"2 UNION PLACE. TUESDAY EVENG.
"_Oct. 9th, 1860_.
_"To the Editors of the 'Evening Post':_
"GENTLEMEN,--You politely offer to publish in your columns a speech
of mine which you seem to think was not adequately developed at the
Cooper Institute last evening, and you add that my friends among your
readers 'would be glad to know how' I 'have reasoned' myself into the
associations in which I stand on the Presidential question.
"If I had a speech already written I would at once avail myself of
the opportunity of submitting my views on public affairs to a mass of
readers, among which are many cultivated intellects and some friends
of my earlier years who, I respectfully say I think, are widely and
dangerously wrong in their present political action. I have but the
intervals of exhausting daily engagements in which to prepare a speech;
but if after this explanation your offer shall continue open, I will
endeavor within the next few days to write out in a condensed form
what I think ought to be said, not to my friends only, but to all our
citizens touching the present state of the country. If, indeed, it can
be justly said that I have helped to lead the _Evening Post_ into any
'heresies,' I acknowledge the sacred duty of showing it a 'decent way
out' of them.
"With much consideration, I remain,
"S. J. TILDEN."
"Though we invited Mr. Tilden to give us the speech which he proposed
to address to his spectators--they would not permit him to call them
his audience--at the Cooper Institute, we are quite willing to extend
the courtesy to anything he may choose to offer us in which he thinks
the public has an interest. The readers of the _Evening Post_ know much
better than the crowd he tried to address at the Cooper Institute that
Mr. Tilden never writes or speaks without having something to say worth
hearing, though they have not lately been unfortunate enough to agree
with him on Federal politics."
The foregoing letter, with the editorial comment which follows it,
appeared in the _Evening Post_ October 10, 1860.
The occasion which provoked it was the following account, which
appeared a day or two previous in the _Evening Post_, of a meeting
at the Cooper Union of malcontents, having little in common to unite
them but their hostility to the party which had nominated Abraham
Lincoln for President. They were mostly the unaccounted-for _débris_
of the old Whig party, who tried to disguise themselves by taking the
name of "Merchants of New York." Mr. Tilden was invited to speak, but
this motley audience did not care to listen long to so prominent a
political partisan of Jackson and Van Buren, who had also been the most
formidable critic of all Whig measures during all their successive
administrations:
"THE TREMENDOUS DEMONSTRATION
"The 'Dry-Goods party,' as by general consent the fusionists have come
to be designated, held what they called a 'Union meeting' last night at
the Cooper Institute. They did not meet at Tammany Hall, for obvious
reasons, though it must have made some of the gentlemen who contributed
towards the expense of the entertainment feel a little queer when they
found themselves associating politically with a class of men who could
not be persuaded to put a foot inside of the old Wigwam. It has been
observed that political parties, as they decline in strength, lengthen
the list of officers supposed to officiate at their public gatherings,
just as the shadows of mountains lengthen as the sun goes down. The
Dry-Goods party did not attempt to be an exception; on the contrary,
they seem to have made all of their party vice-presidents that they
did not make president and secretaries. In looking over the list of
gentlemen who figure on this occasion, we could not but be struck with
what Clay called the 'mutability of all human opinion.' It seemed as if
the milky portion of the old barn-burning party of '48 which had soured
from the effects of Republican thunder, had been specially served up
for the public entertainment. There was Dix, who ran for Governor
with Van Buren in 1848 against Cass, nominated for chairman by Wilson
G. Hunt, largely in the dry-goods line, who supported Van Buren and
free soil as zealously and liberally as he now supports Breckinridge,
Douglas, Bell, Sam & Co.
"Our old friend Tilden, who stood at the wheel during all those
troublous times; who was one of the counsel for the Barnburners in the
Baltimore convention of 1848, and who helped to lead the _Evening Post_
into all its free-soil heresies without ever showing it any decent way
out of them, offered the resolutions and made a short speech. It would
have been longer, but the audience wished to hear Wood. Either Wood or
a song they must have, and so Mr. Tilden retired with his speech just
as good as new, and, as it appeared, too good for his audience, that
they might hear a song from a Mr. Cosgrove, Wood being returned by the
officer 'not found.' The preference for Wood is explained, perhaps,
by the fact that the first vice-president, W. B. Astor, was one of
the ten or dozen gentlemen who certified to Mayor Wood's character
when a candidate a second time for the '_mayorality_'--as Mr. Wood is
in the habit of spelling the dignity he at present enjoys--and who
recommended him warmly to the suffrages of the people. All the rest of
the gentlemen who signed that 'character,' Moses Taylor, M. Aspinwall,
the Browns, etc., figure also among the vice-presidents, and it is
not strange, therefore, that a meeting thus officered should prefer a
speech from Fernando Wood to a speech from Samuel J. Tilden.
"Then there was Henry Grinnell, who paid liberally towards raising
the standard of rebellion at the park meeting, held shortly after
the nomination of Cass, in 1848, and whose name was freely used by
the Barnburners until about the time that the Union-saving steamship
companies began to be incorporated and subsidized by Congress. Since
then he has had little or no interest in anything North, this side of
the Arctic circle.
"John Cochrane, Dan Norris, Henry Eveson, William F. Havemeyer,
Stephen Cambreleng, Charles A. Secor, Myndert Van Schaick, whom, to
his great disappointment, the Barnburners failed to elect Mayor of the
city before the days of fusion, T. B. Tappen, John Van Buren, A. B.
Conger, Addison Gardiner, etc., etc., make up the list of distinguished
Barnburners of the milky sort who have 'turned,' and now form the
cheesy pillars and architrave of the Dry-Goods party.
"The speakers for the evening were James W. Gerard and Charles O'Conor,
two of our ablest lawyers, skilled to make the worse appear the better
reason, and, from long professional training, about as much at home on
one side of a question as another. As neither of these gentlemen were
in good standing with the old Democratic party, the first being an old
Whig and the other a fractious and crockery-breaking independent, they
were listened to with patience by an assembly conspicuously impatient
of anything savoring of old-fashioned Democracy.
"What effect the bringing together such a crowd of officers for
such a thin display of speakers will have upon the dry-goods market
will doubtless appear in the column where such reports are usually
chronicled; what effect it will have on the Pennsylvania election will
appear by the returns in to-morrow's _Evening Post_; what effect it
will have upon the vote of this State is of no sort of consequence, for
we were sure of a large majority before it was held, and of course we
may reasonably expect a larger majority now.
"We are sorry about Mr. Tilden's speech. We have no doubt it was a
good one, and as we are the friends of free speech we will publish it
cheerfully in the _Evening Post_ if he will give us the opportunity. It
will reach a great many more of his friends through our columns than
stood within the reach of his voice, and they will all be glad to know
by what process so clever a man has reasoned himself into such bad
company."