Part 6

"I never destined myself to a public career. I did not come into my present trust until I found myself unable in any other way to have it on the side of reforms I had begun three years before, and to which I had surrendered my professional business, attention to my affairs, and my peace and comfort. I had felt gloomily the decay of all my early ideals of my country, and engaged in the effort to restore them in the city and State in which I live, with no idea of any result to myself except of sacrifice. The logic of events has brought me into my present situation. I have been tempted to do so much to satisfy the curiosity of an old acquaintance, and, as I stop, I do not know but I have provoked more than I have satisfied.

"At any rate, it is a real pleasure to refresh what remains of a set of early associations. I think you were something of a pet of Mr. Van Buren, as I was also. He would have been interested in the course of present events; and puzzled about me, for he told me, near the close of his life, when he had observed me for thirty years, that I was the most unambitious man he had ever known.

"I will send you a pamphlet which will give you some idea of the events in this State to which I have alluded.

"With much esteem, I am very truly yours,

"S. J. TILDEN.

"_Hon. John Bragg, Mobile, Ala._"

SIDNEY WEBSTER TO TILDEN

"NEWPORT, _12 August, 1876_.

"DEAR GOVERNOR,--Since reading your admirable letter of acceptance I have begun two letters to you to say how sincerely I congratulated you, but have destroyed both, chiefly moved thereto by memories of my young days, when I had occasion to know how pestered a candidate for the Presidency is by letters from friends which have no business importance, but which, nevertheless, either consume his precious time by the reading or are turned over to the files. This letter now begun _may_ have a better fate!

"I cannot see how an acceptance-letter could have been framed better adapted to the imperative needs of the situation. Repeal of the law of 1875 was on the platform, and you had to deal with it. 'Contraction' is a red rag to our friends in the West and South, and that must be accepted. And along the Atlantic coast are they who fancy their pecuniary salvation depends on _instantly_ lifting the greenback to an equality with gold, and these could not be lost sight of. And, finally, you had to keep in mind a _policy_ which you could 'work' when you enter the White House next March.

"There was possibly a little peril in departing from the traditional acceptance-letter of fine phrases and loyalty to the platform; but you did wisely to incur that peril, for I do think your letter has practically eliminated the financial issue from the canvass--has prevented an alarming sectional conflict and bad blood between debtors and creditors--and will in the end convince all reasonable people you purpose to 'resume' as rapidly as human power can. And besides this (which may seem a contradiction), I believe you have given a hint to those who are in pecuniary distress and sorrow, and would like inflated business to lift them, as they think, out of their misery, that they had better join hands with the Democracy.

"My idea of the canvass is that the independent voters will soon come to think there is little difference in the purposes of you and Governor Hayes, and the only question is which of you is likely to be most able to carry them out. That, of course, leads to an inquiry into the personal qualities of the two candidates and the temper of the party behind each. On both of those inquiries you _ought_ to win, and you will (excepting in a contingency to which I will presently refer) win. If the independent voters appreciated your mental and moral fibre as I do, they would not doubt as to the first; and as to the second, our party is new in power, ambitious to establish a dynasty, and is extremely amenable to reason and fair-dealing.

"I was a little sorry you said anything of a second term. You cannot accomplish much if it is known you won't have a second, and a good way to treat Hayes would be to suggest that he resign at the end of two years (if elected), or never be inaugurated.

"My forecast of the situation is that 'the machine' will squelch the reformer (but of that we can judge better after the Republican _State_ nominations); that the financial issue will drop to the rear; and the Republican managers will endeavor to force on us the Southern question and obscure the reform issue. I hope our friends will not dally with the Southern question, but say (defiantly and offensively, if need be) that they will give no moral sympathy or support to those who seek to deprive the negroes of any of their political rights or embarrass the free exercise of them. Rightly or wrongly, they are citizens, and we at the North must look upon them as such. Under the recent decisions of the Supreme Court (which are correct) the Federal govt., certainly the President, can do little; but it does seem to me that your moral influence, if judicially manifested in a letter for publication (as it would be by you), would do good in every respect.

"I have written, as you see--_currente calmo_--and at too great length, for all I wished to express was my appreciation of the wisdom of your acceptance-letter, and my belief in your triumphant victory.

"Faithfully yours, "SIDNEY WEBSTER."

PARKE GODWIN TO JOHN BIGELOW

"CUMMINGTON, _Aug. 28th, '76_.

"MY DEAR BIGELOW,--I don't know what Mr. Bryant has written, but I presume he has not consented. John and I have both tried to get him to pronounce himself publicly, but he will not, tho' saying that he means to vote for Tilden all the while. I presume he feels himself bound in some way to the E. P. I hope to be in Alb'y on Wednesday or Thursday with Minna!

"Yours very truly, "PARKE GODWIN."

