He suffered under the petty charge that he had been influenced by a
scrap of stock whose value might be affected by Congressional action;
and those who knew him well were aware that his innocence of knowledge
to do what he was charged with doing, was absurd and itself proof that
he was sound. He was, by virtue of superior capacity, at the head of
the Ohio delegation to the Republican National Convention of 1880,
and was charged with the management of the candidacy of John Sherman,
Secretary of the Treasury, for the Presidency--the most competent man
in the country for the office.
It had been thought for a time that the combination of important men
for a third term of General Grant would succeed, as the glory of the
General was very great and those who wanted him for President again
were able and resolute. Blaine had hesitated for a moment whether to
take the field; but learning that Sherman would be in the race whether
there was or was not any other man a candidate in opposition to Grant,
he made the fight, and he and Sherman were the representative leaders
against the third term.
Their feeling was that they were not making war upon General Grant,
but upon those who sought to use his fame for their own purpose, and
they meant particularly Senator Conkling. General Grant, at Galena,
wrote a letter to Senator Cameron, and gave it to John Russell Young,
who handed it to Mr. Cameron, and it disappeared. This letter was a
frank and serious statement that he desired not to be considered
a candidate, and no doubt his preference was the nomination of Mr.
Conkling.
The interest of the great convention early centred in the two tall
men on the floor, the undoubted champions of the contending forces,
Conkling and Garfield; and the latter got the first decided advantage
in breaking the third term line when Conkling demanded that the
majority of the delegation of a State should cast the entire vote.
This was the famous unit rule, the defeat of which was the first event
of the convention. Garfield and Conkling were foremost in the fray
because they were the most masterful men of the vast assembly--nearly
twenty thousand people under the roof.
The advocates of the Old Commander for a third term were in heavy
force, and knew exactly what they wanted; and whenever the convention
met, as Senator Conkling usually walked in late, he had a tumultuous
reception. The opposition saw it was necessary to counteract this
personal demonstration, and managed to hold Garfield back so that he
should be later than Conkling, and then they gave him salutations of
unheard-of exuberance far resounding; and this was the beginning
of the end. Garfield, because he was in person, position, and
transcending talent a leader, was transformed into a colossus before
the eyes of the convention, and was an appeal to the imagination.
When the nominating addresses were made, none was heard by the whole
multitude but those by Conkling and Garfield. They stood on tables
of reporters, and their voices rang clear, through their splendid
speeches, carrying every word to the remotest corners; and the rivalry
between the two men became emphasized. Each had the sense to admire
the effort of the other, Conkling saying to the delegate by his side:
"It is bright in Garfield to speak from that place," and it was a
good deal for him to say. More and more Garfield loomed as the man who
stood against Grant.
There had been a good many persons meantime saying that neither Blaine
nor Sherman could beat Grant, and that Garfield was the man to do
it. All who are familiar with our political methods are aware of the
frantic desire of the average office-seeker, or practical politician,
no matter what he wants, to find out early all the possibilities of
the next Presidency; and it is esteemed a superb achievement to be
among the first to pick the man. The number of far-sighted citizens
on the subject of the eligibility of Garfield, as the convention
progressed, grew large. Governor Foster of Ohio did not conceal his
impression that the nomination of Garfield was certain. In his opinion
Sherman was not in the race, and perhaps his judgment to that effect
assisted the formation of the current that finally flooded the
convention. One man, a delegate from Pennsylvania, voted for Garfield
on every ballot, and kept him before the people. I had telegrams from
correspondents of the Cincinnati "Commercial," at Chicago, several
days before the nomination, evidently reflecting Governor Foster's
opinions, and frequently repeated, until the event justified them,
saying Garfield would be the nominee. I was that time slow to
understand the situation, and protested, against putting the
"nonsense" on the wires, in telegrams that after the event were held
to signify lack of sagacity about Garfield.
The first man who held decidedly Garfield would be nominated was Mr.
Starin of New York, who travelled with Senator Conkling in a special
car from the national capital to the convention, and said on the way
the nomination of Grant was not to be, and that Blaine and Sherman
could not carry off the prize, and that therefore Garfield was to
be the man. He made this point to the Hon. Thomas L. James, the
Postmaster-General in Garfield's cabinet, between Harrisburg and
Chicago. Mr. Blaine regarded beating Grant at Chicago as no loss to
the General and no reflection on him, but rather as the best thing for
him; and that the true policy and purpose was to beat Conkling, who
committed the error in strategy, however gallant the sentiment that
inspired him, of committing himself irretrievably to Grant--and though
the contested votes were all against him, he was unchangeable.
"No angle-worm nomination will take place to-day"--meaning nothing
feeble--was Mr. Conkling's oracular remark the morning of the day when
the Presidential destiny of the occasion was determined.
The drift toward Garfield was in so many ways announced before the
decisive hour that he could not be insensible of its existence, and he
was greatly disturbed. He said he would "rather be shot with musketry
than nominated" and have Sherman think he had been unfaithful to his
obligations as leader of the forces for him. That Senator Sherman was
offended is well known; but so far as he felt that Garfield had been
to blame, it was due to the gossip, widely disseminated, that Garfield
was personally concerned in working his own "boom." All that was well
threshed out long ago, and there is nothing tangible in it to-day.
