BY WILLIAM HENRY HURLBURT.

The United States being, and having been from the outset of their

history, a Democratic Republic, it may well puzzle a European reader

to understand why American “Republicans” should bewail a “Democratic”

triumph, or American “Democrats” exult in the overthrow of a

“Republican” party.

Yet it may not be impertinent to suggest that in no country are

the names of political parties or factions commonly selected by a

committee of philologists with an eye to making the national politics

intelligible. What notions of English history are conveyed by the mere

names of “Whig” and “Tory” or even of “Liberal” and “Conservative” to

a person unfamiliar with the political history of England? What light

is thrown on the history of Byzantium by talking of the “Blues” and the

“Greens,” or on the history of Florence by casual references to the

“Bianchi” and the “Neri”?

When one asks for the origin of such names, history is apt to give him

no better answer than that of the small African child who was invited

by a sympathetic lady to explain how she came to have six toes on one

of her feet—“they growed so!”

This is so emphatically true of American political parties that my

readers must pardon me if I take them back to the “beginnings of

things” for an accurate perspective of the recent Presidential election

in the United States, and of its significance.

* * * * *

The existing Constitution of the American Union was adopted in 1789 by

the citizens of thirteen new-born Republics who had grown up to manhood

in the then anomalous condition of subjects of the British Crown

enjoying all the privileges and immunities of local self-government

in thirteen distinct and independent colonies which differed among

themselves in origin, in social traditions and habits, and in religion,

almost as widely as Wales differs from Ireland, or Ireland from

Scotland. These colonies had co-operated from time to time with the

mother country for the common defence against a common enemy, colonial

France. And they had been united under a temporary political bond in

the great revolutionary war of 1776, by a common spirit of resistance

to that Parliamentary despotism, tempered by corruption, which after

the English Revolution of 1688 and the establishment of the House of

Hanover assumed to itself the place originally held by the British

Crown in the allegiance of these stalwart “Home-Rulers” beyond the

Atlantic.

At the peace of Versailles in 1783 Great Britain found herself

compelled to recognize the independence of all and of each of these

colonies, which thenceforth took their places in the family of nations

as separate and sovereign states. They were recognized in this

capacity not in block, but severally and individually, each by its

own territorial designation; and from the moment of such recognition

each of them felt that it was absolutely free, and “of right ought to

be free,” saving so far as it had bound itself to the then existing

confederacy of 1778, to adopt any form of government which might suit

the humor of its citizens, and to form any alliances advantageous to

its own interests. The States were, indeed, at that moment bound

together for certain specified purposes by a federal compact formed

during the war in 1778; but this compact sate so lightly upon them

that it was not only impossible to compel the several States into an

exact fulfilment of confederate obligations, but very difficult even

to induce them to get themselves properly represented under it for

legislative and executive purposes at the then federal capital of

Annapolis in Maryland. A striking illustration of this is given in a

private letter, now in my possession, written by Thomas Jefferson of

Virginia, the author of the Declaration of Independence of 1776, and

eventually the founder of that great Democratic party under the Union

of 1789, which now once more, after a quarter of a century of extra

constitutional experiments in government, has been commissioned by

the voters of the United States, in the election to the Presidency

of Governor Cleveland of New York, to restore in all its parts, and

re-establish on its original and enduring foundations, the sway of the

Federal Constitution of 1789. Writing from Annapolis to a friend in

Virginia in regard to the negotiations at Paris which had secured the

recognition of American Independence, Mr. Jefferson, in December 1783,

complains bitterly of the indifference of the States to this momentous

event. Under the ninth article of the then existing confederate compact

of 1778, the assent of nine States represented in the Congress at

Annapolis assembled was necessary to the ratification of any treaty

with a foreign power. The time fixed for the ratification by Congress

of the Treaty of Versailles was rapidly running out at the date of the

letter to which I refer, and the Congress had been long in session.

“We had yesterday, for the first time, seven States,” exclaims Mr.

Jefferson; and he goes on to express his concern lest the necessary

quorum of nine States should not be assembled before the expiration of

the term fixed for ratification in the treaty by which, after seven

years of an exhausting war, their independence was to be established!

I dwell on this point in order to emphasise the truth, vital to any

intelligent appreciation of the great change now impending in the

administration of public affairs in the United States, that the

commonwealths by which the American Union was established were,

from the first, in the opinion of their inhabitants, sufficient

each unto itself; and this because each of these commonwealths was

indeed a well-organised body politic, the members of which had long

managed their domestic affairs under one or another form of chartered

authority, after their own fashion; and, for the protection within

their own borders of life and of property, had adjusted to their

several situations and necessities the maxims and principles of English

liberty defined and guarded by law. These States were the creators,

not the creatures of that “more perfect Union” which (the Confederacy

of 1778 failing) was finally formed by them after all its features had

been discussed, debated, and redebated, not only in a Convention of the

States assembled for that purpose in 1787, but in the several States

subsequently, with a fulness, vigor of thought, and intelligence which,

in the opinion of others than my own countrymen, make the volumes of

Elliott’s _Debates on the Constitution_ the most valuable treasury of

constitutional politics in existence.

The framers of the American Constitution of 1789 were no rude

uninstructed settlers, summoned from the axe and the plough to

improvise an orderly government. The traditions of the older States

went back to the struggle between the prerogative and the taxpayers

of England under the Stuart kings. Virginia, the “Old Dominion” of

Elizabeth and the Restoration, with her Established Church, her College

of William and Mary, and her legends of the Cavaliers, was in no

hurry to believe that her consequence could be much enhanced by any

merger of her sovereignty in that of a federal union with Charles the

Second’s Crown colony of Rhode Island, and with the gallant little

community which keeps green on the banks of the Delaware the memory

of the self-sacrificing and heroic Thomas West. The colonial story

of the great central State of New York had made its sturdy people

familiar with those ideas of federated liberty on which the fabric

of Netherlandish independence had been founded. The curious in such

matters have found an indication of the extent to which the spirit of

the Netherlands influenced the framers of the new American republic

in the fact that when the style and title to be taken by the American

President were under consideration, Washington inclined to the notion

that the Chief Magistrate should be addressed and known as “His High

Mightiness.”

Nor were the citizens of the youngest of the colonies disposed to put

the control of their persons and their purses unreservedly into the

hands of any imperial central authority.

After the Constitution of 1789 (to take the date from the day, April

30, 1789, on which Washington was inaugurated at New York as the

first President of the United States) had been definitely adopted by

eleven States, the two States of North Carolina and Rhode Island still

withholding their ratification of the instrument, remained as foreign

powers outside of the Union, the former until the 21st of November

1789, and the latter until the 29th of May 1790.

A notable date this last!

Never was a great compact more opportunely framed and ratified!

Almost upon the morrow of these final adhesions to the “more perfect

Union,” the storm of the French Revolution broke upon the world,

bringing with it great international convulsions which affected every

nerve and fibre of the social, political, and industrial life of

America, and tested to the utmost every seam and joint in the fabric

of the new American Republic. The excesses of Jacobinism in France

strengthened the doubts and fears of many excellent persons in America

who had small faith in the capacity of the people for self-government

on a grand scale, and who accepted the Constitution of 1789 not as a

final and trustworthy frame of polity, but because, while they thought

it, to use the language of one of the ablest of their number, “frail

and worthless in itself,” they hoped to see it lead up to the eventual

establishment of some such “splendid central government” as in our own

times Mr. Seward, the true founder of the “Republican” party which has

just been defeated in the United States, used to dream of and did his

best to build up.

The influence of these doubts and fears upon the politics of the new

American Republic was fortunately met and countered by the genius and

the faith of a group of great American statesmen, the friends and

associates of Thomas Jefferson; and the fundamental divergence between

the controlling ideas of the two great parties which now occupy the

field of American politics goes back to this closing decade of the

eighteenth century. When the existing Constitution was first submitted

by the Convention of 1787 to the people and to the States, those who,

with Alexander Hamilton of New York, and James Madison of Virginia,

advocated its adoption were called “Federalists”, and those who, with

Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, and Patrick Henry of Virginia, opposed

it as threatening the rights and sovereignty of the States, were

called Anti-Federalists. After its adoption the latter party took the

name of “Strict Constructionists,” their object being to bind down

the administration of the new system to the closest and most rigid

interpretation of the powers conferred by the States upon the Federal

Government; while their opponents were styled “Broad Constructionists.”

