to make nominations for office; the Senate is to advise and consent
to appointments, and the House of Representatives is to accuse
and prosecute faithless officers. The best interest of the public
service demands that these distinctions be respected; that Senators
and Representatives, who may be judges and accusers, should not
dictate appointments to office. The invariable rule in appointments
should have reference to the honesty, fidelity, and capacity of the
appointees, giving to the party in power those places where harmony
and vigor of administration require its policy to be represented,
but permitting all others to be filled by persons selected with sole
reference to the efficiency of the public service, and the right of
all citizens to share in the honor of rendering faithful service to
the country.
6. We rejoice in the quickened conscience of the people concerning
political affairs, and will hold all public officers to a rigid
responsibility, and engage that the prosecution and punishment of all
who betray official trusts shall be swift, thorough, and unsparing.
7. The public-school system of the several States is a bulwark of the
American Republic, and, with a view to its security and permanence,
we recommend an amendment to the Constitution of the United States
forbidding the application of any public funds or property for the
benefit of any schools or institutions under sectarian control.
8. The revenue necessary for current expenditures and the obligations
of the public debt must be largely derived from duties upon
importations, which, so far as possible, should be adjusted to promote
the interests of American labor and advance the prosperity of the
whole country.
9. We reaffirm our opposition to further grants of the public land to
corporations and monopolies, and demand that the national domain be
devoted to free homes for the people.
10. It is the imperative duty of the Government so to modify existing
treaties with European governments, that the same protection shall
be afforded to the adopted American citizen that is given to the
native-born; and that all necessary laws should be passed to protect
emigrants, in the absence of power in the States for that purpose.
11. It is the immediate duty of Congress fully to investigate the
effect of immigration and importation of Mongolians upon the moral and
material interests of the country.
12. The Republican party recognizes with its approval the substantial
advances recently made toward the establishment of equal rights
for women by the many important amendments effected by Republican
Legislatures in the laws which concern the personal and property
relations of wives, mothers, and widows, and by the appointment and
election of women to the superintendence of education, charities, and
other public trusts. The honest demands of this class of citizens for
additional rights, privileges, and immunities should be treated with
respectful consideration.
13. The Constitution confers upon Congress sovereign power over
the Territories of the United States for their government, and in
the exercise of this power it is the right and duty of Congress
to prohibit and extirpate, in the Territories, that relic of
barbarism—polygamy; and we demand such legislation as shall secure
this end and the supremacy of American institutions in all the
Territories.
14. The pledges which the nation has given to her soldiers and sailors
must be fulfilled, and a grateful people will always hold those who
imperilled their lives for the country’s preservation in the kindest
remembrance.
15. We sincerely deprecate all sectional feeling and tendencies. We
therefore note with deep solicitude that the Democratic party counts,
as its chief hope of success, upon the electoral vote of a united
South, secured through the efforts of those who were recently arrayed
against the nation; and we invoke the earnest attention of the country
to the grave truth that a success thus achieved would reopen sectional
strife and imperil national honor and human rights.
16. We charge the Democratic party with being the same in character
and spirit as when it sympathized with treason; with making its
control of the House of Representatives the triumph and opportunity
of the nation’s recent foes; with reasserting and applauding in the
national Capitol the sentiments of unrepentant rebellion; with sending
Union soldiers to the rear, and promoting Confederate soldiers to the
front; with deliberately proposing to repudiate the plighted faith
of the Government; with being equally false and imbecile upon the
overshadowing financial questions; with thwarting the ends of justice
by its partisan mismanagement and obstruction of investigation; with
proving itself, through the period of its ascendancy in the lower
house of Congress, utterly incompetent to administer the Government;
and we warn the country against trusting a party thus alike unworthy,
recreant, and incapable.
17. The national administration merits commendation for its honorable
work in the management of domestic and foreign affairs, and President
Grant deserves the continued hearty gratitude of the American people
for his patriotism and his eminent services, in war and in peace.
