At an early period of his life Samuel J. Tilden seems to have had a
sense of its importance not ordinarily felt by youth of his age. This
may be accounted for in part by the circumstance that while barely out
of his teens, both by pen and speech, he had secured the respectful
attention of many of the leading statesmen of his generation. At
school he preserved all his composition exercises, and from that time
to the close of his life it may well be doubted if he ever wrote a
note or document of any kind of which he did not preserve the draft
or a copy. As the events with which he had to deal came to assume, as
they naturally did, increasing importance with his years, one or more
corrected drafts were made of important papers, most, if not all, of
which were carefully preserved.
As what may fitly enough be termed Mr. Tilden's public life covered
more than half a century, during most of which time he was one of the
recognized leaders of one of the great parties of the country, the
public will learn without surprise that the accumulations of social,
political, and documentary correspondence which fell into the hands of
his executors, to be measured by the ton, embraced among its topics
almost every important political question by which this nation has
been agitated since the accession of General Andrew Jackson to the
Presidency in 1829.
A collection of _Tilden's Public Writings and Speeches_ was published
in 1885, only a year before his death, but very little of his private
correspondence appeared in that publication.
The duty imposed upon his executors of looking through such a vast
collection of papers and selecting such as would be profitable for
publication has been a long and a very tedious one. They indulge the
hope, however, that the volumes now submitted will be found to shed
upon the history of our country during the latter half of the last
century much light unlikely to be reflected with equal lustre from
any other quarter. It will also, they believe, help to transmit to
posterity a juster sense than as yet generally prevails of the majestic
proportions of one of the most gifted statesmen our country has
produced.
Tilden may be said to have fleshed his maiden sword in politics as a
champion of President Jackson in his war against the recharter of a
United States bank of discount and deposit. He next became somewhat
more personally conspicuous as a fervent champion of Mr. Van Buren's
substitute for the national bank, now known as the Assistant Treasury.
In 1848 he led the revolt of the Democratic party in New York State
against the creation of five slave States, with their ten slave-holding
Senators, out of the Territory of Texas. Among the immediate results of
this revolt were the defeat of General Cass, the Democratic candidate
for President, and the development of a Free-soil party, which later
took the name of the Republican, nominated and elected Abraham Lincoln
to the Presidency--synchronously with which, and for the first time in
the nation's history, the decennial census of 1860 disclosed the fact
that the political supremacy of the nation had been transferred to the
non-slave-holding States.
Though averse to resisting the secession of the slave States by
flagrant war, Tilden did his best and much during the war to prevent an
irreconcilable alienation of the people of the two sections, while at
the same time building up for himself a reputation in his profession
scarcely second to that of any other in the country; and by it, before
he had reached the fiftieth year of his age, a fortune which made him
no longer dependent upon it for his livelihood.
The first public use he made of this independence was to retrieve the
fortunes of the Democratic party by delivering the city of New York
from a municipal combination which was threatening it with bankruptcy.
Of Tilden's many achievements as a public servant, it may well be
doubted if there was any for which he deserves so much honor as for his
part in the overthrow of this pillaging combination, familiarly known
as the Tweed Ring, nor any for which it seems so entirely impossible
to have then provided another equally competent leader who could and
would have given the time, incurred the expense, and assumed the risks
that Mr. Tilden did when, with no personal advantage in view, he boldly
consecrated several of what might have been the most lucrative years
of his professional life to this desperate battle with intrenched
municipal villany.
The people of the State were not slow to realize that a man with the
courage, power, and resources exhibited by Mr. Tilden in this memorable
conflict was precisely the kind of man needed by them for Governor; and
while yet wearied with the fatigue and covered with the dust of this
municipal struggle, he was constrained by his admirers to enter the
lists as a candidate against General Dix, the Republican candidate for
that office. The result was a change of about 100,000 votes from the
number by which Governor Dix had been elected two years before, and
Tilden's triumphant election to his place.
Without doffing his armor, and even before his investiture with his new
robes of office, he instituted an elaborate investigation of the canals
of the State; so that he had been but a few weeks in office before
he was engaged with numerically a far more formidable foe than the
one over which he had just triumphed, but one for which his official
position happily equipped him with far superior resources. His triumph
over the Canal Ring of the State was consequently so short, quick, and
decisive as to give him a national reputation, and to make him, long
before his term of office at Albany expired, the inevitable candidate
of his party to succeed General Grant for the Presidency. He was
unanimously nominated by the Democratic National Convention, held at
St. Louis in 1876, on the second ballot, and was elected by a popular
majority of over 250,000. He was then destined to receive a distinction
never shared by any President of the United States, of being an elect
of the people for that office, which, by the operation of a tribunal
unknown to the Constitution, was given to another.
For the remaining ten years of his life Tilden's health prevented his
being wholly a candidate or wholly not a candidate, so reluctant were
his numerous friends to give up all hope of such a restoration of
health as would enable him to resume once more the leadership of his
party. In this they were disappointed.
Thus for more than half a century Mr. Tilden was a shaper and a maker
of American history. What kind of history and by what means it was made
these volumes are expected to render more clear to the world, and his
fame perhaps more enduring.
Mr. Tilden's life, like that of Israel's second king, was, as we have
seen, a life of almost constant warfare, and of course he was always
more or less liable to be viewed by partisan eyes and judged with only
partial justice. None of us can judge himself quite correctly until he
can look back upon his conduct after a considerable lapse of years. So
we only see a public man as he is entitled to be seen, as Moses was
permitted to see his Lord: after He had passed. It is to be hoped that
sufficient time has elapsed since Tilden was taken from us to enable us
to see by the reflection of his life in this correspondence how lofty
was the plane of his entire public life, and how correctly he judged
his qualifications for a successful political career when he said that
his party standards were too high for the multitude. They were too
high, unquestionably, for what is commonly understood as success in
politics. It would have been easy for him--as these pages will show--to
have been President had his ethical standards been nearer the average
of those of the parties of his time.
Without presuming to institute any invidious comparisons, I have no
hesitation in expressing my conviction that neither in the writings,
speeches, or literary remains of any President of the United States
thus far will be found more suggestions profitable for teaching, for
reproof, for correction, and for the instruction of any American
who aspires to be a maker of a nation's laws or an administrator of
them, than will be found in Mr. Tilden's Writings, Speeches, and
Correspondence.
* * * * *
With the permission of Messrs. Houghton & Mifflin, I have prefixed
to these volumes an "Appreciation" of Mr. Tilden by the late James
Coolidge Carter, which originally appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ of
October, 1892. Mr. Carter's eminence at the American bar and forum, and
his relations, both personal and professional, with Mr. Tilden, give
value to his judgment of his deceased friend which, both for the honor
of himself and of Mr. Tilden, is entitled to all the prominence that
can be given to it in these volumes.