The recent election in North Carolina made this practically manifest. Even without a telescope, all could discern the operations of the field. Postmasters and officers of Internal Revenue were on hand, each in his place; then came the Marshal, with files of deputies, extemporized for the occasion; while, ranging over the extensive circuit, was the Supervisor of the Revenue; the whole instructed and animated by members of the Cabinet, who abandoned their responsible duties to help reëlection, which for the time was above all departments of Government and all exigencies of the public service. In the same way the chief Custom-Houses of the country have been enlisted. Each has become a political centre whose special object is reëlection. Authentic evidence before a Congressional Committee shows that Thomas Murphy, while Collector of New York, acting as Lieutenant of the President, sought to control the Republican State Convention by tendering office to four men, in consideration of the return of certain delegates, promising that “he would immediately send their names on to Washington and have them appointed”; and by way of enforcing the Presidential supremacy, he announced with startling effrontery that “President Grant was the representative and head of the Republican party, and all good Republicans should support him in all his measures and appointments, and any one who did not do it should be crushed out.”[191] If this were not authenticated under oath, it would be hard to believe. But the New Orleans Custom-House has a story much worse. Here Presidential pretension is mixed with unblushing corruption, in which the Collector, a brother-in-law, is a chief actor. And all for reëlection.[192]
This prostitution of the offices of the country to the Presidential will can be upheld only by unhesitating partisan zeal, discarding reason and patriotism. Already it has been condemned in an official Report made to the House of Representatives, November 25, 1867, by Mr. Boutwell, as Chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, and signed by him. His direct object was to arraign Andrew Johnson; but these words declare a rule applicable to all Presidents:—
“The presence and active participation of two of the Heads of Departments in a political convention at Philadelphia, having for its object the organization of a party to sustain the policy of the President and defeat the will of Congress and the people, and one of those functionaries the prime agent in the removals from and appointments to office for ‘political reasons,’ is a fact well known to the country. The like had not happened before in its history. In the view of right-minded men, it was something more than a public scandal.”[193]
The Report adduces the authority of John Locke, the eminent philosopher, as declaring “the employment of ‘the force, treasure, and offices of the society to corrupt the representatives, or openly to preëngage the electors, and prescribe what manner of persons shall be chosen,’ as among those breaches of trust in the executive magistrate which amounts to a dissolution of the Government; for ‘what is it,’ he says, ‘but to cut up the Government by the roots, and poison the very fountains of public security?’”[194] But all this we witness here. The offices are employed to preëngage the electors, and prescribe the persons to be chosen. Nor do I see any corrective of this undoubted abuse, especially after the example now set in high quarters, so long as the President is a candidate for reëlection.
Therefore, to arrest a flagrant tyranny, and to secure purity in the Government, also to save the President from himself, should this Amendment be adopted; and since Horace Greeley is known to be its strenuous supporter, we have an unanswerable reason in his behalf.
RECONCILIATION.
From the practical question of Civil Service Reform I pass to Reconciliation, being the most important issue ever presented to the American people,—reconciliation not only between the two once warring sections, but also between the two races. This issue, so grand and beautiful, was distinctly presented, when Horace Greeley, in accepting the Republican nomination at Cincinnati, wrote these memorable words:—
“In this faith, and with the distinct understanding, that, if elected, I shall be the President, not of a party, but of the whole people, I accept your nomination,—in the confident trust that the masses of our countrymen, North and South, are eager to clasp hands across the bloody chasm which has too long divided them, forgetting that they have been enemies, in the joyful consciousness that they are, and must henceforth remain, brethren.”[195]