USA > Ohio > History of Ohio, covering the periods of Indian, French and British dominion, the territory Northwest, and the hundred years of statehood > Part 43
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Governor Haves, in his third inaugural address of January, 1876, called attention to the rapid and dangerous growth of local indebted- ness, and cited statistics showing that in 1571 thirty-one of the prin- cipal cities and towns, levying annual taxes of nine million dollars, were in debt seven millions, and in 1875 the same cities and towns were levying over twelve millions taxes each year, and had increased their debt to over twenty millions. At the same time the cities were
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complaining of bad administration of public affairs. "Profligate expenditure," said the governor, "is the fruitful cause of municipal misgovernment," and he urged the legislature to restrict the powers of municipalities to go in debt as the constitution restricted the State. The legislature acted on the suggestion, and prohibited special improvements by cities until the money to cover the expense bad been obtained by special assessments on property to be benefited. Other laws were also passed tending to restrict the extravagance of munic- ipal governments. Notwithstanding this, however, Ohio has, in recent years, furnished an instance of a city government going into the hands of a receiver.
The main topie of talk and thought in Ohio in 1876 was the great exposition held at Philadelphia, in commemoration of the declaration of independence. Among the most interesting things on exhibit were the new machines called typewriters, made at Cincinnati by G. W. N. Yost, one of the owners of the patents obtained by Sholes, Soulé, Glidden and Densmore. It was in this year that the first patent for a telephone was taken out by Elisha Gray, a native of Belmont county, who had obtained his education at Oberlin college, and had been working toward the perfection of telegraphy for eight years. Bell's telephone, patented almost simultaneously, was exhib- ited at the Centennial fair. Thomas Alva Edison, a native of Milan, Erie county (1847), who had grown up as a newsboy in Michigan, and afterward spent some years at Cincinnati as a telegraph operator, had established himself in importance by inventing duplex teleg- raphy, and in this same year founded his establishment at Menlo Park, N. J., itself one of the wonders of the world, and began work- ing on the invention of the incandescent electric lamp and the phono- graph. Charles F. Brush, another Ohioan, born near Cleveland, in the same year patented his dynamo, the basis of the modern system of lighting. Thus it will be seen that the year 1876 was an epoch of vast importance and Ohio was at the front.
Governor Hayes urged the legislature, early in the year, in con- sideration of the theory of economy that was pressing very strongly upon the minds of the members: "Let your session be short, avoid all schemes requiring excessive expenditures, and your constituents will cheerfully approve an appropriation for the Centennial." Many thousands of the citizens of Ohio attended the exposition, and the State made a very creditable display of its products, participated in by a thousand exhibitors, of whom a fourth received awards, a greater proportion than in any other state. The showing of school methods and the work of pupils was particularly excellent, the exhibit of one Ohio city receiving mention as the best that had ever been made in any country. Ohio also took pride in the faet that this first great international fair in America was under the successful
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direction of Alfred T. Goshorn, who had received his training for the place in the management of the annual C'ineinnati exposition.
Early in 1876 Judge Alphonso Taft, of Cincinnati, was called to the national cabinet as secretary of war, and a little later he was made attorney-general. Afterward Judge Taft served with ability as minister of the United States at the courts of Austria and Russia.
Looking to the old world, it is to be noted that in 1876 an Ohio man rose to great prominence in international affairs through his work as a newspaper correspondent. This was Janarius Aloysius MacGahan, a native of the same county (Perry) as Philip Henry Sheridan ; son of an Irishman, who died and left his boy to be reared by the mother in a cabin among the hills. He prepared himself in the district schools to become a teacher, afterward was a writer for St. Louis newspapers, and in 1868 went to Europe and became the war correspondent of the New York Herald during the invasion of France by Germany. After traveling in Asia, going through the Spanish war with the army of Don Carlos, and sailing to the Aretic regions, he went into Bulgaria and in 1876 wrote letters of remark- able power exposing the atrocities of the Turkish government. Mae- Gahan's letters forced Disraeli to withhold the support of England from the sultan, and Russia was free to wage a war that liberated a large region from Turkish control. Dying at Constantinople in 1878, MacGahan's body was brought home in an United States war ship in 1884, and interred at New Lexington.
