The Life and Work of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States / Embracing an Account of the Scenes and Incidents of His Boyhood; the Struggles of His Youth; the Might of His Early Manhood; His Valor As a Soldier; His Career As a Statesman; His Election to the Presidency; and the Tragic Story of His Death.

by John Clark Ridpath

FREE CONSENT THE BASIS OF OUR LAWS.

“Our theory of law is free consent. That is the granite foundation of our whole superstructure. Nothing in this Republic can be law without consent—the free consent of the House; the free consent of the Senate; the free consent of the Executive, or, if he refuse it, the free consent of two-thirds of these bodies. Will any man deny that? Will any man challenge a line of the statement that free consent is the foundation rock of all our institutions? And yet the programme announced two weeks ago was that if the Senate refused to consent to the demand of the House, the Government should stop. And the proposition was then, and the programme is now, that, although there is not a Senate to be coerced, there is still a third independent branch in the legislative power of the Government whose consent is to be coerced at the peril of the destruction of this Government; that is, if the President, in the discharge of his duty, shall exercise his plain constitutional right to refuse his consent to this proposed legislation, the Congress will so use its voluntary powers as to destroy the Government. This is the proposition which we confront; and we denounce it as revolution.

“It makes no difference, Mr. Chairman, what the issue is. If it were the simplest and most inoffensive proposition in the world, yet if you demand, as a matter of coercion, that it shall be adopted against the free consent prescribed in the Constitution, every fair-minded man in America is bound to resist you as much as though his own life depended upon his resistance.

“Let it be understood that I am not arguing the merits of any one of the three amendments. I am discussing the proposed method of legislation; and I declare that it is against the Constitution of our country. It is revolutionary to the core, and is destructive of the fundamental element of American liberty, the free consent of all the powers that unite to make laws.

“In opening this debate, I challenge all comers to show a single instance in our history where this consent has been coerced. This is the great, the paramount issue, which dwarfs all others into insignificance. Victor Hugo said, in his description of the battle of Waterloo, that the struggle of the two armies was like the wrestling of two giants, when a chip under the heel of one might determine the victory. It may be that this amendment is the chip under your heel, or it may be that it is the chip on our shoulder. As a chip it is of small account to you or to us; but when it represents the integrity of the Constitution and is assailed by revolution, we fight for it as if it were a Koh-i-noor of purest water. [Applause.]

“The proposition now is, that after fourteen years have passed, and not one petition from one American citizen has come to us asking that this law be repealed; while not one memorial has found its way to our desks complaining of the law, so far as I have heard, the Democratic House of Representatives now hold if they are not permitted to force upon another House and upon the Executive against their consent the repeal of a law that Democrats made, this refusal shall be considered a sufficient ground for starving this Government to death. That is the proposition which we denounce as revolution. [Applause on the Republican side.]

“And here I ask the forbearance of gentlemen on the other side while I offer a suggestion which I make with reluctance. They will bear me witness that I have in many ways shown my desire that the wounds of the war should be healed; that the grass that has grown green over the graves of both armies might symbolize the returning spring of friendship and peace between citizens who were lately in arms against each other.

“But I am compelled by the necessities of the case to refer to a chapter of our recent history. The last act of Democratic domination in this Capitol, eighteen years ago, was striking and dramatic, perhaps heroic. Then the Democratic party said to the Republicans, ‘If you elect the man of your choice as President of the United States we will shoot your Government to death;’ and the people of this country, refusing to be coerced by threats or violence, voted as they pleased, and lawfully elected Abraham Lincoln President of the United States.

“Then your leaders, though holding a majority in the other branch of Congress, were heroic enough to withdraw from their seats and fling down the gage of mortal battle. We called it rebellion; but we recognized it as courageous and manly to avow your purpose, take all the risks, and fight it out on the open field. Notwithstanding your utmost efforts to destroy it, the Government was saved.

“To-day, after eighteen years’ defeat, the book of your domination is again opened, and your first act awakens every bitter memory, and threatens to destroy the confidence which your professions of patriotism inspired. You turned down a leaf of the history that recorded your last act of power in 1861, and you have now signalized your return to power by beginning a second chapter at the same page; not this time by a heroic act that declares war on the battle-field, but you say if all the legislative powers of the Government do not consent to let you tear certain laws out of the statute-book, you will not shoot our Government to death as you tried to do in the first chapter; but you declare that if we do not consent against our will, if you can not coerce an independent branch of this Government against its will, to allow you to tear from the statute-books some laws put there by the will of the people, you will starve the Government to death. [Great applause on the Republican side.]

“Between death on the field and death by starvation, I do not know that the American people will see any great difference. The end, if successfully reached, would be death in either case. Gentlemen, you have it in your power to kill this Government; you have it in your power by withholding these two bills, to smite the nerve-centers of our Constitution with the paralysis of death; and you have declared your purpose to do this, if you can not break down that fundamental element of free consent which, up to this hour, has always ruled in the legislation of this Government.”

The question stated at the beginning of this chapter is: Was Garfield a Statesman? In view of what the reader has perused since that question was put, it must at this point be restated—Was Garfield not a Statesman? The burden of proof has shifted. It is, of course, too soon to form a complete estimate of Garfield’s stature. We are too near to the man we loved. It will be for some future generation, farther removed from the spell of his name, and more able calmly to contemplate his life apart from the bloody death. This is the task for the historian of the future.

But what we say enters into the contemporary estimate of the dead President’s life and work. While the relative height of the mountain peak can only be told by viewing it from a long distance, where the entire range pictures its upper outline on the eye, the people who dwell at the foot of the mountain know it as the highest of their neighborhood. Moreover, some of the strongest objections to the contemporary estimates of a public man are entirely wanting in the present case. One of these is the popularity of his opinions or achievements. Men are apt to overestimate the abilities of a man who agrees with them. But time and again, on different questions, as in the currency and the enforcement act, the Wade-Davis manifesto, and the defense of Bowles and Milligan, we have seen General Garfield, not merely opposing, but openly defying the opinions of the people who elected him. When he thought a thing was true, no personal consideration could affect his public utterance. Such a spectacle is rare indeed in American politics.

Another reason why the present contemporary estimate of Garfield is more likely than usual to pass into history is that, in a sense, the vindication of his policy is already accomplished. When Cromwell died his work was incomplete. It was only one act in the great drama of the struggle against kings. The result was unknown at the time. Other fields were to run red with patriot blood, other monarchs to expire on the scaffold, before the solution of the deadly struggle should appear. It was uncertain whether any other government than monarchy was possible. No man was wise enough to tell, at Cromwell’s death, whether he had advanced or retarded civilization and progress. But this is a more rapid age. Events hurry on quickly. The questions growing out of the Civil War are very largely settled already. The historic genius which sits in judgment upon men and institutions is no longer in doubt as to those questions. Similarly, too, the stupendous problem of national finance, to which Garfield devoted such herculean labor, has reached its solution. It may be that all men are not willing to surrender yet, but beyond a doubt the return to a specie basis, and the wonderful improvement of the times following it, are a vindication of General Garfield’s statesmanship. It is the same with his position on the Force Bill and the Tariff. Some things, however, are still incomplete. The railway problem and the perpetuity of American institutions the future alone can pass upon; but these are the exceptions. The completeness of Mr. Lincoln’s work at the time of his assassination was not generally recognized, but we see it now. So with Garfield’s labors. They were in a sense complete. We may pass judgment upon them. The vindication of history is already at hand.

There is still another reason why the contemporary estimate of James A. Garfield is likely to become permanent. It is because the field of his principal achievements was not one of popular interest. It was not one which takes hold of the people’s hearts, and sweeps the popular judgment from its moorings. It lacked the glamour of military fame. The present age will hand down to posterity the fame of mighty soldiers, but their glory must be viewed with some reserve, some mistrust for the present.

Julius Cæsar, who was assassinated as a tyrant, now takes his place at the head of all secular history. Napoleon Bonaparte, the mention of whose name has, for three quarters of a century, been enough to convulse Paris and fill every wall with placards and every street with barricades, is likely to become the most odious figure of modern times. Garfield’s chosen field of work, that where his fame must rest, was to the careless masses dull. Men grow excited over battles, but not a pulse beats higher over a computation of interest on the public debt. The stories of marches and sieges thrill the reader a thousand years after every combatant has been vanquished by the black battalions of Death. But the most eloquent orator in America finds it difficult to hold an audience with the discussion of the tariff list or of public expenditures or of the currency, even when every man in the audience knows that his pocket is touched. If such discussions are thrown into newspaper editorials they are but little read. No argument, however powerful, on the fallacy of fiat money ever drew a tear or roused a cheer. No table of the reduction of public expenditure is ever greeted with huzzas. When the news of a victory comes, every corner has a bonfire and every window an illumination. But the change of the balance of trade in our favor only awakens a quiet satisfaction in the merchant’s heart as he glances through the morning papers. A new kind of gun attracts world-wide attention; it is talked over at every breakfast-table and described in every paper, but a new theory of surplus and deficits in the public treasury is utterly unnoticed. We see no flushed assemblies straining to catch every word that falls from the orator’s lips as he discusses the tariff on sugar or quinine. But when Kearney shouts his hoarse note of defiance to capital, the street is packed with listening thousands.

Hence it is that the man who significantly whispers “Garfield is overestimated” is more likely to be wrong than right. There is no tide of popular excitement over his work. The calm conviction of his abilities is a different thing from the feverish hurrahs of a campaign. In 1859 his old neighbors in his county had this conviction when they sent him to the State Senate. From the county, this spread to his Congressional district; from the district to the State of Ohio; from Ohio to the Union. It was gradual, and sure.

Garfield’s speeches must be the foundation for his fame. To these history will turn as a basis for its estimate. The first thing which is to be said of them, is that they dealt with the real problems of the epoch. That he was a great orator is true; that he was much more than this is equally true. While other men busied themselves with political topics Garfield took hold of the great non-political problems of the time. He refused to view them from a partisan or a personal stand-point. He grappled with the leviathans of reconstruction, tariff, and currency in the spirit of the statesman. That he was always right, we are not prepared to say; that he was right in his views on the great questions above mentioned, that with regard to them he was a leader of leaders, seems hardly to admit of a doubt. He was so radical in opinion that on almost every question he was ahead of his party and the country. This was the case in his arguments on the status of the rebel States, and what ought to be done with them; in his arguments in favor of a reduction of the tariff as prices declined after the war, and in his discussion of the currency and banking problems. Yet so nearly right was he that in every one of these instances Congress and the country gradually moved up to and occupied the position which he had taken in advance of them.

On the other hand, he was so conservative in practice that on no question was he ever an extremist. While he was a strong believer in the nationality of the Republic, and its powers of self-preservation, he faced the entire North in his opposition to the provisions of the “Force Bill,” for the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and the declaration of martial law in a country bleeding at every wound from war, but in a state of peace. Let no reader omit his speech of April 4, 1871. We say it the more willingly because at the time we thought Garfield was wrong. While he was a protectionist, he believed in a tariff which avoided both extremes. While he was an original and unintermittent hard-money man, he believed in the necessity of an elastic volume of currency. As the end of resumption forbade inflation, he demanded that every part of the country should have its share of banks, and the drafts and checks which they threw into the circulation.

Of the variety as well as the quantity of his work, men will not soon cease to wonder. There were few who could equal him in the discussion of any one of the great topics of the day, much less all of them. His name and fame can never be identified with any single question or measure, for he displayed the same ability on every subject alike.

In other respects he also differed from the men around him. He was a scholar in the broadest sense. His speeches are absolutely unequaled anywhere for their scientific method. In their philosophical discussions they were the product of the ripest scholarship; in their practical suggestions and arguments, they were, they are the product of the highest statesmanship.

Finally, a man of more spotless honor and loftier integrity never trod the earth than James A. Garfield. He lived in an atmosphere of purity and unselfishness, which, to the average man, is an unknown realm. After all, there are men enough with intellect in politics, but too few with character. An estimate of Garfield would be incomplete which failed to include the inflexible honesty of the great orator and legislator, whether in affairs public or private. History shows that while no institutions ever decayed because of the intellectual weakness of the people among which they flourished, empire after empire has perished from the face of the earth through the decay of morals in its people and its public men. History repeats itself. What has been, will be. Name after name of the great men of the new Republic is stained with private immorality and public crime. The noblest part of Garfield, with all his genius, was his spotless character. There was, there is, no greater, purer, manlier man.

“His tongue was framed to music,

His hand was armed with skill,

His face was the mold of beauty,

And his heart the throne of will.”

CHAPTER X.
THE CLIMAX OF 1880.

The Clans are met in the prairied West,

And the battle is on, is on again,

The struggle of great and little men,

To make one victor above the rest.

The fathers of the Republic had no suspicion of the form which American politics has assumed. The thing which we know as a political party is new under the sun. No other country or age ever had any thing like what America understands by the word party. When we speak of a party, we do not have in mind a mere sect, or class, distinguished by peculiar opinions, and composed of individuals whose only bond of union is their harmony of opinion, passion, or prejudice. We do not mean a caste, nor a peculiar section of American society, nor a portion of the masses, whose birth, condition, and surroundings predestine them to take a traditional sort of a view of political affairs, which they hold in common with their parents and their fellows. This was what Rome, in the days of her Republic, understood by the name of party. Patrician and plebeian stood not merely for opinion, but for more—for birth, heritage, and station. When there was an election, it was a rout, a rabble, without organization, work, or object. Rich and poor were arrayed against each other; the public offices were the glittering prize. But they were captured more by seditions, revolts, coups d’état, than by the insinuating arts of the wire-puller. The same thing is largely true of England and France, although less so lately than formerly.

But in America by a political party, we mean an organism, of which the life is, in the beginning at least, an opinion or set of opinions. We mean an institution as perfectly organized as the government itself; and taking hold of the people much more intimately. We mean an organization so powerful that the government is in its hands but a toy; so despotic that it has but one penalty for treason—political death; so much beloved, that while a few men in a few widely separated generations make glorious and awful sacrifices for their country, nearly all the men of every generation lend themselves, heart and soul, to the cause of party. A political party raises, once in four years, drilled armies, more numerous than any war ever called forth. If the battalions wear no uniform but red shirt and cap, and carry no more deadly weapon than the flaming torch, they are, nevertheless, as numerous, as well drilled, and as powerful as the glistening ranks of Gettysburg or Chickamauga. They, too, fight for the government—or against it. A political party has its official chief, its national legislature or “committee,” its state, county, township, ward, and precinct organizations. It is stupendous. The local organization has in its secret rooms lists containing the name of every voter, with an analysis of his political views; if they are wavering, a few significant remarks on how he can be “reached.” The county and state organizations have their treasuries, their system of taxation and revenue, their fields of expenditure, and their cries of robbery, reform, and retrenchment. In the secret committee rooms are laid deep and sagacious plans for carrying the election. In some States, the old, crude ways of sedition, driving away of voters, and stuffing the poll are still followed; but in most of the States prevail arts and methods so mysterious, so secret, that none but the expert politician knows what they are.

A political party has other than financial resources. It owns newspapers—manufacturers of public sentiment. It makes the men that make it. It controls offices, and places of trust and profit. It has all the powers of centralization. One man in a State is at the head of the organism. He is an autocrat, a czar, a sultan. At the crack of his finger the political head of his grand vizier falls under the headsman’s ax. The party has in its service the most plausible writers, the most eloquent orators, the most ingenious statisticians, and the most graphic artists. In its service are all the brilliant and historic names and reputations. Military glory, statesmanship, diplomacy, are alike appropriated to itself. Wealth, genius, love, and beauty, alike lay their treasures at its feet.

A party as well as the nation has its laws. Its delegates and committeemen are as certain to be elected, and those elections are required to occur at times and places as definitely settled by party rule as those for Congressmen or President.

The thing which we have been describing did not begin with the Republic. It is substantially a growth of the last fifty years. Its beginning was marked by the rise of the convention, its most public and prominent feature. Formerly, congressional and legislative caucuses nominated the candidates for office. But about 1831 a change began to come about. When the first severe cold of winter begins, every floating straw or particle of dust on the surface of a pond becomes the center of a crystallization around itself. The distances between the nearer and smaller, then the more isolated and larger, centers, are gradually bridged until the icy floor is built. So in the rise of party organism in the Republic. The local organizations, the town clubs, the township conventions for the nomination of trustee and road master, became the initial centers of a process of crystallization which was to go on until the icy floor of party organization and platforms covered the thousand little waves and ripples of individual opinions from shore to shore.

The delegate and the convention, the permanent committee and the caucus, became the methods by which the organization grew. Stronger and stronger have they grown, twining themselves like monster vines around the central trunk of the Republic. Every Presidential election has doubled the power, unity, centralization and resources of the monsters. The surplus genius and energy of the American people for organizing, being unexhausted and unsatisfied by the simple forms of the Republic, has spent itself in the political party.

With the rise of the party as an independent, self-sustaining organism, which, like the government, derives its powers from the consent of the people, two facts have become more and more prominent: first, the struggle for the delegateships to the conventions; second, the struggle to control delegates by instructions after they were elected. While these are both called struggles, the word has a widely different meaning in the two places. In the first it stands for the contest between candidates. Not only did the party become a nationalized organism for a campaign against the enemy, but the candidacies within the party for its nomination for a national office also became nationalized. But, in the second place, the word struggle stands for a contest, not between men, but between principles. In every phase of this long conflict the underlying struggle was between two opposite tendencies. The one was toward stronger and stronger party organization, greater centralization, increased powers of the caucus, the absolute tyranny of the majority, in short, the subordination of the individual to the machine, in the name of party discipline. The other tendency was toward less organization, less centralization, less binding powers for the caucus on its members, the representation of minorities, the subordination of the machine to the individual.

The struggle between these tendencies, of which the unit rule or the control of the vote of solid delegations, by instructions or by the voice of the majority of the delegation, was but a single aspect, reached its highest point so far, in the Republican National Convention which assembled in Chicago, June 2d, 1880. As will be seen, the contests of that convention must make it absolutely unique. The tremendous tide toward organization received a strong check. The events of that convention are far more significant of the political life-tendencies of the American people than the election of the following November.

All other ages and countries have distrusted the people, have concentrated power in the hands of the few, and perpetuated it by the rigid forms of despotic government. In America that tendency was defeated. But the same instincts are still present in the hearts of men. It is not impossible that in the struggles toward organization, discipline, party centralization and the machine aspect of politics, we see the same devilish forces of the past at work in a new field. It is not impossible that in party “bosses,” and the tyranny of the machine, we are really looking in the face of the ancient foe of mankind, whose sole aim was to concentrate and perpetuate power in the hands of the few.

When, after General Grant returned from his trip around the world, he consented to become a candidate for the Presidency, he had a perfect right to do so. It was the privilege of his countrymen to bring forward and support for that position the great Captain of the nineteenth century. The three men who were instrumental in bringing about his candidacy, and who managed the campaign for him, were Roscoe Conkling, of New York; Don Cameron, of Pennsylvania, Chairman of the Republican National Committee; and John A. Logan, of Illinois. The history of the canvass for the nomination of General Grant shows an ability so remarkable that his defeat must still be a matter of wonder. The New York member of the triumvirate caused a resolution to be passed in his State convention instructing the delegates to vote solidly for Grant. Cameron achieved the same thing in Pennsylvania. In Illinois, Logan, fearing or foreseeing that instructions were a feeble reliance, attempted the more heroic method of electing a solid Grant delegation by a majority of votes in the State convention. The minority, to protect itself, held meetings by congressional districts and selected contesting delegates. Over the right to instruct and the right to elect solid delegations the battle was fought. It was unquestioned that with three solid delegations from the three most populous States in the Union, and his other strong support, Grant’s nomination was overwhelmingly assured. The country, in the few days preceding the convention was wrought up to a pitch of feverish excitement.

The three principal candidates for the Presidency, whose names were openly before the convention, were: Ulysses S. Grant, of Illinois; James G. Blaine, of Maine; and John Sherman, of Ohio.

General Grant is the best known living American. His wonderful career is familiar throughout the civilized world. Rising from the trade of a tanner in an Illinois village, he became the commander of the armies of the Republic, the greatest soldier of the age, President of the United States for two terms, and the most distinguished citizen of the Union. The foundation of his fame is his military achievements. Taciturn, self-poised, alike unmoved by victory or defeat, grim, immovable, bent only on achieving the thing which lay before him, of deadly earnestness, equal to every emergency, Grant must be admitted to be a man of solitary and sublime genius. For practical resources, the age has not produced his equal.

Grant’s candidacy at Chicago, which seemed so singular to many, was really the result of underlying forces, greater than any of the men who were borne onward by the tide. First, was the fact of his personal candidacy.

On one side was the Republican party closing its quarter of a century—a Long Parliament of counsels, deeds, and changes; and, on the other, the tried Cromwell of the Commonwealth, backed by his victories, and asking the party to recognize him again. The party seemed almost destined to make the choice. In asking again for the Presidency, it was natural that he should look toward organization, discipline, and studied strategy as the instrumentalities of his canvass. His career as a soldier, his mental constitution, and his political training and experience during the arbitrary and tempestuous times of the civil war and the epoch of reconstruction, his military habit of relying on his subordinate generals, all were antecedents of the memorable struggle at Chicago, and helped to give it its character.

But if Grant, in his personal canvass, naturally reached for the party organization to make up his line of battle, the underlying tendency toward organization in politics, of which we have spoken heretofore, seeking for its strongest personal representative, inevitably selected Grant. On the one side was his individual will turning toward the Machine. On the other was the far more powerful but impersonal force, in its struggle to grasp and subordinate American politics, embodying itself in its chosen representative. It will be remembered that in popular opinion Grant became a candidate as much at the request of his friends as from any personal wish. The distinguished gentlemen who thus urged him were animated not merely by personal affection and preference, but by the invincible tendency toward organization, structure, and machinery in politics. In the organism the man found his support; in the man, the organic force found its strongest representative.

But what of the opposite tendency, the counter-current, which set against organization, party discipline, unit rules, the tyranny of majorities, and toward the freedom of individual action? Who was its representative? Was it ready to do battle with its gigantic foe? The Chicago Convention must be viewed not as a personal struggle between rival candidates, but as the meeting of two mighty waves in the ocean of American politics, the shock of whose collision was to be felt on the farthest shores. Amid the foam which rose along the line of breaking crests, mere men were for the moment almost lost from view.

In the nature of the case the counter tendency could not embody itself beforehand in a representative. To be sure there was Blaine, the dashing parliamentary leader, the magnetic politician, the brilliant debater. Generous and brave of heart, superb in his attitude before the maligners of his spotless fame, personally beloved by his supporters beyond any man of his political generation, he was too independent to represent the organism, and too much of a candidate, and had too much machinery, too many of the politician’s arts, to fully meet the requirements of the counter tendency in the great crisis. Although Blaine was beyond question running on his personal merits, yet the fact that he was a leading candidate, but without a majority, destined him to fall a prey to his competitors. In the great political arena, when one gladiator is about to triumph over his divided rivals, the latter unite against him, that all may die together, and by giving to an unknown the palm of victory save themselves from the humiliation of a rival’s triumph.

