in y2~<£ Buffalo Commercial Advertiser Campaign Document No. 1. THE PRESIDENTIAL BATTLE OF 1872. GRANT AND HIS DEFAMERS: DEEDS AGAINST WORDS. SPEECH HON. KOSCOE COtfKLIM, At Cooper Institute, New York, July 23, 1872. "A r o might nor greatness in mortality Can censure 'scape ; back-wounding calumny The whitest virtue strikes; what king so strong, Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue? ' ■ — Measure for Measure. The Republican mass meeting held on Tues- day evening, July 23d, 1872, at Cooper Insti- tute, New York, to ratify the nominations of Grant and Wilson, was remarkable in point of numbers, respectability and enthusiasm. Long before the hour for the opening of the proceedings the large hall of the Institute was densely crowded. Many ladies were among the audience. Every seat in the lobby, hall, and on the stage was occupied, and hundreds were glad to obtain standing room. The Hon. Jackson S. Schultz presided, and a long list of Vice-Presidents and Secreta- ries was read. The Hon. Roscoe Conkling, U. S. Senator, on being introduced by the President, was received with loud and repeated cheers. After the applause had subsided, he said : Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen : Your greeting of me tonight, and the warmth of your reception, quite oppress me. I have no words to fitly express my feelings. For twenty years, it has been my privilege to address my neighbors upon political issues, and loo much ardor, has, perhaps, been among my faults. Yet no canvass has ever stirred me so deeply as this. No election has ever appealed so strongly to my sense of fair play, no canvass within my memory has ever been so full of foul play, injustice and malice, none has ever more thoroughly tested the common sense and gen- erosity of the American people. INJUSTICE HEAPED ON THE PRESIDENT. Eleven years' service in Congress has made me a close observer of four Presidents and of many public men ; and if among them all there is one, living or dead, who never knowingly failed in his duty, that one is Ulysses Sydney Grant. There was forecast in giving him the name of .Sydney, for his greatest and gentlest quality is his magnanimity. If there has been a high official ever ready to admit and correct an error ; if there has been one who did wisely, firmly and well the things given him in charge, that one is the soldier in war and the quiet patriot in peace, who has been named again by every township in forty-six States and Territo- ries for the great trust he now holds. Yet this man, honest, brave and modest, and proved by his transcendant deeds to be endowed with genius, common sense and moral qualities, ade- quate to the greatest affairs ; this man who saved his cou and our cans his shield th' but for him man, under has flourish man, to wh . tion are due, is made the mark for ribald jibes and odious, groundless slanders. Why is all this? Simply because he stands in the way of the greed and ambition of politicians and schemers. Many honest men join in the cry, or hear it without indignation. They are de- ceived by the cloud of calumny which darkens the sky ; but the inventors are men distempered with griefs, or else the sordid and the vile, who follow politics as the shark follows the ship. A war of mud and missiles has been waged for months. The President, his family, and all nearly associated with him have been bespat- tered, and truth and decency have been driven far away. Every thief, and cormorant, and drone who has been put out ; every baffled mouser for place or plunder ; every man with a The President and His Slanderers. 'CI* grievance of a grudge ; all who have something to make by a change, seem to wag an unbtidle- ed tongue or to drive a foul pen. The President cannot enter the lists of con- troversy and defend himself ; the proprieties of his station forbid it ; his chief competitor, managing behind the curtain a newspaper from which he pretends to have retired, is free to defend and puff himself, and feels free to fill his paper with base and scurrilous falsehood, in the hope of blackening a name which is one of the treasures of the nation and which will be the pride of posterity. All this pollution will, in the end, disgrace only its authors ; it will not disgrace Grant or the nation, because the na- tion will spurn and resent it. The disgusting personalities emptied upon Gen. Jackson se- cured his re-election ; an offended people struck back, and they will strike back again. WHERE THE OPPOSITION HAS BLUNDERED. The American people may misjudge a politi- cal question ; they may be deceived ; but, with the truth before them, they will never be unjust, and never untrue upon a question of right and wrong. Ingratitude has been charged upon Republics, and just there is the point where the angry enemies of the President have blundered. Had the cool veterans of the Democracy formed or selected the issues to be presented, they would have been wise enough to so frame them that the people could decide in their favor without Axing a stigma upon Gen. Grant, and without blasting his name or doing him wrong. But the Democratic statesmen, the leaders in a hundred fights, have been mere lookers on; leadership has been assumed by Republican renegades