On June 25th of the Centennial year Gen. George A. Custer, native of Harrison county, descendant of a Kuster who was one of the Hessians who came over to fight against Washington and became citizens-('uster, the "Yellow Hair," as the Indians ealled him, met his death with near three hundred of his men, in a wild charge upon a camp of hostile Sionx in Montana.
In the same year, it may be noted, Matthew Simpson, born at Cadiz in 1811, then in the prime of his manhood and famous as a great orator and the foremost bishop of the strongest Protestant church in America, published his "Hundred Years of Methodism."
Near the close of 1876, on the bitterly cold and stormy night of December 29th, a westward express train on the Lake Shore railroad, running at the rate of forty miles an hour, broke through the iron bridge over the Ashtabula river, and eight cars were thrown into the chasm. Trains were in that day heated with coal stoves, and the wreckage, in which over a hundred and fifty people were entangled, was soon in flames. Eighty people perished in this terrible aeci- dent, but not entirely in vain, for the dangers of railroad traveling, of which the Ashtabula disaster was for a long time the most famous example, have since then been greatly decreased by the improved construction of cars, bridges and tracks, which were shown, by such horrors, to be necessary.
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The presidential campaign of 1876 was opened by a movement of independent Republicans, of which General Cox was one, demanding a candidate pledged to civil service reform. A national Prohibition convention met at Cleveland and nominated Green Clay Smith, of Kentucky, for president, and Gideon T. Stewart, of Ohio, for vice- president. The national Greenback party was organized at Indi- anapolis and its ticket was Peter Cooper and Samuel F. Cary, the latter a Cincinnati man famous as a lecturer on temperance and a political orator, who had once been elected to congress to succeed General Haves. Next. the national Republican convention met at Cincinnati. It was memorable for the enthusiastic support given James G. Blaine, of Maine, who was born in western Pennsylvania, and in youth had made his home for a time with his kinsman, Thomas Ewing, and attended school at Lancaster, Ohio. Ohio supported in the convention her governor, Rutherford B. Hayes, and General Noyes presented his name in a manner that was creditable in a con- vention never surpassed in oratory. By a concentration of the oppo- sition to Mr. Blaine, Governor Hayes was nominated for president on the seventh ballot. In the national Democratic convention at St. Louis, Ohio voted for William Allen for president and Allen G. Thurman for vice-president, but Gov. Samuel J. Tilden, of New York, was chosen as the candidate for president.
Governor Hayes and Governor Tilden both declared for reform of the civil service and the resumption of specie payments, and both promised the South generous treatment. The real issue was the removal or continuance of that support that the national government. had so far continued to give the negro voters of the South in their attempts at voting and controlling public affairs, aided by numerous Northerner who were called "carpetbaggers." One of the North- ern men, who because they made their homes in the South, were classed indiscriminately with some who were less worthy, was Will- iam Burnham Woods, born at Newark in 1824, a graduate of West- ern Reserve college and Yale, a Democratic legislator and speaker of the house (1858-59), who went into the army as a staff officer of the Seventy-sixth Ohio, commanded a brigade of Sherman's army and received the brevet of major-general. He was appointed from the South to the United States supreme court in 1880. Another was Maj .- Gen. James B. Steedman, who for some time was collector of the port of New Orleans. Another was Albion W. Tourgee, a native of Ashtabula county, who became a judge in North Carolina, and described the experiences of the "carpet-baggers" in books he sig- nificantly entitled, "A Fool's Errand," and "Bricks without Straw," which were the greatest literary successes of the day.
