Before the Rhetorical Presidency

The Challenges of Reunification: Rutherford B. Hayes on the Close Race and the Racial Divide

The Challenges of Reunification: Rutherford B. Hayes on the Close Race and the Racial Divide amy฀r.฀slagell In most U.S. history textbooks Rutherford B. Hayes ranks neither among the famous nor the infamous of the U.S. presidents; in short, he ranks among the lesser known. However, the controversy surrounding the 2000 presidential election gave him a sudden surge of fame as reporters dug into the history of contested elections. Near the end of November 2000, John Judis wrote in The New Republic that though “it may be weeks until we know who our next president will be, . . . this year’s election has already produced one clear winner: Rutherford B. Hayes. Even when Hayes was president, it’s doubtful he got as much ink as he has this past week, as historians and pundits have drawn countless comparisons between this year’s presidential contest and the one in 1876.”1 In the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876 reporters found a good story; it supplied intrigue, back room deals, special legislation, filibusters , and competing claims of fraud along with voter intimidation. Here was ample room for comparison, for contrast, and for assurances for the American people that even in the context of unrest among recent battlefield combatants, even with soldiers deployed in the capital cites of two states, even in a situation where the outcome of the presidential election was not decided until days before the scheduled inauguration of the new president, there was no serious destabilization of the government; there were no armed amy฀r.฀slagell  hostilities and the U.S. system of government with its tradition of the peaceful transition of power, was sustained. In fact, the American people, in time, seemed to have forgotten about the controversy. Samuel Tilden receded from memory, his name little more than a footnote in the record of presidential election curiosities. Nevertheless, from November 1876 to March 1877 and beyond, the election created a complex exigency demanding a rhetorical response from Hayes. The controversy surrounding the election exacerbated the still unhealed separation between North and South and at the same time created new divisions within the political parties themselves. Such periods of unrest often give rise to remarkable rhetorical feats, but in the corpus of Rutherford B. Hayes we find no single startling masterpiece. However, we do find a rhetoric responsive to the needs of the immediate situation, a discourse aimed at reconciliation and the reestablishment of the Union, and a creative effort by an intelligent mind to use all manner of persuasive tools to bring about those goals. Because so little attention has been paid to the discourse of Hayes, this essay is one of recovery. Concentrating on the first ten months of his administration , this essay demonstrates that Hayes’s early presidential discourse is preoccupied with healing the divisions in the nation that were caused from the fallout of the war and from the controversial election. Hayes confronts the divisions within the nation and at the same time offers a vision of a united nation in the future. This reunion is built upon the almost contradictory notions of remembering and returning to the fraternal relations of the nation’s past and the principles of the Founders, while forgetting the most recent past. Hayes stakes his rhetorical success largely upon an appeal to uphold the Constitution as the articulation of the binding principles of union, as the sacred document of the past. But the appeal is confounded by the reality that the Reconstruction amendments, those freeing all who had been held in slavery, and enfranchising the men, were innovations questioned by many throughout the nation. Hayes’s concern for the rights of African American citizens seems sincere, but protecting those rights with arms would threaten the vision of reunion that he also held dear. Hayes’s solution seems to have been to protect their rights with rhetoric instead of arms— to articulate over and over the necessity, the justice, of upholding the new amendments. Though a clear proponent of the rule of law, Hayes seemed to recognize that attitude change was a necessary first step to successful enforcement of these laws. In this sense, Hayes’s use of executive power took a clear rhetorical turn. challenges฀of฀reunification:฀rutherford฀b.฀hayes฀฀฀ ฀ ฀ In this chapter I will explore this rhetorical turn. After a brief summary of the historical context concerning the contested election, I will turn to a detailed...