The New Nation

by Frederic L. Paxson

Few of the leaders of the period 1861 to 1876 ever grew into an understanding of problems other than those of the Civil War. The most eminent of them were gone before the latter year. Lincoln was dead; Grant had had two terms; Stevens was gone; Sumner had been driven from party honor before his death; Chase had died Chief Justice, but unhappy. With these men living, lesser men had remained obscure. As they dropped out, a host of minor leaders, trained to a disproportionate view of the war and ignorant of other things, controlled affairs.

About these men the scandals of the Grant Administrations clustered, and their standards came to be those of the Republican party organization. They represented a dead issue, which they had never directed when it was alive, and were chosen by voters whose choice had become automatic. In their hands office tended to become a thing to be enjoyed for its own sake, not a trust to be fulfilled.

If the Republican organization was drifting into the control of second-rate men who misrepresented the rank and file, the status of the opposition was no better. At the South the Democratic party was openly founded on force and fraud. In the deliberate judgment of the white population of the South, negro control was intolerable and worse than any variety of political corruption that might be necessary to prevent it. The leaders of the party in this section had borne so important a part in the Confederacy that it was hopeless to think of them for national leaders, while they could meet the Northern charge of fraud only by the assertion of a greater alternate evil, which their opponents would not recognize as such. The South could be counted on for Democratic votes, but not as yet for leaders.

In the North and West the Democratic party was still weakened by its past. Its leaders of the early sixties, where they had not joined the Union party, were Copperheads, and were as little available as ex-Confederates. One of them, Seymour, whose loyalty, though he was in opposition to Lincoln, is above question, had been nominated and defeated in 1868. So few had been available in 1872 that the party had been reduced to the indorsement of Horace Greeley. Even the scandals of the Republican administration could not avail the Democrats unless a leader could be found free from the taint of treason and copperheadism and strong enough to hold the party North and South.

In the paucity of leaders during Grant's second Administration the Democrats turned to New York where a reform governor was producing actual results and restoring the prestige of his party. Like other Democrats of his day, Samuel J. Tilden had few events in his life during the sixties to which he could "point with pride" in the certain assurance that his fellow citizens would recognize and reward them. He had been a civilian and a lawyer. He had not broken with his party on its "war a failure" issue in 1864. He had acted harmoniously with Tammany Hall while it began its scheme of plunder, in New York City. But he had turned upon that organization and by prosecuting the Tweed Ring had made its real nature clear. Within the party he had led the demand to turn the rascals out, and had been elected Governor of New York on this record in 1874. As Governor he had proved that public corruption was non-partisan and had exposed fraud among both parties so effectively that he was clearly the most available candidate when the Democratic Convention met in St. Louis in 1876.

The only competitors of Tilden for the Democratic nomination were "favorite sons." Thomas A. Hendricks, a Greenbacker, was offered by Indiana and pushed on the supposition that this doubtful State could not be carried otherwise. Pennsylvania presented the hero of Gettysburg, General Winfield Scott Hancock, through whom it was hoped to bring to the Democratic ticket the aid of a good war record. The other candidates received local and scattering votes, and altogether they postponed the nomination for only one ballot. On the first ballot Tilden started with more than half the votes; on the second he had nearly forty more than the necessary two thirds. Hendricks got the Vice-Presidency, and the party entered the campaign upon a program of reform.

The Republicans had completed their nominations some weeks before the Democrats met, and having no unquestioned leader had been forced to adjust the claims of several minor men. Six different men received as many as fifty votes on one ballot or another, but only three factions in the party stood out clearly. The Administration group had sounded the public on a third term for Grant, and receiving scanty support had brought forward Conkling, a shrewd New York leader, and Morton, war Governor of Indiana. The out-and-out reformers were for Bristow, who had made a striking reputation as Secretary of the Treasury, over the frauds of the Whiskey Ring. Between the two groups was the largest single faction, which stood for James G. Blaine from first to last.

The political fortunes of James G. Blaine prove the difficulty with which a politician brought up in the Civil War period retained his leadership in the next era. Blaine had been a loyal and radical Republican through the war. Gifted with personal charms of high order, he had built up a political following which his unswerving orthodoxy and his service as Speaker of the House of Representatives served to widen. Never a rich man, he had felt forced to add to his salary by speculations and earnings on the side. In these he had come into contact with railroad promoters and had not seen the line beyond which a public man must not go, even in the sixties. His indiscretions had imperiled his reputation at the time of the Crédit Mobilier scandal. They became common property when an old associate forced him to the defensive on the eve of the convention of 1876. In the dramatic scene in the House of Representatives when Blaine read the humiliating "Mulligan" letters that he had written years before, tried to explain them, and denounced his enemies, he convinced his friends of his innocence, and evidenced to all his courage and assurance. But his critics, reading the letters in detail, were confirmed in their belief that if his official conduct was not criminal, it was at least improper, and that no man with a blunted sense of propriety ought to be President.

Despite all opposition, Blaine might have won the nomination had not a sunstroke raised a question as to his physical availability. He led for six ballots in the convention, and only on the seventh could his opponents agree upon the favorite son of Ohio, General Rutherford B. Hayes, who added to military distinction a good record as Governor of his State.

Neither Hayes nor Tilden represented a political issue. Each had been nominated because of availability, and each party contained many voters on each side of every question before the public. Even the appeal to loyalty and Union, which had worked in three campaigns, failed to stir the States. Blaine, expert in the appeal, had revived it over the proposition to extend pardon and amnesty to Jefferson Davis, but his frantic efforts, as he waved the "bloody shirt," evoked no general enthusiasm. The war and reconstruction were over, but the old parties had not learned it.