and "outs;" men so eaten up with envy, or so mad- dened with the loss or refusal of place and pat- ronage, that nothing would satisfy them short of a rancorous, revengeful, personal raid. When a man turns Turk he spits on the Cross, and when wide-throated ultra Republicans clandes- tinely trade with the enemy, and then turn open traitors to their party, they become the meanest and fiercest opponents, just as Yankee slave overseers from New England were always more brutal than those born in the South. When men whose vanity was hurt, and others nawed by ambjuan and. cupidity, went out to n' the party which they could not rule, mad- ness drove them on. They had no polar star, except hatred of Grant and his supporters. These lusty patriots who modestly assumed the name of "Reformers," would not have an ordi- nary Presidential canvass for the fair discussion of political questions; such a proceeding would In c been too tame and insipid for them. Their Stomachs craved stronger, more game-flavored meat ; hard names must be called ; vengeance must be satisfied ; the President must be politi- cally court-martialed or dragged before a na- tional assize to be tried as a malefactor. In the Senate the Democrats proper kept si- lent or talked about business ; I give them credit for wasting but little time ; but half the la-t session, ei^ht months in length, was worn out and wasted by slanderous electioneering harangues aimed at the Administration and its friends by men badly in need of being reformed themselves. These self-righteous and noisy or- acles pitched the key in which the anti-Grant chorus was to be sung, and hence comes the ab- sence of political questions and the presence of personal and scandalous issues. The public journals and newspaper correspondence from Washington, controlled by these "Liberals" — liberal in nothing so much as in defaming honest men and praising and helping themselves — took hue from the heart-burnings, distempers and ambitions which set them on. "Anything to beat Grant" was the motto, and it gratified their hate and spite to assail the President per- sonally, and to heap malignant charges upon him ; thus his character, his integrity, his stand- ing as a man, have been put in issue, and the people are compelled to pass upon his guilt or innocence. The case has been so put, that the question is not merely whether Grant shall be President, but whether Grant shall be pronounc- ed by the nation a fool, a knave, an impostor, an enemy of his country. Had issue been taken upon public measures, had public ques- tions been raised, whether new questions or those which have divided parties heretofore, a popular verdict would have been a verdict only between parties, and policies, and princi- ples. Such a verdict would have rested upon public grounds, personal and disparaging to. no one. If the political views the President represents are not those of a majority there is no injustice and no reflection upon any one in so saying and so voting. But when he is arraigned for ignor- ance, dishonesty and vice, and for nothing else,, the case is different. PLATFORM MADE UP OF SLANDERS OF DIS- APPOINTED MEN. What is the arraignment? What political position held by the Republican Party or its candidates does the "Any thing-to-beat-Grant" coalition deny? Will anyone tell me? Read the manifesto put forth at Cincinnati, which Mr. Greeley did over in improved words, as he thought, in his letter of acceptance. Read the address lately published by Mr. Greeley and his committee, soliciting the votes of the people of this State. These papers, in so far as they refer to the Administration, are a gross personal libel upon the President, and they are nothing more. Hear the words of the self-constituted crowd at Cincinnati — that motley group made up of a few respectable men who have since repudiated it, and of the most piebald, disreputable collec- tion to be scraped from the gutters and sewers of politics. These political lazzaroni, pretend- ing to represent States, laid down the platform on which Mr. Greeley thinks he is running. See how it reads ; The President of the TTnited States has openly used the powers and opportunities of his high office for the promotion of personal ends. He has kept notoriously corrupt and unworthy men in places of power and responsibility, to the detriment of the public interest. He has used the public service of the Government as a machinery of corruption and personal influence, and has interfered, with tyrannical arrogance, in the political affairs of States and municipalities. He has rewarded with influential and lucrative officii Senator Conklin'fs Great Speech at Xeio York. > men who have acquired his favor by valuable presents, thus stimulating l!ie demoralization of our political lile by his conspicuous example. -»». He has shown himself deplorably unequal to the ta ;ks imposed upon him by the necessities of tni culpably careless of the responsibility of hi, high, office. Mr. Greeley's personal backers and trainers "-'recently delighted the public with an address, „ embroidered with the rhetoric and signature of Mr. John Cochrane. This paper, gorgeous in composition, speaks of the Cincinnati fiasco as "one of the most stately and