The Greenback party had embodied in their platform the following dogmas:
"The general government should issue an ample volume of full legal tender currency to meet the business needs of the country, and to promptly pay all of its debts."
"The national banking system should be immediately abolished."
"We demand the immediate calling-in and payment of all United States bonds in full legal tender money."
One of the Members of Congress from the State of Maine, Hon. G. W. Ladd, was reported to have paid his attention to me, in a speech in Portland, in the following language:
"Mr. Sherman has sold one hundred and ninety millions of four per cent. bonds in one day to bloodsuckers who were choking the country, and he should be impeached."
In closing my speech I said:
"It is to support such dogmas, my Republican friends, that we are invited to desert the great party to which we belong. It may be that the Republican party has made in the last twenty years some mistakes. It may not always have come up to your aspirations. Sometimes power may have been abused. To err is human; but where it has erred it has always been on the side of liberty and justice. It led our country in the great struggle for union and nationality, which more than all else tended to make it great and powerful. It has always taken side with the poor and the feeble. It emancipated a whole race, and has invested them with liberty and all the rights of citizenship. It never robbed the ballot box. It has never deprived any class of people, for any cause, of the elective franchise. It maintains the supremacy of the national government on all national affairs, while observing and protecting the rights of the states. It has tried to secure the equality of all citizens before the law. It opposes all distinctions among men, whether white or black, native or naturalized. It invites them all to partake of equal privileges, and secures them an equal chance in life. It has secured, for the first time in our history, the rights of a naturalized citizen to protection against claims of military duty in his native country. It prescribes no religious test. While it respects religion for its beneficial influence upon civil society, it recognizes the right of each individual to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, without prejudice or interference. It supports free common schools as the basis of republican institutions. It has done more than any party that ever existed to provide lands for the landless. It devised and enacted the homestead law, and has constantly extended this policy, so that all citizens, native and naturalized, may enjoy, without cost, limited portions of this public land. It protects American labor. It is in favor of American industry. It seeks to diversity productions. It has steadily pursued, as an object of national importance, the development of our commerce on inland waters and on the high seas. It has protected our flag on every sea; not the stars and bars, not the flag of a state, but the stars and stripes of the Union. It seeks to establish in this republic of ours a great, strong, free government of free men. It would, with frankness and sincerity, without malice or hate, extend the right hand of fellowship and fraternity to those who lately were at war with us, aid them in making fruitful their waste places and in developing their immense resources, if only they would allow the poor and ignorant men among them the benefits conferred by the constitution and the laws. No hand of oppression rests upon them. No bayonet points to them except in their political imaginings.
"We would gladly fraternize with them if they would allow us, and have but one creed—the constitution and laws of our country, to be executed and enforced by our country, and for the equal benefit of all our countrymen. If they will not accept this, but will keep up sectionalism, maintain the solid south upon the basis of the principles of the Confederate states, we must prepare to stand together as the loyal north, true to the Union, true to liberty, and faithful to every national obligation. I appeal to every man who ever, at any time, belonged to the Republican party, to every man who supported his country in its time of danger, to every lover of liberty regulated by law, and every intelligent Democrat who can see with us the evil tendencies of the dogmas I have commented upon, to join us in reforming all that is evil, all the abuses of the past, and in developing the principles and policies which in twenty years have done so much to strengthen our government, to consolidate our institutions, and to excite the respect and admiration of mankind."
I made similar speeches at Lewiston, Augusta, Waterville and Bangor. General Sherman's estimate of my speech at Portland, in reply to an inquiry, is characteristic of him, viz: