CHAPTER XXVI

A CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT

1872

I have passed a great many days in jail. A jail is a good place to meditate and to plan in, if only one can be patient in such a place. Much of my work was thought out and wrought out while living in the fifteen jails of which I have been a tenant. It was in a jail in Dublin, called the Four Courts' Marshalsea, that a feeling of confidence that I might one day be President of the United States first came into definite form. It was in this prison, also, that I planned Train Villa, which was to be built in Newport. As my life in that Villa, which in its day was one of the most famous and luxurious in America, was a sort of prelude to my campaign for the Presidency, I may fitly say here what I have to say about it in this book.

I had long wanted a handsome residence by the sea, and so, when I had nearly completed the work done in connection with the Union Pacific Railway, and there seemed to be ahead of me a period of comparative leisure, I projected this house. My plans were made before I was in the Dublin jail. My wife built the Villa, or began work on it, while I was still in the Marshalsea. The lot on which it stands embraced some two and a half acres in the most delightful region of Newport. In order that my boys might have an opportunity for sport at home, I had a building put up for billiards and bowling. This was, I believe, the first residence in Newport that had a special place of this kind, although of course, many had billiard tables. A fine cottage was also built for my father-in-law, Colonel George T. M. Davis. This cottage was sold recently for $50,000, to the Dolans of Philadelphia.

The Villa itself must have cost $100,000, but the truth is, I have never known how much money was lavished upon its building and adornment. I was called rich and had never, at any time, given a thought to the mere details of money. What I wanted I got. In those days that was the substance of my economic system in personal matters. We lived there in manorial style, entertaining so lavishly and freely that the Villa became a free guest-house for all Newport. I also recollect that my living cost me more than $2,000 a week. Now I manage to live on $3 a week in the Mills Hotel, or Palace, as I call it. Here I am more contented than I was at Newport. I seem to be saving $1,997 a week. We turned out, in Newport, six carriages when we went driving; but this was a display that I always set my heart against. It seemed to be mere wastefulness.

Since my occupancy, Train Villa, as it is called to this day, has been rented by some of the most prominent persons in the fashionable world. Among those who have lived in it are the Kernochans, the Kips, Governor Lippitt of Rhode Island, some of the Vanderbilts and the Mortimers. At the present time, it is occupied by George B. de Forest. It was formerly rented for $5,000 for three months or the season. It never paid us two per centum on its cost, and finally was sold by the trustee, Colonel Davis.

The Villa was once turned into a jail, although I was not the captive in that instance. In the famous Crédit Mobilier case, in '72-'73, a man, who was my guest at the time, was arrested, and, as the Crédit Mobilier men then in Newport could not give bail in the sum of $1,000,000, as demanded, an arrangement was made with the sheriff by which the Villa temporarily became a jail, where my guest was confined.

So full of confidence was I that I could be elected President in '72, that I telegraphed from San Francisco that I would reach Newport on a certain day, and wished arrangements made for a "Presidential" banquet. Although this banquet was not the end of the campaign, it was the last flourish of trumpets in my Presidential aspirations.

My political career in fact was brief. My intention was to have it extend through at least a Presidential term; but the people would not have it so. Prior to '69, '70, '71, and '72, I had taken no active part in politics, although I had been interested in various campaigns and in many great public questions of the day. I have already referred to the offer made to me by the revolutionists in Australia to make me their President. That was, perhaps, the first time that anything political ever entered my life. The offer was by no means a temptation to me and I refused to consider it, without a single poignant regret.

In '65, the Fenians, after I had espoused the general cause of the Irish, as of the oppressed of every country, asked me to attend their first convention, which was to be held in Philadelphia. They wished me to address them. This I did, but I took no active part in the work of the convention or of the faction. I had already attended the Democratic Convention in Louisville in '64, when I held a proxy from Nebraska, and had hoped to have General Dix nominated for President and Admiral Farragut for Vice-President, but I was not permitted to take my seat.

While I was in the Four Courts' Marshalsea, in Dublin, in '68, James Brooks, of the New York Express, sent word to me that the Democrats in convention were willing to nominate Salmon P. Chase if I would consent to take the second place on the ticket. This did not suit me at all, and I sent a despatch to Brooks that I would take the first place only, and that as Chase was my friend, he could take the second place. This put an end to the negotiations.

But the seed of ambition had been sown, even before this, and it germinated in the old Irish prison. As soon as I got out of that jail, I began my campaign for President of the United States, and in '69 started on a program that involved 1,000 addresses to 1,000 conventions. It seemed to me that, with the effect I had always had upon people in my speeches and in personal contact, and with the record of great achievements in behalf of the progress of the world, especially with regard to the development of this country, I should succeed. I supposed that a man with my record, and without a stain on my reputation or blemish in my character, would be received as a popular candidate.

