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.
Sincerely,
R. B. HAYES.
[Unidentified.]
SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and
Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 3, p. 72