Various
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885
The chief spirit of the new “Republican” party was Ex-Governor Seward, the leader of the Whigs of New York, a consummate politician, “honest himself,” as one of his special friends said of him, “but indifferent to honesty in others,” who labored with uncommon skill and adroitness for six years to build the new organisation up into Presidential proportions, only to experience the common fate of such party leaders in the United States, and to find himself set aside by his own Republican Convention of 1860, at Chicago, in favor of the then relatively obscure Western candidate Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois.
The old name “Republican” used by the party of Jefferson was taken by the new party for the express purpose of dissimulating, as far as might be, its “Whig” parentage, and of thus recommending it to the widespread and growing anti-slavery element among the Democrats of the North and West. The Whig origin and tendencies of the new party, however, clearly appeared in the demand made in its first platform of 1856 for “appropriations by Congress for the improvement of rivers and harbors.” It selected as its first Presidential candidate in 1856 Colonel John C. Fremont of California, an officer of the army who had married the daughter of an eminent Democratic senator, Mr. Benton of Missouri, and who had acquired a kind of romantic popular prestige as “the Pathfinder of the Rocky Mountains” by an expedition across the continent. With him was associated as Vice-Presidential candidate a man of more political weight and force, Mr. Dayton, a Whig leader, of New Jersey, who afterwards rendered the country distinguished services as Minister to France under President Lincoln. Mr. Buchanan of Pennsylvania was nominated by the Democrats to succeed President Pierce in 1856. In the “platform” then adopted the Democratic party met the “Protectionist” tendency of the new “Republican” organisation by declaring “that justice and sound policy forbid the Federal Government to foster one branch of industry to the detriment of another;” denounced the attempt of the Whig “Know-Nothings” to organise a crusade against Catholics and citizens of alien birth; and in the matter of slavery reaffirmed “the compromise of 1850,” and committed itself to “the determined conservation of the Union and the non-interference of Congress with slavery in the territories or the district of Columbia.”
The new “Republican party” in its “platform” of 1856, let me here observe, raised no question touching slavery where slavery then existed, but pronounced it to be “both the right and the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery;” this latter attack on the Mormons being a bid for votes at the West and an appeal to the religious prejudices of the East.
A third remnant of the old “Whigs,” meeting in Baltimore in September 1856, appealed to the country to beware of “geographical parties,” adopted the nomination made by the Whig “Know-Nothings” of Ex-President Fillmore, and asserted that in Kansas “civil war” was “raging,” and that the Union was “in peril.” The contest was conducted by the Republicans at the North very much on the lines on which the first Whig victory of 1840 had been won – by the organisation, that is, of “Pathfinder Clubs” and processions, with brass bands, bonfires, and all the paraphernalia of “politics by picnic,” and a large popular vote was cast for the Republican candidate. But Mr. Buchanan, nevertheless had a majority of nearly 500,000 votes over Colonel Fremont at the polls in a total vote of about three millions, and he was elected President by 174 votes in the Electoral College, eight votes being cast by Maryland for Mr. Fillmore, and 114 votes being cast for Colonel Fremont, if the five votes of Wisconsin were properly included in that number – a very grave question as to that point being raised by the undisputed fact that the electoral votes of Wisconsin, which, under an obviously wise precept of the Constitution, ought to have been cast on the same day with the electoral votes of all the other States of the Union (December 3, 1856), were not cast until the next day (December 4) because the electors were prevented by a snowstorm from reaching the capital of the State in season to comply with the behest of the organic law.
Events moved rapidly after the election of President Buchanan. In spite of a great financial panic in 1857, the commerce of the United States, under the salutary régime established by Democratic Secretaries of the Treasury, advanced beyond all former precedent. The net imports of the United States increased from 298,261,364 dollars in 1856, the year of Mr. Buchanan’s election, to 335,233,232 dollars in 1860, the last year of his administration, and the exports from 310,586,330 dollars in 1856 to 373,189,274 dollars in 1860. The sea going tonnage of the Union ran up to that of Great Britain;4 and never had the country been so prosperous as during this period of Democratic ascendancy and relative fiscal freedom.
