JOHN BIGELOW TO HON. WILLIAM H. PECK, EX-SECRETARY OF STATE OF MICHIGAN
"New York, Febry. 28th, 1879.
"My dear Friend,—In your last note you ask me if Tilden will be in the field for the Presidency in 1880.
"That is a question which, I presume, no one, not even Tilden himself, could answer categorically at present. I can express to you my own conviction, and you may take it for what it is worth.
"Mr. Tilden has scarcely been in a position at any time, since the election, to consult his own tastes or personal comfort in this matter; if he had been, I think he would have notified his friends immediately upon his return from Europe in 1877 that they must look for another leader. He forbore to take that step, because he shared the popular belief that he was the President-elect of the United States, and that he was thereby clothed with certain responsibilities to his party at least, anomalous and unprecedented it is true, but which were of the gravest character and which it was impossible for him to put off.
"He was still the commander in the midst of a campaign in which he had defeated the enemy, but had not yet realized the fruits of victory. To leave his soldiers in the field and in the presence of the enemy without a leader was a step which would not stand the test of a moment's reflection. Washington could, with equal propriety, have resigned his command after the battle at Yorktown and delivered his sword to Cornwallis, instead of himself taking the sword of the British general.
"Such a procedure on Mr. Tilden's part would have practically disarmed the Democratic party and compelled its surrender at discretion. What in 1877 would have been only compromising subsequent events would now make disgraceful. Conscious that they had come into office by criminal processes, and that Tilden was the choice of the people, the administration has exerted all the powers of the Federal government in the effort to reconcile the country with this result by defaming and maligning the character of Mr. Tilden, and persecuting him, if possible, out of public life.
"In the latter purpose, they would probably have succeeded had Mr. Tilden been a poor man, and dependent upon his profession for his daily bread.
"Mr. Tilden could easily accommodate himself to the choice of any good man for the Presidency, for it is no vulgar ambition which has led him to accept the prominence which his party has given him, but he cannot be expected to make the slightest concession that involves his personal honor. He will defend that as long as he has a drop of blood in his body, whoever may stand by him or desert him. Of this you may feel perfectly assured.
"Now, I do not see how it is possible for Tilden, under the circumstances, to withdraw from the canvass for 1880; and just so far as it seems impossible for him to withdraw, it seems impossible for his party to assent to his withdrawal.
"There are three questions which must take precedence of every other in the next national convention.
"1. Was Tilden elected by the people in 1876?
"2. Was Hayes counted in by corrupt and fraudulent means?
"3. Has Tilden done anything since the election to forfeit the confidence of his party or of the nation?
"Its answer to these three questions will exercise a controlling influence over its final action.
"On the proofs already in the possession of Congress, I venture to say that there could not be found a jury of twelve disinterested and unbiased freeholders in the land who would hesitate to hold—-
"First. That Tilden was elected President by the people.
"Second. That he was deprived of the office by fraud; and,
"Third. That the charges of attempting to purchase electoral votes are not only not proven, but that they are the foul offspring of the most ruffianly and rancorous partisanship.
"To take another candidate in 1880 is to admit that Tilden was never the choice either of his party or of the country, and that he was unworthy of the support of either. It is to sanction the base conspiracy by which the people were defrauded of their choice. It is to lie down under the degrading imputations by which, through Tilden, the conspirators have sought to humiliate and demoralize his party.
"Can you believe for a moment that the Democratic party is or can be reduced to such extremities?
"The calumnies which have been propagated against Tilden will rather strengthen than weaken him as a candidate if renominated. They will be fatal to any other candidate, and for the obvious reason that any other candidate would have to contend with the practical admission of his party that it had presented and supported a candidate at the last Presidential election who was unworthy of its own or the country's confidence, and whom they had in consequence deliberately abandoned.
"Such an admission would be fatal, and the more surely fatal both because it would be an act of the most flagrant injustice to Mr. Tilden, and because the responsibility for such an act of political brutality would be directly traceable to the unreasonable ambition of men whose first duty it should be to sustain and defend him.