Both parties happily had such confidence in the patriotism and wisdom

of Washington that he came into power as first President by a unanimous

vote, and selected his first cabinet from the leaders of both the great

parties which had contended over the adoption and the construction of

the new Constitution. At the first session of the first Congress, in

1789, ten amendments to the Constitution were adopted, embodying a

Bill of Rights to secure the liberties of the citizens of the several

States, and explicitly reserving to the several States “respectively”

or to the people, “all the powers not delegated to the United States by

the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the States.” These amendments

Thomas Jefferson counselled the friends of Home Rule and State Rights

to accept as an adequate guarantee of both. His wise advice was taken,

and the great political party which was formed under the Constitution

took, at his suggestion, the name of the “Republican Party.” The name

was appropriate enough to that party which held each State of the new

Union to be indeed an independent “Republic,” and regarded the

“Federal” Government as the agent and protector of the “Republican”

independence of each State.

It gathered to itself a kind of passion, too, in the popular heart from

the then very general conviction that the leaders, at least, of the

“Federalist” party secretly desired to see these “Republics” disappear

into some form of centralised monarchy.

As the French Revolution grew more portentous and interesting, and its

agents busied themselves with efforts to draw America into the European

contest as an ally, or rather as a dependency, of Republican France,

the political antagonism of the “Federalists” and the “Republicans”

grew dangerously high and hot. Men wore French or English Cockades in

the streets of New York and Philadelphia. A distinguished public man

of Massachusetts once told me that his earliest recollection of any

political event took him back to a day on which a friend of his father,

who was a leading Federalist of Massachusetts, met him in the streets

coming home from school, and, giving him a bright Spanish dollar, said,

“Now, Jack, run as fast as you can to your father’s court, and tell him

from me that Robert Spear’s head has been cut off, and he must give you

just such another dollar!” News came at long intervals then from Europe

to America, and the tidings of the fall of Robespierre had that morning

reached Boston.

Under the stress of these emotions the “Republicans” took to denouncing

the “Federalists” as “Monocrats” and “Anglomen,” and the “Federalists”

retorted by reviling their opponents as “Jacobins” and “Democrats.”

The “Federalist” party held its own during the two Presidencies of

Washington, and elected John Adams to succeed the “Father of his

country” in 1796. Under the Presidency of Mr. Adams the “Federalists”

lost their heads, and the “Republicans” in the year 1800 took

possession of power under the first Presidency of Thomas Jefferson.

They had for some time been known commonly as “Democratic Republicans,”

and in the ninth Congress which met under the second Presidency of

Jefferson in 1805 they boldly took the name of “Democrats,” in the

spirit of good Bishop Willegis, who put the wagoner’s wheel into

his coat-of-arms, and like the “Gueux,” the “Huguenots,” and the

“Roundheads,” extracting “glory out of bitterness.”

From that time to this the “Democratic” party has continued to be

what Jefferson made it, the party of “Home Rule” as opposed to

centralisation, and of a strict construction of the organic law

by which the provisions and the limitations of Federal power are

sanctioned and defined, as against that plausible paternalism under

cover of which, in the language of a great living leader of the

Democratic party, Senator Bayard of Delaware, “the general government

assumes guardianship and protection over the business of the private

citizen, and functions of control over matters of domestic and local

interest.”

* * * * *

If I have enabled my readers to estimate aright the vital importance

attached by the people of the several States in the formation of

the Constitution to the recognition of the rights and the reserved

sovereignty of the States, they will not be surprised to learn that

when Thomas Jefferson established the Democratic party upon this

recognition as its fundamental principle he secured for the Democratic

party such a profound and permanent hold upon the confidence and the

affections of the American people as can never be shaken while the

Union remains what it was meant to be. For forty years after his first

Presidency, no combinations succeeded in wresting from the Democrats

the control of the executive authority. The only apparent exception to

this statement confirms it. In the Presidential election of 1824, the

electoral ticket of General Jackson, the leading Democratic candidate,

received a considerable majority of the votes of the people; but as

there were four candidates in the field, and General Jackson did

not secure a majority of the votes of all the electoral colleges,

the choice of a President went, under the Constitution, into the

lower House of Congress, in which the members vote for a President

not individually as representing the people, but by delegations as

representing the sovereign States. John Quincy Adams secured a majority

of the delegations; but such was the popular indignation that in the

next House of Representatives President Adams found himself confronted

by an overwhelming opposition; and at the end of his term of office

General Jackson was made President by a majority of more than two

to one against him. Jackson was twice elected, and transmitted his

power to his Secretary of State, Martin Van Buren of New York, in the

election of 1836. Between the years 1840 and 1860 the predominance of

the Democratic party was but twice disturbed. In 1840 the Democratic

President Van Buren, being a candidate for re-election, was defeated

after a very severe struggle by General Harrison, the candidate of a

conglomerate party which, for lack of a better, had taken the name

of the “Whig” party, and which represented in a general way the

Anti-Democratic classes of the country, and more particularly the

banking interests and the Protectionists, of whom more hereafter. The

real and brilliant leader of this party, Henry Clay of Kentucky, had

been deprived of the presidential nomination through the machinations

of a nominating device unknown to the Constitution, called a

“Presidential Convention;” and though the Whig candidate secured a

great majority in the electoral colleges, thanks to the skill with

which his managers played upon the financial distress of the country

caused by a great business panic in 1837, yet when he unexpectedly

died at the end of a single short month after his inauguration, the

Vice-President elected with him and who succeeded him, Mr. Tyler

of Virginia, originally a Democrat, was found to be opposed to the

rechartering of a United States Bank; and a bill passed by both Houses

for that purpose, which had been indeed the main purpose of the leading

Whigs in promoting the election of Harrison and Tyler, was twice vetoed

by him. This was the first lesson given to the American people of the

potential importance of the Vice-Presidency in case of the death or

disability of the President. Curiously enough, the same lesson, which

has been repeated several times since, has, in every instance, with one

exception, followed upon the election of a President by Anti-Democratic

votes.

Henry Clay, who was enthusiastically nominated and supported by the

“Whig” party for the Presidency at the close of President Tyler’s

administration in 1844, was defeated by the Democratic nominee, Mr.

Polk of Tennessee, under whom the annexation of the magnificent

Republic of Texas to the United States was consummated, with its

inevitable corollary of a war with Mexico, that republic refusing to

acknowledge the right of the people of Texas to sever their connection

with the Mexican States. This war led immediately to the cession

by Mexico to the United States of New Mexico, California, and the

Northern Pacific coast of the old Spanish dominions in North America,

and ultimately to the settlement of the boundary lines on the Pacific

between the dominions of Great Britain and the United States. At the

close of President Polk’s administration, the “Whigs,” who had been

disheartened and “demoralised” by the defeat of their “magnetic”

leader, Henry Clay, in 1844, made a second effort to capture executive

power. The occasion was offered to them by a schism in the Democratic

party, which had begun on personal grounds when Ex-President Van Buren,

who desired a renomination, was set aside in 1844 for Mr. Polk, and

which was intensified on broader issues by the determination of many

Northern Democrats not to permit the extension of slavery into the vast

and splendid territories acquired under President Polk.

It is far from being true, as I shall presently show, that the

“Republican” party, so called, of our own times, which has just been

defeated under Mr. Blaine, originated the political action in the

United States which finally led to the extinction of slavery as an act

of war by President Lincoln. The “Republican” party of our own times,

deriving its origin from the “Federalists” of the last century, through

the “Whigs” of 1840, has been recently and not unfairly described by

Mr. John Bright as the “party of Protection and Monopoly.” This is so

far true that it represents those tendencies to a plausible paternalism

in government, and to a consolidation of the Federal power at the

expense of Home Rule and State sovereignty, which found expression

in Federalism at the beginning of our history; which threatened the

secession of New England and the establishment of an “Eastern Empire”

when Louisiana was purchased from France under President Jefferson;

which waged the “war of the banks” against President Jackson; and which

founded the “Whig” party of Henry Clay upon the doctrine that the

Federal Government might lawfully and constitutionally levy taxes upon

the consumers of imported goods for the express purpose of enhancing

the profits of domestic manufacturers.

