JOHN BIGELOW TO HON. SMITH ELY
"Highland-Falls-on-Hudson, June 19, 1904.
"My dear Mr. Ely,—I am extremely obliged to you for the clipping you sent me from the Evening Post. Though familiar with rumors of that nature, it is the first statement with any semblance of authenticity I have met with of the reasons why Conkling did not keep faith with our friends. I am not sure that Conkling himself did not weaken at the pinch as much as the recalcitrant Senator. Had he stood up on that occasion, as he should have done, he would have established for himself a reputation for virtues which no biographer can now claim for him.
"I do not remember the name of the Senator alluded to, because I never knew the fact. Was it Kernan?
"Yours truly.
"P. S.—Cannot you give us a candidate for the Presidency without making prostitutes of the judiciary?[18] When we made judges elective we went as far in that direction as was safe, and farther than was prudent. It was a perversion of the representative system when we submitted the choice of experts, like judges and district attorneys, to the popular vote. If we encourage judges to aspire to the Presidency the suitors for justice will have to take their check-books to court, and their cases will be argued, as they are said to be, before Turkish cadis.
"Yours Truly,
"John Bigelow."
About the middle of January, 1877, and before the Electoral Commission had given its decision, I received a telegram from Washington that a friend of the Honorable S. S. Cox, then a representative in Congress from New York city, wished to confer with me in reference to the Presidential contest pending in Washington. Cox's friend proved to be Mr. Corbin, a brother-in-law of President Grant. I replied to my correspondent that he might arrange for an interview with me anywhere in New York city except in Mr. Corbin's house, Corbin at that time having a residence in New York city.
It was arranged that we should meet at the Westminster Hotel, about noon, on the 27th of January. I had known something of Corbin through my relations with Colonel Benton many years before, and had become slightly acquainted with him. What I did know of him disinclined me to give him my confidence. I had no idea of the motive which led him to invite this interview. He had intimated to Mr. Cox that he would talk with me, but with no other of Mr. Tilden's friends. The grounds for his taking me into his confidence exclusively was equally unintelligible, beyond the fact that we had been political friends of long standing as common friends of Senator Thomas Benton, of Missouri.
He opened the interview by giving at considerable length what he regarded as evidence of Senator Sherman's expectation that his brother the general would have been nominated at Cincinnati in 1876 instead of President Hayes, and of the intrigues already making for the general's nomination of 1880. At length he proceeded to speak for and in the name of his brother-in-law, the President. He said Grant wished to retire with grace and honorably from his office, and had no special interest in the success of either of the candidates whose fate was depending upon the action of the Electoral Commission. He said that for himself he preferred Tilden forty times to Hayes, and that all the ladies of Grant's family were champions of Tilden. He wound up by saying that if he could be useful in letting the President's views be known to Governor Tilden, when they might serve a useful purpose, he would be glad to do so, and that that was the special purpose of his inviting this interview.
I said to him that in a contingency not difficult to imagine there might be two persons claiming a title to the White House on the 4th of March, one by the choice of the Senate, another by the choice of the House of Representatives, and that it would interest Governor Tilden very much to know whether General Grant would think it his duty to solve that problem with the sword, or leave it to the solution of time and events. Corbin replied that he would tell me what must not go beyond me and Governor Tilden. Some time ago, he said, Grant sent a number of boxes to his house at Elizabeth for safe-keeping, and in stating his intention to do so, he observed that as the inauguration would occur on Sunday at 12 M. he proposed to vacate the White House Saturday night; whoever, therefore, said Corbin, gets into it first will have a very substantial advantage. The President might perhaps stay in until the following day if sufficient reason were shown for so doing. But, said I, suppose our candidate gets the White House and the other gets the Capitol, what then? Corbin paused a little, and then said: "The keeper of the Capitol is under the control of the Commissioner of Public Buildings. The Commissioner of Public Buildings is an engineer officer, under the orders of Chief-Engineer Humphreys. The present Commissioner of Public Buildings is Babcock; like St. Paul, he is generally believed to have an eye 'to the recompense of reward.' Then, those Irish doorkeepers may be worth looking to." Such was the substance of an interview which occupied about two hours.
What may have prompted Corbin to take the trouble to come all the way from Washington to give me this hint, beyond a desire to give himself importance in the eyes of Mr. Tilden, and how far President Grant countenanced his mission, if he knew anything about it, are questions which I never troubled myself to solve. There is no doubt that President Grant thought Tilden had been elected, and found no satisfaction in the prospect of having Hayes for his successor; but if he had wished to convey to Mr. Tilden any intimation that he would find the White House vacant and ready for his occupation on the night of the 3d of March, I find it difficult to believe that he would have selected Corbin for his emissary. However that may be, neither Mr. Tilden nor myself thought his communication worthy of serious consideration.
On the second day of March the House of Representatives, by a vote of 137 to 88, adopted the preamble and resolutions which follow, declaring that Samuel J. Tilden had been duly elected President, and Thomas A. Hendricks duly elected Vice-President of the United States. If these 137 votes in favor of Tilden and Hendricks represented the requisite constitutional number of States in the Union, it is not easy to see what more was necessary to make the one President and the other Vice-President two days later than simply to take the oaths of office prescribed by the Constitution.