TILDEN [INCOMPLETE]
"Dear Sir,—Your letter was received yesterday. I do not think there will be any considerable difficulty in respect to resolutions. The general disposition will be to go to every reasonable extent to disarm those who are predetermined to make mischief. The true and only serious difficulty is to get the convention organized. The plan of those who are hostile to the union of the party is to have two conventions, if it be possible to confuse the public mind as to which really represents the party and its organization. All the moderation, prudence, and liberality consistent with the preservation of the convention must be exercised to avoid a disorganization; or, if that cannot be avoided (as it cannot be, if any considerable minority are bent on it), to leave the disorganizers with as little of a case as possible. The danger is in the large number of contested seats—real and pretended. In about half of the cases there is no shadow of claim on the part of the hard-shell contestants; and such cases can be multiplied indefinitely, so as to form with the extreme men in the convention and the contestants out of it a sufficient number to be a quorum of a separate body. I think we can stand the large number of these now known, if the moderate and union Hunkers can be held, as we anticipate. I have heard from various sources that the President feels the same solicitude which your letter expresses, and that he thinks that the defeat of the party here would revive and reorganize the Whigs all over the country. In that he is quite right. On the encouragement of a disaster in this State, the Whig party would spring to new and full life. It was so in 1837 and in 1846, and in both those cases the results spread over the whole country. Neither you nor the President need doubt that we are fully aware of the peril, both to the party in the Union and in this State; or that any reasonable effort will be omitted to avert it.
"But we are put to great odds when 30 or 35 of our districts are neutralized by contested claims, and in all this part of the State the mass of the patronage of the genl. government is used most unscrupulously against us, and—"