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

by Samuel J. Tilden

"I can't find words strong enough to express my feelings regarding this brazen fraud.

"This scheme of plunder develops a weak spot in the government of the United States, which I would not mention were it not for the importance of the issue. We all know that a single State frequently determines the result of a Presidential election. The State of Louisiana has determined the result of a Presidential election. The vote of that State was offered to me for money, and I declined to buy it. But the vote of that State was sold for money!"

A day or two after this anti-lottery meeting the New York Sun recites this passage of Mr. Hewitt's speech, and accompanies it with the following pertinent and instructive comment:

"We do not remember that this highly important testimony has ever before been elicited from Mr. Hewitt in any public declaration. He says that he has personal knowledge that the vote of Louisiana was sold to Mr. Hayes' managers for money; that the same vote was offered for money to him as Mr. Tilden's representative, and that he declined to buy it—very properly, as all patriotic citizens and all honest men will agree.

"Some time in the summer of 1878, when the great crime was less than two years old and the beneficiaries of that crime were still in the full enjoyment of its fruits, there occurred a spirited, we may even say a bitterly personal, controversy between the Hon. Henry Watterson and Mr. Hewitt as to the extent of the latter's responsibility for the failure of the Democratic party to obtain its rights by the seating of Mr. Tilden in the office to which he had been elected. Col. Watterson acrimoniously, and, as we are glad to believe, unjustly, charged Mr. Hewitt not only with a mismanagement of Democratic interests at the time of the electoral count, but also with suppressing the fact of Mr. Tilden's personal disapproval of the electoral commission bill at a critical time in the deliberations of Mr. Tilden's friends at Washington.

"The merits of the Watterson-Hewitt controversy are not now of living interest. Time doubtless has softened the sentiments of each of the two statesmen with reference to the other's part in the events of 1876 and 1877. We refer to the incident merely to say that even under the strongest provocation to disclose all that he knew about the theft of the Presidency, Mr. Hewitt withheld the statement which he made so distinctly and emphatically at an anti-lottery meeting in Chickering Hall fifteen years after the crime.

"There was also, as it may be remembered, a searching investigation into all of the circumstances surrounding the theft of the vote of Louisiana, conducted by the special committee of the Forty-fifth Congress, known as the Potter committee. The object was not to remedy the irremediable, but to bring out the whole truth, to fix the responsibility where it belonged, and to make a repetition of the crime forever impossible. Those Democrats who possessed special knowledge bearing upon the crime came forward and testified. The report and testimony of the Potter investigation fill about twenty-five hundred printed pages, but on no page is there any piece of evidence more important than that which Mr. Hewitt volunteered on Thursday night before a mass-meeting called for an enterprise of moral and social, rather than political, reform.

"We speak of the Potter investigation merely to say that the Hon. Abram S. Hewitt was not among the witnesses before that committee. He did not appear to testify to the sensational facts which he gave so freely to the anti-lottery meeting in Chickering Hall. In all the twenty-five hundred pages he appears only once, and then indirectly. Major Burke testified that when he went to Mr. Hewitt as the ostensible manager of Mr. Tilden's case in the House, and asked him whether Louisiana was to be abandoned by the Democratic managers, Mr. Hewitt replied, among other things, that 'the Democratic party could not afford to take the responsibility of plunging this country into anarchy and strife, upsetting values and disturbing trade.'

"But Mr. Hewitt's silence on previous occasions, when his testimony would have been so valuable, does not render it less interesting, now that its importance is mainly historical."