THE HAYES ADMINISTRATION

The reËlection of Grant in 1872 was almost automatic. No new issue had forced itself into politics to stir up the old party fires or light new ones. The old issues had begun to lose their force. Men ceased to respond when told that the Union was in danger; they questioned or ignored the statement. Many of them contradicted it and voted for Greeley in 1872, but they were impelled to this by repulsion from Republican practice rather than by attraction to Democratic promise. Yet, on the whole, the habit of voting the Union or Republican ticket retained its hold on so many in the North that Grant's second term was insured, and it was even possible that a Republican successor might profit by the same political inertia.

The second term (1873-77) added no strength to Grant or to his party. Throughout its course, administrative scandals continued to come to light, striking at times dangerously near the President, but failing to injure him other than in his repute for judgment. The period was one of financial depression and discouragement. The best intellect of the United States was directed into business, the professions, and educational administration. Politics was generally left to the men who had already controlled it, and these were the men who had risen into prominence in the period of the Civil War.

THE POLITICAL SITUATION AT WASHINGTON, 1869-1917

Showing the party in control of the national government in each Congress

politics
politics

A new and not a better type was brought into American politics by the Civil War. Notwithstanding the bad manners and excesses of ante-bellum politics, the leaders had been men of defined policy, only occasionally reaching high office through trickery or personal appeal. Now came the presence of an intense issue which smoothed out other differences, magnified a single policy,—the saving of the Union,—and gave opportunity to a new type of intense, patriotic, narrow mind. Men of this type dominated in the reconstruction days. As the sixties advanced, their number was recruited by men who had won prominence and popularity on the battlefield, who used military fame as a step into politics, and who came into public life with qualifications adapted to an issue that was closed.

Few of the leaders of the period 1861 to 1876 ever grew into an understanding of problems other than those of the Civil War. The most eminent of them were gone before the latter year. Lincoln was dead; Grant had had two terms; Stevens was gone; Sumner had been driven from party honor before his death; Chase had died Chief Justice, but unhappy. With these men living, lesser men had remained obscure. As they dropped out, a host of minor leaders, trained to a disproportionate view of the war and ignorant of other things, controlled affairs.

About these men the scandals of the Grant Administrations clustered, and their standards came to be those of the Republican party organization. They represented a dead issue, which they had never directed when it was alive, and were chosen by voters whose choice had become automatic. In their hands office tended to become a thing to be enjoyed for its own sake, not a trust to be fulfilled.

If the Republican organization was drifting into the control of second-rate men who misrepresented the rank and file, the status of the opposition was no better. At the South the Democratic party was openly founded on force and fraud. In the deliberate judgment of the white population of the South, negro control was intolerable and worse than any variety of political corruption that might be necessary to prevent it. The leaders of the party in this section had borne so important a part in the Confederacy that it was hopeless to think of them for national leaders, while they could meet the Northern charge of fraud only by the assertion of a greater alternate evil, which their opponents would not recognize as such. The South could be counted on for Democratic votes, but not as yet for leaders.

In the North and West the Democratic party was still weakened by its past. Its leaders of the early sixties, where they had not joined the Union party, were Copperheads, and were as little available as ex-Confederates. One of them, Seymour, whose loyalty, though he was in opposition to Lincoln, is above question, had been nominated and defeated in 1868. So few had been available in 1872 that the party had been reduced to the indorsement of Horace Greeley. Even the scandals of the Republican administration could not avail the Democrats unless a leader could be found free from the taint of treason and copperheadism and strong enough to hold the party North and South.

In the paucity of leaders during Grant's second Administration the Democrats turned to New York where a reform governor was producing actual results and restoring the prestige of his party. Like other Democrats of his day, Samuel J. Tilden had few events in his life during the sixties to which he could "point with pride" in the certain assurance that his fellow citizens would recognize and reward them. He had been a civilian and a lawyer. He had not broken with his party on its "war a failure" issue in 1864. He had acted harmoniously with Tammany Hall while it began its scheme of plunder, in New York City. But he had turned upon that organization and by prosecuting the Tweed Ring had made its real nature clear. Within the party he had led the demand to turn the rascals out, and had been elected Governor of New York on this record in 1874. As Governor he had proved that public corruption was non-partisan and had exposed fraud among both parties so effectively that he was clearly the most available candidate when the Democratic Convention met in St. Louis in 1876.

