Part 1

LETTERS AND LITERARY MEMORIALS OF SAMUEL J. TILDEN

EDITED BY JOHN BIGELOW, LL.D.

VOL. 1

NEW YORK AND LONDON HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 1908

Copyright, 1908, by HARPER & BROTHERS.

_All rights reserved._ Published February, 1908.

_Shortly before the death of the late Samuel J. Tilden, and in compliance with his wishes, a selection was made by our senior colleague from such of Mr. Tilden's public writings and speeches as were then conveniently accessible and seemed then responsive to a popular demand. This selection was edited and published in 1885._

_The forty-second section of the will of Mr. Tilden, who died in the following year, provided as follows:_

_"I also authorize my said Executors and Trustees to collect and publish in such form as they may deem proper my speeches and public documents, and such other writings and papers as they may think expedient to include with the same, which shall be done under their direction. The expenses thereof shall be paid out of my estate. My Trustees and Executors are authorized and empowered to burn and destroy any of my letters, papers or other documents, whether printed or in manuscript, which in their judgment will answer no useful purpose to preserve."_

_In discharge of the duty imposed on us by this clause of the testator's will, we have selected such portions of a vast correspondence with, or relating to, the testator as give promise of answering a useful purpose; and at our solicitation Mr. Bigelow has undertaken to edit and publish them in a form that shall harmonize with, and be complementary to, the volume of "Speeches and Writings of Mr. Tilden," already in print._

JOHN BIGELOW, } Executors GEORGE W. SMITH, } and L. V. F. RANDOLPH. } Trustees.

PREFACE OF THE EDITOR

At an early period of his life Samuel J. Tilden seems to have had a sense of its importance not ordinarily felt by youth of his age. This may be accounted for in part by the circumstance that while barely out of his teens, both by pen and speech, he had secured the respectful attention of many of the leading statesmen of his generation. At school he preserved all his composition exercises, and from that time to the close of his life it may well be doubted if he ever wrote a note or document of any kind of which he did not preserve the draft or a copy. As the events with which he had to deal came to assume, as they naturally did, increasing importance with his years, one or more corrected drafts were made of important papers, most, if not all, of which were carefully preserved.

As what may fitly enough be termed Mr. Tilden's public life covered more than half a century, during most of which time he was one of the recognized leaders of one of the great parties of the country, the public will learn without surprise that the accumulations of social, political, and documentary correspondence which fell into the hands of his executors, to be measured by the ton, embraced among its topics almost every important political question by which this nation has been agitated since the accession of General Andrew Jackson to the Presidency in 1829.

A collection of _Tilden's Public Writings and Speeches_ was published in 1885, only a year before his death, but very little of his private correspondence appeared in that publication.

The duty imposed upon his executors of looking through such a vast collection of papers and selecting such as would be profitable for publication has been a long and a very tedious one. They indulge the hope, however, that the volumes now submitted will be found to shed upon the history of our country during the latter half of the last century much light unlikely to be reflected with equal lustre from any other quarter. It will also, they believe, help to transmit to posterity a juster sense than as yet generally prevails of the majestic proportions of one of the most gifted statesmen our country has produced.

Tilden may be said to have fleshed his maiden sword in politics as a champion of President Jackson in his war against the recharter of a United States bank of discount and deposit. He next became somewhat more personally conspicuous as a fervent champion of Mr. Van Buren's substitute for the national bank, now known as the Assistant Treasury.

In 1848 he led the revolt of the Democratic party in New York State against the creation of five slave States, with their ten slave-holding Senators, out of the Territory of Texas. Among the immediate results of this revolt were the defeat of General Cass, the Democratic candidate for President, and the development of a Free-soil party, which later took the name of the Republican, nominated and elected Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency--synchronously with which, and for the first time in the nation's history, the decennial census of 1860 disclosed the fact that the political supremacy of the nation had been transferred to the non-slave-holding States.

Though averse to resisting the secession of the slave States by flagrant war, Tilden did his best and much during the war to prevent an irreconcilable alienation of the people of the two sections, while at the same time building up for himself a reputation in his profession scarcely second to that of any other in the country; and by it, before he had reached the fiftieth year of his age, a fortune which made him no longer dependent upon it for his livelihood.

The first public use he made of this independence was to retrieve the fortunes of the Democratic party by delivering the city of New York from a municipal combination which was threatening it with bankruptcy.

Of Tilden's many achievements as a public servant, it may well be doubted if there was any for which he deserves so much honor as for his part in the overthrow of this pillaging combination, familiarly known as the Tweed Ring, nor any for which it seems so entirely impossible to have then provided another equally competent leader who could and would have given the time, incurred the expense, and assumed the risks that Mr. Tilden did when, with no personal advantage in view, he boldly consecrated several of what might have been the most lucrative years of his professional life to this desperate battle with intrenched municipal villany.