Governor Wright, a Democratic predecessor of Governor Cleveland in

the executive chair of the “Empire State,” who had supported the

renomination of Ex-President Van Buren in 1844, led, until his sudden

and lamented death in 1847, the opposition of Northern sentiment, after

the annexation of Texas, to any extension of slavery beyond the limits

assigned to it by the famous “Missouri Compromise” of 1820. The Whig

forerunners of Mr. Blaine were discreetly silent on the subject, and

the question was thrown into the arena of political discussion and

agitation by a Democratic Member of Congress from Pennsylvania, Mr.

Wilmot, who, during the boundary negotiations with Mexico, introduced

and moved the adoption of a “proviso,” that “no part of the territory

to be acquired should be open to the introduction of slavery.”

This “proviso” was obviously unnecessary to the exclusion of slavery

from any “part of the territory to be acquired,” for negro slavery

had been long before abolished in New Mexico and in California under

Mexican law; and the Democratic party of the United States had laid it

down as a cardinal principle of Democratic policy, involved indeed, as

many Democrats thought, in the principle of Home Rule, that there was

“no power in Congress to legislate upon slavery in the Territories.”

The introduction of the “proviso” therefore led, and could lead, solely

to an immediately sterile, but eventually most dangerous, inflammation

of the public mind on the question of the relations of slavery, as an

institution already existing within the Union, to the politics of the

country. The “proviso” was defeated in Congress; but the discussion had

aroused the abolitionists of the North on the one hand, and the extreme

pro-slavery men at the South on the other side, into loud and angry

debate; and the opportunity of “forcing an issue” was seized by Mr.

Calhoun of South Carolina, a man of the highest character and of keen

intellect, who honestly believed that the South must be sooner or later

driven in self-defence to withdraw from the Union, and who had brought

his State and himself in 1832, on the question of the right of a State

to “nullify” a Federal law, within striking distance of the executive

authority wielded by the iron hand of President Jackson.

Mr. Calhoun introduced into the Senate, on the 19th of February, 1847,

a series of resolutions denying the right of Congress to pass any law

which would have the effect of preventing any citizen of a slave State

from carrying slaves as his property into any territory. No vote was

taken on these resolutions, but they served Mr. Calhoun’s purpose of

awakening public sentiment at the South to the threatening attitude of

the anti-slavery sentiment at the North.

The “Whigs,” with whom Mr. Lincoln then acted, profited adroitly by

this excitement in both sections. They avoided the subject of slavery

altogether, and nominated for the Presidency in 1848 General Taylor,

a slaveholder of Louisiana, who had won a wide and well-deserved

popularity as a military commander in the Mexican war, and a man

of “moderate” views on all subjects. With him they associated

Mr. Fillmore, a respectable citizen of New York. The friends of

Ex-President Van Buren united in that State with the anti-slavery men

in an independent nomination of Ex-President Van Buren and Mr. Charles

Francis Adams, as the candidates of a new third party which took the

name of the “Free Soil” party. This party declared that Congress had

no right to interfere with slavery in the States in which it already

existed; that it was the duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in the

Territories; and that Congress had a constitutional right to abolish

slavery in the Federal district of Columbia, which is the seat of the

Federal Government. The result of all this was the election of Taylor

and Fillmore, who received 163 votes in the electoral colleges against

127 cast for Cass and Butler, the Democratic candidates, and a popular

plurality over those candidates of less than 150,000 in a total of

somewhat less than 3,000,000 votes.

But the “Whig” triumph was short-lived. The gold discoveries in

California gave such a sudden and tremendous impetus to the settlement

of the new Pacific empire of the Union as “forced the hand” of the new

Administration; and General Taylor dying in July 1849, while Congress

and the country were hotly contending over the social and political

organization of that new empire, his successor, Mr. Fillmore, with

Daniel Webster as his Secretary of State, threw the weight of the

Administration against the anti-slavery agitation and in favor of what

were called the “Compromise Measures” of 1850. These measures admitted

California without extending to the Pacific the boundary line between

free and slave territory fixed by the “Missouri Compromise” of 1820,

and left slavery untouched in the Federal district. Of course such a

compromise neither quieted the alarms of the slaveholding South nor

satisfied the aggressive abolitionists of the North. But the country

accepted it, and at the next Presidential election, in 1852, the

Democratic candidate, General Pierce of New Hampshire, was elected by

an overwhelming majority, carrying four of the New England States,

the great Middle States of New York and Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan,

Indiana, and Illinois at the West, all the Southern States, excepting

Kentucky and Tennessee, and the new State on the Pacific, California.

He received 254 electoral votes against 42 thrown for his Whig

antagonist, General Scott, who had led the armies of the Union to their

crowning victories in Mexico, and who had been a conspicuous military

personage in the United States ever since the second war of 1812 with

Great Britain.

There could scarcely have been a more decisive proof than this election

gave that the Democratic party of the United States is really the

permanent and enduring “party of the people,” without distinction of

sections; for the tremendous victory won by General Pierce was

distinctly due to the general, though, as it proved, the mistaken,

impression of the masses of the people, that the irritating question

of slavery in its Federal relations had been taken out of the arena

of politics by the “Compromise Measures” of 1850. This was so clear

that the opponents of the Democratic party, representing the shattered

elements of the Whig party and the friends, as Mr. Bright would say,

of “Protection and Monopoly,” changed front suddenly and concentrated

all their efforts on a revival and extension of the anti-slavery

agitation, as being the only program which offered them a hope of

breaking down again, even for a time, the ascendency of Democratic

principles. In this effort they were naturally seconded not only by the

Northern abolitionists, but by the extreme partisans of slavery at the

South. The value of slave property had been enormously increased by

the sudden development of trade and manufactures all over the world,

and especially in Great Britain and the United States, which resulted

from the gold discoveries in California and Australia, and from the

adoption, first in the United States under a great Democratic Secretary

of the Treasury, Robert J. Walker, in 1846, of a liberal tariff, and

then, in Great Britain, of what is not perhaps with perfect accuracy

called the “Free Trade” policy of Mr. Bright and Mr. Cobden. One

might almost say that the cotton manufacturers of Lancashire and New

England fell into a conspiracy to delude the slaveholders of the South

into those dreams of a vast slaveholding empire surrounding the Gulf

of Mexico, which began, at the period of which I now write, to shake

the foundations of the Union by fascinating the minds of grasping and

ambitious men in that part of the United States.

In February, 1853, before the inauguration of President Pierce,

a Democratic Senator, Mr. Douglas, of Illinois, who had been an

unsuccessful candidate for the Presidential nomination in the preceding

year, took the occasion presented by a bill for organizing a new

Western Territory, Nebraska (which included the two now existing States

of Nebraska and of Kansas), to propose a repeal of the old “Missouri

Compromise,” to which I have more than once alluded. By this measure—a

“Federalist,” not a Democratic measure—adopted in 1820, it was

provided that slavery should never be carried into any Territory north

of the fixed line of 36° 30´ north latitude. I have already mentioned

that Congress refused to extend this line to the Pacific during the

discussions which attended the admission of California in 1850; and

I am sure that no one who knew Senator Douglas will differ from me

now, when I say that he undoubtedly hoped by urging the repeal of the

Missouri Compromise, which was voted by Congress the 25th of May,

1854, to get the whole question whether slavery should or should not

be introduced into new Territories, and so into the new States of the

Union, relegated from the domain of Congressional action into that

of “popular sovereignty.” It was not the purpose either of the small

minority at the South who desired disunion as the first step towards

the founding of a “semi-tropical empire,” or of the more considerable

minority at the North who preferred the risk of disunion to the

toleration of slavery under the American flag, that this question

should be taken out of the domain of Congressional action, and the

expectations of Senator Douglas were disappointed. The repeal of the

“Missouri Compromise” simply turned Kansas into a battle-ground. It led

rapidly up to a succession of armed conflicts within that Territory

between organised bands of Northern and of Southern “emigrants,” which

set fire to the popular passions in both sections of the country,

“swamped” the attempt of a section of the now disbanding “Whig” party

to capture power by organising the prejudices of race and of religion

into a secret political order of “Native Americans” or “Know-nothings,”

and gave vitality and success to the more serious and sustained efforts

of a much larger section of the “Whigs,” who devoted themselves to

founding a new party which should combine the permanent objects “of

Protection and Monopoly” with the temporary and immediate object of

restricting slavery within the limits of the then existing slave

States. Thanks to this section of the “Whigs,” the modern “Republican

Party” was formed in 1854, which, after precipitating the country

into civil war by the election of President Lincoln (against whom it

revolted, as I shall show, when he had carried through to victory the

terrible task it imposed upon him), after retarding the pacification

of the Union for years by its policy of military “reconstruction” at

the South, and after inflicting upon the taxpayers of the United States

burdens undreamed of by the original “Whigs” in their most extravagant

days of “paternalism,” has now finally come to the ground under the

candidacy of two of its most thoroughly representative leaders, Mr.

