The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

Republicans ran, as astute Democrats recognized they would, against “the Pope and Jeff Davis.” The Republicans waved the bloody shirt and attacked what they claimed was a Catholic assault on the schools. Hayes, quite sincerely, feared a Democratic return to power as an annulment of the constitutional and legal changes that had followed the war. The question was, “Shall the ex-Rebels have the Government?” Rep. James Garfield of Ohio, one of Hayes’s leading supporters, warned in a widely reprinted pamphlet that, with the South eager to overturn the results of Reconstruction, the North must maintain its memory of the War and sustain “the whole meaning … of the revolution through which we have passed and are still passing.”