Part 29

17. The national administration merits commendation for its honorable work in the management of domestic and foreign affairs, and President Grant deserves the continued hearty gratitude of the American people for his patriotism and his eminent services, in war and in peace.

18. We present as our candidates for President and Vice-President of the United States two distinguished statesmen, of eminent ability and character, and conspicuously fitted for those high offices, and we confidently appeal to the American people to intrust the administration of their public affairs to Rutherford B. Hayes and William A. Wheeler.

The friends of Blaine were grievously disappointed at the action of the Cincinnati convention, but Blaine promptly came to the front in his heroic way, and made a tireless battle for the success of the ticket.

The Democratic convention met at St. Louis on the 28th of June. Henry Watterson, of Kentucky, was temporary chairman, and was succeeded by General John A. McClernand, of Illinois, as permanent presiding officer. This was the first convention to cross the Father of Waters, and it was a thoroughly organized Tilden convention before it met. Tilden was the ablest political manager in the Democratic party of that day. He was tireless, methodical, and sagacious, and he made his nomination over Hancock and Hendricks by early and complete organization of his friends in all the debatable States. He had won national reputation by his courage in bringing Tweed to justice, and he was regarded by the country generally as well equipped for the high duties of Chief Magistrate. The friends of Hendricks made a desperate battle for him, but they were outclassed in leadership, and it was a Tilden convention when the body convened, with very able men to hold it in subjection.

The Tilden forces required little leadership at St. Louis, as his nomination had been thoroughly accomplished before the convention met. Tilden exhausted his wonderful powers of organization in getting control of the delegations of doubtful States, and looked minutely to the men who should be chosen as delegates, and when the convention met there was no boisterous jostling between the opposing forces, as the majority was complete in its organization and moved with directness to the accomplishment of its purpose. William L. Scott, of Erie, Penn., who was twice elected to Congress in an overwhelmingly Republican district, was the accepted leader of the Tilden people. He was personally popular, self-poised, sagacious, and discreet, and all he had to do was to keep his solid lines unbroken.

The minority was dumbfounded at the development of the Tilden strength, but the Hendricks people, led by McDonald, of Indiana—afterward United States Senator—and most zealously and aggressively aided by the helpless Tammany minority in the New York delegation, fought heroically at every step; but with Scott to manage and Harry Watterson to inspire the Tilden people, they maintained their mastery from start to finish, and Tilden was declared the nominee. When the nomination was announced the convention presented a singular spectacle. The Tilden delegates were at once upon their feet cheering lustily and waving their handkerchiefs, and one after another of the minority delegations rose and joined in the huzzas for the declared candidate, but the Indiana delegates sat stubbornly in their seats, presenting the appearance of a small cleared patch in a forest. The convention waited some minutes for the Indiana men to rise, but they kept their seats. The next day Hendricks was made the candidate for Vice-President in spite of the protests of his delegation and his friends, and finally the convention joined in united cheers for the ticket.

Much bitterness was developed during the struggle between the opposing clans, and a duel between General Morgan, a fighting Democratic soldier of Ohio, and Colonel Breckenridge, of Kentucky, was only averted, when the convention adjourned, by Colonel Watterson hurrying Breckenridge off to dinner, and compelling him to make concessions which properly satisfied the Ohio warrior.

It required only two ballots to give Tilden the nomination, as follows:

═══════════════════════════╤════════╤════════ │ First. │Second. ───────────────────────────┼────────┼──────── Samuel J. Tilden, N. Y. │ 417 │ 535 Thomas A. Hendricks, Ind. │ 140 │ 60 Winfield S. Hancock, Penn. │ 75 │ 59 William Allen, Ohio │ 56 │ 54 Thomas F. Bayard, Del. │ 33 │ 11 Joel Parker, N. J. │ 18 │ 18 Allen G. Thurman, Ohio │ ―― │ 7 ═══════════════════════════╧════════╧════════

The platform was prepared under Tilden’s own direction, and it was unanimously adopted as follows:

We, the delegates of the Democratic party of the United States, in national convention assembled, do hereby declare the administration of the Federal Government to be in urgent need of immediate reform; do hereby enjoin upon the nominees of this convention, and of the Democratic party in each State, a zealous effort and co-operation to this end; and do hereby appeal to our fellow-citizens of every former political connection to undertake with us this first and most pressing patriotic duty.

For the Democracy of the whole country, we do here reaffirm our faith in the permanence of the Federal Union, our devotion to the Constitution of the United States, with its amendments universally accepted as a final settlement of the controversies that engendered civil war, and do here record our steadfast confidence in the perpetuity of Republican self-government.