The fact is, Garfield could not have worked a personal scheme. He must
have been defeated if he had tried it. A movement on his part of that
kind would have been fatal. On the other hand, if he had got up to
decline to be a candidate, it would have been easy to say that he
was making a nominating speech for himself. It was not particularly
difficult to call Garfield a "traitor," and the temptation to do
it was because he was so sensitive regarding that imputation in
politics--whatever hurts goes. He had no idea of concealing anything,
and told such queer stories as this:
The morning of his nomination--the fact that this was from Garfield
himself is certain--one of his relatives from Michigan saw him and
said: "Jim, you are going to be nominated to-day. I had a dream about
you last night, and thought I was in the hall and there was something
happening, I could not tell what, when suddenly on every side the
standards of the States [names of the States on staffs locating the
delegations] were pulled from their places, and men ran to where you
were sitting, and waved them over your head." Garfield stated that
this was certainly told him on the way to his breakfast; and after the
nomination the dreamer reappeared and said: "What did I tell you,
Jim? Why, the very thing I saw in my dream last night, I saw in the
convention to-day."
The inside truth about the nomination was freely given by Mr. Blaine,
who, as the convention progressed, was studying the proceedings with
the surprisingly clear vision he possessed for the estimation of
passing events. He soon made up his mind that his nomination could
not happen, and that Sherman also was impossible. They could not unite
forces without losses. Evidently there was a crisis at hand. There is
something in a convention that always tells the competent observer,
near or far, that decisive action is about to be taken. The evidence
appears of an intolerant impatience. Mr. Conkling was relying upon
the absolute solidity of his three hundred and five. Mr. Blaine was a
wiser man about the force of a tempest in a convention, and would have
preferred Sherman to Conkling. But Conkling was quite as bitter toward
Sherman as regarding Blaine, even more so in his invective; and this
grew out of the custom-house difficulty that ultimately so deeply
affected General Arthur's fortunes. There had to be a break
somewhere--to Grant from Sherman and Blaine, or from him to them, or
a rush to Conkling, or to Garfield, whose conspicuity had constantly
suggested it; and Blaine resolved that the chance to rout the
third-termers was to sweep the convention by going for Garfield, and
overwhelming him with the rest, thus winning a double victory over
Conkling.
It is a fact, and the one that makes certain the proposition that
Sherman could not have been nominated, that the majority of the Blaine
men from New York, turned loose by breaking the unit rule--there were
nineteen of them--preferred Grant to Sherman. If the break by Blaine
from himself had been attempted, for Sherman, Grant would have been
nominated if one ballot had been decisive. But Blaine was able to
transfer every vote cast for him to Garfield, with the exception
of that of a colored delegate from Virginia; and this movement was
managed so as to overthrow all who strove to stand against it. Grant
was in the lead for thirty-four ballots, but on the thirty-fourth
there were seventeen votes for Garfield. On the thirty-fifth ballot
Garfield had three hundred and ninety-nine votes, twenty-one majority
over all. Blaine by telegraph had outgeneralled Conkling, present and
commanding in person.
The course of the proceedings of the convention from the first was
a preparation for the final scenes, the putting of Garfield against
Conkling and working up a rivalry between them having a marked effect;
and this was not so much for Garfield as against Conkling. Garfield
grieved to think Sherman would misunderstand him, and was apprehensive
as to the feeling of the New York delegation. "How do your people feel
about this?" Garfield asked a New Yorker, when he had returned to his
hotel the nominee.
"Well, they feel badly and bitterly," was the reply.
"Yes," said Garfield, "I suppose they do. It is as Wellington
said, 'next to the sadness of defeat, the saddest moment is that of
victory.'" This remark was quite in Garfield's method and manner.
Mr. Sherman's failure was made inevitable in this, as in other
conventions, by the strange absence, always observable in New York, of
appreciation of the unparalleled services to the country of his public
labors culminating in the resumption of specie payments. That is the
real secret and chief fault of the convention.
Ex-Governor Dennison of Ohio appeared at the headquarters of the New
York delegation after the Garfield nomination, and Senator Conkling
greeted him cordially. There Dennison said, so that the whole
delegation heard, that he was the bearer of a message from the
delegation of Ohio, that they would give a solid vote for any man New
York would be pleased to name for Vice-President. "Even," said Senator
Conkling promptly, in his finest cynical way, "if that man should be
Chester A. Arthur?"
Dennison's answer was, after a moment, "Yes;" and Conkling put the
question of supporting Arthur to a vote, making a motion that he
was the choice of the delegation for the Vice-Presidency, and it was
carried immediately. This was understood to be pretty hard on the Ohio
people, including especially Sherman and Garfield. Of course, under
the lead of New York and Ohio, the convention ratified the motion
of Conkling, and the ticket was Garfield and Arthur. And so ample
preparation was made for the bitterness of the coming time--for the
troubled administration of Garfield and its tragic close.