The only competitors of Tilden for the Democratic nomination were "favorite sons." Thomas A. Hendricks, a Greenbacker, was offered by Indiana and pushed on the supposition that this doubtful State could not be carried otherwise. Pennsylvania presented the hero of Gettysburg, General Winfield Scott Hancock, through whom it was hoped to bring to the Democratic ticket the aid of a good war record. The other candidates received local and scattering votes, and altogether they postponed the nomination for only one ballot. On the first ballot Tilden started with more than half the votes; on the second he had nearly forty more than the necessary two thirds. Hendricks got the Vice-Presidency, and the party entered the campaign upon a program of reform.

The Republicans had completed their nominations some weeks before the Democrats met, and having no unquestioned leader had been forced to adjust the claims of several minor men. Six different men received as many as fifty votes on one ballot or another, but only three factions in the party stood out clearly. The Administration group had sounded the public on a third term for Grant, and receiving scanty support had brought forward Conkling, a shrewd New York leader, and Morton, war Governor of Indiana. The out-and-out reformers were for Bristow, who had made a striking reputation as Secretary of the Treasury, over the frauds of the Whiskey Ring. Between the two groups was the largest single faction, which stood for James G. Blaine from first to last.

The political fortunes of James G. Blaine prove the difficulty with which a politician brought up in the Civil War period retained his leadership in the next era. Blaine had been a loyal and radical Republican through the war. Gifted with personal charms of high order, he had built up a political following which his unswerving orthodoxy and his service as Speaker of the House of Representatives served to widen. Never a rich man, he had felt forced to add to his salary by speculations and earnings on the side. In these he had come into contact with railroad promoters and had not seen the line beyond which a public man must not go, even in the sixties. His indiscretions had imperiled his reputation at the time of the CrÉdit Mobilier scandal. They became common property when an old associate forced him to the defensive on the eve of the convention of 1876. In the dramatic scene in the House of Representatives when Blaine read the humiliating "Mulligan" letters that he had written years before, tried to explain them, and denounced his enemies, he convinced his friends of his innocence, and evidenced to all his courage and assurance. But his critics, reading the letters in detail, were confirmed in their belief that if his official conduct was not criminal, it was at least improper, and that no man with a blunted sense of propriety ought to be President.

Despite all opposition, Blaine might have won the nomination had not a sunstroke raised a question as to his physical availability. He led for six ballots in the convention, and only on the seventh could his opponents agree upon the favorite son of Ohio, General Rutherford B. Hayes, who added to military distinction a good record as Governor of his State.

Neither Hayes nor Tilden represented a political issue. Each had been nominated because of availability, and each party contained many voters on each side of every question before the public. Even the appeal to loyalty and Union, which had worked in three campaigns, failed to stir the States. Blaine, expert in the appeal, had revived it over the proposition to extend pardon and amnesty to Jefferson Davis, but his frantic efforts, as he waved the "bloody shirt," evoked no general enthusiasm. The war and reconstruction were over, but the old parties had not learned it.

There was doubt throughout the canvass as to the nature of the issue, and when the votes were counted there was equal doubt as to which of the candidates had been elected. Tilden had received a popular plurality over Hayes of about 250,000 votes, but it was not certain that these carried with them a majority of the electoral college. Of the 369 electoral votes, Tilden and Hendricks had, without question, 184; while Hayes and Wheeler were equally secure in 166. The remaining 19 (Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina) were claimed by both parties, and it appeared that both claims were founded on widespread fraud. Unless all these 19 votes could be secured, Hayes was defeated, and to obtain them the Republican party set to work.

For weeks between the election and the counting of the electoral votes the United States debated angrily over the result. The Constitution required that when Congress should meet in joint session to hear the returns, the Vice-President should preside, and should open the certificates from the several States; and that the votes should then be counted. It was silent as to the body which should do the counting, or should determine which of two doubtful returns to count. Since the outcome of the election would turn upon the answer to this question, it was necessary to find some solution before March 4, 1877.

