sohcitation from the voters, or certain of the voters, and these contributors came in usually for some sort of a reward, either in the form of office, or conces- sion, or rake-off. PRESIDENT HAYES 19 In order to prevent dissension within the party and to assign to each worker his duty and reward, some one person was advanced, through a sort of process of natural selection, to the position of party leadership in the different dis- tricts and States. This was the boss, the cap- stone of party organization, in the decade pre- ceding 1876. So soon as General Grant succeeded to the presidency he began to feel the cramp of the situation and to rebel against it. He secured a modification of the Tenure of Office Acts, which gave him a little freer hand, and in his annual message of December, 1870, he recommended a reform of the civil service. President Grant designated the existing system as "an abuse of long standing," and declared that he wished a reform applicable not only to subordinate offices, but one which should "govern the manner of making all appointments." He wished not only to remove the relation of the congressmen to the officers of the administration, but also to relieve himseK and his heads of departments from an intolerable burden. Under pressure from the President, Congress 20 THE ADMINISTRATION OF passed the Act of 1871, authorizing the Presi- dent to estabhsh a civil-service commission, and making an appropriation for its expenses. The President lost no time in the appointment of the members of the commission, and they lost no time in setting up a system of competi- tive examinations for the offices. Almost im- mediately the character of the public service began to improve, too rapidly to suit the con- gressmen, who saw their patronage and the means of controlling the nominations and elec- tions slipping away from them. By 1874 the Congressional revolt against the new system was strong enough to refuse the annual appropria- tion to defray the expenses of the commission, and before the end of President Grant's second term the official service was back in the old ruts of 1870. Inefficiency, graft, and corruption crept in everywhere and brought scandal upon the administration from top to bottom. Even the Secretary of War fell under such strong sus- picion that he was obliged to resign in great haste his high office in order to escape impeach- ment by the House of Representatives, which by the elections of 1874 had fallen into the hands of PRESIDENT HAYES 21 the Democrats. Star Route, Credit Mobilier, and the Whiskey Ring are terms which will always be connected in our history with the venality, or at least the generally believed venality, of the Republican party and the Re- pubhcan administration in the year 1876. The economic and financial systems of the country had fallen into no less confusion and viciousness. The long war and the spirit of ad- venture developed by it had produced an era of reckless speculation. This was encouraged by the existence of opportunities for its indul- gence never before at hand. These opportuni- ties consisted, first, in the railway situation and extension; secondly, in the land-grabbing game; thirdly, in the discovery of the mining wealth of the Rockies; and, fourthly, in the condition of the pubhc debt and the currency. In the first place, the distinction was still to be made in our law between pubHc-service cor- porations and purely private corporations, and the system of governmental control of the former was still to be worked out. As a rule, charters were granted to favored persons, and they were left to their own devices as to how 22 THE ADMINISTRATION OF they might exploit the rights and privileges granted in them to their own private advantage without any regard to the primary interests of the public. They were allowed to float stocks and bonds at will, and in many cases the bonds of municipalities and States, and in one noted case the bonds of the United States, were given to them either outright or under a method of loan, which amounted to nearly the same thing. Vast areas of public land along their routes were also given to them. The natural and inevitable results of all this were the overbuilding of rail- roads, the inflation of the capital invested in them by the overissue of stocks and bonds, the management of the roads for the purely private enrichment of the managers, discrim- ination in rates between places and between shippers, declaration of dividends without re- gard to earnings, wild and artificial speculation in the stocks so manipulated, and certain loss or even bankruptcy in the end. The opening up of the public lands to private occupation on a scale never before experienced and the placing of mines by the discoverers of the mineral wealth of the new country were PRESIDENT HAYES 23 things no less conducive to reckless speculation than the railroad situation. Everybody was grabbing the public land under every possible subterfuge, and even boasting of his shrewd- ness in outwitting government and law in doing so, while the exchanges were glutted with the shares of mining stocks, many of them worth- less and some of them simply bogus. The get- rich-quick bacillus had entered every man's blood, and had poisoned the brain and de- stroyed the conscience of all too many. To all this as universal incentive came the monetary situation, the debt and the currency problems. The war had left a debt upon the United States Government alone, to say nothing of the States and municipalities, of nearly three thousand millions of dollars, and an irredeema- ble paper currency of over four hundred millions of dollars. President Johnson's Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Hugh M'CuUoch, was a sound financier, and he strove earnestly and success- fully to reduce the debt and the volume of the paper currency, but Congress stopped his work as to the latter by the law of 1868, and fixed the volume of the greenbacks, as this currency was 24 THE ADMINISTRATION OF called, at three hundred and fifty -six millions of dollars, and made no provision for its redemp- tion. Down to 1870, it was still an open ques- tion whether the Supreme Court would hold the legal-tender quality ascribed by Congress to these notes to be in accordance with the Consti- tution. In that year the Court pronounced against it, and then in another case, after the addition of two members known to be favorable to the greenbacks, it reversed its decision and fastened upon our monetary system a legal- tender paper currency which contained no pro- vision for its present or future redemption in coin. These performances of the Supreme Court, and these acts of the administration in so chang- ing its membership as to bring them about, pro- duced a judicial scandal, which increased, most harmfully, the confusion of the age in regard to the standards of morality and law. The final decision of the Court was a great encouragement to the party which favored the expansion of the greenback currency to any degree which, in the judgment of the government, the business of the country might require, and the payment of all public, as well as private, debts in such cur- PRESIDENT HAYES 25 rency, unless otherwise expressly stipulated in the evidence of the debt itself or in the law under which it had been created. The situation favored and increased, also, spec- ulation in the coin metals, making prices of commodities not only high, but uncertain and irregular. And to all this came now the silver question, or the question of the relation between gold and silver as the coin basis of our monetary system. After 1853, and down to 1873, the fact that, under the legal ratio between gold and silver coin, the gold dollar was worth less than the sil- ver dollar had driven the silver dollar out of cir- culation and had made the gold dollar the stand- ard of our money. By the act of Congress of 1873, it was ordered that no more silver dollars should be minted for our domestic use, but that a silver dollar containing more grains of the metal should be coined for our foreign trade. By this time, however, the discoveries of the new silver mines in the Rockies were depreciat- ing, by greatly increased supply, the value of silver as compared with gold, and the demon- etization of silver by one of the great European states worked at the same time in the same di- 26 THE ADMINISTRATION OF rection. It was stipulated in the larger part of our bonded indebtedness that both principal and interest were payable in coin. Disregarding the fact that coin had, since 1853, meant practically gold, a very large party now rapidly formed itself which demanded the free coinage of silver as legal-tender money at the existing legal ratio be- tween it and gold, and the payment of all our indebtedness requiring coin payment with such coin. It was argued by both the greenback and free-silver adherents that in no part of our bonded indebtedness was there any mention of gold, but of coin, and that silver was lawful coin at the time of the creation of the debt, and had always been coin in the United States down to 1873, when it had been demonetized in the un- just interest of the creditor class. They claimed that the United States would not only fulfil every legal and moral obligation by paying its stipulated coin debt in silver, but was bound to do so in the interest of our own people, be- cause the great mass of our people belonged to the debtor class. They pointed out that the laborer and the salaried man, who constituted the vast majority of the people, received their PRESIDENT HAYES «7 pay in greenbacks, while the bondholder received his interest in gold coin, and they demanded that there should be one and the same currency for the laborer and the bondholder, and de- manded it in the name of justice and humanity. The free coinage of silver legal-tender money, at the legal ratio between silver and gold pre- vailing in 1873, it was declared, would bring about this result and at the same time redeem our pledges of coin indebtedness, and it was maintained that our right to pay our indebted- ness in silver coin would not have been ques- tioned except for the monstrous and iniquitous measure of 1873 demonetizing silver. This reasoning and these representations were so universally embraced by the masses that they produced a veritable craze. Any man who did not accept them was denounced as inhuman as well as immoral, as the defender of the rich against the poor, as the upholder of plutocracy against democracy. The Republican party was accused, and not without reason, of favoring privilege. In 1874 it still held control of both houses of Congress, while the elections of 1874 gave the House of Representatives in the next 28 THE ADMINISTRATION OF Congress, by large majority, to the Democrats. The RepubHcans now hurried through Con- gress the famous resumption of specie pay- ments measure at the beginning of the year 1875. This meant the redemption of the paper currency in coin, on presentation at the United States Treasury after a given time, viz.: Jan- uary 1, 1879. It did not thus affect the silver question, but only the paper-money question, and Mr. Bland was preparing his noted Free Silver Bill at almost the same moment. This Bland Bill was passed by the succeeding Demo- cratic house by an overwhelming majority, and fairly reflected the views and wishes of a vast majority of the people of the country. Add to all this the fact that the situation, polit- ical and economic, of the country had produced the great monetary panic of 1873, and the hard times of the years immediately following, with so great a depression in the labor market as to cause great suffering and unrest, and you have sufficient grounds for claiming that in the minds of the great mass of the people the time had come for some radical change in the ordering of our affairs, since otherwise we should find our- PRESIDENT HAYES 29 selves entering upon the road of national de- cline. In eras of institutional collapse the demand is always felt for the leadership of a great person- ality. The leadership of such a personality is the only way of escape from institutional de- cadence, followed by social decadence. In the year 1876 the instinct of the American people and of their leaders went out in search of such a personaHty, and when that instinct is thor- oughly aroused and terribly in earnest, it is usually unerring. The galaxy of prominent men from whom to choose was never fuller. There was the great soldier, the popular hero, who had already ad- ministered the government for eight years. But his success as a civil officer had not at all equalled that as a military leader. His choice for a third time would conflict with the Amer- ican principle against perpetual service. And, finally, his own private character had not en- tirely escaped the scandal which had borne down so many of his subordinates. It was clear that General Grant was not the man whom the ne- cessities of the hour demanded. 30 THE ADMINISTRATION OF Then there was the sturdy, judicious, pru- dent Secretary of State, Mr. Fish, who had man- aged our foreign affairs with such abihty, adroit- ness, firmness, and success throughout a critical period. He was upright and courteous as a man, and without a blemish upon his official character, and, besides his experience in the great diplomatic office, he had made an excellent governor of the great State of New York. But he was now too old to undertake the strain of the presidential office, too much identified with Grantism, as it was called, and too rich and aristocratic to understand the feelings, suffer- ings, and aspirations of the masses. Then there was the brilliant, jovial, popular Blaine of Maine, the hail-fellow-well-met in poh- tics as in everything else, the Henry Clay of his generation, idolized by his friends and hated by his foes. But he had had no administrative experience save of a quasi sort as speaker of the House of Representatives . He had been smirched in the Credit Mobilier matter. And he, too, was thought to be alhed with the "interests." Then there was the arrogant and autocratic Conkling, master of sarcasm and invective, PRESIDENT HAYES 31 shrewd wire-puller and politician, feared by many and loved by few, the right-hand man of President Grant in Congress, probably unap- proachable with money, but entirely uncon- scionable in the employment of the bribe of office for the maintenance of party organization. His qualifications for the presidency were not such that they need now to have any disquali- fications set off against them. Then there was Morton, the great war gov- ernor of Indiana, a tried and proved politician and administrator, undoubted patriot, and above all suspicion as to financial honesty, one of the chief founders and supporters of the Republican party. But there were rumors about dissolute- ness in private life, and it was evident that he was failing physically. Then there was Bristow, Grant's Secretary of the Treasury, who had made himself noted in the prosecution of the Whiskey Ring, and who was regarded as the one real reformer of the Grant administration. But he was comparatively a new man, and he came from a State south of the Ohio. He had not been sufficiently tried and tested for the great place at this critical juncture. 32 THE ADMINISTRATION OF Then there were Hartranft, the soldier-gov- ernor of the great State of Pennsylvania, and the genial Marshall Jewell, of Connecticut, and the wise political manager and compromiser of differences, W. H. Wheeler, of New York, to all of whom failed, in some point or other, the full- rounded life, experience, character, acquire- ments, and reputation which the exigencies of the period and the critical state of affairs de- manded. But happily for the country, and I may say for the world, there was such a man, and, as had happened before in the history of our country, he hailed from Ohio, the State of great leaders both in war and in peace. He was a native- born son of Ohio, of the sturdy Scotch-New England stock; an orphan from birth on the father's side, and to his mother, therefore, not only a devoted son but a helper and guide; a dutiful and affectionate nephew of the best uncle who ever lived; a loving brother; the model husband of a noble woman, whom he himself designated as "the incarnation of the golden rule," and the fond and anxious father of a household of children, all of whom have, in their PRESIDENT HAYES 33 Kves and services, rewarded his paternal care; a thoughtful, considerate, and helpful neighbor; a patriotic, zealous, and generous fellow citizen, and a Christian gentleman of blameless life, courteous manners, and universal sympathy. Here was that broad foundation of personal and domestic virtue, of old-fashioned, genuine worth, upon which to build public character, intellec- tual and moral, of the finest fibre, strength, and firmness. And he had built it continuously, expansively, and successfully. In college he was, I need not tell you, the valedictorian of his class, great especially in logic, philosophy, and mathematics and in oratory and debate — the sterhng things, not the softs — always seeking to conquer the difficult and avoiding the effect of the easy. In the law school he was, on account of his mastery of the knotty points and his philosophic view of the whole domain of juris- prudence, a favorite pupil of Story and Green- leaf, and the like. As legal adviser of the gov- ernment of a large and growing city he had labored always with assiduity and success to prevent graft, check extravagance, maintain harmony of action, and promote municipal wel- 34 THE ADMINISTRATION OF fare. As a member of Congress, although for only a short time, he displayed legislative ability and tact, and acquired the necessary law- maker's view-point of pubhc questions. But it was as an administrator in war and peace that he had manifested his greatest ability and re- ceived his most valuable experience and edu- cation for the great office which destiny held in store for him. As a brave and efficient soldier throughout the entire Civil War, beginning as major of his regiment and mounting to the posi- tion of a general of division, he learned both how to obey and command, how to suffer and grow strong, how to put duty and country above life and self. And finally as three times governor of this great State of statesmen, he schooled him- self in the work of civil administration upon a large and exacting scale for the executive lead- ership of the nation. In all his public acts and utterances, while a stanch Republican from the foundation of the party, he had never lost his balance, had never been touched by any of its excesses or its errors, but had always stood upon its fundamental principles and had known how to apply them correctly to the details of PRESIDENT HAYES 35 political and economic life. He upheld loyally the amendments to the Constitution won by the nation's victory in arms, but his manly sympathy for the suffering South was well known. He was also of national reputation as the invincible foe of all graft and corruption in politics, and all heresies in economy and finance. He had beaten on the hustings and at the polls the three most popular Democrats of Ohio be- cause of their unsoundness on the monetary