The outlook for Mr. Hendricks was considered flattering by his immediate supporters, but to the skilled political observer it was evident that the figures of the eighteenth ballot gave no assurance to the friends of any candidate. After the adjournment of the Convention, and throughout the night that followed, calculation and speculation took every shape. The delegations from New York and Ohio absorbed the interest of the politicians and the public. The two delegations were playing at cross-purposes—each trying to defeat the designs of the other, and each finding its most available candidate in the State of the other. The tactics of New York had undoubtedly defeated Pendleton, and the same men were now planning to nominate Chief Justice Chase. The leading and confidential friends of Mr. Pendleton were resolved that the New York plot should not succeed, and that Mr. Chase should not, in any event, be the candidate. In a frame of mind which was half panic, half reason, they concluded that it would be impossible to defeat the Chief Justice if his name should be placed before the Convention by the united delegation of New York speaking through the glowing phrases of Mr. Seymour, who, as it was rumored, would next morning leave the chair for that purpose. It was concluded, therefore, in the consultations of Mr. Pendleton's friends, that the movement should be anticipated by proposing the name of Mr. Seymour himself. The consultations in which these conclusions were reached were made up in large part of the aggressive type of Western Democrats, who had been trained to political fighting under the lead of Stephen A. Douglas. Among the most active and combative was Washington McLean of the Cincinnati Enquirer. It was this class of Democrats that finally rendered the nomination of the Chief Justice impossible.
On the following morning (of the last day of the Convention, as it proved), the Ohio delegation took the first and most important step, in formally withdrawing the name of Mr. Pendleton. The voting was then resumed, and the nineteenth and twentieth ballots showed a slight loss for Hancock, and a corresponding gain for Hendricks. On the twenty-first ballot Hancock had 135½, and Hendricks 132; with 48½ divided among minor candidates. At this point the Ohio delegation, having been absent in conference, entered the hall, and amid a hush of expectation and interest proposed the name of Horatio Seymour. Mr. Seymour had been frequently mentioned, and would have been formidable from the first if he had permitted the use of his name, but he had invariably met the proposition with the answer that he could under no circumstances become a candidate. He now repeated this statement from the chair, but Ohio insisted and New York assented. With a whirl of excitement all the States followed, and the nomination was made on the twenty-second ballot by a unanimous vote. Mr. Seymour had, no doubt, been sincere in declining to be a candidate; but the prolonged balloting had produced a great anxiety among the delegates, and the pressure had at last come in a form which he could not resist.
The ticket was completed without delay. Just prior to the Convention General Frank Blair had written a remarkable letter to Colonel Brodhead, one of the Missouri delegates. General Blair's name had been mentioned as a Presidential candidate, and in this letter he defined his position. He insisted, as the supreme issue, that the Reconstruction Acts and their fruits must be overthrown. How they should be overthrown he thus indicated: "There is but one way to restore the Government and the Constitution, and that is for the President to declare these Acts null and void, compel the army to undo its usurpations at the South, dispossess the carpet-bag State governments, allow the white people to re-organize their own governments and elect senators and representatives." General Blair contended that this was "the real and only question," and that until this work was accomplished "it is idle to talk of bonds, greenbacks, the public faith, and the public credit." This letter, as will be noted, harmonized in thought and language with the plank which Wade Hampton had inserted in the platform, and its audacious tone commended its author to those who had been potential in committing the Convention to this extreme position. General Preston of Kentucky, who had won his stars in the Confederate army, presented General Blair for Vice-President. General Wade Hampton, distinguished in the same cause, seconded it, and the nomination was made of acclamation.
The Democratic party thus determined, through its platform and partially through its candidates, to fight its battle on the two issues of paying the debt in depreciated paper currency and overthrowing Reconstruction. Other questions practically dropped out. The whole discussion of the canvass turned on these two controlling propositions. No violence of design which the Republicans imputed to their adversaries exceeded their open avowals. The greater positiveness of General Blair, the keener popular interest in the Southern question and the broader realization of its possible dangers, made the issue on Reconstruction overshadow the other. The utterances of Southern leaders confirmed its superior importance in the public estimate. The jubilant expressions of Wade Hampton at Charleston have already been given. In a speech at Atlanta, Robert Toombs declared that "all these Reconstruction Acts, as they are called, these schemes of dissolution, of violence and of tyranny, shall no longer curse the statute-book nor oppress the free people of the country; these so-called governments and legislatures which have been established in our midst shall at once be made to vacate. The convention at New York appointed Frank Blair specially to oust them." Howell Cobb and Benjamin H. Hill also made incendiary speeches during the canvass, proclaiming their confidence in the practical victory of those who had waged the Rebellion; and Governor Vance of North Carolina boasted that all they had lost when defeated by Grant they would regain when they triumphed with Seymour.
