THE HAYES ADMINISTRATION
The reelection 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
President
+------+ +-------+ +--------+ +------------+ +-------------+ +-----------+
|GRANT | | GRANT | | HAYES | | GARFIELD- | | CLEVELAND | | HARRISON |
| | | | | | | ARTHUR | | | | |
| R | | R | | R | | R | | D | | R |
+------+ +-------+ +--------+ +------------+ +-------------+ +-----------+
Senate
1869 1873 1877 1881 1885 1889 1893
+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+------+-----+-----+-----+----+---+
| R | R | R | R | R | D | R | R | R | R | R | R |
+------+-----+-----+-----+------+------+------+-----+-----+-----+----+---+
House
1871 1875 1879 1883 1887 1891
+---+ +----+ +---+ +-----+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +----+ +---+
|41 | |42 | |43 | |44 | |45 | |46 | |47 | |48 | |49 | |50 | |51 | |52 |
| B | | B | | B | | R | | R | | R | | K | | C | | C | | C | | R | | C |
| l | | l | | l | | a | | a | | a | | e | | a | | a | | a | | e | | r |
| a | | a | | a | | n K | | n | | n | | i | | r | | r | | r | | e | | i |
| i | | i | | i | | d e | | d | | d | | f | | l | | l | | l | | d | | s |
| n | | n | | n | | a r | | a | | a | | e | | i | | i | | i | | | | p |
| e | | e | | e | | l r | | l | | l | | r | | s | | s | | s | | | | |
| | | | | | | l | | l | | l | | | | l | | l | | l | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | e | | e | | e | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| R | | R | | R | | D | | D | | D | | R | | D | | D | | D | | R | | D |
+---+ +----+ +---+ +-----+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +----+ +---+
President
+----------+ +----------+ +-----------+ +-----------+ +--------+ +--------+
| | | | | | | | | | | |
|CLEVELAND | | McKINLEY | | McKINLEY- | | ROOSEVELT | | TAFT | | WILSON |
| | | | | ROOSEVELT | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | |
| D | | R | | R | | R | | R | | D |
| | | | | | | | | | | |
+----------+ +----------+ +-----------+ +-----------+ +--------+ +--------+
Senate
1893 1897 1901 1905 1909 1913
+------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+------+------+
| | | | | | | | | | | | |
| D | R | R | R | R | R | R | R | R | R | D | D |
| | | | | | | | | | | | |
+------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+------+------+
House
1895 1899 1903 1907 1911
+---+ +---+ +---+ +----+ +---+ +----+ +----+ +----+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +---+
|53 | |54 | |55 | |56 | |57 | |58 | |59 | |60 | |61 | |62 | |63 | |64 |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| C | | R | | R | | H | | H | | C | | C | | C | | C | | C | | C | | C |
| r | | e | | e | | e | | e | | a | | a | | a | | a | | l | | l | | l |
| i | | e | | e | | n | | n | | n | | n | | n | | n | | a | | a | | a |
| s | | d | | d | | d | | d | | n | | n | | n | | n | | r | | r | | r |
| p | | | | | | e | | e | | o | | o | | o | | o | | k | | k | | k |
| | | | | | | r | | r | | n | | n | | n | | n | | | | | |(?)|
| | | | | | | s | | s | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | o | | o | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | n | | n | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| D | | R | | R | | R | | R | | R | | R | | R | | R | | D | | D | | D |
+---+ +---+ +---+ +----+ +---+ +----+ +----+ +----+ +---+ +---+ +---+ +---+
During only three of the ten Congresses between 1875 and 1895 did either
party control the national government. The Democrats were in possession
only once, in the 53d Congress. The Republicans controlled the 47th
Congress by manipulation of senators, and the 51st by Reed's drastic
rules. Most of the partisan legislation of twenty years was enacted
during these three Congresses.
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 Credit 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
Perces 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
J.F. Rhodes terminates his great history with the election of 1876, and
although he has promised sometime to continue it, he has as yet
published only a few scattered essays upon the later period. A.M.
Gibson, _A Political Crime_ (1885), is a contemporary and partisan
account of the electoral contest; P.L. Haworth, _The Hayes-Tilden
Disputed Presidential Election_ (1906), is a recent work of critical
scholarship; E. Stanwood may be relied upon for platforms, tables of
votes, and other formal details, in his _History of the Presidency_.
_The Writings and Speeches of S.J. Tilden_ (2 vols., ed. by J. Bigelow,
1885) are useful, as are the Blaine books: J.G. Blaine, _Twenty Years of
Congress_, E. Stanwood, _James Gillespie Blaine_ (1905, in American
Statesmen Series); G. Hamilton (pseud. for M.A. Dodge), _James G.
Blaine_ (1895, a domestic biography); and the spicy _Letters of Mrs.
James G. Blaine_ (edited by H.S.B. Beale, 2 vols., 1908). Other useful
biographies or memoirs exist for R.P. Bland, Roscoe Conkling, Robert G.
Ingersoll, O.H. Platt, T.C. Platt, John Sherman, and Carl Schurz, etc.