In absolute acquiescence in the will of the majority—the vital principle of republics; in the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; in the total separation of Church and State, for the sake alike of civil and religious freedom; in the equality of all citizens before just laws of their own enactment; in the liberty of individual conduct, unvexed by sumptuary laws; in the faithful education of the rising generation, that they may preserve, enjoy, and transmit these best conditions of human happiness and hope—we behold the noblest products of a hundred years of changeful history; but, while upholding the bond of our Union and great charter of these our rights, it behooves a free people to practise also that eternal vigilance which is the price of liberty.

Reform is necessary to rebuild and establish in the hearts of the whole people the Union, eleven years ago happily rescued from the danger of a secession of States, but now to be saved from a corrupt centralism which, after inflicting upon ten States the rapacity of carpet-bag tyrannies, has honeycombed the offices of the Federal Government itself with incapacity, waste, and fraud; infected States and municipalities with the contagion of misrule, and locked fast the prosperity of an industrious people in the paralysis of hard times.

Reform is necessary to establish a sound currency, restore the public credit, and maintain the national honor.

We denounce the failure, for all these eleven years of peace, to make good the promise of the legal tender notes, which are a changing standard of value in the hands of the people, and the non-payment of which is a disregard of the plighted faith of the nation.

We denounce the improvidence which, in eleven years of peace, has taken from the people in Federal taxes thirteen times the whole amount of the legal tender notes, and squandered four times their sum in useless expense without accumulating any reserve for their redemption.

We denounce the financial imbecility and immorality of that party which, during eleven years of peace, has made no advance toward resumption, no preparation for resumption, but instead has obstructed resumption, by wasting our resources and exhausting all our surplus income; and, while annually professing to intend a speedy return to specie payments, has annually enacted fresh hindrances thereto. As such hindrance, we denounce the resumption clause of the act of 1875, and we here demand its repeal.

We demand a judicious system of preparation by public economy, by official retrenchment, and by wise finance, which shall enable the nation soon to assure the whole world of its perfect ability and its perfect readiness to meet any of its promises at the call of the creditor entitled to payment.

We believe such a system, well devised, and, above all, intrusted to competent hands for its execution, creating at no time an artificial scarcity of currency, and at no time alarming the public mind into a withdrawal of that vaster machinery of credit by which ninety-five per cent. of all business transactions are performed—a system open, public, and inspiring general confidence—would, from the day of its adoption, bring healing on its wings to all our harassed industries, set in motion the wheels of commerce, manufactures, and the mechanic arts, restore employment to labor, and renew in all its natural resources the prosperity of the people.

Reform is necessary in the sum and modes of Federal taxation, to the end that capital may be set free from distrust, and labor lightly burdened.

We denounce the present tariff, levied upon nearly four thousand articles, as a masterpiece of injustice, inequality, and false pretence. It yields a dwindling, not a yearly rising revenue. It has impoverished many industries to subsidize a few. It prohibits imports that might purchase the products of American labor. It has degraded American commerce from the first to an inferior rank on the high seas. It has cut down the sales of American manufactures at home and abroad and depleted the returns of American agriculture—an industry followed by half our people. It costs the people five times more than it produces to the treasury, obstructs the processes of production, and wastes the fruits of labor. It promotes fraud, fosters smuggling, enriches dishonest officials, and bankrupts honest merchants. We demand that all custom-house taxation shall be only for revenue.

Reform is necessary in the scale of public expense—Federal, State, and municipal. Our Federal taxation has swollen from sixty millions gold, in 1860, to four hundred and fifty millions currency, in 1870; our aggregate taxation from one hundred and fifty-four millions gold, in 1860, to seven hundred and thirty millions currency, in 1870; or in one decade from less than five dollars per head to more than eighteen dollars per head. Since the peace, the people have paid to their tax gatherers more than thrice the sum of the national debt, and more than twice that sum for the Federal Government alone. We demand a rigorous frugality in every department, and from every officer of the Government.

Reform is necessary to put a stop to the profligate waste of the public lands and their diversion from actual settlers by the party in power, which has squandered two hundred million acres upon railroads alone, and out of more than thrice that aggregate has disposed of less than a sixth directly to tillers of the soil.

