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

Hardly had the opening prayer of the good man of God come to its amen when Mr. Conkling offered the following:

Resolved, As the sense of this Convention, that every member of it is bound in honor to support its nominee, whoever that nominee may be; and that no man should hold a seat here who is not ready to so agree.

Mr. Hale said he thought that a Republican Convention did not need to be instructed, that its first and underlying duty, after nominating its candidate, was to elect him over the Democratic candidate.

A call of the States being requested, the convention voted unanimously in favor of Mr. Conkling’s resolution, with the exception of three hostile votes from West Virginia.

Mr. Conkling then offered the following:

“Resolved, That the delegates who have voted that they will not abide the action of the convention do not deserve and have forfeited their vote in this convention.”

Mr. Campbell, of West Virginia—“Mr. Chairman: There are three gentlemen from West Virginia, good and true Republicans, who have voted in the negative in the last vote. Gentlemen, as a delegate in a Republican Convention, I am willing to withdraw. If it has come to this that in the city of Chicago, where I came as a young man from the State of Virginia, after having submitted twenty years to contumely and to violence in the State of Virginia for my Republican principles—if it has come to this, that in the city of Chicago a delegate from that State can not have a free expression of opinion, I for one am willing to withdraw from this convention. Mr. Chairman, I have been a Republican in the State of Virginia from my youth. For twenty-five years I have published a Republican newspaper in that State. I have supported every Republican Presidential nominee in that time. I expect to support the nominee of this convention. But, sir, I shall do so as a Republican, having imbibed my principles from the great statesman from New York, William H. Seward, with whom I had an early acquaintance by virtue of my having gone to school with him nine years from the city of Utica, from which the Senator from New York now hails. I was a Republican then, and I made the acquaintance of that distinguished gentleman. I came home, and in my youth I became a newspaper editor. From that day to this—from the John Brown raid on Harper’s Ferry all through the troubles of the last twenty-five years—I have consistently and always supported our State and National Republican nominee. But, Mr. Chairman, I feel as a Republican that there is a principle in this question, and I will never go into any convention and agree beforehand that whatever may be done by that convention shall have my indorsement. Sir, as a free man, whom God made free, I always intend to carry my sovereignty under my own hat. I never intend that any body of men shall take it from me. I do not, Mr. Chairman, make my living by politics; I make it by my labor as a newspaper editor; and I am not afraid to go home and say that I stood up here in this convention, as I was not afraid to stand up in the State of West Virginia, when but 2,900 men were found to vote for Abraham Lincoln, and where that party has risen to-day to 45,000 votes under the training that we received from our early inspiration of principle. I am not afraid to go home and face these men as I have faced them always.”

The two other dissenters also stated their position as defiantly if not as ably. After some further debate, Mr. Garfield spoke, taking ground against Conkling’s pending resolution. While speaking to this, he said:

“There never can be a convention, of which I am one delegate, equal in rights to every other delegate, that shall bind my vote against my will on any question whatever on which my vote is to be given.

“I regret that these gentlemen thought it best to break the harmony of this convention by their dissent; but, when they tell the convention that their dissent was not, and did not mean, that they would not vote for the nominee of this convention, but only that they did not think the resolution at this time wise, they acted in their right, and not by my vote. I do not know the gentlemen, nor their affiliations, nor their relations to candidates, except one of them. One of them I knew in the dark days of slavery, and for twenty long years, in the midst of slave-pens and slave-drivers, has stood up for liberty with a clear-sighted courage and a brave heart equal to the best Republicans that live on this globe. And if this convention expel him, then we must purge ourselves at the end of every vote by requiring that so many as shall vote against us shall go out.”