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223

Rutherford B. Hayes Speech Signed

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Autographs Start Price:1,000.00 USD Estimated At:NA
Rutherford B. Hayes Speech Signed
"WINNERS WILL BE NOTIFIED AFTER THE AUCTION ENDS BY THE AUCTIONEER ONCE ALL BIDS HAVE BEEN PROCESSED TO DETERMINE THE WINNER FOR EACH LOT."
Fantastic speech by Rutherford B. Hayes, extensively annotated in his hand and signed at the conclusion, ''R.B. Hayes''. In this undated speech (though after 1880), Hayes writes extensively on educational reform, especially in the south after the Civil War, and references past Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, writing in the first names of these Presidents. Other hand-edits by Hayes include writing in the date of ''1861-1865'' for the Civil War (referenced as a ''tremendous tragedy''). Speech including Hayes' edits reads in part, ''...popular education...is the duty of the General Government to complete the work of reconstruction by affording aid, wherever it is needed, for the education of the illiterate white and colored people in the late slaveholding states...The magnitude of the evil to be eradicated is not, I apprehend, generally and fully understood. These facts should be considered: in the late slaveholding States, under the system of slavery, education was denied to the colored people, and the education of the non-slaveholding white people was greatly neglected...Almost three million of the young people of the South are growing up without the means of education. Citizenship and the right to vote were conferred upon the colored people by the Government and People of the United States. It is, therefore, the sacred duty, as it is the highest interest, of the United States to see that these new citizens and voters are fitted by education for the grave responsibility which has been cast upon them...In the Territories of the United States it is estimated that there are over two hundred thousand Indians, almost all of whom are uncivilized. They have heretofore been hunters and warriors...The solution of the Indian question will speedily be either the extinction of the Indians or their absorption into American citizenship by means of the civilizing influences of education...Happily for the United States, several of the large elements of this immigration contain very few people who are wholly uneducated. The Germans and Scandinavians have for the most part been educated at public schools in their native country. But it is probable that from one-fourth to one-third of the present total immigration into our country is from foreign nations in which popular education is greatly neglected...Thomas Jefferson, with his almost marvelous sagacity and foresight, declared nearly a hundred years ago, that free schools were an essential part - one of the columns, as he expressed it - of the republican edifice...James Madison said, almost sixty years ago, 'A popular government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps to both.' Already, in too many instances, elections have become the farce which Madison predicted, and the tremendous tragedy of 1861-1865 could never have occurred if in all sections of our country there had been universal suffrage based upon universal education...'' Speech is entitled at top, possibly in Hayes' hand, ''National Aid to Popular Education / By Rutherford B. Hayes''. The original printed speech upon which Hayes makes his edits appears to be a speech he gave previously, here pasted onto larger sheets measuring 5.25'' x 8.75''. Four-page document is on four separate sheets, ideal for framing. Light soiling, overall in very good condition.
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