Before the election, General Sherman, at that time in command of the United States army, was directed to hold as many troops as pos- sible in readiness to protect citizens without regard to color in the
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exercise of the right to vote, and assist in the punishment of all who should attempt to nullify the Fifteenth amendment. Attorney- General Noves instructed the United States marshals to preserve peace at the polls and guard against fraud and intimidation. In the South, particularly, the issue was based on this exercise of national authority, and a general impulse to overthrow the political power of the colored people, while in the North there was general apathy as to the result, with a rather predominating notion that the military power had been used long enough. The result was that the South was revolutionized politically, generally by more or less active intimida- tion of the negroes, and New York, New Jersey, Indiana and Con- nectient gave majorities for Tilden. The plurality for Haves in Ohio was only 7,500. The election was at first supposed to have been carried by Tilden, but the Republican committee claimed a majority of one, by the votes of Florida, Louisiana and South Caro- line, where the vote was very close. Committees of prominent men were sent South by both parties to be near during the official counting of votes. A brief account of the contest cannot be given that would be just and altogether truthful, because in the case of each of the three Southern states the circumstances were complicated. But it may be said, as Senator Sherman wrote to Governor Hayes regarding Louisiana, that Tilden had a majority on the face of the returns, but under the State laws many of the county returns were rejected on the showing of fraud and intimidation of legal voters. The other side could not seriously deny intimidation, but charged frand upon the county and State returning boards. The two houses of Congress, divided in politics, after facing for a while the danger of a civil war that some excited partisans threatened, referred the counting of the state returns, of which there were two sets from four states, to an electoral commission, in which Senator Thurman and Congressmen James A. Garfield and Henry B. Payne were among the members. Said Mr. Blaine afterward: "If we are to believe the earnest speeches made in 1876, we were right on the crater of the volcano, right where the yawning gulf of chaos and dissolution confronted us, and we escaped it by a makeshift, and a pretty riekety one it was." The members of the commission acted as would have been anticipated from their known political convictions and by a vote of eight to seven accepted those returns that assured Governor Haves of a majority of one in the electoral college. He was inaugurated peacefully in 1877, and began an administration that is an epoch in the restoration of fraternal relations between the people who fought the battles of 1861-1865.
Throughout his term he was denounced by political opponents as the beneficiary of fraud, and his chilly attitude toward office-hunters and job-promoters in his own party did not add to his popularity. But history will record that he did his duty in accepting the presi-
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deney, and in his administration of that office showed himself one of the wisest and best of American presidents. One of the earliest of the verdicts is that of E. Benjamin Andrews, in his "History of the Last Quarter Century." He says: "Ilis administration was in every way one of the most creditable in all our history. He had a resolute will, irreproachable integrity, and a comprehensive and remarkably healthy view of public affairs."
To his cabinet Mr. Hayes called Senator Jolin Sherman, who as a member of Congress had secured the passage of an aet for the resump- tion of specie payments by the United States treasury. As secre- tary of the treasury he was successful in bringing about this resumption, and raising paper money to par with gold, the crowning act of his great public career, in 1879. This, and the general over- throw of the political power of the colored race in the South, per- mitted by the president's policy of non-interference, are the most memorable features of the period of his administration at home, and the opening of friendly relations with China by a former Seneca county boy, Anson Burlingame, and the arrival of the first Chinese minister at Washington, the great events of foreign affairs.
When Governor Haves left his State office to become president, his place was taken by Lieutenant-Governor Thomas Lowry Young, who came to the United States, a poor Irish boy, in 1847, was a soldier in the Mexican war and afterward went to school in Cincinnati, read law and practiced his profession at that city until the war of the rebellion, when he went to the front as a first lieutenant in his regi- ment, won the rank of colonel of the Hundred-and-Eighteenth Ohio and was given the brevet of brigadier-general for gallantry at Resaca. After his return to Cincinnati he had served twice in the legislature. The place of Senator Sherman in Congress was filled by the election of Stanley Matthews, of Cincinnati, who had been at one time a sup- porter of Salmon P. Chase in abolition days and later judge, legisla- tor and United States district attorney. He went into the war as one of that famous trio of field officers of the Twenty-third Ohio, Rose- erans, Matthews and Haves, and afterward became colonel of the Fifty-first. In 1876 he was defeated as a candidate for Congress by Henry B. Banning, mainly because of a remarkable instance, already noted, of his enforcement of the fugitive slave law before the war, and early in 1877 he was the main counsel for General Haves before the electoral commission. Senator Matthews' most important part in national legislation was the introduction of a resolution which was adopted, declaring the United States bonds legally payable in silver.
