"Respectfully,
"Thos. Van Rensselaer."
M. VAN BUREN TO S. J. TILDEN
"Lindenwald, October 18th, '48.
"My dear Sir,—As you are the man of business, if not the only one in our ranks, you must not complain of the trouble I am about to give you. The enclosed has embarrassed me not a little. Having been pleased with the writer's very successful reply to Mr. Gerrit Smith, which I think we read together, I feel loath to slight him altogether, and yet I can neither do what he suggests without falsifying my position or open a correspondence with him without exposing the act to perversion. I wish, therefore, you would take the trouble to send for him and explain to him my situation upon the said point.
In haste, very truly yours,
"M. Van Buren."
TILDEN ON MR. GREELEY, THE LEGISLATOR, AND THE SLAVERY QUESTION[17]
[From the "Evening Post," Dec. 23, 1848.]
"When we wrote our former articles on the bill of Mr. Douglass we had not seen the letter from Mr. Greeley which was published in Saturday's Tribune (Dec. 16, 1848). The intimation contained in that letter of his sentiments and probable course in regard to that bill if presented in its original form, would not have been allowed to pass without the animadversion which its extraordinary nature calls for, and which we shall now briefly make, not upon the impersonality which edits the Tribune, but upon Mr. Greeley, the legislator, who represents in part the people of this city in the highest councils of the nation.
"When, after having professed to consider the extension of slavery to free Territories as the question of questions involved in the late election—after having for months exhorted all to treat it as far above the other objects of party association, and reproached those who did not so treat it as false to freedom—after having at first distrusted the noble band of Democrats who proclaimed their determination to maintain throughout the canvass and at the polls the sentiments which they had before professed, taunted them with the prediction that they would ultimately surrender principles to a slavish subserviency to party, and at length applauded their constancy when it could no longer be disputed; after having stigmatized as recreant to principle and duty all who should support a candidate for the Presidency not avowedly in favor of the Wilmot proviso; after having denounced General Taylor as identified in interest and association with the slave power, and probably unsound in principle on the greatest of issues; when, after having done all this, the editor of the Tribune, on the eve of election, announced his intention to support General Taylor, to vote for a man because he was available, whom he had denounced for that very reason when nominated as an available; to vote for a man because he would beat Gen. Cass, whom he had denounced when nominated on that express ground; to vote for a man whom, after three months of nice balancing, he found to be a shade less objectionable than another candidate, because it was necessary to make a choice of evils between the nominees of the two old party organizations, no matter how wrong and dangerous the principles of both might be; thus surrendering the great question of freedom in the Territories, in the same manner and for the same reasons, for which most of the supporters of Taylor and Cass at the North professed to surrender it, and uniting with them in presenting the miserable spectacle of a number of electors sufficient to choose the President, all voting for men not representing their sentiments on a question professedly regarded by them as the most important, because there was no chance of electing one who did represent those sentiments; when, in a word, after all his former professions, Mr. Greeley ended in doing precisely what the original Taylor men and the Cass men of the North did, and for precisely the same reasons, and addressed to others precisely the same arguments which had been so long addressed to him in vain, and which he had been so long refuting, he shook deeply—very deeply—the confidence in his sincerity which his apparent zeal in behalf of freedom had inspired. For our part, we were inclined to take a charitable view of his conduct. We thought we saw him struggling in the meshes of party association, and yielding not until he had half satisfied his own conscience that he could vote for Taylor as not so certainly declared as Cass, and therefore not quite so objectionable on the great issue, and at last reconciled to himself by the general sense that it was a little better that Taylor should be elected than Cass. We thought we saw a painful conflict with his self-respect and his sense of consistency—a consciousness that he had not chosen the nobler, even if the more expedient, part—that he was doing at best a doubtful act against which his better nature revolted. We are disposed always to respect, in silence, such manifestations, and not to reproach.