question. If any man in the United States could at that time be called the leader in the struggle for civil-service reform, honorable pubhc finance, and sound money, it was he. Many of the best men of the country were well ac- quainted with these facts, and had marked him as the coming man. When the national convention of the Repub- lican party assembled in June of 1876 at Cin- cinnati the seriousness of the situation was thoroughly realized, and the determination to meet it successfully possessed every mind. This was not so clearly manifested in the plat- form, but when it came to the nominations, the body threw aside one after another of the candi- 36 PRESIDENT HAYES dates, Blaine, Morton, Conkling, Bristow, and the rest, and gravitated surely and continuously, as if driven by a higher power, to the right man, the man who by force of his upright character, unblemished reputation, inteUigent and sound public views, judicious management and firm will was called by more than human appoint- ment to lead the Republican party out of its devious ways into a new path of victory, use- fulness, and continued supremacy, the noblest son of this noble institution, the valedictorian of its class of 1842, the governor of the great State of Ohio, Rutherford Birchard Hayes. LECTURE II THE ELECTION OF 1876 AND THE INAUGURATION THE law of election of the President of the United States was, in 1876, and still is, a very compHcated matter, and un- derstood with exactness by very few persons. It is composed of two elements, the one is State law, and the other United States law. The State law controls exclusively the election of the elec- tors of the President, and the United States law controls exclusively the election of the President by the electors, but both the State law and the United States law are contained in, or based on, the provisions of the Constitution of the United States. The power of the State to select the electors is vested in it expressly by the Constitution of the United States. The language of the vest- ing clause is as follows: "Each State shall ap- point, in such manner as the legislature thereof 37 38 THE ADMINISTRATION OF may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Con- gress." The power of the State as to the man- ner of selecting the electors is thus vested by the Constitution of the United States in the legis- lature of that State, and there is, therefore, no power in the State to limit or control its legis- lature in the slightest degree in regard to that matter, or to order the manner of selecting the electors to be fixed by any other body. Even an article of the State constitution directing otherwise would be of no force or effect what- soever. The Constitution of the United States itself lays only one limitation on the power of the State legislature to control absolutely and exclusively the manner of selecting the electors, and that is a disqualification of any member of Congress, or any holder of a United States office of trust or profit, from being appointed an elec- tor, and that is not a limitation of the manner of the election, but as to the qualification of the electors. Under this power, vested by the Con- stitution of the United States in the legislature of each State, the legislature may appoint the PRESIDENT HAYES 39 electors itself, or designate the body which shall appoint or elect them, and shall determine how that selection shall be effected and determined. It is, therefore, possible to have as many ways of selecting the presidential electors as there are State legislatures. In fact, down to the out- break of the Civil War, the selection of the presidential electors in all the States had not been uniform, not even as to the body selecting the electors. At the time of the election of 1876, the practice of electing the electors by the voters had become uniform in all the States, but not the method of determining how the choice should be exercised by the voters nor how the choice should be declared. For example, in the States upon which the election of 1876 turned, viz.: Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon, the State law was not uniform. In the first three States, the respective legislatures had created canvassing boards, and vested in them not only the power to count and declare the result of the vote, but also the power to throw out the returns from voting precincts in which, according to the belief of the said board, there had been fraud, violence, or intimidation. 40 THE ADMINISTRATION OF actual or threatened. On the other hand, the legislature of the State of Oregon had made the Secretary of State of the State the ultimate can- vassing officer, with the power to declare the result of the vote, but had not vested in him the power to throw out the returns from any precinct for any reason. To whom the declaration of the result of the vote for the electors should be made and who should give the official certification to the per- sons chosen were points not included in the power vested by the Constitution of the United States in the State legislatures. These were, therefore, points to be fixed by United States law, and as the constitutional law of the United States did, and does, not fix them in detail, it had to be done by a Congressional act. The then ex- isting Congressional act (U. S. Revised Statutes, Sees. 137-140) designated the governor of each State as the person to whom the ultimate State canvassing officer, or board, should make decla- ration of the result of the election of the presi- dential electors, and laid upon the governor the duty of issuing his certificate of their election to the electors, and upon the electors the duty of PRESIDENT HAYES 41 enclosing this certificate of their election with the report of the votes given by them for Presi- dent and Vice-President to the president of the Senate of the United States. Back to this point, then, the national body vested by the Constitu- tion with the power of counting the vote of the electors for President and Vice-President might go, but no further. That is, this body could, according to a sound interpretation of the Con- stitution of the United States, go behind the governor's certificate in determining who the true presidential electors from the particular State might be, but not behind the report of the State canvassing ofiicer, or board, to the gov- ernor. The governor, in giving his certificate to the electors attesting their choice, was acting under United States law, and his act could, therefore, be inquired into by the national or- gan for counting the vote of the electors. The State canvassing boards or officers were, on the other hand, acting under State law, and their reports must be received with the effect pre- scribed by the respective State legislatures, as provided by the Constitution of the United States itself. Any sound constitutional lawyer 42 THE ADMINISTRATION OF could have had no doubt upon that point, even before the elucidating discussions of the winter of 1876-7. What the national organ was for determining who, in case of conflicting returns, were the true presidential electors chosen in each State, and for counting their votes for President and Vice- President, was not so clear. The national Con- stitution simply provided that the electors chosen in each State should sign, certify, and transmit sealed to the president of the national Senate the lists of their votes for President and Vice-President, and that the president of the Senate should, in the presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives, open these documents, and that the votes should then be counted. Down to 1876 the president of the Senate had, through tellers appointed for the purpose, cast up the reports from the electoral colleges in the different States, and announced the result, for although there had been instances of conflicting returns, they were not suflScient to affect the result, however counted, and no ne- cessity had, therefore, been felt for determining which were the correct returns, or for deciding PRESIDENT HAYES 43 what organ was vested by the Constitution with the power of determining which were the correct returns. Since the election of 1864 there had existed a rule adopted by each house of Con- gress for itself, called the twenty-second joint rule, according to which no electoral vote could be counted from any State, if either house of Congress should vote to reject it. This was, of course, a very crude solution of the question, as it gave the House of Representatives the power to defeat an election by the electors, and then alone elect the President and Vice-President itself, as provided by the Constitution in case of the failure of the electors to make the choice. Consequently the Senate, which was in 1876 Republican, while the House was Democratic, had given notice before the count of the vote of the election of that year came on that it would not renew the rule. The situation, then, was as follows: It was known that there would be conflicting returns from at least four States, and that the election would turn on the decision in regard to them; that the Senate would not acquiesce in the prop- osition that the House of Representatives alone 44 THE ADMINISTRATION OF could reject the returns of the electoral vote from any State; that the president of the Sen- ate was a Repubhcan, and might claim to de- termine, in case of conflicting returns, which set of returns from any State was to be counted; and that the outgoing President, being a Repub- lican, would probably exercise all the powers vested in him by the Constitution to seat the candidate of his party as his successor. The Democrats asserted stoutly that they had won the election, but they did not feel at all sure that, as things stood, their candidates would be counted in. They were, therefore, quite willing to join in the passage of an act for counting the vote, which they thought would commit the Republicans, and could hardly fail to give them, the Democrats, the presidency. In fact, it must be said that they were the chief authors of the act, since it was their votes which carried it through. This statute was the noted Electoral Commis- sion Act of January 29, 1877. It provided that a commission of fifteen persons should be selected : five from and by the Senate, five from and by the House of Representatives, and five from the PRESIDENT HAYES 45 Supreme Court, the justices of the first, third, eighth, and ninth circuits being designated by the act and authorized to select the fifth justice from among the other members of the Court; that where only one set of returns appeared from a State, the votes so given must be counted unless otherwise ordered by the concurrent ac- tion of both houses of Congress; that where conflicting returns appeared from any State, the same should be referred to the Commission, and the votes contained in the set of returns, de- cided by the Commission to be the true returns, should be counted, unless otherwise ordered by the concurrent action of both houses of Con- gress; and that all constitutional or legal rights of a judicial nature, if any, to question the title of any one thus declared elected President or Vice-President of the United States were reserved. The principle of this statute was that the power to count the electoral votes from the States for President and Vice-President belonged to the two houses of Congress jointly, and exer- cising equal weight, and the difficulty overcome by the Electoral Commission contrivance was 46 THE ADMINISTRATION OF the difficulty of two bodies exercising equal weight arriving at a conclusion. The Democrats needed to obtain only one electoral vote from the four States presenting conflicting returns to elect their candidates. The Republicans, therefore, must obtain every electoral vote from all four of these States in order to elect their candidates. The prospect seemed on the surface fair for the Democrats, and rather desperate for the Republicans. But the sudden and unexpected resignation of Jus- tice David Davis from the Supreme Court, the member of the Court, who, on account of his independence in politics, it was thought would be selected by his colleagues as the fifth judi- cial member of the Commission, in order to ac- cept the United States senatorship from Illinois, to which he had been elected by the Democratic legislature of Ilhnois, left four members, all Re- publicans, in the Supreme Court from among whom the justices designated in the act must choose the fifth judicial member of the Com- mission. The Commission as finally constituted contained thus eight Republicans and seven Democrats. PRESIDENT HAYES 47 The facts in the disputed cases were as follows: The returns from Florida consisted of the report of the regular canvassing board created by the State legislature to the governor that the Re- publican electors had been chosen by the voters, the certificate of Governor Stearns given to these electors, and the vote of the electors for Hayes and Wheeler; also a paper containing votes for Tilden and Hendricks given by certain persons representing themselves as the electors chosen by the voters, but not accompanied by the report of any canvassing board or officer to the governor designating them as the persons chosen electors, and not certified to by the governor. The returns from South Carolina were in a similar condition. Those from Louisiana consisted of two com- plete sets, each containing the report of a can- vassing board, appointed by a body claiming to be the State legislature, to different persons, each claiming to be the lawful governor, one report declaring that the Republican electors had been chosen by the voters, the other that the Demo- cratic electors had been so chosen, also the cer- tificate of different persons, each claiming to be 48 THE ADMINISTRATION OF the lawful governor, to each body of electors, testifying that each were the true electors of the State, and the vote of one of these bodies of electors for Hayes and Wheeler and of the other for Tilden and Hendricks. Finally, the returns from Oregon consisted of two sets; one of which contained a report from the State canvassing officer, the Secretary of State, declaring the election of the Republican electors by the voters, also the vote of this body for Hayes and Wheeler, and a statement of the selection of one member of this body by the others, on account of the fact that one of them selected by the voters held at the time of his election an office under the national govern- ment, and was, therefore, ineligible. The other set contained the governor's certificate to certain persons claiming to be the lawful presidential electors, the vote of this body, two for Hayes and Wheeler and one for Tilden and Hendricks, and an account of the selection of two members of this body by one member, the one to whom the governor handed the certificate of election, to fill the places of the two elected by the peo- ple, but who had refused to serve with the per- PRESIDENT HAYES 49 son having the governor's certificate in his pos- session, on the ground that he had not received a majority of the votes cast for the electors and was a Democrat, in other words, on the ground that the governor, who was himself a Democrat, had not acted lawfully in giving the certificate to a Democrat who had not received a majority of the votes of the people. In all of these disputed cases the Electoral Commission gave, by a vote of eight to seven, the electoral vote of these States to Hayes and Wheeler. It was said then by many, and has been said ever since by some, because the eight men voting to do so were Republicans. I have never seen why it could not be said with much more force that the seven men voting against so doing, and voting to give the electoral votes of the first three and two of the electoral votes of the fourth to Tilden and Hendricks did so simply and solely because they were Democrats. They did not have a leg nor a peg to stand upon or hang upon in either one of the cases. In Florida and South Carolina the self- styled Democratic electors had no certifica- tion to their election by any board or officer 50 THE ADMINISTRATION OF authorized thereto by either the legislature of the State or the Congress of the United States. The Tilden counsel before the Commission claimed that the RepubHcan canvassing boards had thrown out returns from certain polhng places where the majority was in favor of the Democratic candidates for electors. But these canvassing boards had the right and power to do this, given to them by the respective State legislatures, empowered thereto by the Consti- tution of the United States, upon the existence of certain conditions of fraud, violence, or in- timidation, of the existence of which the said legislatures had made these boards the final judges. The Tilden lawyers also claimed that there had been United States soldiers stationed at the polls, and that this invalidated the elec- tion. But they were there by authority of a statute of the Congress of the United States, a statute the enactment of which was undoubt- edly within the constitutional power of Congress. In Louisiana the claimed Democratic electors had certificates from a claimed canvassing board created by a claimed legislature and also from a claimed governor. But the claimed PRESIDENT HAYES 51 legislature which created this canvassing board and this claimed governor had never had any legal existence, while the legislature creating the canvassing board which had reported the election of the Republican electors to the gov- ernor and the governor who had furnished these electors with his certificate to their elec- tion had been recognized as the lawful legisla- ture and the lawful governor of the State by every department of the United States Govern- ment. It was also claimed by the Tilden counsel before the Commission that the Republican can- vassing board in Louisiana had thrown out the returns from certain voting precincts where the Democrats were in majority, and had thus given the State to the Republican electors, but there was no more evidence that they had done this than that the terrorizing organizations of the Democrats had by intimidation kept the Republican voters away from the polls in these places. Anyhow, the lawful legislature of the State had, in the exercise of a power vested in it by the Constitution of the United States, authorized the canvassing board to do this at its own discretion, in case of fraud, violence. 