Volume III Part 36 (2/2)
[Footnote 1567: In H.R. 45th Cong., 3d Sess., No. 140, p. 48 (Potter report) is a list of those connected with the Louisiana count ”subsequently appointed to or retained in office.”]
[Footnote 1568: These conventions occurred as follows: Ohio, August 2; Maine, August 9; Pennsylvania, September 6; Wisconsin, September 12; Ma.s.sachusetts, September 20; New Jersey, September 25. See New York papers on the day following each.]
New York's Republican convention a.s.sembled at Rochester on September 26. The notable absence of Federal office-holders who had resigned committees.h.i.+ps and declined political preferment attracted attention, otherwise the members.h.i.+p of the a.s.sembly, composed largely of the usual array of politicians, provoked no comment. Conkling and Cornell arrived early and took possession. In 1874 and in 1875 the Senator's friends fought vigorously for control, but in 1877 the divided sentiment as to the President's policies and the usual indifference that follows a Presidential struggle inured to their benefit, giving them a sufficient majority to do as they pleased.
Thus far Conkling had not betrayed his att.i.tude toward the Administration. At the time of his departure for Europe in search of health, when surrounded by the chief Federal officials of the city, he significantly omitted words of approbation or criticism, and with equal dexterity avoided the expression of an opinion in the many welcoming and serenade speeches amidst which his vacation ended in August. No doubt existed, however, as to his personal feeling. The selection of Evarts for secretary of state in place of Thomas C. Platt for postmaster general did not make him happy.[1569] George William Curtis's ardent support of the President likewise aided in separating him from the White House. Nevertheless, Conkling's att.i.tude remained a profound secret until Thomas C. Platt, as temporary chairman, began the delivery of a carefully prepared speech.
[Footnote 1569: New York _Tribune_, February 28, 1877.]
Platt was then forty-four years old. He was born in Owego, educated at Yale, and as a man of affairs had already laid the foundation for the success and deserved prominence that crowned his subsequent business career. Ambition also took him early into the activities of public political life, his party having elected him county clerk at the age of twenty-six and a member of Congress while yet in his thirties. His friends, attracted by his promise-keeping and truth-telling, included most of the people of the vicinage. He was not an orator, but he possessed the resources of tact, simplicity, and bonhomie, which are serviceable in the management of men.[1570] Moreover, as an organiser he developed in politics the same capacity for control that he exhibited in business. He had quickness of decision and flexibility of mind. There was no vacillation of will, no suspension of judgment, no procrastination that led to hara.s.sing controversy over minor details.
He seemed also as systematic in his political purposes as he was orderly in his business methods. These characteristic traits, well marked in 1877, were destined to be magnified in the next two decades when local leaders recognised that his judgment, his capacity, and his skill largely contributed to extricate the party from the chaotic conditions into which continued defeat had plunged it.
[Footnote 1570: ”Platt and I imbibed politics with our earliest nutriment. I was on the stump the year I became a voter, and so was he. I was doing the part of a campaign orator and he was chief of the campaign glee club. The speech amounted to little in those days unless it was a.s.sisted by the glee club. In fact the glee club largely drew the audience and held it. The favorite song of that day was 'John Brown's Body,' and the very heights of ecstatic applause were reached when Brother Platt's fine tenor voice rang through the arches of the building or the trees of the woodland, carrying the refrain, 'We'll hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree, while John Brown's soul goes marching on.'”--Chauncey M. Depew, _Speeches_, 1896 to 1902, p. 237.]
Conkling early recognised Platt's executive ability, and their friends.h.i.+p, cemented by likeness of views and an absence of rivalry, kept them sympathetically together in clearly defined fields of activity. In a way each supplemented the other. Platt was neither self-opinionated nor overbearing. He dealt with matters political with the light touch of a man of affairs, and although without sentiment or ideals, he worked incessantly, listened attentively, and was anxious to be useful, without taking the centre of the stage, or repelling support by affectations of manner. But like Conkling he relied upon the use of patronage and the iron rule of organisation, and too little upon the betterment of existing political conditions.
This became apparent when, as temporary chairman, he began to address the convention. He startled the delegates by calling the distinguished Secretary of State a ”demagogue,” and other Republicans who differed with him ”Pecksniffs and tricksters.” As he proceeded dissent blended with applause, and at the conclusion of his speech prudent friends regretted its questionable taste. In declining to become permanent president Conkling moved that ”the gentleman who has occupied the chair thus far with the acceptance of us all” be continued. This aroused the Administration's backers, of whom a roll-call disclosed 110 present.[1571]
[Footnote 1571: The vote stood 311 to 110 in favour of the motion.]
The platform neither approved nor criticised the President's Southern policy, but expressed the hope that the exercise of his const.i.tutional discretion to protect a State government against domestic violence would result in peace, tranquillity, and justice. Civil service reform was more artfully presented. It favoured fit men, fixed tenure, fair compensation, faithful performance of duty, frugality in the number of employes, freedom of political action, and no political a.s.sessments.