18. We present as our candidates for President and Vice-President of
the United States two distinguished statesmen, of eminent ability
and character, and conspicuously fitted for those high offices,
and we confidently appeal to the American people to intrust the
administration of their public affairs to Rutherford B. Hayes and
William A. Wheeler.
The friends of Blaine were grievously disappointed at the action of the
Cincinnati convention, but Blaine promptly came to the front in his
heroic way, and made a tireless battle for the success of the ticket.
The Democratic convention met at St. Louis on the 28th of June. Henry
Watterson, of Kentucky, was temporary chairman, and was succeeded
by General John A. McClernand, of Illinois, as permanent presiding
officer. This was the first convention to cross the Father of Waters,
and it was a thoroughly organized Tilden convention before it met.
Tilden was the ablest political manager in the Democratic party of
that day. He was tireless, methodical, and sagacious, and he made
his nomination over Hancock and Hendricks by early and complete
organization of his friends in all the debatable States. He had won
national reputation by his courage in bringing Tweed to justice, and
he was regarded by the country generally as well equipped for the high
duties of Chief Magistrate. The friends of Hendricks made a desperate
battle for him, but they were outclassed in leadership, and it was a
Tilden convention when the body convened, with very able men to hold it
in subjection.
The Tilden forces required little leadership at St. Louis, as his
nomination had been thoroughly accomplished before the convention
met. Tilden exhausted his wonderful powers of organization in getting
control of the delegations of doubtful States, and looked minutely to
the men who should be chosen as delegates, and when the convention met
there was no boisterous jostling between the opposing forces, as the
majority was complete in its organization and moved with directness to
the accomplishment of its purpose. William L. Scott, of Erie, Penn.,
who was twice elected to Congress in an overwhelmingly Republican
district, was the accepted leader of the Tilden people. He was
personally popular, self-poised, sagacious, and discreet, and all he
had to do was to keep his solid lines unbroken.
The minority was dumbfounded at the development of the Tilden strength,
but the Hendricks people, led by McDonald, of Indiana—afterward United
States Senator—and most zealously and aggressively aided by the
helpless Tammany minority in the New York delegation, fought heroically
at every step; but with Scott to manage and Harry Watterson to inspire
the Tilden people, they maintained their mastery from start to finish,
and Tilden was declared the nominee. When the nomination was announced
the convention presented a singular spectacle. The Tilden delegates
were at once upon their feet cheering lustily and waving their
handkerchiefs, and one after another of the minority delegations rose
and joined in the huzzas for the declared candidate, but the Indiana
delegates sat stubbornly in their seats, presenting the appearance of
a small cleared patch in a forest. The convention waited some minutes
for the Indiana men to rise, but they kept their seats. The next day
Hendricks was made the candidate for Vice-President in spite of the
protests of his delegation and his friends, and finally the convention
joined in united cheers for the ticket.
Much bitterness was developed during the struggle between the opposing
clans, and a duel between General Morgan, a fighting Democratic soldier
of Ohio, and Colonel Breckenridge, of Kentucky, was only averted, when
the convention adjourned, by Colonel Watterson hurrying Breckenridge
off to dinner, and compelling him to make concessions which properly
satisfied the Ohio warrior.
It required only two ballots to give Tilden the nomination, as follows:
═══════════════════════════╤════════╤════════
│ First. │Second.
───────────────────────────┼────────┼────────
Samuel J. Tilden, N. Y. │ 417 │ 535
Thomas A. Hendricks, Ind. │ 140 │ 60
Winfield S. Hancock, Penn. │ 75 │ 59
William Allen, Ohio │ 56 │ 54
Thomas F. Bayard, Del. │ 33 │ 11
Joel Parker, N. J. │ 18 │ 18
Allen G. Thurman, Ohio │ ―― │ 7
═══════════════════════════╧════════╧════════
The platform was prepared under Tilden’s own direction, and it was
unanimously adopted as follows:
We, the delegates of the Democratic party of the United States, in
national convention assembled, do hereby declare the administration
of the Federal Government to be in urgent need of immediate reform;
do hereby enjoin upon the nominees of this convention, and of the
Democratic party in each State, a zealous effort and co-operation to
this end; and do hereby appeal to our fellow-citizens of every former
political connection to undertake with us this first and most pressing
patriotic duty.