52 THE ADMINISTRATION OF or intimidation, of the existence of which con- dition the board was made by the legislature the final judge. The Electoral Commission could not, there- fore, have refused to receive the returns of these canvassing boards, or to count the votes of the electors designated therein for the President and Vice-President, without violating the pro- vision of the Constitution of the United States itself, vesting in the State legislatures respec- tively the sole power of determining the manner of appointing the electors of the President and Vice-President from the respective States. The case of Oregon was more compHcated but equally clear. The Secretary of State, the ultimate canvassing officer of the State, as desig- nated by the State legislature, reported by regular return to the governor the election of the three Republican electors. One of these, named Watts, held a small post-office, and was thereby disqualified as an elector. Thereupon the governor, a Democrat, named Grover, gave his certificate to the other two Republican electors and to the Democratic candidate for elector, who, after the Republican electors, had PRESIDENT HAYES 53 the highest number of votes though, of course, not a majority of the votes cast for electors, in place of the disquahfied Watts. This man's name was Cronin, and it was to him, in fact, that the governor handed his certificate for all three. This manoeuvre was, of course, for the purpose of placing Cronin in a position to force the two Republican electors, whose names were on the certificate, to act with him, and thus give two electoral votes from Oregon to Hayes and Wheeler and one to Tilden and Hendricks, which, in the condition of the vote in the other States, would have elected Tilden and Hen- dricks President and Vice-President. The Re- publican electors refused, however, to act with Cronin, but met by themselves and chose a third man, Watts, by the bye, who had mean- time resigned his office, and sent their three votes for Hayes and Wheeler to the president of the Senate of the United States, attested by a copy of the report to the governor by the Secretary of State of the State, the ultimate can- vassing officer of the State, of their election as electors. Cronin, on the other hand, chose two persons to act with him, and sent from his body 54 THE ADMINISTRATION OF two electoral votes for Hayes and Wheeler and one for Tilden and Hendricks to the president of the Senate of the United States, accompanied by the certificate of the governor to his own election, but not as to the election of the other two acting with him. The Electoral Commission went, of course, behind the certificate of the governor who, as we have seen, was acting in giving his certificate under an act of Congress, but stopped, of course, at the report of the ultimate canvassing officer of the State, the Secretary of State, who derived his authority from the State legislature, by virtue of its independent power over the man- ner of appointing the electors, vested in it by the Constitution of the United States. The right of the two Republican electors to fill the vacancy made by the disqualification of Watts had been settled by the vote of both houses of Congress in previous cases of this nature. It was not, therefore, a partisan act on the part of the Electoral Commission to give the entire electoral vote of the State of Oregon, and of the States of Florida, Louisiana, and South CaroHna, to the Republican candidates for the PRESIDENT HAYES 55 presidency and vice-presidency, but a strictly legal and constitutional act. They could not have done otherwise without infracting the Constitution of the United States and invading the power of the State legislatures respectively, vested in them and secured to them by the Constitution of the United States. No President nor Vice-President had ever had a more complete title legally to his office than did Mr. Hayes and Mr. Wheeler. In Oregon there was no doubt that both legally and morally the Republicans were in the right and the Demo- crats in the wrong. The Democratic governor had nothing to stand on either in law, prece- dent, or morality. His act in furnishing Cronin with the certificate of election was sheer partisan arbitrariness. And if there were any grounds in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina of a moral nature against the Republicans, they were entirely overbalanced by those against the Democrats. If the Republican canvassing boards had thrown out the returns of certain precincts, it was because, they said, fraud, vio- lence, or intimidation had rendered the counting of such returns unlawful, and they were the 56 THE ADMINISTRATION OF final judges of that question. It all depended upon whether the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States were to be upheld in these States or not. If they were, then from every point of view, legal and moral, the Republicans were in the right. They have been in large measure set aside since then, but at that time they were regarded as of full force, and no officer either of the United States or of the State would have fulfilled his sworn duty had he disregarded their provisions. Moreover, I am entirely convinced that Mr. Hayes would never have entered upon the office of President had he not known that his title was above all just reproach. He had the means of judging of this matter to the ex- tent not possessed by any other man. His am- bition was always subject to his moral sense. The approval of his own conscience stood with him above everything else. This was even more true, if possible, of Mrs. Hayes. There was in his household no woman's immoderate love of place and glory to lead him astray, but a help- mate, yea, a guide in all right-doing. Notwithstanding all this, the manner of PRESIDENT HAYES 57 President Hayes' election was an embarrass- ment and a handicap to him in many ways, and has served in the hands of designing men to depreciate the great work of his administra- tion. As time goes on, however, and as the partisan hatreds which clustered around the election are lost from view, that work looms larger and ever larger. Although there had been threats of violence, both secret and open, the inauguration went off quietly and successfully. The inaugural ad- dress was a model of sound sense, wise states- manship, genuine patriotism, and cordial good- will, expressed in concise, chaste, and elegant language, and pronounced with a manly firm- ness and grace which impressed most favorably and profoundly all those who heard it and all who read it in the public prints. The thing most significant about it was the conviction which it carried that the new President was firmly resolved to live up to the pledges of the party platform and of his letter of acceptance of the nomination, and not to regard them as mere campaign documents to be ignored and forgotten after the election. While this was 58 THE ADMINISTRATION OF most gratifying and encouraging to the people, it was startling and disquieting to the so-called elder statesmen, Blaine, Conkling, Cameron, Logan, and the rest, chiefly because of the civil- service reform pledges of the platform, which President Hayes repeated with great emphasis in the inaugural and declared himself unaltera- bly determined, in so far as it lay within his power, to fulfil. This would destroy the pat- ronage system in the appointment to office upon which their power rested, and upon which the existing organization of the party depended in very large measure. I dare say that they thought they were sincere in opposing the Presi- dent in this matter, but the country gave them quickly and sharply to understand that they were out of touch with the views of the plain people in regard to it. Before going to Washington for his inaugura- tion Mr. Hayes had fixed upon the three chief members of his Cabinet. While he had done this quite independently, he had not done it arbitrarily. He had conferred with a few trusted friends, but he had really consulted the country and had selected the men whom na- PRESIDENT HAYES 59 tional, and in one case at least international, reputation had pointed out as the best-fitted men in the land for the positions. First of all, there was the profound and at the same time brilliant lawyer, Mr. William M. Evarts, equally learned in public as in private law, whose great qualities had been manifested in his great achievements in the impeachment trial of President Johnson, in the presentation of the American case before the Geneva Tribu- nal, and in the argument of the Republican case before the Electoral Commission. Under all of these supreme tests he had shown himself the most sound and learned constitutional and inter- national lawyer and the most skilful diplomatist which the country possessed. He was a genu- ine Republican, but not a wire-pulling politi- cian, and not so hide-bound in his party allegi- ance as to suit the ring-leaders of the party. He knew more of law, history, and philosophy than all of them put together, and such a man is not naturally a follower, but a leader. The principle of natural selection designated him for the secretaryship of state, and Mr. Hayes had fixed upon him for the position 60 THE ADMINISTRATION OF before he made the famous plea in the election case. He was not, however, the first to be ap- proached by Mr. Hayes in constituting the membership of his Cabinet. The first to whom the formal proposal was made to share in the responsibilities of the administration was the President-elect's long-time friend and fellow Ohioan, Senator John Sherman. Mr. Hayes asked Senator Sherman to take the exceedingly responsible position of the secretaryship of the treasury. In doing this Mr. Hayes had simply taken the man whom the whole country re- garded as the soundest man in the nation, next to Mr. Hayes himself, on the monetary question, and the best-equipped man to discharge the great responsibilities of conducting the finances of the country through the period of preparation for the resumption of specie payments to the accomplishment of that result. He had long been looked up to in the Congress of the United States as the highest authority among them on the subject of public finance, and the Resump- tion Act of 1875 was, in large measure, his work, in much larger measure than that of any other PRESIDENT HAYES 61 man. Mr. Hayes not only asked Senator Sher- man first and directly to become a member, under the circumstances of the times perhaps the most important member, of his official house- hold, but he availed himself of Senator Sher- man's influence in Washington and in the East to secure Mr. Evarts. The third member of his Cabinet selected by Mr. Hayes was chosen by him more largely upon grounds of personal preference than either Mr. Sherman or Mr. Evarts — in fact, than any other member of the body. I mean exactly by this statement that the general consensus had less part in the selection of this member, and the feelings of the President-elect himself greater part, than in the choice of any other. It was the German- American, Carl Schurz, profound scholar, brilliant orator, brave soldier, wise statesman, independent thinker, great reader, honest man, genial companion, and courteous gentleman. These were qualities which recom- mended him irresistibly to a man like Mr. Hayes. In fact, the two men were as sympathetic, as similar in their natures, as it is possible for two men of different nationality to be. Politically 62 THE ADMINISTRATION OF it was, in large measure, Mr. Schurz's zeal for civil-service reform and his immense fund of in- formation regarding administrative systems and practices in foreign countries which determined Mr. Hayes to make him his Secretary of the Interior and give him the power to set up the models of improved administrative service in this department, from which all the others might take lesson. Mr. Hayes had settled upon these three men as the leading members of his Cabinet of advisers before he went to Wash- ington to take up the reins of government — in fact, before he had been declared elected — and nothing and nobody could shake him from his determination. And there was not the slight- est reason why he should have been. He had selected the best talent, character, and com- petency which the Republican party and the country at large possessed to aid him in the solution of the three great problems — the paci- fication of the South, the regulation of the mon- etary and financial system, and the reform of the civil service — the three great problems which confronted his administration at the outset and claimed by far the largest share of attention and activity throughout. PRESIDENT HAYES 63 Mr. Hayes had also before going to Wash- ington considered most seriously nominating General Johnston, the famous Confederate leader, to be his Secretary of War. There was no doubt of General Johnston's techni- cal qualifications to fill the position, and Mr. Hayes desired to give this proof to the South of his sincere intentions towards that section of the country. He thought that it would be the seal of the re-establishment of the union of feeling between North and South in a common nation- ality. He felt it necessary, however, to consult some of the Republican leaders in the matter, and was immediately made to understand that his generous impulses were not shared by them. With great reluctance he gave up Johnston, for he entertained very high respect for his ability and character. He still clung, however, to his plan of having a Southerner as a member of his official family. After reaching Washington he settled upon Senator David M. Key, of Ten- nessee. He was a Democrat and had served as a Confederate soldier, but he hailed from a State that had furnished almost as many sol- diers to the Union army as to the Confederate army, and he was a genuinely reconstructed 64 THE ADMINISTRATION OF rebel. He had shown this in his attitude upon all questions coming before Congress, and he had exercised a most favorable influence over the Southern members in Congress during the trying session of 1876-7. The selection was a wise one, and Mr. Key proved himself a valu- able counsellor of the President in the Southern question as well as an able administrator of the Post-OflSce Department. In the selection of the other three members of the Cabinet President Hayes seems to have been influenced in a greater degree by the lead- ers of the party in Congress, though not by the domineering element among them. He refused to give ear to Blaine, who was anxious to place one of his lieutenants, W. P. Frye, in the Cab- inet, but he took counsel of Senator Hoar and selected, with Hoar's advice. Judge Charles Devens as his Attorney-General. The choice was an excellent one. It could hardly have been improved. Desire to show his respect for Governor Morton, the great war governor of Indiana, seems also to have been an element in the selection of Colonel Richard W. Thompson, the brilliant Indiana orator, who had made PRESIDENT HAYES 65 the nominating speech for Morton at the Cin- cinnati convention, as the Secretary of the Navy. Who or what recommended the selection of Mr. McCrary to Mr. Hayes as Secretary of War is not so certain. Mr. McCrary was an excellent lawyer, but had made no mark as a soldier. I find by looking over the Congressional debates that he was the member of Congress who seems to have first suggested the idea of the Electoral Commission as the means for solving the prob- lem of the contested election. He was an au- thority on the law of elections. President Hayes probably had him in mind first for the attorney- generalship, and after Devens' name came up for a place in the Cabinet changed him over to the secretaryship of war. Taken all together, it was the strongest body of men, each best fitted for the place assigned to him, that ever sat around the council-table of a President of the United States. Thomp- son was the weakest one among them. He came the nearest also to being a poUtical ap- pointment. But his want of equal efficiency with the others was more because of his ad- 66 THE ADMINISTRATION OF vanced age than any lack of original endowment or practical experience. There was no valid reason why the Senate should have manifested any hesitation what- ever in the confirmation of any one of them, except, perhaps, the Democrat, Key. It might have been a question whether a Democrat could conscientiously uphold the general policy of a Republican administration. Senator Key had already informed the President, however, that if he should feel at any time that he could not do so, he would promptly resign his portfolio. Nevertheless, the Senate, under the leadership of the stalwart Republicans, departed from its unbroken custom of confirming the President's nominees of the members of his official family immediately and without reference to any com- mittees and voted to refer them all to com- mittees for examination and report. Even Senator Sherman's nomination went with the rest, although it had always been the usage of the Senate to confirm the nomination of one of its own members to any oflSce immediately and without reference. It was all meant as an at- tack upon the President for exercising his own PRESIDENT HAYES 67 independent discretion in nominating the mem- bers of his Cabinet, instead of asking Blaine, ConkHng, Cameron, and some others each to nominate a member for him. The action of the Senate, however, immedi- ately produced a revolt in the country. The press generally disapproved in emphatic lan- guage of the departure of the Senate from its immemorial custom in this instance. Especially the Republican press manifested, in many cases, intense indignation at this attempt to discredit and weaken the Republican administration, especially at a time when Republican unity and harmony were most needed. Individual sena- tors were stormed with telegrams and letters from their particular constituents demanding that the Senate recede from its indefensible position. It was on Wednesday, March 7th, that the President sent the nominations to the Senate. By Saturday the battle between the Senate and the country was over. On Thursday the Senate had taken the nomination of Senator Sherman from the committee to which it had been referred on the day before and confirmed it. On Saturday, the 9th, the committees reported 68 THE ADMINISTRATION OF all the nominations favorably, and the Senate confirmed them all immediately and by almost unanimous vote. It was evident thus from the outset that Mr. Hayes' administration would be involved in more or less of conflict with the elder statesmen of the Republican party, but that it would be sustained by the people, and that, too, in con- siderable degree, without regard to party. It is true that Mr. Hayes himself was a loyal Re- publican, a much sounder Republican than either Blaine, Conkling, or Cameron, the men whom General Noyes called "invincible in peace and invisible in war." Mr. Hayes had proved his Republicanism on the battle-field as well as in civil office and in the ranks of the plain citi- zens. But he understood better than any of them the distinctions between civil rights and political qualifications, and he furthermore un- derstood the difference between the political side and the business side of the administration. In other words, Mr. Hayes was a political scientist and a statesman as well as a party man. He knew the place of party in the system of the Republic. He knew, therefore, where loyalty PRESIDENT HAYES 69 to party must give way to loyalty to country. He knew that the exaggeration of party loyalty made the attainment of national unity and the development of a national consensus of opinion in regard to the fundamental principles of rights and policies impossible. With him, therefore, party loyalty must be kept within the limita- tions imposed upon it by sound political sci- ence, constitutional law, and the historic ideals of American policy. He himself expressed the re- lation which should exist between party and people, the relation