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Marse Henry (Vol. 1)

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"The Tribune is gone and I am gone," he said, and spoke no more.

The death of Greeley fell upon the country with a sudden shock. It roused a
universal sense of pity and sorrow and awe. All hearts were hushed. In an
instant the bitterness of the campaign was forgotten, though the huzzas of
the victors still rent the air. The President, his late antagonist, with
his cabinet and the leading members of the two Houses of Congress, attended
his funeral. As he lay in his coffin he was no longer the arch rebel,
leading a combine of buccaneers and insurgents, which the Republican
orators and newspapers had depicted him, but the brave old apostle of
freedom who had done more than all others to make the issues upon which a
militant and triumphant party had risen to power.

The multitude remembered only the old white hat and the sweet old baby
face beneath it, heart of gold, and hand wielding the wizard pen; the
incarnation of probity and kindness, of steadfast devotion to his duty as
he saw it, and to the needs of the whole human family. A tragedy in truth
it was; and yet as his body was lowered into its grave there rose above it,
invisible, unnoted, a flower of matchless beauty--the flower of peace
and love between the sections of the Union to which his life had been a
sacrifice.

The crank convention had builded wiser than it knew. That the Democratic
Party could ever have been brought to the support of Horace Greeley for
President of the United States reads even now like a page out of a nonsense
book. That his warmest support should have come from the South seems
incredible and was a priceless fact. His martyrdom shortened the distance
across the bloody chasm; his coffin very nearly filled it. The candidacy of
Charles Francis Adams or of Lyman Trumbull meant a mathematical formula,
with no solution of the problem and as certain defeat at the end of it.
His candidacy threw a flood of light and warmth into the arena of deadly
strife; it made a more equal and reasonable division of parties possible;
it put the Southern half of the country in a position to plead its own
case by showing the Northern half that it was not wholly recalcitrant or
reactionary; and it made way for real issues of pith and moment relating to
the time instead of pigments of bellicose passion and scraps of ante-bellum
controversy.

In a word Greeley did more by his death to complete the work of Lincoln
than he could have done by a triumph at the polls and the term in the White
House he so much desired. Though but sixty-one years of age, his race
was run. Of him it may be truly written that he lived a life full of
inspiration to his countrymen and died not in vain, "our later Franklin"
fittingly inscribed upon his tomb.




Chapter the Twelfth

The Ideal in Public Life--Politicians, Statesmen and Philosophers--The
Disputed Presidency in 1876--The Personality and Character of Mr.
Tilden--His Election and Exclusion by a Partisan Tribunal



I


The soul of journalism is disinterestedness. But neither as a principle nor
an asset had this been generally discovered fifty years ago. Most of my
younger life I was accused of ulterior motives of political ambition,
whereas I had seen too much of preferment not to abhor it. To me, as to
my father, office has seemed ever a badge of servitude. For a long time,
indeed, I nursed the delusions of the ideal. The love of the ideal has not
in my old age quite deserted me. But I have seen the claim of it so much
abused that when a public man calls it for a witness I begin to suspect his
sincerity.

A virile old friend of mine--who lived in Texas, though he went there from
Rhode Island--used to declare with sententious emphasis that war is the
state of man. "Sir," he was wont to observe, addressing me as if I were
personally accountable, "you are emasculating the human species. You are
changing men into women and women into men. You are teaching everybody
to read, nobody to think; and do you know where you will end, sir?
Extermination, sir--extermination! On the north side of the North Pole
there is another world peopled by giants; ten thousand millions at the very
least; every giant of them a hundred feet high. Now about the time you have
reduced your universe to complete effeminacy some fool with a pick-axe will
break through the thin partition--the mere ice curtain--separating these
giants from us, and then they will sweep through and swoop down and swallow
you, sir, and the likes of you, with your topsy-turvy civilization, your
boasted literature and science and art!"

This old friend of mine had a sure recipe for success in public life.
"Whenever you get up to make a speech," said he, "begin by proclaiming
yourself the purest, the most disinterested of living men, and end
by intimating that you are the bravest;" and then with the charming
inconsistency of the dreamer he would add: "If there be anything on this
earth that I despise it is bluster."

