The Crime of Caste in Our Country

by Benjamin Rush Davenport

CHAPTER XXIV. NOT A DEFEAT OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S REPUBLICAN PARTY.

The “Grand Old Party,” which sprang from American intelligence and the advancement of civilization, fully armed, like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter!

That transcendent glory which will ever surround the name of the Republican party with a halo, was not forever submerged beneath the flood of indignant votes, November 8, 1892. That party which, by its deeds, shall ever live in the grateful recollection of the American heart, was not vanquished in the fight November last.

The symmetry, beauty, and virtues so pre-eminent in the party of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, will ever present a spectacle for the admiration of the “plain” “Common People” of America. They loved the Republican party in 1860, and cast their votes for it because it represented them—the plain “Common People”; because the candidate of the Republican party, Abraham Lincoln, was one of them, the “Common People”; because in the right hand of the Republican party was carried the standard of equality and emancipation; because in their standard-bearer, Abraham Lincoln, the plain people recognized a typical man of the “Common People.” “Mudsillism” was synonymous to them with the term “Common People.” The industrial and laborial North was aroused to righteous indignation by the assumption of a social superiority on the part of the cavaliers, the believers in “caste,” in the South. The Republican party, led by that wonderful creation of the American soil and the air of freedom, Abraham Lincoln, won the battle of the equality of man in 1861-65. Following still the guiding star which had left its reflected glory upon the horizon even after it had descended into the tomb made by the assassin, the people of the Union elected the victorious general, Ulysses S. Grant, to the office of Chief Executive of the nation. Believing in and trusting the man who had been a friend to Abraham Lincoln, when he was surrounded by a multitude of dangers, they cheerfully re-elected the victorious General Grant to be the President of the people for a second term.

Slowly, but none the less surely, had been going on, during General Grant’s administration, the disintegration of those principles that made the party of Abraham Lincoln great in the eyes of the “Common People” of the Union. After twice enjoying the exalted position of Chief Magistrate of the nation, General Grant was called upon to surrender his office to a successor. So great had been the inroads of decay upon that sterling honesty of the Republican party—that Republican party which had been planted by the loving hands of Lincoln in the breasts of the American people—that President Hayes succeeded General Grant, as a Republican President, only by concessions made in the interests of peace by a great statesman, Samuel J. Tilden.

The weakening influence of the barnacles growing upon that stalwart tree of Republicanism, and which had been washed there by the ocean tide of prosperity that had surged upon our nation, was felt in the campaign between Hayes and Tilden. And let all good Americans, Republicans as well as Democrats, uncover their heads in speaking of a man like Tilden, who was a man of the people, thought of the people, and of the horrors of civil war. Each succeeding administration tended but to weaken the hold of that good old Republican party, that Grand Old Party! (and it gives us pleasure to say it) upon the hearts of the American people, because the barnacles which had clung on to the life-giving roots of the stalwart oak of Republicanism and the Grand Old Party—those barnacles of sham aristocracy, believers in “caste” and class distinction, the wealthy—had managed to sap the strength of the vigorous young tree planted by Abraham Lincoln, until, deformed, it presented a spectacle obnoxious to the eyes of the “Common People” of America.

The first decisive evidence of the dissatisfaction of the people was given in the election of Grover Cleveland in 1884.

While Burchard, with that remarkable alliteration, “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” is accredited with having caused the defeat of James G. Blaine, the impression made upon the “Common People” by the spectacle of that dinner of millionaires, called the “Belshazzar feast,” at which the nominee of the Republican party, James G. Blaine, occupied a seat, was much greater than the howling of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” by an obscure preacher.

The Republican party had ceased to represent to the minds of the plain “Common People” what it had originally represented. There had grown upon that party the fruit of evil, in the shape of a moneyed class, who assumed to be better than the plain “Common People” of America. Hence, James G. Blaine, with all his personal popularity, magnetism, and magnificent record, was unable to secure, from the ranks of the “Common People,” the votes necessary to elect him President.

The defeat of Grover Cleveland by President Harrison was brought about (and there can be no doubt of it) largely by the use of money, secured as contributions from the moneyed class to perpetuate the control of the Republican party in the Federal Government, thinking that by so doing the power and assumption of social superiority upon the part of believers in “caste,” who cared nothing about the principles of the original Abraham Lincoln Republican party, and who were as far beneath it in patriotism, honesty, and truth as the earth is beneath the heavens, would also be perpetuated.