John Sherman, the very opposite of Blaine, cold, cautious, solid, hostile to display, was also a candidate upon personal merits, and was also to fail from the same cause.

It can not be said that there was any other candidate before the convention. Windom, Edmunds, and Washburne, had each a small personal following, but neither sought the nomination, and all were only possible “dark horses.”

On the floor of the convention, Grant was to be represented by the triumvirate of United States Senators, Conkling, Cameron, and Logan. Of these, Cameron, though a superb manipulator, a splendid manager, and a man full of adroitness and resources, was a silent man. His voice was not lifted in debate. His work was in the secret room, planning, and not amid the clash of arms in the open field. Logan, tall and powerful, of coppery complexion, and long, straight, black hair, which told plainly of the Indian blood, was a somewhat miscellaneous but rather powerful debater. His tremendous voice was well fitted for large audiences. That he was a man of great force is shown by his career. While his two colleagues were descended from high-born ancestry,—Cameron’s father having been the son’s predecessor in the United States Senate,—Logan sprang from below.

The leader of the trio, and with one exception the most distinguished person in the convention, was Roscoe Conkling. Tall, perfectly formed, graceful in every movement, with the figure of an athlete, and the head of a statesman, surmounted with a crown of snow-white hair, he was a conspicuous figure in the most brilliant assemblage of the great which could convene on any continent. In speaking, his flute-like tones, modulated by the highest elocutionary art, his intensely dramatic manner, his graceful but studied gesticulation, united to call attention to the speaker as much as to the speech. He was dressed in faultless style, from the tightly-buttoned blue frock coat—the very ne plus ultra of the tailor’s art,—to the exquisite fancy necktie. If it were not for his intellect he would have been called a dandy. In his walk there was a perceptible strut. But the matter of Conkling’s speeches is the best revelation of his character. Every sentence was barbed with irony; every expression touched with scorn. He was the very incarnation of pride. Haughty, reserved, imperious in manner, at every thrust he cut to the quick. His mastery of the subject in hand was always apparently perfect, and not less perfectly apparent. He was called “Lord Roscoe,” “The Superb,” “The Duke,” and other names indicative of his aristocratic bearing. Never for a moment did he cease to carry himself as if he were on the stage. It is said that great actors become so identified with the characters they impersonate, that even in private life they retain the character which they have assumed on the stage. Thus Booth is said to order his fried eggs with the air of a Hamlet. So Conkling never for a moment laid aside the air of high tragedy.

Nevertheless the commanding genius of the man was unquestioned. He was the chief representative in the Chicago Convention of the tendency to more organism, stronger party discipline, a more perfect machine. The problem to which he applied all his abilities, was to strengthen the party structure; and to that end, practically place the power of both his party and his country in the hands of a few. A national party, with the consciences of its individual members in the hands of a few astute politicians, could control the Government forever. But the end is vicious, and the means an abomination to governments of the people, for the people, and by the people.

The companion figure to that of Roscoe Conkling, of New York, was James A. Garfield, of Ohio. He was there as the chief supporter of John Sherman. The contrast between Conkling and Garfield was of the strongest possible kind. In person, Garfield was a taller man than Conkling, but his size and solidity of build made him look shorter. His figure, though less trim, had an air of comfortable friendliness and cheer about it. He, too, had a massive head, but it rested more easily above the broad shoulders. His face lacked the lines of scorn traced on the other, and made a true picture of a benevolent good nature, a generous, kindly heart, and a great and wise intellect. He wore a plain sack coat, and his attire generally though neat, was of an unstudied sort. He had a habit of sitting with his leg swinging over the arm of the chair, and his manners were those of a big, jolly, overgrown boy. In speaking he had a deep, rich voice, with a kindly accent, in marked contrast with the biting tones of the great New York Senator. He was never sarcastic, though often grave. His speeches were conservative but earnest. Socially, his manners were utterly devoid of restraint; he was accessible to every body, and appeared to be on good terms with himself. The dramatic element was completely absent. He believed in Sherman heartily, though he was evidently a stranger to the mysterious arts of the wire-puller and politician. For himself, he was well satisfied looking forward to the seat in the United States Senate, which he was to enter the next December, with joy and gratification.

These were the two chief figures of the Chicago Convention. Each was there as the chief supporter of another. The one was the conscious personification and representative of a tendency which, for fifty years, had been setting more and more strongly toward party organism and permanent structure, having for its aim a perfect power-getting and power-keeping machine. The other was the unconscious personification and representative of the opposite tendency, the current which set toward a flexible rather than rigid party organization, toward new political ideas, and the independence of individual thought. The one was a patrician, the other the child of the people.

When the Chicago Convention met, it was the nature of the organic tendency to have its candidate selected. On the other hand, it was equally the nature of the opposite tendency to have no candidate. But each force was present in the convention working in the hearts and minds of its members. Day after day, the angry white caps rose along the line where the two waves met. As the crisis approached the movement of resistance to the strengthening and increase of party organism, with that instinct which belongs to every subtle underlying tendency in human society, began to look and to feel its way toward a personal representative. Having found the man, the spirit would enter into him and possess him.

Thus it was that when the supreme moment came, personal candidates and preferences, pledges and plans, leaders and followers were suddenly lost from view. The force, which was greater than individuals, rose up, embodied itself in the person of a protesting and awe-stricken man within whose heart may have been some presentiment of the tragic future, and, subordinating all to itself, relentlessly demanding and receiving the sacrifice alike of candidates and of the supporter, defeating for the time being, not so much the silent soldier from Galena, as the political tendency which made him its representative.

Notwithstanding the nomination of Garfield, as the remaining chapters of this story will show, the spirit of party organism was not killed but stunned. Cast out from the most famous citizen of the Republic, it was to enter into a swine. History will say of Guiteau, that he embodied and represented a force stronger than himself.

Let us turn now from the internal philosophy to the external facts of the Chicago Convention.

Chicago is a roomy place and well-suited for the meeting of a large assembly, but its resources were taxed by the Convention of 1880. By Monday preceding the Convention, its hotels were crowded, and thousands upon thousands were pouring in every hour. It was a great gathering of rival clans, which did not wait the order of their generals to advance, but charged upon each other the moment they came upon the field.

There were two battles in progress—the one of the masses, the other of the leaders.

On Monday evening two public meetings of the “Grant” and “anti-Grant” elements, respectively, were held in Dearborn Park and in the Base Ball Park.

The speakers announced for the Grant meeting were Senators Conkling, Logan, Carpenter, Stewart L. Woodford of New York, Leonard Swett, Emory Storrs, Robert T. Lincoln, and Stephen A. Douglas. But the advertised speakers did not all appear; neither Conkling nor Carpenter spoke. They were too busy plotting elsewhere. In fact, this Grant meeting was, so far as any demonstration in favor of the third term was concerned, an acknowledged failure. The speakers, however, managed to throw some spirit into the affair, and aroused some enthusiasm.

But the anti-Grant meeting, as was quite evident, felt and fared better. Though it had been but meagerly advertised, and but few speakers of prominence had been announced, the grounds were densely crowded. At least ten thousand persons were in attendance.

The tone of the meeting was unmistakable. The most radical utterances were the most loudly cheered. The people declared that “they would not submit to boss rule; that they would not have a third term; that they would defeat the villainous attempt to deprive them of their liberties.” People came there determined to be pleased—with every thing or any thing but Grant. But they hissed the third term. They shouted themselves hoarse for Blaine, Washburne, and Edmunds.

Speakers from New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and New Hampshire, declared that those States would be lost to the Republican party by a third-term campaign. Meanwhile, notwithstanding the vast crowds attending the two meetings, the corridors of the hotels and streets were thronged. The utmost interest was manifested, and every report of the work of the managers of the candidates, whether reasonable or unreasonable, was seized and discussed in its bearing upon the candidates. The greatest interest centered about the Palmer House, where a secret meeting of the National Committee was being held.

And what of this secret meeting? The National Committee contained a majority of anti-Grant men. At its very beginning, William E. Chandler, of New Hampshire, took the floor and offered the following resolutions:

“Resolved, That the committee approves and ratifies the call for the approaching Republican National Convention, which was issued by its chairman and secretary, and which invites ‘two delegates from each Congressional district, four delegates at large from each State, two from each Territory, and two from the District of Columbia,’ to compose the convention.

“Resolved, That this committee recognizes the right of each delegate in a Republican National Convention freely to cast and have counted his individual vote therein, according to his own sentiments, if he so decides, against any ‘unit rule’ or other instructions passed by a State convention, which right was conceded without dissent, and was exercised in the conventions of 1860 and 1868, and was, after a full debate, affirmed by the convention of 1876, and has thus become a part of the law of Republican conventions; and until reversed by a convention itself must remain a governing principle.”

The first of these passed unanimously. But not so the second. The “unit rule” was not to die without a struggle. Chairman Cameron promptly declared this resolution out of order.

Then Mr. Chaffee, of Colorado, offered a resolution approving of the decision of the Cincinnati Convention, declaring that each delegate should be allowed to vote on all subjects before the convention. Mr. Gorham, of California, inquired of Mr. Cameron if he intended to entertain these resolutions. Mr. Cameron announced that he would not. This caused great excitement, and Mr. Chaffee appealed from this decision. The next decision of Mr. Cameron caused still greater commotion, this being to the effect that there could be no appeal, as there was no question before the committee. At this Mr. Chaffee renewed his appeal, saying that if the committee submitted to such tyranny it might as well have a king. This was roundly applauded. Mr. Cameron again repeated that there could be no appeal, and he would put none.

Mr. Chandler thereupon, in a vigorous speech, demurred to such ruling, and wound up by also appealing from the decision of the chair. To further aggravate matters, Cameron again refused to entertain the appeal. This brought Frye, of Maine, to his feet, and in a caustic speech he told the chairman that the committee had rights which he (the chairman) was bound to respect.

Mr. Chandler significantly remarked that if the chairman would not pay any respect to the committee, the same power that made him chairman would remove him.

Mr. Forbes, of Massachusetts, then offered a resolution appointing a committee of six to select and present to the committee a candidate to preside at the temporary organization. This was adopted. A recess was then taken till half-past ten o’clock.

It now became certain that the anti-Grant men were ready to depose Cameron at once if they could not control him in any other way.

The committee to select the name of a temporary chairman returned after a recess of fifteen minutes, and reported in favor of Senator George F. Hoar, of Massachusetts. Senator Jones announced that the minority reserved the right to name a candidate in the convention. After some minor matters, Mr. Frye offered one of the resolutions of the caucus, providing, in the case of the absence of the chairman of the committee from sickness or from any cause, that the chairman of the committee of six (Mr. Chandler) should be authorized to call the convention to order, and perform all the duties pertaining to the temporary organization.

Mr. McCormick followed with a second resolution of the caucus, directing that in all questions pertaining to the temporary organization the chairman shall rule that every delegate was at liberty to vote as he chooses, regardless of instructions. Messrs. Gorham, Filley, and others, made great opposition, and Mr. Cameron ruled that this resolution would not be entertained, since it was not in the power of the committee to instruct the chairman as to his rulings.

A warm debate followed as to the rights and powers of the committee. Finally, the meeting attended to some routine business, and adjourned till next day noon.

The battle now grew hotter every hour. Mr. Conkling’s delegation broke in two, and issued the following protest:

“Chicago, May 31, 1880.

“The undersigned, delegates to the Republican National Convention, representing our several Congressional districts in the State of New York, desiring above all the success of the Republican party at the approaching election, and realizing the hazard attending an injudicious nomination, declare our purpose to resist the nomination of General U. S. Grant by all honorable means. We are sincere in the conviction that in New York, at least, his nomination would insure defeat. We have a great battle to fight, and victory is within our reach, but we earnestly protest against entering the contest with a nomination which we regard as unwise and perilous.

“William H. Robertson, 12th Dist.; William B. Woodin, 26th Dist.; Norman M. Allen and Loren B. Sessions, 33d Dist.; Moses D. Stivers and Blake G. Wales, 14th Dist.; Webster Wagner and George West, 20th Dist.; Albert Daggett, 3d Dist.; Simeon S. Hawkins and John Birdsall, 1st Dist.; John P. Douglass and Sidney Sylvester, 22d Dist.; John B. Dutcher, 13th Dist.; Henry R. James and Wells S. Dickinson, 19th Dist.; James W. Husted, 12th Dist.; Ferris Jacobs, Jr., 21st Dist.; Oliver Abell, Jr., 18th Dist.”

A similar protest was published by twenty-two Pennsylvania delegates, headed by Mr. James McManes.

At nine o’clock on the morning of June 1st, an anti-Grant caucus was held, which determined to defeat the “unit rule” at all hazards, even if Mr. Cameron must first be deposed from the chairmanship.

The news of the firm attitude of the caucus had reached Cameron, Gorham, Filley, Arthur, and their associates, and before any movement could be made, the Grant men announced that they had a proposition to make, looking to harmonizing all differences. A recess was taken to allow a committee on the part of Cameron, Conkling, Arthur, and Logan, to state the agreement which they were willing to make. It proved to be as follows:

“That Senator Hoar should be accepted as temporary chairman of the convention, and that no attempt should be made to enforce the unit rule, or have a test vote in the convention, until the committee on credentials had reported, when the unit-rule question should be decided by the convention in its own way.”

This proposition was finally, in the interest of harmony, agreed to by all parties.

On Wednesday, June 2d, after days and nights of caucusing, serenading, speech-making, and cheering by every body, and for nearly every body, the great convention held its first session. As a clever correspondent wrote at the time:

“A more beautiful day in June probably never rose upon a Presidential Convention. The sun, the shade, the trees, the lake, the high façades of business buildings and palace hotels; the air cool, yet temperate; the well-dressed, energetic people, and the signs of prosperous business, uninfluenced even by such a convention, sent a hopeful, cheery feeling to the heart. The rageful features of the past day or two went into their tents at such sunshine and calm godliness of sky.”

The place of meeting was in the Exposition Building, in the south half of which vast structure there is a hall 400 feet long by 150 feet wide, with galleries all round, and so arranged that room for about ten thousand people could be provided.

THE EXPOSITION BUILDING, WHERE GARFIELD WAS NOMINATED.

At eleven o’clock the band stationed on the north gallery began playing national airs, but nearly an hour passed before the delegates took their seats. The Chairman called on the Secretary to read the call, and Secretary Keogh proceeded, in a clear voice, to read the document.

Mr. Cameron then arose, and, in a short address, nominated, as temporary chairman, the Hon. George F. Hoar, of Massachusetts, who was elected by a unanimous vote. Mr. Hoar was then conducted to the chair; and the preliminary organization was thus peacefully resigned by the disappointed Grant faction, which had expected to control all.

On motion of Eugene Hale, of Maine, the roll of States and Territories was called, and the committees made up. There were four: (1) Permanent Organization; (2) Rules; (3) Credentials; and (4) Resolutions.

After a slight stir over Utah, and a sharp encounter between Conkling and Frye, the opening business was completed, and the convention adjourned for that day.

A newspaper dispatch sent out of the room during this session said:

“There is a good deal of talk about Garfield. Some significance is attached to the fact that when the name was mentioned in the convention to-day as a member of the Committee on Rules it was loudly applauded.”

And another added:

“A prolonged contest is now certain on the floor of the convention to-day over the reports from the committees on Credentials, Rules, and Resolutions. Senator Conkling is recognized as the leader of debate on the Grant side. Frye and Hale will be the principal speakers, with Garfield and Conger on the part of the majority. The debates preceding the balloting promise to be the most heated and the ablest ever heard in a Republican Convention.”

That night the popular battle in the streets and lobbies continued, attended with ever-growing excitement. Grant men and Blaine men loudly proclaimed their confidence in a victory for their respective favorites, on the first or second ballot. Each of these two leaders claimed about three hundred reliable votes; but, in fact, they had not six hundred between them.

Sherman, Edmunds, Washburne, and Windom men felt sure that neither Blaine nor Grant could be nominated on account of the violent opposition of their factions. This gave hope to each of these smaller sections, and made “dark-horse” talk plausible.

At eleven o’clock of June 3d, the second day’s fight of the convention began. As the delegations took their places, the great crowd of spectators occupied themselves in getting acquainted with the men who were to give and receive the hard blows to be dealt by both sides when the contest opened. All these men—Conkling, Garfield, Frye, Hale, and Logan—were cordially received, though there were degrees in the favor.

The most spontaneous of the greetings given any one of the leaders was to Garfield. One of the ovations to him gave rise to a ludicrous affair for Conkling. The latter had made his usual late and pompous entrance, had been received with much noise, and walked slowly up to his seat near the front. Just as he rose to show himself further and address the chair, General Garfield came in at the rear. A tremendous and rapidly spreading cheer broke out, which the New York “Duke” mistook for his own property.

The second day was now passing, and the preliminaries were not yet complete. It was the policy of the Grant men to make delay, and wear out the strength of all opponents. They had come, as Cameron said, “to stick until we win.” The Blaine leaders, on the other hand, had no such reliable, lasting force. They must dash in boldly and carry off their prize at once, or be forever defeated.

To-day the Blaine men came in jubilant, for they had beaten the Grant faction in the committees. Conkling opened the proceedings from the floor at the earliest moment. He moved to adjourn until evening to await the report of the Committee on Credentials. Hale opposed this. Conkling, in his haste, forgetting his parliamentary knowledge, claimed that his motion to take a recess was not debatable. The Chairman overruled this, much to the annoyance of Conkling. He soon poured out a little vial of wrath on Hale, and sneered at him as his “amiable friend.” To this Hale retorted that he had not spent his time in cultivating sarcastic and sneering methods in argument; and if the Senator from New York was less amiable than others this morning the convention understood the reason well. At this reference to the general defeat of the Grant forces in the committees during the last evening the people laughed loudly at Conkling, and that august gentleman himself deigned to smile.

Soon the Committee on Permanent Organization reported, the temporary chairman and other officers were continued, and Mr. Hoar took permanent possession of his Chairmanship. Thereupon Mr. Frye moved that the Committee on Rules and Order of Business report at once. Mr. Sharpe, of New York, now arose and said that he had been instructed by the delegates of nine States to prepare a minority report of the Committee on Rules; that he had not had time to do so, and this ought not to be taken advantage of, because, by agreement in the committee, he should have had a longer time to prepare.

Mr. Frye then said that if the chairman of that committee—Mr. Garfield—was present, he would request that gentleman to state what agreement had been made.

As General Garfield arose in his seat he was greeted with loud and prolonged cheers and applause, and cries of “Platform,” “Step up on the seat.” He said:

“Mr. President, the Committee on Rules finished its business at about eleven o’clock by adopting a body of rules and an order of business. A resolution was then offered by one member of the committee that it was the judgment of the committee that the report ought to be made after the report of the Committee on Credentials, and that was adopted, whether unanimously or not I am unable to say, for the committee was about breaking up. General Sharpe requested that a minority of that committee might have leave to offer their views as a minority, and no objection was made. No vote was taken on that latter topic. I did not, therefore, and shall not tender a report of the Committee on Rules. I am, however, like every other delegate, subject to the orders of this convention, and when they desire the report and order it, I suppose the committee are ready to make it, but good faith requires this certainly, that if the minority is not ready with its report it ought to have the time.”

Mr. Frye then withdrew his motion, and the convention adjourned until evening.

At half-past five they had reassembled and the battle proceeded at the point where it had been dropped before adjournment.

The Committee on Credentials were not ready to report, and it was so announced. The Blaine men forced the fighting, entering a motion by Mr. Henderson, of Iowa, that the convention proceed to consider the report of the Committee on Rules and Organization. This the Grant men resisted, and for this reason: The rules which had been agreed to by the committee only allowed five minutes debate on the matter of each individual contested seat. The Grant men did not want the report adopted before the Committee on Credentials reported, because they wanted to ascertain just what the latter report would be. Logan led the fight for Grant, supported by Boutwell and others. Henderson held his own very well. Finally, after an hour of this running fire of debate, Mr. Sharpe moved to amend the pending motion by substituting an order that the Committee on Credentials report at once.

On this amendment a vote was soon reached which proved to be the most significant event of the day; for it was the first vote taken by States; it was a test vote between the Grant men on the one side and the allied anti-Grant factions on the other, and it settled the fate of the “unit rule.”

Upon Alabama being called, the Chairman of the delegation, Mr. Dunn, announced 20 ayes.

Mr. Allen Alexander, of Alabama, a colored delegate—I desire to vote “No.”

The Chairman—Does the gentleman from Alabama desire that his vote should be received in the negative?

Mr. Alexander—Yes, sir.

The Chairman—It will be so recorded.

Several other States offered divided votes.

The result was against Sharpe’s substitute, by a vote of 318 to 406. About forty delegates were absent or did not vote. There was great rejoicing among the anti-Grant factions when it became certain that Hoar would allow no “unit rule” until forced to do so by an order of the convention.

On motion of Mr. Brandagee, of Connecticut, Henderson’s motion was laid on the table, and adjournment till the next day followed immediately.

Friday of convention week dawned less delightfully than did the first two days. There was a cloudy sky, an east wind, a rheumatic, chilly atmosphere penetrating every nook and corner of the great Convention Hall, and a crowd of shivering mortals pushed and elbowed each other up and down the passages, delegates looking angular, stiff, and cold, and angry,—every body denouncing the weather. The dull light made the pictures on the walls look sour and stern and cross. The frown on the wretched oil-painted face of old Ben Wade was deepened; Zach Chandler’s hard mouth appeared more firmly set, and Sumner’s jaw was more rigid and uncompromising than ever in life. The flags drooped under the depressing atmospheric influences, blue turned black, the red was dull, and the white looked dirty, and the stars were dim. The opening scenes of each day had now assumed a stereotyped form. Conkling made his arrival in state as usual, and the usual cheer went up. General Phil Sheridan was greeted with hearty applause, and Garfield’s entrance was the signal for a great ovation.

Hardly had the opening prayer of the good man of God come to its amen when Mr. Conkling offered the following:

Resolved, As the sense of this Convention, that every member of it is bound in honor to support its nominee, whoever that nominee may be; and that no man should hold a seat here who is not ready to so agree.

Mr. Hale said he thought that a Republican Convention did not need to be instructed, that its first and underlying duty, after nominating its candidate, was to elect him over the Democratic candidate.

A call of the States being requested, the convention voted unanimously in favor of Mr. Conkling’s resolution, with the exception of three hostile votes from West Virginia.

Mr. Conkling then offered the following:

“Resolved, That the delegates who have voted that they will not abide the action of the convention do not deserve and have forfeited their vote in this convention.”