which he undertook to es- tablish as the aim and end of his administration, in the famous sentence which has now become one of the most important of American political axioms, viz.: "He serves his party best who serves his country best." LECTURE III THE SOUTHERN POLICY AND THE FINANCIAL POLICY ^S we have seen, the Republican platform /-% promised the pacification of the South, Mr. Hayes' letter of acceptance of the nomination for the presidency reiterated it with more emphasis, and the President's inaugural address contained the assertion of his deter- mination to realize it. If any of the statesmen or politicians who framed the platform sup- posed that they were simply composing high- sounding phrases for the purposes of the cam- paign, and that these would be allowed to go the usual way of such pronunciamentos by the administration, they had greatly misread the character of the man whom they had helped to make the chief magistrate of the nation. It was observed that during the campaign the Republican managers, writers, and speakers had emphasized the financial question and had al- lowed the Southern question to fall into the 70 PRESIDENT HAYES 71 background. And it must have been something of a shock to the "Stalwarts," the elder states- men, that the President put the Southern ques- tion first in his inaugural and dwelt upon it at greatest length, and then followed it with his earnest appeal for civil-service reform, thus in- dicating to the country that his administration was to be devoted most especially to the solu- tion of these two great problems, and to that of the Southern situation first of all. At the time of the election of 1876, all the Southern States, except Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, had, partly through means of doubtful legality, indeed, freed themselves from carpetbag-negro domination. Of these three the situation of Florida was most favorable. The final determination of the State elections in this State was a function of its supreme court, and happily there was one universally recog- nized court in Florida — and but one. This court sat in judgment on the State elections of 1876 and decided that the Democratic can- didates for governor and lieutenant-governor had been elected. The Republican candidates simply protested, but did not resist forcibly nor 72 THE ADMINISTRATION OF demand the support of the Washington govern- ment. The question as to Florida was thus solved by the State law and State administra- tion, and Florida was reclaimed by its own white citizens. The situation in Louisiana and South Car- olina was, however, quite different. The leg- islatures of these States as well as that of Florida had, as we have seen in the previous lecture, constructed returning-boards as the final authority in the counting of the votes of the suffrage holders, with the power to throw out the returns of the election officers from pre- cincts and districts in which fraud or force had been practised. This was entirely regular, as we have also seen, in regard to the election of the electors of the President and the Vice- President, because the Constitution of the United States vests this power in the several State legislatures, and there is no other body or organ in the State which can lawfully inter- fere with the legislature in the exercise of this function, not even the people of the State them- selves. Whether these returning-boards were, how- PRESIDENT HAYES 73 ever, the final authority for counting the votes of the suffrage holders for State officers and the members of the State legislatures was quite another question, and depended for its solution upon the provisions of the constitutions of the respective States. In the States of Louisiana and South Carolina these returning-boards had assumed to act in both capacities, and had returned the Repub- lican candidates for governor — Packard in Lou- isiana and Chamberlain in South Carolina — as elected, and also the Republican candidates for the legislature in sufficient number to create Republican legislatures in both States. The Democrats, on the other hand, claimed that the returning-boards created by the legislatures had, according to the State constitutions, no authority over the returns of the election officers of the precincts and districts, and claimed on the face of the returns the election of Francis T. Nicholls as governor of Louisiana, and Wade Hampton as governor of South Carolina, and of a suffi- cient number of candidates for the legislature to constitute the lawful legislature in each of these States. 74 THE ADMINISTRATION OF Both Packard and NichoUs had set up State governments in Louisiana, and both Chamber- lain and Hampton had set up State governments in South Carohna, and each was supported by a legislature claiming to be the lawful legislature of the State. In Louisiana there were also two su- preme courts, one attached to each government. The Republican governors and legislatures were installed in the regular State House in each State, and were defended by detachments of United States troops within the buildings, or encamped around them. The Democratic gov- ernments had, on the other hand, occupied fixed quarters, and were in potential if not actual command of the State militia and were sustained by voluntary contributions from the taxpayers. The jurisdiction of the Republican governments, finally, was recognized over only a very limited area in the two States, while that of the Democratic governments was pretty gen- erally recognized throughout the same. It was clear that matters had^reached a crisis in the Southern problem, and that the danger of insurrection was extremely imminent. One of the great questions which the President had to PRESIDENT HAYES 75 determine in his own mind was whether he could trust the white leaders in these States to secure the constitutional rights of the blacks. Nearly twelve years had passed since the close of the Civil War, and it was pretty clear to any far- seeing, unprejudiced mind that the regime of the carpetbaggers and negroes, supported by the United States soldiery, was a dismal failure and a lasting disgrace, and that matters could not be made much worse by any change which could be fairly conceived. The Republican Stalwarts tried to hold the President by the argument that the titles of Packard and Cham- berlain, and that of the legislatures acting with them, rested on the same basis as his own, viz.: the decisions of the returning-boards ; but he was constitutional lawyer enough to know that, while these decisions were lawful and binding in his case, by virtue of a provision of the Con- stitution of the United States, they were subject to revision by higher authority in State elections, if so ordered by the constitution of the State concerned. He saw clearly that he was not compelled by law, or even by reason of con- sistency, to give the mihtary power of the 76 THE ADMINISTRATION OF United States to the maintenance of the Repub- lican State governments in Louisiana and South Carohna against the Democratic State govern- ments, unless the contest between the two gov- ernments in each State should lead to domestic violence, and the legislature or legislatures thereof, or the executive or executives thereof, should apply to him for protection, in which event he would have to determine which was the real government of the State, and extend military support, if necessary, to this one. President Hayes was thoroughly convinced that the time had come to test the assurances of the responsible white men of these States, whether they had been engaged twelve years before in rebellion against the national govern- ment and sovereignty or not, that the rights, both civil and political, of all classes of the population would be equally upheld and pro- tected, if the United States would withdraw its military power and leave to the States their constitutional autonomy; but he was wisely mindful to do this in a manner and with such preparatory steps as to make sure that when he withdrew the troops the contention between the PRESIDENT HAYES 77 rival governments would settle itself by the im- mediate subsidence of the claims of one of them in each case, and not lead again to insurrec- tionary movements, such as might require the reintervention of the military power of the United States. With this in viev/ President Hayes took up the question as related to South Carolina first, and for two reasons: primarily, because there was only one supreme court and only one set of judicial organs in South Carolina, and there- fore there could be no conflicting decisions of the State courts in regard to the State elections or anything else, which could not be overcome simply by appeal to the one universally recog- nized supreme court from the lower courts; and, secondly, because the high and patriotic character of the Republican claimant to the governorship in South Carolina encouraged President Hayes to believe that a personal ap- peal on the part of the President to Mr. Cham- berlain would meet with a generous response, and probably with disinterested co-operation. On the 23d of March, not quite three weeks from the day of his inauguration as President, Mr. 78 THE ADMINISTRATION OF Hayes caused to be addressed to Mr. Chamber- lain and Mr. Hampton invitations to come to Washington for a conference with him regard- ing the pohtical condition of the State of South Carohna. The notes of invitation contained the following significant paragraph: "It is the earnest desire of the President to be able to put an end as speedily as possible to all appear- ance of intervention of the military authority of the United States in the political derange- ments which affect the government and afflict the people of South Carolina. In this desire the President cannot doubt he truly represents the patriotic feeling of the great body of the people of the United States." With this the two gentlemen claiming the governorship of South Carolina were not left in doubt in regard to what they would have to face in Washington. The Republican Chamberlain went to meet the Republican President unher- alded and depressed, while the Democrat Hamp- ton's journey was like a triumphal procession. On March 29th they were both in the national capital. The President went patiently and thoroughly over the whole question with each PRESIDENT HAYES 79 of them, during the course of which conversa- tions he became even more thoroughly con- vinced that the time had come for leaving the States of the South to themselves in their own local affairs. Able and persuasive as Mr. Cham- berlain was, his arguments only revealed the more clearly that his claim to rule could be sustained only on the principle that the State of South Carolina was not a State of the Union but a military province. The time had passed for that. On April 3, 1877, after due consultation with his advisers, the President took the momentous step. By a formal note addressed to the Secre- tary of War, he gave the renowned order which settled the Southern question and ended the conflict between the North and the South. It read as follows: "Prior to my entering upon the duties of the presidency, there had been sta- tioned by order of my predecessor in the State House at Columbia, South Carolina, a detach- ment of United States Infantry. Finding them in that place, I have thought proper to delay a decision of the question of their removal until I could consider and determine whether the 80 THE ADMINISTRATION OF condition of affairs in that State is now such as either to require or justify the continued mili- tary occupation of the State House. In my opinion there does not now exist in that State such domestic violence as is contemplated by the Constitution as the ground upon which the military power of the national government may be invoked for the defense of the State. There are, it is true, grave and serious disputes as to the rights of certain claimants to the chief execu- tive office of that State. But these are to be settled and determined, not by the executive of the United States, but by such orderly and peaceable methods as may be provided by the constitution and laws of the State. I feel as- sured that no resort to violence is contemplated in any quarter, but that, on the contrary, the disputes in question are to be settled solely by such peaceful remedies as the constitution and laws of the State provide. Under these cir- cumstances, in this confidence, I now deem it proper to take action in accordance with the principles announced when I entered upon the duties of the presidency. You are, therefore, directed to see that the proper orders are issued for the removal of said troops from the State PRESIDENT HAYES 81 House to their previous place of encamp- ment." At midday on April 10th, the United States soldiers marched out of the State House to their barracks. Mr. Chamberlain made no resistance to the occupation of the State House by Mr. Hampton, except the publication of an address asserting the justice of his cause, and complain- ing of the desertion of it by the national govern- ment. The two legislatures became one by the action of the proper State authorities in deter- mining the questions of State elections. All the State, county, and city officers recognized the rightful authority of the Hampton government. The courts, as we have seen, were already in harmony with it. It required but a few days to restore peace and order and good government, government by its own people, by its own best people, to the long-suffering State. And but a few months had passed when the President's course, so stoutly opposed by the RepubHcan Stalwarts and the radical Negrophiles at the outset, was approved so universally as having stood the practical test, that nobody of any importance could be found lifting a voice in further criticism of it. 82 THE ADMINISTRATION OF The situation in Louisiana was somewhat more difficult to deal with. There were two governors, two legislatures, and two supreme courts, and each governor had a military force; the RepubHcan claimant, Packard, had the metropolitan police of New Orleans and the United States soldiers, and the Democrat claim- ant, NichoUs, had the State mihtia. Moreover, Packard was a genuine carpetbagger, with none of the moral fibre and real patriotic spirit of Chamberlain. After much reflection President Hayes deter- mined to send a commission to Louisiana to examine into the situation, and report to him a plan or suggestion for settling the problem of the double government in the State of Louisiana in accordance with the constitution of the State, and "without involving the element of military power" in the settlement, and he instructed the commission to try to secure the universal recog- nition of one government, as a whole, if possible, and, if not, to try to get into a single body a majority of the persons holding certificates of election to membership in the legislature under each set of electoral returns, so as to constitute a single legislature from which, as a base, to PRESIDENT HAYES 83 work out the unification of the other branches of the State government. The President gave the commission most particularly to understand that they were not to investigate the State elec- tions or the State procedures for counting the votes for State ojQScers and the members of the State legislature. That had been already done by Congressional committees. According to the report of the commission, the following situation was found to exist on the date of the arrival of its members, April 6th: "Governor Packard was at the State House with his legislature and friends and armed police force. As there was no quorum in the Senate, even upon his own theory of law, his legislature was necessarily inactive. The supreme court, which recognized his authority, had not at- tempted to transact any business since it had been dispossessed of its court-room and the custody of its records, on the 9th of January, 1877. He had no organized militia, alleging that his deficiency in that respect was owing to his obedience to the orders of President Grant, to take no steps to change the relative posi- tion of himself and Governor NichoUs. His main reliance was upon his alleged legal title, 84 THE ADMINISTRATION OF claiming that it was the constitutional duty of the President to recognize it and to afford him such military assistance as might be nec- essary to enable him to assert his authority as governor. "Governor Nicholls was occupying the Odd- Fellows' Hall as a State House. His legislature met there, and was actively engaged in the busi- ness of legislation. All the departments of the city government of New Orleans recognized his authority. The supreme court, nominated by him and confirmed by his Senate, was holding daily sessions and had heard about two hundred cases. The time for the collection of taxes had not arrived, but considerable sums of money, in the form of taxes, had been voluntarily paid into his treasury, out of which he was defraying the ordinary expenses of the State government. The Nicholls legislature had a quorum in the Senate upon either the Nicholls or Packard theory of law, and a quorum in the House upon the Nicholls, but not on the Packard, theory. The Packard legislature had a quorum in the House on its own theory of law, but, as already stated, not in the Senate, and was thus disabled PRESIDENT HAYES 85 from legislation that would be valid, even in the judgment of its own party. "The commission found it to be very diflScult to ascertain the precise extent to which the re- spective governments were acknowledged in the various parishes outside of New Orleans: but it is safe to say that the changes which had taken place in parishes after the organization of the two governments, January 9, 1877, were in favor of the NichoUs government." Under these conditions the commission soon found it impossible to bring the two claimants for the governorship to any arrangement, and turned to the task of bringing together in a single legislative body a sufficient number of members holding their certificate of election under either theory of the election law to form a quorum. In a number of cases the election officers had returned the same persons as members of the Nicholls legislature as were certified by the Republican returning-board as members of the Packard legislature. These persons had first quahfied in the Packard legislature. But if they could be induced to go over into the Nicholls legislature, they would bring up the member- 86 THE ADMINISTRATION OF ship of the NichoUs legislature to a legal quo- rum in both houses, and leave the two houses of the Packard legislature without a quorum, on either theory of the election law, in either. On the 20th of April the commission sent a telegram to President Hayes, advising the im- mediate announcement of a date by him when he would order the withdrawal of the United States soldiery from the support of the Packard government. By this time the Nicholls legis- lature had secured a quorum of members in both houses whose elections had been certified by the election machinery of both governments, and the Packard legislature had been left with- out a quorum in either house, under any theory of the election law, and the commission had