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 Cleveand through.
But in his case, as in many another, Providence "got there" in fulfilment
of a decree of Destiny.