Mr. Campbell, of West Virginia—“Mr. Chairman: There are three gentlemen from West Virginia, good and true Republicans, who have voted in the negative in the last vote. Gentlemen, as a delegate in a Republican Convention, I am willing to withdraw. If it has come to this that in the city of Chicago, where I came as a young man from the State of Virginia, after having submitted twenty years to contumely and to violence in the State of Virginia for my Republican principles—if it has come to this, that in the city of Chicago a delegate from that State can not have a free expression of opinion, I for one am willing to withdraw from this convention. Mr. Chairman, I have been a Republican in the State of Virginia from my youth. For twenty-five years I have published a Republican newspaper in that State. I have supported every Republican Presidential nominee in that time. I expect to support the nominee of this convention. But, sir, I shall do so as a Republican, having imbibed my principles from the great statesman from New York, William H. Seward, with whom I had an early acquaintance by virtue of my having gone to school with him nine years from the city of Utica, from which the Senator from New York now hails. I was a Republican then, and I made the acquaintance of that distinguished gentleman. I came home, and in my youth I became a newspaper editor. From that day to this—from the John Brown raid on Harper’s Ferry all through the troubles of the last twenty-five years—I have consistently and always supported our State and National Republican nominee. But, Mr. Chairman, I feel as a Republican that there is a principle in this question, and I will never go into any convention and agree beforehand that whatever may be done by that convention shall have my indorsement. Sir, as a free man, whom God made free, I always intend to carry my sovereignty under my own hat. I never intend that any body of men shall take it from me. I do not, Mr. Chairman, make my living by politics; I make it by my labor as a newspaper editor; and I am not afraid to go home and say that I stood up here in this convention, as I was not afraid to stand up in the State of West Virginia, when but 2,900 men were found to vote for Abraham Lincoln, and where that party has risen to-day to 45,000 votes under the training that we received from our early inspiration of principle. I am not afraid to go home and face these men as I have faced them always.”

The two other dissenters also stated their position as defiantly if not as ably. After some further debate, Mr. Garfield spoke, taking ground against Conkling’s pending resolution. While speaking to this, he said:

“There never can be a convention, of which I am one delegate, equal in rights to every other delegate, that shall bind my vote against my will on any question whatever on which my vote is to be given.

“I regret that these gentlemen thought it best to break the harmony of this convention by their dissent; but, when they tell the convention that their dissent was not, and did not mean, that they would not vote for the nominee of this convention, but only that they did not think the resolution at this time wise, they acted in their right, and not by my vote. I do not know the gentlemen, nor their affiliations, nor their relations to candidates, except one of them. One of them I knew in the dark days of slavery, and for twenty long years, in the midst of slave-pens and slave-drivers, has stood up for liberty with a clear-sighted courage and a brave heart equal to the best Republicans that live on this globe. And if this convention expel him, then we must purge ourselves at the end of every vote by requiring that so many as shall vote against us shall go out.”

A few minutes later Mr. Conkling withdrew the obnoxious resolution.

The first important business of the day was now transacted. Mr. Garfield, as Chairman of the Committee on Rules and Order of Business, read the report of that committee. Its most important provision was:

“Rule VIII. In the record of the votes by States, the vote of each State, Territory, and the District of Columbia, shall be announced by the chairman; and in case the votes of any State, Territory, or the District of Columbia shall be divided, the chairman shall announce the number of votes cast for any candidate or for or against any proposition; but, if exception is taken by any delegate to the correctness of such announcement by the chairman of his delegation, the president of the convention shall direct the roll of members of such delegation to be called and the result recorded in accordance with the votes individually given.”

From this resolution a minority of the committee dissented, and, through General Sharpe, presented, as Rule VIII, the following:

“In the record of the votes by States, the vote of each State, Territory, and the District of Columbia shall be announced by the chairman; and in case the votes of any State, Territory, or the District of Columbia shall be divided, the chairman shall announce the number of votes cast for any candidate or for or against any proposition.”

When the final action was taken, the majority report prevailed.

At last there came the long-delayed report of the Committee on Credentials, the one great matter preliminary to the real work of this great gathering of the people’s representatives. This committee’s principal duty was to decide upon the conflicting claims of “regular” and “bolting” delegations from several States.

The reading of this report was painfully tedious, taking over three hours; and the debates which followed as the separate State contests were being settled, kept any other business from being done that day.

From the State of Louisiana, the committee recommended the admission of the delegation with their alternates headed by Henry C. Warmouth, and the exclusion of the delegation with their alternates headed by Taylor Beattie. This contest arose out of two rival conventions.

The committee recommended James T. Rapier for admission as a delegate from the Fourth Congressional District of Alabama. The facts found were that Rapier had been requested to pledge support for Grant, and upon his refusal to do so the president of the convention had been requested to withhold the credentials unless he would, within twenty-four hours, give such pledge. This, Rapier had refused to do.

The committee recommended that William H. Smith and Willett Warner be admitted in the place of Arthur Bingham and R. A. Mosely from the Seventh Congressional District of Alabama. The facts in the case of Messrs. Smith and Warner were substantially the same as those in the case of James T. Rapier.

The committee recommended the admission of eight delegations from the State of Illinois, in the place of sitting members. The Committee found that a State Convention had been held at Springfield, on the 19th day of May, to elect delegates to the National Convention. During the convention, the delegates from eight Congressional Districts had assembled and organized District Conventions, each of which had elected two delegates and two alternates to the Chicago Convention by clear majorities of all the delegates elected to the State Convention in each of said districts, as was shown by the credentials accompanying the report. The State Convention, by means of a committee of one from each Congressional District, selected, and afterward assumed to elect, two delegates to the National Convention, including the sitting members from the foregoing districts, the delegates from each of which filed in the State Convention protests against said election by the State Convention. The committee reported against the validity of the contests in the Second District of Illinois of the seats of sitting members, A. M. Wright and R. S. Tuthill.

Contests were also settled by this report in cases coming from several other States.

In each case of favorable consideration, the committee ascertained that those delegates who were recommended were actually chosen by a proper convention, representing the Congressional District from which they were accredited.

The committee then proceeded to the justice and equity of recognizing, securing, and protecting Congressional District representation, as is also demonstrated by the actual precedents of the Republican party since its organization.

With the exception of a couple of hours for supper, this extraordinary session kept to the subjects of this report steadily from one o’clock in the afternoon till after two in the morning. This chapter can not find room for these debates, though surpassing in interest, as they do, many a volume of the Congressional Record. The Illinois questions caused the most intense feeling of all. At ten o’clock they were taken up; after a short time, on motion, the further debate was limited to one hour on each side.

The whole subject of this report was not fully disposed of until early in the Saturday session. The result was that the majority report was adopted, and the “machine” thus received another solid shot, which penetrated its iron sides below waterline; but the leaders fired no guns to signal their distress.

Saturday, June 5th, was, like Friday, dark and gloomy. The vast crowd, after the preceding night of excitement, was, of course, dull and sleepy. It was noted, however, that when Garfield came into the hall the audience waked up and gave a hearty cheer.

The roll was called at about twelve o’clock. After finishing the matters connected with the credentials, the Convention, on motion of General Garfield, adopted the report of the Committee on Rules. The Committee on Resolutions next reported, and the Platform was adopted; after which the Convention adjourned till evening.

Skirmishing ended, now would come serious work. The triumvirate and its legions had exhausted every parliamentary resource for delay, and at last had to face “the inevitable hour” which must lead, for them, to glory, or the common grave of all their plans.

It was a magnificent audience which poured into the great hall that evening to witness the beginning of the end of this tremendous political conflict.

After some preliminaries, Mr. Hale, of Maine, moved that the roll of States be called alphabetically and that nominations for candidates for President be made.

General Logan inquired whether the rules permitted the seconding of nominations for candidates for President. The Chairman said no, that the rules did not provide for it. Garfield thought there would be no objection to the seconding of nominations. Unanimous consent was accorded for five-minute speeches in seconding nominations. Hale’s motion was then adopted without opposition.

The roll was then called down to Michigan, with no responses. When that State was named, James F. Joy arose and nominated, for President of the United States, James G. Blaine. Mr. Joy was not the kind of a man to arouse the enthusiasm of an audience, and when he had closed, Mr. Pixley, of California, seconded the nomination. These speeches were a great disappointment to the Blaine men. They still remembered Ingersoll’s famous “plumed knight” speech for Blaine at Cincinnati, in 1876. To remedy matters, Mr. William P. Frye, of Maine, obtained the floor by consent, and delivered the following brief, but brilliant little speech, which, in a measure, retrieved the mistake already made. He said:

“I saw once a storm at sea in the night-time, and our staunch old ship battling for its life with the fury of the tempest; darkness every-where; the wind shrieking and howling through the rigging; the huge waves beating upon the sides of that ship and making her shiver from stem to stern. The lightnings were flashing, the thunders were rolling. There was danger every-where. I saw at the helm a calm, bold, courageous, immovable, commanding man. In the tempest, calm; in the commotion, quiet; in the dismay, hopeful. I saw him take that old ship and bring her into the harbor, into still waters, into safety. That man was a hero. I saw the good old ship, the State of Maine, within the last year, fighting her way through the same darkness, through the same perils, against the same waves, against the same dangers. She was freighted with all that is precious in the principles of our Republic—with the rights of American citizenship, with all that is guaranteed to the American citizen by our Constitution. The eyes of the whole Nation were upon her; an intense anxiety filled every American heart, lest the grand old ship, the State of Maine, might go down beneath the waves forever, carrying her precious freight with her. But, sir, there was a man at the helm. Calm, deliberate, commanding, sagacious, he made even the foolish men wise. Courageous, he inspired the timid with courage; hopeful, he gave heart to the dismayed, and he brought that good old ship proudly into the harbor, into safety, and there she floats to-day, brighter, purer, stronger from her baptism of danger. That man, too, was a hero, and his name was James G. Blaine. Maine sends greetings to this magnificent Convention. With the memory of her own salvation from impending peril fresh upon her, she says to you, representatives of 50,000,000 of American people, who have met here to counsel how the Republic shall be saved, she says to you, representatives of the people, take a man, a true man, a staunch man for your leader, who has just saved her, and who will bear you to safety and certain victory.”

Minnesota was next called; whereupon E. F. Drake placed in nomination William Windom, of Winona, a very able and distinguished Senator from that State.

Now was heard the call for New York; a call which meant Roscoe Conkling and the nomination of the great General and ex-President, Ulysses S. Grant.

As Mr. Conkling advanced to the front, he was greeted with tremendous cheers. Taking a commanding position on one of the reporter’s tables, he stood a few moments and regarded the audience while they grew silent at an imperious wave of his hand. Then he said:

“When asked whence comes our candidate, our sole reply shall be, he hails from Appomattox with its famous apple-tree. In obedience to instructions I should never dare to disregard, expressing also my own firm conviction, I rise to propose a nomination with which the country and the Republican party can grandly win. The election before us is to be the Austerlitz of American politics. It will decide for many years whether the country shall be Republican or Cossack. The supreme need of the hour is not a candidate who can carry Michigan. All Republican candidates can do that. The need is not of a candidate popular in the territories, because they have no vote. The need is of a candidate who can carry doubtful States. Not the doubtful States of the North, but doubtful States of the South, which we have heard, if I understand it aright, ought to take little or no part here, because the South has nothing to give, but every thing to receive. No, gentlemen, the need that presses upon the conscience of this convention is of a candidate who can carry doubtful States both North and South. And believing that he, more surely than any other man, can carry New York against any opponent, and can carry not only the North but several States of the South, New York is for Ulysses S. Grant. Never defeated in peace or in war, his name is the most illustrious borne by living man.

“His services attest his greatness, and the country—nay, the world—knows them by heart. His fame was earned not alone in things written and said, but by the arduous greatness of things done. And perils and emergencies will search in vain in the future, as they have searched in vain in the past, for any other on whom the nation leans with such confidence and trust. Never having had a policy to enforce against the will of the people, he never betrayed a cause or a friend, and the people will never desert nor betray him. Standing on the highest eminence of human distinction, modest, firm, simple, and self-poised, having filled all lands with his renown, he has seen not only the high-born and the titled, but the poor and the lowly in the uttermost ends of the earth, rise and uncover before him. He has studied the needs and the defects of many systems of government; and he has returned a better American than ever, with a wealth of knowledge and experience added to the hard common sense which shone so conspicuously in all the fierce light that beat upon him during sixteen years, the most trying, the most portentous, the most perilous.

“Vilified and reviled, truthlessly aspersed by unnumbered presses, not in other lands, but in his own, assaults upon him have seasoned and strengthened his hold on the public heart. Calumny’s ammunition has all been exploded; the powder has all been burned once; its force is spent: and the name of Grant will glitter a bright and imperishable star in the diadem of the Republic when those who have tried to tarnish that name have moldered in forgotten graves, and when their memories and their epitaphs have vanished utterly.

“Never elated by success, never depressed by adversity, he has ever, in peace as in war, shown the very genius of common sense. The terms he prescribed for Lee’s surrender foreshadowed the wisest prophecies and principles of true reconstruction. Victor in the greatest war of modern times, he quickly signalized his aversion to war, and his love of peace by an arbitration of international disputes, which stands the wisest, the most majestic example of its kind in the world’s diplomacy. When inflation, at the height of its popularity and frenzy, had swept both Houses of Congress, it was the veto of Grant which, single and alone, overthrew expansion, and cleared the way for specie resumption. To him, to him immeasurably more than to any other man, is due the fact that every paper dollar is as good as gold.

“With him as our leader we shall have no defensive campaign. No! We shall have nothing to explain away. We shall have no apologies to make. The shafts and the arrows have all been aimed at him, and they lie broken and harmless at his feet.

“Life, liberty, and property will find a safeguard in him. When he said of the colored men in Florida, ‘Wherever I am they may come also;’ when he so said, he meant that had he the power, the poor dwellers in the cabins of the South should no longer be driven in terror from the homes of their childhood and the graves of their murdered dead. When he refused to receive Denis Kearney in California, he meant that Communism, lawlessness, and disorder, although it might stalk high-headed and dictate law to a whole city, would find a foe in him. He meant that popular or unpopular, he would hew to the line of right, let the chips fly where they may.

“His integrity, his common sense, his courage, his unequaled experience, are the qualities offered to his country. The only argument, the only one that the wit of man or the stress of politics has devised is one which would dumbfounder Solomon, because he thought there was nothing new under the sun. Having tried Grant twice and found him faithful, we are told that we must not, even after an interval of years, trust him again. My countrymen! my countrymen what stultification does not such a fallacy involve. The American people exclude Jefferson Davis from public trust. Why? Why? Because he was the arch-traitor and would-be destroyer; and now the same people is asked to ostracise Grant, and not to trust him. Why? Why, I repeat? Because he was the arch-preserver of his country, and because not only in war, but twice as Civil Magistrate, he gave his highest, noblest efforts to the Republic. Is this an electioneering juggle, or is it hypocrisy’s masquerade? There is no field of human activity, responsibility, or reason, in which rational beings object to an agent because he has been weighed in the balance and not found wanting; no department of human reason in which sane men reject an agent because he has had experience, making him exceptionally competent and fit. From the man who shoes your horse to the lawyer who tries your cause, the officer who manages your railway or your mill, the doctor into whose hands you give your life, or the minister who seeks to save your soul, what man do you reject because, by his works, you have known him, and found him faithful and fit? What makes the Presidential office an exception to all things else in the common sense to be applied to selecting its incumbent? Who dares—who dares to put fetters on that free choice and judgment which is the birthright of the American people? Can it be said that Grant has used official power and place to perpetuate his term? He has no place, and official power has not been used for him. Without patronage and without emissaries, without committees, without bureaus, without telegraph wires running from his house to this Convention, or running from his house anywhere else, this man is the candidate whose friends have never threatened to bolt unless this Convention did as they said. He is a Republican who never wavers. He and his friends stand by the creed and the candidates of the Republican party. They hold the rightful rule of the majority as the very essence of their faith, and they mean to uphold that faith against not only the common enemy, but against the charlatans, jayhawkers, tramps, and guerrillas—the men who deploy between the lines, and forage now on one side and then on the other. This Convention is master of a supreme opportunity. It can name the next President. It can make sure of his election. It can make sure not only of his election, but of his certain and peaceful inauguration. It can break that power which dominates and mildews the South. It can overthrow an organization whose very existence is a standing protest against progress.

“The purpose of the Democratic party is spoils. Its very hope of existence is a solid South. Its success is a menace to order and progress. I say this Convention can overthrow that power. It can dissolve and emancipate a solid South. It can speed the Nation in a career of grandeur eclipsing all past achievements. Gentlemen, we have only to listen above the din and look beyond the dust of an hour to behold the Republican party advancing with its ensigns resplendent with illustrious achievements, marching to certain victory with its greatest Marshal at its head.”

After Mr. Bradley, of Kentucky, had seconded Grant’s nomination, the call proceeded, and Ohio being reached, General Garfield arose. Amid great applause he advanced to Mr. Conkling’s late high station on a table, and, as soon as order was restored, said:

“Mr. President: I have witnessed the extraordinary scenes of this Convention with deep solicitude. No emotion touches my heart more quickly than a sentiment in honor of a great and noble character. But as I sat on these seats and witnessed these demonstrations, it seemed to me you were a human ocean in a tempest. I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man. But I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea from which all heights and depths are measured. When the storm has passed and the hour of calm settles on the ocean, when sunshine bathes its smooth surface, then the astronomer and surveyor takes the level from which he measures all terrestrial heights and depths. Gentlemen of the convention, your present temper may not mark the healthful pulse of the people.

“When our enthusiasm has passed, when the emotions of this hour have subsided, we shall find the calm level of public opinion, below the storm, from which the thoughts of a mighty people are to be measured, and by which their final action will be determined. Not here, in this brilliant circle, where 15,000 men and women are assembled, is the destiny of the Republic to be decreed; not here, where I see the enthusiastic faces of 756 delegates waiting to cast their votes into the urn and determine the choice of their party; but by 5,000,000 Republican firesides, where the thoughtful fathers, with wives and children about them, with calm thoughts inspired by love of home and love of country, with the history of the past, the hopes of the future, and the knowledge of the great men who have adorned and blessed our nation in days gone by,—there God prepares the verdict that shall determine the wisdom of our work to-night. Not in Chicago, in the heat of June, but in the sober quiet that comes between now and November, in the silence of deliberate judgment, will this great question be settled. Let us aid them to-night.

“But now, gentlemen of the Convention, what do we want? Bear with me a moment. Hear me for this cause, and for a moment, be silent that you may hear. Twenty-five years ago this Republic was wearing a triple chain of bondage. Long familiarity with the traffic in the body and souls of men had paralyzed the consciences of a majority of our people. The baleful doctrine of State sovereignty had shocked and weakened the noblest and most beneficent powers of the National Government, and the grasping power of slavery was seizing the virgin Territories of the West and dragging them into the den of eternal bondage. At that crisis the Republican party was born. It drew its first inspiration from the fire of liberty which God has lighted in every man’s heart, and which all the powers of ignorance and tyranny can never wholly extinguish. The Republican party came to deliver and save the Republic. It entered the arena when beleaguered and assailed Territories were struggling for freedom, and drew around them the sacred circle of liberty, which the demon of slavery has never dared to cross. It made them free forever.

“Strengthened by its victory on the frontier, the young party, under the leadership of that great man, who on this spot, twenty years ago, was made its leader, entered the national capital and assumed the high duties of the Government. The light which shone from its banner dispelled the darkness in which slavery had enshrouded the Capitol and melted the shackles of every slave, and consumed, in the fire of liberty, every slave-pen within the shadow of the Capitol. Our national industries, by an impoverishing policy, were themselves prostrated, and the streams of revenue flowed in such feeble currents that the treasury itself was well nigh empty. The money of the people was the wretched notes of 2,000 uncontrolled and irresponsible state bank corporations, which were filling the country with a circulation that poisoned rather than sustained the life of business.

“The Republican party changed all this. It abolished the babel of confusion and gave the country a currency as national as its flag, based upon the sacred faith of the people. It threw its protecting arm around our great industries, and they stood erect as with new life. It filled with the spirit of true nationality all the great functions of the Government. It confronted a rebellion of unexampled magnitude, with a slavery behind it, and, under God, fought the final battle of liberty until victory was won. Then, after the storms of battle, were heard the sweet, calm words of peace uttered by the conquering nation, and saying to the conquered foe that lay prostrate at its feet, ‘This is our only revenge, that you join us in lifting to the serene firmament of the Constitution, to shine like stars forever and forever, the immortal principles of truth and justice, that all men, white or black, shall be free and stand equal before the law.’ Then came the questions of reconstruction, the public debt, and the public faith.

“In the settlement of these questions the Republican party has completed its twenty-five years of glorious existence, and it has sent us here to prepare it for another lustrum of duty and of victory. How shall we do this great work? We can not do it, my friends, by assailing our Republican brethren. God forbid that I should say one word to cast a shadow upon any name on the roll of our heroes. This coming fight is our Thermopylæ. We are standing upon a narrow isthmus. If our Spartan hosts are united we can withstand all the Persians that the Xerxes of Democracy can bring against us.

“Let us hold our ground this one year, for the stars in their courses fight for us in the future. The census to be taken this year will bring reinforcements and continued power. But, in order to win this victory now, we want the vote of every Republican, of every Grant Republican in America, of every Blaine man and every anti-Blaine man. The vote of every follower of every candidate is needed to make our success certain; therefore I say, gentlemen and brethren, we are here to calmly counsel together, and inquire what we shall do. [A voice: ‘Nominate Garfield.’—Great applause.]

“We want a man whose life and opinions embody all the achievements of which I have spoken. We want a man who, standing on a mountain height, sees all the achievements of our past history, and carries in his heart the memory of all its glorious deeds, and who, looking forward, prepares to meet the labor and the dangers to come. We want one who will act in no spirit of unkindness toward those we lately met in battle. The Republican party offers to our brethren of the South the olive branch of peace, and wishes them to return to brotherhood, on this supreme condition, that it shall be admitted, forever and for evermore, that, in the war for the Union, we were right and they were wrong. On that supreme condition we meet them as brethren, and no other. We ask them to share with us the blessings and honors of this great Republic.

“Now, gentlemen, not to weary you, I am about to present a name for your consideration—the name of a man who was the comrade, and associate, and friend of nearly all those noble dead whose faces look down upon us from these walls to-night; a man who began his career of public service twenty-five years ago, whose first duty was courageously done in the days of peril on the plains of Kansas, when the first red drops of that bloody shower began to fall which finally swelled into the deluge of war. He bravely stood by young Kansas then, and, returning to his duty in the national legislature, through all subsequent time his pathway has been marked by labors performed in every department of legislation.

“You ask for his monuments. I point you to twenty-five years of the national statutes. Not one great beneficent statute has been placed on our statute books without his intelligent and powerful aid. He aided these men to formulate the laws that raised our great armies and carried us through the war. His hand was seen in the workmanship of those statutes that restored and brought back the unity and married calm of the States. His hand was in all that great legislation that created the war currency, and in a greater work that redeemed the promises of the Government, and made the currency equal to gold. And when, at last, called from the halls of legislation into a high executive office, he displayed that experience, intelligence, firmness, and poise of character which has carried us through a stormy period of three years. With one-half the public press crying ‘Crucify him!’ and a hostile Congress seeking to prevent success—in all this he remained unmoved until victory crowned him.

