Our ancestors were complete bad asses that remained confident even a country torn by war would be reunited under our established principles. They bequeathed this history to us, but we can’t figure out how to do something as simple as balance the budget or come to a meaningful compromise on abortion.
Rutherford B. Hayes isn’t anyone’s favorite President. Many probably don’t even know his name, and for those who do, he’s simply someone who was President long ago, some unspecified period in the 19th century, in a country that seems far away, radically different than today in ways both better and worse. Those who know a little more might remember that he became President only after one of the most contentious elections in United States history, the sort of thing that makes 2000 and 2020 seem tame by comparison, and perhaps that he did so by selling out Southern blacks and setting the foundation for Jim Crow. There is some truth to this, sadly. The Republican, Hayes, lost the popular vote to Samuel J. Tilden in 1876, but neither had enough electoral votes to secure victory. Hayes prevailed after making a deal with Democrats, known as the Compromise of 1877, to end federal support for Reconstruction and the ongoing occupation of the Southern states since the end of the Civil War, effectively giving segregationists and the Ku Klux Klan free reign below the Mason Dixon line. At the same time, Hayes was also a man long considered radical in his own anti-slavery party, one who fought tirelessly in the wake of the war itself for equal rights for all, staunchly advocating on behalf of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, believing that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution could only be fulfilled if blacks enjoyed the same benefits of citizenship as whites. He sparred frequently with a segregationist cousin Texas, writing that “the remedy [to our post Civil War struggles] is not, I am sure to be found in the abandonment of the American principle that all must share in government. The whites of the South must do as we do, forget to drive and learn to lead.” For that matter, few can be said to have fought more fiercely in the war itself to secure the Union and freedom for the slaves, a veteran of countless battles, a man who marched somewhere around 1,200 miles over four years, was wounded five times, presumed dead once – and seemingly loved every minute of it. These were surprising developments to even his own family. Hayes was almost 40 years old when the war began and had a history of illness, debilitating enough that he was unable to fight in the Mexican War more than a decade earlier. He’d been a Harvard Law graduate and had built a practice in his native Ohio since 1845. He married the love of his life, Lucy Webb, in 1852, and had three sons by 1858. As a lawyer, he had a soft spot for lost cause cases, particularly when an execution was a possible fate for the accused, defending the mentally ill and dispossessed including women. He also didn’t shy away from defending former slaves, protecting them as best he could from returning to bondage because of the Fugitive Slave Act.
These acts and others didn’t earn him much money, but his stature grew in the budding Republican Party and by 1856 he was offered a judgeship. He declined that role but obtained a prominent perch as solicitor for Cincinnati when the war started. In the early days, he was somewhat ambivalent, believing that if the Southern states wanted to secede, we should just “let them go,” but his feelings changed when the Rebels turned more violent, attacking and seizing Federal property at Fort Sumter. On April 15, 1861, newly elected President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to defend the union, and Hayes almost immediately embraced the cause, believing the “people responded with wild and joyous excitement” and “unbounded enthusiasm. How relieved we were to have a Government again.” He sponsored a resolution to join the effort at a meeting in Cincinnati, and wrote to his uncle, “We are all for war. The few dissentients have to run like quarter horses. A great change for two weeks to produce.” Still, Hayes remained unsure of his own ability to fight, limiting himself to joining a volunteer company and conducting a few drills, describing “the first ten days of war…as jolly and exciting as you could wish.” Like many of his countrymen at the time, he saw war as a fundamentally ennobling experience, writing to his cousin in Texas that “People forget self. The virtues of magnanimity, courage, patriotism, etc., etc., are all called into life. People are more generous, more sympathetic, better than when engaged in the more selfish pursuits of peace. The same exhibition of virtue is witnessed on your side. May there be as much of this, the better side of war, enjoyed on both sides and as little of the horrors of war suffered, as possible, and may we soon have an honorable and enduring peace.” While it might be easy to dismiss such naivety from a man who’d not yet committed to fighting, much less participated in an actual battle, there is also the sense that the near 40 year old father of three was girding himself to join the conflict directly. Soon, he was writing “I would prefer to go into it if I knew I was to die or be killed in the course of it, than to live through and after without taking any part in it.” When he learned Ohio Governor William Dennison, Jr. had appointed him a major in the Twenty-third regiment of volunteers, he told Lucy, “You know how I love you; how I love the family all, but Lucy, I am much happier in this business than I could be fretting away in the old office near the courthouse. It is living.” From there, Hayes didn’t look back despite almost four years of impossible to imagine hardships to follow.
After a series of small skirmishes and half-fought battles, Hayes found himself in the midst of a full blown war on September 14, 1862, where he suffered his first of several grievous injuries. Promoted to colonel by that point, he was ordered to take the Twenty-third up a mountain pass to protect the Union’s flank and secure what were supposed to be two cannons posted there, but shortly after 9 AM they encountered far more resistance than anticipated. Fearing the regiment would be overrun even though they were hidden in heavy woods, Hayes, “eyes shining like a cat’s,” ordered a charge of his own, hoping to break the Confederates. “Now boys, remember, you are the Twenty-third and give them hell. In these woods, the Rebels don’t know but we are ten thousand…we are as good as ten thousand by God.” The men charged up the hill, not once, but three times, pushing the enemy back, but then Hayes himself “felt a stunning blow,” hit by a musket on his left arm above the elbow. The bone was fractured, there was a gaping hole, and damage to his ribs. As he laid down about twenty feet behind his men, they discovered that the Confederate forces at the top of the ridge were far, far superior in number. Incredibly, Hayes described himself as “pretty comfortable” while lying on the dirt and had a “pretty accurate notion of the way the fight was going. The enemy’s fire was occasionally very heavy, balls passed near my face and hit the ground all around me.” Perhaps even more incredibly, though he was bleeding profusely and in great pain, Hayes attempted to rejoin the fight, though he was unable to stand for more than a few moments. Regardless, he continued to issue commands from his prone position, ordering his captain to stymie a flanking maneuver, “let his company wheel backward so as to face the threatened attack.” This worked for a time, but had the unfortunate effect of leaving Hayes himself lying alone with nothing between him and the enemy. In fact, right next to him was a Confederate soldier who’d also been wounded. The two commenced a “considerable talk,” exchanging messages to loved ones should either of them not make it through, “right jolly and friendly,” and by no means “an unpleasant experience.” This continued for about twenty minutes, when the firing suddenly ceased. Hayes called out, “Hallo Twenty-third men, are you going to leave your colonel for the enemy?” At this, his men rushed forward, only to meet more gunfire from the Rebels, prompting Hayes to order them back, “they would get me shot and themselves too.” Lieutenant Ben W. Jackson was able to retrieve Hayes during the next pause in fighting. He was treated by Lucy’s own brother, Dr. Joe Webb, but rather than convalescing, he immediately ventured a half-mile walk to where the other wounded soldiers were being treated. There he chatted with Confederates, in a “pleasant, friendly way,” two of whom noted “you came a good ways to fight us.” A few hours later, he was headed to Maryland to fully recover, a process that took several months, but he was back with his men by December.
Throughout the remainder of the war, Hayes and his beloved regiment frequently found themselves leading the charge, taking the fight to the enemy on the very front lines. On September 19, 1863 at Opequon Creek in Virginia, they led a fearsome charge directly into a patch of almost uncrossable mud. Hayes described the scene to this wife, “The Rebel fire now broke out furiously…To stop was death. To go on was probably the same; but we started again. My horse plunged in and mired down hopelessly, just as by frantic struggling he reached about the middle of the stream. I jumped off, and down on all fours, succeeded in reaching the Rebel side – but alone…I was about the middle of the brigade and saw nobody else, but hundreds were struggling in the stream…Soon they came flocking, all regiments mixed up – all order gone, no chance of every reforming, but pell-mell, over the obstructions went the crowd. Two cannons were captured; the rest run off.” Hayes would characterize this hellish scene later as “Perhaps the happiest moment of my life was then, when I saw that our line didn’t break, and that the enemies did.” He wrote this even though the battle was far from over. They chased the Confederates as he commanded, only to come under intense fire once more. He told Lucy then that “Things began to look dark” until the legendary General Philip Sheridan arrived with the “splendid cavalry…with shouts at a gallop [they] charged right into the Rebel lines. We pushed on and broke the Rebels. The cavalry came back, and an hour later and nearly a mile back, the same scene again; and a third time; and the victory was ours just before sundown.” The cost of this victory was over 5,000 men including a life threatening injury to Captain Russel Hastings, Hayes’ own adjutant general (he would survive, miraculously), but rather than lament the loss, they celebrated the survival of Hastings’ horse. Old Whitey had lived through 19 battles at that point, a “capital war horse,” and was adopted as the mascot of Hayes beloved Twenty-third. This shouldn’t imply that Hayes was without remorse. A short time later, he told Lucy, “We now talk of our killed and wounded. There is, however, a happy feeling. Those who escape regret of course the loss of comrades and friends, but their own escape and safety to some extent mollifies their feelings.”