The people of the State were not slow to realize that a man with the courage, power, and resources exhibited by Mr. Tilden in this memorable conflict was precisely the kind of man needed by them for Governor; and while yet wearied with the fatigue and covered with the dust of this municipal struggle, he was constrained by his admirers to enter the lists as a candidate against General Dix, the Republican candidate for that office. The result was a change of about 100,000 votes from the number by which Governor Dix had been elected two years before, and Tilden's triumphant election to his place.

Without doffing his armor, and even before his investiture with his new robes of office, he instituted an elaborate investigation of the canals of the State; so that he had been but a few weeks in office before he was engaged with numerically a far more formidable foe than the one over which he had just triumphed, but one for which his official position happily equipped him with far superior resources. His triumph over the Canal Ring of the State was consequently so short, quick, and decisive as to give him a national reputation, and to make him, long before his term of office at Albany expired, the inevitable candidate of his party to succeed General Grant for the Presidency. He was unanimously nominated by the Democratic National Convention, held at St. Louis in 1876, on the second ballot, and was elected by a popular majority of over 250,000. He was then destined to receive a distinction never shared by any President of the United States, of being an elect of the people for that office, which, by the operation of a tribunal unknown to the Constitution, was given to another.

For the remaining ten years of his life Tilden's health prevented his being wholly a candidate or wholly not a candidate, so reluctant were his numerous friends to give up all hope of such a restoration of health as would enable him to resume once more the leadership of his party. In this they were disappointed.

Thus for more than half a century Mr. Tilden was a shaper and a maker of American history. What kind of history and by what means it was made these volumes are expected to render more clear to the world, and his fame perhaps more enduring.

Mr. Tilden's life, like that of Israel's second king, was, as we have seen, a life of almost constant warfare, and of course he was always more or less liable to be viewed by partisan eyes and judged with only partial justice. None of us can judge himself quite correctly until he can look back upon his conduct after a considerable lapse of years. So we only see a public man as he is entitled to be seen, as Moses was permitted to see his Lord: after He had passed. It is to be hoped that sufficient time has elapsed since Tilden was taken from us to enable us to see by the reflection of his life in this correspondence how lofty was the plane of his entire public life, and how correctly he judged his qualifications for a successful political career when he said that his party standards were too high for the multitude. They were too high, unquestionably, for what is commonly understood as success in politics. It would have been easy for him--as these pages will show--to have been President had his ethical standards been nearer the average of those of the parties of his time.

Without presuming to institute any invidious comparisons, I have no hesitation in expressing my conviction that neither in the writings, speeches, or literary remains of any President of the United States thus far will be found more suggestions profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for the instruction of any American who aspires to be a maker of a nation's laws or an administrator of them, than will be found in Mr. Tilden's Writings, Speeches, and Correspondence.

* * * * *

With the permission of Messrs. Houghton & Mifflin, I have prefixed to these volumes an "Appreciation" of Mr. Tilden by the late James Coolidge Carter, which originally appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ of October, 1892. Mr. Carter's eminence at the American bar and forum, and his relations, both personal and professional, with Mr. Tilden, give value to his judgment of his deceased friend which, both for the honor of himself and of Mr. Tilden, is entitled to all the prominence that can be given to it in these volumes.

MR. TILDEN

AN APPRECIATION, BY JAMES C. CARTER

My acquaintance with Governor Tilden began a few years before the War of the Rebellion, and my first impressions were not favorable to him. Completely dominated by the combined and swelling impulse of patriotism, passion, and aspiration under which the Republican party was then gathering its mighty hosts, I was in no condition to tolerate anything in the nature of opposition to the movement, or even to appreciate the reasons upon which any such opposition might be founded.

It was not until the war was over, when the passions had subsided, when it became necessary to cultivate the arts of peace and to restore the waste and ruin which war had wrought, that I was inclined to extend any hospitality to the qualities for which he was most distinguished, or to lend any ear to his teachings. Drawn from year to year into a nearer acquaintance with him, and having occasion, when he came to fill stations of influence and power, to observe the ready sagacity and easy skill with which he conceived and carried through important measures for the redress of errors and frauds in public administration, I became more and more impressed with his prodigious superiority to other men.