I had not the slightest doubt that I should be elected; and, with this sublime self-confidence, threw myself into the campaign with an energy and fire that never before, perhaps, characterized a Presidential candidate. I went into the campaign as into a battle. I forced fighting at every point along the line, fiercely assailing Grant and his "nepotism," on the one hand, and Greeley, and the spirit of compromise and barter that I felt his nomination represented, on the other.

In the year '69 I had made twenty-eight speeches in California, and eighty on the Pacific coast. I also made a trip over the Union Pacific Railway, on the first train over that line, and made addresses at many places throughout the country. The following year, '70, I seriously set myself to the task of appealing to the people directly for support, and began a series of public addresses on the issues of the day. But this year's work was interrupted by my trip around the world in eighty days, which consumed the end of the year, from the 1st of August to Christmas.

In '71 I fought hard from January to December, making the total of my speeches to the people 800, and having spoken directly, up to that time, to something like 2,000,000 persons. Of course, my campaign was made on independent lines entirely. I was not the nominee nor the complaisant tool of any party or faction. I made my race as one who came from the bosom of the people, and who represented the highest interests of the people. It was just here that failure came. I thought I knew something of the people, and felt confident that they would prefer a man of independence, who had accomplished something for them, to a man who was a mere tool of his party, a distributor of patronage to his friends and relatives, or to one who was a mere stalking-horse. But I was mistaken. The people, as Barnum has said, love to be humbugged, and are quite ready to pay tribute to the political boss and spoilsman.

A remarkable feature of my campaign was that, instead of scattering money broadcast, to draw crowds or to win votes, I made a charge for admission to hear my addresses. I spoke to audiences that paid to hear me talk to them in my own behalf and in theirs. In three years of active work--with the interruption of my trip around the world in '70--I took in $90,000 in admission charges. In spite of these charges, I spoke to more people and had greater audiences to listen to me than any other speaker during that heated campaign.

There was another remarkable thing about my campaign. I possessed tremendous power over audiences. So long as I could reach them with my voice, or talk with them or shake hands with them, I could hold them; but the moment they got out of my reach they got away from me, and slipped back again to the sway of the political bosses.

I saw that my chance of getting the nomination was lost long before the assembling of the Liberal Republican Convention of '72 in Cincinnati. I was not astonished by the result of that convention, except that I did not expect the nomination of Greeley, which I considered as a piece of political treachery, a deliberately calculated movement in the interest of Grant. But I still felt, vainly, indeed, some hope that the people would see the futility of supporting Greeley, and of placing me at the head of the ticket.

I can recall now the scenes in the Convention Hall when Carl Schurz nominated Horace Greeley. Outside of some cheering on the part of those who were party to the trickery, the nomination was received with ominous stillness. Suddenly, from out of the gallery, near where I was seated, there came a thin, quavering, piercing voice, like the cry of a seer of the wilderness or a wandering Jeremiah: "Sold, by God, but the goods not delivered!"

The words sounded then like a pronouncement of doom; but it proved not to be so. The "deal" was carried out, and the "goods" were delivered. Grant was elected, and Greeley, betrayed, retired, a heart-broken man.

Before I close this chapter on the Presidency, I wish to record here one distinct service which I believe I rendered this city and the country during my campaign. It was I, and not the New York newspapers, that first exposed the so-called "Tweed Ring." I began the fight against this ring of corrupt politicians, single-handed, and kept it up for more than a year before any New York paper or any other journal took up the issue. The New York papers, in fact, refused to publish my speech exposing this gang of public plunderers, and it was published in the Lyons, N. Y., Republican on April 22, '71. The speech itself was made long before Tweed had been accused of misuse of public funds.

While I was on the platform, a voice asked me "Who is the ring?" I had been attacking the "ring" in every public utterance in New York. I replied: "Hoffman, Tweed, Sweeney, Fisk, and Gould." Later, in the same speech, I said: "Tweed and Sweeney are taxing you from head to foot, while their horses are living in palaces," and then, using, for effect, some of the methods of the French Commune, I cried: "To the lamp-post! All those in favor of hanging Tweed to a lamp-post, say aye!" There was a tremendous outburst of "ayes."

In other speeches I went into details and gave the sums of which the people of New York had been plundered, and the amounts that had been paid in bribes to obtain influence in stilling public suspicion, and to buy immunity from exposure and opportunity for further theft.

So my campaign for the Presidency was not entirely in vain. It was something that seemed unavoidable, toward which I seemed pressed by circumstance and fate; and I can rest in the consciousness that it accomplished some permanent good.