F. O. PRINCE TO TILDEN

"BOSTON, _Augt. 28, 1876_.

"DEAR MR. TILDEN,--I am much concerned touching the matter about which Messrs. Avery and Collins and myself conferred with you a few days at Albany.

"Although the Fenian sympathizers seem disposed to oppose the nomination of Mr. A.,[10] I think their opposition can be controlled; but a certain candidate, who has hitherto expressed himself willing to waive any claims he may have for the nomination in favor of our man, has now changed his mind and wants it.

[10] Charles Francis Adams, our minister to England during the Civil War.

"We fear he will cause such discord in the convention as to prevent our offering the nomination to Mr. A. upon the terms upon which he consents to accept it. These are, that it should be made with reasonable unanimity.

"We can carry the convention for our candidate, but not, probably, with such general consent as would be required.

"We have had several interviews with the party causing the trouble, and tried our best to impress upon him the importance of nominating Mr. A. for the sake of our cause _outside_ of Massachusetts, but to no effect.

"If we fail in this matter I shall feel that we have lost some of our chances for success.

"Congratulating you upon the auspicious outlook elsewhere,

"I am, very truly, y'rs, "F. O. PRINCE."

CHARLES F. ADAMS TO BIGELOW

"ADAMS BUILDING, 23 COURT ST., BOSTON, _January 10, 1906_.

"MY DEAR MR. BIGELOW,--I have to acknowledge the receipt of your favor of yesterday, the 9th.

"The extract you make from the letter of F. O. Prince is quite intelligible to me. I remember all the circumstances.

"Mr. Tilden was very anxious, indeed, that my father should be the Democratic candidate for Governor of Massachusetts in 1876. Mr. F. O. Prince was then chairman, I think, of the Democratic committee; at any rate, he was influential. Mr. Tilden, as you very well know, was never at a loss when it came to handling men.

"Mr. Tilden worked through Mr. Prince to accomplish his end. William A. Gaston, afterwards Governor, desired the nomination. It is he who is referred to as a 'certain candidate.' My father was wholly unwilling to accept the nomination unless it came to him unsought, and with 'reasonable unanimity.' The Irish were strongly opposed to him. Their dislike, or rather personal antipathy, to him dated far back--as far, indeed, as 1840, when the questions relating to the burning of the Ursuline Convent at Charlestown were before the General Court of Massachusetts, of which my father was a member.

"Considerable pressure had to be brought to bear upon Mr. Gaston, who finally consented to withdraw, and did, although not with very good grace, nominate my father at the convention. His nomination, of course, gave a certain prestige to the ticket. As a popular candidate in that election my father did not prove a success. A considerable Irish element refused to vote for him.

"It is rather strange to reflect that all these events occurred now thirty-one years ago--nearly the lifetime of a generation; but it is the Irish opposition to which Mr. Prince refers as the 'Fenian sympathizers.' They proved quite irreconcilable. The whole thing is now ancient history.

"Believe me, etc., "CHARLES F. ADAMS."

JOHN BIGELOW TO AN INQUIRER

(MR. TILDEN'S WAR RECORD)

_"Sept. 1876._

"MY DEAR SIR,--I have an abiding faith that a falsehood never hurts any but those who propagate it. It is also my conviction that no man can pay a much greater homage to another than to deliberately misrepresent him. It is a cowardly confession of weakness and of inferiority. With this sort of homage no public man in this country, so far as I know, has ever been so liberally favored as Mr. Tilden. But two short years ago and there was no American of equal political prominence who could to a greater extent be said to receive the praises of his countrymen, without distinction of party, nor one, perhaps, who had enjoyed fewer of the advantages of adverse criticism. From the moment, however, that he loomed above the horizon as a probable candidate for the Presidency until now, the invention of his political adversaries has been taxed to the utmost to feed whatever appetite remained unsatisfied for calumny and scandal.

"Most of these inventions are so improbable and monstrous that they perish in coming to the birth. As, however, you seem to think the charge of disloyalty during the war has been raised to the dignity of an exception by the recent letter of Gen. Dix, which you enclose, I cheerfully comply with your request to furnish what I trust you and those other Republican friends in Maine, with whom it has been my privilege in times past to co-operate, will regard as a satisfactory answer, not only to the insinuation of Gen. Dix, but to any and every other charge or insinuation that has been or may be made in impeachment of the loyalty or patriotic devotion of Mr. Tilden to the Union, whether before, during, or since the war of the rebellion. To make this perfectly clear I may be obliged to ask your patience, but I will try not to abuse it.

"Let me first dispose of the statement of Gen. Dix that 'Mr. Tilden did not unite in the call for the great Union meeting in New York, after the attack and surrender of Fort Sumter; but he refused to attend it, though urgently solicited to by one of his own political friends.'