also reached the conclusion that Packard's govern- ment outside of the precincts of the State House had no existence, and never would have any un- less held up at every point by the national army. The commission had also reached the conclu- sion that the withdrawal of the United States troops would not result in any insurrectionary movements, but that their retention would probably, almost certainly, do so. PRESIDENT HAYES 87 The President issued the order for the with- drawal of the national military from the sup- port of the Packard government, and on the 24th of April it was executed, and the final step was taken in restoring all the States of the South to their full membership in the Union, as self- governing bodies within the limits of the Con- stitution. Packard protested, but yielded more easily and gracefully than had been expected. Wade, Blaine, Garrison, Phillips, Butler, and all the rest of their kind poured upon the President their vials of wrath, some in the language of sorrow and pity for the backsliding President, and others in the language of abuse and vitu- peration for the treacherous man in the White House. I have no doubt that they were all, except perhaps Blaine, entirely sincere. But they were all wofuUy mistaken. No violence followed the withdrawal of the troops anywhere. Peace and prosperity and contentment were re- stored. The State government became honest, efficient, and economical. And the rights of the negroes were more perfectly realized than ever before. Some of the disappointed ones undertook to blacken the President's character 88 THE ADMINISTRATION OF by claiming that the President's action was prompted by an agreement made by him, or for him, by two of his Northern friends, with prominent Southerners, in order to secure their acquiescence in the Congressional canvass of the electoral vote. But the President and his ad- visers demanded immediate publicity as to every item of the charge, and it was at once manifest that he had given no assurances pri- vately that were anything more than a reitera- tion of his public statements, and that his friends had made no promises for him, and had done nothing more than express their own private opinions that President Hayes was a man of his word, and would undoubtedly undertake the realization of the policies announced in his letter of acceptance of the nomination to the presidency, and in his inaugural address upon induction into office. No braver, wiser, or more patriotic thing was ever done by any occupant of the presidential chair than President Hayes' work for the paci- fication of the South. He disregarded entirely the arguments of the Stalwarts that his own title to the office was nulhfied by his failure to PRESIDENT HAYES 89 sustain that of the RepubHcan claimants in South Carohna and Louisiana, and that he was destroying the RepubHcan party in the South and betraying the freedmen. He saw through the sophistry of all this and disregarded en- tirely any effect which his action might have upon his own personal political fortunes. His only thought was for justice and the welfare of the whole country, and he held as the first article of his political faith the principle so hap- pily formulated by himself: "He serves his party best who serves his country best." In the solution of the Southern problem President Hayes showed himself to be a statesman of the first order and of the broadest national type. The problem itself, however, was not one of great intricacy. It was rather one of plain and elemental justice, one in which the way of solu- tion selected by him was supported by a major- ity of the people at the North. It was against the Stalwart faction of his own party and a few fanatics that he had to exercise his firmness of purpose. The liberal faction of his own party, the Democrats of the North, and the whites of the South were with him. The greatest strug- 90 THE ADMINISTRATION OF gle which he had with himself over the subject was the question whether he was deserting the just cause of the black man and delivering him back to servitude. Had he not been able to convince himself that his policy of restoring the autonomy of the State governments in the South would not lead to this result, he certainly could never have followed it, no matter how unanimous the approval of it may have been. On the other hand, the financial question was distressingly intricate, and the solution of it required broadness, acuteness, and originality in economic reasoning. It seems to me that it was in the handling of this question that Presi- dent Hayes manifested, in highest degree, his superiority as an independent thinker and also his uncompromising devotion to principle. As we have seen, the monetary situation at the time of the accession of Mr. Hayes to the presidency was most unsatisfactory. The coun- try had not recovered from the panic of 1873, and it was pretty generally believed that the chief cause of all trouble was the scarcity of money. We had nearly three hundred and fifty milHons of greenbacks, i. e., of irredeemable PRESIDENT HAYES 91 legal-tender paper of the government in circula- tion, and about as much more of national bank- notes secured by government bonds and green- backs, and a bonded indebtedness of nearly fifteen hundred millions of dollars, upon about half of which we were paying six per cent in- terest, and upon the other half five per cent. We had a law for the resumption of specie pay- ment, i. e., for redeeming our paper money in coin on and after January 1, 1879. We had also the law of 1873 suspending the coinage of the silver dollar, which virtually made coin to mean gold coin, as in fact had been the case since 1853. It was in the face of this situation that Presi- dent Hayes said in his inaugural address: "Upon the currency question, I may be permitted to repeat here the statement made in my letter of acceptance that, in my judgment, the feel- ing of uncertainty inseparable from an irre- deemable paper currency, with its fiuctuation of values, is one of the greatest obstacles to a re- turn to prosperous times. The only safe paper currency is one which rests upon a coin basis, and is at all times promptly convertible into coin. I adhere to the views heretofore expressed 92 THE ADMINISTRATION OF by me in favor of Congressional legislation in behalf of an early resumption of specie pay- ments, and I am satisfied not only that this is wise, but that the interests as well as the pub- lic sentiment of the country imperatively de- mand it.*' Notwithstanding this warning, the State con- ventions of the Democratic and Greenback parties which occurred in the summer of 1877 declared in favor of a repeal of the Resumption Act, and of the passage of an act rehabilitating silver as full legal-tender money on a par with gold, and providing for its free and unlimited coinage at the old rate of 16 to 1, and the State conventions of the Republican party west of the Alleghanies pronounced themselves in favor of the remonetizing of silver. In the special session of Congress in the au- tumn of 1877, the Bills for both purposes passed the House of Representatives in November by tremendous majorities. The Senate, which was still Republican, as to the majority, took up the Silver Bill, referred it to its finance committee, and on report of this committee placed the Bill on its calendar. The special session of Con- PRESIDENT HAYES 93 gress was now near its end, but the Silver Bill was in position for consideration by the next regular session, which would open almost im- mediately, i. e.y on the first Monday of the fol- lowing month. This was the situation which moved Presi- dent Hayes to incorporate in his first annual message, of December 3, 1877, a discussion of the monetary question which has never been surpassed, if equalled, for correctness, concise- ness, and exliaustiveness anywhere in our eco- nomic literature. . Naturally a mind like his would regard the subject from a moral as well as an economic point of view. The scrupulously honest ful- filment of all financial obligations on the part of the government and on the part of individuals was, of course, the first article of his financial creed. Upon this part of the subject his words were as follows: "The poHcy of resumption should be pursued by every suitable means, and no legislation would be wise that should dis- parage the importance or retard the attainment of that result. I must adhere to my most ear- nest conviction that any wavering in purpose or 94 THE ADMINISTRATION OF unsteadiness in methods, so far from avoiding or reducing the inconvenience inseparable from the transition from an irredeemable to a re- deemable paper currency, would only tend to increased and prolonged disturbance in values, and, unless retrieved, must end in serious dis- order, dishonor, and disaster in the financial affairs of the government and of the people. The mischiefs which I apprehend, and urgently deprecate, are confined to no class of the peo- ple, indeed, but seem to me most certainly to threaten the industrious masses, whether their occupations are of skilled or common labor. To them, it seems to me, it is of prime impor- tance that their labor should be compensated in money which is itself fixed in exchangeable value by being irrevocably measured by the labor necessary to its production. This permanent quality of the money of the people is sought for, and can only be gained, by the resumption of specie payments. The rich, the speculative, the operating, the money-dealing classes may not always feel the mischiefs of, or may find casual profits in, a variable currency, but the misfortunes of such a currency to those who PRESIDENT HAYES 95 are paid in salaries or wages are inevitable and remediless." And again: "I respectfully recommend to Congress that in any legislation providing for a silver coinage, and imparting to it the quality of legal tender, there be impressed upon the measure a firm provision exempting the payment of the public debt, heretofore issued and now outstanding, from payment, either of principal or interest, in any coinage of less commercial value than the present gold coinage of the country." The honest dollar for honest labor and the financial honor of the country were placed by him above all interests, in fact were the highest interest. When these things were secured, then and not till then would he consent to consider the subject from the point of view of economic policy purely. And when he came to this side of the question, he manifested in his treatment of it a soundness and f oresightedness not equalled by any of his contemporaries and not surpassed by any who have come after him. He said: "In adapting the new silver coinage to the or- dinary uses of currency in the every-day trans- actions of life, and prescribing the quality of 96 THE ADMINISTRATION OF legal tender to be assigned to it, a considera- tion of the first importance should be so to ad- just the ratio between the silver and the gold coinage as to accomplish the desired end of maintaining the circulation of the two metallic currencies, and keeping up the volume of the two precious metals as our intrinsic money. It is a mixed question for scientific reasoning and historical experience to determine how far, and by what methods, a practical equilibrium can be maintained which will keep both metals in circulation in their appropriate spheres of com- mon use. An absolute equality of commercial value, free from disturbing fluctuations, is hardly attainable, and without it an unlimited legal tender for private transactions assigned to both metals would irresistibly tend to drive out of circulation the dearer coinage, and disappoint the principal object proposed by the legislation in view. I apprehend, therefore, that two con- ditions, one, that of a near approach to equality of commercial value between the gold and silver coinage of the same denomination, and the other, that of a limitation of the amounts for which the silver coinage is to be a legal tender, are PRESIDENT HAYES 97 essential to maintaining both in circulation. If these conditions can be successfully observed, the issue from the mint of silver dollars would afford material assistance to the community in the transition to redeemable paper money, and would facilitate the resumption of specie pay- ment and its permanent estabhshment. With- out these conditions I fear that only mischief and misfortune would flow from a coinage of silver dollars with the quahty of unlimited legal tender, even in private transactions." It is probable that these wise words of Presi- dent Hayes had some effect in preventing the passage in the Senate of the House Bill repealing the Resumption Act, but they did not prevent the passage of the Silver Bill. A large number of the conservative men of the country, of the Republican party as well as of the Democratic party, had become inoculated with the craze. The campaign for free silver became a sort of holy war for the "restoration of the people's birthright." Nevertheless, these publicly pro- nounced views of the President must have had some effect in imposing conservative action on the Silver Bill in the Senate. Under the leader- 98 THE ADMINISTRATION OF ship of Senator Allison the Bland Bill was modi- fied in several very important particulars. In place of the free-coinage provision on private account, the Bland-Allison Bill allowed only the coinage of silver on government account, limit- ing the amount which the government might coin to four millions of dollars a month, and fixing the amount which it must coin at two millions of dollars a month, and covering the seigniorage into the treasury of the United States. The process intended by the Bill was as follows: The government should purchase from two to four million dollars' worth of silver bullion per month, paying gold for it; coin be- tween two and four millions of dollars per month at the ratio of sixteen ounces of silver to one ounce of gold; allow the deposit of such silver dollars in the treasury of the United States, and issue silver certificates upon them in order to facilitate their circulation. The Bill made these silver dollars full legal tender in the payment of all debts, public or private, past or future, "ex- cept where otherwise expressly stipulated in the contract." In this form the Bill passed the Senate, was grudgingly concurred in by the PRESIDENT HAYES 99 House, and sent to the President for his signa- ture. The pressure upon the President to approve it was enormous. It was declared by the press of the whole country that the people by over- whelming majority were in favor of it, certainly the majority of both the Democratic and Re- publican members in both houses of Congress had voted in favor of it. Even Secretary Sher- man, the chief financial officer of the govern- ment, and by reputation the soundest financier in the country, favored it, or at least thought best not to oppose it. He thought that the country could keep the two million dollars a month of silver addition to the legal-tender coin money on a par with gold indefinitely. Not so the President. He saw clearer than Sherman, clearer than all the leaders of both parties put together, and clearer than all the people, that this amount of silver dollars could not be kept on a par with gold dollars, and that to pay our bonded debt with them would be partial repu- diation. He, therefore, vetoed the Bill without any regard to the effect of the veto upon his personal or political fortunes, and although he 100 THE ADMINISTRATION OF knew perfectly well that his veto would be over- ridden. The Bill was passed over the veto, and we started on the downward course pre- dicted by President Hayes. Year by year, yea, month by month, the gold in the treasury was exhausted to buy silver bullion, to the enrich- ment of the silver kings of the Rockies, the com- mercial value of the silver dollars steadily de- chned as they piled higher and higher in the vaults of the treasury, and in fifteen years the crisis of 1893 came upon us. Then the whole country saw how high above all his colleagues and contemporaries President Hayes had stood in prescience and moral firmness. The Resumption Act still stood, however, by the unconquerable support given it by the President and Secretary Sherman. By rigid economy in governmental expenditure, and by borrowing gold through bond issues, the adminis- tration succeeded in accumulating enough gold in the treasury, despite the enforced silver pur- chases, to warrant the government in declaring on January 1, 1879, that it would pay coin for paper whenever presented. So soon as the hold- ers of government notes knew that they could PRESIDENT HAYES 101 have coin for them on asking, they did not want it. More coin was offered the treasury for notes than was demanded from the treasury for notes. The President foresaw that this would be the result, and not wishing to have anything interfere with the operation of the Re- sumption Law, he had, in his annual message of December, 1878, recommended Congress to abstain from any financial legislation. By the close of the year 1879, however, resumption was so completely established, and business had so revived, that he could, without apprehension, request further legislation by Congress for im- proving the financial system. In his annual message of December 1, 1879, after having referred to the fact of resumption and the prosperity of the country in conse- quence of it, and to the fact that since the Bland- Allison silver coinage law had gone into effect and down to November 1, 1879, 45,000,850 silver dollars had been coined, of which only 12,700, 344 had gone into circulation while 32,300,506 still remained stacked up in the treasury, repre- senting just that much depletion of the gold re- serve and consequently just so much money 102 THE ADMINISTRATION OF withdrawn from circulation, he went on to say: "I would strongly urge upon Congress the im- portance of authorizing the Secretary of the Treasury to suspend the coinage of silver dollars upon the present legal ratio. The market value of the silver dollar being uniformly and largely less than the market value of the gold dollar, it is obviously impracticable to maintain them at par with each other if both are coined without limit. If the cheaper coin is forced into circu- lation, it will, if coined without limit, soon be- come the sole standard of value, and thus defeat the desired object, which is a currency of both gold and silver, which shall be of equivalent value, dollar for dollar, with the universally rec- ognized money of the world." The President saw clearly then that we could not keep a vol- ume of silver dollars, increasing by two millions of dollars a month, on a par with gold; that we should exhaust our gold to pay the mine owners for the silver bullion, and that we should soon be left on a monometallic basis of silver. He was in favor of coining all the silver money which could be maintained in circulation on a par with gold, but not a dollar more, and he PRESIDENT HAYES 103 saw in the piling-up of the silver dollars in the treasury the unanswerable evidence that we had already gone too far. The President said further: "The retirement from circulation of United States notes, with the capacity