Reform is necessary to correct the omissions of a Republican Congress, and the errors of our treaties and diplomacy, which have stripped our fellow-citizens of foreign birth and kindred race recrossing the Atlantic, of the shield of American citizenship, and have exposed our brethren of the Pacific coast to the incursions of a race not sprung from the same great parent stock, and, in fact, now by law denied citizenship through naturalization as being neither accustomed to the traditions of a progressive civilization nor exercised in liberty under equal laws. We denounce the policy which thus discards the liberty-loving German and tolerates a revival of the Cooly trade in Mongolian women imported for immoral purposes, and Mongolian men held to perform servile labor-contracts, and demand such modification of the treaty with the Chinese empire or such legislation within constitutional limitations as shall prevent further importation or immigration of the Mongolian race.

Reform is necessary, and can never be effected but by making it the controlling issue of the elections, and lifting it above the two false issues with which the office-holding class and the party in power seek to smother it:

1. The false issue with which they would enkindle sectarian strife in respect to the public schools, of which the establishment and support belong exclusively to the several States, and which the Democratic party has cherished from their foundation, and is resolved to maintain without prejudice or preference for any class, sect, or creed, and without largesses from the treasury to any.

2. The false issue by which they seek to light anew the dying embers of sectional hate between kindred peoples once estranged, but now reunited in one indivisible republic and a common destiny.

Reform is necessary in the civil service. Experience proves that efficient, economical conduct of the governmental business is not possible if its civil service be subject to change at every election; be a prize fought for at the ballot-box; be a brief reward of party zeal, instead of posts of honor assigned for proved competency, and held for fidelity in the public employ; that the dispensing of patronage should neither be a tax upon the time of all our public men, nor the instrument of their ambition. Here, again, promises falsified in the performance attest that the party in power can work out no practical or salutary reform.

Reform is necessary even more in the higher grades of the public service. President, Vice-President, judges, Senators, Representatives, Cabinet officers—these and all others in authority are the people’s servants. Their offices are not a private perquisite; they are a public trust.

When the annals of this Republic show the disgrace and censure of a Vice-President; a late Speaker of the House of Representatives marketing his rulings as a presiding officer; three Senators profiting secretly by their votes as law-makers; five chairmen of the leading committees of the House of Representatives exposed in jobbery; a late Secretary of the Treasury forcing balances in the public accounts; a late Attorney-General misappropriating public funds; a Secretary of the Navy enriched or enriching friends by percentages levied off the profits of contractors with his department; an ambassador to England censured in a dishonorable speculation; the President’s private secretary barely escaping conviction upon trial for guilty complicity in frauds upon the revenue; a Secretary of War impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors,—the demonstration is complete that the first step in reform must be the people’s choice of honest men from another party, lest the disease of one political organization infect the body politic, and lest, by making no change of men or parties, we get no change of measures and no real reform.

All these abuses, wrongs, and crimes, the product of sixteen years’ ascendency of the Republican party, create a necessity for reform confessed by Republicans themselves; but their reformers are voted down in convention and displaced from the Cabinet. The party’s mass of honest voters is powerless to resist the eighty thousand office-holders, its leaders and guides.

Reform can only be had by a peaceful civic revolution. We demand a change of system, a change of administration, a change of parties, that we may have change of measures and of men.

_Resolved_, That this convention, representing the Democratic party of the United States, do cordially endorse the action of the present House of Representatives in reducing and curtailing the expenses of the Federal Government, in cutting down salaries, extravagant appropriations, and in abolishing useless offices and places not required by the public necessities; and we shall trust to the firmness of the Democratic members of the House that no committee of conference and no misinterpretation of the rules shall be allowed to defeat these wholesome measures of economy demanded by the country.

_Resolved_, That the soldiers and sailors of the Republic, and the widows and orphans of those who have fallen in battle, have a just claim upon the care, protection, and gratitude of their fellow-citizens.

Business and trade were very much depressed in 1876, as the country was then approaching the panic and industrial troubles of 1877, which convulsed the country from Eastern to Western sea, and the Greenback or Independent National party, as it was called, exhibited formidable proportions in the contest. It held its national convention at Indianapolis on the 18th of May, with Thomas J. Durant, of Washington, D. C., as permanent president. Peter Cooper, the noted philanthropist of New York, was unanimously nominated for President, and Newton Booth, then a California Senator, was in like manner nominated for Vice-President, but he declined, and General Samuel F. Cary, of Ohio, was substituted. There were 19 States represented by 239 delegates. The following platform was unanimously adopted:

The Independent party is called into existence by the necessities of the people, whose industries are prostrated, whose labor is deprived of its just reward, by a ruinous policy which the Republican and Democratic parties refuse to change, and in view of the failure of these parties to furnish relief to the depressed industries of the country, thereby disappointing the just hopes and expectations of the suffering people, we declare our principles, and invite all independent and patriotic men to join our ranks in this movement for financial reform and industrial emancipation.