For the Democracy of the whole country, we do here reaffirm our
faith in the permanence of the Federal Union, our devotion to the
Constitution of the United States, with its amendments universally
accepted as a final settlement of the controversies that engendered
civil war, and do here record our steadfast confidence in the
perpetuity of Republican self-government.
In absolute acquiescence in the will of the majority—the vital
principle of republics; in the supremacy of the civil over the
military authority; in the total separation of Church and State, for
the sake alike of civil and religious freedom; in the equality of
all citizens before just laws of their own enactment; in the liberty
of individual conduct, unvexed by sumptuary laws; in the faithful
education of the rising generation, that they may preserve, enjoy,
and transmit these best conditions of human happiness and hope—we
behold the noblest products of a hundred years of changeful history;
but, while upholding the bond of our Union and great charter of these
our rights, it behooves a free people to practise also that eternal
vigilance which is the price of liberty.
Reform is necessary to rebuild and establish in the hearts of the
whole people the Union, eleven years ago happily rescued from the
danger of a secession of States, but now to be saved from a corrupt
centralism which, after inflicting upon ten States the rapacity of
carpet-bag tyrannies, has honeycombed the offices of the Federal
Government itself with incapacity, waste, and fraud; infected States
and municipalities with the contagion of misrule, and locked fast the
prosperity of an industrious people in the paralysis of hard times.
Reform is necessary to establish a sound currency, restore the public
credit, and maintain the national honor.
We denounce the failure, for all these eleven years of peace, to make
good the promise of the legal tender notes, which are a changing
standard of value in the hands of the people, and the non-payment of
which is a disregard of the plighted faith of the nation.
We denounce the improvidence which, in eleven years of peace, has
taken from the people in Federal taxes thirteen times the whole amount
of the legal tender notes, and squandered four times their sum in
useless expense without accumulating any reserve for their redemption.
We denounce the financial imbecility and immorality of that party
which, during eleven years of peace, has made no advance toward
resumption, no preparation for resumption, but instead has obstructed
resumption, by wasting our resources and exhausting all our surplus
income; and, while annually professing to intend a speedy return to
specie payments, has annually enacted fresh hindrances thereto. As
such hindrance, we denounce the resumption clause of the act of 1875,
and we here demand its repeal.
We demand a judicious system of preparation by public economy, by
official retrenchment, and by wise finance, which shall enable the
nation soon to assure the whole world of its perfect ability and its
perfect readiness to meet any of its promises at the call of the
creditor entitled to payment.
We believe such a system, well devised, and, above all, intrusted to
competent hands for its execution, creating at no time an artificial
scarcity of currency, and at no time alarming the public mind into a
withdrawal of that vaster machinery of credit by which ninety-five
per cent. of all business transactions are performed—a system open,
public, and inspiring general confidence—would, from the day of its
adoption, bring healing on its wings to all our harassed industries,
set in motion the wheels of commerce, manufactures, and the mechanic
arts, restore employment to labor, and renew in all its natural
resources the prosperity of the people.
Reform is necessary in the sum and modes of Federal taxation, to the
end that capital may be set free from distrust, and labor lightly
burdened.
We denounce the present tariff, levied upon nearly four thousand
articles, as a masterpiece of injustice, inequality, and false
pretence. It yields a dwindling, not a yearly rising revenue. It has
impoverished many industries to subsidize a few. It prohibits imports
that might purchase the products of American labor. It has degraded
American commerce from the first to an inferior rank on the high
seas. It has cut down the sales of American manufactures at home and
abroad and depleted the returns of American agriculture—an industry
followed by half our people. It costs the people five times more than
it produces to the treasury, obstructs the processes of production,
and wastes the fruits of labor. It promotes fraud, fosters smuggling,
enriches dishonest officials, and bankrupts honest merchants. We
demand that all custom-house taxation shall be only for revenue.
