But he was by no means wanting in the sense of moral earnestness, and he had a just perception of the occasions demanding the exercise of that faculty. He was well aware that fraud and corruption could not be successfully combated with the weapons of reason, and that they did not deserve to be reasoned with. When he found himself confronted by the powerful Canal Ring, which had fattened for a generation upon fraudulent contracts for repairs and pretended improvements to the canals, a ring which had founded wealthy and influential families, and had its stipendiaries among the able lawyers of the State, he perceived that it was a warfare in which no quarter could be given, and which could not be carried on by the weapons of facts and figures alone. He courageously determined to invade, single-handed, the strongholds of his enemies, and to arouse against them the moral indignation of the people. Using a vacation from pressing official duties, he made a series of speeches in a tour along the line of the canals from Buffalo to Albany. Flinging aside his customary temperance and moderation, he denounced his adversaries—men of wealth and the highest social standing—as criminals, and summoned the people to stand by his side in an effort to enforce against them the criminal law. Speaking at Syracuse, in the midst of the men he was condemning, he said: "Here, under your own eyes and your own observation, these transactions have been carried on in open day, by a combination that has sought to rule the State.... I was called upon this morning to speak some words of encouragement and hope to four hundred little boys in the Western House of Refuge. During all my journey I have been frequently followed by persons asking for their friends and those in whom they were interested a pardon from the penitentiaries and State-prisons. I have been compelled to look into such cases to see who are the inmates of these institutions, and of what they have been accused, and to ascertain what it is that constitutes the wrong to society of which they have been convicted. When I compare their offences, in their nature, temptations, and circumstances, with the crimes of great public delinquents who claim to stand among your best society, and are confessedly prominent among their fellow-citizens—crimes repeated and continued year after year—I am appalled at the inequality of human justice." He made by this series of addresses a profound impression upon the public mind.
He was cautious not to be imposed upon by those who wished his official aid or influence, and commonly subjected them to a searching cross-examination, but a case of real distress quickly moved him. I remember an instance which occurred during my sojourn, already mentioned, at the Governor's mansion in Albany. We were at work together rather late one evening, when he was told that a little girl wished to see him. She was wretchedly clad, and seemed to be in great misery. Moments were then quite precious to him, but he dropped everything and spent half an hour with her. When he returned to the library where we were at work he told me her tale. It was that she was the oldest of several children; that her father was a drunkard and cruel to her mother, who also sometimes got intoxicated—though, as the girl said, only when her father abused her—and who had, the day before, although having a nursing infant only a few weeks old, been sent to prison for ten days for drunkenness; that the little girl had been vainly endeavoring to take care of the infant and the rest of the family, but had given up in despair. The Governor seemed a good deal moved at this separation of mother and infant, and spoke with indignation of the manner in which the criminal law was administered in the lower courts by incompetent magistrates. He immediately despatched a secretary to the executive chamber for a sealed pardon in blank, filled it up and signed it, and sent the same secretary with the girl to the prison, with instructions to see that the woman was released and taken to her home that very night. I asked him whether this was not rather hasty and inconsiderate action, adding that possibly the magistrate, if consulted, might give a different statement of the case. He answered: "No, and I wouldn't believe him if he did. Don't I know that the little girl told me the truth?"
In assigning to Governor Tilden capacities for public usefulness superior to those of other men of his generation, one qualification should perhaps be made. He could not have led, or rather guided, as Lincoln did, the storm of patriotic passion which the Southern insurrection aroused. There are resistless currents in human affairs which disdain the feeble control of mere reason, and insist upon working their way by force alone. War is a conflict of the passions, and, when it becomes necessary or preferable to peace, those passions should be inflamed rather than checked.
But the superior wisdom of Governor Tilden was equally manifest in this great crisis, although, perhaps, incapable of dealing with it. Naturally anti-slavery, he had encouraged the first tendencies towards the assertion of the Free-soil sentiment of the North by joining in the revolt of the Northern Democrats against the nominees of the Democratic convention in 1848, and supporting the candidates nominated at the Barnburners' convention at Utica. But when he saw this movement developing into the formation of a permanent political organization under the name of the Republican party, with the avowed object of preventing by national legislation any further extension of slavery, he paused and receded.
