“Gentlemen of the Convention: In the name of the great republic, the only republic that ever existed upon the face of the earth; in the name of all her defenders and of all her supporters; in the name of all her soldiers living; in the name of her soldiers that died upon the field of battle; and in the name of those that perished in the skeleton clutch of famine at Andersonville and Libby, whose sufferings he so vividly remembers,—Illinois—Illinois nominates for the next president of this country that prince of parliamentarians, that leader of leaders James G. Blaine.”6
The Chicago Times reported the speech in these words:
Ingersoll moved out from the obscure corner and advanced to the central stage. As he walked forward the thundering cheers, sustained and swelling, never ceased. As he reached the platform they took on an increased volume of sound, and for ten minutes the surging fury of acclamation, the wild waving of hats and handkerchiefs, transformed the scene from one of deliberation to that of a bedlam of rapturous delirium. Ingersoll waited with unimpaired serenity, until he should get a chance to be heard. . . . And then began an appeal, impassioned, artful, brilliant, and persuasive. . . . Possessed of a fine figure, a face of winning, cordial frankness, Ingersoll had half won his audience before he spoke a word. It is the attestation of every man that heard him, that so brilliant a master stroke was never uttered before a political Convention. Its effect was indescribable. The coolest-headed in the hall were stirred to the wildest expression. The adversaries of Blaine, as well as his friends, listened with unswerving, absorbed attention. Curtis sat spell-bound, his eyes and mouth wide open, his figure moving in unison to the tremendous periods that fell in a measured, exquisitely graduated flow from the Illinoisan’s smiling lips. The matchless method and manner of the man can never be imagined from the report in type. To realize the prodigious force, the inexpressible power, the irrestrainable fervor of the audience requires actual sight.7
It was after five o’clock in the afternoon when all of the speeches were finished. Fearful that Ingersoll’s nomination speech would lead to an early victory for Blaine if the votes were begun at once, his opponents obtained an adjournment to the following day. When they convened then, the first ballot gave Blaine a substantial lead. Three hundred seventy-nine votes were necessary for the nomination, and he received 285. Morton received 125, Bristow 113, Conkling 99, Hayes 61, and Hartranft 58. After four ballots, Blaine had gained only 7 votes, but after two more, his total had risen to 308. But Hayes’ total had also risen, to 104. The seventh ballot was decisive. Indiana withdrew its votes for Morton, and gave most of them to Hayes. Kentucky withdrew Bristow’s name and gave most of its votes to Hayes. When the clerk reached the State of New York on the roll call, Roscoe Conkling exacted his revenge for Blaine’s allusion to his “turkey-gobbler strut.” Sixty-one of the state’s 70 votes now went to Hayes. At the end of the seventh ballot Hayes was the victor with 384 votes.
“My hand is sore with shaking hands,” Hayes wrote to Birch at 6 p.m. Blaine graciously congratulated Hayes, who responded with equal graciousness. Hayes was momentarily overcome with emotion when he thought of how proud Uncle Sardis and his sister Fanny would have been, but on the whole he remained “calm and self-possessed.”8
— CHAPTER 3 —
Samuel Jones Tilden
N FEBRUARY 9, 1814, Samuel Jones Tilden was born in New Lebanon, New York, an upstate hamlet on the turn-pike route between Albany and Pittsfield, Massachusetts. That route eventually became U.S. Highway 20, and New Lebanon today remains a village located just west of the New York– Massachusetts state line.
The Tilden family emigrated from England in the first part of the seventeenth century, settling first in Massachusetts, then moving to Connecticut, and finally to Columbia County, New York. Elam, Samuel’s father, was a successful farmer and then the owner of a general store. As a sideline, he sold medicinal herbs on consignment from a nearby Shaker settlement. He and his wife, Polly, endured the usual sorrows and hardships of rural life at this time—crop failures, hard times, and the deaths of five of their children.