Decidedly he was not a disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet he, too, in
his way was an idealist, and for all his oddity a man of intellectual
integrity, a trifle exaggerated perhaps in its methods and illustrations,
but true to his convictions of right and duty, as Emerson would have had
him be. For was it not Emerson who exclaimed, "We will walk on our own
feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds?"



II


In spite of our good Woodrow and our lamented Theodore I have quite made up
my mind that there is no such thing as the ideal in public life, construing
public life to refer to political transactions. The ideal may exist in art
and letters, and sometimes very young men imagine that it exists in very
young women. But here we must draw the line. As society is constituted the
ideal has no place, not even standing room, in the arena of civics.

If we would make a place for it we must begin by realizing this.
The painter, like the lover, is a law unto himself, with his little
picture--the poet, also, with his little rhyme--his atelier his universe,
his attic his field of battle, his weapons the utensils of his craft--he
himself his own Providence. It is not so in the world of action, where the
conditions are directly reversed; where the one player contends against
many players, seen and unseen; where each move is met by some counter-move;
where the finest touches are often unnoted of men or rudely blotted out by
a mysterious hand stretched forth from the darkness.

"I wish I could be as sure of anything," said Melbourne, "as Tom Macaulay
is of everything." Melbourne was a man of affairs, Macaulay a man of books;
and so throughout the story the men of action have been fatalists, from
Cæsar to Napoleon and Bismarck, nothing certain except the invisible player
behind the screen.

Of all human contrivances the most imperfect is government. In spite of
the essays of Bentham and Mill the science of government has yet to be
discovered. The ideal statesman can only exist in the ideal state, which
has never existed.

The politician, like the poor, we have always with us. As long as men
delegate to other men the function of acting for them, of thinking for
them, we shall continue to have him.

He is a variable quantity. In the crowded centers his distinguishing
marks are short hair and cunning; upon the frontier, sentiment and the
six-shooter! In New York he becomes a boss; in Kentucky and Texas, a
fighter and an orator. But the statesman--the ideal statesman--in the
mind's eye, Horatio! Bound by practical limitations such an anomaly would
be a statesman minus a party, a statesman who never gets any votes or
anywhere--a statesman perpetually out of a job. We have had some imitation
ideal statesmen who have been more or less successful in palming off their
pinchbeck wares for the real; but looking backward over the history of
the country we shall find the greatest among our public men--measuring
greatness by real and useful service--to have been while they lived least
regarded as idealists; for they were men of flesh and blood, who amid the
rush of events and the calls to duty could not stop to paint pictures, to
consider sensibilities, to put forth the deft hand where life and death
hung upon the stroke of a bludgeon or the swinging of a club.

Washington was not an ideal statesman, nor Hamilton, nor Jefferson, nor
Lincoln, though each of them conceived grandly and executed nobly. They
loved truth for truth's sake, even as they loved their country. Yet no one
of them ever quite attained his conception of it.

Truth indeed is ideal. But when we come to adapt and apply it, how many
faces it shows us, what varying aspects, so that he is fortunate who is
able to catch and hold a single fleeting expression. To bridle this and
saddle it, and, as we say in Kentucky, to ride it a turn or two around the
paddock or, still better, down the home-stretch of things accomplished,
is another matter. The real statesman must often do as he can, not as he
would; the ideal statesman existing only in the credulity of those simple
souls who are captivated by appearances or deceived by professions.

The nearest approach to the ideal statesman I have known was most grossly
stigmatized while he lived. I have Mr. Tilden in mind. If ever man pursued
an ideal life he did. From youth to age he dwelt amid his fancies. He was
truly a man of the world among men of letters and a man of letters among
men of the world. A philosopher pure and simple--a lover of books, of
pictures, of all things beautiful and elevating--he yet attained great
riches, and being a doctrinaire and having a passion for affairs he was
able to gratify the aspirations to eminence and the yearning to be of
service to the State which had filled his heart.