But while the managers of the new sectional Republican party worked night and day to develop and consolidate their voting power at the North and West, and availed themselves skilfully of every exciting incident in the history of the day to fan the passions of the people into flame, a sharp conflict was raging within the Democratic ranks between the Administration and the followers of Senator Douglas, which the leaders of the disunion movement at the South carefully and skilfully fomented, and which culminated in an open secession from the Democratic National Convention at Charleston in April 1860.
The Convention was adjourned to meet at Baltimore in June. There a second secession of Southern delegates occurred, followed by the nomination for the Presidency of Senator Douglas. A few days later the seceders, meeting in a Convention of their own, nominated Vice-President Breckenridge of Kentucky. In the meantime on the 9th of May a convention of “moderate men” of all shades of opinion had assembled in Baltimore, and nominated two eminent members of the disbanded Whig party, Mr. Bell of Tennessee and Mr. Edward Everett of Massachusetts, for the Presidency and the Vice-Presidency; while the now confident Republicans, gathered in Convention at Chicago on the 16th of May, had selected not Ex-Governor Seward of New York, but Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, as their candidate.
Of course, with such a prospect of success before them as the Democratic disorganisation offered, the managers of this Convention of the Republicans adroitly threw all questions but the “burning questions” of the hour as far as possible into the background of their operations. But while they declared themselves in favor of the preservation of “the Federal Constitution, the rights of the States, and the union of the States,” they did not forget to record their desire for such an “adjustment” of the “duties on imports” as “should encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country,” under which rather vague phraseology lay concealed the purpose of organising a new tariff for protection – a purpose which was carried into effect by the Republicans at Washington as soon as the subsequent secession from Congress of the Southern members made it practicable.
With the first election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, and his inauguration in March, 1861, we come upon a sudden and complete “solution of continuity” in the political history of the United States. Of the total popular vote of the country, amounting to 4,680,193, thrown on the 4th of November, 1860, Mr. Lincoln received but 1,866,452, being thus left in a popular minority of no fewer than two million, two hundred and thirteen thousand, seven hundred and fifty-one votes! It is impossible in the face of these figures to doubt that if the tremendous issue of peace and war between the two great sections of the Union, which really lay hidden in the ballot-boxes of the Union on that November day, had been never so dimly perceived by the American people, the verdict of the nation would have made an end that day of the new “Republican,” party. But neither Mr. Lincoln himself, nor Mr. Seward, nor any considerable number of the Republican voters of the North and the West believed, or could be made to believe, in the reality of this issue. It came upon them all and upon the country at last, after all the agitation and all the warnings of years, like “a thief in the night,” and coming upon the country it suspended for four long and dismal years the normal action of the constitution, and the normal development therefore of public opinion through the channels of constitutional politics.
It is juggling with phrases to say that from the 5th of March, 1861, to the 15th of April, 1865, Mr. Lincoln was, in any true sense of the words, a President of the United States with a political party at his back. He was to all intents and purposes a war dictator of the Northern and Western States, maintaining with all the resources of those sections of the country the fabric of the American Union against the armed and persistent efforts of thirteen sovereign States banded together in a confederacy to make an end of its authority and its existence so far as concerned its relations with them and with their inhabitants. To this colossal task Mr. Lincoln brought, as I think the most impartial critics of his administration in my own party now admit, most rare and remarkable gifts of character and of mind. It has been not uncommon among those who, since his death, have constituted themselves the special eulogists of this extraordinary man, to represent him as struggling from the first, not merely against the enormous difficulties arrayed in his path by the energy, and wealth, and determination of the seceding Confederacy, but against the ill-will and infidelity to his trust of the Democratic President whom Mr. Lincoln was elected by the North and the West to succeed. This is not the place for any vindication in this point of President Buchanan. He has had no lack of critics within the ranks of my own party. But no man who was present during that fateful winter of 1860-61 in Washington, and who was really conversant with men and things there, will need to be told that but for President Buchanan’s fidelity to his constitutional oath, and to the behest of the party which elected him in 1856 to “uphold the Union,” the Civil War would probably have begun in Washington itself before Mr. Lincoln set foot within the capital.
