The Life and Work of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States / Embracing an Account of the Scenes and Incidents of His Boyhood; the Struggles of His Youth; the Might of His Early Manhood; His Valor As a Soldier; His Career As a Statesman; His Election to the Presidency; and the Tragic Story of His Death.

by John Clark Ridpath

Grant’s candidacy at Chicago, which seemed so singular to many, was really the result of underlying forces, greater than any of the men who were borne onward by the tide. First, was the fact of his personal candidacy.

On one side was the Republican party closing its quarter of a century—a Long Parliament of counsels, deeds, and changes; and, on the other, the tried Cromwell of the Commonwealth, backed by his victories, and asking the party to recognize him again. The party seemed almost destined to make the choice. In asking again for the Presidency, it was natural that he should look toward organization, discipline, and studied strategy as the instrumentalities of his canvass. His career as a soldier, his mental constitution, and his political training and experience during the arbitrary and tempestuous times of the civil war and the epoch of reconstruction, his military habit of relying on his subordinate generals, all were antecedents of the memorable struggle at Chicago, and helped to give it its character.

But if Grant, in his personal canvass, naturally reached for the party organization to make up his line of battle, the underlying tendency toward organization in politics, of which we have spoken heretofore, seeking for its strongest personal representative, inevitably selected Grant. On the one side was his individual will turning toward the Machine. On the other was the far more powerful but impersonal force, in its struggle to grasp and subordinate American politics, embodying itself in its chosen representative. It will be remembered that in popular opinion Grant became a candidate as much at the request of his friends as from any personal wish. The distinguished gentlemen who thus urged him were animated not merely by personal affection and preference, but by the invincible tendency toward organization, structure, and machinery in politics. In the organism the man found his support; in the man, the organic force found its strongest representative.

But what of the opposite tendency, the counter-current, which set against organization, party discipline, unit rules, the tyranny of majorities, and toward the freedom of individual action? Who was its representative? Was it ready to do battle with its gigantic foe? The Chicago Convention must be viewed not as a personal struggle between rival candidates, but as the meeting of two mighty waves in the ocean of American politics, the shock of whose collision was to be felt on the farthest shores. Amid the foam which rose along the line of breaking crests, mere men were for the moment almost lost from view.

In the nature of the case the counter tendency could not embody itself beforehand in a representative. To be sure there was Blaine, the dashing parliamentary leader, the magnetic politician, the brilliant debater. Generous and brave of heart, superb in his attitude before the maligners of his spotless fame, personally beloved by his supporters beyond any man of his political generation, he was too independent to represent the organism, and too much of a candidate, and had too much machinery, too many of the politician’s arts, to fully meet the requirements of the counter tendency in the great crisis. Although Blaine was beyond question running on his personal merits, yet the fact that he was a leading candidate, but without a majority, destined him to fall a prey to his competitors. In the great political arena, when one gladiator is about to triumph over his divided rivals, the latter unite against him, that all may die together, and by giving to an unknown the palm of victory save themselves from the humiliation of a rival’s triumph.

John Sherman, the very opposite of Blaine, cold, cautious, solid, hostile to display, was also a candidate upon personal merits, and was also to fail from the same cause.

It can not be said that there was any other candidate before the convention. Windom, Edmunds, and Washburne, had each a small personal following, but neither sought the nomination, and all were only possible “dark horses.”

On the floor of the convention, Grant was to be represented by the triumvirate of United States Senators, Conkling, Cameron, and Logan. Of these, Cameron, though a superb manipulator, a splendid manager, and a man full of adroitness and resources, was a silent man. His voice was not lifted in debate. His work was in the secret room, planning, and not amid the clash of arms in the open field. Logan, tall and powerful, of coppery complexion, and long, straight, black hair, which told plainly of the Indian blood, was a somewhat miscellaneous but rather powerful debater. His tremendous voice was well fitted for large audiences. That he was a man of great force is shown by his career. While his two colleagues were descended from high-born ancestry,—Cameron’s father having been the son’s predecessor in the United States Senate,—Logan sprang from below.

The leader of the trio, and with one exception the most distinguished person in the convention, was Roscoe Conkling. Tall, perfectly formed, graceful in every movement, with the figure of an athlete, and the head of a statesman, surmounted with a crown of snow-white hair, he was a conspicuous figure in the most brilliant assemblage of the great which could convene on any continent. In speaking, his flute-like tones, modulated by the highest elocutionary art, his intensely dramatic manner, his graceful but studied gesticulation, united to call attention to the speaker as much as to the speech. He was dressed in faultless style, from the tightly-buttoned blue frock coat—the very ne plus ultra of the tailor’s art,—to the exquisite fancy necktie. If it were not for his intellect he would have been called a dandy. In his walk there was a perceptible strut. But the matter of Conkling’s speeches is the best revelation of his character. Every sentence was barbed with irony; every expression touched with scorn. He was the very incarnation of pride. Haughty, reserved, imperious in manner, at every thrust he cut to the quick. His mastery of the subject in hand was always apparently perfect, and not less perfectly apparent. He was called “Lord Roscoe,” “The Superb,” “The Duke,” and other names indicative of his aristocratic bearing. Never for a moment did he cease to carry himself as if he were on the stage. It is said that great actors become so identified with the characters they impersonate, that even in private life they retain the character which they have assumed on the stage. Thus Booth is said to order his fried eggs with the air of a Hamlet. So Conkling never for a moment laid aside the air of high tragedy.

Nevertheless the commanding genius of the man was unquestioned. He was the chief representative in the Chicago Convention of the tendency to more organism, stronger party discipline, a more perfect machine. The problem to which he applied all his abilities, was to strengthen the party structure; and to that end, practically place the power of both his party and his country in the hands of a few. A national party, with the consciences of its individual members in the hands of a few astute politicians, could control the Government forever. But the end is vicious, and the means an abomination to governments of the people, for the people, and by the people.