Samuel grew up into an abnormally delicate youth. He was zealously guarded against exposure of all kinds, padded with heavy clothing, warned against wet feet, and confined a great deal of the time within the house. . . . Thus coddled and impressed with his own frailty, it would have been surprising if the lad had not conceived an exaggerated impression of the gravity of his ailments. His early life seems to have been a succession of colds, fevers, and stomach troubles, and his earliest notes are crammed with recipes for remedies, long accounts of afflictions of his throat, lungs, teeth and stomach, and detailed descriptions of treatments to relieve pain....1
What he missed in the companionship of outdoor activities with friends his own age he made up for by reading avidly and participating in the society of his elders. Samuel read books well beyond his age level, and while he was still young, his father came to defer to his judgment on political questions. At the age of sixteen Tilden was driven by his father to Williamstown, Massachusetts, to attend a preparatory school associated with Williams College. After spending only one term there, he returned to his family in New Lebanon where he acted as secretary for the local debating society. But his many illnesses and his bookishness as a youth were to leave a lasting impact on his character as a man. His biographer, A. C. Flick, observes:
Samuel J. Tilden missed the best experiences of childhood. Those golden hours with their spontaneous laughter, their joyous and winning irresponsibility, their romantic dreaming and robustious gusto were, unhappily, never a part of his life. His importunate mind leaped the span of childhood, and in so doing deprived his character of those qualities which would have mellowed and completed it; and there perished in those days the capacity for friendship, the experience of shared adventure which is the basis of trust, and—
Samuel Tilden, not dated.
most tragic of all—the free spirit of fun which would have made his character more responsive and his personality more likeable. 2
In 1832 Tilden journeyed to New York City to continue his studies. He boarded with his mother’s sister and roomed with his uncle, the Reverend Henry Davis Ware. His “studies” were an unsystematic hodgepodge, and his relations with his aunt proved unpleasant. He returned to New Lebanon after a few months and took an active part in the state and national elections of 1832. He wrote campaign manifestos for the Democratic state ticket headed by William Marcy for Governor.
Marcy was a member of the Albany Regency, one of the first political machines in the nation. It was led by Martin Van Buren, who would eventually become the eighth President of the United States. One of Van Buren’s favorite places for relaxation was Lebanon Springs, a spa close to the Tildens’ home. Elam Tilden’s political advice was sought by both Van Buren and his friend Silas Wright. Samuel, with his keen interest in politics, surely overheard if he did not actually sit in on some of these conferences. As Tilden grew to maturity, Van Buren became one of his mentors.
Van Buren was born into an established Dutch family in the Hudson River valley town of Kinderhook in 1782. His formal education consisted of a few years in the village school. He became active in politics when only eighteen, following in his father’s footsteps as a Jeffersonian Republican. Admitted to the New York Bar after working in a law office in New York City, in 1803 he moved back to Kinderhook to hang out his shingle. He climbed the ladder of New York politics rapidly, starting as county surrogate in 1808. Four years later, he was elected to the State Senate, where he adroitly shifted sides between the Republican factions in the state. He headed the “Bucktail” wing of his party, which opposed Governor DeWitt Clinton.
In 1821 the Bucktails elected Van Buren to the United States Senate, and in 1822 he was elected Governor. Van Buren’s Albany Regency now controlled the state. Associated with him were Silas Wright, William L. Marcy, and Azariah Flagg. The “Little Magician,” as Van Buren was called by his supporters, would go on to become Governor of New
York in 1828, an office which he resigned the following year to become Secretary of State in the administration of Andrew Jackson. He was a champion of the “spoils system,” a term derived from his colleague Marcy’s maxim that “to the victor belongs the spoils.” This principle applied to politics meant that a newly elected administration should feel free to replace government employees from the previous one with its own party faithful. Van Buren suited action to words by securing the removal of more than one hundred postmasters in New York alone.
Van Buren and Vice President John C. Calhoun were both ambitious to succeed Jackson. Jackson ultimately chose Van Buren and placed him on the Democratic ticket in 1832 as the party’s candidate for Vice President. The Democratic Party was victorious both in New York and the nation in 1832, reelecting Jackson President and electing Marcy Governor.
