Hayes: The Diary of a President, 1875-1881 (review)

442civil war history ing, as it does, in the same year as Professor James Silver's Mississippi: The Closed Society. Some of this material and this tone may have a role to play but they are of little use, it seems to me, to students seeking to understand the section. A more important critical problem also exists. Even in the more perceptive articles in this collection there is no indication that the authors have considered whether the qualities identified as Southern—violence, commitment to myth, political romanticism, or change generally—mark that region alone. It can certainly be argued that each of these things, as well as other attributes identified as Southern, are not sectional but national phenomena. We have become increasingly aware in recent years that we can be (regardless of section) violent, anti-Negro, and deeply committed to romantic myths in a changing world. Differences between North and South may be of degree and of opportunity rather than stemming from different characteristics. Perhaps the time has come to reduce the stress on sectional differences and see them as separate parts of a common body of experience, rather than to stress differences and search out roots which may very well be all tangled together at the bottom. All in all, then, this collection is a very mixed bag—somewhat enlightening in parts, but on the whole neither deeply revealing nor coming to grips with basic problems. Joel H. Silbey University of Pittsburgh Hayes: The Diary of a President, 1875-1881. Edited by T. Harry Williams . (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1964. Pp. xliv, 329. $6.50.) Scholars have long been conscious of the need for a new edition of the diary of Rutherford B. Hayes. The task has been ably undertaken by T. Harry Williams, whose one-volume work is bound to supersede, in part, the older edition by Charles R. Williams. While the present book covers only the years 1875 to 1881, it constitutes a great improvement over its five-volume predecessor which spanned a much longer period. Faithfully rendering all of Hayes's eccentricities in spelling, Professor Williams has given us the diary as it really is, with virtually no editorial tampering with the text. Hayes has always been a relatively neglected public figure. Assuming the Presidency after the disputed election of 1876, he has often been looked upon as an interloper who should not have been inaugurated at all. And while recent scholarship has tended to soften this verdict, modern problems of racial adjustment have once again caused historians to examine Hayes's Southern policy in a critical manner. Did not his withdrawal of Federal troops from the South result in the complete abandonment of the Negro? And did not the end of Reconstruction usher in a long period of shame in race relations , a misfortune for which we are still paying today? Williams' edition of the diary throws some interesting lights on the problems raised by these questions. Hayes was certain in his own mind that book reviews443 Negroes had been fraudulently kept from the polls in the South, a circumstance which vitiated the Democratic case against him. And far from being indifferent to the Negroes' fate, he constantly sought to bring the South to a realization that the Civil War amendments must be faithfully observed. Of course he failed; by withdrawing the troops from the South he himself contributed greatly to the complete emasculation of the amendments for decades to come. His intentions, however, were good. Professor Williams has added a fifteen-page introduction, a chronology of Hayes's administration, and a convenient dramatis personae. By leaving the text much as he found it, he has made it easy to follow the President's train of thought. Interspersed with various letters and jottings for Hayes's personal use, the entries faithfully reproduce the writer's interests. And since the burdens of the Presidency were infinitely lighter in the 1870's than they are today, Hayes found time to keep his diary during some of the most agitated days of his administration. A devotion to duty as he saw it was the key to the President's attitude toward the disputed election, the patronage...