The foregoing letter, with the editorial comment which follows it, appeared in the Evening Post October 10, 1860.
The occasion which provoked it was the following account, which appeared a day or two previous in the Evening Post, of a meeting at the Cooper Union of malcontents, having little in common to unite them but their hostility to the party which had nominated Abraham Lincoln for President. They were mostly the unaccounted-for débris of the old Whig party, who tried to disguise themselves by taking the name of "Merchants of New York." Mr. Tilden was invited to speak, but this motley audience did not care to listen long to so prominent a political partisan of Jackson and Van Buren, who had also been the most formidable critic of all Whig measures during all their successive administrations:
"THE TREMENDOUS DEMONSTRATION
"The 'Dry-Goods party,' as by general consent the fusionists have come to be designated, held what they called a 'Union meeting' last night at the Cooper Institute. They did not meet at Tammany Hall, for obvious reasons, though it must have made some of the gentlemen who contributed towards the expense of the entertainment feel a little queer when they found themselves associating politically with a class of men who could not be persuaded to put a foot inside of the old Wigwam. It has been observed that political parties, as they decline in strength, lengthen the list of officers supposed to officiate at their public gatherings, just as the shadows of mountains lengthen as the sun goes down. The Dry-Goods party did not attempt to be an exception; on the contrary, they seem to have made all of their party vice-presidents that they did not make president and secretaries. In looking over the list of gentlemen who figure on this occasion, we could not but be struck with what Clay called the 'mutability of all human opinion.' It seemed as if the milky portion of the old barn-burning party of '48 which had soured from the effects of Republican thunder, had been specially served up for the public entertainment. There was Dix, who ran for Governor with Van Buren in 1848 against Cass, nominated for chairman by Wilson G. Hunt, largely in the dry-goods line, who supported Van Buren and free soil as zealously and liberally as he now supports Breckinridge, Douglas, Bell, Sam & Co.
"Our old friend Tilden, who stood at the wheel during all those troublous times; who was one of the counsel for the Barnburners in the Baltimore convention of 1848, and who helped to lead the Evening Post into all its free-soil heresies without ever showing it any decent way out of them, offered the resolutions and made a short speech. It would have been longer, but the audience wished to hear Wood. Either Wood or a song they must have, and so Mr. Tilden retired with his speech just as good as new, and, as it appeared, too good for his audience, that they might hear a song from a Mr. Cosgrove, Wood being returned by the officer 'not found.' The preference for Wood is explained, perhaps, by the fact that the first vice-president, W. B. Astor, was one of the ten or dozen gentlemen who certified to Mayor Wood's character when a candidate a second time for the 'mayorality'—as Mr. Wood is in the habit of spelling the dignity he at present enjoys—and who recommended him warmly to the suffrages of the people. All the rest of the gentlemen who signed that 'character,' Moses Taylor, M. Aspinwall, the Browns, etc., figure also among the vice-presidents, and it is not strange, therefore, that a meeting thus officered should prefer a speech from Fernando Wood to a speech from Samuel J. Tilden.
"Then there was Henry Grinnell, who paid liberally towards raising the standard of rebellion at the park meeting, held shortly after the nomination of Cass, in 1848, and whose name was freely used by the Barnburners until about the time that the Union-saving steamship companies began to be incorporated and subsidized by Congress. Since then he has had little or no interest in anything North, this side of the Arctic circle.
"John Cochrane, Dan Norris, Henry Eveson, William F. Havemeyer, Stephen Cambreleng, Charles A. Secor, Myndert Van Schaick, whom, to his great disappointment, the Barnburners failed to elect Mayor of the city before the days of fusion, T. B. Tappen, John Van Buren, A. B. Conger, Addison Gardiner, etc., etc., make up the list of distinguished Barnburners of the milky sort who have 'turned,' and now form the cheesy pillars and architrave of the Dry-Goods party.
"The speakers for the evening were James W. Gerard and Charles O'Conor, two of our ablest lawyers, skilled to make the worse appear the better reason, and, from long professional training, about as much at home on one side of a question as another. As neither of these gentlemen were in good standing with the old Democratic party, the first being an old Whig and the other a fractious and crockery-breaking independent, they were listened to with patience by an assembly conspicuously impatient of anything savoring of old-fashioned Democracy.
"What effect the bringing together such a crowd of officers for such a thin display of speakers will have upon the dry-goods market will doubtless appear in the column where such reports are usually chronicled; what effect it will have on the Pennsylvania election will appear by the returns in to-morrow's Evening Post; what effect it will have upon the vote of this State is of no sort of consequence, for we were sure of a large majority before it was held, and of course we may reasonably expect a larger majority now.
"We are sorry about Mr. Tilden's speech. We have no doubt it was a good one, and as we are the friends of free speech we will publish it cheerfully in the Evening Post if he will give us the opportunity. It will reach a great many more of his friends through our columns than stood within the reach of his voice, and they will all be glad to know by what process so clever a man has reasoned himself into such bad company."