534 Chapter 20 From Smoke-Filled Rooms to Prairie Wildfire: 1877–1896
Lackluster Presidents: From Hayes to Harrison
The leading statesmen of the period were disinter-
ested in important contemporary questions, power-
less to influence them, or content with things the way
they were. Consider the presidents.
Rutherford B. Hayes, president from 1877 to
1881, came to office with a distinguished record. He
attended Kenyon College and Harvard Law School
before settling down to practice in Cincinnati.
Although he had a family to support, he volunteered
for service in the Union army within weeks after the
first shell fell on Fort Sumter. “A just and necessary
war,” he called it in his diary. “I would prefer to go
into it if I knew I was to die... than to live through
and after it without taking any part.”
Hayes was wounded at South Mountain on the
eve of Antietam and later served under Sheridan in
the Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1864. Entering
the army as a major, he emerged a major general. In
1864 he was elected to Congress; four years later he
became governor of Ohio, serving three terms alto-
gether. The Republicans nominated him for president
in 1876 because of his reputation for honesty and
moderation, and his election, made possible by the
Compromise of 1877, seemed to presage an era of
sectional harmony and political probity.
Outwardly Hayes had a sunny disposition;
inwardly, in his own words, he was sometimes “ner-
vous to the point of disaster.” Despite his geniality, he
was utterly without political glamour. He played
down the tariff issue. On the money question he was
conservative. He cheerfully approved the resumption
of gold payments in 1879 and vetoed bills to expand
the currency. He accounted himself a civil service
reformer, being opposed to the collection of political
contributions from federal officeholders.
Hayes complained about the South’s failure to
treat blacks decently after the withdrawal of federal
troops, but he took no action. He worked harder for
civil service reform, yet failed to achieve the “thor-
ough, rapid, and complete” change he had promised.
In most matters, he was content to “let the record
show that he had made the requests.”
Hayes’s successor, James A. Garfield, fought at
Shiloh and later at Chickamauga. In two years he rose
from lieutenant colonel to major general. In 1863 he
won a seat in Congress, where his oratorical and man-
agerial skills brought him to prominence in the affairs
of the Republican party.
Garfield had been a compromise choice at the
1880 Republican convention. His election precipi-
tated a great battle over patronage, the new president
standing in a sort of no-man’s land between contend-
ing factions within the party. In July 1881 an unbal-
anced office-seeker named Charles J. Guiteau shot
Garfield in the Washington railroad station. After lin-
gering for weeks, the president died on September 19.
The assassination of Garfield elevated Chester A.
Arthur to the presidency. A New York lawyer and
abolitionist, Arthur became an early convert to the
Republican party and rose rapidly in its local councils.
In 1871 Grant gave him the juiciest political plum in
the country, the collectorship of the Port of New
York, which he held until removed by Hayes in 1878
for refusing to keep his hands out of party politics.
The vice presidency was the only elective position
that Arthur had ever held. Before Garfield’s death, he
had paid little attention to questions like the tariff and
monetary policy, being content to take in fees ranging
upward of $50,000 a year as collector of the port and to
oversee the operations of the New York customs office,
with its hordes of clerks and laborers. (During Arthur’s
tenure, the novelist Herman Melville was employed as
an “outdoor inspector” by the customhouse.) Of
course, Arthur was an unblushing defender of the spoils
system, though in fairness it must be said that he was
personally honest and an excellent administrator.In this 1880 campaign lithograph by Currier & Ives, “Farmer Garfield”
uses a scythe made of honesty, ability, and patriotism to cut a swath
to the White House through brush infested by snakes like Falsehood
and Malice. One snake bears the countenance of Garfield’s
predecessor, Hayes.