It is not probable that the Democrats could, by any policy, have achieved success in this contest. The prestige of Grant's great fame and the momentum given to the Republican party by his achievements during and immediately after the war, would have defeated any opposition, however skillful. But had Governor Seymour himself framed the platform on which he was to stand, and had he been free from the burden and the embarrassment of Blair's imprudent and alarming utterances, his greater sagacity and adroitness would have insured a more formidable battle. As it was, the rash action of the Democratic Convention made it reasonably clear from the beginning that the ticket was doomed to defeat. The progress of the canvass strengthened this impression; the Democracy was placed everywhere on the defensive; its own declarations shotted every gun that was aimed against it; and its orators and organs could neither make effective reply nor divert public attention from its fatal commitment.
The Democrats however made a strenuous contest and sought to counterbalance the weakness of their national contest by strong State tickets. In Indiana Mr. Hendricks was nominated for Governor, and it was hoped that the influence of his name would secure the advantage of success in the preliminary October struggle. In Pennsylvania a vigorous canvass was conducted under the skillful management of William A. Wallace. But all these efforts were unavailing. The October elections clearly presaged Republican victory. The Republicans carried Pennsylvania, in spite of surprising and questionable Democratic gains in Philadelphia; they held Ohio by a satisfactory majority; and in Indiana, Conrad Baker was elected Governor over Mr. Hendricks. With this result in the October States the November battle could not be doubtful.
The Democratic leaders however did not yet surrender the field. They made one more energetic effort to snatch the victory which seemed already in the grasp of their adversaries. But their counsels were divided. One element proposed to try heroic surgery and cut off the diseased member. While the echoes of the October verdict were still resounding, the New-York World, the leading Metropolitan organ of the Democratic party, in a series of inflammatory articles demanded that General Blair should be withdrawn from the ticket. This disorganizing demonstration met with little favor in the ranks of the party, and only served as a confession of weakness without accomplishing any good. A more significant and better advised movement was that of Governor Seymour himself. He had thus far borne no public part in the campaign, but he now took the field in person to rally the broken cohorts of his party and if possible recover the lost ground. Up to this time General Blair, through his self-assertion and his bold proclamation of Democratic designs, had been the central figure of the canvass. It was now determined that Blair should go to the rear and that Governor Seymour should go to the front and make a last and desperate effort to change the line of battle.
He started the week following the October elections, and went through Western New York, Ohio, Illinois and Pennsylvania; ending his tour only with the close of the National canvass. Delivering at least one extended address each day at some central point, and speaking frequently by the way, his journey fastened the attention of the country and amply illustrated his versatile and brilliant intellectual powers. No man was more seductive in appeal, or more impressive in sedate and stately eloquence. With his art of persuasion he combined rare skill in evading difficult questions while preserving an appearance of candor. His speeches were as elusive and illusive as they were smooth and graceful. In his present series of arguments he labored to convince the country that if the Democrats elected the President they would still be practically powerless, and that apprehension of disturbance and upheaval from their success was unfounded. He sought also to draw the public thought away from this subject and give it a new direction by dwelling on the cost of government, the oppression of taxes, the losses from the disordered currency and the various evils that had followed the trials and perils through which the country had passed. But it was not in the power of any man to change the current of public feeling. The popular judgment had been fixed by events and by a long course of concurrent evidences, and no single plea or pledge could shake it. The election resulted in the success of General Grant. Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas, in which Reconstruction was not yet completed, did not choose electors. Of the remaining thirty-four States Mr. Seymour carried but eight. General Grant's majority on the popular vote was 309,584. Of the electors he had 214 and Mr. Seymour had 80.
CHAPTER XVI.
While the result of the Presidential election of 1868 was, upon the record of the electoral votes, an overwhelming victory for the Republican party and its illustrious candidate, certain facts tended to qualify the sense of gratulation and triumph on the part of those who give serious study to the progress and results of partisan contests. It was the first Presidential election since the close of the war, and the candidates represented in sharp and definite outline the antagonistic views which had prevailed among Northern men during the period of the struggle. General Grant was the embodiment of the war feeling, and presented in his own person the spirit of the contest for the Union and the evidence of its triumph. The Democratic candidate, if not open to the charge of personal disloyalty, had done much as Governor of New York to embarrass the National Administration in the conduct of the war, and would perhaps have done more but for the singular tact and address with which Mr. Lincoln had prevented an open quarrel or even a serious conflict of authority. Mr. Seymour was indeed unpleasantly associated in the public mind with the riot which had been organized in the city of New York against the enforcement of the draft. He had been a great favorite of the Peace party, and at the most critical point in the civil struggle he had presided over a National convention which demanded that the war should cease.