The challenges of reunification: Rutherford B. Hayes on the close race and the racial divide

Before the Rhetorical Presidency

Volumn , Issue , 2008, Pages 243-266

  Slagell, Amy R ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84896255004     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Chapter

References (17)

1. John Judis, "Making Hayes -Why Election 2000 is the Opposite of 1876," The New Republic, November 27, 2000, 10.
2. Diary entry, November 12, 1876, in The Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, Nineteenth President of the United States, Vol. III, ed. Charles Richard Williams (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State Archeological and Historical Society, 1922), 377, online version: http://www.ohiohistory.org/onlinedoc/hayes/index. cfm. Entries for later references to this source will be noted with the date of the entry and the page number in this volume.
3. Ari Hoogenboom, Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 292-93.
4. Woodward, quoted in Allen Peskin, "Was There a Compromise of 1877?" The Journal of American History 60 (1973): 64-65 Peskin, 65.
5. Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro (New York: Collier, 1954, rpt. 1965), 23.
6. Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, October 22, 1876, 370.
7. Russell Conwell, Life and Public Services of Gov. Rutherford B. Hayes (Boston: B. B. Russell, 1876), 306. This text is Hayes's campaign biography and contains many complete and excerpted speech texts from Hayes's political career in Ohio.
8. August 5, 1867, address in Lebanon, Ohio, in Conwell, Life and Public Services, 232.
9. James Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents 1789-1897, VII (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1898): 442-43, emphasis added.
10. For the classic discussion of the characteristics of the inaugural genre see Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, "Inaugurating the Presidency," Presidential Studies Quarterly 15 (1985): 394-411.
11. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 446.
12. Gerald Gamm and Renee M. Smith, "Presidents, Parties, and the Public: Evolving Patterns of Interaction, 1877-1929," In Speaking to the People: The Rhetorical Presidency in Perspective, ed. Richard J. Ellis (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 102.
13. Hayes's turn to directly address African Americans in his audience with passages such as, "I believed that your rights and interests would be safer if this great mass of intelligent white men were let alone by the general Government," (Atlanta, New York Times, September 23, 1877, 7).
14. Clearly indicate that Hayes himself was infected by many of the same racist assumptions of most European Americans at this time. For an incisive critique of presidential rhetoric on race issues during this period see Kirt H. Wilson, "The Politics of Place and Presidential Rhetoric in the United States, 1875-1901," in Civil Rights Rhetoric and the American Presidency, ed. James Arnt Aune and Enrique D. Rigsby (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 16-40.
15. Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, September 25, 1877, 443. This entry also contains the following notation about a letter Hayes received from William Henry Smith confirming Hayes's own impression of his success: "The trip South has been the greatest success, as it has been the most pleasant surprise, of the year. I must congratulate you on your speeches which have been admirable in their directness, and unexceptionable in taste. The temptation to touch on other topics must have been great, but you resisted it with the same wise self control that has always characterized your public career. The implacables are at last dumbfounded. They never believed that you would talk plainly to the Southern people of the Constitutional amendments and education as you did. Let them pass. They are now powerless for evil.
16. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 459-60.
17. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 493, 494.