What he would have been able to accomplish had he been permitted to assume the functions of the great office to which the majority of his countrymen believed him to have been elected is matter of idle conjecture only; but the list of his achievements during the few years in which, upon a narrower theatre, he acted a public part can hardly be matched. Omitting from view the splendid contributions made by him from time to time, prior to 1871, by papers and speeches upon the principles of politics and the methods of governmental administration, and taking note only of the practical measures in the conception and execution of which he was the leader during the five short years in which, either as a private citizen or as public officer, he was actually engaged in the public service, we can distinctly impute to him the following results: In 1871 he seized the opportunity, suggested by the disclosure and publication of the prodigious sums drawn from the New York city treasury by way of pretended payment of municipal debts, to endeavor to fasten upon the principal city officials the crime, universally suspected, but of which there was no proof, of having corruptly embezzled to an enormous extent the moneys of the city. By a long and patient tracing of a multitude of accounts in different banks, he reached a series of results which, when compared, not only disclosed but conclusively demonstrated, by competent legal evidence, the whole scheme of fraud, the officials engaged in it, and the amounts received by each. Although a strict party man and chairman of the Democratic State Committee, yet, finding that the Democratic organization of the city of New York could not be wrested from the control of the official delinquents, he organized and led the popular movement which effected their overthrow. He accepted, at the same time, a nomination for the legislature, was elected, and extorted from a reluctant majority the impeachment of the corrupt judges who had disgraced the judicial ermine. In 1874, when the craze for fiat money had become prevalent throughout a great part of the country, and more threatening to the public prosperity than the free-silver delusion has at any time been, he drew from the Democratic State Convention of New York the first condemnation which it had received from either of the national parties. Elected in that year as Governor of the State, he conceived an extensive series of reforms in administration, drew the necessary legislative bills, secured their adoption, and carried them into effect. These plans contemplated, by the adoption of new methods and various economies, extensive reductions in the public expenditures, the institution of suits for the punishment of frauds of public officers, and the recovery of moneys embezzled by them. They had very large practical results.

Nor was he less efficient in baffling mischievous schemes. The Democratic organization of Tammany Hall, reorganized, after the overthrow of Tweed, under the leadership of John Kelly, an able and not dishonest partisan chief, demanded from the Democratic majority in the legislature the passage of laws designed to secure to that organization a more complete control of the municipal patronage. Governor Tilden refused to lend his countenance to this policy, and the imperious leader undertook to force him into acquiescence by forming a combination in the legislature with the numerous adherents and stipendiaries of what was known as the Canal Ring. That coterie of men, powerful in both parties, had already scented the peril to their practices threatened by the Governor's reformatory plans, and were only too willing to join in a warfare against him. He suddenly found himself in danger of being deserted by a majority of his own party. The Democratic Speaker of the Assembly took the floor, and arraigned him as unfaithful to the Democracy of the State. He had long before seen the possibility of this combination against him, and had sought by the practice of all the conciliatory arts, of which he was a thorough master, to prevent it. When it came, he was not daunted by it, but boldly went behind his enemies to the constituencies which they were betraying. They soon found that they were dealing with an adversary who possessed resources which they had not taken into account. Most of them abandoned their opposition. The rest were severely dealt with by their constituents.

Never were the possibilities for good of a great office like that of Governor of New York so happily developed and displayed. In the course of an administration of two years, an enormous reduction in taxation was effected; the administrative system in every department was improved; the lobby was almost dispersed; and at the same time the Governor, in his communications with the public through his annual messages, his veto messages, and speeches upon official and other public occasions, was furnishing to the people of the State, and indeed of the whole country, a nearly complete exposition, theoretical and practical, of the whole work of public administration. I have never read a state paper which equals his second annual message in the power and ease with which it treats of the principles upon which government should be conducted, or in the order and perspicuity with which it arranges and sets forth the details of public business. In this paper he considers at much length the then depressed condition of business, its causes, and the proper remedies. It may be thought--was thought at the time by some--that this was going beyond the domain of state affairs in order to make an ambitious display of knowledge upon the larger concerns of the nation; but it would be well if every man possessing such knowledge as is here exhibited, and such a capacity for communicating it, would embrace all opportunities to display it. Governor Tilden, however, had a special motive in placing his views before the country at that time. He saw the false policy of indefinite issues of government legal-tender currency everywhere taking hold of the public mind, and that, unless speedily corrected, it would acquire a force to which the timidity of political leaders would submit. He had already induced a convention of the Democratic party in New York to take ground against it. He wished to draw forth a similar declaration from the Democracy of the nation, at its next convention for the nomination of a President. He succeeded; and to his influence, probably, more than to that of any other man, we owe the downfall of the paper-money delusion.

An attempt to analyze the rare combination of talents and faculties which enabled him to accomplish so much in a period so brief may not be uninteresting. His original intellectual endowments were of the highest order. They were not of that character which, while leaving their possessor satisfied with some hasty and superficial conclusions that at the moment seem true, enable him to impress them upon others by fervid and moving language. These are the intellectual traits most frequently exhibited by the ablest men whom our public life brings into notice; but they do not make up the _scientific_ mind which Governor Tilden's pre-eminently was. At the beginning of his intellectual manhood he clearly perceived that the whole moral world was as rigidly as the physical world subject to an order, an arrangement, a law; and that all policies, whether in government, in finance, or in business, not founded upon a recognition of this truth would result in confusion and mischief. Naturally attracted to the study of the public economy of States, his first aim was to discover the laws governing every part of that extensive domain. Whether the theme was expenditure, taxation, private or public justice, internal improvements, or any form of public administration, he would make no utterance until his brooding mind had reached what he conceived to be the underlying truth; and the same trait was manifest in him where the purpose was not to refute or establish a general policy, but to ascertain, in a particular case, the truth upon a disputed question of fact.