COLUMBUS, OHIO, November 13, 1869.
DEAR SAGE: I am in receipt of yours of yesterday. I will send you reports of [the] Ohio Penitentiary and Reform Farm. No report of Girls' Reformatory yet made. But the rules adopted may answer your purpose and I will try to get them for you. They were approved by me as the law required and were in the handwriting of Judge M—— [Matthews (?)].
I have the Thanksgiving proclamations of twenty-seven States all recognizing religion, nearly all the religion of the Bible, and several the Divinity of Christ. More are coming, doubtless. Our Legislature for many years has passed a joint resolution annually authorizing a thanksgiving and frequently in terms which recognized the religion of the Bible. The last Legislature omitted to do so by a mere accident this year, but in [the] Sixty-fifth volume Ohio Laws, page 306, passed one last year. If you wish to borrow my bundle of Thanksgiving proclamations I will send them to you. All state institutions have religious exercises, some of them chaplains paid under state laws. The meetings of the two houses of the General Assembly are always opened with prayer in accordance, sometimes, with resolutions (passed unanimously usually), and sometimes by common consent. The inaugurations of governors are prefaced by religious exercises.
The general proposition on which you stand is undoubtedly sound. Whether your particular relief can be granted by a court is perhaps doubtful; and if you are beaten I am not sure but the question will go before the committee in a better form for a final and correct decision by the people without the intervention of the courts in opposition to the late action of the School Board than it will with such intervention. But if I can aid you, call on me.
SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 3, p. 72
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