Democratic Sentinel, Volume 3, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 October 1879 — HAYES ANALYZED. [ARTICLE]

HAYES ANALYZED.

His Career as an Unaccountable Visitation of Divine Providence, [Washington Letter to Louisville Courier-Journal.] One of the beatitudes which I do not .find in the Bible, but yet has a basis of truth, is this: “ Blessed are those who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed.” In like fashion it may be asserted: “ Blessed is he from whom nothing is expected; for if he speaks or acts foolishly the public will take it as a matter of course, and let him off easy.” Here Mr. Hayes comes in with his usual luck. The public expects nothing from him. It simply accepts him as a fact, disagreeable it may be, but not wholly unendurable. He is regarded by them much as a pious Mussulman is said to regard a December fall of snow, namely, as “a cold, uncomfortable, unaccountable visitation of Divine Providence, sent for some good purpose to be revealed hereafter.” People reckon that Mr. Hayes cannot do a great 'deal of harm while there is a Democratic Congress to hold him in check, and as he is to go out of office in a little over a year they are not concerned so much about him as they are about his successor in office. The one is a nuisance already gauged; the other a great unknown, with indefinite, mysterious possibilities of evil or of good. The methods, the surroundings and the atmosphere, social, religious and political, by which such a man as Hayes is bred, would reward the study of a Dickens or a Thackeray. There are thousands of just such persons as he scattered all through the Northern States, though it so happens that only one of this class ever attained the Presidency. But they have been a power in public affairs. They have kept alive such papers as the New York Tribune and the Cincinnati Gazette. Unlike Grant personally, they yet exerted a large influence upon his administration, and probably upon Lincoln’s also. The potations of the one and the smut of the other were not exactly in their line, but they could readily connive at such trifles when they had a point to gain. Over all they did there was an air of unctuous piety that disarmed criticism and imparted to the worst political knavery an air of apparent respectability. It was, indeed, an organized hypocrisy, but careful training had made every actor perfect and yet carries on the drama to its consummation. Given a certain amount of narrow-mindedness and bigotry, surface reading and catchwords without reflection, religious cant, political malignity, greed of office and money, and you have the materials for fashioning Rutherford B. Hayes, the Congressman, as he sat in the House of Representatives, not daring to take part in the debates,' accepting as a natural thing the obscurity that made him simply an item of the yea and nay list; but yet a power with the many smaller men of his own party and sect who live and disgrace God’s beautiful handiwork in rural Ohio. A singular conjunction of personal luck—the Republican Convention evenly balanced by the contentions of its great chiefs, gave him the opportunity to become its candidate, and subsequently the automatic recipient of the power snatched by the bold villainy of its more reckless and audacious leaders. This, and a demoralized, cowed populace, made such a President a possibility of this nineteenth century. It is a mortifying exhibition, but still a wholesome one, that the person thus permitted to attain the high and exalted office of President should go around the country and make silly speeches. When the people listen to all this partisan drivel and these platitudes they should remember that the man before them is Chief Magistrate over 40,000,000 of people, and armed with a far larger actual power than the Queen of England or any crowned head in Europe, save the Czar of Russia, and then they may ask whose shame it is that he - fills the chair of Washington. I notice that Mr. Hayes, anxious to reestablish himself with the “ Stalwarts,” joins in their raid upon State rights. His willful perversion of the truth by asserting that the doctrine of State rights and the right of secession are equivalent terms, and held by the same persons, has, I believe, been already exposed in your columns. Such a perversion and an attempt to deceive would disgrace a village Radical newspaper or a store-box orator, and it is doubly disgraceful in a President. In his late speech at Springfield, Mr. Hayes reiterated this falsehood, and went on to criticise and object to the expression “ State sovereignty,” which he found on the State House, placed there long before nis visit had been announced. He quoted Mr. Lincoln to show that “State sovereignty is not found in the constitution of the United States.” When Mr. Hayes stole the Presidency there was just one little form that he had to go through which I presume he found rather irksome. He had to swear obedience to the constitution of the United States. Now, if he would read this constitution through, he would probably find that it recognizes both State and Federal rights. Every Judge, every great man of the past, the United States Supreme Court, over and over again, speaking by the mouths of Democrats and Republicans, have recognized State rights. I will not, however, be so absurd as to suppose that the text of the constitution or the decisions of the courts would weigh with a man who could deliberately take and keep an office and $200,000 of money that he knew did not belong to him. But even such a person as he is, a hide-bound partisan, might have some respect for the Republican platform of 1860, adopted by the convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln. That platform declares that “the Federal constitution, the rights of the States and the union of the States must and shall be preserved.” The same platform also declares that “the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment, exclusively, is essential to the balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend.” If this be true, the attitude of Mr. Hayes and his friends in seeking to prejudice and destroy State rights is moral treason, and the greater treasor. because it is done in a cowardly manner, under color of office, without risking their Eves in battle. But it is useless to talk of morals to such people as these. When the Spartans went forth to vanquish the Helots

