Mr. Tilden accepted the result with equanimity. “I was at his house,”
says John Bigelow, “when his exclusion was announced to him, and also
on the fourth of March when Mr. Hayes was inaugurated, and it was
impossible to remark any change in his manner, except perhaps that he
was less absorbed than usual and more interested in current affairs.”
His was an intensely serious mind; and he had come to regard the
Presidency as rather a burden to be borne--an opportunity for public
usefulness--involving a life of constant toil and care, than as an
occasion for personal exploitation and rejoicing.
However much of captivation the idea of the Presidency may have had for
him when he was first named for the office, I cannot say, for he was as
unexultant in the moment of victory as he was unsubdued in the hour of
defeat; but it is certainly true that he gave no sign of disappointment
to any of his friends. He lived nearly ten years longer, at Greystone,
in a noble homestead he had purchased for himself overlooking the
Hudson River, the same ideal life of the scholar and gentleman that he
had passed in Gramercy Park.
Looking back over these untoward and sometimes mystifying events,
I have often asked myself: Was it possible, with the elements what
they were, and he himself what he was, to seat Mr. Tilden in the
office to which he had been elected? The missing ingredient in a
character intellectually and morally great, and a personality far from
unimpressive, was the touch of the dramatic discoverable in most of the
leaders of men: even in such leaders as William of Orange and Louis the
XI, as Cromwell and Washington.
There was nothing spectacular about Mr. Tilden. Not wanting the
sense of humor, he seldom indulged it. In spite of his positiveness
of opinion and amplitude of knowledge, he was always courteous and
deferential in debate. He had none of the audacious daring, let us say,
of Mr. Blaine, the energetic self-assertion of Mr. Roosevelt. Either,
in his place, would have carried all before him.
It would be hard to find a character farther from that of a subtle
schemer--sitting behind his screen and pulling his wires--which
his political and party enemies discovered him to be as soon as he
began to get in the way of the Machine and obstruct the march of the
self-elect. His confidences were not effusive nor their subjects
numerous. His deliberation was unfailing, and sometimes it carried the
idea of indecision, not to say actual love of procrastination. But in
my experience with him I found that he usually ended where he began,
and it was nowise difficult for those whom he trusted to divine the
bias of his mind where he thought it best to reserve its conclusions.
I do not think that in any great affair he ever hesitated longer than
the gravity of the case required of a prudent man, or that he had a
preference for delays, or that he clung over-tenaciously to both horns
of the dilemma, as his professional training and instinct might lead
him to do, and did certainly expose him to the accusation of doing.
He was a philosopher and took the world as he found it. He rarely
complained and never inveighed. He had a discriminating way of
balancing men’s good and bad qualities and of giving each the benefit
of a generous accounting, and a just way of expecting no more of a man
than it was in him to yield. As he got into deeper water his stature
rose to its level, and, from his exclusion from the Presidency in 1877
to his renunciation of public affairs in 1884 and his death in 1886,
his walks and ways might have been a study for all who would learn
life’s truest lessons and know the real sources of honor, happiness,
and fame.
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