"The most charitable construction to be put upon this statement is that the writer had been misinformed; he certainly could have had no personal knowledge upon the subject. It was publicly contradicted when it first appeared in print; it is not true in point of fact; and, if it had been, it would not follow, by any means, that Mr. Tilden did not sympathize in the objects of the meeting.

"Mr. Tilden received a formal written invitation, bearing date the 18th of April, inviting him to act as an officer of the meeting in question. As soon as he found himself at liberty he went to the proper quarter to ascertain what resolutions were to be proposed, and, on being satisfied in regard to them, then and there assented to the use of his name as one of the officers of the meeting. He not only assented to such use of his name, but was himself in actual attendance upon the meeting; and not only did he attend this meeting, but only two days later he attended another meeting of the New York bar, which was called for a similar purpose, and took part in its deliberations.

"Now let me state to you precisely the attitude which Mr. Tilden occupied during the war, and why he manifested so much caution in any action which might possibly influence the course of events at that critical moment.

"It has been my privilege to know Mr. Tilden familiarly, not to say intimately, during his entire public life, embracing a period of nearly or quite forty years. During that time, though we frequently differed about processes, and were often enlisted under opposing political organizations, and though we took widely different views of the fittest way to meet the storm which had been brewing since the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, it never occurred to me for one moment to suppose there was any man in the country less tolerant than he of the doctrine of secession, or prepared to make greater sacrifices to preserve our Union and the republican institutions which had been bequeathed to us.

"At the comparatively youthful age of eighteen years Mr. Tilden had acquired settled opinions upon and shared in the public discussions of the subject of secession. In a speech at a Union meeting, held in Union Square, at which Gen. Dix presided, and Hamilton Fish, William H. Aspinwall, James Brown, Andrew Carrigan, and many other Republicans were vice-presidents, on the 17th of September, 1866, Mr. Tilden, in vindication of President Johnson, incidentally alluded to his early investigation of the subject of secession, and to the conclusion to which he then arrived. He said:

"'The Constitution of the United States is, by its own terms, declared to be perpetual. The government created by it acts within the sphere of its powers directly upon each individual citizen. No State is authorized, in any contingency, to suspend or obstruct that action, or to exempt any citizen from the obligation to obedience. Any pretended act of nullification or secession whereby such effect is anticipated to be produced is absolutely void. The offence of the individual citizen, violating the lawful authority of the United States, is precisely the same as if no such pretended authority ever existed.'

"On the subject of slavery, Mr. Tilden's opinions were no less fixed. Though never what used to be known as an Abolitionist, neither was he ever the advocate or apologist of servile labor. In the controversy which grew out of our territorial acquisitions from Mexico in 1847, he was for doing everything to secure those Territories the benefit of the social and industrial institutions of the North. In that sense he acted in 1848 in opposing the extension of slavery into any of the free Territories by the act of the Federal government; and again, in 1854, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was under consideration in Congress, and the flames of sectional controversy broke out afresh, Mr. Tilden was open and decided in his opposition to the repeal, in reference to which he stated in a letter to Wm. Kent in 1860:

"'I used all my influence, at whatever sacrifice of relations, against the repeal ... because I thought a theoretical conformity to even a wise system dearly purchased by breaking the tradition of ancient pacification on such a question and between such parties.'

"Accustomed as I was to converse with Mr. Tilden freely upon all public questions, even when our views were most at variance, having always been in the habit of reading everything which I knew to come from his pen, I feel that I may safely challenge anybody to produce a particle of evidence, either oral or in print, of any sympathy on his part either with secession or with slavery, or any evidence that in the course he felt it his duty to pursue he was not actuated by his best judgment as to what was wise and right for the government and for the welfare of his country. After the breach with the South in 1854, I think I am competent to affirm that he had no partisan relations whatever with slave-holding States. In a letter to the _Evening Post_, written in February, 1863, he speaks of being taunted by Senator Preston King as an object of proscription by the South, and of being asked if he thought his name could pass the Senate of the United States.

"'I answered,' said Mr. Tilden, 'that it was a matter of very little consequence to me whether it could or not; but that it was of great consequence to me that I should do what I thought best for the country.'

"Every act and every expression of his during the war, so far as it has come under my cognizance, was in full accordance with this position, and, what is more, in entire harmony with the whole tenor of his life.

"Better than any person that I knew, he comprehended the irreconcilability of the forces that were arraying themselves against each other in the country. Exaggerating, perhaps, the danger of attempting to rule the country by a sectional party, he deemed it the part of wise statesmanship to postpone as long as possible, in the hope, through the mediatorial offices of time and its inevitable changes, of avoiding a collision.

"No one contested the force of his reasoning on this subject; but they derided his apprehensions of a civil war. So preposterous did they appear to the impassioned multitude in the North, that I remember myself to have been asked by one of his personal friends whether he was quite in his right mind on the subject.