Moreover, it commended Hayes's declaration in his letter of acceptance that ”the officer should be secure in his tenure so long as his personal character remained untarnished and the performance of his duty satisfactory,” and recommended ”as worthy of consideration, legislation making officers secure in a limited fixed tenure and subject to removal only as officers under State laws are removed in this State on charges to be openly preferred and adjudged.”[1572] This paralleled the President's reform except as to freedom of political action, and in support of that provision it arrayed a profoundly impressive statement, showing by statistics that Hayes's order, if applied to all State, county, and town officials in New York, would exclude from political action one voter out of every eight and one-half. If this practical ill.u.s.tration exhibited the weakness of the President's order it also antic.i.p.ated what the country afterwards recognised, that true reform must rest upon compet.i.tive examination for which the Act of March 3, 1871 opened the way, and which President Hayes had directed for certain positions.
[Footnote 1572: Appleton's _Cyclopaedia_, 1877, pp. 562-563.]
But despite the platform's good points, George William Curtis, construing its failure to endorse the Administration into censure of the President, quickly offered a resolution declaring Hayes's t.i.tle to the presidency as clear and perfect as that of George Was.h.i.+ngton, and commending his efforts in the permanent pacification of the South and for the correction of abuses in the civil service.[1573] Curtis had never sought political advantage for personal purposes. The day he drifted away from a clerks.h.i.+p in a business firm and landed among the philosophers of Brook Farm he became an idealist, whom a German university and years of leisure travel easily strengthened. So fixed was his belief of moral responsibility that he preferred, after his unfortunate connection with _Putnam's Magazine_, to lose his whole fortune and drudge patiently for sixteen years to pay a debt of $60,000 rather than invoke the law and escape legal liability. He was an Abolitionist when abolitionism meant martyrdom; he became a Republican when others continued Whigs; and he stood for Lincoln and emanc.i.p.ation in the months of dreadful discouragement preceding Sheridan's victories in the Shenandoah. He was likewise a civil service reformer long in advance of a public belief, or any belief at all, that the custom of changing non-political officers on merely political grounds impaired the efficiency of the public service, lowered the standard of political contests, and brought reproach upon the government and the people. It is not surprising, therefore, that he stood for a President who sought to re-establish a reform that had broken down under Grant, and although the effort rested upon an Executive order, without the permanency of law, he believed that any attempt to inaugurate a new system should have the undivided support of the party which had demanded it in convention and had elected a President pledged to establish it. Moreover, the President had offered Curtis his choice of the chief missions, expecting him to choose the English. Remembering Irving in Spain, Bancroft in Germany, Motley in England, and Marsh in Italy, it was a great temptation. But Curtis, appreciating his ”civic duty,” remained at home, and now took this occasion to voice his support of the Executive who had honoured him.[1574]
[Footnote 1573: New York _Tribune_, September 27.]
[Footnote 1574: Curtis declined chiefly from the motive ascribed in Lowell's lines:
”At courts, in senates, who so fit to serve?
And both invited, but you would not swerve, All meaner prizes waiving that you might In civic duty spend your heat and light, Unpaid, untrammelled, with a sweet disdain.
Refusing posts men grovel to attain.”
--_Lowell's Poems_, Vol. 4, pp. 138-139.]
His speech, pitched in an exalted key, sparkled with patriotic utterances and eloquent periods, with an occasional keen allusion to Conkling. He skilfully contrasted the majority's demand for harmony with Platt's reference to Evarts as a ”demagogue” and to civil service reform as a ”nauseating s.h.i.+bboleth.” He declared it would shake the confidence of the country in the party if, after announcing its principles, it failed to commend the agent who was carrying them out.
Approval of details was unnecessary. Republicans did not endorse Lincoln's methods, but they upheld him until the great work of the martyr was done. In the same spirit they ought to support President Hayes, who, in obedience to many State and two or three National conventions, had taken up the war against abuses of the civil service.
If the convention did not concur in all his acts, it should show the Democratic party that Republicans know what they want and the man by whom to secure such results.
In speaking of abuses in the civil service he told the story of Lincoln looking under the bed before retiring to see if a distinguished senator was waiting to get an office,[1575] referred to the efforts of Federal officials to defeat his own election to the convention, and declared that the President, by his order, intended that a delegate like himself, having only one vote, should not meet another with one hundred votes in his pocket obtained by means of political patronage. Instead of the order invading one's rights it was intended to restore them to the great body of the Republicans of New York, who now ”refuse to enter a convention to be met--not by brains, not always by mere intelligence, not always by convictions, or by representative men, but by the forms of power which federal patriots a.s.sume.” He did ”not believe any eminent Republican, however high his ambition, however sore his discontent, hoped to carry the Republican party of the United States against Rutherford B. Hayes. Aye, sir, no such Republican, unless intoxicated with the flattery of parasites, or blinded by his own ambition.” He spoke of Conkling's interest in public affairs as beginning contemporaneously with his own, of their work side by side in 1867, and of their sustaining a Republican President without agreement in the details of his policy, and he closed with the prayer that they might yet see the Republican party fulfilling the hope of true men everywhere, who look to it for honesty, for reform, and for pacification.[1576]
[Footnote 1575: See Chapter XII., p. 166.]
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