Failing to find in the Constitution a rule for determining cases such as this, Congress made its own, and created an Electoral Commission to which the doubtful cases were to be submitted. This body, fifteen in number, five each from Senate, House, and Supreme Court, failed, as historians have since failed, to convince the United States that the claims of either Republican or Democratic electors were sound. Honest men still differ in their beliefs. The members came out of the Commission as they went in, firm in the acceptance of their parties' claims, and since eight of the fifteen members were Republican, the result was a decision giving none of the nineteen contests to Tilden, and making possible the inauguration of Rutherford B. Hayes.

There was bitter partisanship shown over the contest, and the Democrats, with a real majority of popular votes, maintained that they had been robbed of the Presidency. Excepting this, there was no issue that clearly separated the followers of Hayes from those of Tilden when the former took the oath of office. There was likewise, unhappily for Hayes, no common bond by which the President could hold his own party together and make a successful administration.

Like three of his predecessors, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Martin Van Buren, Hayes was carried into office by the weight of a well-organized machine, rather than by his own hold upon the people. Like all of them he fought faction as a consequence, and every new step in administration forced upon him increased his embarrassment in conducting the Government. At the start, he alienated many Republicans by his policy toward the South.

Before the election Hayes had reached the conclusion that coercion in the South must be abandoned. The people must be left in control of their own institutions, and if they mishandled them must take the consequences. This meant that the last of the States, in which only the army garrisons had kept the Republicans in office, must revert to the control of the Democrats. It also meant an attack upon the President by those who still believed the South a menace, and those who cherished it as a political issue,—the "sentimentalists controlled by knaves," in Godkin's language. Hayes acted upon his conviction as soon as he took office, withdrew the troops, and turned over to the South her own problems. Political reconstruction, as shaped by Congress, had broken down in every part, and it remained to be seen whether the constitutional reconstruction, as embodied in the amendments, would be more permanently effective.

In addition to taking their issue from them, Hayes deprived the politicians of their plunder. The personal conduct of his household added nothing to his popularity in Washington, for his wife served no wines and gave to the White House the atmosphere of the standard middle-class American family. His official family struck a blow at the political use of offices.

Although many of the Liberal Republicans of 1872 were still dissatisfied and saw no prospect of a change of heart for their party, most of them had voted for Hayes, and one of them was taken into the new Cabinet. Carl Schurz became Secretary of the Interior, bringing into office for the first time an active desire to reform the civil service. Congress had made a timid experiment in civil service reform early in the seventies, but had soon wearied of it. Schurz announced that his subordinates would be chosen on merit, and acted upon the announcement.

The storm broke at once upon the Secretary over the issue of the patronage, and soon reached the President. The offices were not only valued assets of Senators and Representatives, who held control over their followers through them, but had come to be regarded as the cement that held the national party organization together. In the absence of an issue, the binding force of the offices had an enlarged importance. But Hayes generally backed up Schurz in the fight. The Indian Bureau, in particular, profited by the new policy. Two serious outbreaks had recently occurred as the result of bad administration. In one, Custer had been led to his destruction; in the other Chief Joseph and the Nez PercÉs had worried the regular army through a long campaign. The Democratic House of Representatives had in this very period been striking at the army appropriations in order to shape Grant's Southern policy. It had enabled Nast to draw, in one of his biting cartoons, a picture of the savage, the Ku-Klux, and the Congressman shaking hands over a common policy. Schurz and his Indian Commissioner foresaw the changes needed, now that the range Indians had all been consolidated on reserves, and took this time to reorganize the service.

Hayes refused to give over all the offices as spoils, and removed some officials for pernicious political activity. The most important removal was that of Chester A. Arthur, Collector of the Port of New York, whose enraged friends, Conkling among them, became the center of the attack on the titular head of the party. Sneering at the sincerity of the new policy, Conkling cynically declared that "when Doctor Johnson said that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel, he ignored the enormous possibilities of the word reform." But because Hayes did not in every case follow an ideal that no other President had even set, he lost the support of the reformers who soon denounced him nearly as fiercely as did the "Stalwarts."