On the day of Mr. Lincoln’s inauguration, a day never to be forgotten by any American who witnessed the scene, it was the presence by the side of Mr. Lincoln of his great Northern Democratic rival, Senator Douglas, which more than all the bayonets of the troops assembled for the protection of Washington by General Scott, under orders from President Buchanan, convinced the most intelligent of the Southern men that the Union was not to be dissolved like snow in the sunbeams, and gave all the weight of the Democratic masses of the North and West to the new President’s deliberate declaration that the forts and property of the United States would be “held and occupied” by all the power of the unseceded States.
The one member of Mr. Lincoln’s Cabinet who from the beginning foresaw the gravity of the impending contest, and who put the whole pressure of his personal influence upon the new President almost to the extent of compelling him into asserting his authority by force of arms, was not the Whig who had organised the “Republican” party, Mr. Seward, It was Mr. Montgomery Blair, a “Democrat” by training, the son of the confidential adviser of President Jackson and the brother of a Democratic general in the Union armies who was afterwards nominated for the Vice-Presidency on the same ticket with Governor Seymour of New York in 1868 by the Democratic party. Mr. Montgomery Blair himself left Mr. Lincoln’s Cabinet in July 1864, escaped the war made by the “Republican” party under Sumner and Stevens upon the friends of President Lincoln, after the assassination of the President by a melodramatic madman, and became a trusty ally of Governor Tilden of New York, the Democratic candidate who was elected to the Presidency of the United States in 1876 by a popular majority of nearly 300,000 votes in a total poll of a little over 8,000,000, and by a majority of one vote in the electoral colleges, only to be defrauded of his office by the audacious tampering of a cabal of Republican office-holders with the votes of three Southern States.
It is not my purpose, and it would swell this paper beyond all reasonable limits, to sketch here, even in outline, the political annals of the quarter of a century which stretches now between the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and the election of Governor Cleveland in 1884. I may assume my readers to have a general knowledge of the main features of this period of American history. No intelligent man can be familiar even with the distorted and partial presentation of those features which has hitherto passed current on both sides of the Atlantic, without asking himself what the magic virtue can be which has carried the great Democratic party of the United States steadily onward through so many years of exclusion from executive power and such storms of systematic obloquy, enabling it amid the passions of a fierce sectional conflict to retain such a popular support throughout the North and West as has persistently threatened the tenure of the Federal authority by its all-powerful and never over-scrupulous opponents, giving it again and again control of the popular branch of the Federal Congress, and commanding for it, as soon as the restoration of the Union became in truth an accomplished fact, an unquestioned majority of the suffrages of the American people.
My object has been to indicate the true answer to this question by setting forth the foundations on which the Democratic party of the United States was planted by its great leaders in the very dawn of our national history.