“The great fiscal affairs of the nation and the great business interests of the country he has guarded and preserved, while executing the law of resumption and effecting its object without a jar, and against the false prophecies of one-half of the press and all the Democracy of this continent. He has shown himself able to meet with calmness the great emergencies of the Government for twenty-five years. He has trodden the perilous heights of public duty, and against all the shafts of malice has borne his breast unharmed. He has stood in the blaze of ‘that fierce light that beats against the throne,’ but its fiercest ray has found no flaw in his armor, no stain on his shield.

“I do not present him as a better Republican, or as a better man than thousands of others we honor, but I present him for your deliberate consideration. I nominate John Sherman, of Ohio.”

The addresses of Conkling and Garfield are given here, that the reader may contrast these two great leaders at their best. Garfield’s speech made a profound impression, not only on the Convention, but on the country,—and strengthened the already powerful sentiment in favor of making himself the nominee.

Edmunds and Washburne were the only other nominations proposed. They, with Sherman, were minor candidates, whose only hope lay in the enmity of the Grant and Blaine factions, whose evenly-balanced powers would prevent the success of either.

At twelve o’clock the Convention adjourned over till Monday,—but not for a Sabbath of repose! On Sunday very few of the delegates found time for church, but devoted the day to mustering forces, polishing arms, and a general preparation for the battle of the ballots on Monday. Of the group of great men who led these hosts of enthusiasts, Garfield was one of the very, very few, who attended religious worship. Bound by the good habit of Sabbath observance, he went his solitary way to a little congregation of Disciples, where the tumult and turmoil of the time was smoothed away in peaceful contemplation of the eternal.

A bright, cool, and delightful morning made the Convention open pleasantly on Monday, and at half-past ten the Hall was filled with an immense crowd, made up largely of ladies, come to see the climax of this great battle, and to be in at the finish. The Blaine men were confident. Grant’s followers were not so confident, but still determined. All were hopeful, as the uncertain always may possibly favor us, and most men believe in the luck of their own stars.

On motion, when called to order, the roll of States was called for the first ballot, which appears in full on the opposite page.

After this vote it became evident that there would be no immediate choice, and with a long breath of resignation to its fate, the multitude settled down to a prospectively long siege. There were twenty-eight successive ballots taken, when the day’s work ended, and still no choice.

On Tuesday, June 8, the sixth and last day of the Convention, the great work of nomination was completed. “It was done, and well done.” We give the work of the day somewhat in detail:

On the twenty-ninth ballot Sherman’s vote suddenly went up from 91 on the previous ballot to 116. This resulted from a change in Massachusetts, which broke for him to the extent of twenty-one votes. On the thirtieth he reached his best vote, 120, and then steadily sank to 99 on the thirty-fifth ballot.

Finally that wonderful Grant column of three hundred and five, which had stood so nobly by their great candidate for many hours, began to gain. Pennsylvania gave him an increase, and on the thirty-fourth ballot he had 312 votes. It then became evident that the anti-Grant factions must combine at once, or be beaten.

FIRST VOTE.
STATES.	Grant	Blaine	Sherman	Washburne	Edmunds	Windom
Alabama	16	1	3
Arkansas	12
California		12
Colorado	6
Connecticut		3		7	2
Delaware		6
Florida	8
Georgia	6	8	8
Illinois	24	10		8
Indiana	1	26	2	1
Iowa		22
Kansas	4	6
Kentucky	20	1	3
Louisiana	8	2	6
Maine		14
Maryland	7	7	2
Massachusetts	3		2	1	20
Michigan	1	21
Minnesota						10
Mississippi	6	4	6
Missouri	29			1
Nebraska		6
Nevada		6
New Hampshire		10
New Jersey		16		2
New York	51	17	2
North Carolina	6		14
Ohio		9	34		1
Oregon		6
Pennsylvania	32	23	3
Rhode Island		8
South Carolina	13		1
Tennessee	16	6	1		1
Texas	11	2	2	1
Vermont					10
Virginia	18	3	1
West Virginia	1	8
Wisconsin	1	7	3	9
Arizona		2
District of Columbia	1	1
Montana		2
New Mexico		2
Utah	1	1
Washington		2
Dakota	1	1
Idaho		2
Wyoming	1	1
Total	304	284	93	30	34	10

It was at this point that Wisconsin pointed them the way to victory. Garfield’s manly course in the Convention had created a favorable impression on all sides, the result of which in the Wisconsin delegation was that he was freely talked of for second choice. They held no caucus, and during the night of Monday were anxiously waiting to see some other State make the break for Garfield. After the adjournment on Monday night the matter was talked up in the delegation, and it was agreed that, if no other solution offered itself within three or four ballots, the delegation would throw its solid strength to Garfield. No consultation was had on the subject with the other leaders, as it was intended to operate as a feeler, Wisconsin being among the last States called on the roll. The result of this feeler is now a matter of history. The thirty-fifth ballot developed a Garfield strength of 50 votes.

Amid the most intense excitement another call was ordered. It was Grant or Garfield—which?

Here General Garfield rose to a question of order. He challenged the vote on the ground that votes had been given for him without his consent, which consent he absolutely refused to give. The point was overruled. The roll call proceeded. When Connecticut was reached, eleven of the twelve votes were given for Garfield. This was the beginning of the excitement. Then Illinois gave seven votes for Garfield, followed by Indiana with twenty-nine votes. Next came Iowa, which had voted for Blaine on every ballot, with its full twenty-two votes for Garfield. When Maine was reached it voted for Garfield. This settled the question. Blaine was out of the field, and Garfield was speedily nominated. Vermont, Edmunds’ State, gave a solid vote for Garfield.

At this point the people could no longer be controlled. The breeze had grown into a storm of enthusiasm. Delegates crowded around Garfield; the people in the galleries, ignoring the lines that had divided them, cheered and waved their hats and handkerchiefs. In this 10,000 people were engaged. It was taken up by almost as many people on the outside, where cannon were also discharged. The scene was one that will not soon be forgotten by those who were present. Republicans, without regard to previous differences, felt and acted as if a great and crushing weight had been removed, and as if they had safely emerged from an impending danger—a danger that threatened the very existence of the party.

The result was read out as follows: Whole number of votes, 755; necessary to a choice, 378; Grant, 306; Blaine, 42; Sherman, 3; Washburne, 5; Garfield, 399.

There was immense cheering, and the Chairman found it difficult to restore order. But order being secured, he said: “James A. Garfield is nominated for President of the United States.”

In the midst of all this, Garfield sat deeply moved. He was overwhelmed. Loud calls of “Platform” and “Speech” were unheard by him, and he sat silently in the heart of the hurricane which had caught him up.

As soon as a hearing could be obtained, Mr. Conkling arose, and, after a few remarks on the subject of unity and harmony, and in praise of the nominee, moved that the nomination be made unanimous. This motion was seconded, with warm pledges of support, by several distinguished gentlemen, previous leaders of factions, now leaders of a united and satisfied political party.

At half-past two o’clock the Convention adjourned to meet again at seven in the evening. In view of the fact that the man nominated for the second place on the National ticket was, in fact, a future president, it may be well to give this closing session a passing notice.

When the time of reassembling came, business was begun at once. The principal names presented for Vice-President were: Elihu B. Washburne, of Illinois; Marshall Jewell, of Connecticut; and Chester A. Arthur, of New York. On the first and only ballot the New York gentleman received 468 votes to 288 for all others. A vote to make the nomination unanimous carried with a good will, and Garfield and Arthur were at last before the country on their records and their characters, both to be approved and both to be elected.

The following table gives the results of each ballot in the well-contested struggle, of which this brief chronicle has been trying to tell the story:

BALLOTS.	Grant	Blaine	Sherman	Washburne	Edmunds	Windom	Garfield	Hayes	Harrison	McCrary	Davis, of Texas	Hartranft, of Pa.
First	304	284	93	30	34	10
Second	305	282	94	31	32	10	1
Third	305	282	93	31	32	10	1		1
Fourth	305	281	95	31	32	10	1
Fifth	305	281	95	31	32	10	1
Sixth	305	280	95	31	32	10	2
Seventh	305	281	94	31	32	10	2
Eighth	306	284	91	32	31	10	1
Ninth	308	282	90	32	31	10	2
Tenth	305	282	92	32	31	10	2	1
Eleventh	305	281	93	32	31	10	2	1
Twelfth	304	283	92	33	31	10	1	1
Thirteenth	305	285	89	33	31	10	1			1
Fourteenth	305	285	89	35	31	10
Fifteenth	309	281	88	36	31	10
Sixteenth	306	283	88	36	31	10
Seventeenth	303	284	90	36	31	10					1
Eighteenth	305	283	91	35	31	10
Nineteenth	305	279	96	32	31	10	1					1
Twentieth	308	276	93	35	31	10	1					1
Twenty-first	305	276	96	35	31	10	1					1
Twenty-second	305	275	97	35	31	10	1					1
Twenty-third	304	275	97	36	31	10	2
Twenty-fourth	305	279	93	35	31	10	2
Twenty-fifth	302	281	91	35	31	10	2
Twenty-sixth	303	280	93	36	31	10	2
Twenty-seventh	306	277	93	36	31	10	2
Twenty-eighth	307	279	91	35	31	10	2
Twenty-ninth	305	278	116	35	12	7	2
Thirtieth	306	279	120	33	11	4	2
Thirty-first	308	276	118	37	11	3	1
Thirty-second	309	270	117	44	11	3	1
Thirty-third	309	276	110	44	11	4	1
Thirty-fourth	312	275	107	30	11	4	17
Thirty-fifth	313	257	99	23	11	3	50
Thirty-sixth	306	42	3	5			399

CHAPTER XI.
CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY.

To be thus made a mark conspicuous

For Envy’s shaft and brutal prejudice—

To hear above the loud huzzas the voice

Of some Satanic fool’s malignity

Roaring along the wind, like a wild ass

Braying th’ Assyrian desert, and to doubt

The applauding throng that gathers eagerly

To share the sunshine or perchance to weave

Some subtle scheme of selfishness,—all this

Is what the orators and poets call

The crowning honor!

A candidate for public office has a difficult part to play. There is constant and imminent danger that he will commit some blunder, and thereby put himself on the defensive. The fear of doing or saying something which shall put a club into the hands of the enemy haunts both himself and his friends. He is obliged to stand for some months on a high platform in the market-place, saying to the whole world: “Now get out your microscopes and your telescopes; with the one examine me, and with the other examine the heavens of my past, and see if you can’t find something that shall make me wince—some tender spot which you may prod and make me cry out with pain.”

Notably does a candidate for the presidency suffer from exposure to this fierce light and heat. All summer long he must be scrutinized and assailed. All kinds of attack he must meet with equanimity. Every sort of missile he must face, from the keenest-barbed arrows of analysis and satire to the vulgarest discharges of mud. To be angered is a sign that he is hurt; to bear it without flinching is a sign of indifferent reprobacy; to do nothing at all is a sign of cowardice! Of a certainty the American people will see their man. They will hear him, if he can be tortured into opening his mouth. To all this we must add the diabolical ingenuity of that inquisitor-general of the ages, the “interviewer” of the public press—that wizen-faced mixture of gimlet, corkscrew, and blood-sucker, who squeezes in, and bores, and pumps, and then goes away with a bucket filled with the ichor of his own imagination. This he retails to the public as the very wine of truth!

All the dangers of the case considered, the candidate generally adopts the policy of mum. He becomes pro tempore a universal know-nothing. He has no ideas, no thoughts, no opinions. He has no political preferences. He has not heard the news from Europe. He does not know whether the Danubian provinces can compete with the American wheat-fields or not. He has never heard that there is an English market for American beef. He has never read a book. His family receive the newspapers; he does not read them. The grave problem as to whether the Mississippi runs by St. Louis he has not fully considered. The time of the year and the day of the week are open questions which he has not investigated. Such matters should be referred to the managers of the observatory and the bureau of statistics. Only on two things does he plant himself firmly; to wit, the Nicene Creed and the platform of his party!

How would General Garfield, now that he was nominated, bear himself before the country? Could one who had so long been accustomed to speaking out in meeting hold his peace, and assume the role of the typical know-nothing? The General seems not to have taken counsel with any body on this question, but simply to have made up his mind that the mum policy was pusillanimous, and that for himself he would continue to talk to his neighbors and friends and the general public just as usual. This was, according to the judgment of the trimmers, an alarming decision. Even thoughtful politicians were doubtful whether the outspoken, talking policy could be trusted. But General Garfield soon taught them and the country at large the useful lesson that a man can talk without being a fool. He began at once to converse freely on all proper occasions, to make little speeches to delegations of friends who came from all directions to pay their respects, and to abandon, both theoretically and practically, the monastic method of running for office.

But let us resume the narrative. In the evening after his nomination the General was called upon at the parlors of the Grand Pacific Hotel, and in the presence of a great company of ladies and gentlemen was formally notified of his nomination. Senator Hoar headed the committee appointed to carry the news to the nominee, and to receive, in due season, his response. The committee confronted General Garfield, and the distinguished chairman said:

“General Garfield: The gentlemen present are appointed by the National Republican Convention, representatives of every State in the Union, and have been directed to convey to you the formal ceremonial notice of your nomination as the Republican candidate for the office of President of the United States. It is known to you that the convention which has made this nomination assembled divided in opinion and in council in regard to the candidate. It may not be known to you with what unanimity of pleasure and of hopes the convention has received the result which it has reached. You represent not only the distinctive principles and opinion of the Republican party, but you represent also its unity; and in the name of every State in the Union represented on the committee, I convey to you the assurance of the cordial support of the Republican party of these States at the coming election.”

At the conclusion of Senator Hoar’s speech, General Garfield replied with great gravity and composure:

“Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen: I assure you that the information you have officially given to me brings the sense of very grave responsibility, and especially so in view of the fact that I was a member of your body, a fact that could not have existed with propriety had I had the slightest expectation that my name would be connected with the nomination for the office. I have felt, with you, great solicitude concerning the situation of our party during the struggle; but, believing that you are correct in assuring me that substantial unity has been reached in the conclusion, it gives me a gratification far greater than any personal pleasure your announcement can bring.

“I accept the trust committed to my hands. As to the work of our party, and as to the character of the campaign to be entered upon, I will take an early occasion to reply more fully than I can properly do to-night.

“I thank you for the assurances of confidence and esteem you have presented to me, and hope we shall see our future as promising as are indications to-night.”

As soon as the morning broke, General Garfield made preparations for starting home. It seldom falls to the lot of man to return home under such circumstances. He was followed by the eyes of millions. A special car whirled him away in triumph. By his side were a multitude of distinguished friends. A candidate for the presidency of the United States is not likely to want for friends. Those who accompanied General Garfield, however, were, for the most part, the genuine article. Many of them were his old comrades in arms; others were prominent politicians, some of them, no doubt, busy in constructing the fabric of a new administration with themselves for possible corner-stones.

At La Porte, Indiana, the train made a halt. That great organ of American noise, the brass band, came down the street with a multitudinous citizenship at its heels. The huzzas called out the General. He was introduced by Governor Foster, of Ohio. Then there were more huzzas, and the train rolled away. The same happened at South Bend, at Elkhart, at Goshen, and at all the other points, great and small, between Chicago and Cleveland. At the latter city there was an immense demonstration. The spacious depot was crowded with an enthusiastic throng, that burst out with far-resounding cheers as the General’s train came in. The city was all in a flutter, and it became evident that the people were up and stirring. The great Ohioan was driven to the hotel, and, in response to a speech of welcome, said:

“Fellow-citizens of my native county and of my State: I thank you for this remarkable demonstration of your good-will and enthusiasm on this occasion. I can not at this time proceed upon any speech. All that I have to say is, that I know that all this demonstration means your gladness at the unity and harmony and good feeling of a great political party, and in part your good feeling toward a neighbor, an old friend. For all of these reasons I thank you, and bid you good night.”

The following day, the 10th of June, was passed at Cleveland, and on the morrow General Garfield visited his old school at Hiram. The commencement exercises were set for that day, and the distinguished nominee was under promise to speak. Here were gathered his old friends and neighbors. Here he had first met his wife. She, with the boys, was now a part of her husband’s audience. Here was the scene of his early struggles for discipline and distinction. Here he had been a bell-ringer, a student, a college professor, a president. Here he had seen the horizon of his orphanage and boyhood sink behind him, and the horizon of an auspicious future rise upon his vision. Before the vast throng of visitors and students, at the appointed hour, he rose and delivered his address as follows:

“Fellow-citizens, old neighbors and friends of many years: It has always given me pleasure to come back here and look upon these faces. It has always given me new courage and new friends, for it has brought back a large share of that richness which belongs to those things out of which come the joys of life.

“While sitting here this afternoon, watching your faces and listening to the very interesting address which has just been delivered, it has occurred to me that the least thing you have, that all men have enough of, is perhaps the thing that you care for the least, and that is your leisure—the leisure you have to think; the leisure you have to be let alone; the leisure you have to throw the plummet into your mind, and sound the depth and dive for things below; the leisure you have to walk about the towers yourself, and find how strong they are or how weak they are, to determine what needs building up; how to work, and how to know all that shall make you the final beings you are to be. Oh, these hours of building!

“If the Superior Being of the universe would look down upon the world to find the most interesting object, it would be the unfinished, unformed character of the young man or young woman. Those behind me have probably in the main settled this question. Those who have passed into middle manhood and middle womanhood are about what they shall always be, and there is but little left of interest, as their characters are all developed.

“But to your young and your yet unformed natures, no man knows the possibilities that lie before you in your hearts and intellects; and, while you are working out the possibilities with that splendid leisure that you need, you are to be most envied. I congratulate you on your leisure. I commend you to treat it as your gold, as your wealth, as your treasure, out of which you can draw all possible treasures that can be laid down when you have your natures unfolded and developed in the possibilities of the future.

“This place is too full of memories for me to trust myself to speak upon, and I will not. But I draw again to-day, as I have for a quarter of a century, life, evidence of strength, confidence and affection from the people who gather in this place. I thank you for the permission to see you and meet you and greet you as I have done to-day.”

After this reunion with his old friends at Hiram, General Garfield was, on the morning of the 12th of June, driven to Mentor and Painesville. At both places he was received with great enthusiasm, and at the latter place, in response to the speech of welcome, made the following characteristic address:

“Fellow-citizens and neighbors of Lake County: I am exceedingly glad to know that you care enough to come out on a hot day like this, in the midst of your busy work, to congratulate me. I know it comes from the hearts of as noble a people as lives on the earth. [Cheers.] In my somewhat long public services there never has been a time, in however great difficulties I may have been placed, that I could not feel the strength that came from resting back upon the people of the Nineteenth District. To know that they were behind me with their intelligence, their critical judgment, their confidence and their support was to make me strong in every thing I undertook that was right. I have always felt your sharp, severe, and just criticism, and my worthy, noble, supporting friends always did what they believed was right. I know you have come here to-day not altogether, indeed not nearly, for my sake, but for the sake of the relations I am placed in to the larger constituency of the people of the United States. It is not becoming in me to speak, nor shall I speak, one word touching politics. I know you are here to-day without regard to politics. I know you are all here as my neighbors and my friends, and, as such, I greet you and thank you for this candid and gracious welcome. [Cheers.] Thus far in my life I have sought to do what I could according to my light. More than that I could never hope to do. All of that I shall try to do, and if I can continue to have the good opinion of my neighbors of this district, it will be one of my greatest satisfactions. I thank you again, fellow-citizens, for this cordial and generous welcome.” [Applause and cheers.]

After some days of rest at his home, General Garfield repaired to Washington City, where he arrived on the 15th day of June. Everywhere along the route the railway stations and towns were crowded with people, anxious to catch a glimpse and hear a word from the probable President. Arriving at the Capital, he was, on the evening of the 16th, serenaded at his hotel, and, responding to the cheers of the crowd, appeared on the balcony and made the following happy speech:

“Fellow-citizens: While I have looked upon this great array, I believe I have gotten a new idea of the majesty of the American people. When I reflect that wherever you find sovereign power, every reverent heart on this earth bows before it, and when I remember that here for a hundred years we have denied the sovereignty of any man, and in place of it we have asserted the sovereignty of all in place of one, I see before me so vast a concourse that it is easy for me to imagine that the rest of the American people are, gathered here to-night, and if they were all here, every man would stand uncovered, all in unsandaled feet in presence of the majesty of the only sovereign power in this Government under Almighty God. [Cheers.] And, therefore, to this great audience I pay the respectful homage that in part belongs to the sovereignty of the people. I thank you for this great and glorious demonstration. I am not, for one moment, misled into believing that it refers to so poor a thing as any one of our number. I know it means your reverence for your Government, your reverence for its laws, your reverence for its institutions, and your compliment to one who is placed for a moment in relations to you of peculiar importance. For all these reasons I thank you.

“I can not at this time utter a word on the subject of general politics. I would not mar the cordiality of this welcome, to which to some extent all are gathered, by any reference except to the present moment and its significance; but I wish to say that a large portion of this assemblage to-night are my comrades, late of the war for the Union. For them I can speak with entire propriety, and can say that these very streets heard the measured tread of your disciplined feet, years ago, when the imperiled Republic needed your hands and your hearts to save it, and you came back with your numbers decimated; but those you left behind were immortal and glorified heroes forever; and those you brought back came, carrying under tattered banners and in bronze hands the ark of the covenant of your Republic in safety out of the bloody baptism of the war [cheers], and you brought it in safety to be saved forever by your valor and the wisdom of your brethren who were at home; and by this you were again added to the great civil army of the Republic. I greet you, comrades and fellow-soldiers, and the great body of distinguished citizens who are gathered here to-night, who are the strong stay and support of the business, of the prosperity, of the peace, of the civic ardor and glory of the Republic, and I thank you for your welcome to-night. It was said in a welcome to one who came to England to be a part of her glory—and all the nation spoke when it was said:

“‘Normans and Saxons and Danes are we,

But all of us Danes in our welcome of thee.’

“And we say to-night, of all nations, of all the people, soldiers and civilians, there is one name that welds us all into one. It is the name of American citizen, under the union and under the glory of the flag that led us to victory and to peace. [Applause.] For this magnificent welcome I thank you with all there is in my heart.”

VIEW OF MENTOR.

On the next evening after this address, General Garfield was given a reception and banquet, at which were present many of the most distinguished men of the nation. Then, after a brief stay at Washington, he returned to Mentor, hoping to enjoy a respite from the excitements of the hour. But there was little hope of rest for one who by the will of the millions had thus been whirled into the blazing focus of expectation.