Tilden now returned to New York City, where he combined his elusive “studies” with writing pamphlets defending Jackson and Van Buren against their detractors. In June 1834 he entered Yale College in New Haven as a freshman, still supported by his family. But he stayed only one term, again returning to New Lebanon, where he was once more active in state politics. In 1835—the year of his majority—he returned to New York City and enrolled at New York University. His attendance at college was sporadic, but the bustling activity and cultural life of the city intrigued him. In 1836 he rejoiced in the election of the Tilden family friend Van Buren as President.
He continued his studies at New York University but abandoned them short of graduation. He then began the study of law in 1837, but due to his usual procrastination was not admitted to practice in the state until 1841. One of the reasons for this delay was that he took time off from his legal studies in 1840 to work for the reelection of Martin Van Buren, who faced an uphill battle.
Shortly before he retired from office in 1837, President Jackson had issued his Specie Circular, which required that payments for the purchase of government lands be made in gold or silver rather than in paper money. Jackson had issued the circular to dampen the often wild speculation in western lands, but it did more than that. British banks had demanded gold and silver from their correspondent American banks, while the price of cotton, on which the southern economy depended, declined. Only a few days after Van Buren’s inauguration in March 1837, several of the cotton brokerage houses in New Orleans failed, and the panic soon spread to the New York City banks. The ensuing hard times would hover like a dark cloud over the administration of the new President.
The country was on the mend by 1840, but the opposition had now coalesced into the Whig Party, and that party decided to take a new electoral tack. In 1836 the Whigs had been so divided that they ran regional presidential candidates in different parts of the country, including Henry Clay and William Henry Harrison. They were defeated by Van Buren.
Clay, Harrison, and Daniel Webster were the most prominent figures in the Whig leadership. Clay had lost to Jackson in 1832, and to Van Buren in 1836. With the Whigs smelling victory as the election of 1840 drew near, Clay very much desired the nomination again. He was certainly their ablest candidate, but he had lost twice, and this was enough to cause the Whig managers to turn elsewhere. They held their convention in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in December 1839, a remarkably early date. They nominated William Henry Harrison as their candidate, and John Tyler of Virginia as his running mate.
Harrison, at least on paper, seemed a strange choice. If successful, he would be sixty-eight at the time of his inauguration in 1841. He had been born to the Virginia aristocracy just before the beginning of the Revolutionary War and enlisted in the Army at the age of eighteen, becoming an aide to “Mad Anthony” Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in what was then the Northwest Territory. After leaving the Army, he had been appointed Governor of Indiana Territory, a post which he held for more than ten years.
There was at this time a gathering confederacy of Indians under the leadership of Shawnee Chief Tecumseh, and Harrison led a force of Kentucky and Indiana militia against them at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. Two years later, during the War of 1812, he commanded an American force against the British and Canadians at the Battle of the Thames in Ontario. He was victorious; the battle ended with the death of Tecumseh and the flight of the British commander.
In retrospect, these military feats—more than twenty-five years before his nomination for President—were the high points of Harrison’s career. He served two undistinguished terms in Congress and part of a term in the United States Senate. In 1829, Henry Clay, then Secretary of State, procured his appointment as minister to Colombia, where he offended the government of his host country. He then returned to his farm at North Bend, Ohio. He had made a number of unfortunate investments and eked out a living with the help of his salary as county recorder for Hamilton County, Ohio. He ran as one of several Whig candidates for President in 1836 and immediately began preparing to run again in 1840.
Democrats were quick to ridicule Harrison, saying that he wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of his days in a log cabin with a barrel of hard cider. But these criticisms backfired; two Whig operatives in Pennsylvania put together a huge transparency of a log cabin with a cider barrel by the door and displayed the picture on the wall at a political rally. The idea caught fire.