No man ever learned by practical experience of the responsibilities of power to appreciate the solidity of these foundations more thoroughly than President Lincoln. A “Whig” by his early political affiliations and an active and successful politician in times of high party excitement, President Lincoln was not a partisan by temperament, and nothing is more certain than that he came during his practical war-dictatorship to very sound conclusions as to the essentially ephemeral character of the political organisation which had lifted him into that trying and dangerous post. He had no respect at all for professional “philanthropists,” and not much for loudly “philanthropic” politicians. The abolitionist agitators of the North instinctively disliked and distrusted him. The ablest of their number, Mr. Wendell Phillips, sneered at him as being not “honest exactly, but Kentucky honest.” It was no confidence in President Lincoln, but the political necessity of the moment, which compelled the extreme Anti-Democratic leaders of the Republican party to acquiesce in his renomination in November 1864, with a Democratic ex-Senator from the South, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, as his associate on the Presidential ticket. Of this fact President Lincoln himself was well aware. Nor was he blind to the popular and political significance of that Presidential election of 1864. In spite of all that could be done by an army of Federal office-holders larger than the armed force which Mr. Seward at the outset of the civil war had imagined would be adequate to “suppress the rebellion;” in spite of the combined influence of the “Republican” local governments in the Northern and Western States; in spite of military force brought to bear openly upon the polls in regions undisturbed by war; in spite of the overshadowing fact that the issues of the great civil war were still being fought out in the field, the Democratic party of the North and West confronted the Republican President at the polls in November 1864 with a popular vote of nearly two millions out of four millions cast in those sections of the Republic! The exact figures show that General M’Clellan, whose popularity with the Democratic party was based upon his fame as the creator of the Union army of the Potomac and upon his expressed loyalty to the principles of the Constitution as the Democratic party holds them, received, in November 1864, 1,802,237 votes in the North and West, or within a few thousands of the 1,866,452 votes which were cast for Mr. Lincoln himself in November 1860!
President Lincoln had shrewd sense enough to see that as the maintenance of the authority of the Union had only been made possible to him by the unswerving determination of the Northern and Western Democratic party that the authority of the Union should be maintained under the Constitution, so the restoration of peace within the Union could only be achieved by accepting the Democratic construction of the position and the rights of all the States in the Union under the Constitution, of the seceded as well as of the unseceded States; and he had patriotism enough to resolve that peace should be restored within the Union, no matter what became of the ephemeral “Republican” party which had been called into existence and carried into power chiefly by the force of the sectional passions which had found final expression in the civil war. He had gone beyond the Constitution under the war power in abolishing slavery, and he knew that in abolishing slavery he had abolished the vital impulse to which the “Republican” party owed its existence. He knew too that the extreme “Republican” partisans by whom he was surrounded knew this as well as he, and he was thoroughly aware that there were among them men like Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, who were prepared and determined if possible to keep the sectional passions which slavery had evoked alive and burning after slavery itself should have disappeared, and to organise for themselves a new lease of power at the expense of the peace of the country and of the happiness and prosperity of millions of their fellow-countrymen.
At the beginning of the war President Lincoln had met the challenge thrown down to him by the Confederate War Department on the lines indicated by a great Democratic jurist, the late Judge Black of Pennsylvania, in his “Opinion upon the Powers of the President,” prepared at the request of President Buchanan, in whose Cabinet Judge Black had successively held the posts of Attorney-General and of Secretary of State.
If one of the States (wrote Judge Black) should declare her independence, your action cannot depend upon the rightfulness of the cause upon which such declaration is based. Whether the retirement of a State from the Union be the exercise of a right reserved in the Constitution, or a revolutionary movement, it is certain that you have not in either case the authority to recognise her independence or to absolve her from her Federal obligations. Congress or the other States in Convention assembled must take such measures as may be necessary and proper. In such an event I can see no course for you but to go straight onward in the path which you have hitherto trodden – that is, execute the laws to the extent of the defensive means placed in your hands, and act generally upon the assumption that the present constitutional relations between the States and the Federal Government continue to exist until a new order of things shall be established either by law or by force.
The seceding States attempted to establish “a new order of things by force,” and maintained that attempt for four years with such resolution, pertinacity, and courage as more than once brought them within what an eminent English statesman would perhaps call such a “measurable distance” of success as may well explain the conviction expressed in England at one period of the struggle, that Jefferson Davis had “established a nation.”