Reform is necessary in the scale of public expense—Federal, State, and
municipal. Our Federal taxation has swollen from sixty millions gold,
in 1860, to four hundred and fifty millions currency, in 1870; our
aggregate taxation from one hundred and fifty-four millions gold, in
1860, to seven hundred and thirty millions currency, in 1870; or in
one decade from less than five dollars per head to more than eighteen
dollars per head. Since the peace, the people have paid to their tax
gatherers more than thrice the sum of the national debt, and more
than twice that sum for the Federal Government alone. We demand a
rigorous frugality in every department, and from every officer of the
Government.
Reform is necessary to put a stop to the profligate waste of the
public lands and their diversion from actual settlers by the party in
power, which has squandered two hundred million acres upon railroads
alone, and out of more than thrice that aggregate has disposed of less
than a sixth directly to tillers of the soil.
Reform is necessary to correct the omissions of a Republican Congress,
and the errors of our treaties and diplomacy, which have stripped
our fellow-citizens of foreign birth and kindred race recrossing the
Atlantic, of the shield of American citizenship, and have exposed
our brethren of the Pacific coast to the incursions of a race not
sprung from the same great parent stock, and, in fact, now by law
denied citizenship through naturalization as being neither accustomed
to the traditions of a progressive civilization nor exercised in
liberty under equal laws. We denounce the policy which thus discards
the liberty-loving German and tolerates a revival of the Cooly trade
in Mongolian women imported for immoral purposes, and Mongolian men
held to perform servile labor-contracts, and demand such modification
of the treaty with the Chinese empire or such legislation within
constitutional limitations as shall prevent further importation or
immigration of the Mongolian race.
Reform is necessary, and can never be effected but by making it the
controlling issue of the elections, and lifting it above the two false
issues with which the office-holding class and the party in power seek
to smother it:
1. The false issue with which they would enkindle sectarian strife in
respect to the public schools, of which the establishment and support
belong exclusively to the several States, and which the Democratic
party has cherished from their foundation, and is resolved to maintain
without prejudice or preference for any class, sect, or creed, and
without largesses from the treasury to any.
2. The false issue by which they seek to light anew the dying embers
of sectional hate between kindred peoples once estranged, but now
reunited in one indivisible republic and a common destiny.
Reform is necessary in the civil service. Experience proves that
efficient, economical conduct of the governmental business is not
possible if its civil service be subject to change at every election;
be a prize fought for at the ballot-box; be a brief reward of party
zeal, instead of posts of honor assigned for proved competency,
and held for fidelity in the public employ; that the dispensing of
patronage should neither be a tax upon the time of all our public men,
nor the instrument of their ambition. Here, again, promises falsified
in the performance attest that the party in power can work out no
practical or salutary reform.
Reform is necessary even more in the higher grades of the public
service. President, Vice-President, judges, Senators, Representatives,
Cabinet officers—these and all others in authority are the people’s
servants. Their offices are not a private perquisite; they are a
public trust.
When the annals of this Republic show the disgrace and censure of
a Vice-President; a late Speaker of the House of Representatives
marketing his rulings as a presiding officer; three Senators profiting
secretly by their votes as law-makers; five chairmen of the leading
committees of the House of Representatives exposed in jobbery; a late
Secretary of the Treasury forcing balances in the public accounts; a
late Attorney-General misappropriating public funds; a Secretary of
the Navy enriched or enriching friends by percentages levied off the
profits of contractors with his department; an ambassador to England
censured in a dishonorable speculation; the President’s private
secretary barely escaping conviction upon trial for guilty complicity
in frauds upon the revenue; a Secretary of War impeached for high
crimes and misdemeanors,—the demonstration is complete that the first
step in reform must be the people’s choice of honest men from another
party, lest the disease of one political organization infect the body
politic, and lest, by making no change of men or parties, we get no
change of measures and no real reform.