brilliant par- liaments ever assembled in this country." These rainbow-dyed words show on what sky-scraping pinions the "Liberal" eagle soars. Sec how this gloomy and peculiar monarch of the clouds swoops down on the poor pigmy ami truant of Appomattox. Observe the awful obscurity, grand even in parenthesis, with which he "goes for" his prey, as another reformer "went for that heathen Chinee": The history of the Administration is a shadowy record of discreditable {sometimes disgraceful) acts— many of them blunders; others, crimes. He has repeatedly shown himself on the one hand ig- norant of the laws, and on the other defiant of them. He has accepted gifts from flatterers, for which he has rendered dishonorable equivalents, by bestowing public emoluments on obsequious givers. These are but three of the seventeen personal crimes, of which the bright particular Cochrane appears as the avenging angel. Do such des- picable assertions and imputations raise any po- litical or party issue ? NOTHING TANGIBLE ABOUT TARIFF, AMNES- TY, OR CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. The tariff resolution, at Cincinnati, is a mere jurrgle — a shallow evasion, by which no one of common intelligence has a right to be cheated. The resolution about Congress and "central- ism," if they mean anything, refer to the exercise of powers by Congress everyone of which Mr. Greeley approved and demanded in his usual violent and unmeasured language. The amnesty resolution is spent, because a general amnesty bill was passed weeks ago. Every rebel votes, and every rebel may hold office now, except Jefferson Davis, and less than two hundred others, who still spurn for- giveness. There is nothing left of the amnesty question, unless some one wants to mount a dead horse in behalf of Jefferson Davis and his handful of cronies, who say that their perjury needs no forgiveness, and seeks none, and that they have no use just now in that way for those they keep to sign their bail bonds, and d * their other chores. Where, then, is the political issue the people are to pass upon? It cannot be "civil service reform," unless dishonesty is imputed to the President. He is for civil service reform ; he recommended it and inaugurated it, and the Philadelphia Convention specially declared for it. There can be no issue of that kind, except by pretending that Grant is a hypocrite, and that Greeley is not ; and neither of these things would be easy to prove. Mr. Greeley has plainly and repeatedly avowed, in public and in private, that his political action hinges on pat- ronage and spoils; without stopping to prove this now, I will recur to it hereafter. The coalition presents nothing of substance, on which parties or individuals are divided in principle, but only assaults upon the President. This is nothing more or less than a challenge of comparison between the candidates. The issue is narrowed to a single inquiry : Which is personally the safest, fittest man for the Presi- dency? That is the question, and the whole of it. DEMOCRACY GIVES UP — WHAT IS ASKED uF DEMOCRATS. Some things, however, are said and done ef- fectually by the platform and nomination of our opponents. They blot out and renounce the time-honored creed of the Democratic Party. That creed is laid aside and its vital points re- pudiated. It is fairly admitted that Democratic doctrines and Democratic candidates cannot stand before the judgment of the country. The Democracy confesses its defeat upon the great issues of the century, and confesses its error also. Equality of race ; emancipation of slaves ; the ballot for the blacks ; a protective tariff; exemption of Government bonds from taxation ; paying bonds in coin ; — upon these and other things, the Democracy at last con- fesses itself not only beaten but wrong, and the Republican Party victorious and right. Stop- ping here, the homage paid to the Republican Party would be great indeed, but we find greater tribute and homage still. Not only are the old grounds of difference given up, but no new ones can be found. What measure or doctrine of the Republican Party, again I ask, have our opponents ventur- ed to attack ? The Republican Party has been in power for years, responsible for all legislation in the greatest era of the nation, and now its life-long rival and adversary at last throws up the sponge, not daring to join issue upon one political ques- tion. Even the Kuklux and election bills are nd matters in difference, for Mr. Greeley supported them both, with all his virulent vocabulary. My own part in preparing and pressing the election law was, I remember, the occasion of my being praised in the Tribune. This puzzled me at the time, and suggested that I must have been doing something wrong, because the Tribune marked me for destruction after its editor was not elected to the Senate. Mr. Greeley must have been elated indeed over the Congressional election law, when his exuber- ance became so great that he could write a kind, or even a just or true, word of me. The only instances of alleged "centralism" being measures to which Mr. Greeley stands fully committed, the candidate and the plat- form together leave not a shred of anything Democratic. As if to abjure the last vestige