of legal tender in private contracts, is a step to be taken in our progress towards a safe and stable currency, which should be ac- cepted as the policy and duty of the govern- ment and the interest and security of the peo- ple. It is my firm conviction that the issue of legal-tender paper money, based wholly upon the authority and credit of the government, except in extreme emergency, is without war- rant in the Constitution and a violation of sound financial principles." Had Congress heeded the advice of the Presi- dent and taken then the steps recommended by him, the finances of the country would have been placed upon a perfectly solid and endur- ing basis, and we should have been saved all the loss and trouble which we have since suffered upon that subject. The President waited anxiously another year for Congress to show some response to his ap- 104 THE ADMINISTRATION OF peal, but in vain. He knew, however, that he was right, and he had the courage of his convic- tions. Undauntedly he made a final effort in his last annual message to move Congress to complete the good work done by his adminis- tration in what we may call the financial re- construction of the Union. He said: "There are still in existence uncan- celled $346,681,016 of United States legal-ten- der notes. These notes were authorized as a war measure, made necessary by the exigencies of the conflict in which the United States was then engaged. The preservation of the nation's existence required, in the judgment of Congress, an issue of legal-tender paper money. That it served well the purpose for which it was then created is not questioned, but the employment of the notes as paper money indefinitely, after the accomplishment of the object for which they were provided, was not contemplated by the framers of the law under which they were issued. These notes long since became, like any other pecuniary obligation of the government, a debt to be paid, and when paid to be cancelled as a mere evidence of an indebtedness no longer PRESIDENT HAYES 105 existing. I, therefore, repeat what was said in the annual message of last year, that the retire- ment from circulation of United States notes, with the capacity of legal tender in private contracts, is a step to be taken in our progress towards a safe and stable currency, which should be accepted as the policy and duty of the govern- ment and the interest and security of the peo- ple." Upon the silver question he said: "At the time of the passage of the act now in force re- quiring the coinage of silver dollars, fixing their value, and giving them legal-tender character, it was believed by many of the supporters of the measure that the silver dollar, which it authorized, would speedily become, under the operations of the law, of equivalent value with the gold dollar. There were other supporters of the Bill, who, while they doubted as to the probability of this result, nevertheless were willing to give the proposed experiment a fair trial, with a view to stop the coinage, if experi- ence should prove that the silver dollar author- ized by the Bill continued to be of less com- mercial value than the standard gold dollar. 106 THE ADMINISTRATION OF The coinage of silver dollars, under the act referred to, began in March, 1878, and has been continued as required by the act. The average rate per month to the present time has been $2,276,492. The total amount coined prior to the 1st of November last was $72,847,- 750. Of this amount $47,084,450 remain in the treasury, and only $25,763,'^291 are in the hands of the people. A constant effort has been made to keep this currency in circulation, and con- siderable expense has been necessarily incurred for this purpose; but its return to the treasury is prompt and sure. Contrary to the confident anticipation of the friends of the measure at the time of its adoption, the value of the silver dollar, containing four hundred and twelve and one-half grains of silver, has not increased. During the year prior to the passage of the Bill authorizing its coinage, the market value of the silver which it contained was from ninety to ninety-two cents as compared with the stand- ard gold dollar. During the last year the aver- age market value of the silver dollar has been eighty-eight and a half cents. "It is obvious that the legislation of the last PRESIDENT HAYES 107 Congress in regard to silver, so far as it was based upon an anticipated rise in the value of silver as a result of that legislation, has failed to produce the effect then predicted. The longer the law remains in force, requiring, as it does, the coinage of a nominal dollar which in reality is not a dollar, the greater becomes the danger that this country will be forced to ac- cept a single metal as the sole legal standard of value in circulation, and this a standard of less value than it purports to be worth in the recog- nized money of the world." The President then besought Congress to "repeal so much of existing legislation as required the coinage of silver dollars containing only four hundred and twelve and one-half grains of silver, and in its stead authorize the Secretary of the Treasury to coin silver dollars of equivalent value, as bullion, with gold dollars." But Congress still refused to listen to the voice of reason. The majority in both houses were Democrats, nearly all of whom were wedded to both the greenback and free-silver heresies, and many, nay most, of the Republicans were laboring under the same delusions. Even Sher- 108 THE ADMINISTRATION OF man was still undecided about the retirement of the greenbacks. President Hayes was, how- ever, entirely clear in his mind upon these sub- tle and complicated questions. He was wiser than any or all of his colleagues and contem- poraries in regard to them. Taught by bitter experience, we have taken one of the steps which the President recommended, viz.: the suspen- sion of the coinage of legal-tender silver dollars, but the other menace to our monetary system, the three hundred and forty-six millions of greenback currency, still remains, making our currency rigid instead of flexible, redundant at times when it should be curtailed, and insuffi- cient at times when it should be plentiful. Every sound financier knows that they ought to be retired, but the Congress and the voters are still not educated up to the adoption of such a measure. As to this. President Hayes still remains the prophet ahead of his time, but the true prophet whose time will surely come and whose teachings upon this subject also will surely prevail. I cannot, however, close this short account of President Hayes' great services to the financial PRESIDENT HAYES 109 development of his country without referring briefly to the great success of his administra- tion in the refunding of the pubhc debt and the great saving, in interest payment, to the nation. During the first three years of his term a sav- ing of some fifteen milhon dollars per annum had been effected in this manner, and he and his able Secretary, Mr. Sherman, had matured a plan and proposed it to Congress, which in the last year of his term would have saved the country twelve million dollars more per annum. The Democratic Congress, however, loaded the proposed measure down with wild amendments which, Mr. Sherman said, would have made *'the execution of the law practically impossi- ble." Among these amendments was one which the President believed would prove most destruc- tive to the national banking system. Its effect would have been, as he thought, and rightly thought, to have concentrated the banking facilities in the relatively few large cities to the great disadvantage of the smaller cities and towns and the mass of the people, especially in the agricultural communities. Much as it 110 PRESIDENT HAYES would have gratified him to have been able to say that the financial operations of his adminis- tration had saved the country, in the single matter of the refunding of the debt, over twenty-five millions of dollars in annual in- terest, instead of fifteen millions, he, never- theless, decided that he must forego the glory of this statement to do his country the greater, though to the people far less apparent, good of preserving the national banking system against monopolistic tendencies and later monopolistic development. He therefore vetoed the bill and thereby prevented its enactment into law. This was his last great service to the cause of sound public finance, and it manifested not only his deep insight into this intricate subject, but his singleness of purpose and his great power of dealing with everything touching his public duty entirely objectively, and without anyre- gard whatsoever to the effect of his decisions upon his personal or political fortunes or to the glory of success. LECTURE IV THE RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF THE GOVERN- MENT UPON ITS CONSTITUTIONAL FOUNDATION THE Civil War had subordinated all de- partments of the government to the executive as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and the period of reconstruc- tion had carried the pendulum to the other end of the arc, and made the legislature supreme. It remained for President Hayes' administra- tion to restore the constitutional equilibrium of independent co-ordinate departments, each act- ing within its own constitutionally prescribed sphere and all co-operating in the constitution- ally prescribed manner. President Hayes' activities as directed to- ward this end may be distinguished under three categories. First, his doctrine as to the presi- dential term. Second, his opposition to parlia- mentary government as unconstitutional and 111 112 THE ADMINISTRATION OF as irreconcilable with the principles of the Republic. Third, his reform of the civil service. First. It was President Hayes' firm behef that the admissibihty of a second term in the presidential office furnished temptations dan- gerous to, if not absolutely incompatible with, the most effective discharge of the duties of the great office. He was convinced that it was too severe a draft upon human nature to expect that any man under the temptation of securing a second term would not have his thoughts, time, and energies diverted, in a greater or less measure, from the discharge of his official duties to the work of bringing about his renomina- tion and his re-election. He also believed that the poHcies and official activities of a President under such a temptation would be, more or less, tainted with selfish considerations, which would blind his vision and demorahze his conscience. And, finally, he was clearly convinced that any reform in the official service, in middle and lower instance, could be secured only by eman- cipating the chief executive from any prospec- tive political obligations to these officials or anybody else. PRESIDENT HAYES 113 We find, consequently, in Mr. Hayes' letter of acceptance of the nomination to the presi- dency by the national convention of the Re- publican party, his firm and unalterable decla- ration that he would not accept the nomination for a second term, and in his inaugural address the proposal that a constitutional amendment should be adopted forbidding a re-election to the presidential office and extending the single term from a period of four to a period of six years. Nearly forty years have now passed since President Hayes made this wise recom- mendation, and it is not yet realized. I have no doubt that it will be finally realized. I am almost encouraged to think that it is nearer re- alization now than ever before. Men were in- chned to regard it then as a far-fetched ideal for transcendentalists to amuse themselves with. Now it is taken seriously and is a plank in the platform of one of the great parties. Come to it we must, if we would have a President of the whole country, with all his thought, time, and energy devoted to his official work, and an of- ficial system capable, efficient, and incorrupt- ible. 114 THE ADMINISTRATION OF Secondly, President Hayes' wise and cou- rageous struggle against the attempt to foist parliamentary government upon our country was much more immediately successful. The Constitution of the United States provides that all bills for the raising of revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives. Out of this power of the sole initiative of tax measures, the House of Representatives sought to develop a control of the entire budget, both of income and appropriation, such as that exercised by the British House of Commons, and then to use this power for forcing the consent of the Senate and the President to legislation contrary to their judgment and wishes. The course en- tered on by the House of Representatives for the attainment of this end was to tack the leg- islation, which it undertook to force through against the opposition of the Senate and the President, to the appropriation Bills for the support of the government, and hold up these until such legislation should be agreed to by them. It was not exactly a new thing at the time of the accession of Mr. Hayes to the presi- dency, but it had never before come to be so PRESIDENT HAYES 115 manifestly a struggle between two systems of government, the parliamentary system and the check-and-balance system. The struggle be- gan in the session of Congress of the year 1878-9. The Democrats had the majority in the House of Representatives, and the Republicans in the Senate. The Democrats from the South- ern States held the balance of power in their party. They were determined to abolish the acts of Congress relating to the disqualification of those who had taken part in the rebellion to act as jurors in the courts, and to the employ- ment of the army of the United States to keep the peace at the polls, and finally to the control of the national elections by national officials. The Democratic House attached provisions re- pealing these laws to several of the most im- portant appropriation Bills. The Republican Senate refused to pass the Bills with the riders, and the House refused to pass the Bills without them. The session closed on the 4th day of March, 1879, without having made any pro- vision for the support of the most important branches of the administration. 116 THE ADMINISTRATION OF President Hayes was, therefore, compelled to summon the new Congress, now Democratic in both houses, to extra session for the purpose of passing the appropriation bills. His message of summons was concise and to the point, and con- tained no argument in regard to the attitude of the late Congress, and no criticism upon it. It assumed that Congress would do its duty. It made a good impression upon the country, and the President started in with a fair field for the battle. The Congress passed, first, the appropriation Bill for the army, and tacked to it the repeal of the law authorizing the employ- ment of an armed force to keep the peace at the polls. The President sent his veto of this Bill to the House of Representatives on April 29, 1879. The President objected to the pro- visions of the Bill against using an armed force to keep the peace at the polls, on the ground that it left the civil oflScers of the elections without protection in case of riot, and without physical power to enforce the laws. But his chief ob- jection to the whole Bill was that, by the tack- ing process, it undertook to force the executive into submission to the legislature in a way not PRESIDENT HAYES 117 provided in the Constitution. His position was stated in the following words: "On the assembhng of this Congress, in pur- suance of a call for an extra session, which was made necessary by the failure of the Forty-fifth Congress to make the needful appropriations for the support of the government, the question was presented whether the attempt made in the last Congress to engraft by construction a new prin- ciple upon the Constitution should be persisted in or not. That principle is, that the House of Representatives has the sole right to originate bills for raising revenue and, therefore, has the right to withhold appropriations upon which the existence of the government may depend, unless the Senate and the President shall give their consent to any legislation which the House may see fit to attach to the appropriation Bills. To establish this principle is to make a radical, dangerous, and unconstitutional change in the character of our institutions. That a majority of the Senate now concurs in the claim of the House adds to the gravity of the situation, but does not alter the question at issue. The new doctrine, if maintained, will result in a consoli- 118 THE ADMINISTRATION OF dation of unchecked and despotic power in the House of Representatives. A bare majority of the House will become the government. The executive will no longer be, what the fram- ers of the Constitution intended, an equal and independent branch of the government. It is clearly the constitutional duty of the President to exercise his discretion and judgment upon all bills presented to him without constraint or duress from any other branch of the government. To say that a majority of either or both of the houses of Congress may insist on the approval of a bill under the penalty of stopping all of the operations of the government, for want of the necessary supplies, is to deny to the executive that share of the legislative power which is plainly conferred by the second section of the Seventh Article of the Constitution. It strikes from the Constitution the qualified negative of the President. It is said that this should be done because it is the peculiar function of the House of Representatives to represent the will of the people. But no single branch or depart- ment of the government has exclusive authority to speak for the American people. The most PRESIDENT HAYES 119 authentic and solemn expression of their will is contained in the Constitution of the United States. By that Constitution they have or- dained and established a government whose powers are distributed among co-ordinate branches, which, as far as possible, consistently with a harmonious co-operation, are absolutely independent of each other. The people of this country are unwilling to see the supremacy of the Constitution replaced by the omnipotence of any department of the government. "The enactment of this Bill into a law will establish a precedent which will tend to de- stroy the equal independence of the several branches of the government. Its principle places not merely the Senate and the executive, but the judiciary also, under the coercive dic- tation of the House. The House alone will be the judge of what constitutes a grievance, and also of the means and measures of redress. An act of Congress to protect elections is now the grievance complained of. But the House may on the same principle determine that any other act of Congress, a treaty made by the President, with the advice and consent of the 120 THE ADMINISTRATION OF Senate, a nomination or appointment to oflfice, or that a decision or opinion of the Supreme Court is a grievance, and that the measure of redress is to withhold the appropriations re- quired for the support of the offending branch of the government. Beheving that this Bill is a dangerous violation of the spirit and mean- ing