Upon the failure of the Confederate experiment, President Lincoln, in spite of the bitter and threatening hostility to him of a number of the most conspicuous leaders of the Republican party in and out of Congress, wisely and consistently determined to adhere to the position involved in Judge Black’s opinion that the constitutional relations between the States and the Federal Government could not be and had not been shaken by the contest. After the Confederate Government had abandoned Richmond, he visited that capital as President of the United States, and in words made pathetic and historical by the deplorable and senseless crime which was so soon to shock the country and the civilised world, proclaimed his intention to administer the Government “with malice towards none, with charity for all.” In his last public speech, delivered on the 11th of April, 1865, two days only before his assassination, he spoke of the seceded States as already restored to their places in the Union, and said of them in his quaint and homely fashion that, “finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had been abroad.” Mr. Gideon Welles of Connecticut, to whom the portfolio of the Navy had been given by President Lincoln in his first Cabinet, as a representative of the Democratic wing of the then newly-organized “Republican” party, tells us that at a Cabinet meeting held on the last day of President Lincoln’s life, April 13, 1865, the President urged all the members of the Cabinet to exert their influence to get all the State Governments of the lately seceded States of the South “going again before the annual meeting of Congress in December.” This meant, of course, that President Lincoln intended and expected the lately seceded States to send to Washington their proper and constitutional quota of senators and representatives freely elected under the local franchise in each of those States. His purpose was to secure the ratification by the seceded States of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery formally, and then to accept them as in all respects States within the Union. In the Emancipation Proclamation of the 22nd of September, 1862, which President Lincoln had issued avowedly as a war measure, he had taken pains to declare that his object in prosecuting the war as “Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy” of the United States, was, had been, and would be, “practically to restore the constitutional relation between the United States and each of the States and the people thereof in which that relation was or might be suspended.”
This was not at all the object of the unscrupulous and reckless leaders who took command of the “Republican” party upon the death of President Lincoln, and under whom Mr. Blaine first made a figure upon the field of Federal politics.
A clear line will be drawn by the historian between the war administration of the President who upheld the Union and the dismal epoch of Southern reconstruction which followed – an epoch of unconstitutional Congressional despotism, mitigated only from time to time by the personal authority of General Grant. The story of the relations of General Grant as President of the United States with the party which found itself compelled to take advantage of his unbounded popularity as the surest means of retaining its grasp upon authority at Washington will one day constitute a most interesting and instructive chapter in the history of government, but it lies outside the scope of this paper. That General Grant would gladly have co-operated with President Lincoln in carrying out his plan of re-establishing the Union on Democratic and constitutional lines may be inferred not only from the fact which he has stated, that the only vote he ever cast before the civil war was for a Democratic President, but from the more significant fact that he was so fully convinced of the readiness of the Southern States to accept the results of the civil war in good faith, that, immediately after the accession of President Johnson in 1865, he urged upon the President the importance of throwing a combined army of Union and of Confederate soldiers into Mexico for the purpose of expelling the French under Bazaine, and compelling Maximilian to abandon the hopeless attempt to found an empire in the land of the Montezumas which eventually cost that gallant but unfortunate prince his life. President Johnson eagerly adopted General Grant’s suggestion, but the Secretary of State Mr. Seward, opposed it, and Mr. Seward’s objection was fatal. “It cost Maximilian his life,” General Grant tells us, “and gave Napoleon the Third five more years of power in France.” He might have added that it cost the people of the Southern States ten years of the most odious and corrupting mal-administration recorded in modern history – mal-administration which, but for the solid political capacity and the traditional common sense and patriotism of the Americans of the Southern States, must have reduced the fairest portion of the North American continent to a social and industrial chaos without precedent in the annals of modern civilisation.
The evil influences of that dark epoch extended themselves in all directions North and South, cropping out in organised official peculations, in shameless political dishonesty, in reckless speculation, in monstrous lobbying, and in incredible excesses of public extravagance, based upon such a system of inordinate and unconstitutional taxation as no American in his senses could have been brought, before the outbreak of the civil war, to believe would ever for a moment be tolerated by the American people.