He seemed a medley of contradiction. Without the artifices usual to the
practical politician he gradually rose to be a power in his party; thence
to become the leader of a vast following, his name a shibboleth to millions
of his countrymen, who enthusiastically supported him and who believed that
he was elected Chief Magistrate of the United States. He was an idealist;
he lost the White House because he was so, though represented while he
lived by his enemies as a scheming spider weaving his web amid the coil of
mystification in which he hid himself. For he was personally known to few
in the city where he had made his abode; a great lawyer and jurist who
rarely appeared in court; a great political leader to whom the hustings
were mainly a stranger; a thinker, and yet a dreamer, who lived his own
life a little apart, as a poet might; uncorrupting and incorruptible; least
of all were his political companions moved by the loss of the presidency,
which had seemed in his grasp. And finally he died--though a master of
legal lore--to have his last will and testament successfully assailed.

Except as news venders the newspapers--especially newspaper workers--should
give politics a wide berth. Certainly they should have no party politics.
True to say, journalism and literature and politics are as wide apart as
the poles. From Bolingbroke, the most splendid of the world's failures, to
Thackeray, one of its greatest masters of letters--who happily did not get
the chance he sought in parliamentary life to fall--both English history
and American history are full of illustrations to this effect. Except in
the comic opera of French politics the poet, the artist, invested with
power, seems to lose his efficiency in the ratio of his genius; the
literary gift, instead of aiding, actually antagonizing the aptitude for
public business.

The statesman may not be fastidious. The poet, the artist, must be always
so. If the party leader preserve his integrity--if he keep himself
disinterested and clean--if his public influence be inspiring to his
countrymen and his private influence obstructive of cheats and rogues among
his adherents--he will have done well.

We have left behind us the gibbet and the stake. No further need of the
Voltaires, the Rousseaus and the Diderots to declaim against kingcraft
and priestcraft. We have done something more than mark time. We report
progress. Yet despite the miracles of modern invention how far in the arts
of government has the world traveled from darkness to light since the old
tribal days, and what has it learned except to enlarge the area, to
amplify and augment the agencies, to multiply and complicate the forms and
processes of corruption? By corruption I mean the dishonest advantage of
the few over the many.

The dreams of yesterday, we are told, become the realities of to-morrow.
In these despites I am an optimist. Much truly there needs still to be
learned, much to be unlearned. Advanced as we consider ourselves we are yet
a long way from the most rudimentary perception of the civilization we are
so fond of parading. The eternal verities--where shall we seek them? Little
in religious affairs, less still in commercial affairs, hardly any at all
in political affairs, that being right which represents each organism.
Still we progress. The pulpit begins to turn from the sinister visage of
theology and to teach the simple lessons of Christ and Him crucified. The
press, which used to be omniscient, is now only indiscriminate--a clear
gain, emitting by force of publicity, if not of shine, a kind of light
through whose diverse rays and foggy luster we may now and then get a
glimpse of truth.



III


The time is coming, if it has not already arrived, when among fair-minded
and intelligent Americans there will not be two opinions touching the
Hayes-Tilden contest for the presidency in 1876-77--that both by the
popular vote and a fair count of the electoral vote Tilden was elcted
and Hayes was defeated; but the whole truth underlying the determinate
incidents which led to the rejection of Tilden and the seating of Hayes
will never be known.

"All history is a lie," observed Sir Robert Walpole, the corruptionist,
mindful of what was likely to be written about himself; and "What is
history," asked Napoleon, the conqueror, "but a fable agreed upon?"

In the first administration of Mr. Cleveland there were present at a
dinner table in Washington, the President being of the party, two leading
Democrats and two leading Republicans who had sustained confidential
relations to the principals and played important parts in the drama of the
Disputed Succession. These latter had been long upon terms of personal
intimacy. The occasion was informal and joyous, the good fellowship of the
heartiest.

Inevitably the conversation drifted to the Electoral Commission, which had
counted Tilden out and Hayes in, and of which each of the four had some
story to tell. Beginning in banter with interchanges of badinage it
presently fell into reminiscence, deepening as the interest of the
listeners rose to what under different conditions might have been described
as unguarded gayety if not imprudent garrulity. The little audience was
rapt.

Finally Mr. Cleveland raised both hands and exclaimed, "What would the
people of this country think if the roof could be lifted from this house
and they could hear these men?" And then one of the four, a gentleman noted
for his wealth both of money and humor, replied, "But the roof is not going
to be lifted from this house, and if any one repeats what I have said I
will denounce him as a liar."