of the Constitution, I am compelled to re- turn it to the House in which it originated without my approval. The qualified negative with which the Constitution invests the Presi- dent is a trust that involves a duty which he cannot decline to perform. With a firm and conscientious purpose to do what I can to pre- serve unimpaired the constitutional powers and equal independence, not merely of the execu- tive, but of every branch of the government, which will be imperilled by the adoption of the principle of this Bill, I desire earnestly to urge upon the House of Representatives a return to the wise and wholesome usage of the earlier days of the Republic, which excluded from ap- propriation Bills all irrelevant legislation. By this course you will inaugurate an important reform in the method of Congressional legisla- PRESIDENT HAYES 121 tion. Your action will be in harmony with the fundamental principles of the Constitution and the patriotic sentiment of nationality which is their firm support; and you will restore to the country that feeling of confidence and security and the repose which are so essential to the prosperity of all our fellow citizens." The houses of Congress were unable to pass the Bill over the veto, and they separated the two parts and passed the rider in a somewhat modified form which, however, failed under the veto of the President. Finally they passed the army appropriation Bill with a proviso that the army of the United States should not be used as a police force at the polls. As this was al- ready the law, the President allowed them to save their faces, in some measure, in this way, and signed the Bill. In the meanwhile the houses had tacked the repeal of the national election laws, under the form of such a modification of them as to make them almost incapable of enforcement, and of the juror's test oath, to the appropriation Bill for the support of the legislative, executive, and judicial departments of the government. After 122 THE ADMINISTRATION OF the crushing veto of the army appropriation Bill, they separated the Bill for the support of the legislative, executive, and judicial depart- ments into two measures, the one an appropria- tion Bill for the legislative and executive depart- ments without any rider of any kind, and the other an appropriation Bill for the judicial de- partment, with riders abolishing the juror's test oath and forbidding the use of any of the ap- propriation for enforcing the existing national election laws. The President vetoed this latter Bill on like grounds to those contained in the veto of the army appropriation Bill, and the houses were unable to pass the Bill over his veto. They now divided this Bill into two parts, the one an ap- propriation Bill for the judicial department without any rider, but without any provision for the payment of the United States marshals and deputy-marshals, and the other an appro- priation Bill for the payment of these with the rider, forbidding the use of any of the appro- priation for the enforcement of the national election laws. The President signed the former and vetoed the latter. The Congressional session PRESIDENT HAYES 123 closed without making any appropriation for the payment of the marshals and the deputy- marshals. Under exhortation and encourage- ment from the President, these kept on doing their duties patriotically without pay. At the next session, that of 1879-80, the houses passed an appropriation Bill for the payment of the marshals and deputy-marshals with a rider emas- culating that part of the existing law relating to the employment of special deputy -marshals. The President refused to have his consent to the rider, which he did not approve, forced by the tacking process and vetoed this Bill. The houses finally gave way entirely and passed the Bill without any rider. The President had won a double victory, and, in both parts, completely. He had vindicated the right and power of the national government to regulate by national law subjects made na- tional by the Constitution and to enforce such national law by national officials, and he had prevented the parliamentary system of govern- ment, the system of the sovereignty of the lower house of the legislature, the system which finally extinguishes all of the constitutional immunities 124 THE ADMINISTRATION OF of the individual, from displacing the check- and-balance system provided by the Constitu- tion for the purpose of maintaining and protect- ing those immunities. This alone would have been suflScient to have made President Hayes' administration immortal. His contemporaries recognized in some, though not in full, degree the value of the great service he had done the country. The President was not unduly elated by their approval. He knew perfectly the fick- leness of public opinion, and he had a fight on with the bosses of his party for the reform of the civil service which he knew well would strain the force of his favor with his party to the ut- most. He wrote in his diary: *'When The Tribune can say: *The President has the cour- tesy of a Chesterfield and the firmness of a Jackson,' I must be prepared for the reaction- ary counterblast." So soon as the President had settled the South- ern question by the withdrawal of the troops, he addressed himself to the great problem of improving the civil service. In the early days of the Republic, when the number of officials was relatively small, and before the European PRESIDENT HAYES 125 idea of permanency of term had given way to the new American idea of a change of all offi- cers at the beginning of each new administra- tion, it was possible for the President and the heads of the departments to select from among their personal acquaintances proper incumbents for the civil service of the government. After these changes, however, began to have their ap- preciable and then their full effect, in the sixth and seventh decades of the last century, it be- came more and more manifest that this was no longer possible. Already in the year 1853 and 1855 laws had been passed by Congress requir- ing examinations of candidates for office in the national civil service. The character of the examinations was not, however, fixed by these laws, and it soon became manifest that the ar- bitrariness and favoritism which had formerly characterized the appointments had only been transferred back to the determination of the admission to examination. By 1865, and with the great increase in the number of offices in the civil service, the griev- ance became a crying one, and in 1866 Mr. Jenckes, of Rhode Island, began the agitation for 126 THE ADMINISTRATION OF reform in the House of Representatives, and in 1869 Mr. Schurz, in the Senate. This agitation continued during the next four years, and in 1870 was increased and furthered by the rec- ommendations of President Grant in his annual message of that year. In this message Presi- dent Grant called the existing system of ap- pointment to the civil offices of the government an abuse, and asked that Congress immediately find the remedy for it. He said: "The present system does not secure the best men, not even fit men, for public place. The elevation and purification of the civil service of the govern- ment will be hailed with approval by the whole people of the United States." Under this pres- sure Congress passed the Act of March 3, 1871, vesting in the President the power to make rules and regulations for admission to the civil service of the government. The President immediately constituted a civil-service commission with Mr. George W. Curtis for its chairman. This commission adopted the principle of free competitive ex- aminations for admission to the civil service, admitting new men, through these, only to the PRESIDENT HAYES 127 lowest grades in the service and promoting from the lower to the higher grades. The hostility of the spoilsmen of both of the great parties, and especially of the Repubhcan, as the ruling party, to the new system of non-partisan, busi- ness administration in the middle and lower offices quickly manifested itself. Congress re- fused to continue the appropriation for the commission, and President Grant let the matter drop. The improvement in the service had, however, been so evident that the country clamored for the continuance of the reform. The national conventions of both of the great parties in 1876 contained civil-service-reform planks in their platforms. If the writers of these planks intended them simply for political effect, and supposed that the newly to be elected President would ignore them at a sign from the party leaders, they greatly misread the character of Mr. Hayes. In his letter of acceptance, and in his inaugural address, he dwelt particularly upon this subject, and gave strong evidence of his earnestness and determination concerning it. He declared in his inaugural address that the reform must be 128 THE ADMINISTRATION OF "thorough, radical, and complete," and indicated what he meant by this, viz.: appointment on the ground of capacity alone; security of tenure on the ground of honesty and faithful perform- ance of duty; and freedom from any of the re- quirements of partisan service. It was in this connection that he used the famous sentence which has taken its place among American political maxims, and to which I have already referred: "He serves his party best who serves his country best." In the carrying out of this reform it was upon Mr. Schurz more than upon any other member of his Cabinet that President Hayes relied. Mr. Schurz was the idealist, with great historical knowledge and a wide, practical experience both in Europe and America. He had the indepen- dence of superior knowledge, and the strength and tenacity of absolute uprightness. Presi- dent Hayes knew well his great worth and gave him unreserved confidence. The President ap- pointed him with Mr. Evarts, at the very outset, as a committee of the Cabinet for formulating the regulations governing appointments. Evi- dently the President was determined to take the PRESIDENT HAYES 129 matter of civil-service reform into his own hands and not wait for the action of Congress. Sec- retary Schurz immediately reformed his own department on the principles laid down in the President's inaugural address, and made it the model and the object-lesson for all the others and for the entire service. Everything super- fluous was done away with, all incompetent or unfaithful persons were dismissed, and honesty, capacity, efficiency, and fidelity to duty became the sole ground of appointment to, continuance in, and advancement in, office. All the de- partments at Washington quickly followed the example of the Department of the Interior, and a marked improvement was distinctly observed throughout all the offices at the national capital. The next step was to extend the reform from Washington throughout the country. The most important place in the whole country, outside of Washington, required it most pressingly, viz.: the New York custom house. Two- thirds of the customs revenue of the entire na- tion were collected there. Two-thirds of the imports of the entire nation passed through its gates. Here, therefore, was the greatest pos- 130 THE ADMINISTRATION OF sible opportunity for political favoritism, in- competency, fraud, and corruption. And this possible opportunity had been well improved. The place was filled with holders of sinecures, pot-house politicians, and incompetents. Graft abounded everywhere, from passing dutiable articles of personal baggage for a tip to under- valuing the imports made by New York City merchants who had sufficient political influence to bring it about. Secretary Sherman appointed an investigating committee with the venerable and upright John Jay as its chairman, who re- ported the most scandalous condition of affairs and recommended its speedy and radical cure. On the 26th of May, 1877, the President sent Secretary Sherman a written communication approving the recommendations of the com- mittee. He wrote: "It is my wish that the collection of the revenues shall be free from partisan control, and organized on a strictly business basis, with the same guarantees for effi- ciency and fidelity required by a prudent mer- chant. Party leaders should have no more in- fluence in appointments than other equally respectable citizens. No assessment for politi- PRESIDENT HAYES 131 cal purposes on officers or subordinates should be allowed. No useless officer or employee should be retained. No officer should be re- quired or permitted to take part in the manage- ment of political organizations, caucuses, con- ventions, or election campaigns. Their right to vote, and to express their views on public questions, either orally or through the press, is not denied, provided it does not interfere with their official duties." Here was the whole system of civil-service reform in a nutshell. The RepubHcan pohti- cians were against it tooth and nail. They saw in it their loss of patronage, and they declared that to deny to the office-holders the leadership in the caucuses and conventions would disrupt the party and doom it to defeat. But the Presi- dent was neither frightened nor intimidated. On the 22d day of June, 1877, he caused a letter to be addressed to all civil officers of the govern- ment containing the following instructions: "No officer should be required or permitted to take part in the management of poHtical organiza- tions, caucuses, conventions, or election cam- paigns. The right to vote and to express their 132 THE ADMINISTRATION OF views on public questions, either orally or through the press, is not denied, provided it does not interfere with their official duties. No assessment for political purposes, on officers or subordinates, should be allowed. This rule is applicable to every department of the civil service. It should be understood by every officer of the general government that he is ex- pected to conform his conduct to its require- ments." The President thus threw down the gauge of battle to the spoilsmen everywhere. He pursued his course without wavering, but was able to execute his order only in part. His opponents pointed to the Republican defeats in the State elections in the autumn of 1877 as the fruit of his policy of denying to the officials the control of the party organization. He ad- mitted that the first effect of this policy was dis- organizing, but contended that this would be speedily followed by a better and purer organiza- tion, and he called upon Congress, in his message of December 3, 1877, to revive the civil-service commission, constituted by the law of March 3, 1871, still in existence, by making a suitable PRESIDENT HAYES 133 appropriation for its support. Pronunciamentos and recommendations would not, however, solve the question. The order of June 22d must be enforced, and enforced, first of all, against the highest offenders. These were the officers of the New York custom house, Mr. Chester A. Arthur, the collector, and Mr. Alonzo B. Cor- nell, the naval officer. These men openly de- fied the order and continued managing the conventions and caucuses of the Republican party. Mr. Cornell persisted in holding his place as the chairman of the Republican State committee of the State of New York. Presi- dent Hayes first asked these two men to resign their offices. They ignored his request and he nominated Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., and Mr. L. Bradford Prince to take their places. At the same time he nominated Mr. Edwin A. Merritt to take the place of Mr. Sharpe, whose term as surveyor of the port had expired. As the Senate was in session these nominations went to it immediately for confirmation. Since Mr. Merritt's nomination was to a vacancy, the Senate confirmed it, but Senator Conkling and his spoilsmen colleagues were able, after a fierce 134 THE ADMINISTRATION OF and acrimonious debate, to reject the nomina- tions of Roosevelt and Prince, and keep Mr. Arthur and Mr. Cornell in their places. The President remained, however, undaunted by this defeat. He wrote in his memorandum of events: "I am right, and shall not give up the contest." He waited until the session of the Senate expired, and, it having daily become more manifest that the reforms could not be car- ried out in the New York custom house with Arthur and Cornell as collector and naval offi- cer, backed by Conkling and the spoilsmen, he suspended them from office and appointed Mr. Merritt, the surveyor of the port, to the collec- torship, and Mr. Silas W. Burt, the deputy naval officer, to the surveyorship. Of course, these names had, according to the existing Tenure of Office Acts, to be submitted to the Senate for confirmation upon the reassembly of the body, i. e., in December of 1878. So soon as this was done, the contest broke out anew and raged for nearly two months. At last the President, judging the moment opportune, sent a message to the Senate, enclosing a letter from the Secre- tary of the Treasury which exposed the scandals PRESIDENT HAYES 185 of the custom house so thoroughly that many of the senators saw that the courtesy of the Senate for Mr. ConkHng could no longer with- stand the popular displeasure. On the 3d of February, 1879, the Senate confirmed the Presi- dent's nominations, and the great battle was won. The President now caused a code of rules to be formulated regulating appointments to, pro- motion in, and dismissal from, office in the civil service, divorcing the service entirely from poli- tics and basing it on ability, honesty, and effi- ciency, as determined impartially by competitive examinations and actual work. This code was framed primarily for the New York custom house and post-office, but it was put in opera- tion in all the great administrative offices throughout the country. It will be seen, however, that the civil-ser- vice reform as instituted by President Hayes was one founded on rules issued wholly by the Executive Department of the government, and put in practice by the officers in each depart- ment. In a monarchy, that is, in a government where the executive holds his office for life and 136 THE ADMINISTRATION OF by the tenure of hereditary right, such a reform may be, probably would be, permanent; but in a government where the executive is elected and holds for a short term of years, it is exposed to the risk of vicious modifications and even total abandonment. Naturally, therefore, Presi- dent Hayes sought to give his great work per- manence by appealing to Congress to put it on the foundation of organic statutes. In his annual message of December 1, 1879, he transmitted to Congress an elaborate re- port by Mr. D. B. Eaton, the chairman of the civil-service commission, who generously served without compensation in that capacity, urged Congress to co-operate with the executive in furthering the reform and in placing it upon the basis of Congressional statutes instead of execu- tive ordinances, and recommended a suitable appropriation for the support of the work of the civil-service commission in extending the reform throughout every branch of the admin- istrative service. Still Congress, composed now in both branches of Democrats in majority, would not heed him. He struggled on another year, doing everything in his power