It was to make an end of all this that the people of the United States in 1876 elected one Democratic Governor of New York to the Presidency. Defeated then of their will by the Republican agents of reconstruction, the people of the United States had now at last in 1884 compelled their voice to be heard and to be respected. With the inauguration of Governor Cleveland in March 1885, the Federal Government of the United States will be once more organised upon the enduring Democratic foundations of respect for Home Rule at the South and at the North, in the East and in the West, and of a strict limitation of the functions of the Federal Government to the powers granted and prescribed to it by the Constitution.
If I have done anything like justice in this necessarily hasty sketch to the origin and development of the Democratic party of the United States, my readers will not need to be told that its advent to power at this time opens a new and most important chapter in the annals of the American Republic. It involves much, very much more than the transfer of executive power from one to another set of administrative officers.
It closes definitely an era of such political disease and corruption in the United States as I have preferred rather to indicate than to dwell upon here. Work of that sort, in my judgment, may as well be confined to the domestic laundry. Quite enough of it has been done for the edification of mankind at large by certain of my countrymen who have hitherto found it more convenient to bewail the political profligacy of those to whom “respectable Republicans” chose to surrender the control of the Republican party after the murder of President Lincoln “cried havoc and let slip the dogs of faction” than to co-operate resolutely with the great Democratic party in making the Union once more solid, and settling it upon its only possible foundations – Home Rule and a strict construction of the Constitution.
It is easy to draw dramatic pictures of the demoralisation of American politics; but there is more significance surely for thoughtful men in the returns, which show that the candidacy of Mr. Blaine and Mr. Logan has cut down the plurality of the Republican party in “moral” Massachusetts from more than fifty thousand to ten thousand votes; in Illinois, from over forty thousand to fifteen thousand; in Michigan, from more than fifty thousand to barely two thousand; in Ohio, from more than thirty thousand to eleven thousand. It has made the Democratic Governor of New York President by an electoral majority of 37 votes and a popular plurality of about 400,000 votes. Less is to be learned of the deep and lasting currents of popular thought and feeling in the United States from an elaborate study of the absurd abominations of Republican “Reconstruction” at the South than from the handwriting of fire on the polling-places of the Empire State which illuminated the Belshazzar’s Feast of Mr. Blaine’s “millionaires” on the eve of the Presidential Election of 1884!
In a certain sense, President Cleveland will occupy a position not unlike that of President Lincoln at the outset of his first Presidency. But the task of the Democratic chief magistrate who goes to Washington with a great historical party at his back, to restore the well-understood metes and bounds of the Federal authority over thirty-eight free and independent States will be a less troublesome and in its immediate results ought to be an infinitely more benign and grateful task, than that of the reluctant war dictator who found himself, against all his expectations, driven by angry sections, with a mixed and undisciplined mob of placemen, of monopolists, and of philanthropists behind him, into cutting with the sword the Gordian knot of slavery, at the risk of severing with it forever the golden bands of the Union, and those “mystic chords of memory” of which he spoke with such a wistful pathos in his inaugural address. Some points of resemblance may be found, too, between the personal histories of Lincoln and of Cleveland. Like Mr. Lincoln, Governor Cleveland comes of an old American stock. His family name smacks of Yorkshire, and his direct ancestors established themselves in Massachusetts nearly two hundred years ago. One of the family, a Cambridge man, and a clergyman of the Anglican Church, died at Philadelphia under the roof of his friend Benjamin Franklin twenty years before the American Revolution. Another, who sat in the Legislature of Connecticut, and who was a minister of the Independents, is remembered as an early advocate in that “land of steady habits” of the abolition of African slavery, and this at a time when the worthy citizens of Massachusetts thought it expedient to keep the Bay State clear of negro blood by ordaining in their organic law that any African “not a subject of our faithful ally the Emperor of Morocco” who ventured twice across the Massachusetts border should be on each occasion whipped, imprisoned and sent away, and that if this did not restrain his ardor, he should upon his third advent be so dealt with as to put an effectual stop to his travels.