Once in a while the world is startled by some revelation of the unknown
which alters the estimate of a historic event or figure; but it is
measurably true, as Metternich declares, that those who make history rarely
have time to write it.

It is not my wish in recurring to the events of nearly five-and-forty years
ago to invoke and awaken any of the passions of that time, nor my purpose
to assail the character or motives of any of the leading actors. Most of
them, including the principals, I knew well; to many of their secrets I
was privy. As I was serving, in a sense, as Mr. Tilden's personal
representative in the Lower House of the Forty-fourth Congress, and as a
member of the joint Democratic Advisory or Steering Committee of the two
Houses, all that passed came more or less, if not under my supervision, yet
to my knowledge; and long ago I resolved that certain matters should remain
a sealed book in my memory.

I make no issue of veracity with the living; the dead should be sacred.
The contradictory promptings, not always crooked; the double constructions
possible to men's actions; the intermingling of ambition and patriotism
beneath the lash of party spirit; often wrong unconscious of itself;
sometimes equivocation deceiving itself--in short, the tangled web of good
and ill inseparable from great affairs of loss and gain made debatable
ground for every step of the Hayes-Tilden proceeding.

I shall bear sure testimony to the integrity of Mr. Tilden. I directly know
that the presidency was offered to him for a price, and that he refused it;
and I indirectly know and believe that two other offers came to him, which
also he declined. The accusation that he was willing to buy, and through
the cipher dispatches and other ways tried to buy, rests upon appearance
supporting mistaken surmise. Mr. Tilden knew nothing of the cipher
dispatches until they appeared in the New York _Tribune_. Neither did
Mr. George W. Smith, his private secretary, and later one of the trustees
of his will.

It should be sufficient to say that so far as they involved No. 15 Gramercy
Park they were the work solely of Colonel Pelton, acting on his own
responsibility, and as Mr. Tilden's nephew exceeding his authority to act;
that it later developed that during this period Colonel Pelton had not been
in his perfect mind, but was at least semi-irresponsible; and that on two
ocasions when the vote or votes sought seemed within reach Mr. Tilden
interposed to forbid. Directly and personally I know this to be true.

The price, at least in patronage, which the Republicans actually paid
for possession is of public record. Yet I not only do not question the
integrity of Mr. Hayes, but I believe him and most of those immediately
about him to have been high-minded men who thought they were doing for the
best in a situation unparalleled and beset with perplexity. What they did
tends to show that men will do for party and in concert what the same men
never would be willing to do each on his own responsibility. In his "Life
of Samuel J. Tilden," John Bigelow says:

"Why persons occupying the most exalted positions should have ventured to
compromise their reputations by this deliberate consummation of a series of
crimes which struck at the very foundations of the republic is a question
which still puzzles many of all parties who have no charity for the crimes
themselves. I have already referred to the terrors and desperation with
which the prospect of Tilden's election inspired the great army of
office-holders at the close of Grant's administration. That army, numerous
and formidable as it was, was comparatively limited. There was a much
larger and justly influential class who were apprehensive that the return
of the Democratic party to power threatened a reactionary policy at
Washington, to the undoing of some or all the important results of the
war. These apprehensions were inflamed by the party press until they were
confined to no class, but more or less pervaded all the Northern States.
The Electoral Tribunal, consisting mainly of men appointed to their
positions by Republican Presidents or elected from strong Republican
States, felt the pressure of this feeling, and from motives compounded in
more or less varying proportions of dread of the Democrats, personal
ambition, zeal for their party and respect for their constituents,
reached the conclusion that the exclusion of Tilden from the White House
was an end which justified whatever means were necessary to accomplish
it. They regarded it, like the emancipation of the slaves, as a war
measure."



IV


The nomination of Horace Greeley in 1872 and the overwhelming defeat that
followed left the Democratic party in an abyss of despair. The old Whig
party, after the disaster that overtook it in 1852, had been not more
demoralized. Yet in the general elections of 1874 the Democrats swept the
country, carrying many Northern States and sending a great majority to the
Forty-fourth Congress.