without PRESIDENT HAYES 137 the support of statutory provisions and perma- nent laws. The service was improving all the time, however, and while he was subjected to fierce criticism from the spoilsmen, on the one side, whom he was depriving of patronage, and from the radical reformers on the other, for whom he did not advance fast enough, he never- theless built steadily the structure, which was never again completely demolished, and which is now at last fairly well established. In his final annual message, that of December 6, 1880, he made a last vigorous appeal to Con- gress to give his great work the permanency of law. He told Congress that the stabiHty of the government was threatened by the dangers of patronage, i. e., of appointments upon recom- mendation by the members of Congress "for personal or partisan considerations," and that these dangers increased with "the enlargement of the administrative service and the growth of the country in population." He implored Con- gress to meet these dangers and dispel them by laws confirming and making universal the sys- tem of competitive examinations for appoint- ment, which he bad instituted, reUeving the 138 THE ADMINISTRATION OF members of Congress from "the demands made upon them by their constituents with reference to appointments to office, defining the relations of the members of Congress to the same, enabhng the officers of the government to safely refuse demands upon their salaries for political pur- poses, and making regular and sufficient appro- priation of funds for supporting and developing the work of the civil-service commission." He also begged Congress to repeal the vicious Ten- ure of Office Act of March 2, 1867, which had contributed so greatly to the demoralization of the civil service, in high instance, by giving the confidential advisers of the President a power over him, at the pleasure of the Senate, most destructive to the proper order of authority in the administration of the government. But Congress was as deaf as ever to his plea, and he left the great office three months later with the feeling that the great structure which he had reared rested only upon a foundation of sand. But it was not so. His work had been a great object-lesson to the American people, and it has never again been possible for any subsequent administration to ignore it. He had PRESIDENT HAYES 139 builded better than he knew, and it was vouch- safed to him by a kind Providence to see that himself before he was gathered to his fathers. The settlement of the Southern question, the / resumption of specie payment, and the reform of governmental practice and service were the \ great achievements of the Hayes administra- tion, but other things were successfully accom- plished, always with the same sound judgment and in the same high tone. There were serious disturbances with Mexico attending the violent advent of Porfirio Diaz to the presidency of that turbulent people not at all unlike what has been taking place there during the last two or three years. Mr. Hayes was no more pleased with the way Diaz came to the presidency than was Mr. Wilson with the supposed or assumed complicity of Huerta in the killing of Madero, and there were the same violations of, and dangers to, American interests, and the same boundary infractions by Mexican marauders to be dealt with. But Mr. Hayes was a practical statesman, of refined manners, and he had at his council-table in the Department of Foreign Affairs a rather indifferent politician indeed, but 140 THE ADMINISTRATION OF the best international lawyer in the country, and while the administration "waited watch- fully" for Diaz to re-establish order at the cen- tre, and threw nothing in the nature of ideal Democratic principles in his way, and extended no aid to his adversaries, it sent General Ord and the soldiers to the Rio Grande and in- structed him to protect our boundary and, if necessary, to pursue those infracting it into Mexico and punish them and recapture stolen property, with the result that Diaz became firmly established and universally commanding, and to Mexico was vouchsafed thirty-five years of such peace and prosperity as it had never before en- joyed and, I fear, never will again. The policy of the President in the Chinese question was no less wise, just, firm, and suc- cessful. The Pacific coast was roused to a frenzy of excitement over the influx of the quiet, in- dustrious Chinese laborers, and demanded the instant abrogation, by Congressional act, of our treaty with China allowing the free ingress of the subjects of each country to the other. Con- gress, under the influence of political pressure, passed the act abrogating the treaty, but the PRESIDENT HAYES 141 President vetoed it on the ground that, except under dire necessity, which did not then exist, it would be a violation of international good faith, and the houses were unable to repass it in sufficient majority to overcome the veto. The President then took the matter up diplo- matically with the Chinese government and secured by mutual agreement the desired relief. It was during President Hayes' administra- tion also that the French Republic undertook, through nominally private enterprise, to get hold of the construction and control of the con- nection by canal of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Isthmus of Panama, and it was President Hayes who, first of American Presidents, formulated the policy of the United States in regard to such a waterway. In a special message of March 8, 1880, the President declared : "The policy of this country is a canal under American control. The United States cannot consent to the surrender of this control to any European power or to any combination of Euro- pean powers. If existing treaties between the United States and other nations, or if the rights 142 THE ADMINISTRATION OF of sovereignty or property of other nations, stand in the way of this poHcy — a con- tingency which is not apprehended — suitable steps should be taken by just and liberal ne- gotiations to promote and establish the Ameri- can policy on this subject, consistently with the rights of the nations to be affected by it." President Hayes did not live to see the prin- ciple which he formulated regarding the Panama Canal realized, but I venture to say that had he been in the presidential chair when the time was ripe for it, he would have acted with no less decision and effectiveness, though perhaps with more impeccable diplomacy, than his suc- cessor in office did. Returning again from the foreign to the do- mestic field, we must not overlook the great fact that President Hayes' administration found the key to the solution of our long- vexing Indian problem, and advanced that solution many stages towards completion. To his brilliant Secretary of the Interior, the statesman with a conscience and an ideal. President Hayes him- self was accustomed to ascribe the success of his administration in the handling of the Indian PRESIDENT HAYES 143 problem. But we must remember that it was President Hayes' sound judgment of men that brought Mr. Schurz into his Cabinet against great opposition by the leaders of the Repub- lican party. What Mr. Schurz did also was done with President Hayes' approval and sup- port, and, therefore, while still attributing to Mr. Schurz the initiative in this great work, we must consider it one of the great achieve- ments of President Hayes' administration. The elements of the Indian policy were simple as all great things are simple. They were, first, the education of the Indians in schools apart from their tribes, and in the practical things of civilized life. Promising boys and girls, judi- ciously selected, were sent to the Hampton In- stitute. The cavalry barracks at Carlisle were assigned to Mr. Schurz' s department for a school entirely for the Indians, and another school for them was established at Forest Grove, in the State of Oregon. In the second place, the allotment to individuals of small farms in complete separate ownership, under the limita- tion that they could not, for a term of years, be disposed of by their owners. In the third place, 144 THE ADMINISTRATION OF the sale of the remaining lands of the reserva- tions to white settlers and the devotion of the proceeds to the Indian fund for their benefit and support. And in the fourth place, the training of the Indians to keep order among themselves by the organization of an Indian police force officered by whites. So rapid was the progress of the Indians under this policy that President Hayes had the great satisfaction of writing in his last annual message : "It gives me great pleasure to say that our Indian affairs appear to be in a more hopeful condition now than ever before. The Indians have made gratifying progress in agriculture, herding, and mechanical pursuits. Many who were a few years ago in hostile conflict with the government are quietly settling down on farms, where they hope to make their permanent homes, building houses and engaging in the oc- cupations of civilized life. The organization of a police force of Indians has been equally suc- cessful in maintaining law and order upon the reservations, and in exercising a wholesome moral influence upon the Indians themselves." We of to-day, the fortunate heirs of the re- PRESIDENT HAYES 145 suits of this wise policy, know that we have now no longer a dangerous Indian problem, and we dare not forget to whom we owe our success in preserving to civilization the remnants of a once powerful race, a race which yielded to us the possession of the continent. Such was, in outhne, barest outline, the ad- ministration of Rutherford B. Hayes as the nineteenth President of the United States. It is a topic upon which volumes could be easily written, but when we say, in a single paragraph, that when he left the presidential office the coun- try enjoyed profound peace and friendship with every country of the world, that every great in- ternal problem — the Southern problem, the cur- rency problem, the civil-service problem, and the Indian problem — had been solved or put upon the right course of solution, that the whole country was prosperous and happy, and that his party had been restored to power in all branches of the government, we certainly shall have presented proof undeniable of the high suc- cess of Mr. Hayes' administration; and when we compare the situation at the end of it with the situation of chaos, confusion, and bad tem- 146 THE ADMINISTRATION OF per reigning everywhere and at all points in the beginning of it, we must conclude that no wiser, sounder, and more successful presidential period has ever been experienced by this coun- try. If Kenyon College had never done any- thing more for the country and the world than to start Rutherford B. Hayes on the course of his higher education, it would still have vindi- cated its title to existence and perpetuation and to the respect and veneration of the nation which he served and honored in the highest capacity which can fall to the lot of man. In estimating the great services of President Hayes to his country, there is, however, one more very important factor to be taken into the account, and I cannot regard this series of lectures upon the administration of President Hayes as complete without a few words upon the administration of Mrs. Hayes. When Mrs. Hayes went to Washington as "the first lady of the land," the society of the capital and of the official circles had reached almost the limit of vulgarity, ostentation, extravagance, and, in many cases, debauchery. Much of the official corruption which then prevailed has been ac- PRESIDENT HAYES 147 counted for by the pressure which the men found themselves under in order to provide dress and entertainment for the women. Smoking, drinking, gambhng prevailed everywhere. And it is not too severe to say that common taste and bad manners were to be met with in the White House itself. With the advent of Mrs. Hayes as its mistress, everything was changed, changed radically and in the twinkling of an eye. Simplicity, modesty, refinement, unfailing courtesy, incomparable tact, genuine cordiality, temperate living, and high thinking took the place of qualities which patriotism forbids me from properly designating. The very highest type of genuine Americanism, of the genuine American family life, had now, most fortunately for the country and at the most necessary mo- ment, become the model in highest place for the imitation of the nation. The influence of it was felt immediately through the oflScial cir- cles, through the society of the capital, and gradually through the entire land. There was some ill-natured criticism on the absence of wines and alcoholic beverages from the White House entertainments, but Mrs. Hayes' one 148 THE ADMINISTRATION OF experience with them at the banquet given in the second month of her Washington hfe to a couple of Russian grand dukes was enough to determine her unalterably to banish them from her table. Her entertainments were generous and very frequent, and she kept the mansion full of house-parties, while literary, musical, and artistic functions were preferred above all others. In a word, the White House became, under the administration of Mrs. Hayes, a seat of finest culture for the refinement of the soci- ety of the capital and the country. Since her day and after her example Washington society has never dropped back again to the low level of 1876. But Mrs. Hayes' administration went much further than the social regeneration of the cap- ital, and through it, in some degree at least, of the country. She possessed two qualities which strengthened the character of the President mightily and sustained him powerfully in his work. The one was her passion, I might almost say, for aiding others and making others happy, and the unconsciousness of self which is always the accompaniment of this high virtue. This PRESIDENT HAYES 149 more than anything else was the secret of her personal fascination, and it elevated the spirit and character of every human being with whom she came in contact. What an ennobling in- fluence it must have had upon the mind and heart of the man who was privileged to live with her in perfect accord for so many years ! The President said of her after her departure had left him desolate: "I think of her as the golden rule incarnate." It is impossible to calculate the value of such a woman, as life companion, to a man in any station, so much more in high station, and so much more still in the highest station. The friends and supporters which, by this quality, she drew to the President were in- numerable; but more than all this it was the influence exerted upon the development and re- finement of his own character which must be reckoned as of supreme importance. The second quality was her absolute faith and confidence in her husband, in his abihty, his truthfulness, his conscientiousness, his integ- rity, his singleness of purpose, and his loyalty. Misunderstood, criticised, abused, and maligned, he could always turn to her, not for blind de- 150 PRESIDENT HAYES votion, but for intelligent appreciation, wise counsel, friendly advice, and for complete un- derstanding of his purposes. There is no force under heaven so calculated to put clearness and correctness into a man's judgment, courage into his heart, and rectitude into his motives as such faith and confidence on the part of a pure, noble, intelligent, whole-hearted, and unselfish woman, for whose truthfulness of mind and character his respect knows no limits. Under such an influence it is no wonder that the personal and family life of President Hayes was impeccable, and his political life incorruptible. It would have put lofty ideals and exalted purposes into a man of far less original virtue than was Presi- dent Hayes' heritage. As it was, and taken all in all, the historian can say conscientiously and without exaggeration, that the finest examples of genuine American manhood and womanhood who ever occupied the White House of the na- tion were Rutherford Birchard and Lucy Webb Hayes. INDEX INDEX Appointment to federal office, 16. Appropriation bills, 115, 122. Army Appropriation Bill, 10. Arthur, Chester A., 133. Blaine, James G., 30, 58, 64, 87. Bland Bill, 28, 98, 101, 105. Bristow, Secretary, 31. Cabinet, 58, 66. Canvassing boards. State, 41, 47, 48, 72. Certification of electors, 40. Chamberlain, Governor, 73, 77. Character of Hayes, 32, 150. Chinese question, 140. Civil Service Commission, 20, 126, 132. Civil Service Reform, 125, 131. Coinage history, 25. Coinage of silver, 27, 92, 95, 106, Commission to Louisiana, 82. Congressional plan, 4, 8. Conkling, Roscoe, 30, 58, 133, 135. Cornell, Alonzo B., 133. Corruption in civil service, 18. Counting of electoral votes, 42. Cronin, elector, 53. Currency question, 91. Curtis, George W., 126. Election law, 37. Electoral Commission, 44, 49, 52, 54. Evarts, William M., 59, 128. Federal patronage under Grant, 15. Financial question, 90. Fish, Secretary, 30. Florida, 7, 39, 47, 49, 71. Free coinage of silver, 27. Governor's certificate of election, 41. Grant, President U. S., 14, 19, 29, 126. Greenback currency, 24. Greenback question, 103, 108. Grover, Governor, 52. Hampton, Wade, 73, 78. Hartranft, Governor, 32. Hayes, Mrs., 2, 56, 146. Inaugural address, 57. Indian problem, 142. Johnson, President Andrew, 9, 13. Johnston, General, 63. Joint rule of Congress, 43. Davis, Justice David, 46. Devens, Judge Charles, 64. Diaz, Porfirio, 139. Kenyon College, 1, 36, 146. Key, David M., 63, 66. Ku-Klux Klan, 6. 163 154 INDEX Legal tender, 24. Lincoln-Johnson plan, 3. Louisiana, 7, 39, 47, 50, 72, 73, 82. McCrary, George W., 65. McCuUoch, Secretary Hugh, 23. Messages: Annual, 1877,93; 1879, 101, 13G; 1880, 104, 137, 144; on Panama Canal, 141; on Rela- tion of Departments, 117; on Resumption, 93. Mexico, 139. Military rule, 7. Morton, Oliver P., 31, 64. National banking system, 109. New York custom house, 129. Nichols, Governor Francis T., 73, 82. Oregon, 39, 48, 52. Packard, Governor, 73, 82. Panama Canal, 141. Panic of '73, 90. Parliamentary system, 114, 117, 123. Prince, L. Bradford, 133. Reconstruction: Congressional plan, 4, 8; Lincoln-Johnson plan, 3; military rule, 7. Refunding public debt, 109. Relation of departments, 114. Report of Louisiana Commission, 83. Republican Convention of 1876, 35. Resumption of specie payments, 28, 91, 101. Riders to appropriations, 115, 121. Roosevelt, Theodore, Sr., 133. Rules for Civil Service, 135. Schurz, Carl, 61, 126, 128, 143. Selection of electors, 38. Senate action on Cabinet, 66. Sherman, John, 60, 67, 100, 109, 130. Silver Bill, 92, 97. Single term, 112. South Carolina, 7, 39, 47, 49, 72, 73, 77. Southern question, settlement of, 74, 89. Speculation, 22. Stalwarts, 68, 71, 75, 88. Stanton, Edwin M., 12. State power over Federal elections, 38. Stearns, Governor, 47. Siunmary of administration, 145. Tenure of Offoe Act, 9, 12, 138. Term of President, 112. Thompson, Colonel Richard W., 64. Tilden, Samuel J., 47, 48, 50. Tribune, The New York, 124. Twenty-second Joint Rule, 43. U. S. Notes, 103, 108. Vetoes, 99, 110, 116, 120, 122, 141. Watts, Republican elector, 52. Wheeler, W. H., 32. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 013 789 637