By Nov. 12 Rutherford B. Hayes Comes to Terms with Defeat by “Violations of the 15th Amendment”

On November 12, 1876 Rutherford B. Hayes wrote in his diary that he had accepted that he had lost the election. He wrote that numerous violations of the 15th Amendment, including violence and intimidation, had kept so many Blacks away from the polls in the South that his defeat was  a foregone conclusion. By late that day, Hayes was receiving some encouraging news that the race might not have been lost. Here is an excerpt from his November 12 diary entry:

Sunday, November 12. -The news this morning is not conclusive. The headlines of the morning papers are as follows:-The News, “Nip and Tuck”; “Tuck has it”; “The Mammoth National Doubt”;-and the Herald heads its news column, “Which?” But to my mind the figures indicate that Florida has been carried by the Democrats. No doubt both fraud and violence intervened to produce the result. But the same is true in many Southern States.

We shall, the fair-minded men of the country will, history will hold that the Republicans were by fraud, violence, and intimidation, by a nullification of the Fifteenth Amendment, deprived of the victory which they fairly won. But we must, I now think, prepare ourselves to accept the inevitable. I do it with composure and cheerfulness. To me the result is no personal calamity.

I would like the opportunity to improve the civil service. It seems to me I could do more than any Democrat to put Southern affairs on a sound basis…

We are in a minority in the Electoral Colleges; we lose the Administration. But in the former free States – the States that were always loyal – we are still in a majority. We carry eighteen of the twenty-two and have two hundred thousand majority of the popular vote. In the old slave States, if the recent [13th, 14th. and 15th] Amendments were cheerfully obeyed, if there had been neither violence nor intimidation nor other improper interference with the rights of the colored people, we should have carried enough Southern States to have held the country and to have secured a decided popular majority in the nation. Our adversaries are in power, but they are supported by a minority only of the lawful voters of the country. A fair election in the South would undoubtedly have given us a large majority of the electoral votes, and a decided preponderance of the popular vote.

I went to church and heard a good, strong, sensible sermon by Critchfield’s son-in-law. After church and dinner I rode with General Mitchell and his children out to Alum Creek and around past the place of my old friend Albert Buttles. We talked of the Presidential question as settled, and found it in all respects well for me personally that I was not elected. On reaching home at Mitchell’s, we found my son Webb with the following dispatch from Governor Dennison, a prudent and cautious gentleman, which seems to open it all up again: –

WASHINGTON, D. C., November 12, 1876.

Received at Columbus 2:05 P. M.

To GOVERNOR R. B. HAYES.

You are undoubtedly elected next President of the United States. Desperate attempts are being made to defeat you in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida, but they will not succeed.

W. DENNISON*

Note: “W. DENNISON” was former Ohio Governor William Dennison, a one-time member of Lincoln’s cabinet.

Source Hayes Diary pp. 374-378 entry for November 12, 1876.

Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:

•