Blaine and General Logan.

The chief spirit of the new “Republican” party was Ex-Governor

Seward, the leader of the Whigs of New York, a consummate politician,

“honest himself,” as one of his special friends said of him, “but

indifferent to honesty in others,” who labored with uncommon skill

and adroitness for six years to build the new organisation up into

Presidential proportions, only to experience the common fate of such

party leaders in the United States, and to find himself set aside by

his own Republican Convention of 1860, at Chicago, in favor of the then

relatively obscure Western candidate Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois.

The old name “Republican” used by the party of Jefferson was taken by

the new party for the express purpose of dissimulating, as far as might

be, its “Whig” parentage, and of thus recommending it to the widespread

and growing anti-slavery element among the Democrats of the North

and West. The Whig origin and tendencies of the new party, however,

clearly appeared in the demand made in its first platform of 1856 for

“appropriations by Congress for the improvement of rivers and harbors.”

It selected as its first Presidential candidate in 1856 Colonel John

C. Fremont of California, an officer of the army who had married the

daughter of an eminent Democratic senator, Mr. Benton of Missouri, and

who had acquired a kind of romantic popular prestige as “the Pathfinder

of the Rocky Mountains” by an expedition across the continent. With him

was associated as Vice-Presidential candidate a man of more political

weight and force, Mr. Dayton, a Whig leader, of New Jersey, who

afterwards rendered the country distinguished services as Minister

to France under President Lincoln. Mr. Buchanan of Pennsylvania was

nominated by the Democrats to succeed President Pierce in 1856. In the

“platform” then adopted the Democratic party met the “Protectionist”

tendency of the new “Republican” organisation by declaring “that

justice and sound policy forbid the Federal Government to foster one

branch of industry to the detriment of another;” denounced the attempt

of the Whig “Know-Nothings” to organise a crusade against Catholics

and citizens of alien birth; and in the matter of slavery reaffirmed

“the compromise of 1850,” and committed itself to “the determined

conservation of the Union and the non-interference of Congress with

slavery in the territories or the district of Columbia.”

The new “Republican party” in its “platform” of 1856, let me here

observe, raised no question touching slavery where slavery then

existed, but pronounced it to be “both the right and the imperative

duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of

barbarism, polygamy and slavery;” this latter attack on the Mormons

being a bid for votes at the West and an appeal to the religious

prejudices of the East.

A third remnant of the old “Whigs,” meeting in Baltimore in September

1856, appealed to the country to beware of “geographical parties,”

adopted the nomination made by the Whig “Know-Nothings” of Ex-President

Fillmore, and asserted that in Kansas “civil war” was “raging,” and

that the Union was “in peril.” The contest was conducted by the

Republicans at the North very much on the lines on which the first

Whig victory of 1840 had been won—by the organisation, that is, of

“Pathfinder Clubs” and processions, with brass bands, bonfires, and all

the paraphernalia of “politics by picnic,” and a large popular vote was

cast for the Republican candidate. But Mr. Buchanan, nevertheless had a

majority of nearly 500,000 votes over Colonel Fremont at the polls in a

total vote of about three millions, and he was elected President by

174 votes in the Electoral College, eight votes being cast by Maryland

for Mr. Fillmore, and 114 votes being cast for Colonel Fremont, if the

five votes of Wisconsin were properly included in that number—a very

grave question as to that point being raised by the undisputed fact

that the electoral votes of Wisconsin, which, under an obviously wise

precept of the Constitution, ought to have been cast on the same day

with the electoral votes of all the other States of the Union (December

3, 1856), were not cast until the next day (December 4) because the

electors were prevented by a snowstorm from reaching the capital of the

State in season to comply with the behest of the organic law.

Events moved rapidly after the election of President Buchanan. In spite

of a great financial panic in 1857, the commerce of the United States,

under the salutary régime established by Democratic Secretaries of the

Treasury, advanced beyond all former precedent. The net imports of the

United States increased from 298,261,364 dollars in 1856, the year of

Mr. Buchanan’s election, to 335,233,232 dollars in 1860, the last year

of his administration, and the exports from 310,586,330 dollars in 1856

to 373,189,274 dollars in 1860. The sea going tonnage of the Union

ran up to that of Great Britain;[4] and never had the country been so

prosperous as during this period of Democratic ascendancy and relative

fiscal freedom.

But while the managers of the new sectional Republican party worked

night and day to develop and consolidate their voting power at the

North and West, and availed themselves skilfully of every exciting

incident in the history of the day to fan the passions of the people

into flame, a sharp conflict was raging within the Democratic ranks

between the Administration and the followers of Senator Douglas,

which the leaders of the disunion movement at the South carefully and

skilfully fomented, and which culminated in an open secession from the

Democratic National Convention at Charleston in April 1860.

The Convention was adjourned to meet at Baltimore in June. There

a second secession of Southern delegates occurred, followed by

the nomination for the Presidency of Senator Douglas. A few days

later the seceders, meeting in a Convention of their own, nominated

Vice-President Breckenridge of Kentucky. In the meantime on the 9th

of May a convention of “moderate men” of all shades of opinion had

assembled in Baltimore, and nominated two eminent members of the

disbanded Whig party, Mr. Bell of Tennessee and Mr. Edward Everett

of Massachusetts, for the Presidency and the Vice-Presidency; while

the now confident Republicans, gathered in Convention at Chicago on

the 16th of May, had selected not Ex-Governor Seward of New York, but

Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, as their candidate.

Of course, with such a prospect of success before them as the

Democratic disorganisation offered, the managers of this Convention

of the Republicans adroitly threw all questions but the “burning

questions” of the hour as far as possible into the background of

their operations. But while they declared themselves in favor of the

preservation of “the Federal Constitution, the rights of the States,

and the union of the States,” they did not forget to record their

desire for such an “adjustment” of the “duties on imports” as “should

encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole

country,” under which rather vague phraseology lay concealed the

purpose of organising a new tariff for protection—a purpose which was

carried into effect by the Republicans at Washington as soon as the

subsequent secession from Congress of the Southern members made it

practicable.

* * * * *

With the first election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, and

his inauguration in March, 1861, we come upon a sudden and complete

“solution of continuity” in the political history of the United States.

Of the total popular vote of the country, amounting to 4,680,193,

thrown on the 4th of November, 1860, Mr. Lincoln received but 1,866,452,

being thus left in a popular minority of no fewer than _two million,

two hundred and thirteen thousand, seven hundred and fifty-one votes_!

It is impossible in the face of these figures to doubt that if the

tremendous issue of peace and war between the two great sections of

the Union, which really lay hidden in the ballot-boxes of the Union on

that November day, had been never so dimly perceived by the American

people, the verdict of the nation would have made an end that day of

the new “Republican,” party. But neither Mr. Lincoln himself, nor

Mr. Seward, nor any considerable number of the Republican voters of

the North and the West believed, or could be made to believe, in the

reality of this issue. It came upon them all and upon the country at

last, after all the agitation and all the warnings of years, like “a

thief in the night,” and coming upon the country it suspended for four

long and dismal years the normal action of the constitution, and the

normal development therefore of public opinion through the channels of

constitutional politics.

It is juggling with phrases to say that from the 5th of March, 1861,

to the 15th of April, 1865, Mr. Lincoln was, in any true sense of

the words, a President of the United States with a political party

at his back. He was to all intents and purposes a war dictator of

the Northern and Western States, maintaining with all the resources

of those sections of the country the fabric of the American Union

against the armed and persistent efforts of thirteen sovereign States

banded together in a confederacy to make an end of its authority and

its existence so far as concerned its relations with them and with

their inhabitants. To this colossal task Mr. Lincoln brought, as I

think the most impartial critics of his administration in my own

party now admit, most rare and remarkable gifts of character and of

mind. It has been not uncommon among those who, since his death, have

constituted themselves the special eulogists of this extraordinary man,

to represent him as struggling from the first, not merely against the

enormous difficulties arrayed in his path by the energy, and wealth,

and determination of the seceding Confederacy, but against the ill-will

and infidelity to his trust of the Democratic President whom Mr.