Before then, however, Hayes was literally left for dead. On October 19, 1864 General Sheridan’s army suffered a surprise attack and began making an ignoble retreat despite Hayes and the other leaders’ call to stand their ground. Hayes himself had no choice except to gallop off after his fleeing men, but “his fine large black horse [was shot and] killed instantly, tumbling [him] heels over head” and smashing him “on the ground violently.” He was knocked unconscious and his ankle was twisted badly; even worse, he was abandoned by his men who thought he was killed, left to the approaching Confederates, who attempted to take him prisoner. It remains unclear how, but he managed to escape into the woods – only to be shot in the head. He described it to Lucy, “I was also hit fairly in the head by a ball, which had lost its force in getting (I supposed) through somebody else! It gave me only a slight shock.” Shortly thereafter, he caught up with the army, found another horse, and marched to the next battle. While all these events and many others were happening, Hayes had been nominated for a congressional seat in Ohio, a move that launched his political career though he refused to campaign, saying “an officer fit for duty who at this crisis would abandon his post to electioneer for a seat in Congress ought to be scalped.” This devotion to his duty, however, likely won him the race, making the rest history as they say. The war would end and President Abraham Lincoln would be assassinated before he was sworn in the following year. Future President William McKinley described his conduct in combat compared to regular life, “His whole nature seemed to change when in battle. From the sunny, agreeable, the kind, the generous, the gentle gentleman…he was, when the battle once was on…intense and ferocious.” Though he told his mother, “I am very happy to be through the war,” he also described the experience as the most glorious years of his life and doubted of his men, “that many of them will ever see as happy times again as they have had in the army.”
Almost 160 years later, it’s almost impossible to imagine this mindset, but Hayes was not alone. Thirty years after the Civil War, future President Teddy Roosevelt would also find himself on his own in the middle of charging an enemy while serving in the Spanish American War. It would be another half century before the zeal to fight and die for one’s country, the idea that battle was noble and the proper conditions to show one’s honor and loyalty, would dissipate from a broadly shared conception to one held by only a few. There are logistical and technical reasons for some of this shift in our cultural attitudes. The Civil War in which Hayes fought is regarded as the first modern conflict because of the widespread use of trains and telegraphs, and the invention of early machine guns, but these weapons were quaint by the time World War I broke out in the heart of Europe in August 1914, and quainter still by the time World War II ended with the nuclear bomb, a weapon powerful enough to destroy the world. Over the course of less than two hundred years, humanity “progressed” from wars that killed a few thousand men (6,800 deaths, for example, on the US side of the Revolutionary War) to hundreds of thousands to millions (over 25 million in World War II). War was always hell, but the scale of the carnage that would come would have been inconceivable to a George Washington or a Rutherford B. Hayes. Given that both men – along with many of their seemingly war loving contemporaries – were known for their huge hearts, honorable natures, good manners, and gentle demeanors outside of battle, it’s almost inconceivable they would have felt the same deposited in the trenches in World War I France. Still, logistics and technology alone doesn’t seem to explain the obvious loss of spirit, particularly in the Western World. There is an unmistakable sense in popular culture that the sort of pride in one’s country that would inspire a Hayes or a Roosevelt is no longer something to be cherished and cultivated. Those who do so are backwards at best, not enlightened enough to join their fellow citizens of the world, or downright imperialist if not racist at worst. While there is a certain appeal to feeling one is above concerns now considered provincial, the unavoidable byproduct is a lack of confidence in almost everything we do. Our ancestors solved the world’s toughest challenges with their blood, sweat, and tears, complete bad asses that remained confident even a country torn by war would be reunited under our established principles. They bequeathed this history to us, but we can’t figure out how to do something as simple as balance the budget or come to a meaningful compromise on abortion. There is a heart here that has been lost, to all of our detriments, and sadly it seems unlikely to be coming back.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 