Even if Hayes had been able to keep a united party behind him, his Administration could scarcely have been marked by constructive legislation. His party had lost control of the House of Representatives in the election of 1874. The Forty-fifth Congress, chosen with Hayes in 1876, and the Forty-sixth, in 1878, were Democratic, and delighted to embarrass the Administration. Dissatisfied Republicans saw the deadlock and laid it upon the shoulders of the President. The Democratic Congress checked Administration measures, and managed to advance opposition measures of its own. Twice Hayes had to summon special sessions because of the failure of appropriation bills, and in his first winter the opposition endangered those policies of finance to which the Republican party had become pledged.

The Greenback agitation, rising about 1868 and stimulated by the panic of 1873, had not subsided when Hayes became President. It had lost much of its force, but there continued throughout the West, in both parties, a spirit that encouraged inflation of every sort. In Congress there were repeated efforts to repeal the Resumption Act of 1875, which the Democratic platform had denounced the next year. And when a sudden increase in the production of silver reduced its price, a silver inflation movement was placed beside the Greenback movement.

The United States had used almost no silver coin between 1834 and 1862 because the coinage ratio, sixteen to one, undervalued silver and made it wasteful to coin it. No specie was used as currency between 1862 and 1879, and the relative market prices of bullion remained close to their usual average until the year of panic. During the seventies the price of silver fell as new mines were opened in the West. The ratio rose above sixteen to one, and silver, from being undervalued at that ratio, came to be overvalued. It would now have paid owners of silver bullion to coin it into dollars at the legal rate, but Congress had in 1873, after a generation of disuse of silver, dropped the silver dollar from the list of standard coins. As silver fell in value, mine-owners asked for a renewal of coinage, and inflationists joined them, hoping for more money of any kind. During the winter of 1878 a free silver coinage bill, passed by the Democratic House under the guidance of Richard P. Bland, of Missouri, was under consideration in the Republican Senate.

John Sherman, the defender of gold resumption, was no longer in the Senate to fight this Bland Act. He had become Hayes's Secretary of the Treasury, and in this capacity was working toward resumption and upholding Hayes in his war on the spoilsmen. In his place, Allison, of Iowa, forced an amendment to the Bland Bill, taking away its free-coinage character and substituting a requirement to buy a specified amount of silver bullion each month—from $2,000,000 to $4,000,000 worth—and coin it. Thus amended, the House concurred in the act, which Hayes vetoed in February, 1878. It became a law over his veto.

The Administration was embarrassed in its financial policy, but not defeated. The Resumption Bill withstood attacks and, as the day for the resumption of specie payment approached, the price of greenbacks reflected the growing credit of the United States. It reached par two weeks before the appointed day. When that day arrived, Wednesday, January 1, 1879, John Sherman had the satisfaction of seeing the change to a coin basis effected without a shock. More gold was turned into the Treasury for exchange with greenbacks than greenbacks for redemption in gold. It appeared that Horace Greeley had been right when he had maintained that "the way to resume is to resume,"—that few would want gold if they could get it.

The adherence of Hayes to the gold standard and resumption drove from his side another body of Republicans. He had now lost the reformers and the spoilsmen, the radical Republicans and the inflationists, and no one hoped or believed that he would recall his pledge for a single term and be renominated in 1880 to succeed himself. The disintegration of his party was as complete as the collapse of its issues. On no subject, between 1876 and 1880, was it possible to bring before the public a distinctive party issue. The uncertainties of the campaign of 1876 were increased during the next four years.

Both parties had ceased to represent either policies or the people. The office-holders were in no sense the leaders of their communities. Industry, social life, education, and religion had parted company with politics since the decline of the Union issue, and unless a new political alignment could be found there was a prospect of continued rivalry for offices alone. Yet men were beginning to realize that a new period of growth had begun during the Hayes Administration, and that American institutions, formulated before the Civil War, had ceased to meet industrial needs.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE