Читать книгу History of Westchester County, New York, Volume 2 - Группа авторов - Страница 10

In an old-fashioned frame dwelling-house still standing, though considerably older than our federal constitution, Mr. Tilden was born on the 9th of February, 1814. The old homestead, where four generations of the family have been reared, fronts upon the long street which constitutes the backbone of the village of New Lebanon, in the county of Columbia, in the state of New York.

Mr. Tilden's ancestry may be traced back to the latter part of the sixteenth century and to the county of Kent, in England, where the name is still most honorably associated with the army, the navy and the church. In 1634 Nathaniel Tilden was among the Puritans who left Kent to settle in America. Eleven years previously he had been mayor of Tenterden. He was succeeded in that office by his cousin John, as he had been preceded by his uncle John, in 1585 and 1600. He removed with his family to Scituate, in the colony of Massachusetts, in 1634. He was one of the commissioners to locate that town, and the first recorded conveyance of any of its soil was made to him. His brother, Joseph, was one of the merchant adventurers of London who fitted out the Mayflower. This Nathaniel Tilden married Hannah Bourne, one of whose sisters, married a brother of Governor Winslow and another a son of Governor Bradford. Among the associates of Joseph Tilden in fitting out the Mayflower was Timothy Hatherby, who afterward married the widow of Nathaniel Tilden, and was a leading citizen of Scituate until expelled from public life for refusing to prosecute the Quakers.

Governor Tilden's grandfather, John Tilden, settled in Columbia county, since then uninterruptedly the residence of this branch of the Tilden family. The Governor's mother was descended from William Jones, lieutenant-governor of the colony of New Haven, who, in all the histories of Connecticut, is represented to have been the son of Colonel John Jones, who was one of the regicide judges of Charles 1, and who is said to have married a sister of Oliver Cromwell and a cousin of John Hamden. The Governor's father, a farmer and merchant of New Lebanon, was a man of notable judgment and practical sense and the accepted oracle of the county upon all matters of public concern, while his opinion was also eagerly sought and justly valued by all his neighbors, but by none more than by the late President Van Buren, who, till his death, was one of his most cherished and intimate personal friends.

Samuel J., after a suitable preparatory education at Williamstown, Massachusetts, was entered at Yale College in the class of 1833, where, however, in consequence of ill health, he was not able to complete the course. He concluded his collegiate studies at the New York University, and then took the course of law in that institution, at the same time entering the law office of the late John W. Edmunds, then a prominent member of the New York bar. While yet in his 'teens he was a watchful student of the political situation, and tradition has preserved many interesting stories of his triumphs, both of speech and pen, in the political area. Young and obscure as he then was. Presidents Van Buren and Jackson had in this state few more effective champions of the great measures of their respective administrations than this stripling from New Lebanon.

He was admitted to the bar in 1841. Four years before, when only twenty-three years of age, he delivered a speech in Columbia county on the subject of "Prices and Wages," which not only attracted the attention and won the admiration of the leading political economists of that time, but is today one of perhaps the half-dozen most profound, comprehensive and instructive papers on that complicated subject now in print in any language. Upon his admission to the bar Mr. Tilden opened an office in Pine street, in the city of New York, which will be remembered by his acquaintances of that period as a favorite resort for the leading Democrats, whether resident or casually on a visit to that city.

In 1844, in anticipation and preparation for the election which resulted in making James K. Polk president, and Silas Wright governor of the state of New York, Mr. Tilden, in connection with John L. O'Sullivan, founded the newspaper called the Daily News, by far the ablest morning journal that had up to that time been enlisted in the service of the Democratic party. Its success was immediate and complete, and to its efficiency was largely due the success of the Democratic ticket that year. As Mr. Tilden did not propose to enter journalism as a career, and embarked in this enterprise merely for its bearing upon the presidential campaign of 1844, he retired from it after the election, presenting his entire interest in the property to his colleague.

In the fall of 1845 he was sent to the assembly from the city of New York, and while a member of that body was elected to the convention for remodeling the constitution of the state, which was to commence its sessions a few weeks after the legislature adjourned. In both of these bodies he was a conspicuous authority, and left a permanent impression upon the legislation of the year, and especially upon all the new constitutional provisions affecting the finances of the state and the management of its system of canals. In this work he was associated, by personal and political sympathy, most intimately with Governor Wright, Michael Hoffman and with Azariah C. Flagg, then the controller of the state, who had all learned to value very highly his counsel and co-operation.

The defeat of Mr. Wright in the fall of 1846, and the coolness which had grown up between the friends of President Polk and the friends of the late President Van Buren, resulted fortunately for Mr. Tilden, if not for the country, in withdrawing his attention from politics and concentrating it upon his profession. He inherited no fortune, but depended upon his own exertions for a livelihood. Thus far his labor for the state or in his profession had not been lucrative, and, despite his strong tastes and pre-eminent qualifications for political life, he was able to discern at that early period the importance, in this country at least, of a pecuniary independence for the successful prosecution of a political career. With an assiduity and a concentration of energy which had characterized all the transactions of his life, he now gave himself up to his profession. It was not many years before he became as well-known at the bar as he had before been known as a politician. His business developed rapidly, and though he continued to take more or less interest in political matters, they were not allowed, after 1857, to interfere with his professional duties.

From that time until 1869, when he again consecrated all his personal and professional energies to the reform of the municipal government of New York city, a period of about twenty years, his was nearly or quite the largest and most lucrative practice conducted by any single barrister in the country. During what may be termed the professional parts of his career he had associated his name imperishably with some of the most remarkable forensic struggles of our time.

It was, however, during this period of Mr. Tilden's life in which he was devoting himself almost exclusively to his profession, that his name figures prominently in one of the most important political transactions in American history. The convention held in 1848, at Baltimore, for the selection of a presidential ticket to be supported by the Democratic party presumed to deny to the regular delegates from New York state, of whom Mr. Tilden was one, admission to their body upon equal terms with the delegates from other states, assigning as a reason that the convention which chose them had declared that the immunity from slavery contained in the Jeffersonian ordinance of 1787 should be applied to all the territories of the northwest so long as they should remain under the government of congress. Mr. Tilden was selected by his colleagues of the delegation to make their report to their constituents, a report which helped to make the Utica convention of June, 1848, one of the most momentous in the history of the country.

"With this intolerant proscription of the New York Democracy began the disastrous schism which was destined to rend in twain both the great parties of the country and practically to annihilate the political organization which had given a wise and beneficent government to the country for half a century. Then and there, too, were laid the foundations of the political conglomerate, which, in 1860, acquired, and for a quarter of a century retained, uninterrupted control of our federal government.

"Just twenty-eight years after the delegate from New York, who had been selected by his colleagues for the purpose, broke to their outraged constituents the story of their state's humiliation, that same delegate received the suffrages, of a large majority of his countrymen for the highest honor in their gift; and to-day, through that delegate's influence, another citizen of New York who was nominated by a Democratic national convention, which imposed no sectional tests, and who was elected without the 'vote of a single slave-holder, becomes the chief magistrate and most honored citizen of the republic. ' The wheel is come full circle,' and the bones of the Democratic party that were broken upon the cross of slavery in 1848, now, after an interval of thirty-six years, are once more knit together, and the traditions and the doctrines inherited from the golden age of the Republic are about to resume, not merely their official, but their moral supremacy in the nation."

The four years, from 1869 to 1873, were mainly devoted by Mr. Tilden to the overthrow of what was known as the "Tweed ring," which had thoroughly debauched every branch of the New York city government, legislative, executive and judicial, and was threatening the state government also with its foul embrace.

"The total surrender of my professional business during that period," he has said in one of his published communications, "the nearly absolute withdrawal of attention from my private affairs, and from all enterprises in which I am interested, have cost me a loss of actual income, which, with expenditures and contributions the contest has required, would be a respectable endowment of a public, charity.