Reconstruction was breaking down of its very weight and rottenness. The
panic of 1873 reacted against the party in power. Dissatisfaction with
Grant, which had not sufficed two years before to displace him, was growing
apace. Favoritism bred corruption and corruption grew more and more
flagrant. Succeeding scandals cast their shadows before. Chickens of
carpetbaggery let loose upon the South were coming home to roost at the
North. There appeared everywhere a noticeable subsidence of the sectional
spirit. Reform was needed alike in the State Governments and the National
Government, and the cry for reform proved something other than an idle
word. All things made for Democracy.

Yet there were many and serious handicaps. The light and leading of the
historic Democratic party which had issued from the South were in obscurity
and abeyance, while most of those surviving who had been distinguished in
the party conduct and counsels were disabled by act of Congress. Of the few
prominent Democrats left at the North many were tainted by what was called
Copperheadism--sympathy with the Confederacy. To find a chieftain wholly
free from this contamination, Democracy, having failed of success in
presidential campaigns, not only with Greeley but with McClellan and
Seymour, was turning to such Republicans as Chase, Field and Davis. At last
heaven seemed to smile from the clouds upon the disordered ranks and to
summon thence a man meeting the requirements of the time. This was Samuel
Jones Tilden.

To his familiars Mr. Tilden was a dear old bachelor who lived in a fine old
mansion in Gramercy Park. Though 60 years old he seemed in the prime of
his manhood; a genial and overflowing scholar; a trained and earnest
doctrinaire; a public-spirited, patriotic citizen, well known and highly
esteemed, who had made fame and fortune at the bar and had always been
interested in public affairs. He was a dreamer with a genius for business,
a philosopher yet an organizer. He pursued the tenor of his life with
measured tread.

His domestic fabric was disfigured by none of the isolation and squalor
which so often attend the confirmed celibate. His home life was a model
of order and decorum, his home as unchallenged as a bishopric, its
hospitality, though select, profuse and untiring. An elder sister presided
at his board, as simple, kindly and unostentatious, but as methodical as
himself. He was a lover of books rather than music and art, but also of
horses and dogs and out-of-door activity.

He was fond of young people, particularly of young girls; he drew them
about him, and was a veritable Sir Roger de Coverley in his gallantries
toward them and his zeal in amusing them and making them happy. His
tastes were frugal and their indulgence was sparing. He took his wine not
plenteously, though he enjoyed it--especially his "blue seal" while
it lasted--and sipped his whisky-and-water on occasion with a pleased
composure redolent of discursive talk, of which, when he cared to lead
the conversation, he was a master. He had early come into a great legal
practice and held a commanding professional position. His judgment was
believed to be infallible; and it is certain that after 1871 he rarely
appeared in the courts of law except as counsellor, settling in chambers
most of the cases that came to him.

It was such a man whom, in 1874, the Democrats nominated for Governor of
New York. To say truth, it was not thought by those making the nomination
that he had any chance to win. He was himself so much better advised that
months ahead he prefigured very near the exact vote. The afternoon of the
day of election one of the group of friends, who even thus early had the
Presidency in mind, found him in his library confident and calm.

"What majority will you have?" he asked cheerily.

"Any," replied the friend sententiously.

"How about fifteen thousand?"

"Quite enough."

"Twenty-five thousand?"

"Still better."

"The majority," he said, "will be a little in excess of fifty thousand."

It was 53,315. His estimate was not guesswork. He had organized his
campaign by school districts. His canvass system was perfect, his
canvassers were as penetrating and careful as census takers. He had before
him reports from every voting precinct in the State. They were corroborated
by the official returns. He had defeated Gen. John A. Dix, thought to be
invincible by a majority very nearly the same as that by which Governor Dix
had been elected two years before.



V


The time and the man had met. Though Mr. Tilden had not before held
executive office he was ripe and ready for the work. His experience in the
pursuit and overthrow of the Tweed Ring in New York, the great metropolis,
had prepared and fitted him to deal with the Canal Ring at Albany, the
State capital. Administrative reform was now uppermost in the public mind,
and here in the Empire State of the Union had come to the head of affairs
a Chief Magistrate at once exact and exacting, deeply versed not only in
legal lore but in a knowledge of the methods by which political power
was being turned to private profit and of the men--Democrats as well as
Republicans--who were preying upon the substance of the people.

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