The President’s Southern Policy: An Interview Given in Washington, D.C., on November 13, 1878
THE PRESIDENT’S SOUTHERN POLICY: AN INTERVIEW
GIVEN IN WASHINGTON, DC, ON 13 NOVEMBER 1878
Washington Evening Star, 13 November 1878. Other texts in Chicago Tribune, 14
November 1878; St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer and Democrat, 16 November 1878.
The results of the November 1878 election came as a shock to President
Rutherford B. Hayes and to supporters of his conciliatory policies toward
southern whites. As a result of widespread threats and violence directed
against black voters, Republican totals in the South fell dramatically: all of the
party’s gubernatorial and all but four of its congressional candidates were
defeated. Hayes’s cabinet met and approved the vigorous prosecution of
violators of the laws protecting voting rights. On the morning of 13 November
1878, newspaper interviews quoted a statement by Hayes that southern white
leaders had broken promises to protect the civil and political liberties of blacks
and that the federal government must act to vindicate the right of suffrage. On
the same morning, a reporter from the Washington Evening Star interviewed
Douglass concerning the Hayes administration’s evolving policy toward the
South. Washington Evening Star, 12 November 1878; New York , 13,
14 November 1878; Davison, Rutherford B. Hayes, 141-43; DeSantis, Re-
publicans Face the Southern Question, 100-01 ; Gillette, Retreat from Recon-
struction, 353-54.
Walking up and down his private office, Marshal Frederick Douglass
talked freely to a STAR reporter this morning. He said:
The attitude of President Hayes in respect to the southern policy,
implied in his present effort to protect all citizens alike in the exercise of the
right of suffrage in South Carolina, Louisiana and elsewhere, does not
surprise me.1Newspaper reports on the recent elections singled out Louisiana and congressional districts in several other southern states as areas where acts of intimidation had effectively disenfranchised many blacks. In post-election public statements President Hayes also denounced the failure of state officials in South Carolina and Louisiana to protect the rights of black voters and promised corrective action by the Justice Department. After Hayes, in his annual message to Congress on 2 December 1878, called on Congress to investigate the validity of the elections in those states, a special Senate committee confirmed the charges of a systematic campaign of violence against black voters. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, however, refused to deny membership to the newly elected congressmen from those states. Although disillusioned by the behavior of southern whites, Hayes made no significant departure from his policy of reconciliation toward that region during his last two years as president. New York Tribune, 13, 14 November 1878; Washington Evening Star, 14 November 1878; Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson, 2d ed. (New York, 1965), 40-46; Kenneth E. Davison, Rutherford B. Hayes, 141-43. It is precisely what I have expected ever since the experiment
of conciliation has failed, not through any lack of earnestness and sincerity
on the part of the President or his Cabinet in commending it to the south,
but through the wrong-headedness and
IRRECONCILABLENESS OF THE SOUTH ITSELF.
I have known from the beginning that what has been called the pacification
policy was not, like the laws of the Medes and Persians, unchangeable, but
that it would be abandoned or modified as the public weal might render it
necessary.
DOUGLASS’ INTERVIEW WITH GOV. HAYES.
Two weeks before President Hayes came to Washington to be inaugu-
rated, it was my good fortune to meet him in the statehouse at Columbus,
Ohio, and to have a free and full conversation with him on what had already
been foreshadowed as his southern policy.2Douglass's interview with Rutherford B. Hayes took place in the latter's gubernatorial office in Columbus, Ohio, on 17 February 1877. In his diary Hayes wrote that Douglass, who had listened to his views on southern Reconstruction and approved of them, also “gave me many useful hints about the whole subject." In the same entry Hayes described his intended policy as “a firm assertion and maintenance of the rights of the colored people of the South, according to the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, coupled with a readiness to recognize all southern people, without regard to past political conduct, who will now go with me heartily and in good faith in support of these principles." New York Herald, 18 February 1877; New York Tribune, 19 February 1877; T. Harry Williams, ed., Hayes: The Diary of a President, 1875-1881 (New York, 1964), 74-75. I began the conversation with
him by expressing a sense of alarm at the outgivings of the press through
sundry reporters as to the course he meant to pursue towards the late rebels.
I asked him directly if the report which had reached me that he meant to
appoint southern men, not [R]epublicans, to office in the south was true.
WHAT THE PRESIDENT ELECT SAID.
His answer was frank and to the point. He said that was his purpose and
gave as a reason that something must be done to break up the race line and
color line in the politics of the south. The fact that the colored people were
in one party and the whites in another was provocative of race hostility and
bloodshed, and something must be done to put an end to such strife; that he
had had assurances from influential men at the south that such a policy as he
proposed would lead to a correction of this evil and to the organization of
such independent political action as would conduce to harmony in the
southern states. The President said but very little by way of argument, but
invited me to speak my whole views frankly in respect to his proposed
policy.
WHAT DOUGLASS SAID.
This invitation I was not very slow to accept. For an hour or more I
argued against it showing, as well as I could by a brief review of the conflict
between freedom and slavery during the last forty years, that every conces-
sion which had been made to the south had been followed by increased
exactions and arrogance; that there was no satisfying or appeasing the
ruling element of the south; that there had always been a class of men in that
section who esteemed themselves and were esteemed as above law, or a
law unto themselves; who were not impressed with any just sense of
sacredness of human life, and thought that negroes, especially, might be
killed with impunity. I insisted that a policy of conciliation would be as
pearls cast before swine;3Douglass adapts Matt. 7: 6. that our concessions would be treated as coward-
ice; that what the south needed was to be taught that there is a God in Israel;
that the laws of the land will be enforced in South Carolina as in Mas-
sachusetts and Ohio.
THE PRESIDENT’S PURPOSE TO CHANGE HIS POLICY, IF NECESSARY.
I said much more to Governor Hayes to the same effect, and after
giving me a patient hearing the governor assured me that he still intended to
give the south a fair chance to right itself and to remove all cause of
complaint if possible. “But,” said he, “if what I propose shall fail of the
good results at which I aim I shall certainly adopt some other course. In no
event do I intend to abandon your race or to fail in extending to them the
protection of the rights guaranteed to them by the constitution.”
I left Governor Hayes impressed with the idea that he is an honest and
courageous man—a man wedded to no policy to the extent of pursuing it
without regard to consequences, and controlled by a patriotism as firm and
inflexible as that which controlled the action of the wise and good Abraham
Lincoln himself.
THE NEW DEPARTURE.
“What do you think will be the result of the ‘new departure’ (if there is
a new departure) of the administration in dealing with the south?”
“Most salutary,” was the reply. “I think the south itself will see its
errors and correct them. It will, I believe, find out that a ‘solid south'4Popularized during the presidential election campaign of 1876, the term Solid South referred to the loyalty of the vast majority of white voters in the eleven former Confederate states to the Democratic party. ESH, 1124. is
dangerous, even to itself, when secured by disfranchising freemen. It will,
I believe, after learning the lesson, be ready to grant equal rights to all.”