Soon after taking office, President Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-1893; see entry in volume 3) toured the South. He made many speeches in which he announced his plan to end the federal policy of Reconstruction that followed the end of the Civil War (1861-65). Hayes hoped that Southerners would respond by protecting equal rights guaranteed to all American citizens by the Constitution.

Hayes was a well-reasoned gentleman. He believed that the rightness of his views on equality and fairness could prevail. He wanted to end the post-Civil War era in which the North dominated the South politically, and in which some Southern whites used violence and intimidation to deny constitutional rights of African Americans.

Hayes had won the controversial presidential election of 1876, in which vote tallies in several states were disputed: in some cases, African Americans had been...