On the 3d of July the Soldiers’ Monument at Painesville, Ohio, was formally dedicated. General Garfield was present on the occasion, and after the principal oration, was called upon to speak. His address created great enthusiasm, especially among the veterans, who were gathered in great numbers to hear their old leader. General Garfield said:

“Fellow-citizens: I can not fail to respond on such an occasion, in sight of such a monument to such a cause, sustained by such men. [Applause and cheers.] While I have listened to what my friend has said, two questions have been sweeping through my heart. One was, ‘What does the monument mean?’ and the other, ‘What will the monument teach?’ Let me try and ask you for a moment, to help me answer what does the monument mean. Oh! the monument means a world of memories, a world of deeds, and a world of tears, and a world of glories. You know, thousands know, what it is to offer up your life to the country, and that is no small thing, as every soldier knows. Let me put the question to you: For a moment suppose your country in the awfully embodied form of majestic law, should stand above you and say: ‘I want your life. Come up here on the platform and offer it.’ How many would walk up before that majestic presence and say, ‘Here I am, take this life and use it for your great needs.’ [Applause.] And yet almost two millions of men made that answer [applause], and a monument stands yonder to commemorate their answer. That is one of its meanings. But, my friends, let me try you a little further. To give up life is much, for it is to give up wife, and home, and child, and ambition. But let me test you this way further. Suppose this awfully majestic form should call out to you, and say, ‘I ask you to give up health and drag yourself, not dead, but half alive, through a miserable existence for long years, until you perish and die in your crippled and hopeless condition. I ask you to volunteer to do that,’ and it calls for a higher reach of patriotism and self-sacrifice; but hundreds of thousands of you soldiers did that. That is what the monument means also. But let me ask you to go one step further. Suppose your country should say, ‘Come here, on this platform, and in my name, and for my sake, consent to be idiots. [Voice—Hear, hear.] Consent that your very brain and intellect shall be broken down into hopeless idiocy for my sake.’ How many could be found to make that venture? And yet there are thousands, and that with their eyes wide open to the horrible consequences, obeyed that call.

“And let me tell how one hundred thousand of our soldiers were prisoners of war, and to many of them when death was stalking near, when famine was climbing up into their hearts, and idiocy was threatening all that was left of their intellects, the gates of their prison stood open every day, if they would quit, desert their flag and enlist under the flag of the enemy; and out of one hundred and eighty thousand not two per cent. ever received the liberation from death, starvation and all that might come to them; but they took all these horrors and all these sufferings in preference to going back upon the flag of their country and the glory of its truth. [Applause.] Great God! was ever such measure of patriotism reached by any men on this earth before? [Applause.] That is what your monument means. By the subtle chemistry that no man knows, all the blood that was shed by our brethren, all the lives that were devoted, all the grief that was felt, at last crystallized itself into granite rendered immortal, the great truth for which they died [applause], and it stands there to-day, and that is what your monument means.

“Now, what does it teach? What will it teach? Why, I remember the story of one of the old conquerors of Greece, who, when he had traveled in his boyhood over the battle-fields where Miltiades had won victories and set up trophies, returning said: ‘These trophies of Miltiades will never let me sleep.’ Why? Something had taught him from the chiseled stone a lesson that he could never forget; and, fellow-citizens, that silent sentinel, that crowned granite column, will look down upon the boys that will walk these streets for generations to come, and will not let them sleep when their country calls them. [Applause.] More than from the bugler on the field, from his dead lips will go out a call that the children of Lake County will hear after the grave has covered us and our immediate children. That is the teaching of your monument. That is its lesson, and it is the lesson of endurance for what we believe, and it is the lesson of sacrifices for what we think—the lesson of heroism for what we mean to sustain—and that lesson can not be lost to a people like this. It is not a lesson of revenge; it is not a lesson of wrath; it is the grand, sweet, broad lesson of the immortality of the truth that we hope will soon cover, as the grand Shekinah of light and glory, all parts of this Republic, from the lakes to the gulf. [Applause.] I once entered a house in old Massachusetts, where, over its doors, were two crossed swords. One was the sword carried by the grandfather of its owner on the field of Bunker Hill, and the other was the sword carried by the English grandsire of the wife, on the same field, and on the other side of the conflict. Under those crossed swords, in the restored harmony of domestic peace, lived a happy, and contented, and free family, under the light of our republican liberties. [Applause.] I trust the time is not far distant when, under the crossed swords and the locked shields of Americans North and South, our people shall sleep in peace, and rise in liberty, love, and harmony under the union of our flag of the Stars and Stripes.”

The next public utterance of General Garfield had been anxiously awaited. Until now he had not found time to return a formal answer to the committee, whose chairman had, on the evening of the 8th of June, informed him of his nomination for the Presidency. On the 12th of July, the General, from his home at Mentor, issued his letter of acceptance. It was a document of considerable length, touching upon most of the political questions of the day, and gave great satisfaction to his party throughout the Union. The letter was as follows:

“Mentor, Ohio, July 10th, 1880.

“Dear Sir: On the evening of the 8th of June last I had the honor to receive from you, in the presence of the committee of which you were chairman, the official announcement that the Republican National Convention at Chicago had that day nominated me for their candidate for President of the United States. I accept the nomination with gratitude for the confidence it implies and with a deep sense of the responsibilities it imposes. I cordially indorse the principles set forth in the platform adopted by the convention. On nearly all the subjects of which it treats my opinions are on record among the published proceedings of Congress. I venture, however, to make special mention of some of the principal topics which are likely to become subjects of discussion, without reviewing the controversies which have been settled during the last twenty years, and with no purpose or wish to revive the passions of the late war.

“It should be said that while Republicans fully recognize and will strenuously defend all the rights retained by the people and all the rights reserved to the States, they reject the pernicious doctrine of State supremacy, which so long crippled the functions of the National Government and at one time brought the Union very near to destruction. They insist that the United States is a nation, with ample power of self-preservation; that its Constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof are the supreme law of the land; that the right of the nation to determine the method by which its own legislature shall be created can not be surrendered without abdicating one of the fundamental powers of the Government; that the national laws relating to the election of representatives in Congress shall neither be violated nor evaded; that every elector shall be permitted freely and without intimidation to cast his lawful ballot at such election and have it honestly counted, and that the potency of his vote shall not be destroyed by the fraudulent vote of any other person. The best thoughts and energies of our people should be directed to those great questions of national well-being in which we all have a common interest. Such efforts will soonest restore perfect peace to those who were lately in arms against each other, for justice and good-will will outlast passion; but it is certain that the wounds can not be completely healed and the spirit of brotherhood can not fully pervade the whole country until every one of our citizens, rich or poor, white or black, is secure in the free and equal enjoyment of every civil and political right guaranteed by the Constitution and the laws. Wherever the enjoyment of this right is not assured, discontent will prevail, immigration will cease, and the social and industrial forces will continue to be disturbed by the migration of laborers and the consequent diminution of prosperity. The National Government should exercise all its constitutional authority to put an end to these evils, for all the people and all the States are members of one body; and no member can suffer without injury to all.

“The most serious evils which now afflict the South arise from the fact that there is not such freedom and toleration of political opinion and action that the minority party can exercise an effective and wholesome restraint upon the party in power. Without such restraint party rule becomes tyrannical and corrupt. The prosperity which is made possible in the South, by its great advantages of soil and climate, will never be realized until every voter can freely and safely support any party he pleases. Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither justice nor freedom can be permanently maintained. Its interests are intrusted to the States and the voluntary action of the people. Whatever help the nation can justly afford should be generously given to aid the States in supporting common schools; but it would be unjust to our people and dangerous to our institutions to apply any portion of the revenues of the nation or of the States to the support of sectarian schools. The separation of the Church and the State in every thing relating to taxation should be absolute.

“On the subject of national finances my views have been so frequently and fully expressed that little is needed in the way of additional statement. The public debt is now so well secured, and the rate of annual interest has been so reduced by refunding, that rigid economy in expenditures and the faithful application of our surplus revenues to the payment of the principal of the debt, will gradually but certainly free the people from its burdens, and close with honor the financial chapter of the war. At the same time the Government can provide for all its ordinary expenditures, and discharge its sacred obligations to the soldiers of the Union and to the widows and orphans of those who fell in its defense. The resumption of specie payments, which the Republican party so courageously and successfully accomplished, has removed from the field of controversy many questions that long and seriously disturbed the credit of the Government and the business of the country. Our paper currency is now as national as the flag, and resumption has not only made it everywhere equal to coin, but has brought into use our store of gold and silver. The circulating medium is more abundant than ever before, and we need only to maintain the equality of all our dollars to insure to labor and capital a measure of value from the use of which no one can suffer loss. The great prosperity which the country is now enjoying should not be endangered by any violent change or doubtful financial experiments.

“In reference to our custom laws, a policy should be pursued which will bring revenues to the Treasury, and will enable the labor and capital employed in our great industries to compete fairly in our own markets with the labor and capital of foreign producers. We legislate for the people of the United States, not for the whole world; and it is our glory that the American laborer is more intelligent and better paid than his foreign competitor. Our country can not be independent unless its people, with their abundant natural resources, possess the requisite skill at any time to clothe, arm, and equip themselves for war, and in time of peace to produce all the necessary implements of labor. It was the manifest intention of the founders of the Government to provide for the common defense, not by standing armies alone, but by raising among the people a greater army of artisans, whose intelligence and skill should powerfully contribute to the safety and glory of the nation.

“Fortunately for the interests of commerce there is no longer any formidable opposition to appropriations for the improvement of our harbors and great navigable rivers, provided that the expenditures for that purpose are strictly limited to works of national importance. The Mississippi River, with its great tributaries, is of such vital importance to so many millions of people that the safety of its navigation requires exceptional consideration. In order to secure to the nation the control of all its waters, President Jefferson negotiated the purchase of a vast territory, extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. The wisdom of Congress should be invoked to devise some plan by which that great river shall cease to be a terror to those who dwell upon its banks, and by which its shipping may safely carry the industrial products of twenty-five millions of people.

“The interests of agriculture, which is the basis of all our material prosperity, and in which seven-twelfths of our population are engaged, as well as the interests of manufactures and commerce, demand that the facilities for cheap transportation shall be increased by the use of all our great water courses. The material interests of this country, the traditions of its settlement and the sentiment of our people, have led the Government to offer the widest hospitality to immigrants who seek our shores for new and happier homes, willing to share the burdens as well as the benefits of our society, and intending that their posterity shall become an undistinguishable part of our population. The recent movement of the Chinese to our Pacific coast partakes but little of the qualities of such an immigration, either in its purposes or its result. It is too much like an importation to be welcomed without restriction; too much like an invasion to be looked upon without solicitude. We can not consent to allow any form of servile labor to be introduced among us under the guise of immigration. Recognizing the gravity of this subject, the present administration, supported by Congress, has sent to China a commission of distinguished citizens for the purpose of securing such a modification of the existing treaty as will prevent the evils likely to arise from the present situation. It is confidently believed that these diplomatic negotiations will be successful without the loss of that commercial intercourse between the two great powers which promises a great increase of reciprocal trade and the enlargement of our markets. Should these efforts fail, it will be the duty of Congress to mitigate the evils already felt, and prevent their increase by such restrictions as, without violence or injustice, will place upon a sure foundation the peace of our communities and the freedom and dignity of labor.

“The appointment of citizens to the various executive and judicial offices of the Government is, perhaps, the most difficult of all duties which the Constitution has imposed upon the Executive. The convention wisely demands that Congress shall coöperate with the Executive Department in placing the civil service on a better basis. Experience has proved that, with our frequent changes of administration, no system of reform can be made effective and permanent without the aid of legislation. Appointments to the military and naval service are so regulated by law and custom, as to leave but little ground of complaint. It may not be wise to make similar regulations by law for the civil service, but, without invading the authority or necessary discretion of the Executive, Congress should devise a method that will determine the tenure of office, and greatly reduce the uncertainty which makes that service so uncertain and unsatisfactory. Without depriving any officer of his rights as a citizen, the Government should require him to discharge all his official duties with intelligence, efficiency, and faithfulness. To select wisely from our vast population those who are best fitted for the many offices to be filled, requires an acquaintance far beyond the range of any one man. The Executive should, therefore, seek and receive the information and assistance of those whose knowledge of the communities in which the duties are to be performed, best qualifies them to aid in making the wisest choice. The doctrines announced by the Chicago Convention are not the temporary devices of a party to attract votes and carry an election. They are deliberate convictions, resulting from a careful study of the spirit of our institutions, the events of our history, and the best impulses of our people. In my judgment, these principles should control the legislation and administration of the Government. In any event, they will guide my conduct until experience points out a better way. If elected, it will be my purpose to enforce strict obedience to the Constitution and the laws, and to promote as best I may the interest and honor of the whole country, relying for support upon the wisdom of Congress, the intelligence and patriotism of the people, and the favor of God.

“With great respect, I am very truly yours,

“J. A. Garfield.

“To Hon. Geo. F. Hoar, Chairman of the Committee.”

The battle was now fairly on. The Democracy had, on the 23d day of June, in convention at Cincinnati, nominated as their standard-bearer the distinguished and popular soldier, Major-General Winfield S. Hancock. This nomination was received by the General’s party with as much satisfaction and enthusiasm as that of General Garfield had been by the Republicans. Meanwhile, General James B. Weaver, of Iowa, had been chosen to make the race by the National party, in a convention held in Chicago, on the 9th of June. So that there were presented for the suffrages of the people three eminent soldiers—all men of large abilities, undoubted patriotism, and thorough soundness of character. It was evident, however, from the opening of the campaign, that the contest was narrowed to Generals Garfield and Hancock, with the chances in favor of the former; and as the public mind became warmed up to the pitch of battle, the chances of Garfield were augmented by almost every incident of the fight. The platforms of the two parties had both been made with a view to political advantage rather than to uphold any distinctive principles. So the fight raged backwards along the line of the history and traditions of the two parties rather than forward along the line of the living political issues of the present and the future. In a modified form the old questions of the war were revived and paraded. A delegate in the Cincinnati Convention, allowing his zeal to run away with his sense, had pledged a “Solid South” to the support of General Hancock. This sectional utterance was a spark dropped among the old war memories of the Union soldiers; and the politicians were quick to fan the flame by suggesting that “a Solid South” ought to be confronted by “a Solid North.” This line of argument, of course, meant ruin to the Democracy. The Republican leaders virtually abandoned the Southern States, and concentrated all their efforts upon the doubtful States of the Northern border. Indiana became a critical battle-field; and here the political fight was waged with the greatest spirit. Having a gubernatorial election in October, it was foreseen that to carry this doubtful State would be well nigh decisive of the contest, and to this end the best talent of both parties was hurried into her borders. While these great movements were taking place, General Garfield remained, for the most part, at his quiet home at Mentor. On the 3d of August he attended the dedication ceremonies of a soldiers’ monument at Geneva, Ohio. More than ten thousand people were in attendance. After the principal address of the day had been delivered, General Garfield was introduced, and spoke as follows:

LAWNFIELD.—THE HOME OF PRESIDENT GARFIELD AT MENTOR.

“Fellow-citizens, Ladies and Gentlemen: These gentlemen had no right to print on a paper here that I was to make a speech, for the types should always tell the truth. [A voice—They did it this time.] They have not done it in this case; but I can not look out upon an audience in Ashtabula County, recognizing so many old faces and old friends, without at least making my bow to them, and saying ‘good-bye’ before I go. I can not either hear such a speech as that to which I have just listened without thanking the man who made it [applause] and the people who enabled him to make it [applause], for after all no man can make a speech alone. It is the great human power that strikes up from a thousand hearts that acts upon him and makes the speech. [Applause.] It originates with those outside of him, if he makes one at all, and every man that has stood on this platform to-day has had a speech made out of him by you and by what is yonder on your square. That’s the way speeches are made, and if I had time to stay long enough, these forces with you might make one out of me. [Applause.] Ideas are the only things in the universe really immortal. Some people think that soldiers are chiefly renowned for courage. That is one of the cheapest and commonest qualities; we share it with the brutes. I can find you dogs and bears and lions that will fight, and fight to the death, and will tear each other. Do you call that warfare? Let me tell you the difference. They are as courageous as any of these soldiers, if mere brute courage is what you are after. The difference between them and us is this: Tigers never hold reunions [laughter] to celebrate their victories. When they have eaten the creature they have killed, that is the only reunion they have ever held. [Laughter.] Wild beasts never build monuments over their slain comrades. Why? Because there are no ideas behind their warfares. Our race has ideas, and because ideas are immortal, if they be true, we build monuments to them. We hold reunions not for the dead, for there is nothing on all the earth that you and I can do for the dead. They are past our help and past our praise. We can not add more glory, and we can give them no immortality. They do not need us, but forever and forever more we need them. [Applause.] The glory that trails in the clouds behind them after their sun has set, falls with its benediction upon us who are left [applause], and it is to commemorate the immortality of the ideas for which they fought, that you assemble to-day and dedicate your monument, that points up toward God who leads them in the glory of the great world beyond. Around these ideas, under the leadership of these ideas, we assemble to-day, reverently to follow, reverently to acknowledge the glory they achieved and the benediction they left behind them. That is the meaning of an assembly like this, and to join in it, to meet you, my old neighbors and constituents, to share with you the memories that we have heard rehearsed and the inspiration that this day points to, that this monument celebrates, is to me a joy, and for it I am grateful to you.”

Immediately after this address at Geneva, General Garfield took his departure for New York, where it had been determined to hold a conference of the principal Republican leaders, relative to the conduct of the pending campaign. The standard-bearer participated in the council of his friends, adding not a little by his presence and unflagging spirits to the zeal and enthusiasm of those upon whose efforts so much depended. On the 7th he left the city for Lake Chautauqua, where he had decided to spend a day at the great Sunday-school encampment and other lakeside resorts. He was received with the greatest good-will by the thousands assembled at Jamestown and Chautauqua; and on the eve of his departure was induced, in response to salutations and cheers, to make the following brief address:

“Fellow-citizens: You have done so much to me since I arrived on this shore, that I am quite unable to tell what sort of man I am this morning. [Laughter.] I had never been here, and really did not know what you were doing. Last evening I asked Mr. Vincent, rather brusquely, to tell me what Chautauqua means—what your work here means—and he filled me so full of your ideas that I have not yet assimilated it so as to be quite sure what manner of man I am since I got hold of it. But this I see, you are struggling with one of the two great problems of civilization. The first one is a very old question—‘How shall we get leisure?’ That is the object of every hammer stroke, of every blow that labor has struck since the foundation of the world. [Applause.] The fight for bread is a great primal fight, and it is so absorbing a struggle that until one conquers to some extent he can have no leisure. We may divide the struggles of the human race into two chapters: First, the fight to get leisure, and, second, what to do with our leisure when we have won it. It looks to me that Chautauqua has solved the second problem. [Applause.] Like all blessings, leisure is a very bad thing unless it is well used. The man with a fortune ready made, and with leisure on his hands, is likely to get sick of the world, sick of himself, tired of life, and to become a useless, wasted man. What shall you do with your leisure? I understand Chautauqua is trying to develop new energies, largeness of mind and culture in a better sense, ‘with the varnish scratched off,’ as our friend, Dr. Kirkwood, says. [Applause.] We are getting over the fashion of painting and varnishing our native woods. We are getting down to the real grain, and finding whatever is best and most beautiful in it, and if Chautauqua is helping to develop in our people the native stuff that is in them rather than to give them varnish and gewgaws of culture, it is doing well. Chautauqua, therefore, has filled me with thought, and, in addition to that, you have filled me with gratitude for your kindness and for this great spontaneous greeting in early morning, earlier than men of leisure get up. [Laughter.] Some of these gentlemen of the press around me looked distressed at the early rising by which you have compelled our whole party to look at the early sun. [Laughter.] This greeting on the lake slope toward the sun is very precious to me, and I thank you all. This is a mixed audience of citizens, and I will not offend the proprieties of the occasion by discussing controverted questions or entering upon any political discussion. I look in the faces of men of all shades of opinion, but whatever our party affiliation, I trust there is in all this audience that love of our beneficent institutions which makes it possible for free labor to earn leisure, and for our institutions to make that leisure worth something [applause]—our Union and our institutions, under the blessing of equal laws, equal to all colors and all conditions, an open career for every man, however humble, to rise to whatever place the power of a strong arm, the strength of a clear head, and the aspirations of a pure heart can do to lift him. That prospect ought to inspire every young man in this vast audience. [Applause.] I heard yesterday and last night the songs of those who were lately redeemed from slavery, and I felt that there, too, was one of the great triumphs of the Republic. [Applause.] I believe in the efficiency of the forces that come down from the ages behind us, and I wondered if the tropical sun had not distilled its sweetness, and if the sorrow of centuries of slavery had not distilled its sadness into verses, which were touching, sweet verses, to sing the songs of liberty as they sing them wherever they go. [Applause.]

“I thank that choir for the lesson they have taught me here, and now, fellow-citizens, thanking you all, good-bye.” [Applause.]

On the 9th of the month General Garfield returned to his home, where he again sought a respite from the uproar and tumult of publicity which followed him everywhere. On the 25th of August, a reunion of his old regiment, the Forty-second Ohio, was held at Ashland, and the General could but accept an invitation to share the occasion with his former comrades in arms. The old soldiers passed a resolution, declaring it an honor that their former Colonel had become the conspicuous man of the nation, and commending him to the world as a model of all soldierly virtues. He was elected President of the Regimental Association for the ensuing year, and was thereupon called out for an address. The General spoke as follows:

“Fellow-citizens: This is a family gathering, a military family, for in war a regiment is to the army what a family is to the whole civilized community. [Here a portion of the platform fell.] A military reunion without some excitement and some accident would be altogether too monotonous and tame to be interesting, and in this good-natured audience we can have a good many accidents like that and still keep quiet and be happy.

“I said this is a family reunion, an assembly of the Forty-second military family, and it is well for us to meet here. Nineteen years ago I met a crowd of earnest citizens in that court-room above stairs. Your bell was rung, your people came out. The teacher of your schools was among them. The boys of the school were there, and after we had talked together a little while, about our country and its imperiled flag, the teacher of the schools offered himself to his country, and twenty of his boys with him. They never went back into the school-house again; but in the dark days of November, 1861, they and enough Ashland County boys to make one hundred went down with me to Columbus to join another one hundred that had gone before them from Ashland County, and these two hundred of your children stood in the center of our military family and bore these old banners that you see tattered before you to-day. One of them was given to our family by the ladies of Ashland, and Company C, from Ashland, carried it well. It was riddled by bullets and torn by underbrush. Flapped by the winds of rebellion, it came back tattered, as you see, but with never a stain upon its folds, and never a touch of dishonor upon it anywhere; and the other of these banners was given us by the special friends of Company A, in my old town of Hiram, the student company from the heart of the Western Reserve, and it also shared like its fellows, the fate, and came home covered with the glory of the conflict.

“We were a family, I say again, and we did not let partisan politics disturb us then, and we do not let partisanship enter our circle here to-day.

“We did not quarrel about controversies outside of our great work. We agreed to be brethren for the Union, under the flag, against all its enemies everywhere, and brothers to all men who stood with us under the flag to fight for the Union, whatever their color of skin, whatever their previous politics, whatever their religion. In that spirit we went out; in that spirit we returned; and we are glad to be in Ashland to-day, for it is one of the homes of our regiment, where we were welcomed in the beginning and have always been welcome since. We are grateful for the welcome tendered us to-day by this great assembly of our old neighbors and friends of Ashland County.

