"_Hon. William H. Peck._
* * * * *
The universal conviction that Mr. Tilden was going to receive the
votes of the nation for President in 1876 compelled Mr. Hayes, or
his official dependents in Washington, to begin, in the fall of
that year, a campaign of defamation against the one who promised to
become General Grant's inevitable successor.
Mr. Tilden's public services and character, and the expressions
of popular favor with which the press was teeming, left the
administration no resource but calumny.
The prosperity which he had enjoyed in the prosecution of his
profession during the years succeeding the election of Mr. Lincoln
to the Presidency inspired the suspicion that he had become a man of
far greater wealth than he had yet realized; and through the control
which the administration could exert over the machinery of the
Federal courts, they hit upon the device of charging him with giving
false reports of his income to their officers.
Without any proof except their corrupt suspicions, they directed
the United States District Attorney at New York to institute
proceedings for the recovery of the income supposed to have been
illegally withheld. By such a proceeding they not only expected to
subject Mr. Tilden to enormous expense in reproducing records of his
professional income reaching back fifteen or twenty years, but to
hold him up, in the press, at least, until after the election or his
retirement from public life, as a defaulter to the government and as
a perjurer in his returns of his professional earnings.
This suit moved along very leisurely, but actively enough to keep
the subject and the victim of it before the public during the
election. Later on they realized that its partisan uses not only had
not been exhausted, but were more important than ever to them; for
the fraudulent means by which Mr. Tilden had been deprived of the
office to which he was elected made him apparently the inevitable
candidate to succeed Mr. Hayes.
In due time the weakness of their machinations could no longer be
concealed, and in the winter of 1878 they were obliged to confess
that they never had any testimony on which to go to trial in support
of their caluminous allegations; but to keep the charge alive in
the servile prints of the administration, they filed a "bill of
discovery" to extort from Tilden himself proof of their infamous
charges. It was in consequence of this aggravating persecution that
Mr. Tilden invited Mr. O'Conor to assist in his defence, which led
to the following correspondence.
The history of this vexatious and vicious prosecution will be found
in ample detail from its initiation, in 1876, to the government's
ignominious retreat, in 1882, in the _Biography of Tilden_, p. 225.