they did not take their arms, but whips with which they had scourged these Helots before, and tbe Helots promptly submitted. As Mr. Hayes has become a “rebel” to the Government he is sworn to support, and is openly plotting treason against the system on which our fabric of Government depends, and cannot be reached by moral considerations, the only remedy left us is to appeal to his fears. I beg leave to remind him that he has a master before whom he has already crouched in the past, and who will not tolerate such stuff as he is now putting forth. Speaking in the Senate of the United States, on the 24th of May last, Senator Edmunds, a stalwart of the stalwarts, discussing the distribution of power, spoke as follows: “And the courts have said that that is a case of concurrent jurisdiction, that each State, having supreme and sovereign domain over the conduct of its own citizens, is not limited in the exercise of that dominion by the fact that there is another power that has a similar dominion in that particular case over citizens of that other power; that is to say, over citizens of the United States; and, therefore, the citizen is amenable to two jurisdictions; either may command him not to do a particular act, but each commands him in its own right, speaking directly to the fact of what he is to do, and not in reference to the laws of the other at all. In that instance, it is clear, according to the decided cases, and, I thirk, according to the philosophy of this singular Government which we have, that each sovereignty may exert itself according to its own notions of what is fit and reasonable against the same man for the same act.” Further on Mr. Edmunds says: “The State laws, consistently with the constitution of the United States and independent of it, and in a respect where the constitution of the United States does not touch upon the sovereignty of the State, and in regard to which the sovereignty of the State was never in any degree surrendered, may provide, as they do provide in many States, for. the preservation of the health of the citizens of the State.”

In other words, not only do the States have rights not surrendered, but in respect to these rights they are absolutely “sovereign.” It is a great pity that among these precious rights of sovereignty, State or Federal, there is not also the power to furnish a person holding the office of President with a decent modicum of brains and honesty. Mr. Hayes’ object was not so much to propound his constitutional views as to fan the flame of prejudice against the South. The South was at one time disposed to give him a most generous interpretation. Unmindful of the fact that the policy of withdrawing the troops from the infamous office of upholding the carpet-bag governments had been resolved on and actually ordered by Grant before he went out of office; that the execution of the order was defeated by the Sherman influence in a covert and underhanded manner, so as to secure for Hayes the disposition of the whole question; that months elapsed before Hayes carried out Grant’s policy, and then only after his own agents at New Orleans had endeavered to extort two United States Senators as the price of the concession of their right to choose their own rulers; the Southern people hastily assumed that the President meant to treat them fairly. But they were undeceived. They saw him dispensing the patronage of his office not to the best citizens, but to the worst, paying the Returning Boards and their affiliated miscreants for their dirty work, and then the confidence of the Southerners in him was shaken. Mr. Hayes found that he could not hitch on the South to the car of Radicalism, and now he has taken up the role of defamation, slander and persecution. Perhaps he may hope in this way to help the Sherman boom. His office-holders are at work in this city to secure a solid delegation from the Southern States for Sherman. Their object was unblushingly avowed, and has been published by the Republican coi respondents in this city. But it looks as if the office-holders’ boom would soon be drowned by the Grant boom. Already the California Republicans have spoken. The State Republican Convention in Colorado greeted Mr. Carl Schurz with a pronunciamento for Grant. Nebraska follows suit. These are but the pattering of the rain-drops. The officeholders may as well prepare to go. They will get even less mercy from Grant than they would from a Democratic administration. They will all have to walk the plank, and Mr. Hayes’ side show, the Shermans, the monkeys and the elephants will be buried as forgotten rubbish.