Lincoln was elected by the North and the West to succeed. This is not

the place for any vindication in this point of President Buchanan.

He has had no lack of critics within the ranks of my own party. But

no man who was present during that fateful winter of 1860-61 in

Washington, and who was really conversant with men and things there,

will need to be told that but for President Buchanan’s fidelity to his

constitutional oath, and to the behest of the party which elected him

in 1856 to “uphold the Union,” the Civil War would probably have begun

in Washington itself before Mr. Lincoln set foot within the capital.

On the day of Mr. Lincoln’s inauguration, a day never to be forgotten

by any American who witnessed the scene, it was the presence by the

side of Mr. Lincoln of his great Northern Democratic rival, Senator

Douglas, which more than all the bayonets of the troops assembled

for the protection of Washington by General Scott, under orders from

President Buchanan, convinced the most intelligent of the Southern men

that the Union was not to be dissolved like snow in the sunbeams, and

gave all the weight of the Democratic masses of the North and West to

the new President’s deliberate declaration that the forts and property

of the United States would be “held and occupied” by all the power of

the unseceded States.

The one member of Mr. Lincoln’s Cabinet who from the beginning foresaw

the gravity of the impending contest, and who put the whole pressure

of his personal influence upon the new President almost to the extent

of compelling him into asserting his authority by force of arms, was

not the Whig who had organised the “Republican” party, Mr. Seward,

It was Mr. Montgomery Blair, a “Democrat” by training, the son of

the confidential adviser of President Jackson and the brother of a

Democratic general in the Union armies who was afterwards nominated

for the Vice-Presidency on the same ticket with Governor Seymour of

New York in 1868 by the Democratic party. Mr. Montgomery Blair himself

left Mr. Lincoln’s Cabinet in July 1864, escaped the war made by the

“Republican” party under Sumner and Stevens upon the friends of

President Lincoln, after the assassination of the President by a

melodramatic madman, and became a trusty ally of Governor Tilden of New

York, the Democratic candidate who was elected to the Presidency of the

United States in 1876 by a popular majority of nearly 300,000 votes in

a total poll of a little over 8,000,000, and by a majority of one vote

in the electoral colleges, only to be defrauded of his office by the

audacious tampering of a cabal of Republican office-holders with the

votes of three Southern States.

It is not my purpose, and it would swell this paper beyond all

reasonable limits, to sketch here, even in outline, the political

annals of the quarter of a century which stretches now between the

election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and the election of Governor

Cleveland in 1884. I may assume my readers to have a general knowledge

of the main features of this period of American history. No intelligent

man can be familiar even with the distorted and partial presentation

of those features which has hitherto passed current on both sides of

the Atlantic, without asking himself what the magic virtue can be which

has carried the great Democratic party of the United States steadily

onward through so many years of exclusion from executive power and such

storms of systematic obloquy, enabling it amid the passions of a fierce

sectional conflict to retain such a popular support throughout the

North and West as has persistently threatened the tenure of the Federal

authority by its all-powerful and never over-scrupulous opponents,

giving it again and again control of the popular branch of the Federal

Congress, and commanding for it, as soon as the restoration of the

Union became in truth an accomplished fact, an unquestioned majority of

the suffrages of the American people.

My object has been to indicate the true answer to this question by

setting forth the foundations on which the Democratic party of the

United States was planted by its great leaders in the very dawn of our

national history.

No man ever learned by practical experience of the responsibilities of

power to appreciate the solidity of these foundations more thoroughly

than President Lincoln. A “Whig” by his early political affiliations

and an active and successful politician in times of high party

excitement, President Lincoln was not a partisan by temperament,

and nothing is more certain than that he came during his practical

war-dictatorship to very sound conclusions as to the essentially

ephemeral character of the political organisation which had lifted

him into that trying and dangerous post. He had no respect at all for

professional “philanthropists,” and not much for loudly “philanthropic”

politicians. The abolitionist agitators of the North instinctively

disliked and distrusted him. The ablest of their number, Mr. Wendell

Phillips, sneered at him as being not “honest exactly, but Kentucky

honest.” It was no confidence in President Lincoln, but the political

necessity of the moment, which compelled the extreme Anti-Democratic

leaders of the Republican party to acquiesce in his renomination in

November 1864, with a Democratic ex-Senator from the South, Andrew

Johnson of Tennessee, as his associate on the Presidential ticket.

Of this fact President Lincoln himself was well aware. Nor was he

blind to the popular and political significance of that Presidential

election of 1864. In spite of all that could be done by an army of

Federal office-holders larger than the armed force which Mr. Seward

at the outset of the civil war had imagined would be adequate to

“suppress the rebellion;” in spite of the combined influence of the

“Republican” local governments in the Northern and Western States;

in spite of military force brought to bear openly upon the polls in

regions undisturbed by war; in spite of the overshadowing fact that

the issues of the great civil war were still being fought out in the

field, the Democratic party of the North and West confronted the

Republican President at the polls in November 1864 with a popular vote

of nearly two millions out of four millions cast in those sections of

the Republic! The exact figures show that General M’Clellan, whose

popularity with the Democratic party was based upon his fame as the

creator of the Union army of the Potomac and upon his expressed loyalty

to the principles of the Constitution as the Democratic party holds

them, received, in November 1864, 1,802,237 votes in the North and

West, or within a few thousands of the 1,866,452 votes which were cast

for Mr. Lincoln himself in November 1860!

President Lincoln had shrewd sense enough to see that as the

maintenance of the authority of the Union had only been made possible

to him by the unswerving determination of the Northern and Western

Democratic party that the authority of the Union should be maintained

under the Constitution, so the restoration of peace within the Union

could only be achieved by accepting the Democratic construction of

the position and the rights of all the States in the Union under the

Constitution, of the seceded as well as of the unseceded States; and he

had patriotism enough to resolve that peace should be restored within

the Union, no matter what became of the ephemeral “Republican” party

which had been called into existence and carried into power chiefly by

the force of the sectional passions which had found final expression in

the civil war. He had gone beyond the Constitution under the war power

in abolishing slavery, and he knew that in abolishing slavery he had

abolished the vital impulse to which the “Republican” party owed its

existence. He knew too that the extreme “Republican” partisans by whom

he was surrounded knew this as well as he, and he was thoroughly aware

that there were among them men like Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania,

who were prepared and determined if possible to keep the sectional

passions which slavery had evoked alive and burning after slavery

itself should have disappeared, and to organise for themselves a new

lease of power at the expense of the peace of the country and of the

happiness and prosperity of millions of their fellow-countrymen.

At the beginning of the war President Lincoln had met the challenge

thrown down to him by the Confederate War Department on the lines

indicated by a great Democratic jurist, the late Judge Black of

Pennsylvania, in his “Opinion upon the Powers of the President,”

prepared at the request of President Buchanan, in whose Cabinet Judge

Black had successively held the posts of Attorney-General and of

Secretary of State.

If one of the States (wrote Judge Black) should

declare her independence, your action cannot depend

upon the rightfulness of the cause upon which such

declaration is based. Whether the retirement of a

State from the Union be the exercise of a right

reserved in the Constitution, or a revolutionary

movement, it is certain that you have not in either

case the authority to recognise her independence or

to absolve her from her Federal obligations. Congress

or the other States in Convention assembled must take

such measures as may be necessary and proper. In

such an event I can see no course for you but to go

straight onward in the path which you have hitherto

trodden—that is, execute the laws to the extent

of the defensive means placed in your hands, and

act generally upon the assumption that the present

constitutional relations between the States and the

Federal Government continue to exist until a new

order of things shall be established either by law or

by force.

The seceding States attempted to establish “a new order of things

by force,” and maintained that attempt for four years with such

resolution, pertinacity, and courage as more than once brought them

within what an eminent English statesman would perhaps call such a

“measurable distance” of success as may well explain the conviction

expressed in England at one period of the struggle, that Jefferson

Davis had “established a nation.”