1. We demand the immediate and unconditional repeal of the Specie-Resumption act of January 14, 1875, and the rescue of our industries from ruin and disaster resulting from its enforcement; and we call upon all patriotic men to organize, in every Congressional district of the country, with a view of electing Representatives to Congress who will carry out the wishes of the people in this regard, and stop the present suicidal and destructive policy of contraction.

2. We believe that a United States note, issued directly by the Government, and convertible on demand into United States obligations, bearing a rate of interest not exceeding one cent a day on each one hundred dollars, and exchangeable for United States notes at par, will afford the best circulating medium ever devised. Such United States notes should be full legal tender for all purposes except for the payment of such obligations as are, by existing contracts, especially made payable in coin, and we hold that it is the duty of the Government to provide such circulating medium, and insist, in the language of Thomas Jefferson, that bank paper must be suppressed, and the circulation restored to the nation, to whom it belongs.

3. It is the paramount duty of the Government, in all its legislation, to keep in view the full development of all legitimate business, agricultural, mining, manufacturing, and commercial.

4. We most earnestly protest against any further issue of gold bonds, for sale in foreign markets, by which we would be made, for a long period, hewers of wood and drawers of water for foreigners, especially as the American people would gladly and promptly take, at par, all bonds the Government may need to sell, provided they are made payable at the option of the holder, and bearing interest at 3.65 per cent. per annum, or even a lower rate.

5. We further protest against the sale of Government bonds for the purpose of purchasing silver, to be used as a substitute for our more convenient and less fluctuating fractional currency, which, although well calculated to enrich owners of silver mines, yet in operation it will still further oppress, in taxation, an already over-burdened people.

The Prohibitionists held their national convention at Cleveland, O., on the 17th of May, and nominated Greene Clay Smith, of Kentucky, for President, and G. T. Stewart, of Ohio, for Vice-President, by acclamation, and adopted the following platform:

The Prohibition Reform party of the United States, organized in the name of the people to revive, enforce, and perpetuate in the Government the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence, submit in this centennial year of the Republic, for the suffrages of all good citizens, the following platform of national reforms and measures:

1. The legal prohibition in the District of Columbia, the Territories, and in every other place subject to the laws of Congress, of the importation, exportation, manufacture, and traffic of all alcoholic beverages as high crimes against society; an amendment of the national Constitution to render these prohibitory measures universal and permanent; and the adoption of treaty stipulations with foreign powers to prevent the importation and exportation of all alcoholic beverages.

2. The abolition of class legislation and of special privileges in the Government, and of the adoption of equal suffrage and eligibility to office without distinction of race, religious creed, property, or sex.

3. The appropriation of the public lands in limited quantities to actual settlers only; the reduction of the rates of inland and ocean postage; of telegraphic communication; of railroad and water transportation and travel to the lowest practicable point by force of law, wisely and justly framed, with reference not only to the interests of capital employed, but to the higher claims of the general good.

4. The suppression by law of lottery and gambling in gold, stocks, produce, and every form of money and property, and the penal inhibition of the use of the public mails for advertising schemes of gambling and lotteries.

5. The abolition of those foul enormities, polygamy and the social evil, and the protection of purity, peace, and happiness of homes by ample and efficient legislation.

6. The national observance of the Christian Sabbath, established by laws prohibiting ordinary labor and business in all departments of public service and private employment (works of necessity, charity, and religion excepted) on that day.

7. The establishment by mandatory provisions in national and State Constitutions, and by all necessary legislation, of a system of free public schools for the universal and forced education of all the youth of the land.

8. The free use of the Bible, not as a ground of religious creeds, but as text-book of the purest morality, the best liberty, and the noblest literature, in our public schools, that our children may grow up in its light, and that its spirit and principles may pervade the nation.

9. The separation of the Government in all departments and institutions, including the public schools and all funds for their maintenance, from the control of every religious sect or other association, and the protection alike of all sects by equal laws, with entire freedom of religious faith and worship.

10. The introduction into all treaties hereafter negotiated with foreign governments of a provision for the amicable settlement of international difficulties by arbitration.

11. The abolition of all barbarous modes and instruments of punishment; the recognition of the laws of God and the claims of humanity in the discipline of jails and prisons, and of that higher and wiser civilization worthy of our age and nation, which regards the reform of criminals as a means for the prevention of crime.