"My dear Sir,—Accept my thanks for your attention to my stock affair. Please deposit the balance to my credit in Mr. Worth's bank. I regret your inability to visit me, as I long to have an old-fashioned chat with you.
"In haste,
"Very truly yours,
"M. Van Buren."
TILDEN TO——
SUGGESTION FOR PRESIDENT PIERCE IN THE ORGANIZATION AND CONDUCT OF HIS ADMINISTRATION
"New York, Jany. 15th, 1853.
"My dear Sir,—I thank you for the copy of Hawthorne's Memoirs. It would have reminded me, if I had forgotten, that I promised to write you my views on the subject of our conversation when I last had the pleasure to see you. I should have done so earlier, but engagements, which it is no exaggeration to call incessant, have left me no opportunity.
"The preliminary question is, on what general theory is the new administration to be formed? Is the Cabinet to be composed of those who are commonly regarded as Presidential men—who were candidates for the recent nomination—and are surrounded by the affiliations which naturally grow up around those occupying that position? It seems to me that this would be attempting to stand steadily and firmly on a half-dozen different stools. The President might himself look after the success of his administration, while his constitutional helpers were thinking how each measure and each appointment would affect their pretensions to the succession; or he might content himself with the formal honor of presiding over the councils of these heads of factions. But, in my judgment, he ought to be—not what Victoria is in the British government, not a grand Elector, as Sieyès would have made Napoleon, not a mere chooser of the actual rulers—but the real and responsible head of the administration. That he may be such, he should have, as far as practicable, a Cabinet able to perform its duty towards him, faithfully and effectively, and not inviting by the aspirations of its members internal dissension or external hostility. In the last term of an administration, it may be difficult to exclude pretensions to the succession. But why incur the embarrassments which they never fail to generate, during a first term, unless it be certain that it is also the last! And is it to be now assumed that the Democracy will look from the candidate through whom it solved the difficulties of a choice at the last convention, and to candidates through whom it found itself unable to solve those difficulties? It is not clear that the party can, after so recent a disorganization—if it could under other circumstances—be sufficiently consolidated in a single term to be instrumental to any great public service. But it is clear what will become of the family discipline and how the farm will be managed if the old gentleman begins by announcing his own decease and inviting the boys to scramble for the inheritance. Polk tried that, secretly meaning all the while to be his own heir; and while he contrived and they scrambled, the inheritance went to strangers. Let not Gen. Pierce content himself with being a loose and temporary bond of union between factions; but rather let him aim to fuse those factions, and constitute a single, compact party.
"Now what is to be done with New York? Some will say avoid all difficulties by taking no member of the Cabinet from that State. That would be better than to do worse; and, if on due reflection it should be deemed most expedient, I should not personally complain. But it is not a policy after my heart or my judgment; nor does it tend to constitute a party out of the fused elements of factions. An evasion policy, in such a case, is a feeble policy.
"Well, who then shall be taken? The public regard Messrs. O'Conor, Dickinson, Marcy, and Dix as candidates; and therefore I may be justified in remarking upon them as such. The first two I shall not say much about, because I do not suppose their present relations to the prevailing policies of the State will make them regarded as admissible selections.
"Mr. O'Conor is a man of extensive and accurate legal learning, of an acuteness of reason somewhat excessive even for the higher uses of his profession—of great mental activity, indefatigable, vehement and sarcastic in controversy; remarked at the bar as able rather than wise, and remarkable for a want of tact. What these qualities—not weakened by a life almost exclusively forensic—would naturally make him in politics, where they are not counteracted by the large knowledge, long experience, and settled rules and habits that modify their effects in his profession, and where the opposite qualities, the power, not of dissenting or contesting, but of moulding, constructing, and organizing, of determining one's self and representing others, are mainly required, may be imagined. Add inexperience in politics, very limited acquaintance with its subjects, its questions, its history, its methods or its men—unsettled convictions, a tendency to capriciousness, and as little as can easily be found of that capacity which enables a man instinctively to act with others or make them act with him, and you have the political aspects of his character. Whether in personal judgment or action in politics, in administrative council, in a deliberative assembly, or in leading or aiding to lead a party of a nation or a ward, his destiny is to illustrate how little fitted to such purposes may be talents conceded to be eminent in a peculiar sphere. This opinion is the result of many years' observation. It was confirmed when I was associated with him in the convention that formed the present Constitution of this State, and, in an intercourse constant and never unfriendly, was a daily witness of the development of his characteristics. The partiality of his friends would not change the nature, though it might lessen the degree, of this criticism. No one has suggested him except as Attorney Genl.; and for that station, I presume, on the idea that its duties are purely professional. If that office did not share in the general administrative councils of the President; if, as a legal adviser, he were not required to look at the mixed questions that come up before him somewhat with the eye of a statesman as well as that of a mere lawyer—or at least with the largeness and comprehensiveness of a judicial view; if he had no duty or utility beyond conducting the cases in the courts in which he occasionally appears for the United States, certainly there could be no objection to the personal adaptation of this gentleman, and, if that member of the Cabinet from New York need have no relation to the majority of the party there, which has the entire State government, and whose ascendency is every day becoming more complete and solid, and but a very ineffective relation to the minority, if he need represent nobody and be capable of representing nobody, such a selection might not be injudicious as respects the Democracy of the largest State in the Union.