The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes

J. Q. Howard put this book together in 1876, after the Republican convention at Cincinnati made Rutherford B. Hayes its nominee on the seventh ballot. It opens with the family’s arrival from Scotland in 1682, then moves through an Ohio boyhood, Kenyon College, Harvard Law School, a Cincinnati practice, war service with the Twenty-third Ohio, two terms in Congress, and three elections as governor. Much of the volume is Hayes talking: inaugurals, annual messages, letters, and an appendix of six speeches given between 1867 and June 1876. Black suffrage, civil service reform, and hard money come up again and again. Campaign lives were never neutral, which is what makes this one worth reading. It preserves the portrait a candidate wanted voters to see, months before the disputed election put him in the White House.