day he formed his Cabinet it was evident that a change had come. The names of his advisers, undetermined until he reached Washington, and unannounced until he sent them to the Cabinet and Senate, contained a promise for the future. Congress William M. Evarts brought to the State Department great fame as a lawyer and the virtue that he was no man's man and was friendly with reformers. He was bitterly opposed by Senator Roscoe Conkling, confidant of Grant and leader of the New York Republican machine. The propriety of John Sherman's appointment to the Treasury was heightened by his long association with financial legislation in the Senate. In the War Department George W. McCrary, of Iowa, ousted Don Cameron, son of Simon and heir-apparent to the Republican political machine in Pennsylvania, whose reappointment Conkling and the elder Cameron wished to force. Richard M. Thompson, an old Whig spell-binder of Indiana, became Secretary of the Navy, succeeding Robeson, of New Jersey, whom the last House had not impeached for malfeasance only because the evidence against him fell short of the conclusive. At the Post-Office, which Conkling had wanted for Thomas C. Platt, his chief-of-staff, was David M. Key, who was a hostage of peace and an affront to party men because he was a Tennesseean, an ex-Confederate, and even a Tilden Democrat. There had been talk of taking General Joe Johnston into the Cabinet, but Key was the final choice. The cup of bitterness was filled for the steersmen of radical Republicanism by the selection of Carl Schurz for the Interior Department. Schurz, a Liberal Republican of 1872, was a consistently active and earnest reformer. He succeeded Zachary Chandler, of Michigan, who, as chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1876, managed to steer a national campaign without having conference or correspondence with the candidate whom he elected. Judge Charles E. Devens, of Massachusetts, as Attorney-General, completed what Wendell Phillips, strongmouthed as ever, soon denounced as the "slave-hound Cab inet." From Evarts to Devens the council list, equally displeasing to violent radicals and to men grown old in stalwart manipulation of the dominant party, proved what Schurz had written, that the Republican Party had "nominated a man without knowing it," and that Hayes intended to establish peace. The pledge of Hayes in his inaugural repeated the earlier promise of his letter of acceptance that he would restore home rule to the South, clean up the national administration, and maintain the public credit. With advisers identified with each of these three tasks, but with a Congress divided against itself, he set to work. The House of Representatives, Democratic since the election of 1874, was more anxious to embarrass the Administration than to do its work; and in the Republican Senate the President had few friends after he sent in his Cabinet list, Tuesday, March 6. There was an immediate outbreak of wrath at the treason to his party seen in the nominations. "The path of reform to which he [Hayes] is pledged," said the most important of Republican papers, the New York Tribune, "can go only over the ruins of the average Congressman's dearest interests." Blaine, new to the Senate, to which he had been appointed in 1876 after thirteen years in the House, led in the criticism of presidential policy and in defense of Republican control of the South. Conkling, as bitter an enemy as Blaine possessed, joined the attack less from disapproval of the Southern policy than from patronage resentment. Simon Cameron, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, was unable to stop the confirmation of Evarts and the rest, and resigned his seat in the Senate; but showed that he the "old Winnebago chieftain" — still had power by making his pliant Pennsylvania legislature choose his son, J. Donald Cameron, as his successor. The members of the Cabinet received their confirmation with the people less interested than their leaders in the wrangle, but the President was left confronting a gloating opposition, a divided party, and the most difficult of civil tasks. Home rule in the South In eight of the Confederate States white control had been restored before Grant left the presidency. In the remaining three there were contests which made possible the duplicate electoral returns from Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, upon whose counting the fate of the election turned in 1876. In two, Louisiana and South Carolina, the Republican State Governments held their control only because federal troops, stationed in their state houses by Grant, deterred the Democratic claimants from seizing public office. The deterring influence was moral rather than physical, since of the whole regular army, listed in 1876 as 28,571 officers and men, only 5885 were within the limits of the Confederacy, and more than half of these were occupied with Indian and border patrol duties on the Texas plains. In New Orleans there were 232 clerks, officers, and men; in Columbia, 141. The withdrawal of the last vestige of military control from the Southern States was bound up with the fate of the claimant Governments. In both South Carolina and Louisiana the canvass of 1876 produced fraud to fight "bulldozing." Intimidation of negroes entitled to vote under the Fifteenth Amendment had matched fraud in counting the returns. In each State there were both official and contesting returns upon the presidential vote as well as upon the local vote. The Electoral Commission, declining to go behind the official record, had counted the official Republican vote in each instance; but the people themselves had organized Democratic State Governments in Louisiana and South Carolina, with Grant giving official countenance and protection in each case to the Republican claimants; to Stephen B. Packard in Louisiana and to David H. Chamberlain in South Carolina. The Packard and Chamberlain Governments were both inaugurated under federal patronage, but during January and February, 1877, while Congress was working out the basis for the final presidential count, it became clear that the Democratic pretender governors, General Wade Hampton in South Carolina and Francis T. Nicholls in Louisiana, had the real support. There was no possibility for a unanimous decision upon the titles. Each house of Congress, sole judge under the Constitution of the returns of its own members, seated the claimants whom the majority desired, Democratic Representatives in one case, and Senators chosen by the Republican legislatures in the other. The President by his course could not have pleased even Congress, let alone all the people, and accordingly he followed the course that Grant had already outlined for him before inauguration. Grant had protected the establishment of the Republican Governments, had maintained the peace, but had refrained from defending either Government as legitimate. Hayes found peace prevailing on March 4, and no sign of an insurrection that could warrant active interference by the Executive. "If all the people whose recognition amounts to anything refuse to recognize a state government, that government falls of its own weight," explained the New York Independent, which believed with Blaine that the legal title of Chamberlain and Packard was as good as that of Hayes. It frankly confessed that it could not see "how the Federal Government can by a standing army take permanent care of a majority that cannot take care of itself." In this view the great body of Americans appears to have concurred. Some believed in the validity of each contestant, but most were also ready to leave the adjustment to be worked out by the people of the South. The actual steps in disentanglement took some seven weeks. On April 3 the Secretary of War was ordered to remove the squad of troops from the Columbia State House to their barracks, and on April 20 similar orders cleared the State House at New Orleans. In neither case did insult or outrage follow the withdrawal. The effective opinion of the States in question upheld the Democratic Governments, as it had already done in every Southern State. The dispossessed governors came North to attend Republican conventions and pour their woes into willing ears, but the North was no longer willing to fight; the war was over. The South was solid and the United States had turned its mind from strife to the larger tasks of peace. In vain did Blaine shout in the Senate, "You discredit Packard and you discredit Hayes." In vain did he hope that "there shall be no au thority in this land large enough or adventurous enough to compromise the honor of the national administration or the good name of the great republican party that called that administration into existence." The epoch of Blaine and his associates, Conkling, Grant, Logan, and Cameron, had passed. The new realities of life had for leaders in one direction an Astor, a Vanderbilt, and a Gould; in another, an Edison and a Bell; in yet another, Eliot, Angell, Gilman, and Alice Freeman. War had been effective only in preventing disunion; national unity was to be the result of business and education. Educa tional renascence Education, as the underlying problem of self-government, had been sensed in the United States from the beginning. The first action of the old Congress looking toward the use of the national estate had, in the Northwest Ordinance (1787), pledged public aid to the common schools, and when issues of immigration and localization arose thereafter, education appeared to provide the cure. "What are you going to do with all these things?" Thomas Huxley asked, at the opening of Johns Hopkins University in 1876: "You and your descendants will have to ascertain whether this great mass will hold together under the forms of a republic and the despotic reality of universal suffrage." The university that he was helping to launch was itself convincing evidence of the passion for education at all levels and in all directions that had begun to consume the American people during the Civil War, and that brought forth new enterprises every few months from 1865, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Vassar College began their experiments, until the middle eighties when the university had been differentiated from the college, and the whole system of education was in full blast. College, university, normal, technical, and secondary education were at work upon the American character. American education during the first century of independ |