Upon the failure of the Confederate experiment, President Lincoln, in

spite of the bitter and threatening hostility to him of a number of

the most conspicuous leaders of the Republican party in and out of

Congress, wisely and consistently determined to adhere to the position

involved in Judge Black’s opinion that the constitutional relations

between the States and the Federal Government could not be and had

not been shaken by the contest. After the Confederate Government had

abandoned Richmond, he visited that capital as President of the United

States, and in words made pathetic and historical by the deplorable

and senseless crime which was so soon to shock the country and the

civilised world, proclaimed his intention to administer the Government

“with malice towards none, with charity for all.” In his last public

speech, delivered on the 11th of April, 1865, two days only before his

assassination, he spoke of the seceded States as already restored to

their places in the Union, and said of them in his quaint and homely

fashion that, “finding themselves safely at home, it would be

utterly immaterial whether they had been abroad.” Mr. Gideon Welles

of Connecticut, to whom the portfolio of the Navy had been given

by President Lincoln in his first Cabinet, as a representative of

the Democratic wing of the then newly-organized “Republican” party,

tells us that at a Cabinet meeting held on the last day of President

Lincoln’s life, April 13, 1865, the President urged all the members of

the Cabinet to exert their influence to get all the State Governments

of the lately seceded States of the South “going again before the

annual meeting of Congress in December.” This meant, of course, that

President Lincoln intended and expected the lately seceded States to

send to Washington their proper and constitutional quota of senators

and representatives freely elected under the local franchise in each of

those States. His purpose was to secure the ratification by the seceded

States of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing

slavery formally, and then to accept them as in all respects States

within the Union. In the Emancipation Proclamation of the 22nd of

September, 1862, which President Lincoln had issued avowedly as a war

measure, he had taken pains to declare that his object in prosecuting

the war as “Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy” of the United

States, was, had been, and would be, “practically to restore the

constitutional relation between the United States and each of the

States and the people thereof in which that relation was or might be

suspended.”

This was not at all the object of the unscrupulous and reckless leaders

who took command of the “Republican” party upon the death of President

Lincoln, and under whom Mr. Blaine first made a figure upon the field

of Federal politics.

A clear line will be drawn by the historian between the war

administration of the President who upheld the Union and the dismal

epoch of Southern reconstruction which followed—an epoch of

unconstitutional Congressional despotism, mitigated only from time

to time by the personal authority of General Grant. The story of the

relations of General Grant as President of the United States with the

party which found itself compelled to take advantage of his unbounded

popularity as the surest means of retaining its grasp upon authority at

Washington will one day constitute a most interesting and instructive

chapter in the history of government, but it lies outside the scope

of this paper. That General Grant would gladly have co-operated with

President Lincoln in carrying out his plan of re-establishing the

Union on Democratic and constitutional lines may be inferred not only

from the fact which he has stated, that the only vote he ever cast

before the civil war was for a Democratic President, but from the more

significant fact that he was so fully convinced of the readiness of

the Southern States to accept the results of the civil war in good

faith, that, immediately after the accession of President Johnson in

1865, he urged upon the President the importance of throwing a combined

army of Union and of Confederate soldiers into Mexico for the purpose

of expelling the French under Bazaine, and compelling Maximilian to

abandon the hopeless attempt to found an empire in the land of the

Montezumas which eventually cost that gallant but unfortunate prince

his life. President Johnson eagerly adopted General Grant’s suggestion,

but the Secretary of State Mr. Seward, opposed it, and Mr. Seward’s

objection was fatal. “It cost Maximilian his life,” General Grant

tells us, “and gave Napoleon the Third five more years of power in

France.” He might have added that it cost the people of the Southern

States ten years of the most odious and corrupting mal-administration

recorded in modern history—mal-administration which, but for the solid

political capacity and the traditional common sense and patriotism of

the Americans of the Southern States, must have reduced the fairest

portion of the North American continent to a social and industrial

chaos without precedent in the annals of modern civilisation.

The evil influences of that dark epoch extended themselves in all

directions North and South, cropping out in organised official

peculations, in shameless political dishonesty, in reckless

speculation, in monstrous lobbying, and in incredible excesses of

public extravagance, based upon such a system of inordinate and

unconstitutional taxation as no American in his senses could have been

brought, before the outbreak of the civil war, to believe would ever

for a moment be tolerated by the American people.

* * * * *

It was to make an end of all this that the people of the United States

in 1876 elected one Democratic Governor of New York to the Presidency.

Defeated then of their will by the Republican agents of reconstruction,

the people of the United States had now at last in 1884 compelled

their voice to be heard and to be respected. With the inauguration

of Governor Cleveland in March 1885, the Federal Government of the

United States will be once more organised upon the enduring Democratic

foundations of respect for Home Rule at the South and at the North, in

the East and in the West, and of a strict limitation of the functions

of the Federal Government to the powers granted and prescribed to it by

the Constitution.

If I have done anything like justice in this necessarily hasty sketch

to the origin and development of the Democratic party of the United

States, my readers will not need to be told that its advent to power at

this time opens a new and most important chapter in the annals of the

American Republic. It involves much, very much more than the transfer

of executive power from one to another set of administrative officers.

It closes definitely an era of such political disease and corruption in

the United States as I have preferred rather to indicate than to dwell

upon here. Work of that sort, in my judgment, may as well be confined

to the domestic laundry. Quite enough of it has been done for the

edification of mankind at large by certain of my countrymen who have

hitherto found it more convenient to bewail the political profligacy of

those to whom “respectable Republicans” chose to surrender the control

of the Republican party after the murder of President Lincoln “cried

havoc and let slip the dogs of faction” than to co-operate resolutely

with the great Democratic party in making the Union once more solid,

and settling it upon its only possible foundations—Home Rule and a

strict construction of the Constitution.

It is easy to draw dramatic pictures of the demoralisation of American

politics; but there is more significance surely for thoughtful men

in the returns, which show that the candidacy of Mr. Blaine and Mr.

Logan has cut down the plurality of the Republican party in “moral”

Massachusetts from more than fifty thousand to ten thousand votes; in

Illinois, from over forty thousand to fifteen thousand; in Michigan,

from more than fifty thousand to barely two thousand; in Ohio,

from more than thirty thousand to eleven thousand. It has made the

Democratic Governor of New York President by an electoral majority of

37 votes and a popular plurality of about 400,000 votes. Less is to be

learned of the deep and lasting currents of popular thought and feeling

in the United States from an elaborate study of the absurd abominations

of Republican “Reconstruction” at the South than from the handwriting

of fire on the polling-places of the Empire State which illuminated the

Belshazzar’s Feast of Mr. Blaine’s “millionaires” on the eve of the

Presidential Election of 1884!

* * * * *

In a certain sense, President Cleveland will occupy a position

not unlike that of President Lincoln at the outset of his first

Presidency. But the task of the Democratic chief magistrate who goes

to Washington with a great historical party at his back, to restore

the well-understood metes and bounds of the Federal authority over

thirty-eight free and independent States will be a less troublesome

and in its immediate results ought to be an infinitely more benign

and grateful task, than that of the reluctant war dictator who found

himself, against all his expectations, driven by angry sections, with

a mixed and undisciplined mob of placemen, of monopolists, and of

philanthropists behind him, into cutting with the sword the Gordian

knot of slavery, at the risk of severing with it forever the golden

bands of the Union, and those “mystic chords of memory” of which he

spoke with such a wistful pathos in his inaugural address. Some points

of resemblance may be found, too, between the personal histories of

Lincoln and of Cleveland. Like Mr. Lincoln, Governor Cleveland comes

of an old American stock. His family name smacks of Yorkshire, and his

direct ancestors established themselves in Massachusetts nearly two

hundred years ago. One of the family, a Cambridge man, and a clergyman

of the Anglican Church, died at Philadelphia under the roof of his

friend Benjamin Franklin twenty years before the American Revolution.

Another, who sat in the Legislature of Connecticut, and who was a

minister of the Independents, is remembered as an early advocate in

that “land of steady habits” of the abolition of African slavery, and

this at a time when the worthy citizens of Massachusetts thought it

expedient to keep the Bay State clear of negro blood by ordaining in

their organic law that any African “not a subject of our faithful ally

the Emperor of Morocco” who ventured twice across the Massachusetts

border should be on each occasion whipped, imprisoned and sent away,

and that if this did not restrain his ardor, he should upon his third

advent be so dealt with as to put an effectual stop to his travels.