“Now, fellow-citizens, a regiment like a family has the right to be a little clannish and exclusive. It does not deny the right of any other family to the same privileges, but it holds the members of its own family a little nearer and a little dearer than any other family in the world. And so the Forty-second Regiment has always been a band of brothers. I do not this day know a Forty-second man in the world who hates another Forty-second man. There never was a serious quarrel inside the regiment. There was never a serious disagreement between its officers. The worst thing I have ever heard said against it is that all its three field officers came home alive. And they are all here on this stand to-day. It was, perhaps, a little against us that no one of us had the honor to get killed or seriously crippled; but we hold that it was not altogether our fault, and we trust that some day or other you will have forgiven us, if you have not to-day, for being alive and all here together.

“I want to say another thing about the soldiers’ work. I know of nothing in all the circle of human duty that so unites men as the common suffering and danger and struggle that war brings upon a regiment. You can not know a man so thoroughly and so soon as by the tremendous tests to which war subjects him. These men knew each other by sight long before they knew each other by heart; but before they got back home they knew each other, as you sometimes say you know a son, ‘by heart;’ for they had been tested by fire; they had been tested by starvation; they had been tested by the grim presence of death, and each knew that those who remained were union men; men that in all the hard, close chances of life, had the stuff in them that enabled them to stand up in the very extremes they did; and stand up ready to die. And such men, so tried and so acquainted, never got over it; and the rest of the world must permit them to be just a little clannish towards each other; the rest of the world will not think we are narrow when they consider this particular fault of ours; a little closer to us than any of the rest of the world in a military way.

“Now, fellow-citizens, we are here to look into your faces, to enjoy your hospitality, to revive our old memories of the place, but, for more than any thing else, to look into each other’s faces, and revive old memories of a great many places less pleasing and home-like than Ashland. We have been meeting together in this way for nearly fifteen years, and we have made a pledge to each other that as long as there are two of us left to shake hands, we will meet and greet the survivor. Some of us felt a little hurt about ten years ago when the papers spoke of us as the survivors of the Forty-second Regiment. We were survivors it was true, but we thought we were so surviving that it need not be put at us, as though we were about to die. Now, I don’t know how it is with the rest of you. Most of mankind grow old, and you can see it in their faces. I see here and there a bald head, like my own, or a white one, like Captain Gardner’s, but to me these men will be boys till they die. We call them boys; we meet and greet them as boys, even though they become very old boys, and in that spirit of young, hopeful, daring manhood we expect to meet them so long as we live. Nothing can get us a great way from each other while we live. I am glad to meet these men here to-day. [Here another portion of the platform broke down, precipitating General Garfield and two or three of the reporters to the ground.] Continuing, he said: I was glad also that there was not any body hurt when that broke, and nobody made unhappy, and I will conclude all I wanted to say, more than I intended to say, by adding this: These men went out without one single touch of revenge in their hearts. They went out to maintain this Union and make it immortal; to put their own immortal lives into it, and to make it possible that the people of Ashland should make the monogram of the United States, as you see it up there (pointing to the monogram on the building), a wreath of Union inside of a very large N, a capital N, that stands for Nation, a Nation so large that it includes the ‘U. S. A.’ all the people of the Republic, and will include it for evermore; that is what we meant then and is what we mean now.

“And now, fellow-citizens and soldiers of the Forty-second Regiment—for I have been talking mainly to you, and if any of this crowd have overheard I am not particularly to blame for it—I say, fellow-citizens and comrades, I greet you to-day with great satisfaction and bid you a cordial good-bye.”

Two days later General Garfield was present at a reunion of an artillery company, held at Mentor, and since they had composed a part of the force with which Thomas stayed at last the furious onset at Chickamauga, their old chief of staff was all the more willing to say a few words for their edification. This he did as follows:—

“Comrades: This is really the first time I have met this battery as an organization since the Sunday evening of the terrible battle of Chickamauga, nearly seventeen years ago. I last saw you there in the most exposed angle of that unfortunate line, broken by the combined forces of Bragg and Longstreet. I then saw you gallantly fighting under the immediate direction of General Thomas, to reform that broken line, and hold the exultant rebel host in check until the gallant Steedman with reinforcements swept them back into the dark valley of the Chickamauga. I am now able to distinguish among your numbers faces which I saw there in that terrible hour. But how changed! I now see you here with your wives, children, and friends, peaceably enjoying this grand reception of your friends and neighbors here assembled to honor and entertain you.

“But nothing so attracts my attention as your young and active appearance. It is more than eighteen years since you left for the war, and yet you are not old. Indeed, many of you appear almost like boys. This I am pleased to observe; for if there be any men upon the face of the earth who deserve an extension of time, it is you who, in early manhood, so freely gave your services to your country, that it might live. Nothing can be more proper than these annual reunions. I am aware of the reputation which this organization, as well as my own regiment, always enjoyed of unity and good fellowship among its officers and men. May you, therefore, continue to enjoy and perpetuate that friendship to the very latest hour of your lives.”

General Garfield had now to learn that the people in their eagerness, and especially the politicians in their unselfish devotion, had decreed him no further rest, even at Lawnfield. Pilgrimages to Mentor became the order of the day. For meanwhile the October elections had been held, and all had gone triumphantly for the Republicans. Indiana, chief of the so-called “doubtful States,” had whirled into line with an unequivocal majority. Ohio had put a quietus on all hopes of the Democracy to carry her electoral votes for Hancock. The high-blown anticipations of the friends of “the superb soldier” were shockingly shattered. And so all the paths of political preferment led to Mentor; and all the paths were trodden by way-worn pilgrims, who, with sandal-shoon and scallop-shell urged their course thither to see him who was now their hope. On the 19th of October a train of these pilgrims, rather more notable than the rest, came in from Indiana. It was the Lincoln Club of Indianapolis, four hundred strong. They were uniformed, and wore grotesque cockades extemporized out of straw hats into a sort of three-cornered conspicuity. The General was, none the less, greatly pleased with his visitors, and spared no pains to make their brief stay at Mentor a pleasure, if not a profit. The club was formally introduced by Captain M. G. McLean, and in response General Garfield said:—

“Gentlemen: You come as bearers of dispatches, so your chairman tells me. I am glad to hear the news you bring, and exceedingly glad to see the bringers of the news. Your uniform, the name of your club, the place from which you come, are all full of suggestions. You recollect the verses that were often quoted about the old Continental soldiers: “The old three-cornered hat and breeches, and all that were so queer.” Your costume brings back to our memory the days of the Continentals of 1776, whose principles I hope you represent. You are called the Lincoln Club, and Lincoln was himself a revival, a restoration of the days of ’76 and their doctrines. The great Proclamation of Emancipation, which he penned, was a second Declaration of Independence—broader, fuller, the New Testament of human liberty; and then you come from Indiana, supposed to be a Western State, but yet in its traditions older than Ohio. More than one hundred years ago a gallant Virginian went far up into your wilderness, captured two or three forts, took down the British flag, and reared the Stars and Stripes. Vincennes and Cahokia, and a post in Illinois, were a part of the capture. Your native State was one of the first fruits of that splendid fighting power which gave the whole West to the United States, and now these representatives of Indiana come representing the Revolution in your hats, representing Abraham Lincoln in your badges, and representing the victory both of the Revolution and of Lincoln in the news you bring. I could not be an American and fail to welcome your costumes, your badges, your news and yourselves. Many Indiana men were my comrades in the days of the war. I remember a regiment of them that was under my command near Corinth, when it seemed necessary for the defense of our forces to cut down a little piece of timber—seventy-five acres. We unboxed for my brigade about four thousand new axes, and the Fifty-first Regiment of Indiana Volunteers chopped down more trees in half a day than I supposed it was possible could fall in any forest in a week. It appears that in the great political forest from which you have just come, your axes have been busy again. I especially welcome the axmen of the Fifty-first Regiment, who may happen to be here, and thank you all, gentlemen, for the compliment of your visit, and for the good news you bring. I do not prize that news half so much for its personal relations to you and to me, as I do because it is a revival of the spirit of 1776, the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, the spirit of universal liberty, and the spirit of just and equal law all over this land. That gives your news its greatest significance. Gentlemen, I thank you again, and shall be glad to take you by the hand.”

After the speeches, the members of the Lincoln Club all had the pleasure of shaking the hand of General Garfield, and of hearing an individual welcome from his lips.

Two days afterwards, the Cuyahoga Veteran Corps came on a similar pilgrimage to Lawnfield, and were similarly well received. General M. D. Leggett, commander of the corps, made the introductory address; and, in answer, General Garfield said:

“Comrades: Any man that can see twelve hundred comrades in his front-door yard has as much reason to be proud as for any thing that can well happen to him in this world. After that has happened, he need not much care what else happens, or what else don’t happen. To see twelve hundred men, from almost every regiment of the State, and from regiments and brigades and divisions of almost every other State—to see the consolidated field report of the survivors of the war, sixteen years after it is over—is a great sight for any man to look on. I greet you all with gratitude for this visit. Its personal compliment is great.

“But there is another thought in it far greater than that to me and greater to you. Just over yonder about ten miles, when I was a mere lad, I heard the first political speech of my life. It was a speech that Joshua R. Giddings was making. He had come home to appeal to his constituents. A Southern man drew a pistol on him while he was speaking in favor of human liberty, and marched over toward him to shoot him down, to stop his speech and quench the voice of liberty. I remember but one thing that the old hero said in the course of that speech so long ago, and it was this: ‘I knew I was speaking for liberty, and I felt that if the assassin had shot me down, my speech would still go on and triumph.’ Well, now, gentlemen, there are twelve hundred, and the hundred times twelve hundred—the million of men that went out into the field of battle to fight for our Union—felt just as that speaker felt—that if they should all be shot down the cause of liberty would still go on. You and all the Union felt that around you, and above you, and behind you, were a force and a cause and an immortal truth that would outlive your bodies and mine, and survive all our brigades and all our armies and all our battles. Here you are to-day in the same belief. We shall all die, and yet we believe that after us the immortal truths for which we fought will live in a united Nation, a united people against all factions, against all section, against all division, so long as there shall be a continent of rivers and mountains and lakes. It was that great belief that lifted you all up into the heroic height of great soldiers in the war, and it is that belief that you cherish to-day, and carry with you in all your pilgrimages and in all your reunions. In that great belief, and in that inspiring faith, I meet you and greet you to-day, and with it we will go on to whatever fate has in store for us all.

“I thank you, comrades, for this demonstration of your faith and confidence and regard for me. Why, gentlemen, this home of mine will never be the same place again. I am disposed to think that a man does not take every thing away from a place when he takes his body away. It was said that long after the death of the first Napoleon, his soldiers believed that on certain anniversary days he came out and reviewed all his dead troops, he himself being dead; that he had a midnight review of those that had fought and fallen under his leadership. That, doubtless, was a fiction of the imagination; but I shall have to believe in all time hereafter the character and spirit and impressions of my comrades live on this turf, and under these trees, and in this portal; and it will be a part of my comradeship in all days to come.”

On the 28th of the month a delegation of Portage County citizens, two hundred strong, headed by Judge Luther Day, of Ravenna, visited Mentor, and paid the customary respects to him who was now regarded as well nigh certain to carry away the greatest honor known to the American people. After the company was formally introduced by Judge Day, the General, in response, said:

“Judge Day, Ladies and Gentlemen: I once read of a man who tried to wear the armor and wield the sword of some ancient ancestor, but found them too large for his stature and strength. If I should try at this moment to wear and sway the memories which your presence awakens, I should be overwhelmed, and wholly unable to marshal and master the quick-coming throng of memories which this semicircle of old friends and neighbors has brought to me. Here are school-fellows of twenty-eight years ago. Here are men and women who were my pupils a quarter of a century ago. Here are venerable men who, twenty one years ago, in the town of Kent, launched me upon the stormy sea of political life. I see others who were soldiers in the old regiment which I had the honor to command, and could I listen to the teaching and thoughtful words of my friend, the venerable late Chief Justice of Ohio, who has just spoken, without remembering that evening in 1861, of which he spoke too modestly, when he and I stood together in the old church at Hiram, and called upon the young men to go forth to battle for the Union, and be enlisted before they slept, and thus laid the foundation of the Forty-second Regiment? How can I forget all these things, and all that has followed? How can I forget that twenty-five years of my life were so braided and intertwined with the lives of the people of Portage County, when I see men and women from all its townships standing at my door? I can not forget these things while life and consciousness remain. No other period of my life can be like this. The freshness of youth, the very springtide of life, the brightening on toward noonday—all were with you and of you, my neighbors, my friends, my cherished comrades, in all the relations of social, student, military and political life and friendship. You are here, so close to my heart that I can not trust myself to an attempt to marshal these memories with any thing like coherence. To know that my neighbors and friends in Portage County, since the first day of my Congressional life, have never sent to any convention a delegate who was hostile to me; that through all the storm of detraction that roared around me, the members of the old guard of Portage County have never wavered in their faith and friendship, but have stood an unbroken phalanx with their locked shields above my head, and have given me their hearts in every contest. If a man can carry in his memory a jewel more precious than this, I am sure Judge Day has never heard what it is.

“Well, gentlemen, on the eve of great events, closing a great campaign, I look into your faces and draw from you such consolation as even you can not understand. Whatever the event may be, our post is secure, and whatever may befall me hereafter, if I can succeed in keeping the hearts of Portage County near to me I shall know that I do not go far wrong in any thing, for they are men who love the truth for truth’s sake, far more than they love any man.

“Ladies and gentlemen, all the doors of my house are open to you. The hand of every member of my family is outstretched to you. Our hearts greet you, and we ask you to come in.”

In the meantime there had occurred the most remarkable episode of the campaign. On the 21st of October appeared in the columns of a New York newspaper called Truth, a letter purporting to have been written on the 23d of January, 1880, to one H. L. Morey, of Lynn, Massachusetts. The communication was ostensibly a reply to a letter written to General Garfield with the purpose of obtaining his views on the great question of the Chinese in the United States, and more particularly to extract his ideas on the subject of Chinese cheap labor. This previous supposititious letter of Morey was never produced, but only the alleged answer of General Garfield, which was as follows:

“House of Representatives, }

Washington, D. C., January 23, 1880. }

“Dear Sir: Yours in relation to the Chinese problem came duly to hand. I take it that the question of employes is only a question of private and corporate economy. Individuals or companies have the right to buy labor where they can get it the cheapest. We have a treaty with the Chinese Government, which should be religiously kept until its provisions are abrogated by the action of the General Government, and I am not prepared to say that it should be abrogated until our great manufacturing interests are conserved in the matter of labor.

Very truly yours,

“J. A. Garfield.

“To H. L. Morey, Employers’ Union, Lynn, Mass.”

FAC-SIMILE OF THE MOREY LETTER.

FAC-SIMILE OF GARFIELD’S LETTER OF DENIAL.

It was instantly manifested, on the appearance of this letter, that its almost certain effect would be to lose General Garfield the electoral votes of the Pacific States; for the settled sentiment of those States against Chinese immigration and the consequent competition of that people with American free labor, was known to be so pronounced as to make it sure that no party discipline could hold them in allegiance to a candidate who squinted at favoring the Celestials. There was instant alarm among the General’s friends, but their fears were quickly quieted by the prompt action of Garfield himself, who immediately sent to Hon. Marshall Jewell, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, the following dispatch:

“Mentor, O., October 22, 1880.

“To Hon. M. Jewell and Hon. S. W. Dorsey:

“I will not break the rule I have adopted by making a public reply to campaign lies, but I authorize you to denounce the so-called Morey letter as a bold forgery, both in its language and sentiment. Until its publication I never heard of the existence of the Employers’ Union of Lynn, Massachusetts, nor of such a person as H. L. Morey.

“J. A. Garfield.”

The mails of the same day brought to General Garfield a copy of the Truth newspaper, containing a lithographic fac-simile of his alleged letter, and to this he made immediate answer as follows:

Mentor, O., October 23, 1880.

“To Hon. Marshall Jewell:

“Your telegram of this afternoon is received. Publish my dispatch of last evening, if you think best. Within the last hour the mail has brought me a lithographic copy of the forged letter. It is the work of some clumsy villain who can not spell nor write English, nor imitate my handwriting. Every honest and manly Democrat in America, who is familiar with my handwriting, will denounce the forgery at sight. Put the case in the hands of the ablest detectives at once, and hunt the rascal down.

“J. A. Garfield.”

The question of veracity was thus broadly opened between General Garfield and the mythical Morey and his backers. It did not take the American people long to decide between them. Except in the columns of extreme and reckless partisan newspapers and in the months of irresponsible demagogues, the matter was laid forever to rest. To convince the people that James A. Garfield was a liar was an up-hill work. The Republicans simply said that the Morey letter was an outrageous fraud, a forged expedient, a last resort to stay a lost cause.

In the investigation the following facts clearly appeared:

1. That no such person as H. L. Morey lived at or near Lynn, Massachusetts, at the time when the alleged Garfield letter was written.

2. That no such association as the supposed Morey pretended to represent, ever existed in Lynn.

3. The fac-simile of the letter printed in the columns of Truth showed, on close examination, all the internal evidences of forgery. It was a coarse and easily detected counterfeit of the General’s handwriting and signature, and contained, among other palpable absurdities, the word “companies,” spelled companys—a blunder utterly at variance with General Garfield’s scholarship and careful literary habit.

4. The fact that the sentiments of the letter were in broad and palpable contradiction of Garfield’s letter of acceptance and other public utterances on the Chinese question.

5. General Garfield’s positive and unreserved denial of authorship.

This put the abettors of the Morey business on the defensive, and they squirmed not a little. They said that Morey was dead; which was a necessary thing to say. They declared themselves innocent of all complicity. The letter had come into their hands in the regular way. They believed it to be true, etc. But all these allegations combined would not suffice to stay the inevitable reaction; for say what you will, do not the American people believe in fair play?

According to General Garfield’s expressed desire, the Morey case was carried to the courts. A certain Kenward Philp, a contributor to Truth, was charged with the forgery and arrested.

The grand jury in General Sessions presented an indictment against Joseph Hart, Louis A. Post, Kenward Philp and Charles A. Bryne for publishing in the newspaper Truth a criminal libel on General Garfield.

A long trial followed in the court of Oyer and Terminer, of New York. The suit was at first directed against the editors of Truth, and Philp was thus unearthed. As the trial progressed, although the evidence was inconclusive as to Philp’s authorship of the letter, yet every circumstance tended to show unmistakably that the whole affair had been a cunning conspiracy of some prodigious scoundrel to injure General Garfield’s chances for the Presidency.

The production of the letter and its envelope in Court betrayed at once the tampering to which the latter had been subjected, and settled the character of the disgraceful political maneuver which had given it birth. The alleged forger proved to be an English Bohemian, who contributed to the “story papers,” and who confessedly wrote the editorial articles defending the genuineness of the letter in the underground journal which first published it. The register of the Kirtland House, at Lynn, Massachusetts, was produced by the defense, and the name “H. L. Morey” was shown there in October, 1879, and again in February of 1880. But there was the most circumstantial evidence that the name had been recently written on each page of the register. The name had, undoubtedly, been added to the hotel register in each instance by some one who was anxious to bolster up the fraud.

The discovery was made that the envelope containing the forged letter had originally been addressed to some one else than H. L. Morey; and an enlarged photographic copy of the envelope revealed the fact that the original name was Edward or Edwin Fox or Cox, in care of some company in the city of New York. And in the next place it was shown that Edward Fox was employed upon the Truth!

The prosecution failed to convict the publishers of the Truth of criminal libel; but the country rendered again the old Scotch verdict of “Guilty—but not proven.” The Presidential election, however, was imminent, and it is not improbable that General Garfield’s vote on the Pacific Slope was injured by the base machinations of the Morey conspirators.

On the 2d of November was held the Presidential election. The result had been foreseen. The Democracy could not stem the tide. The “Solid South,” the unfortunate plank in their platform declaring in favor of “a tariff for revenue only,” and the Morey forgery which had been charged up to their account, wrought their ruin. Garfield was overwhelmingly elected. The morning of the 3d revealed the general outline of the result. For a few days it was claimed by the Republicans that they had carried two or three of the Southern States, but this idea was soon dispelled. In a like unprofitable way the Democrats set up certain and sundry claims for some of the Northern States. One day they had carried New York; another day they had authentic information that California and Oregon were safe for Hancock. It was all in vain. The South all went Democratic, and all of the Northern States, except Nevada and one electoral vote from California, had been secured by the Republicans. The victory was unequivocal. The humble boy of Mother Garfield was elected President of the United States by 214 electoral votes against 155 for his antagonist, General Hancock. Thus, under the benign institutions of our country, was conferred upon one who began his life in a log cabin the highest civic honor known among the nations of the earth.

General Garfield spent election day at home without manifest excitement. In the evening, and later in the night, news began to arrive indicative of the result. Still no agitation. To some friends he said: “I have been busying myself with a calculation to determine the rate of voting to-day. During the hours in which the election has been in progress about 2000 ballots have dropped for every tick of the pendulum.” With the morning light there was no longer doubt. The title of General, won on the bloody field of Chickamauga, had given place to that of President-elect, won before the grandest bar of public opinion under the circle of the sun.

On the day succeeding the election, the first delegation bearing congratulations visited Mentor. It was composed of the Oberlin College faculty and students, headed by President Fairchild, and the occasion was one of more than usual interest. In reply to the speech of introduction, General Garfield said:

“Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: This spontaneous visit is so much more agreeable than a prepared one. It comes more directly from the heart of the people who participate, and I receive it as a greater compliment for that reason. I do not wish to be unduly impressible or superstitious, but, though we have outlived the days of the augurs, I think we have a right to think of some events as omens; and I greet this as a happy and auspicious omen, that the first general greeting since the event of yesterday is tendered to me by a venerable institution of learning. The thought has been abroad in the world a good deal, and with reason, that there is a divorce between scholarship and politics. Oberlin, I believe, has never advocated that divorce. But there has been a sort of cloistered scholarship in the United States that has stood aloof from active participation in public affairs, and I am glad to be greeted here to-day by the active, live scholarship of Ohio; and I know of no place where scholarship has touched upon the nerve center of the public so effectually as Oberlin. For this reason I am specially grateful for this greeting from the Faculty and students of Oberlin College and its venerable and venerated President. I thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for this visit. Whatever the significance of yesterday’s event may be, it will be all the more significant for being immediately indorsed by the scholarship and culture of my State. I thank you, ladies and gentlemen, and thank your President for coming with you. You are cordially welcome.”

