Without doffing his armor, and even before his investiture with his new robes of office, he instituted an elaborate investigation of the canals of the State; so that he had been but a few weeks in office before he was engaged with numerically a far more formidable foe than the one over which he had just triumphed, but one for which his official position happily equipped him with far superior resources. His triumph over the Canal Ring of the State was consequently so short, quick, and decisive as to give him a national reputation, and to make him, long before his term of office at Albany expired, the inevitable candidate of his party to succeed General Grant for the Presidency. He was unanimously nominated by the Democratic National Convention, held at St. Louis in 1876, on the second ballot, and was elected by a popular majority of over 250,000. He was then destined to receive a distinction never shared by any President of the United States, of being an elect of the people for that office, which, by the operation of a tribunal unknown to the Constitution, was given to another.
For the remaining ten years of his life Tilden's health prevented his being wholly a candidate or wholly not a candidate, so reluctant were his numerous friends to give up all hope of such a restoration of health as would enable him to resume once more the leadership of his party. In this they were disappointed.
Thus for more than half a century Mr. Tilden was a shaper and a maker of American history. What kind of history and by what means it was made these volumes are expected to render more clear to the world, and his fame perhaps more enduring.
Mr. Tilden's life, like that of Israel's second king, was, as we have seen, a life of almost constant warfare, and of course he was always more or less liable to be viewed by partisan eyes and judged with only partial justice. None of us can judge himself quite correctly until he can look back upon his conduct after a considerable lapse of years. So we only see a public man as he is entitled to be seen, as Moses was permitted to see his Lord: after He had passed. It is to be hoped that sufficient time has elapsed since Tilden was taken from us to enable us to see by the reflection of his life in this correspondence how lofty was the plane of his entire public life, and how correctly he judged his qualifications for a successful political career when he said that his party standards were too high for the multitude. They were too high, unquestionably, for what is commonly understood as success in politics. It would have been easy for him—as these pages will show—to have been President had his ethical standards been nearer the average of those of the parties of his time.
Without presuming to institute any invidious comparisons, I have no hesitation in expressing my conviction that neither in the writings, speeches, or literary remains of any President of the United States thus far will be found more suggestions profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for the instruction of any American who aspires to be a maker of a nation's laws or an administrator of them, than will be found in Mr. Tilden's Writings, Speeches, and Correspondence.
With the permission of Messrs. Houghton & Mifflin, I have prefixed to these volumes an "Appreciation" of Mr. Tilden by the late James Coolidge Carter, which originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly of October, 1892. Mr. Carter's eminence at the American bar and forum, and his relations, both personal and professional, with Mr. Tilden, give value to his judgment of his deceased friend which, both for the honor of himself and of Mr. Tilden, is entitled to all the prominence that can be given to it in these volumes.