This would seem clear refutation that Mr. Blaine was party to his own nomination that year. It assuredly reveals keen political instinct and foresight. The capital prize in the national lottery was not for him.
I did not meet him until two years later, when he gave me a minute account of what had happened immediately thereafter; the swing around the circle; Belshazzar’s feast, as a fatal New York banquet was called; the far-famed Burchard incident. “I did not hear the words, ‘Rum, Romanism and Rebellion,’” he told me, “else, as you must know, I would have fittingly disposed of them.”
I said: “Mr. Blaine, you may as well give it up. The doom of Webster, Clay, and Douglas is upon you. If you are nominated again, with an assured election, you will die before the day of election. If you survive the day and are elected, you’ll die before the 4th of March.” He smiled grimly and replied: “It really looks that way.”
My own opinion has always been that if the Republicans had nominated Mr. Arthur in 1884 they would have elected him. The New York vote would scarcely have been so close. In the count of the vote the Arthur end of it would have had some advantage—certainly no disadvantage. Cleveland’s nearly 200,000 majority had dwindled to the claim of a beggarly few hundred, and it was charged that votes which belonged to Butler, who ran as an independent labor candidate, were actually counted for Cleveland.
When it was over an old Republican friend of mine said: “Now we are even. History will attest that we stole it once and you stole it once. Turn about may be fair play; but, all the same, neither of us likes it.”
So Grover Cleveland, unheard of outside of Buffalo two years before, was to be President of the United States. The night preceding his nomination for the governorship of New York, General Slocum seemed in the State convention sure of that nomination. Had he received it he would have carried the State as Cleveland did, and Slocum, not Cleveland, would have been the Chief Magistrate. It cost Providence a supreme effort to pull Cleveland through. But in his case, as in many another, Providence “got there” in fulfilment of a decree of Destiny.
Chapter the Nineteenth
Mr. Cleveland in the White House—Mr. Bayard in the Department of State—Queer Appointments to Office—The One-Party Power—The End of North and South Sectionalism
I
The futility of political as well as of other human reckoning was set forth by the result of the presidential election of 1884. With a kind of prescience, as I have related, Mr. Blaine had foreseen it. He was a sagacious as well as a lovable and brilliant man. He looked back affectionately upon the days he had passed in Kentucky, when a poor school-teacher, and was especially cordial to the Kentuckians. In the House he and Beck were sworn friends, and they continued their friendship when both of them had reached the Senate.