Macaulay tells us that the dinner-table is a wondrous peacemaker,
miracle worker, social solvent; and many were the quarrels composed and
the plans perfected under the Chamberlin roof. It became a kind of
Congressional Exchange with a close White House connection. If those
old walls, which by the way are still standing, could speak, what tales
they might tell, what testimonies refute, what new lights throw into
the vacant corners and dark places of history!
Coming away from Chamberlin’s with Mr. Blaine for an after-dinner
stroll during the winter of 1883-4, referring to the approaching
National Republican Convention, he said: “I do not want the nomination.
In my opinion there is but one nominee the Republicans can elect this
year and that is General Sherman. I have written him to tell him so and
urge it upon him. In default of him the time of you people has come.”
He subsequently showed me this letter and General Sherman’s reply. My
recollection is that the General declared that he would not take the
presidency if it were offered him, earnestly invoking Mr. Elaine to
support his brother, John Sherman.
This would seem clear refutation that Mr. Blaine was party to his own
nomination that year. It assuredly reveals keen political instinct and
foresight. The capital prize in the national lottery was not for him.
I did not meet him until two years later, when he gave me a minute
account of what had happened immediately thereafter; the swing around
the circle; Belshazzar’s feast, as a fatal New York banquet was called;
the far-famed Burchard incident. “I did not hear the words, ‘Rum,
Romanism and Rebellion,’” he told me, “else, as you must know, I would
have fittingly disposed of them.”
I said: “Mr. Blaine, you may as well give it up. The doom of Webster,
Clay, and Douglas is upon you. If you are nominated again, with an
assured election, you will die before the day of election. If you
survive the day and are elected, you’ll die before the 4th of March.”
He smiled grimly and replied: “It really looks that way.”
My own opinion has always been that if the Republicans had nominated
Mr. Arthur in 1884 they would have elected him. The New York vote would
scarcely have been so close. In the count of the vote the Arthur end of
it would have had some advantage—certainly no disadvantage. Cleveland’s
nearly 200,000 majority had dwindled to the claim of a beggarly few
hundred, and it was charged that votes which belonged to Butler, who
ran as an independent labor candidate, were actually counted for
Cleveland.
When it was over an old Republican friend of mine said: “Now we are
even. History will attest that we stole it once and you stole it once.
Turn about may be fair play; but, all the same, neither of us likes
it.”
So Grover Cleveland, unheard of outside of Buffalo two years before,
was to be President of the United States. The night preceding his
nomination for the governorship of New York, General Slocum seemed in
the State convention sure of that nomination. Had he received it he
would have carried the State as Cleveland did, and Slocum, not
Cleveland, would have been the Chief Magistrate. It cost Providence a
supreme effort to pull Cleveland through. But in his case, as in many
another, Providence “got there” in fulfilment of a decree of Destiny.