Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February 1885

by Various

Richard Cleveland, a grandson of the Connecticut abolitionist, married the daughter of an Irish bookseller in Philadelphia, Miss Neale, and was the father of the new President of the United States. He was settled as a Presbyterian minister in the New Jersey village of Caldwell, and there on the 18th of March, 1838, Grover Cleveland was born. His father left New Jersey when he was but a child, and went in the service of the religious body to which he belonged to live in New York. The circumstances of the family were much better, I need not say, than those amid which the youth of Lincoln, the son of an emigrant Virginian, was passed in the wilds of Kentucky and Southern Illinois. But Grover Cleveland, like Lincoln, was early thrown upon his own resources. When he was a lad of sixteen his father died, and he was left to conquer for himself the education he was determined to have, and to make his own way in the world with such small help as a brother and an uncle could afford him, both of them battling with life, and both of them counting, not in vain, upon the young student’s aid in the maintenance of his widowed mother and her young family.

His twenty-first year found the future President admitted to the Bar in Buffalo, the chief city of Western New York. He distinguished himself from the outset of his professional career by his indomitable industry and his devotion to duty. These qualities soon secured for him the honorable but laborious post of Assistant District Attorney. He was not blinded by the glamor and glitter of the “great Civil War” to the rascalities of Reconstruction, but adopted the Democratic faith in politics, though living in a strongly Republican city. In 1870 he was elected Sheriff of Buffalo, and twelve years afterwards, having returned meanwhile to a successful practice at the Bar, the best citizens of Buffalo of all parties rallied to his support as the Democratic candidate for the Mayoralty, in a contest which curiously prefigured, on a smaller arena, the Presidential campaign of 1884. The taxpayers of Buffalo had been systematically plundered by a Republican “municipal ring,” just as the taxpayers of New York many years ago were plundered by the Democratic municipal ring of Tweed and Sweeney, of which so much and such unscrupulous use has been made by Republican writers and speakers to vilify the Democratic party. It has not usually occurred to these ingenious party trumpeters to insist upon the fact that the “Tweed ring” was broken and that its members were brought to chastisement mainly through the persistent efforts of two distinguished Democrats.

One of these was the late Charles O’Conor, in his time the acknowledged leader of the American Bar, and a Democratic candidate for the Presidency in opposition to the headlong and absurd nomination of Horace Greeley, a life-long Whig Protectionist, into which a Democratic Convention allowed itself to be cajoled, despite the manly protest of such true Democratic leaders as Senator Bayard at Baltimore in 1872. The other was Mr. Samuel J. Tilden, whose services against the Tweed ring led first to his election by the Democratic party as Governor of New York in 1874, and then to his election as President of the United States in 1876, the year of the great electoral fraud.

The task which these distinguished Democrats assumed in New York Mr. Cleveland took up in Buffalo, and carried through with such impartial energy and courage that before the expiration of the first year of his term of office as Mayor, he was invited by the Democrats of New York to enter upon the larger stewardship of the State executive. He had been chosen mayor of Buffalo in 1881, by a majority of 3,500 votes. He was chosen Governor of New York in 1882 by a majority of nearly 200,000 in a total poll of 893,000 votes. His opponent was Mr. Folger, a leading Republican, who had sat with distinction on the bench of the highest State Tribunal in New York, and who died the other day as Secretary of the Treasury in the Cabinet of President Arthur; and it is an open secret that the tremendous overthrow of the Republican candidate was partially due to the machinations of the friends of Mr. Blaine who had been dropped for cause from the Cabinet of President Arthur with some emphasis in December of the preceding year. It was the calculation of Mr. Blaine that the defeat of the President’s candidate in the President’s own State of New York in 1882 would materially damage Mr. Arthur’s chances and strengthen his own of securing a Republican Presidential nomination at Chicago in 1884. It was a good calculation, but whether the retrospect of the gubernatorial campaign of 1882 in New York is as gratifying now to Mr. Blaine as it was two years ago may perhaps be doubted.