"In 1860, after the failure of the Democratic party at Charleston--though he was then and had been for several years withdrawn from political life--he did not hesitate openly to proclaim his conviction that the dissolution of the Democratic party and the attempt to govern the country by a party like the Republican, having no affiliation in the Southern States, would inevitably result in civil war. He was asked to fill a vacancy in the delegation from New York at the adjourned meeting of the Democratic convention of that year in Baltimore. In that body he made two speeches, in which he portrayed, as an inevitable consequence of a sectional division of the Democratic party, a corresponding division of the States and an armed conflict. These speeches were described by those who heard them as inspired by a solemn sense of patriotic duty and a most vivid perception of impending dangers. After the election of Mr. Lincoln, and when the dangers he had foretold were becoming realities, he took part in several conferences in which Hamilton Fish, the late Charles H. Marshall, the late Daniel Lord, Moses H. Grinnell, the late Wm. B. Astor, Moses Taylor, William B. Duncan, Richard M. Blatchford, A. A. Low, and other gentlemen of more or less prominence participated; and on two of these occasions he made speeches in which he sought to impress upon his hearers a juster sense than was generally entertained of the threatened dangers, and of the fittest means of averting them.

"Earnestly as Mr. Tilden labored to avert the war and to thwart the measures which seemed to him calculated to precipitate it; anxious as he had been to contribute no fresh ingredient of hatred to the seething caldron; when, without any responsibility on his part, the war came, he never for a moment hesitated as to the course he was to pursue. He felt it to be the duty of every citizen to sustain the government in its resistance to territorial dismemberment. To those who thought, as did many then calling themselves Republicans, that on the whole it would be as well to consent to a peaceful separation, Mr. Tilden always answered that peaceful separation was an illusion; that the questions in controversy would be rendered infinitely more difficult by separation, and new ones still more difficult would be created; that, if the antagonized parties could not agree upon peace within the Union, they certainly would not have peace without the Union. They never could agree upon terms of separation, nor could they agree upon the relations to subsist between them after the separation; and, however lamentable might be the consequences, force could be the only arbiter of their differences.

"Though Mr. Tilden was opposed to any illusory concessions to the spirit of disunion; though he was satisfied, after the attack on Fort Sumter, that the differences between the two sections could only be settled by the last argument of kings; and though he was disposed to do everything in his power to make that argument as effective and decisive as possible--his co-operation with the administration of President Lincoln was qualified by a fixed difference of opinion upon several points.

"This opinion was in accord with the view Mr. Tilden had frequently expressed on other occasions, and was also in accord with the opinion which he subsequently gave when his advice was solicited by the then Secretary of War. The week preceding and the week following Mr. Stanton's assuming the duties of Secretary of War, and at his invitation, Mr. Tilden had frequent conferences with him, at the first of which he is reported to me to have said in substance: 'You have no right to expect a great military genius to come to your assistance. The whole human race have been able to furnish such men only once in a century or two; you can only count on the average military talent; you have three times the available population and perhaps nine times the industrial resources of your antagonist; though you occupy the exterior line, you have an immense advantage in the superior capacity of your railways to move men and supplies. What you have to do is to make your advantages available; you must make your combinations so as to concentrate your forces and organize ample reserves to be ready to precipitate them on critical points. In the probable absence of military genius you must rely on overwhelming numbers, wisely concentrated.' Mr. Stanton appeared to adopt these views, but unhappily they did not prevail in the councils of the government.

"A year and a half later, when Mr. Tilden, accompanied by ex-Gov. Morgan, visited Washington for the purpose of securing greater harmony of action between the Federal and State government, Mr. Stanton, in a conversation with Mr. Tilden, referred to this advice, and added: 'I beg you to remember I always agreed with you.' I refer the more freely to the deference which Mr. Stanton testified to Mr. Tilden's judgment in these matters, because it is known not only to the Hon. Peter H. Watson, then Assistant Secretary of War, but to some, at least, of the members of Mr. Lincoln's Cabinet who are now living.

"On the subject of the finances, an element so vital to the successful prosecution of a war, Mr. Tilden's views were at variance with those adopted by the administration; he had more faith in the people, in their readiness to bear the burdens and make the sacrifices which the occasion required, than was manifested by the authorities at Washington. Before their financial policy was fully determined upon he advised that the money for carrying on the war should be chiefly drawn from loans to be supplemented by taxes, and no more Treasury notes not bearing interest issued than were barely necessary to supply the new uses created by the government in its own payments. He was of the opinion that if these measures were promptly adopted, so that the supply should keep pace with the wants of the government, the war might be carried on without any serious embarrassment, without any exorbitant inflation of prices, and without any extreme depreciation of the government bonds. In discussing the financial situation of our own State in his first message to the Legislature in 1875, Gov. Tilden briefly restated the views which he then entertained and expressed upon this subject.