Richard Cleveland, a grandson of the Connecticut abolitionist, married

the daughter of an Irish bookseller in Philadelphia, Miss Neale,

and was the father of the new President of the United States. He

was settled as a Presbyterian minister in the New Jersey village of

Caldwell, and there on the 18th of March, 1838, Grover Cleveland was

born. His father left New Jersey when he was but a child, and went in

the service of the religious body to which he belonged to live in New

York. The circumstances of the family were much better, I need not say,

than those amid which the youth of Lincoln, the son of an emigrant

Virginian, was passed in the wilds of Kentucky and Southern Illinois.

But Grover Cleveland, like Lincoln, was early thrown upon his own

resources. When he was a lad of sixteen his father died, and he was

left to conquer for himself the education he was determined to have,

and to make his own way in the world with such small help as a brother

and an uncle could afford him, both of them battling with life, and

both of them counting, not in vain, upon the young student’s aid in the

maintenance of his widowed mother and her young family.

His twenty-first year found the future President admitted to the Bar

in Buffalo, the chief city of Western New York. He distinguished

himself from the outset of his professional career by his indomitable

industry and his devotion to duty. These qualities soon secured for

him the honorable but laborious post of Assistant District Attorney.

He was not blinded by the glamor and glitter of the “great Civil War”

to the rascalities of Reconstruction, but adopted the Democratic

faith in politics, though living in a strongly Republican city. In

1870 he was elected Sheriff of Buffalo, and twelve years afterwards,

having returned meanwhile to a successful practice at the Bar, the

best citizens of Buffalo of all parties rallied to his support as the

Democratic candidate for the Mayoralty, in a contest which curiously

prefigured, on a smaller arena, the Presidential campaign of 1884.

The taxpayers of Buffalo had been systematically plundered by a

Republican “municipal ring,” just as the taxpayers of New York many

years ago were plundered by the Democratic municipal ring of Tweed

and Sweeney, of which so much and such unscrupulous use has been made

by Republican writers and speakers to vilify the Democratic party.

It has not usually occurred to these ingenious party trumpeters to

insist upon the fact that the “Tweed ring” was broken and that its

members were brought to chastisement mainly through the persistent

efforts of two distinguished Democrats.

One of these was the late Charles O’Conor, in his time the acknowledged

leader of the American Bar, and a Democratic candidate for the

Presidency in opposition to the headlong and absurd nomination of

Horace Greeley, a life-long Whig Protectionist, into which a Democratic

Convention allowed itself to be cajoled, despite the manly protest of

such true Democratic leaders as Senator Bayard at Baltimore in 1872.

The other was Mr. Samuel J. Tilden, whose services against the Tweed

ring led first to his election by the Democratic party as Governor of

New York in 1874, and then to his election as President of the United

States in 1876, the year of the great electoral fraud.

The task which these distinguished Democrats assumed in New York Mr.

Cleveland took up in Buffalo, and carried through with such impartial

energy and courage that before the expiration of the first year of his

term of office as Mayor, he was invited by the Democrats of New York to

enter upon the larger stewardship of the State executive. He had been

chosen mayor of Buffalo in 1881, by a majority of 3,500 votes. He was

chosen Governor of New York in 1882 by a majority of nearly 200,000 in

a total poll of 893,000 votes. His opponent was Mr. Folger, a leading

Republican, who had sat with distinction on the bench of the highest

State Tribunal in New York, and who died the other day as Secretary

of the Treasury in the Cabinet of President Arthur; and it is an open

secret that the tremendous overthrow of the Republican candidate was

partially due to the machinations of the friends of Mr. Blaine who had

been dropped for cause from the Cabinet of President Arthur with some

emphasis in December of the preceding year. It was the calculation

of Mr. Blaine that the defeat of the President’s candidate in the

President’s own State of New York in 1882 would materially damage

Mr. Arthur’s chances and strengthen his own of securing a Republican

Presidential nomination at Chicago in 1884. It was a good calculation,

but whether the retrospect of the gubernatorial campaign of 1882 in New

York is as gratifying now to Mr. Blaine as it was two years ago may

perhaps be doubted.

As Governor of New York, Mr. Cleveland has shown himself what he was

as Mayor of Buffalo—rigidly honest, indefatigable, simple in his

personal tastes and habits, disdainful of the silly state, and the

petty parade of official importance into which too many public servants

of the United States have suffered themselves to be seduced during the

reign of King Mammon at Washington. It has been his custom to walk

every morning from the Executive Mansion to the Governor’s Rooms in the

Capitol at Albany, and to spend the day there, incessantly occupied,

but always visible to those who have had any real occasion to see

him. It will be a wholesome thing to see the Presidential office once

more administered in this unostentatious fashion. Mr. Cleveland may

be called a representative of the Young Democracy, since he will go

into the White House a bachelor, like the last Democratic President,

Mr. Buchanan, but a young bachelor, the youngest President indeed yet

elected. In his fidelity to the traditions of Jefferson, who rode up

to the Capitol on horseback to be inaugurated, “hitched his horse to

a post,” took the oath and went about his business, Mr. Cleveland

will be supported by the new Vice-President—ex-Governor Hendricks

of Indiana, who represents the stanch and experienced Democratic

leaders who have borne the brunt of the intense political warfare

of the last quarter of a century with unwavering courage and signal

ability. As a representative in Congress, as a senator of the United

States, as Governor of the great Western State of Indiana, and as the

Democratic candidate for the Vice-Presidency on the same ticket with

Governor Tilden in 1876, Mr. Hendricks has linked his name with the

best traditions, and drawn to himself the general confidence of his

party. On the 6th of February, 1869, what is called a “concurrent

resolution” (which may be passed without requiring the assent of the

President) was introduced into the Senate under the “Reconstruction”

legislation of 1868, directing the President of the Senate to deal in

a particular manner with the vote of Georgia as “a State lately in

rebellion” and to allow that electoral vote to be alluded to only if

the counting or omitting to count it would not effect the decision of

the election in favor of either candidate. The candidates were General

Grant and Governor Seymour of New York. Mr. Hendricks, then a Senator

from Indiana, sustained with memorable force and conviction the right

of Georgia to her proper and unqualified voice in the election. One

Republican Senator alone voted against the “concurrent resolution,”

and that Senator, Mr. Trumbull of Illinois, is now a recognised leader

of the Democratic party in the State which gave Abraham Lincoln to the

Presidency. At the second election of Grant—Horace Greeley having

died immediately after the choice of the electors—most of the votes

given against General Grant were given to Mr. Hendricks; and in the

Democratic Convention of 1876 Mr. Hendricks who was the second choice

of a majority of the Convention after Governor Tilden, was eventually

nominated, almost against his will, for the Vice-Presidency. He is

a man of fine presence and dignified manners, who will preside with

ability and tact over that Upper House of the national Legislature

which stands as the fortress of Home Rule and State Rights, founded

upon the ideal constituency of State sovereignty, and set more safely

beyond the reach of the gusts of popular passion than the hereditary

principle in Europe.

The first duty of the President Elect will be the selection of his

Cabinet officers. Under the American system these officers do not sit

in Congress, and, with the exception of the Secretary of the Treasury,

they are simply agents of the Executive. But it is customary to select

them from the most prominent and influential men of the party, and

with reference to the party strength in different sections of the

country. To recite the names of the men, any one of whom would be

accepted by public opinion in the United States as a fitting Cabinet

Minister of the new President, would really be almost to call the

roll of the Democratic Senators, now thirty-six in number out of a

Senate of Seventy-six members, and of the Democratic Chairmen of

Committees in the House, which as newly elected will be Democratic by

a majority of between thirty and forty votes. The names of Mr. Bayard

of Delaware, the leading candidate after Governor Cleveland at Chicago;

Mr. Thurman of Ohio, long the leading Democratic, with Senator Edmunds

as the Republican, “law lord” of the Senate, and the author of an Act

enforcing upon the great Pacific railway corporations their obligations

to the Government, which it has been left for a Democratic Executive to

carry into effect; General McClellan; Mr. Pendleton of Ohio, to whom

the country chiefly owes whatever measure of reasonable Civil Service

reform it enjoys; Mr. McDonald of Indiana, Mr. Lamar of Mississippi,

Mr. Hewitt and Mr. Kernan of New York, Mr. Garland of Arkansas, Mr.

Beck of Kentucky, Mr. Palmer of Illinois, have been already discussed

in the open councils of the party, and intelligent Americans of all

opinions will admit that a Cabinet framed of such materials would

deserve and command universal confidence. There are many other active

and experienced party men whom it might be troublesome to replace in

one or the other House of Congress, but there need be no fear that the

new President will be at a loss to find able counsellors to aid him in

discharging his great trust.