Conscious that they had a winning formula, Whig party managers avoided the issues, published no party platform, and built their campaign instead around the log cabin. . . . The Whig campaign began officially on Washington’s birthday with a gigantic rally at Columbus, Ohio, replete with log cabins, barrels of cider and cannon salutes. A series of great displays followed—at Tippecanoe, Nashville, Boston, and Cincinnati.3
The Whigs could not afford to deal in issues because there were many discordant voices within the party. This tactic also benefited their candidate, who was not adept at political give-and-take. Indeed, Nicholas Biddle, head of the Bank of the United States and one of the staunchest Whig supporters, had written to one of the Whig managers during Harrison’s 1836 run for the presidency:
Let him say not one single word about his principles, or his creed—let him say nothing—promise nothing. Let no Committee, no convention—no town meeting ever extract from him a single word, about what he thinks now, or what he will do hereafter. Let the use of pen and ink be wholly forbidden as if he were a mad poet in Bedlam.4
The Whig campaign—with its mottoes of “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” and “Van, Van, Is a Used Up Man,” and its symbols of log cabin and hard cider caught the imagination of the country.
With Harrison established in the public mind as a rugged frontiersman living in rural simplicity in a log cabin, it was easy to portray Van Buren as an effete Easterner, living in urban elegance in a mansion. While Harrison drank hard cider from an earthenware mug, Van Buren supposedly drank French wine from a silver goblet.5
In November, Harrison received 234 electoral votes to Van Buren’s 60. Van Buren carried only seven of the twenty-six states that were then in the Union, and lost even his home state of New York by a margin of 13,000.
Tilden’s principal contribution to the campaign was an address in October entitled “Prices, Currency, and Wages,” which attracted favorable attention from students of the subject. Perhaps in another campaign it might have made a difference, but Tilden’s cool, logical approach—which would serve him so well as a lawyer—was politically tone deaf in the emotional campaign of 1840.
Tilden met and talked with Van Buren when the defeated President stopped in New York on his way to Lindenwald, his estate near Kinderhook. He then finally finished his studies and was admitted to the practice of law before the New York courts in 1841. Now he would come into his own. Denied a normal boyhood because of health and temperament, his career as a lawyer would flourish because of his ability to reason persuasively, and his own personal fortune would be made by the shrewdness of his investments.
Tilden began his practice by renting a part of the office of John Edmunds, under wh
om he had read law before his admission to the bar. He then established his own office at No. 13 Pine Street. He was quickly exposed to a practice familiar to many attorneys: members of his family wished him to handle their claims. The drawback, from the attorney’s point of view, of course, is that the family members rarely expect to pay the going rate for services, if indeed they expect to pay anything at all. Tilden’s casebook for 1842 showed several court appearances for fees of $10 or $15 each, and the drafting of a will for which he charged $1.
Meanwhile, he continued his active participation in politics, much to the annoyance of his father, who continued to support him financially. The death of his father early in 1842 was a severe blow to the newly minted lawyer. His biographer Flick describes it as
[t]he greatest sorrow of his life. . . . Elam had been the close friend and confidant of his son in all the details of his life. Their letters were long exchanged two and three times a week, and the father’s thoughts helped to explain the son’s intellectual growth.6
In 1843 Tilden—following a pattern similar to that followed by Hayes in Cincinnati—sought the office of corporation counsel of New York City. He received strong backing from the local leaders of the Democratic Party, and was chosen for the office by a vote of 20 of the 26 city councilmen. Suddenly his practice was transformed into a highly responsible position giving legal representation to the largest city in the United States.
He processed claims against the city; he issued complaints for violation of city ordinances such as encumbrances on the side-walks, operating a cab on Sunday, driving at more than five miles per hour, and dumping coal ashes in the street. When the violators refused to pay the fines, he tried their cases in the courts. The office paid $2,500 per year plus such costs of suits as might be awarded by the court. He estimated that he netted a little more than $2,000 for his efforts. After only a year or so of service in the office, he was removed when his political opponents captured the mayor’s office.
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