On the 6th of November the Republican Central Committee of Indiana repaired to Mentor and paid their respects to the coming Chief Magistrate; and on the 12th of the month the President, soon-to-be, was visited by the Republican Central Committee of Cuyahoga County. In answer to their salutation he said:

“Gentlemen: I have been saying a good many things during the past few weeks, and think I should be nearly through talking by this time. I should be the listener. But I can not refrain from saying that I am exceedingly glad to meet with you, a company of Republicans from my native county, and congratulate you upon what you have done. You have shown your strength and character in your work. You have shown that you are men of high convictions and observe them in all that you do. I have always taken pride in this county and in the city of Cleveland. The Forest City is well worthy to be the capital of the Western Reserve. It has the credit of our country at heart, never losing sight of it in the heat of political warfare. In no city in the country can be found more active and earnest men—solid business men. It is an honor to any one to have the confidence of such a people. I am glad to be here this evening to greet you and thank you for your kind invitation.” [Applause.]

Garfield had now more offices in prospect or actual possession than usually fall to the lot of one man. He was still a member of the House of Representatives in the Forty-sixth Congress; he was also United States Senator-elect for the State of Ohio; and, thirdly, he was President-elect of the United States. On the 10th of November, being perhaps content with the Presidency, he resigned his seats in the House and Senate, and thus for about four months became Citizen Garfield, of Ohio.

The 2d of December was rather a Red-letter day at Mentor. The Presidential electors for the State of Ohio, on that day called on the President-elect and tendered their best regards. In answer to their congratulations he spoke with much animation and feeling as follows:

“Gentlemen: I am deeply grateful to you for this call, and for these personal and public congratulations. If I were to look upon the late campaign and its result merely in the light of a personal struggle and a personal success, it would probably be as gratifying as any thing could be in the history of politics. If my own conduct during the campaign has been in any way a help and a strength to our cause, I am glad. It is not always an easy thing to behave well. If, under trying circumstances, my behavior as a candidate has met your approval, I am greatly gratified. But the larger subject—your congratulations to the country on the triumph of the Republican party—opens a theme too vast for me to enter upon now.

“I venture, however, to mention a reflection which has occurred to me in reference to the election of yesterday. I suppose that no political event has happened in all the course of the contest since the early spring, which caused so little excitement, and, indeed, so little public observation, as the Presidential election which was held yesterday at midday. The American people paid but little attention to the details of the real Presidential election, and for a very significant reason: although you and all the members of the Electoral Colleges had absolute constitutional and technical right to vote for any body you chose, and although no written law directed or suggested your choice, yet every American knew that the august sovereign of this Republic—the 9,000,000 of voters—on an early day in November had pronounced the omnipotent fiat of choice; and that sovereign, assuming as done that which he had ordered to be done, entertained no doubt but that his will would be implicitly obeyed by all the Colleges in all the States. That is the reason why the people were so serenely quiet yesterday. They had never yet found an American who failed to keep his trust as a Presidential Elector.

“From this thought I draw this lesson: that when that omnipotent sovereign, the American people, speaks to any one man and orders him to do a duty, that man is under the most solemn obligations of obedience which can be conceived, except what the God of the universe might impose upon him. Yesterday, through your votes, and the votes of others in the various States of the Union, it is probable (the returns will show) that our great political sovereign has laid his commands upon me. If he has done so, I am as bound by his will and his great inspiration and purpose as I could be bound by any consideration that this earth can impose upon any human being. In that presence, therefore, I stand and am awed by the majesty and authority of such a command.

“In so far as I can interpret the best aspirations and purposes of our august sovereign, I shall seek to realize them. You and I, and those who have acted with us in the years past, believe that our sovereign loves liberty, and desires for all inhabitants of the Republic peace and prosperity under the sway of just and equal laws. Gentlemen, I thank you for this visit; for this welcome; for the suggestions that your presence and your words bring, and for the hope that you have expressed, that in the arduous and great work before us we may maintain the standard of Nationality and promote all that is good and worthy in this country, and during the coming four years we may raise just as large a crop of peace, prosperity, justice, liberty, and culture as it is possible for forty-nine millions of people to raise.”

At the close of the address there was a general hand-shaking à la Américaine; and then to add to the interest of the occasion the President’s aged mother, to whom more than ever of late his heart had turned with loyal devotion, was led into the apartment and presented to the distinguished guests by her more distinguished son.

Two days afterwards there was another assembly of visitors at Mentor. This time it was a delegation of colored Republicans—Black Republicans in both senses of the word—from South Carolina, headed by the negro orator, R. B. Elliott, who delivered the congratulatory address. In answer, the President-elect said:

“General Elliott and Gentlemen: I thank you for your congratulations on the successful termination of the great campaign that recently closed, and especially for your kind allusion to me personally for the part I bore in that campaign.

“What I have done, what I have said concerning your race and the great problem that your presence on this continent has raised, I have said as a matter of profound conviction, and hold to with all the meaning of the words employed in expressing it. What you have said in regard to the situation of your people, the troubles that they encountered, the evils from which they have suffered and still suffer, I listened to with deep attention, and shall give it full measure of reflection.

“This is not the time nor the place for me to indicate any thing as to what I shall have to say and do, by and by, in an official way. But this I may say: I noted as peculiarly significant one sentence in the remarks of General Elliott, to the effect that the majority of citizens, as he alleges, in some portions of the South, are oppressed by the minority. If this be so, why is it so? Because a trained man is two or three men in one, in comparison with an untrained man; and outside of politics and outside of parties, that suggestion is full, brim-full, of significance, that the way to make the majority always powerful over the minority, is to make its members as trained and intelligent as the minority itself. That brings the equality of citizenship; and no law can confer and maintain in the long run a thing that is not upheld with a reasonable degree of culture and intelligence. Legislation ought to do all it can. I have made these suggestions simply to indicate that the education of your race, in my judgment, lies at the base of the final solution of your great question; and that can not be altogether in the hands of the State or National Government. The Government ought to do all it properly can, but the native hungering and thirsting for knowledge that the Creator planted in every child, must be cultivated by the parents of those children to the last possible degree of their ability, so that the hands of the people shall reach out and grasp in the darkness the hand of the Government extended to help, and by that union of effort bring what mere legislation alone can not immediately bring.

“I rejoice that you have expressed so strongly and earnestly your views in regard to the necessity of your education. I have felt for years that that was the final solution.

“Those efforts that are humble and comparatively out of sight are, in the long run, the efforts that tell. I have sometimes thought that the men that sink a coffer-dam into the river, and work for months in anchoring great stones to build the solid abutments and piers, whose work is by and by hidden by the water and out of sight, do not get their share of the credit. The gaudy structure of the bridge that rests on these piers, and across which the trains thunder, is the thing that strikes the eye of the general public a great deal more than the sunken piers and hard work. The educational growth and the building up of industry, the economy and all that can help the foundations of real prosperity is the work that, in the long run, tells. Some Scotch poet said, or put it in the mouth of some prophet to say, that the time would come ‘when Bertram’s right and Bertram’s might shall meet on Ellengowan’s height,’ and it is when the might and the right of a people meet that majorities are never oppressed by minorities. Trusting, gentlemen, that you may take part in this earnest work of building up your race from the foundation into the solidity of intelligence and industry, and upon those bases at last see all your rights recognized, is my personal wish and hope for your people.”

About this time in November, the weather closed in stormy and cold, and, fortunately for Garfield, the tide of visitors ebbed, and he found a little rest. Late in the month, he made a brief visit to Washington, where he spent a few days among his friends and political advisers. After that, he returned to Mentor, and during December his life was passed in comparative quiet at his home.

No doubt in these December days the vision of his boyhood rose many times to view. No doubt, in the silence of the winter evening, by his glowing hearth at Lawnfield, with the wife of his youth by his side and the children of their love around them, and the certain Presidency of the Republic just beyond, he realized in as full measure as falls to the lot of man that strange thing which is called success.

The New Year came in. The bleak January—bitter cold—went by. On the 16th of February, the distinguished Senator Conkling, of New York, made a visit to the President-elect. In the imagination of the political busybodies the event was fraught with great consequences. It was said that the haughty stalwart leader was on a mission looking to the construction of the new administration, to seek favor for his friends, and to pledge therefor the support—hitherto somewhat doubted—of himself and his partisans. The interview was named the “Treaty of Mentor;” but the likelihood is that the treaty consisted of no more than distinguished civilities and informal discussion of the personnel of the new Cabinet, etc. A few days later the President-elect made his departure for Washington to be inaugurated. The special train which was to bear himself and family away, left Mentor on the 28th of February. Fully three thousand people were gathered at the dépôt. Cheer after cheer was given in honor of him who had made the name of Mentor for ever famous. A farewell speech was delivered by Hon. A. L. Tinker, of Painesville, and to this the Chief Magistrate responded thus:

“Fellow-citizens and neighbors of Lake County: I thank you for the cordial and kindly greeting and farewell. You have come from your homes than which no happier are known in this country, from this beautiful lakeside full of that which makes country life happy, to give me your blessing and farewell. You do not know how much I leave behind me of friendship, and confidence, and home-like happiness; but I know I am indebted to this whole people for acts of kindness, of neighborly friendship, of political confidence, of public support, that few men have ever enjoyed at the hands of any people. You are a part of this great community of Northern Ohio, which, for so many years, have had no political desire but the good of your country; and now wishing but the promotion of liberty and justice, have had no scheme but the building up of all that was worthy and true in our Republic. If I were to search over all the world I could not find a better model of political spirit, of aspirations for the truth and the right, than I have found in this community during the eighteen years its people have honored me with their confidence. I thank the citizens of this county for their kindness, and especially my neighbors of Mentor, who have demanded so little of me, and have done so much to make my home a refuge and a joy. What awaits me I can not now speak of, but I shall carry to the discharge of the duties that lie before me, to the problems and dangers I may meet, a sense of your confidence and your love, which will always be answered by my gratitude. Neighbors, friends, and constituents, farewell.” [Great applause.]

Promptly at 1 P. M. the train moved off, and the crowd dispersed. At Ashtabula, that famous old seat of abolitionism, the President-elect was called out by the chorus of cheers, and, in answer, said:

“Citizens of Ashtabula: I greatly thank you for this greeting. I can not forget the tree that was planted so many years ago, and its planting so far watched and assisted by the people of Ashtabula County. It has grown to be a great tree. Its branches cover the whole Republic, and its leaves and fruit are liberty to all men. That is a work for the citizens of Ashtabula County to be proud of to the latest generation. If I, as your representative, have helped on the cause you so much have at heart, I am glad; and if in the future I can help to confirm and strengthen what you have done so much to build; if I can help to garner the harvest that you have helped to plant, I shall feel that I have done something toward discharging the debt of gratitude which I owe for your confidence and love. I thank you, fellow-citizens, for this farewell greeting, and I bid you good-bye.” [Great cheering.]

All along the route, as far as Altoona, Pennsylvania, where night overtook the train, the scene at Ashtabula was renewed, the President-elect responding pleasantly to the many greetings of the people.

We are now come to the last scene in the progress of James A. Garfield from the obscurity of a backwoods home to the high seat of the Presidency. Wonderful career! Magnificent development of American manhood and citizenship! The train carrying the President-elect reached Washington on the evening of the 29th of February. By the courtesy of Mrs. President Hayes the Garfield family was taken at once to the White House. A press note, speaking of the arrival, said:

“The General looks travel-tired and weary, although the excitement keeps him well stimulated, having something of the effect of rich-living. He says that when once his Cabinet is settled, and he begins home-life at the White House, he will have a comparative freedom from worry. He does not sleep excellently well. Probably no man ever did while engaged in making up a Cabinet.”

Here, then, we say, Good-night; but think of To-morrow!

CHAPTER XII.
IN THE HIGH SEAT.

Not titled rank nor storied pride of birth,

But free voice of the Nation

Hath raised him to the highest place of earth,

So fit to grace the station.

The morning of March 4, 1881, dawned—if such days may be said to dawn at all—dark and gloomy. The snow, which had been falling and melting into a very uncomfortable slush for days before, still continued. The “weather clerk” prophesied more snow and rain; and altogether the promise of this day was not good to the unnumbered thousands of Americans who had come to Washington to see Garfield inaugurated. The weather was such as to give a fresh impulse to the talk which is sometimes indulged about changing the date of Inauguration Day to May 4th.

Nevertheless, fair weather or foul, blue sky or gray, the new administration must begin. Shortly before eleven o’clock the military escort of the President and President-elect moved up Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the Capitol. It was one of the finest military displays ever seen in Washington. Pennsylvania Avenue was lined with a vast multitude, whose continual cheers made a sound which could be heard afar, like the undying voices of the ocean waves.

President Hayes and President-elect Garfield rode in an open barouche, drawn by four horses. The First Cleveland Troop, splendidly equipped and drilled, marched before, as a guard of honor. Garfield looked weary. He remarked during the morning that the preceding week had been the most trying of his life. The effect of sleepless nights and deep anxiety was plainly visible on his countenance. Thus, with one of the four grand divisions of the immense procession as his immediate escort, heartily cheered all along the line, at half-past eleven the new President reached the Capitol.

Meanwhile the Senate Chamber and galleries had been rapidly filling with a distinguished throng. The center of attraction was in the front seat in the gallery, opposite the Vice-President’s desk, where sat the President-elect’s mother and wife and Mrs. Hayes. The venerable woman who sat at the head of the seat was regarded with interest by the whole audience, as she looked down upon the scene in which her son was the most conspicuous figure, with a quiet expression of joy that was very delightful to behold. Next to her sat Mrs. Hayes. Mrs. Garfield sat at her right, and was dressed very quietly. The three ladies chatted together constantly, and the eldest set the other two laughing more than once by her quaint remarks on the proceedings in the chamber below them.

The Senators and Senators-elect were all seated on the left side of the chamber, and the prominent members of the body were eagerly watched by the spectators. Among them were David Davis and Roscoe Conkling engaged in earnest conversation. Near these two sat Thurman and Hamlin, two able Senators whose last day in the Senate had come. The venerable Hamlin was evidently in a meditative mood as the last minutes of his long official life passed by, and was not inclined to be talkative. Thurman brought out the familiar snuff-box, took his last pinch of Senatorial snuff, and flung the traditional bandana handkerchief once more to the breeze.

Soon General Winfield S. Hancock, late Democratic candidate for the Presidency, came in, accompanied by Senator Blaine. Hancock was dressed in Major-General’s full uniform, looking in splendid condition, and conducted himself in a manly, modest fashion, which called forth warm applause, and commanded the respect of all spectators. Phil Sheridan was heartily welcomed when he came in soon after and took his seat by Hancock’s side.

After these, the Diplomatic Corps entered, presenting a brilliant appearance; and following them soon came the Judges of the Supreme Court. Then the Cabinet appeared, and immediately the President and President-elect. Vice-President-elect Arthur came last, and was presented to the Senate by Vice-President Wheeler. He spoke a few quiet, appreciative words in that elegant way he has of doing things, and then took the oath of office, after which, exactly at twelve—the Senate clock having been turned back five minutes—the Forty-Sixth Congress was adjourned without day.

The center of interest was now transferred to the east front of the Capitol, whither, as soon as the new Senators had been sworn in, the procession of distinguished people in the Chamber took up the line of march.

A great platform had been erected in front of the building, and the sight presented from it was a most striking one, for rods and rods in front and to either side were massed thousands upon thousands of spectators wedged in one solid mass, so that nothing but their heads could be seen. It was indeed

ONE GREAT SEA OF FACES,

all uplifted in eager expectancy. In the center of the platform, at the front, was a little space raised a few inches above the level of the rest, upon which stood several chairs, the most noticeable being a homely and antique one, which tradition, if not history, says was occupied by Washington at his first inauguration, and which has certainly been used for many years on such occasions.

In this chair Mr. Garfield took his seat for a few minutes when he arrived, the others being occupied by President Hayes, Vice-President Arthur, Mr. Wheeler, Chief-Justice Waite, and Senators Pendleton, Bayard, and Anthony. The elder and younger Mrs. Garfield, Mrs. Hayes, and one or two other ladies, were also given seats here. At about a quarter of one o’clock General Garfield arose from the historic chair, and took from his pocket a roll of manuscript, tied at the corner with blue ribbon. Being introduced by Senator Pendleton, he proceeded to deliver the Inaugural Address.

“Fellow-Citizens—We stand to-day upon an eminence which overlooks a hundred years of national life, a century crowded with perils, but crowned with triumphs of liberty and love. Before continuing the onward march let us pause on this height for a moment to strengthen our faith and renew our hope by a glance at the pathway along which our people have traveled.

“It is now three days more than a hundred years since the adoption of the first written Constitution of the United States, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. The new Republic was then beset with danger on every hand. It had not conquered a place in the family of Nations. The decisive battle of the war for independence, whose centennial anniversary will soon be gratefully celebrated at Yorktown, had not yet been fought. The colonists were struggling, not only against the armies of Great Britain, but against the settled opinions of mankind, for the world did not believe that the supreme authority of government could be safely intrusted to the guardianship of the people themselves. We can not overestimate the fervent love, the intelligent courage, the saving common sense with which our fathers made the great experiment of self-government.

“When they found, after a short time, that the Confederacy of States was too weak to meet the necessities of a glorious and expanding Republic, they boldly set it aside, and in its stead established a National Union, founded directly upon the will of the people, endowed with powers of self-preservation, and with ample authority for the accomplishment of its great objects.

“Under this Constitution the boundaries of freedom are enlarged, the foundations of order and peace have been strengthened, and the growth in all the better elements of National life have vindicated the wisdom of the founders and given new hope to their descendants.

“Under this Constitution our people long ago made themselves safe against danger from without, and secured for their mariners and flag equality of rights on all the seas. Under this Constitution twenty-five States have been added to the Union, with constitutions and laws framed and enforced by their own citizens to secure the manifold blessings of local and self-government.

“The jurisdiction of this Constitution now covers an area fifty times greater than that of the original thirteen states, and a population twenty times greater than that of 1780. The trial of the Constitution came at last under the tremendous pressure of civil war.

“We ourselves are witnesses that the Union emerged from the blood and fire of that conflict, purified and made stronger for all the beneficent purposes of good government, and now at the close of this, the first century of growth, with the inspirations of its history in their hearts, our people have lately reviewed the condition of the Nation, passed judgment upon the conduct and opinions of the political parties, and have registered their will concerning the future administration of the Government. To interpret and to execute that will in accordance with the Constitution is the paramount duty of the Executive. Even from this brief review it is manifest that the Nation is resolutely facing to the front, a resolution to employ its best energies in developing the great possibilities of the future. Sacredly preserving whatever has been gained to liberty and good government during the century, our people are determined to leave behind them all those bitter controversies concerning things which have been irrevocably settled, further discussion of which can only stir up strife and delay the onward march. The supremacy of the Nation and its laws should be no longer the subject of debate. That discussion, which for half a century threatened the existence of the Union, was closed at last in the high court of war by a decree from which there is no appeal: that the Constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof shall continue to be the supreme law of the land, binding alike on the States and the people. This decree does not disturb the autonomy of the States, nor interfere with any of their necessary rules of local self-government, but it does fix and establish the permanent supremacy of the Union.

“The will of the Nation, speaking with the voice of battle and through the amended Constitution, has fulfilled the great promise of 1776 by proclaiming ‘Liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof.’

“The elevation of the negro race from slavery to full rights of citizenship, is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1776.

“No thoughtful man can fail to appreciate its beneficent effect upon our people. It has freed us from the perpetual danger of war and dissolution; it has added immensely to the moral and industrial forces of our people; it has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both.

“It has surrendered to their own guardianship the manhood of more than five millions of people, and has opened to each of them a career of freedom and usefulness. It has given new inspiration to the power of self-help in both races by making labor more honorable to one and more necessary to the other.

“The influence of this force will grow greater and bear richer fruit with coming years. No doubt the great change has caused serious disturbance to the Southern community—this is to be deplored, though it was unavoidable; but those who resisted the change should remember that in our institutions there was no middle ground for the negro race between slavery and equal citizenship. There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States. Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessing as long as law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizenship.

“The emancipated race has already made remarkable progress. With unquestionable devotion to the Union, with a patience and gentleness not born of fear, ‘they have followed the light as God gave them to see the light.’

“They are rapidly laying the material foundation for self-support, widening their circle of intelligence, and beginning to enjoy the blessings that gather around the homes of the industrious poor. They deserve the generous encouragement of all good men.

“So far as my authority can lawfully extend, they shall enjoy full and equal protection of the Constitution and laws. The free enjoyment of equal suffrage is still in question, and a frank statement of the issue may aid its solution.

“It is alleged that in many communities negro citizens are practically denied freedom of the ballot. In so far as the truth of this allegation is admitted, it is answered that in many places honest local government is impossible if the mass of uneducated negroes are allowed to vote. These are grave allegations.

“So far as the latter is true, it is no palliation that can be offered for opposing the freedom of the ballot. Bad local government is certainly a great evil which ought to be prevented, but to violate the freedom and sanctity of suffrage is more than an evil, it is a crime, which, if persisted in, will destroy the Government itself. Suicide is not a remedy.

“If in other lands it be high treason to compass the death of a king, it should be counted no less a crime here to strangle our sovereign power and stifle its voice. It has been said that unsettled questions have no pity for the repose of nations. It should be said, with the utmost emphasis, that this question of suffrage will never give repose or safety to the States or to the Nation, until each, within its own jurisdiction, makes and keeps the ballot free and pure by strong sanctions of law.

“But the danger which arises from ignorance in voters can not be denied. It covers a field far wider than that of negro suffrage and the present condition of that race. It is a danger that lurks and hides in the sources and fountains of power in every State. We have no standard by which to measure the disaster that may be brought upon us by ignorance and vice in citizens when joined to corruption and fraud in suffrage. The voters of the Union, who make and unmake constitutions, and upon whose will hangs the destiny of our government, can transmit their supreme authority to no successor save the coming generation of voters, who are the sole heirs of sovereign power. If that generation comes to its inheritance blinded by ignorance and corrupted by vice, the fall of the Republic will be certain and remediless. The census has already sounded the alarm in appalling figures, which mark how dangerously high the tide of illiteracy has arisen among our voters and their children. To the South the question is of supreme importance, but the responsibility for its existence and for slavery does not rest upon the South alone.

“The Nation itself is responsible for the extension of suffrage, and is under special obligations to aid in removing the illiteracy which it has added to the voting population. For North and South alike there is but one remedy: All the Constitutional power of the Nation and of the States, and all the volunteer forces of the people, should be summoned to meet this danger by the saving influence of universal education. It is the high privilege and sacred duty of those now living to educate their successors, and fit them, by intelligence and virtue, for the inheritance which awaits them. In this beneficent work section and race should be forgotten, and partisanship should be unknown. Let our people find a new meaning in the divine oracle which declares that ‘a little child shall lead them,’ for our little children will soon control the destinies of the Republic.

“My countrymen, we do not now differ in our judgment concerning the controversies of the past generations, and fifty years hence our children will not be divided in their opinions concerning our controversies; they will surely bless their fathers—and their fathers’ God—that the Union was preserved; that slavery was overthrown, and that both races were made equal before the law. We may hasten on, we may retard, but we can not prevent the final reconciliation.

“Is it not possible for us now to make a truce with time by anticipating and accepting its inevitable verdict? Enterprises of the highest importance to our moral and material well-being invite us, and offer ample scope for the enjoyment of our best powers.