All these abuses, wrongs, and crimes, the product of sixteen years’
ascendency of the Republican party, create a necessity for reform
confessed by Republicans themselves; but their reformers are voted
down in convention and displaced from the Cabinet. The party’s
mass of honest voters is powerless to resist the eighty thousand
office-holders, its leaders and guides.
Reform can only be had by a peaceful civic revolution. We demand a
change of system, a change of administration, a change of parties,
that we may have change of measures and of men.
_Resolved_, That this convention, representing the Democratic party
of the United States, do cordially endorse the action of the present
House of Representatives in reducing and curtailing the expenses
of the Federal Government, in cutting down salaries, extravagant
appropriations, and in abolishing useless offices and places not
required by the public necessities; and we shall trust to the firmness
of the Democratic members of the House that no committee of conference
and no misinterpretation of the rules shall be allowed to defeat these
wholesome measures of economy demanded by the country.
_Resolved_, That the soldiers and sailors of the Republic, and
the widows and orphans of those who have fallen in battle, have
a just claim upon the care, protection, and gratitude of their
fellow-citizens.
Business and trade were very much depressed in 1876, as the country
was then approaching the panic and industrial troubles of 1877, which
convulsed the country from Eastern to Western sea, and the Greenback
or Independent National party, as it was called, exhibited formidable
proportions in the contest. It held its national convention at
Indianapolis on the 18th of May, with Thomas J. Durant, of Washington,
D. C., as permanent president. Peter Cooper, the noted philanthropist
of New York, was unanimously nominated for President, and Newton
Booth, then a California Senator, was in like manner nominated for
Vice-President, but he declined, and General Samuel F. Cary, of Ohio,
was substituted. There were 19 States represented by 239 delegates. The
following platform was unanimously adopted:
The Independent party is called into existence by the necessities of
the people, whose industries are prostrated, whose labor is deprived
of its just reward, by a ruinous policy which the Republican and
Democratic parties refuse to change, and in view of the failure of
these parties to furnish relief to the depressed industries of the
country, thereby disappointing the just hopes and expectations of
the suffering people, we declare our principles, and invite all
independent and patriotic men to join our ranks in this movement for
financial reform and industrial emancipation.
1. We demand the immediate and unconditional repeal of the
Specie-Resumption act of January 14, 1875, and the rescue of our
industries from ruin and disaster resulting from its enforcement; and
we call upon all patriotic men to organize, in every Congressional
district of the country, with a view of electing Representatives to
Congress who will carry out the wishes of the people in this regard,
and stop the present suicidal and destructive policy of contraction.
2. We believe that a United States note, issued directly by the
Government, and convertible on demand into United States obligations,
bearing a rate of interest not exceeding one cent a day on each one
hundred dollars, and exchangeable for United States notes at par,
will afford the best circulating medium ever devised. Such United
States notes should be full legal tender for all purposes except
for the payment of such obligations as are, by existing contracts,
especially made payable in coin, and we hold that it is the duty of
the Government to provide such circulating medium, and insist, in the
language of Thomas Jefferson, that bank paper must be suppressed, and
the circulation restored to the nation, to whom it belongs.
3. It is the paramount duty of the Government, in all its legislation,
to keep in view the full development of all legitimate business,
agricultural, mining, manufacturing, and commercial.
4. We most earnestly protest against any further issue of gold bonds,
for sale in foreign markets, by which we would be made, for a long
period, hewers of wood and drawers of water for foreigners, especially
as the American people would gladly and promptly take, at par, all
bonds the Government may need to sell, provided they are made payable
at the option of the holder, and bearing interest at 3.65 per cent.
per annum, or even a lower rate.