"I do not speak of these things," he adds, "to regret them. In my opinion, no instrumentality in human society is so potential in its influence on the well-being of mankind as the governmental machinery which administers justice and makes and executes laws. No benefaction of private benevolence could be so fruitful in benefits as the rescue of this machinery from the perversion which had made it a means of conspiracy, fraud and crime against the rights and the most sacred interests of a great community."

When Mr. Tilden thus wrote he had not experienced nor could he have foreseen the legal consummation of his labors in the arrest, imprisonment or flight of all the parties who, only a few months before, seemed to hold the wealth and power of the Empire state in the hollow of their hands, nor the condemnation of Tweed to the striped jacket and cell of a felon, nor the recovery of verdicts which promised to restore to the city treasury many millions of ill-gotten plunder. Nor could he have foreseen, among the most direct and immediate results of his labors for the purification of the New York city and state governments, his election as governor, in the fall of 1874. by a majority of more than fifty thousand over General Dix, the Republican candidate.

The talents and public virtues which, as a municipal reformer, won the confidence of the people of his native state and made him governor, on this new and wider theater won the confidence and admiration of the nation and made him its choice by a considerable popular majority for the presidency in 1876. It was not, however, in the order of Providence that he or the people were to enjoy the legitimate fruits of this latter victory.

When congress convened in the winter of 1876-77, and proceeded to discharge its constitutional duty of counting the electoral votes for president and vice president, it appeared that there were one hundred and eighty-four uncontested electoral votes for Samuel J. Tilden for president and for Thomas A. Hendricks for vice president; one hundred and sixty-five uncontested votes for Rutherford B. Hayes for president and William A. Wheeler for vice president, and twenty votes in dispute. One hundred and eighty-five votes were necessary for a choice; consequently, one additional vote to Tilden and Hendricks would have elected them, while twenty additional votes were required for the election of the rival candidates. The whole election, therefore, depended upon one electoral vote. This gave to the mode of counting the vote an importance which it had never possessed at any of the twenty-one previous elections in the history of our government.

The provisions of the constitution relating to the mode of counting the vote were sufficiently vague to furnish a pretext for some diversity of opinion upon the subject, wherein the temptation to find one was so great. A majority of the senate being Republicans and a majority of the house of representatives being Democrats, that the senate would not agree to count any one of these twenty votes for Tilden and Hendricks was assumed; and, to avoid a conflict of jurisdiction, which was thought by some to threaten the peace of the country, a special tribunal, to consist of members of congress and of the supreme court, fifteen in number, was created, upon which the duty of counting the electoral vote was devolved by an act of congress. One of the members of this tribunal was classified as an independent, seven as Republicans and seven as Democrats. The Republicans voted to count all the votes of the three contested states for Hayes, and the independent member voted with them, and the candidate elected to the presidency by a considerable popular majority was compelled to give place to the candidate of a minority.

The circumstances under which Mr. Tilden was deprived of the presidency made it inconvenient, indeed impossible, to obey the counsels and warnings of declining health to lay down the leadership of the great party whose unexampled wrong was represented in his person, until he could surrender it into the hands of its proper national representatives. As soon, however, as the national Democratic convention assembled in 1880, he felt constrained to address to the chairman of the New York delegation the memorable letter in which he proclaimed his well-considered intention to retire from public life, for the labors of which he had long felt his health and strength were unequal. In 1884 he was obliged to repeat his resolution, to prevent his nomination by the delegates to the national convention, who were almost unanimously chosen because of their avowed partiality for Mr. Tilden as their candidate, notwithstanding his impaired and failing health. Finding it impossible to obtain his consent to run, the convention accepted a candidate of his choice from the state which he had served so long and faithfully, and his choice was ratified by the nation at the general election.

Mr. Tilden thereafter enjoyed the repose he had so fully earned, and such health as only repose could confer, at his princely home of Graystone, on the banks of the Hudson, which became the pilgrim's shrine of the reinstated party, which Jefferson planted and which Jackson and Van Buren watered.

Of this honored statesman the following words were written prior to his death:

He is one of the few surviving statesmen who had the good fortune to receive early political training in the golden age of the Democratic party, when public measures were thoroughly tested by the constitution and by public opinion, and when by ample debate the voters of the whole nation were educated, not only to embrace but also to comprehend the principles upon which their government was conducted, — a training to which his subsequent political career bears continual testimony. Whatever heresies of doctrine have crept into our public policy since those days, the respectability for them will not rest with them. In all the papers and speeches with which from time to time he has endeavored to enlighten his countrymen, it will be difficult to find a line or a thought not in harmony with the teachings of the eminent statesmen who, during the first fifty years of our national history, traced the limits and defined the functions of constitutional Democracy in America. From that epoch to this there has been scarcely a question of public concern having its roots in the constitution which Mr. Tilden has not carefully considered and more or less thoroughly treated. He was a champion of the Union and of President Jackson against the Nullifiers and Mr. Calhoun. He denounced the American system of Mr. Clay as unconstitutional, inequitable and sectional. He vindicated the removal of the government deposits from the United States Bank by President Jackson, and exploded the sophistical doctrine of its lawyers that the treasury is not an executive department. He vindicated President Van Buren from the charge made by William Leggett of unbecoming subserviency to the slaveholding states in his inaugural address. He was among the first to insist upon free banking under general laws, thus opening the business equally to all, and abolishing the monopoly which was a nearly universal superstition. He exposed the perils of banking upon public funds. He advocated the divorce of bank and state, and the establishment of a subtreasury. He asserted the supervisory control of the legislature over corporations of its own creation. He exposed the enormities of Mr. Webster's scheme to pledge the public lands for the payment of the debts of the states. He drew and vindicated in a profoundly learned and able report the act which put an end to the discontents of the New York "anti-renters." He wrote the protest of the Democracy of New York against making the nationalization of slavery a test of party fealty. He was the first, we believe, to assign statesmanlike reasons for opposing coercive temperance legislation. He pointed out, as no one had done before, the danger of sectionalizing the government. He planned the campaign, he secured the requisite legislation, he bore much the largest expense, and, filially, he drove the storming party which drove Tweed and his predatory associates to prison or into exile. He purified the judiciary of the city and state of New York by procuring the adoption of measures which resulted in the removal of one judge by impeachment and of two judges by resignation. He induced the Democratic convention of 1874 to declare, in no uncertain tone, for a sound currency, when not a single state convention of either party had yet ventured to take a stand against the financial delusions begotten of the war, which for years had been sapping the credit of the country. It was at his instance that the Democratic party of New York, in the same convention, pronounced against third-term presidents, and effectively strengthened the exposed intrenchments which the country, for eighty years and more, had been erecting against the insidious encroachments of dynasticism. During his career as governor Mr. Tilden applied the principles of the political school in which he had been educated to the new questions which time, civil war and national affluence had made paramount. He overthrew the " canal ring," which had become ascendant in all the departments of the state government. He dispersed the lobby which infested the legislative bodies. He introduced a practical reform in the civil service of this state, and elevated the standard of official morality. In his messages he exposed the weakness and inadequacy of the financial policy of the party in power, the mismanagement of our canal system, the federal assaults upon state sovereignty, and the pressing need of radical reforms both in the state and federal administrations.

It is due to Mr. Tilden, also, to say that he rarely discussed any matter of public concern without planting the structure of his argument upon the solid ground of fundamental principles. Always cautious in the selection of his facts, singularly moderate in his statements and temperate in his language, he, better than perhaps any other statesman of our time, can afford to be judged by his record. Who that has figured so prominently in public affairs has said or written less that he would prefer not to have said; less that will not commend itself to the deliberate judgment of thoughtful men and to an unprejudiced posterity. His last important contribution to the history of his time was a communication addressed to John G. Carlisle, speaker of the house of representatives, in regard to the urgent necessity of liberal appropriation for such a system of coast defences as would place the United States in a position of comparative safety against naval attack.

Mr. Tilden passed away at his country house, Graystone, August 4, 1886. He never married, and under the provision of his will the greater portion of his fortune, estimated at five million dollars, was devoted to public uses; but the will was successfully contested by relatives.