"It is, therefore, a vital necessity for the party to vindicate itself no less than Mr. Tilden, while to desert him would be as much more disastrous to the former as the interests of a nation are greater than those of any individual citizen however eminent.
"I do not think there are many people in the Democratic party so dull as not to see this, or so wanting in loyalty to a brave and successful leader as not to feel that they themselves will have to suffer most by deserting the man who has endured three years of unparalleled persecution rather than desert them.
"To you I need not dwell upon other obvious reasons for renominating Tilden—I need not remind you of what he has done for the Democratic party during the last fifty years, and especially since 1874; I need not tell you how he has stood and stands to-day, like Saul in Israel, a head and shoulders above all his countrymen as a statesman and party-leader; of the impossibility of our carrying his native State for any other candidate whose nomination must of necessity be an insult to him and to it; of the vast power and promise treasured up in the political personality, which for several years has enjoyed the distinction of concentrating upon itself the hostility and malignity of all those classes and parties which it has always been the paramount effort and duty of the Democracy to subdue or to exterminate.
"Independent of these obvious, though on that account none the less important, considerations, and looking solely to the special questions which for the first time in our history will confront the next national Democratic convention, I do not see how it can hesitate to renominate Mr. Tilden by acclamation unless he refuses to be a candidate. Nor do I see how, under the circumstances, he can refuse to be a candidate. I have never heard him express any determination upon the subject, but I think it safe to presume that if he had not intended to be a candidate again he would have purchased the peace and repose which such an announcement would have procured him long before this, and when such a step was beset with fewer difficulties than at present.
"That I have not incorrectly interpreted the drift of public sentiment on this subject, I send you a copy of the Albany Argus containing five or six columns of extracts from the leading Democratic journals of nearly every State in the Union. They show how much more logically the people generally are reasoning upon the subject than many who aspire to lead them. These journals, as you will see, almost unanimously recognize not only the expediency, but the necessity of renominating Mr. Tilden. Yours faithfully,
John Bigelow."
"Hon. William H. Peck.
The universal conviction that Mr. Tilden was going to receive the votes of the nation for President in 1876 compelled Mr. Hayes, or his official dependents in Washington, to begin, in the fall of that year, a campaign of defamation against the one who promised to become General Grant's inevitable successor.
Mr. Tilden's public services and character, and the expressions of popular favor with which the press was teeming, left the administration no resource but calumny.
The prosperity which he had enjoyed in the prosecution of his profession during the years succeeding the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency inspired the suspicion that he had become a man of far greater wealth than he had yet realized; and through the control which the administration could exert over the machinery of the Federal courts, they hit upon the device of charging him with giving false reports of his income to their officers.
Without any proof except their corrupt suspicions, they directed the United States District Attorney at New York to institute proceedings for the recovery of the income supposed to have been illegally withheld. By such a proceeding they not only expected to subject Mr. Tilden to enormous expense in reproducing records of his professional income reaching back fifteen or twenty years, but to hold him up, in the press, at least, until after the election or his retirement from public life, as a defaulter to the government and as a perjurer in his returns of his professional earnings.
This suit moved along very leisurely, but actively enough to keep the subject and the victim of it before the public during the election. Later on they realized that its partisan uses not only had not been exhausted, but were more important than ever to them; for the fraudulent means by which Mr. Tilden had been deprived of the office to which he was elected made him apparently the inevitable candidate to succeed Mr. Hayes.
In due time the weakness of their machinations could no longer be concealed, and in the winter of 1878 they were obliged to confess that they never had any testimony on which to go to trial in support of their caluminous allegations; but to keep the charge alive in the servile prints of the administration, they filed a "bill of discovery" to extort from Tilden himself proof of their infamous charges. It was in consequence of this aggravating persecution that Mr. Tilden invited Mr. O'Conor to assist in his defence, which led to the following correspondence.
The history of this vexatious and vicious prosecution will be found in ample detail from its initiation, in 1876, to the government's ignominious retreat, in 1882, in the Biography of Tilden, p. 225.