There is a great contrast in his favor in his manner of bearing this disappointment with that of Clay and Webster under somewhat similar circumstances. Clay was furious at the nomination of General William Henry Harrison, and greeted with unmeasured denunciation those responsible for that judicious act; and Webster was bitter when Taylor and Scott were nominated in the first instance, but came, after a time, grandly out of the clouds. It is an interesting coincidence that Webster when Secretary of State was a candidate for the Presidential nomination against his chief, President Fillmore, and died, on the 24th of October, 1852, a few months after Scott's triumph at Baltimore and a few days before the popular election of Pierce. The enduring memory of Mr. Blaine appeared in the last October he lived, in the precise remark, when something was said of the death of Webster, "Ah! day after to-morrow it will be forty years since Webster died." The news of the nomination of Hayes, Blaine received serenely, and before the vote was declared in the convention sent the nominee a cordial telegram of congratulation. When he knew at Augusta in 1884 that he was beaten, he said: "Personally I care less than my nearest friends would believe, but for the cause and for many friends I profoundly deplore the result." And that was the entire truth. He felt that he had not been fairly beaten, but he gave utterance only to the public wrong done in the unfairness, and left that expression as a warning to the country. He did not, as we have seen, follow the example of Clay, who persistently favored his own candidacy. On the contrary, Blaine did not covet the Presidency, and tried to avoid the personal strife of 1884, and not for any of the apprehensive motives attributed to him by those who acted upon the feeling in his case that the spirit of justice was malevolent.
I feel that I should not now deal fairly with the public if I did not give here the letter from Blaine in my possession, that more completely than any published gives expression to his personal bearing when defeated.
LETTER FROM MR. BLAINE TO MR. HALSTEAD.
(Personal.)
AUGUSTA, MAINE, 16th Nov., '84.
DEAR MR. HALSTEAD:—I think there would be no harm to the public and no personal injustice if you should insert the three enclosed items in your editorial columns.
I feel quite serene over the result. As the Lord sent upon us an ass in the shape of a preacher, and a rainstorm, to lessen our vote in New York, I am disposed to feel resigned to the dispensation of defeat, which flowed directly from these agencies.
In missing a great honor I escaped a great and oppressive responsibility. You know—perhaps better than any one—how much I didn't want the nomination; but perhaps, in view of all things, I have not made a loss by the canvass. At least I try to think not. The other candidate would have fared hard in Maine, and would have been utterly broken in Ohio.
Sincerely,
JAMES G. BLAINE.
Of course all this is private.
P.S.—This note was written before receipt of yours. Pray publish nothing of the kind you intimate unless you first permit me to see the proof. Don't be afraid of the enclosed items. They are rock-ribbed for truth and for a good rendering of public opinion.
Mr. Blaine refers in the closing paragraph to the proposition I made to him to publish the true story of his candidacy—substantially the same pressed upon the attention of General Sherman. Between them they suppressed me, but it is due them that this chapter of history should be known now that they are gone.
I had the privilege of walking with Mr. Blaine in the beautiful and fragrant parks at Homburg, in Southern Germany, in the summer of 1887, and discussing with him the question whether he should be a candidate for the Republican nomination the next spring. He then seemed to be very well, but exertion speedily fatigued him. He was on sight a very striking personage, and always instantly regarded with interest by strangers. His personal appearance was of the utmost refinement and of irreproachable dignity. His absolute cleanliness was something dainty, his dress simple but fitting perfectly and of the best material. His face was very pale, but his sparkling eyes contradicted the pallor.
His form was erect, and his figure that of youth. His hair and beard were exquisitely white. His mouth had the purity of a child's, and he never had tasted tobacco or used spirituous liquors, save when his physician had recommended a little whiskey, and then not enough to color a glass. He drank sparingly of claret and champagne, caring only for the flavor. He was gentle, kindly, genial, and in a manly sense beautiful. There are many distinguished English people at Homburg in the season, and they were gratified to meet Mr. Blaine, and charmed with him. It required no ceremony to announce him as a personage—a man who had made events—and he never posed or gave the slightest hint, in his movements, of conscious celebrity. I never saw him bothered by being aware of himself but once, and that was when, across the street from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in the dusk of an evening, he shaded his face with his hand, and looked curiously at ten thousand people who were gazing at the house, and shouting madly for him, expecting that he would appear at a window and make acknowledgment of their enthusiasm. Suddenly he saw in the glance of one beside him that he was curiously yet doubtfully regarded, and hastened away in fear of his friends, who in their delight at discovering him would have become a mob.
In Homburg he seemed to care for others' opinions about the proper course for him to take; and the substance of that which I had to say—and he seemed to think me in a way representative—was that he alone must decide for himself, as he only knew all the circumstances and elements that must be considered in a decision. Once we walked the main street of the town in the night—and it is then a very lonely place, for it is the fashion to get up in the morning at six o'clock, and take the waters and the music—and that time I was impressed, and the impression abided, that the inner conviction of Mr. Blaine was he had not the vitality to safely take the Presidency if he held it in his hand; that he believed the office would wear him out—that it was a place of dealing with persons who would worry away his existence; that he felt he could not endure the wear and tear and pressure of the first position, and preferred the Secretaryship of State, with the hope of going on with his South American policy, which he had developed in Garfield's time, brief as that was; and I conjectured that all this had been in his mind when he wanted Sherman and Lincoln to be the ticket in 1884. And it occurred to me with so much force as the logic of many things he said, that I accepted it as true, and was reminded of his weary exclamation once of a good friend whose moods were changeable: "Now that he is right, stay with him. He takes the health out of me with his uncertainties."
The Secretaryship of State he cared for; in that office the world was all before him, and he was fully himself, and was not fretted by a perpetual procession of favor-seekers. The argument his urgent admirers used with him was that it would be easier to make up his mind than to convince a President, and that as the Chief of State he could throw the work on the Cabinet; but he was not satisfied. The Florence letter to me seemed familiar, for it was a reminder of Homburg, and its sincerity was in all the lines and between the lines; and it was addressed to a friend in Pittsburg, that it might not be suppressed in New York. He had very close and influential friends who did not divine his true attitude, or would not admit that they had, and insisted that he was really well and strong and tough, better than he had been, and that he should not be humored in his fancy that he was an invalid. This feeling continued even to 1892, though he had been meantime painfully broken by a protracted illness. It will be remembered that in the correspondence between General Harrison as President-elect and Mr. Blaine, when the Secretaryship of State was offered and accepted, there appeared harmony of views concerning Pan-Americanism; that Mr. Blaine enjoyed the office and that his official labors during the Harrison Administration were of the highest distinction, showing his happiest characteristics. The difference as to duties that arose between the President and the Secretary was forgotten, and their mutual sympathies abounded, when there came upon them, in their households, the gravest, tenderest sorrows.
