The Friedman Unit, circa 1877

During the summer of 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes took a victory lap around the American South. He’d been offered the presidency earlier in the year when Southern Democrats (most of whom at the time were, like Hayes himself, former Whigs) agreed to swing 20 contested electoral votes his way; the price of victory included a Republican commitment to withdrawing federal troops and delivering massive economic aid to the “redeemed” Confederate states. Reconstruction was pretty much toast by then anyway, as a divided Republican party and a split Congress — overseen by a disinterested President Grant — allowed the entire project to wither. The ascent of Hayes to the White House merely brought an end to the illusion that the federal government still cared about rehabilitating emancipated slaves.

When Hayes arrived in Atlanta in September, he delivered an address that historians of the period can’t really avoid, no matter how much they might like to. (I taught this address in my Gilded Age/Progressive Era class tonight, which is why I’m yammering on about Rutherford Hayes for quite likely the first time in LGM history). In Atlanta, Hayes spoke eagerly about “reconciliation” and “harmony” between the regions who so recently slaughtered one another by the hundreds of thousands; he sang the virtues of capital as the ointment for sectional rivalries. And in classic American tradition, he shifted blame for social strife onto someone else. Among other things, Hayes blamed previous generations for slavery and for provoking the Civil War — as if no one in his audience had ever benefited from the institution or fought eagerly to preserve it. Most remarkably, he praised the valor of the Confederate veterans in attendance, suggesting that their heroism “in behalf of their convictions” somehow overshadowed (or made irrelevant) the actual substance of those convictions.

Then he uttered one of the most tragically misguided statements in American presidential history — one that rivals Calvin Coolidge’s prediction in December 1928 that the economy was doing just swell and that Americans could anticipate an endless horizon of evenly-distributed affluence. Reassuring black audience members that the demise of Reconstruction was nothing to fret over, Hayes offered this bit of crackerjack analysis:

What troubles our people at the North, what has troubled them, was that they feared that these colored people, who had been made freedmen by the war, would not be safe in their rights and interest in the South unless it was by the interference of the general Government. Many good people had that idea. I had given that matter some consideration, and now, my colored friends, who have thought, or who have been told, that I was turning my back upon the men whom I fought for, now, listen! After thinking over it, 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. And now, my colored friends, let me say another thing. We have been trying it for these six months, and in my opinion in no six months since the war have so few outrages and invasions of your rights . . . as in the last six months.

Because Americans in 1877 evidently lacked a sharp sense of cynicism, no one mounted the stage and beat the new president — one of several to serve after having lost the popular vote — with a burlap sack of doorknobs.