“Let all our people, leaving behind them the battle-fields of dead issues, move forward, and in the strength of liberty and restored union win the grandest victories of peace. The prosperity which now prevails is without parallel in our history. Fruitful seasons have done much to secure it, but they have not done all.

“The preservation of public credit and the resumption of specie payments, so successfully obtained by the administration of my predecessors, have enabled our people to secure the blessings which the seasons brought.

“By the experience of commercial relations in all ages it has been found that gold and silver afforded the only safe foundation for a monetary system. Confusion has recently been created by variations in the relative value of the two metals; but I confidently believe that arrangements can be made between the leading commercial nations which will secure the general use of both metals. Congress should provide that the compulsory coinage of silver, now required by law, may not disturb our monetary system by driving either metal out of circulation.

“If possible, such adjustment should be made that the purchasing power of every coined dollar will be exactly equal to its debt-paying power in all the markets of the world. The chief duty of a National Government, in connection with the currency of the country, is to coin and declare its value. Grave doubts have been entertained whether Congress is authorized by the Constitution to make any form of paper money legal-tender.

“The present issue of United States notes has been sustained by the necessities of war; but such paper should depend for its value and currency upon its convenience in use and its prompt redemption in coin at the will of the holder, and not upon its compulsory circulation. These notes are not money, but promises to pay money. If the holders demand it, the promises should be kept. The refunding of the National debt at a low rate of interest should be accomplished without compelling the withdrawal of National bank notes, and thus disturbing the business of the country.

“I venture to refer to the position I have occupied on the financial question during a long service in Congress, and to say that time and experience have strengthened the opinions I have so often expressed on these subjects. The finances of the Government shall suffer no detriment which it may be possible for my administration to prevent.

“The interests of agriculture deserve more attention from the Government than they have yet received. The farms of the United States afford homes and employment for more than one-half of our people, and furnish much the largest part of all our exports. As the Government lights our coasts for the protection of the mariners and the benefit of our commerce, so it should give to the tillers of the soil the lights of practical science and experience.

“Our manufacturers are rapidly making us industrially independent, and are opening to capital and labor new and profitable fields of employment. This steady and healthy growth should still be maintained. Our facilities for transportation should be promoted by the continued improvement of our harbors and the great interior water-ways and by the increase of our tonnage on the ocean.

“The development of the world’s commerce has led to an urgent demand for a shortening of the great sea voyage around Cape Horn by constructing ship-canals or railways across the Isthmus which unites the two continents. Various plans to this end have been suggested and will need consideration, but none of them have been sufficiently matured to warrant the United States in extending pecuniary aid.

“The subject is one which will immediately engage the attention of the Government with a view to a thorough protection of American interests. We will argue no narrow policy, nor seek peculiar or exclusive privileges in any commercial route; but, in the language of my predecessors, I believe it to be ‘the right and duty of the United States to assert and maintain such supervision and authority over any inter-oceanic canal across the Isthmus that connects North and South America as will protect our National interests.’

“The Constitution guarantees absolute religious freedom. Congress is prohibited from making any laws respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting free exercise thereof.

“The Territories of the United States are subject to the direct legislative authority of Congress, and hence the General Government is responsible for any violation of the Constitution in any of them. It is, therefore, a reproach to the Government that in the most populous of the Territories this constitutional guarantee is not enjoyed by the people, and the authority of Congress is set at naught. The Mormon Church not only offends the moral sense of mankind by sanctioning polygamy, but prevents the administration of justice through the ordinary instrumentalities of the law.

“In my judgment it is the duty of Congress, while respecting to the utmost the conscientious convictions and religious scruples of every citizen, to prohibit within its jurisdiction all criminal practices, especially of that class which destroy family relations and endanger social order. Nor can any ecclesiastical organization be safely permitted to usurp in the smallest degree the functions and powers of the National Government.

“The Civil Service can never be placed on a satisfactory basis until it is regulated by law, for the good of the service itself. For the protection of those who are intrusted with the appointing power against a waste of time and obstruction of public business, caused by the inordinate pressure for place, and for the protection of incumbents against intrigue and wrong, I shall, at the proper time, ask Congress to fix the tenure of minor offices of the several Executive Departments, and prescribe the grounds upon which removals shall be made during the terms for which the incumbents have been appointed.

“Finally, acting always within the authority and limitations of the Constitution, invading neither the rights of States nor the reserved rights of the people, it will be the purpose of my administration to maintain the authority, and in all places within its jurisdiction, to enforce obedience to all laws of the Union; in the interests of the people, to demand rigid economy in all the expenditures of the Government, and to require honest and faithful service of all executive officers, remembering that offices were created not for the benefit of the incumbents or their supporters, but for the service of the Government.

“And now, fellow-citizens, I am about to assume the great trust which you have committed to my hands. I appeal to you for that earnest and thoughtful support which makes this Government in fact, as it is in law, a government of the people. I shall greatly rely upon the wisdom and patriotism of Congress and of those who may share with me the responsibilities and duties of the administration, and upon our efforts to promote the welfare of this great people and their Government I reverently invoke the support and blessing of Almighty God.”

JAMES G. BLAINE.

The address was delivered in a deliberate, forcible manner. The President’s appearance was dignified, and even imposing. That splendid voice, with its magnetic power and fine tone, captivated his admiring audience, who listened patiently throughout the entire thirty-five minutes. At its close Garfield turned toward the Chief Justice who advanced and administered the oath of office, the Clerk of the Supreme Court holding a beautifully-bound Bible, upon which the oath was taken. Then occurred as impressive an episode as was ever seen in official life. After the new President had been congratulated by ex-President Hayes and Chief Justice Waite, who stood next to him, he turned around, took his aged mother by the hand and kissed her. The old lady’s cup of happiness at this moment seemed full and running over. It is quite safe to say that nobody, not even Garfield himself, felt more enjoyment at the spectacle of his elevation than this woman whose mind ranged from the days of his obscure and poverty-stricken boyhood to his present elevation, and nobody witnessed the sight but rejoiced at her happiness. Mrs. Eliza Garfield is the first example of a President’s mother having a home in the White House. And it was a pleasure to the people to know that special arrangements had been made there for her accommodation.

Garfield next kissed his wife, then shook hands with Mrs. Hayes, and speedily found the grasp of his hand sought by every body within reach, from Vice-President down through Congressmen to the unknown strangers who could manage to push within reaching distance.

WILLIAM WINDOM.

Meanwhile the elements had begun to modify their rigors. The bright sunlight breaking through the clouds, was reflected from the snow, and nature seemed less cheerless. At last, the Presidential party, jostled a good deal on the way, returned through the rotunda to the Senate wing of the Capitol, and prepared for the ride to the White House. Taking their place near the head of the procession, they passed up to the other end of the Avenue, receiving on the way the applause of the multitude. President Garfield and party then took position on a stand erected for the purpose in front of a building near the Avenue, and from this point reviewed the procession, which filed past for two full hours. There were over 15,000 men in line, and the whole number of spectators was doubtless over 100,000.

Immediately after review of the procession, President Garfield received the Williams College Association, of Washington, with visiting Alumni to the number of fifty, in the East Room of the Executive Mansion. Rev. Mark Hopkins, ex-president of the college, eloquently presented the congratulations of the Alumni. President Garfield made an appropriate response, in which he exhibited considerable emotion. Afterward the Alumni were presented to the mother and wife of the President. Twenty members of President Garfield’s class were among the Alumni present.

ROBERT T. LINCOLN.

The festivities of March fourth ended at night with a magnificent display of fireworks, a great inaugural ball in the Museum building, and numerous receptions at the houses of the most distinguished residents at the Capital.

On the fifth of March, President Garfield sent to the Senate, then in extra session, a list of nominations for his Cabinet. These were unanimously confirmed. They were: Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, of Maine; Secretary of the Treasury, William Windom, of Minnesota; Secretary of War, Robert T. Lincoln, of Illinois; Secretary of the Navy, Wm. H. Hunt, of Louisiana; Secretary of the Interior, S. J. Kirkwood, of Iowa; Attorney-General, Wayne MacVeagh, of Pennsylvania; Postmaster-General, Thomas L. James, of New York.

This proved an admirable selection. Its components are men who stand well with the country, and whose services in other positions had given sufficient evidence of honesty and capacity to recommend them to the American people. And it involved no antagonistic elements.

WILLIAM H. HUNT.

Again, this new Cabinet did not take its bias from any strong political element. It was not a Grant-Conkling selection; nor even a Blaine Cabinet. It was a Garfield Cabinet, in which the President was unmistakably the central figure and the center of power.

James G. Blaine, Secretary of State, was leader of the group. His prominent position in his party and before the country made his nomination generally acceptable, and his long and intimate acquaintance with affairs of state gave him the requisite experience. Undoubtedly, Blaine is one of the most magnificently endowed men, in intellectual power, now in public life.

Secretary Windom had a difficult place to fill in following John Sherman as Secretary of the Treasury. Sherman had heartily recommended Windom for the place, and he was probably the best choice that could have been made. He had been an anti-third term man, of course, but was very friendly with such Stalwarts as Conkling and Arthur, and was thus a good factor in an administration which did not want to antagonize these men, although not yielding to them.

The nomination of Robert T. Lincoln was very largely the result of sentiment—but a very good sentiment. He had been a respectable lawyer, who attended carefully to his business, and, under trying circumstances, had conducted himself with discretion. It happened that he was a favorite of Senator Logan, and that President Garfield desired to make his Cabinet agreeable to the Senator; also, that young Lincoln had been, according to his opportunities, a Third-termer, and it was the desire of the President to conciliate the Third-termers, so far as it could be done without giving his policy an unwarranted slant; and it happened also that General Garfield, as we have seen from his addresses years previous to this time, held the memory of Abraham Lincoln in the deepest reverence, and felt a solicitude to make his own elevation to the Presidency honor that memory. Under these circumstances, and from these considerations, the appointment of Mr. Robert T. Lincoln to be Secretary of War came naturally about.

DR. D. HAYES AGNEW.

Hunt was appointed to represent the South.

Kirkwood was a man whom Garfield had long held in high esteem, and was familiar with public business.

Wayne MacVeagh, though brother-in-law to Don Cameron, did not belong to the Cameron political clan. He was chosen as a Republican of independent proclivities, and a lawyer of whose ability there could be no question.

WAYNE MACVEAGH.

Mr. James, Postmaster of New York City, was appointed Postmaster-General for purely business reasons, and because he was not only believed to be the best man for the place, but was one of the few first-class public men in New York not fully committed to one or the other of the personal or political factions of Republicans in that State.

Thus Garfield tried, and with a degree of success, to appoint a Cabinet which should not give any one cause for organizing an opposition to the Administration. He certainly had the good will of all Republicans, and even his political enemies conceded that he started out under bright auspices. The country itself was prosperous, and the most far-sighted men joined the unreflecting multitude in predictions of a happy, uneventful administration of four years, under the peaceful rule of a popular President.

THOMAS L. JAMES.

Four days after his inauguration, a company of fifty ladies, members of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, called at the White House to present a portrait of Mrs. Lucy Webb Hayes, just completed by Mr. Huntington. It will be remembered that Mrs. Hayes had won the approval of many good people by declining to put wine on the table at the White House. These ladies now desired to impress on the new incumbents the desirability of continuing that policy. In responding to the presentation speech, President Garfield received the portrait, and referred to the temperance question thus:

“Nothing I can say will be equal to my high appreciation of the character of the lady whose picture is now added to the treasures of this place. She is noble, the friend of all good people. Her portrait will take, and I hope will always hold in this house, an honored place. I have observed the significance which you have given to this portrait from the stand-point you occupy, and in connection with the work in which you are engaged. First, I approve most heartily what you have said in reference to the freedom of individual judgment and action, symbolized in this portrait. There are several sovereignties in this country. First, the sovereignty of the American people, then the sovereignty nearest to us all—the sovereignty of the family—the absolute right of each family to control its affairs in accordance with the conscience and convictions of duty of the heads of the family. In the picture before us that is bravely symbolized. I have no doubt the American people will always tenderly regard their household sovereignty, and however households may differ in their views and convictions, I believe that those differences will be respected. Each household, by following its own convictions, and holding itself responsible to God, will, I think, be respected by the American people. What you have said concerning the evils of intemperance, meets my most hearty concurrence. I have been, in my way, and in accordance with my own convictions, an earnest advocate of temperance, not in so narrow a sense as some, but in a very definite and practical sense. These convictions are deep, and will be maintained. Whether I shall be able to meet the views of all people in regard to all the phases of that question remains to be seen, but I shall do what I can to abate the great evils of intemperance. I shall be glad to have the picture upon these walls; I shall be glad to remember your kind expressions to me and my family; and in your efforts to better mankind by your work, I hope you will be guided by wisdom and that you will achieve a worthy success.”

President Hayes had left the new administration a heritage of hatred from the stalwart element of the Republican party. It was President Garfield’s chief wish, politically, to heal up the chasm which the past had opened, and not to recognize one faction more than another. Notwithstanding these purposes, the deadly breach which had yawned apart during the Hayes administration, was an ominous thing. The defeat of the Stalwarts at Chicago, by Garfield, naturally tended to transfer their hostility from the outgoing to the incoming President. For months before the inauguration, the embarrassment which threatened Garfield was foreseen by the country. On the one hand were the men who had nominated him in the Chicago Convention,—men who, risking every political prospect, rebelled from the command of their leaders, such as Conkling, Cameron, and Logan, and defeated Grant. To such, Garfield owed his nomination. On the other hand was the stalwart element, still bruised and sore from the defeat at Chicago. Yet they had entered heartily into the campaign. They had swallowed their chagrin, and outwardly, if not inwardly, submitted with good grace to their defeat, and wheeled into line of battle for the fall election. To these men, Garfield was largely indebted for his election. In his administration, how could he recognize either one of these elements without arousing the antagonism of the other? This was the riddle which he must solve.

The breach between the two was as deadly as ever. The Cabinet was a compromise, but the Grant men were afraid of it, with Blaine so near the throne.

For a few days after the inauguration, the surface of the sea was tolerably smooth; but acute political mariners prophesied rough weather. The two wings of the party in New York were waiting to fly at each other’s throats at the first opportunity. The balance of power between the two elements was the official patronage of the President. Into whose lap the plum was thrown, to that wing belonged the ascendancy.

Senator Conkling’s chief political purpose was to chastise the men who had deserted his standard at Chicago. This he could best accomplish by controlling the Federal patronage himself; but failing in that, his next object was to cause the patronage to be distributed to neutrals, thereby preventing it from becoming an element at all in the fight.

Senators Conkling, Logan, and Cameron, as well as Sherman and Blaine, were visitors at the White House, and left in pleasant humor. In the eyes of the country it seemed plain that Conkling had made the disposition of the New York patronage the price of his friendship to the new administration. Every body was on tiptoe to see what the President would do. On March 22d, he sent to the Senate, for confirmation, the names of Stewart L. Woodford, to be United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Asa W. Tenney, for the Eastern District; Lewis F. Payne, to be United States Marshal, for the Southern, and Clinton D. McDougall, for the Northern District of New York, and John Tyler, to be Collector of Customs at Buffalo.

This move was interpreted by the country to mean a great victory for Conkling, and that the New York patronage was controlled by him. Other nominations, in Conkling’s supposed interest, were those of James in the Cabinet, and Morton, Minister to France.

But on the following day, President Garfield nominated, for Collector of the port of New York, William H. Robertson. In New York, and more or less throughout the country, this was a great surprise. But it was not an objectionable nomination. Then it was Robertson who headed the break in the New York delegation at Chicago. He had risked much; he had been very largely instrumental in nominating Garfield. Gratitude is a noble quality of human nature, and the President was a man of generous motives and impulses. The general expression from the country upon the Robertson nomination was one of approval. To disinterested people, far away from the heat and dust of the battle, it was, coupled with the nominations of the preceding day, plainly a declaration of an intention to recognize each branch of the party in New York. Weaker men would have recognized neither, giving the offices to neutrals, and pleasing nobody. Mere partisan men would have recognized one faction only. Garfield tried to recognize both. A deeper significance also lay in the Robertson nomination. Whether Garfield meant it or not, it was, in a sense, a declaration of independence. Garfield, with his lion-like courage, his intellectual powers, his moral greatness, could not, in fact or in appearance, allow his administration to be manipulated by outside influence. It was said that Mr. Blaine was the author of the Robertson nomination; that it was his revenge on Conkling. Garfield said repeatedly, even on the bed of pain, that it was his own in every sense, and that Blaine had not known that it was intended to be made.

Whatever President Garfield intended by the nomination of Robertson, Senator Conkling treated it as a declaration of war. In their views of what followed, men will differ. It is not for these pages, penned so soon in the darkness of an awful assassination, to do more than relate the facts, though it is impossible for a biographer of the dead to do other than sympathize with him. Senator Conkling said that Hayes had never done a thing so terrible. He said that the nomination of Robertson, the most objectionable man possible—without consultation with the Senators from New York, or without their being informed of the intention to make a change in the most important office in the State, was a grievous personal and political wrong. He said that the long dispute as to whether a small faction of New York Republicans, or four-fifths of the party in the State, as represented by him, were to be treated by the Administration as the Republican party of New York, had at last to be settled finally and forever.

The situation was one of intense interest. Popular opinion supported the President, though not a few took the side of Conkling. The latter, together with Platt, the junior Yew York Senator, resolved to fight the confirmation of Robertson. They believed that, with the Senate evenly balanced, they could, with the help of the Democrats, prevent Robertson’s confirmation. It was a battle of giants. Men wondered whether, when war was declared, Garfield would strike back or not. The Stalwarts offered only one way of compromise—the withdrawal of Robertson’s nomination. But the President was firm. Efforts were made to induce Robertson to ask the President to withdraw his name in the interest of harmony. But he scouted the idea. The State Senate of New York, of which Robertson was the presiding officer, passed a resolution in support of the Administration. On behalf of the President’s action it was claimed, that it was his constitutional right to nominate; that the New York Senators overstepped their prerogative in attacking his action; that the office of Collector of the Port was a national office, and not rightfully a part of the local patronage; that the Executive should select the man through whose hands passed nine-tenths of the tariff revenues of the country.

There had been a dead-lock of the Senate over the nomination of its officers, and this still continued, and the President was, in consequence, embarrassed by the failure to act on any of his nominations. It began to be thought that this delay, covered by the pretense of securing Mahone, of Virginia, to the Republicans, was really a scheme to prevent any action on the President’s nominations.

Meanwhile, the administration had to deal with problems more important to the country than the Robertson nomination. Two hundred millions of six per cent. bonds were shortly to become redeemable. It was every way desirable that the bonds should be redeemed and the rate of interest on the public debt reduced. To issue bonds under the existing laws, in order to raise money to redeem the six per cents., would require the new bonds to be issued at four per cent. for thirty years, or four and a half per cent. for twenty years. These rates of interest were too high, and the time for the bonds to run too long. In case the Government acquired the means to pay them off before they were due, still the interest would keep running. There were grave objections to calling an extra session of Congress. Garfield and the country were afraid of the unsettling influence of our national legislature. Early in his Congressional career, Garfield had said, “if the laws of God were as vacillating as the laws of this country, the universe would be reduced to chaos in a single day.” Above all things, the business of the country demanded a rest from congressional tinkering.

When powerful, and it was thought overwhelming influences pressed upon President Garfield the policy of an extra session of Congress, he sent to the Secretary of the Treasury a call for full information as to the powers he had under existing laws. It was a wise conclusion that it might be easier to hunt up old laws than to have new ones made. Whatever the old laws permitted was certain, but a fresh Congress is uncertain, especially on finance.

The Secretary found that there was no law to prevent the Government from using its credit and business foresight in handling and refunding its indebtedness. The plan which President Garfield and Secretary Windom evolved was absolutely original and proved to be the highest statesmanship. Garfield was at home on questions of finance.

A circular was issued to the holders of the six per cents., saying that after the following July 1st, interest would cease, and the bonds be redeemed as fast as presented. If, however, the holders preferred to retain the bonds, and receive three and a half per cent., at the pleasure of the Government, they could do so.

As the event showed, hardly any bonds were presented for redemption. And without any legislation the interest on that portion of the public debt was reduced from six to three and a half per cent., and all that without the expense of a new issue of bonds, or the disadvantage of a debt not maturing till long after the Government would probably be ready to pay it. This financial feat attracted the attention of European States, and was pronounced one of the most masterly financial schemes of history.

While the Senate was still at a dead-lock over the offices of Secretary and Sergeant-at-Arms, and the Robertson quarrel grew blacker and blacker, President Garfield and his cabinet found time to commence an investigation of the alleged gigantic frauds in the post-office department. It promised to engulf and destroy some of the best workers of the Republican party, but the President, in spite of terrific pressure, and in spite of the battle raging over the Robertson matter, set his face like brass against all corruption. The Star Route contracts, though they may not fall within reach of the law, were of the following character: In lonely mountain districts of the West, where a mail for miners’ camps would be needed about once in two weeks, a contract would be let for carrying the mail at say $500 a trip, making the cost for the line for the year about $13,000. Then, under pretense of the need of more mails on account of the development of the West, Congress would be induced to order a daily instead of a biweekly mail. By this “expediting,” the contractor was enabled, under the old rate of $500 per trip, to make $150,000 a year out of the line. Many times the mail bags in these “expedited” routes are said to have been empty as they were carried through the mountains. Postmaster-General James and Attorney-General MacVeagh were the principal prosecutors of the investigation.

Meanwhile, the storm raged with ever-growing fierceness around the President. The Republican Senatorial caucus sent committee after committee to him to induce the withdrawal of Robertson’s name. He was subjected to every possible pressure and influence, but Grant himself never held a position with greater firmness. Conkling, however, proposed and carried through the Republican caucus the following plan, by which the dead-lock was to be broken temporarily, allowing the Senate to go into executive session: All nominations that were not opposed by one Senator from the nominee’s State were first to be acted upon. The rest could take care of themselves. This admitted about every one except Robertson to the consideration of the Senate. The plan was popularly supposed to mean the confirmation of all unopposed nominations, including those of Senator Conkling’s friends, and then either an adjournment sine die, or a breaking of the quorum, by absentees, so as to prevent any action on Robertson’s name till December. This would be a victory for the New York Senator.

But the President, though possessing too much self-respect to make this a personal controversy, was yet brave and strategic. Shortly after the Senate went into executive session, the President’s private secretary arrived with a message which fell like a thunderbolt on that body. The message withdrew the nominations of Senator Conkling’s friends. It was a checkmate. The plan of the caucus was foiled. President Garfield assigned as his reason simply that the discrimination which was attempted, in acting on all the nominations from the Stalwart element and refusing to act on the solitary representative of the opposite element, was wrong and unfair. He said that the President’s duty was to nominate, and that the Senate’s sworn duty was to confirm or reject. To refuse to do either was surpassing their prerogative. To show how consistent the President was in this struggle, with views held long years before he ever thought of the Presidency, we insert an extract from an article by him on “A Century of Congress,” in the Atlantic Monthly, for July, 1877: