Letters and Literary Memorials of Samuel J. Tilden, v. 2

by Samuel J. Tilden

"On the subject of slavery, Mr. Tilden's opinions were no less fixed. Though never what used to be known as an Abolitionist, neither was he ever the advocate or apologist of servile labor. In the controversy which grew out of our territorial acquisitions from Mexico in 1847, he was for doing everything to secure those Territories the benefit of the social and industrial institutions of the North. In that sense he acted in 1848 in opposing the extension of slavery into any of the free Territories by the act of the Federal government; and again, in 1854, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was under consideration in Congress, and the flames of sectional controversy broke out afresh, Mr. Tilden was open and decided in his opposition to the repeal, in reference to which he stated in a letter to Wm. Kent in 1860:

"'I used all my influence, at whatever sacrifice of relations, against the repeal ... because I thought a theoretical conformity to even a wise system dearly purchased by breaking the tradition of ancient pacification on such a question and between such parties.'

"Accustomed as I was to converse with Mr. Tilden freely upon all public questions, even when our views were most at variance, having always been in the habit of reading everything which I knew to come from his pen, I feel that I may safely challenge anybody to produce a particle of evidence, either oral or in print, of any sympathy on his part either with secession or with slavery, or any evidence that in the course he felt it his duty to pursue he was not actuated by his best judgment as to what was wise and right for the government and for the welfare of his country. After the breach with the South in 1854, I think I am competent to affirm that he had no partisan relations whatever with slave-holding States. In a letter to the Evening Post, written in February, 1863, he speaks of being taunted by Senator Preston King as an object of proscription by the South, and of being asked if he thought his name could pass the Senate of the United States.

"'I answered,' said Mr. Tilden, 'that it was a matter of very little consequence to me whether it could or not; but that it was of great consequence to me that I should do what I thought best for the country.'

"Every act and every expression of his during the war, so far as it has come under my cognizance, was in full accordance with this position, and, what is more, in entire harmony with the whole tenor of his life.

"Better than any person that I knew, he comprehended the irreconcilability of the forces that were arraying themselves against each other in the country. Exaggerating, perhaps, the danger of attempting to rule the country by a sectional party, he deemed it the part of wise statesmanship to postpone as long as possible, in the hope, through the mediatorial offices of time and its inevitable changes, of avoiding a collision.

"No one contested the force of his reasoning on this subject; but they derided his apprehensions of a civil war. So preposterous did they appear to the impassioned multitude in the North, that I remember myself to have been asked by one of his personal friends whether he was quite in his right mind on the subject.

"In 1860, after the failure of the Democratic party at Charleston—though he was then and had been for several years withdrawn from political life—he did not hesitate openly to proclaim his conviction that the dissolution of the Democratic party and the attempt to govern the country by a party like the Republican, having no affiliation in the Southern States, would inevitably result in civil war. He was asked to fill a vacancy in the delegation from New York at the adjourned meeting of the Democratic convention of that year in Baltimore. In that body he made two speeches, in which he portrayed, as an inevitable consequence of a sectional division of the Democratic party, a corresponding division of the States and an armed conflict. These speeches were described by those who heard them as inspired by a solemn sense of patriotic duty and a most vivid perception of impending dangers. After the election of Mr. Lincoln, and when the dangers he had foretold were becoming realities, he took part in several conferences in which Hamilton Fish, the late Charles H. Marshall, the late Daniel Lord, Moses H. Grinnell, the late Wm. B. Astor, Moses Taylor, William B. Duncan, Richard M. Blatchford, A. A. Low, and other gentlemen of more or less prominence participated; and on two of these occasions he made speeches in which he sought to impress upon his hearers a juster sense than was generally entertained of the threatened dangers, and of the fittest means of averting them.

"Earnestly as Mr. Tilden labored to avert the war and to thwart the measures which seemed to him calculated to precipitate it; anxious as he had been to contribute no fresh ingredient of hatred to the seething caldron; when, without any responsibility on his part, the war came, he never for a moment hesitated as to the course he was to pursue. He felt it to be the duty of every citizen to sustain the government in its resistance to territorial dismemberment. To those who thought, as did many then calling themselves Republicans, that on the whole it would be as well to consent to a peaceful separation, Mr. Tilden always answered that peaceful separation was an illusion; that the questions in controversy would be rendered infinitely more difficult by separation, and new ones still more difficult would be created; that, if the antagonized parties could not agree upon peace within the Union, they certainly would not have peace without the Union. They never could agree upon terms of separation, nor could they agree upon the relations to subsist between them after the separation; and, however lamentable might be the consequences, force could be the only arbiter of their differences.

"Though Mr. Tilden was opposed to any illusory concessions to the spirit of disunion; though he was satisfied, after the attack on Fort Sumter, that the differences between the two sections could only be settled by the last argument of kings; and though he was disposed to do everything in his power to make that argument as effective and decisive as possible—his co-operation with the administration of President Lincoln was qualified by a fixed difference of opinion upon several points.