The year. 1877 was marked by strikes among the coal workers of Starke and Wayne counties, attended by riots and destruction of property, demanding the use of the militia to restore order. Partly in sympathy with mine workers, but mainly on account of a redne- tion in wages, the first general strike of railroad employees was begun
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July 14th, on the Baltimore & Ohio railroad. The road was blockaded at Martinsburg, and, the trouble getting beyond the powers of West Virginia, with actual hostilities, United States troops were called out. The Ohio militia was called out on account of a bloekade at Newark. The strike spread to the Pennsylvania railroad, and, a week later, at Pittsburg, after a battle between the militia and rioters, the torch was applied to the railroad buildings, which were all con- sumed, with a great quantity of freight, causing damage of nearly ten million dollars. The strike spread to all the roads, and there were blockades and riots at Toledo and Cleveland and other railroad centers. At Columbus and Zanesville mobs compelled factories and mills to close and turn their men into the street. The militia prov- ing insufficient, volunteer bands of citizens were compelled to organ- ize to maintain order, and the railroads remained in a crippled condi- tion until the elose of July, no trains running on some roads and few on any except under the protection of troops. The elimax of the strike was at Chicago, where there were pitched battles of rioters and policemen, until quiet was restored with an iron hand by General Sheridan, with troops hurried in from the Indian frontier.
The governorship, in the political campaign of 1877, was sought, in behalf of the Democrats, by Richard Moore Bishop, of Hamilton county, who was born in Kentucky in the first year of the war of 1812-15, and since 1848 had been a prominent merehant at Cinein- mati ; while the Republican "standard-bearer" was William H. West, a native of Pennsylvania who had come to Ohio in 1850, and entered the profession of law in association with William Lawrence of Belle- fontaine. He was a participant in the famous pre-Republican con- vention of 1854 at Columbus, afterward served in the legislature, and was attorney-general in 1868-70, and a justice of the supreme court until the failure of his sight. Retaining his remarkable power as a publie speaker, he was known as "the blind man eloquent." In the campaign he favored the cause of the railroad strikers, which prob- ably led to his defeat, as the strike was accompanied by so much dis- order that it was bitterly condemned by the majority of the people.
Governor Bishop, who was elected by a plurality of 22,520 over West ( Lewis HI. Bond, the Workingmen's candidate, receiving 12,469 : Stephen Jamson, Greenback, 16,912, and H. A. Thompson, Prohibition, 4,836), had the conservative views of a successful mer- chant. In his inaugural address he urged "sneh legislation as will help to restore confidence in financial affairs and bring activity and energy again to our business cireles." Advising attention to the labor question, be deprecated any distinctively elass legislation, and advised the legislators that if they would promote economy and good administration "very little if any other legislative action will be needed to restore harmony between labor and capital." Referring to the complaints regarding the laws of congress (partienlarly the
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laws for resumption of specie payment and the abandonment of sil- ver as a metallie standard ), he said that, while not seeking to justify any congressional action, "It is a very common habit to refer our grievances to causes as far from home as possible, and consequently our willingness to hold our national Congress entirely responsible for the present finaneial condition of the country, is precisely what might be expected. Our real and permanent help must come from economical living and judicious legislation at home. We must begin the work of reform in our own State government." There were three publie grievances to which he particularly directed atten- tion : "Our unequal, unjust and therefore comparatively unproduc- tive system of taxation; our chunsy, exceedingly dilatory and generally odious system of courts; and our confused, extravagant and badly managed system of municipal government." All these words of Governor Bishop are worthy of remembrance and application to the perennial imperfections of government, though matters have since his time been considerably improved.
Soon after the inauguration of Governor Bishop, the legislature, having a large Democratie majority, elected George H. Pendleton, of Ciueinnati, to sneeeed Senator Matthews, the Republicans casting blank ballots. Senator Pendleton was one of the most popular and able men of the State, had eight years' congressional experience as a member of the lower house, and since the war had aspired with good reason to his party's nomination for the presidency. Ile served one term in the senate, and died in 1889 while minister to Germany Notable among the representatives in Congress in the same period was Benjamin Butterworth, a native of Warren county, a brilliant orator who was elected in 1878, and three times afterward, and also held the office of United States commissioner of patents. Gen. T. Warren Keifer, who represented the Springfield district in 1877 to 18.5, was speaker of the house in the Forty-seventh Congress (151-53). The only other Ohio man who has held this important office is Milton Sayler, of Cincinnati, born in Preble county and edu- cated at Miami university and Cincinnati law school. He was elected to Congress as a Democrat, in 1872, 1874sand 1876, and was speaker during a part of the Forty-fourth Congress.
During Bishop's administration, under the supervision of Adju- tant-General Luther M. Meily, and with the financial aid of the legis- lature, the National Guard of Ohio was raised from an almost helpless and worthless condition to that of equality with the best in the United States, a station from which it has not fallen since that time, now being greatly advanced in efficiency beyond the condition reached in 1878 80. The great railroad riot had shown the neces- sity for such protection of property and life.
The year 1878 is to be remembered for the last of the dangerons epidemies in Ohio. Yellow fever, which since then has been more
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and more closely confined to the lower latitudes of America, erept in that year up the Ohio valley, causing much sickness and alarm at the river towns. At Cincinnati there were seventeen deaths from the disease.
The years that followed the Centennial exposition, 1877, 1878, and the early part of 1879, are memorable as the era of "tramps," as all those were called who traveled about, some seeking employ- ment and some apparently under the influences of a vieions spirit of idleness. Many manufactories were closed, the iron industry suffering especially, and a large number of men were thrown out of employment for participation in the railroad disturbances. Some of these wanderers indulged in lawless deeds throughout the country, and there was general alarm, particularly in the less closely inhab- ited districts.
In the midst of the trouble and connotion and fear and doubt of the period, Secretary Sherman predicted, in a speech in Ohio, that the contraction of the currency and the accumulation of a gold reserve in the treasury for the resumption of specie payments was certain to succeed before the time set, January 1, 1879. Actually, before that time, the United States returned to a specie basis, a paper dollar became as good as gold, and the condition was reached which has ever since been maintained, of a currency of various kinds, eir- culating over the entire country, without any difference in purehas- ing power.
Toward the close of 1879 there was a great change in conditions. As Governor Bishop described it, early in the year numerous fur- naces and mills were closed or running on part time, many men were out of employment, and so-called tramps were so numerous that the legislature passed a law for their suppression. But by the end of the year such conditions had passed, and industry was revived. At the same time the great era of speculative railroad building was at its culmination, as it had been thirty years before, and there began to be signs of a coming collapse, though credit continued to be unre- strained for a few years. In 1881 Ohio had 5,840 miles of railroad, almost double the mileage in 1860.
At the State election in 1878, the National party, organized at Toledo from the various parties opposed to banks and hard money, and the labor parties, east nearly forty thousand votes, but the Republican ticket was successful by a small plurality. In 1879 the Democrats put in nomination for governor Gen. Thomas Ewing. a son of the Thomas Ewing of earlier days. He had been one of the fighters for free-soil in Kansas in 1857-60, the first chief-justice of that state, and active in command of Union troops in Missouri dur- ing the war. In 1870 he returned to Ohio, served in Congress in 1877-51, and was a prominent advocate of the remonetization of sil- ver and opponent of the retirement of greenbacks. The Republican
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nominee was Charles Foster, a native of Seneca county and commer- cial founder of the city of Fostoria, who had served in Congress from 1871 to 1879. He won the nomination by a close vote over Judge Alphonso Taft, who had also been supported for the nomination in 1875, and in October Foster was elected by a plurality of over 17,000, while the Greenback and Prohibition vote was reduced to a total of 14,000. Governor Foster was re-elected in 1881 by a major- ity of 24,000 over John W. Bookwalter, and served from January, 1880, to January, 1884.
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