is come full circle,' and the bones of the Democratic party that were broken upon the cross of slavery in 1848, now, after an interval of thirty-six years, are once more knit together, and the traditions and the doctrines inherited from the golden age of the Republic are about to resume, not merely their official, but their moral supremacy in the nation."
The four years, from 1869 to 1873, were mainly devoted by Mr. Tilden to the overthrow of what was known as the "Tweed ring," which had thoroughly debauched every branch of the New York city government, legislative, executive and judicial, and was threatening the state government also with its foul embrace.
"The total surrender of my professional business during that period," he has said in one of his published communications, "the nearly absolute withdrawal of attention from my private affairs, and from all enterprises in which I am interested, have cost me a loss of actual income, which, with expenditures and contributions the contest has required, would be a respectable endowment of a public, charity.
"I do not speak of these things," he adds, "to regret them. In my opinion, no instrumentality in human society is so potential in its influence on the well-being of mankind as the governmental machinery which administers justice and makes and executes laws. No benefaction of private benevolence could be so fruitful in benefits as the rescue of this machinery from the perversion which had made it a means of conspiracy, fraud and crime against the rights and the most sacred interests of a great community."
When Mr. Tilden thus wrote he had not experienced nor could he have foreseen the legal consummation of his labors in the arrest, imprisonment or flight of all the parties who, only a few months before, seemed to hold the wealth and power of the Empire state in the hollow of their hands, nor the condemnation of Tweed to the striped jacket and cell of a felon, nor the recovery of verdicts which promised to restore to the city treasury many millions of ill-gotten plunder. Nor could he have foreseen, among the most direct and immediate results of his labors for the purification of the New York city and state governments, his election as governor, in the fall of 1874. by a majority of more than fifty thousand over General Dix, the Republican candidate.
The talents and public virtues which, as a municipal reformer, won the confidence of the people of his native state and made him governor, on this new and wider theater won the confidence and admiration of the nation and made him its choice by a considerable popular majority for the presidency in 1876. It was not, however, in the order of Providence that he or the people were to enjoy the legitimate fruits of this latter victory.
When congress convened in the winter of 1876-77, and proceeded to discharge its constitutional duty of counting the electoral votes for president and vice president, it appeared that there were one hundred and eighty-four uncontested electoral votes for Samuel J. Tilden for president and for Thomas A. Hendricks for vice president; one hundred and sixty-five uncontested votes for Rutherford B. Hayes for president and William A. Wheeler for vice president, and twenty votes in dispute. One hundred and eighty-five votes were necessary for a choice; consequently, one additional vote to Tilden and Hendricks would have elected them, while twenty additional votes were required for the election of the rival candidates. The whole election, therefore, depended upon one electoral vote. This gave to the mode of counting the vote an importance which it had never possessed at any of the twenty-one previous elections in the history of our government.
The provisions of the constitution relating to the mode of counting the vote were sufficiently vague to furnish a pretext for some diversity of opinion upon the subject, wherein the temptation to find one was so great. A majority of the senate being Republicans and a majority of the house of representatives being Democrats, that the senate would not agree to count any one of these twenty votes for Tilden and Hendricks was assumed; and, to avoid a conflict of jurisdiction, which was thought by some to threaten the peace of the country, a special tribunal, to consist of members of congress and of the supreme court, fifteen in number, was created, upon which the duty of counting the electoral vote was devolved by an act of congress. One of the members of this tribunal was classified as an independent, seven as Republicans and seven as Democrats. The Republicans voted to count all the votes of the three contested states for Hayes, and the independent member voted with them, and the candidate elected to the presidency by a considerable popular majority was compelled to give place to the candidate of a minority.
The circumstances under which Mr. Tilden was deprived of the presidency made it inconvenient, indeed impossible, to obey the counsels and warnings of declining health to lay down the leadership of the great party whose unexampled wrong was represented in his person, until he could surrender it into the hands of its proper national representatives. As soon, however, as the national Democratic convention assembled in 1880, he felt constrained to address to the chairman of the New York delegation the memorable letter in which he proclaimed his well-considered intention to retire from public life, for the labors of which he had long felt his health and strength were unequal. In 1884 he was obliged to repeat his resolution, to prevent his nomination by the delegates to the national convention, who were almost unanimously chosen because of their avowed partiality for Mr. Tilden as their candidate, notwithstanding his impaired and failing health. Finding it impossible to obtain his consent to run, the convention accepted a candidate of his choice from the state which he had served so long and faithfully, and his choice was ratified by the nation at the general election.
Mr. Tilden thereafter enjoyed the repose he had so fully earned, and such health as only repose could confer, at his princely home of Graystone, on the banks of the Hudson, which became the pilgrim's shrine of the reinstated party, which Jefferson planted and which Jackson and Van Buren watered.
Of this honored statesman the following words were written prior to his death:
He is one of the few surviving statesmen who had the good fortune to receive early political training in the golden age of the Democratic party, when public measures were thoroughly tested by the constitution and by public opinion, and when by ample debate the voters of the whole nation were educated, not only to embrace but also to comprehend the principles upon which their government was conducted, — a training to which his subsequent political career bears continual testimony. Whatever heresies of doctrine have crept into our public policy since those days, the respectability for them will not rest with them. In all the papers and speeches with which from time to time he has endeavored to enlighten his countrymen, it will be difficult to find a line or a thought not in harmony with the teachings of the eminent statesmen who, during the first fifty years of our national history, traced the limits and defined the functions of constitutional Democracy in America. From that epoch to this there has been scarcely a question of public concern having its roots in the constitution which Mr. Tilden has not carefully considered and more or less thoroughly treated. He was a champion of the Union and of President Jackson against the Nullifiers and Mr. Calhoun. He denounced the American system of Mr. Clay as unconstitutional, inequitable and sectional. He vindicated the removal of the government deposits from the United States Bank by President Jackson, and exploded the sophistical doctrine of its lawyers that the treasury is not an executive department. He vindicated President Van Buren from the charge made by William Leggett of unbecoming subserviency to the slaveholding states in his inaugural address. He was among the first to insist upon free banking under general laws, thus opening the business equally to all, and abolishing the monopoly which was a nearly universal superstition. He exposed the perils of banking upon public funds. He advocated the divorce of bank and state, and the establishment of a subtreasury. He asserted the supervisory control of the legislature over corporations of its own creation. He exposed the enormities of Mr. Webster's scheme to pledge the public lands for the payment of the debts of the states. He drew and vindicated in a profoundly learned and able report the act which put an end to the discontents of the New York "anti-renters." He wrote the protest of the Democracy of New York against making the nationalization of slavery a test of party fealty. He was the first, we believe, to assign statesmanlike reasons for opposing coercive temperance legislation. He pointed out, as no one had done before, the danger of sectionalizing the government. He planned the campaign, he secured the requisite legislation,