As Governor of New York, Mr. Cleveland has shown himself what he was as Mayor of Buffalo—rigidly honest, indefatigable, simple in his personal tastes and habits, disdainful of the silly state, and the petty parade of official importance into which too many public servants of the United States have suffered themselves to be seduced during the reign of King Mammon at Washington. It has been his custom to walk every morning from the Executive Mansion to the Governor’s Rooms in the Capitol at Albany, and to spend the day there, incessantly occupied, but always visible to those who have had any real occasion to see him. It will be a wholesome thing to see the Presidential office once more administered in this unostentatious fashion. Mr. Cleveland may be called a representative of the Young Democracy, since he will go into the White House a bachelor, like the last Democratic President, Mr. Buchanan, but a young bachelor, the youngest President indeed yet elected. In his fidelity to the traditions of Jefferson, who rode up to the Capitol on horseback to be inaugurated, “hitched his horse to a post,” took the oath and went about his business, Mr. Cleveland will be supported by the new Vice-President—ex-Governor Hendricks of Indiana, who represents the stanch and experienced Democratic leaders who have borne the brunt of the intense political warfare of the last quarter of a century with unwavering courage and signal ability. As a representative in Congress, as a senator of the United States, as Governor of the great Western State of Indiana, and as the Democratic candidate for the Vice-Presidency on the same ticket with Governor Tilden in 1876, Mr. Hendricks has linked his name with the best traditions, and drawn to himself the general confidence of his party. On the 6th of February, 1869, what is called a “concurrent resolution” (which may be passed without requiring the assent of the President) was introduced into the Senate under the “Reconstruction” legislation of 1868, directing the President of the Senate to deal in a particular manner with the vote of Georgia as “a State lately in rebellion” and to allow that electoral vote to be alluded to only if the counting or omitting to count it would not effect the decision of the election in favor of either candidate. The candidates were General Grant and Governor Seymour of New York. Mr. Hendricks, then a Senator from Indiana, sustained with memorable force and conviction the right of Georgia to her proper and unqualified voice in the election. One Republican Senator alone voted against the “concurrent resolution,” and that Senator, Mr. Trumbull of Illinois, is now a recognised leader of the Democratic party in the State which gave Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency. At the second election of Grant—Horace Greeley having died immediately after the choice of the electors—most of the votes given against General Grant were given to Mr. Hendricks; and in the Democratic Convention of 1876 Mr. Hendricks who was the second choice of a majority of the Convention after Governor Tilden, was eventually nominated, almost against his will, for the Vice-Presidency. He is a man of fine presence and dignified manners, who will preside with ability and tact over that Upper House of the national Legislature which stands as the fortress of Home Rule and State Rights, founded upon the ideal constituency of State sovereignty, and set more safely beyond the reach of the gusts of popular passion than the hereditary principle in Europe.

The first duty of the President Elect will be the selection of his Cabinet officers. Under the American system these officers do not sit in Congress, and, with the exception of the Secretary of the Treasury, they are simply agents of the Executive. But it is customary to select them from the most prominent and influential men of the party, and with reference to the party strength in different sections of the country. To recite the names of the men, any one of whom would be accepted by public opinion in the United States as a fitting Cabinet Minister of the new President, would really be almost to call the roll of the Democratic Senators, now thirty-six in number out of a Senate of Seventy-six members, and of the Democratic Chairmen of Committees in the House, which as newly elected will be Democratic by a majority of between thirty and forty votes. The names of Mr. Bayard of Delaware, the leading candidate after Governor Cleveland at Chicago; Mr. Thurman of Ohio, long the leading Democratic, with Senator Edmunds as the Republican, “law lord” of the Senate, and the author of an Act enforcing upon the great Pacific railway corporations their obligations to the Government, which it has been left for a Democratic Executive to carry into effect; General McClellan; Mr. Pendleton of Ohio, to whom the country chiefly owes whatever measure of reasonable Civil Service reform it enjoys; Mr. McDonald of Indiana, Mr. Lamar of Mississippi, Mr. Hewitt and Mr. Kernan of New York, Mr. Garland of Arkansas, Mr. Beck of Kentucky, Mr. Palmer of Illinois, have been already discussed in the open councils of the party, and intelligent Americans of all opinions will admit that a Cabinet framed of such materials would deserve and command universal confidence. There are many other active and experienced party men whom it might be troublesome to replace in one or the other House of Congress, but there need be no fear that the new President will be at a loss to find able counsellors to aid him in discharging his great trust.

The policy of the new Administration is involved and indicated in the traditions of the party. In our foreign relations the United States under a Democratic President will ask nothing of Europe except a cordial maintenance of treaties, an extension of commercial relations under equitable conditions, a full recognition of the accepted rules of international law, a sedulous exemption everywhere of the persons and property of American citizens from unnecessary annoyance by arbitrary power. The State Department under President Cleveland may be expected to be administered, not in the swash-bucklering and speculative fashion which the Republican supporters of Mr. Blaine extolled during the late canvass as brilliant and enterprising, but in the self-respecting, self-contained, and dignified spirit which controlled our foreign relations under ex-Governor Marcy of New York thirty years ago, and which so honorably distinguished the administration of the same department under ex-Governor Fish of New York from that of sundry other high officers of State in the time of President Grant.

Upon the Treasury Department will fall the responsibility of dealing wisely and firmly with the most important domestic issue inherent in the resumption of executive power by the party of the Constitution. This can hardly be more authoritatively stated than it was a fortnight ago by the Vice-President Elect, Mr. Hendricks, in a speech delivered by him to the people at Indianapolis after the election:—

The watchword of the party in this contest, as in the contest of eight years ago, has been reform—executive, administrative, and revenue reform; an honest construction of the laws, and an honest administration of them. The revenue now collected exceeds the wants of an economical administration by $85,000,000. Because of this the Democrats say: “Let there be revenue reform; let that reform consist in part in the reduction of taxation.” Is it not patent to every man that there ought to be a reform here? The Democratic party this year came before the country with a clear and straightforward statement of the reform they intended to accomplish. In the national platform they declared that reform they would have. It was, first, that the taxation shall not exceed the wants of the Government economically administered; second, that taxation shall be for public purposes alone, and not for private gain or advantage; third, that in the adjustment care shall be taken to neither hurt labor nor harm capital; and fourth, that taxation shall be heaviest on articles of luxury and lightest on articles of necessity.

For now a quarter of a century the “Party of Protection and Monopoly” has persistently transgressed the limits set to the Federal authority by the Constitution, and used the earnings of labor and of capital, in the form of excessive taxes, to fertilise and fatten private enterprises.