The argument of the supporters of the new movement was that Congress had the power, not, indeed, to interfere with slavery in the States, but to prevent its establishment in the Territories; and that they were but exercising their constitutional rights in forming a party for the purpose of securing such legislation. Tilden could not deny the mere claim of constitutional right; but this, with him, was but a small part of the question. What would be the consequence of a successful assertion of that right? Could it be reasonably supposed that the Southern States would view it otherwise than as an attack upon what they deemed to be a vital interest? Would not its necessary effect be to force unanimity among them in opposition to the policy? Was the supposition that there was any considerable Free-soil sentiment in the South which would array itself on the side of the government anything but a dream? Should we not have two strictly sectional parties arrayed upon the question of preserving or destroying an institution which one of them, not unnaturally, regarded as essential to self-existence? These, in his view, were questions which must be first solved before such a movement could be encouraged. His solution led him to the conclusion that war would be the necessary result of such action; and this involved the further inquiry whether the object in view would be gained by a civil war, or, if gained, would be worth the terrible cost. Appalled by the uncertainties and terrors of such a conflict, he took refuge, as Mr. Webster had before him, in the belief that the natural forces in operation would of themselves accomplish all that could be gained by the policy of restriction. In a letter to William Kent in 1860, before the election of Lincoln, he stated his conclusions and the reasoning which led to them with his characteristic moderation, but with masterly force. His main conclusion was that if the Republican party should be successful, the national government in the Southern States would cease to be self-government, and become a government by one people over another distinct people—a thing impossible with our race, except as a consequence of successful war, and even then incompatible with our democratic institutions. He said:
"I assert that a controversy between powerful communities, organized into governments, of a nature like that which now divides the North and South, can be settled only by convention or by war. I affirm this upon the universal principles of human nature, and the collective experience of all mankind." And again: "A condition of parties in which the federative government shall be carried on by a party having no affiliations in the Southern States is impossible to continue. Such a government would be out of all relation to those States. It would have neither the nerves of sensation which convey intelligence to the intellect of the body politic, nor the ligaments and muscles which hold its parts together and move them in harmony. It would be in substance the government of one people by another people. That system will not do with our race."
This reasoning was founded upon the facts of human nature, the philosophy of government, and the teachings of experience. Its truth is more manifest now than when it was uttered. Who of the great Free-soil leaders would have had the hardihood to persist in their course if they could have foreseen the consequences so clearly? Greeley, terrified by the horrible spectacle of war, was driven to say: "Let the wayward sisters depart in peace." Seward's short vision predicted that it would be all over "in sixty days"! But in great crises the foresight of the wisest is but blindness. Were it always given men to see what they are to go through with, the greatest steps in moral advancement would never be taken. Tilden did not foresee, through the storms of war, any more than others, the freedom of the slave with the acquiescence of the master, and the consequent unification of the republic.
But the trials of our popular system of government were not terminated by the simultaneous overthrow of the Rebellion and slavery. It may be, rather, that they have just begun. We were confident before the war that slavery was the source of the only peril which really threatened us. That out of the way, we find ourselves confronted with new dangers, growing out of differences of opinion respecting the extent to which the black race shall be allowed to participate in government. That participation is now practically denied by the Southern States, and the mandate of the Constitution is unhesitatingly set at naught by the employment either of force or fraud. The remedy suggested is an enforcement of that mandate by Federal legislation, which means simply the enforcement of its will by one section against that of the other. This is not democratic government, but the rule of the conquered by the conqueror. The evil is bad enough; and the remedy will probably be worse. We begin to see that the real danger which has at all times menaced us is the presence on our soil of a different race, unequal, for the present, at least, to the great office of self-government. Slavery was not itself the evil, but only one of the methods of dealing with it. Is our substitute, the bestowal upon the race of universal suffrage, a successful device? And, if this must be abandoned, what shall next be tried? These grave problems, already threatening, will assume a graver aspect if the results of the census just taken, when studied and compared, shall be found to show a more rapid rate of increase in the black population at the South than in the white. To meet such perils we need nothing so much as a class of statesmen of which Samuel J. Tilden was the most distinguished example.
LETTERS AND LITERARY MEMORIALS OF SAMUEL J. TILDEN