The policy of the new Administration is involved and indicated in the

traditions of the party. In our foreign relations the United States

under a Democratic President will ask nothing of Europe except a

cordial maintenance of treaties, an extension of commercial relations

under equitable conditions, a full recognition of the accepted rules of

international law, a sedulous exemption everywhere of the persons and

property of American citizens from unnecessary annoyance by arbitrary

power. The State Department under President Cleveland may be expected

to be administered, not in the swash-bucklering and speculative fashion

which the Republican supporters of Mr. Blaine extolled during the late

canvass as brilliant and enterprising, but in the self-respecting,

self-contained, and dignified spirit which controlled our foreign

relations under ex-Governor Marcy of New York thirty years ago, and

which so honorably distinguished the administration of the same

department under ex-Governor Fish of New York from that of sundry other

high officers of State in the time of President Grant.

Upon the Treasury Department will fall the responsibility of dealing

wisely and firmly with the most important domestic issue inherent in

the resumption of executive power by the party of the Constitution.

This can hardly be more authoritatively stated than it was a fortnight

ago by the Vice-President Elect, Mr. Hendricks, in a speech delivered

by him to the people at Indianapolis after the election:—

The watchword of the party in this contest,

as in the contest of eight years ago, has been

reform—executive, administrative, and revenue

reform; an honest construction of the laws, and

an honest administration of them. The revenue

now collected exceeds the wants of an economical

administration by $85,000,000. Because of this the

Democrats say: “Let there be revenue reform; let

that reform consist in part in the reduction of

taxation.” Is it not patent to every man that there

ought to be a reform here? The Democratic party

this year came before the country with a clear

and straightforward statement of the reform they

intended to accomplish. In the national platform they

declared that reform they would have. It was, first,

that the taxation shall not exceed the wants of the

Government economically administered; second, that

taxation shall be for public purposes alone, and not

for private gain or advantage; third, that in the

adjustment care shall be taken to neither hurt labor

nor harm capital; and fourth, that taxation shall

be heaviest on articles of luxury and lightest on

articles of necessity.

For now a quarter of a century the “Party of Protection and Monopoly”

has persistently transgressed the limits set to the Federal authority

by the Constitution, and used the earnings of labor and of capital,

in the form of excessive taxes, to fertilise and fatten private

enterprises.

This must stop. And when this stops, the manufacturers of England and

of Europe may make up their minds to meet the competing exports of the

United States in all those markets of the world from which American

exports have been excluded by American legislation ever since the

Whig-Republicans of 1861 laid their grasp upon our fiscal policy. It

cannot stop too soon. The official returns of the exports of the United

States show that during the fiscal year which ended on the 30th of June

1884, the exports of domestic merchandise from the United States to

all parts of the world fell off in value $79,258,780, as compared with

the exports for the year ending the 30th of June, 1883. Our exports of

machinery fell off nearly a million dollars; of general manufactures of

iron and steel more than a million and a quarter of dollars. There was

a good deal of gunpowder burned in the year 1883-4, but the value of

our exports of it fell off a quarter of a million of dollars. The value

of our exports of flax and hemp fell from $547,111 in 1882-3 to $67,725

in 1883-4; our exports of agricultural implements declined during the

last year more than a million of dollars in value; our exports of

cotton goods, colored and uncolored, more than twelve hundred thousand

dollars. Clearly Protection does not develop the manufactures of the

United States. It “protects” the manufacturers (which is quite a

different thing) against and at the expense of the consumers of the

United States, and gives point to the Duke of Somerset’s assertion that

“in no country has the power of capital been more invidiously exerted”

than in the United States. If our foreign manufacturing friends had any

money to spend on American politics, they would have done well to throw

it into one pool with the contributions of Mr. Blaine’s two hundred

millionaires!

Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist Secretary of the Treasury under

Washington, was the first apostle of Protection in America, but

in approaching the subject he “walked delicately,” like Agag. The

Americans of 1789 established absolute free trade between all the

sovereign States of the new Republic; nay more, during the negotiations

for peace at Versailles in 1783, the American Commissioners offered

Great Britain absolute free trade between the new States “and all

parts of the British dominions, saving only the rights of the British

chartered companies.” David Hartley, the philosophic writer on “Man,”

one of the British Commissioners, had wisdom enough to see the immense

importance of this offer, and urged the British Government to close

with it. Lord Shelburne, I believe, agreed with him. But the king

peremptorily refused to entertain a proposition which, had it been

accepted, must have changed the whole subsequent course of the history

of the two countries.

Down to 1809 no import duties were levied in the United States except

for purposes of revenue only. High rates of duty were levied in 1816

after the war of 1812, not for “protection,” but in order to meet the

exigencies of a most dangerous financial situation. In 1824, Henry

Clay, backed by New England and the middle States, carried through a

tariff to “protect American industry.” This was followed up by the

tariff of 1828, known as the “Bill of Abominations.” But the Democratic

sense of the country clearly saw that as the power to levy protective

taxes must be derived from the revenue power it is of necessity

incidental, and that as the incident cannot go beyond that to which it

is incidental, Congress cannot constitutionally levy duties avowedly

for Protection; and the Democratic party has never since departed, and

never can depart, from this doctrine in its party action. In 1833,

under President Jackson, “Protection” went down with Nullification. In

1846, under President Polk, the liberal Democratic tariff of Secretary

Walker was framed, under which our exports increased from $99,299,766

in 1845, to $196,689,718 in 1851, and our net imports from $101,907,734

to $194,526,639. In 1856, under Democratic rule, our net imports

were $298,261,364, in specie value, and our exports $310,586,330.

In that year the Democratic Convention declared “the time has come

for the people of the United States to declare themselves in favor

of progressive free trade throughout the world.” Under Republican

Protection, despite the development of the population, our net imports

fell from $572,080,919 in 1874, to $455,407,836 in 1876, and our

exports from $704,463,120 (mixed values, gold and inflated currency)

to $655,463,969; and in 1876 the Democratic Convention declared, “We

demand that all Custom House taxation shall be only for revenue.” Of

course trade can never be said to be free excepting where, as in the

internal commerce of the United States, no tax is levied on trade; and

therefore so long as any revenue is raised by duties it is absurd, as

Senator Sherman said in discussing the tariff question in 1867, to

talk of a “free trade tariff.” But it cannot be denied that under the

Democratic Revenue Tariff of 1846 a revenue of at least $140,000,000

would easily now be raised, and Senator Sherman, in the speech to

which I refer, admitted that “the wit of man could not possibly frame

a tariff” which should produce that sum “without amply protecting our

domestic industry.” If this happens as an incident to raising such a

revenue, American manufacturers will do well to be thankful for it. Had

the monopolists succeeded in getting Mr. Blaine into the White House

to thwart legislative reform of tariff taxation for four years more, a

worse thing would have overtaken them. For it is unquestionable that

a spirit of resistance to protective monopolies is moving through the

country, and especially through that nursery of empire, the great

North-West, which will not much longer be denied. The Democratic

Convention at Chicago wisely took note of this when it made Mr. Vilas

of Wisconsin, one of the most eloquent and popular of North-Western

Democrats, permanent chairman of the body; and Mr. Vilas has stated

the purposes and the convictions of the North-West with plainness of

speech:—

The tariff (he says) is a form of slavery not

less hateful because the whip is not exposed. No

free people can or will bear it. There is but one

course. The plan of protective robbery must be

utterly eradicated from every law for taxation. With

unflinching steadfastness, but moderately, without

destructive haste or violence, the firm demand of

freedom must be persistently pressed, until every

dollar levied in the name of Government goes to the

Treasury, and the vast millions now extorted for a

class are left in the pockets of the people who earn

the money. Resolute to defend the sacred rights of

property, we must be resolute to redress the flagrant

wrongs of property.

These are strong words. But they are only the echo from the land

of the Great Lakes in 1884 of the liberal principles embodied by

Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and sanctioned

by the Constitution of the United States in 1789. Those principles

are the life of the Democratic party. The Democratic party can only

be opposed by opposing those principles. It can only be crushed

by crushing them; and it is their inextinguishable vitality which

guarantees the permanence of our indissoluble Union of indestructible

States.—_Nineteenth Century._