Letters and Literary Memorials of Samuel J. Tilden, v. 1

by Samuel J. Tilden

"Geneva, in Switzerland, Aug. 1873.

"My dear Sir,—As I shall not be able to return home in season to take part in the political canvass of this fall, I desire through you to request the delegate to the State convention who will be chosen from my district to say for me that I decline a re-election as member-at-large of the State committee and as its chairman.

"What the country now needs in order to save it is a revival of the Jeffersonian democracy, with the principles of government and rules of administration, and with the high standard of official morality which were established by the political revolution of 1800. At that time the infant institutions of the republic were imperilled by the same evil tendencies which have to-day attained a larger development. The demoralizations of war—a spirit of gambling adventure, engendered by false systems of public finance; a grasping centralism, absorbing all functions from the local authorities, and assuming to control the industries of individuals by largesses to favored classes from the public treasury of moneys wrung from the body of the people by taxation—were then, as now, characteristics of the period. The party which swayed the government, though embracing many elevated characters, was dominated, as an organization, by the ideas of its master-spirit, Alexander Hamilton. Himself personally pure, he nevertheless believed that our American people must be governed, if not by force, at least by appeals to the selfish interests of classes, in all the forms of corrupt influence. I recently met here—in the birthplace of Albert Gallatin—a son of that great man, and himself a distinguished American. Speaking in the light of the unsullied traditions of that day, as well as of its public history, he said that the jobbery and corruption and laxity of official morals were as great, proportionally, then as now. If this be a true judgment, the reaction which was effected and which gave us half a century of comparatively pure administration is an encouragement that official morals and public life may be again lifted from degradation. As the means of the reaction of 1800, Thomas Jefferson founded and organized the Democratic party. He set up anew the broken foundations of governmental power. He stayed the advancing centralism. He restored the rights of the States and the localities. He repressed the meddling of government in the concerns of private business, remitting the management of the industries of the country to the domain of the individual judgment and conscience. He not only brought the administration into conformity with principles which lessen the occasions and the motives for corruption, but he enforced, by precept and by example, purity and disinterestedness in official life. He refused to appoint relatives to office. He declined all presents. He refrained, while in the public service, from all enterprises to increase his private fortune.

The immense ascendency over the public opinion of the country acquired by Mr. Jefferson—the complete triumph of the party he formed and led, the acceptance at length by the whole people of him as the highest political authority—shaped the course of government in the United States for half a century. That period will stand in all history as the golden age of the republic.

The reformatory work of Mr. Jefferson in 1800 must now be repeated. Organizations and names are important only as they are available for the result. Every patriotic citizen, sincerely desirous of reform, should discard all prejudices and accept the benefaction from any source which is capable of providing it.

But it is quite clear that the Republican party now swaying the administration, although it embraces large numbers of honorable and patriotic citizens, is, as a whole, incapable of this specific mission. In the sixteen years during which it will have been in possession of the government at the expiration of the present Presidential term, all the evils which call so loudly for redress have had their origin, their persistent and daily growth. Nearly all its thinkers, speakers and writers, its active intellect and its power of leadership, are imbued with strong-government theories of so extravagant a character that even Hamilton would have disowned and doubtless would have condemned them. The classes who desire pecuniary profit from existing governmental abuses have become numerous and powerful beyond any example in our country. The myriads of officeholders, with enhanced salaries, and often with illicit gains; the contractors and jobbers; the beneficiaries of Congressional grants of the public property or of special franchises; the favored interests whose business is rendered lucrative by legislative bounties or legislative monopolies; the corporations whose hopes and fears are appealed to by the measures of the government; the rapacious hordes of carpet-baggers who have plundered the impoverished people of the South at least ten times as much as Tweed's Ring did the rich metropolis, and whose fungus growth is intertwined with the roots of the Republican party; all these classes are not only interested in perpetuating existing evils and existing wrongs, but they are the main agencies and instruments by which that work is done. They furnish organization, they supply numerous partisans who devote themselves to electioneering while the honest citizens are compelled to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow; they contribute and aggregate vast sums of money to be expended in conducting party canvasses, in influencing the elections and in corrupting the voters; sums which no number of disinterested citizens could furnish if equally unscrupulous in the methods of political influence. For the first time in our national history such classes have become powerful enough to aspire to be in America the ruling classes, as they have been and are in the corrupt societies of the Old World. They threaten to reproduce here a state of things often found elsewhere, in which the governmental machine, with its allies and dependents, is capable of setting itself up against and over the whole mass of unorganized citizens who follow the avocations of private life. These classes completely possess the organization of the Republican party. They have absorbed the Republican party. They are, for all practical purposes, the Republican party. They make its nominations; they shape its measures, they preserve its policy. Individual dissenters who preserve the original traditions of American free government there are, but their voices are not heard; they are generally paralyzed; they are always powerless. Hitherto no Democratic minority has been formed capable of exercising any practical power. No internal remedy can come for a disease which has incorporated itself with everything vital in the political body. It is too late to cut out the cancer without killing the patient.

"In the nature of the case, the remedy can come only from an opposition which shall grow strong enough to turn out the present existing administration and take its place. In such an opposition the Democratic masses must contribute a large element. They embrace three and a half or four millions of votes, and are of themselves within five per cent. of a majority. They contain nearly all the thinkers, speakers and writers, all the trained statesmen who adhere to the traditions of Jefferson; and while individual members have been not unstained with the errors of the times, the body, as a whole, is sound; and a majority is sure to declare for the ancient faith of Jefferson and Franklin and George Clinton and Samuel and John Hancock.

"In the part I have borne in the administration of the Democratic party of the State of New York—now closed—I have aimed at three things:

"1. To lead on public opinion in favor of the original ideas of the Jeffersonian democracy and in support of such current measures as secured valuable reforms.

"2. To terminate a degrading strife in which they enlisted themselves, in comparing the leprous spots on their respective sides, and practically declared that the word only was wanting to incite an honorable emulation in which they should seek and apply effectual remedies and the public mind stimulated to reform.