of Democracy and wipe out its very memory, these vaulting managers have selected as their figurehead a professed ultra Republican, for- merly an ultra Whig, and they ask honest Democrats to vote for him, against a man born and bred a Democrat, who never acted with the Republican Party till after the war liad raised The President and His Slanderers". new issues on which Democrats divided. Demo- crats are asked to vote for that Republican who "out-Heroded Herod" always in politics and abuse, and who did more than any other man in the North to encourage secession and bring on the war. A Republican, coming from the Whig Party with such a record, now asks the votes of Democrats ! The anti-Grant managers are daring, if they are not silly. They attempt to crowd down the throats of Democrats who fought the Maine law, the man who drowned all other voices in his outcries for penal statutes and Sunday laws, to stop by force the drinking even of lager-beer. WHY SHOULD DEMOCRATS VOTE FOR GREELEY? If a Democrat was mnning, or if Democratic principles were ill the field, Democrats might be expected to vote the ticket ; but when the choice is between Republicans, and no Democratic principle is at stake, Democrats will be apt to pick and choose for themselves which Republi- can they will vote for, if they vote at all. Upon what ground will patriotic Democrats prefer Greeley to Grant? They must prefer Greeley because they disapprove Grant person- ally, or else because they disapprove some po- litical doctrine he represents. Are Democrats for repudiating the debt? Are they for agitating or annulling the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution? Would they re-establish slav- ery? Would they pay the rebel war debt, or pensions to rebel soldiers, or rebel war claims? Would they inflate the currency again, and flood the country with paper money? Are Demo- crats against reducing taxes and expenses ? Are Democrats opposed to peace with all nations, and stable government at home ? These ques- tions are not asked to impugn the position of any man, but for the opposite reason. Pres. Grant being tried and true in all these things, why should any Union man, or con- servative, or business - man, or patriot, vote against him, even if his competitor was a safe and fit man for President? Plainly there can be no reason, unless Grant is unworthy of confi- dence or respect, and deserves to be found guilty of the crimes and vices alleged against him. To judge this question we must examine his history and lay bare his life. "The tree is known by its fruit"; the carpenter by his chips; the man by his deeds. grant's education and boyhood. Grant cannot be illiterate, or, as a Greeley orator told an audience the other day, "ignorant of what school-boys know." lie was educated at West Point, and whoever graduates in that exacting school must have an education such as few Americans receive. Mental culture is not all we find in Grant at West Point. His letters written then stamp him with a character enough by itself to refute the worn and soiled tavern scandal which now offends the nostrils of the nation. Here is a letter to his mother, June 4, 1839. He was then seventeen. "As the twig is bent the tree is inclined." Let us see what kind of a boy the man grew out of. United States West Point Military Academy, June 4, 1839. My Dear Mother : I have occasionally been called to be separated from you, but never did I feel the full force and effect of this separation as 1 do now. I seem alone in the world without my mother. 'There have been so many ways in which you have advised me, when, hi the quiet of home, I have been pursuing my studies, that you cannot tell how much I miss you. When I was busy with father in the tannery, and on the farm, we were both more or less surrounded by others, who took up our attention and occupied our time. But, I was so often alone with you, and you spoke to me so frequently in private, that the solitude of my situation here at the Academy, among my silent books, and in my lonely room, is all the more striking. It reminds me all the more forcibly of home, and most of all, my dear mother, of you. But, in the midst of all this, your kind instructions and admonitions are ever present with me. 1 trust they may never be absent from me as long as I live. How often I think of them ! and how well do they strengthei* me in every good word and work ! My dear mother, should I progress well with my studies at West Point, and become a soldier for mi- country, I am looking forward with hope to have you spared to share with me in any advancement I may make. I see now, in looking over the records here, how much American soldiers of the right stamp are indebted to good American mothers ! When they go to the field, what prayers go with them ! What tender testimony of maternal affection and counsel are in their knapsacks ! I am struck, in looking over the history of the noble struggle of our fathers for national independence, at the evidence of the good influence exerted upon them by the women of the Revolution. Ah ! my beloved friend, how can the present generation ever repay the debt it owes the patriots of the past for the sacrifices they have so freely and richly made for us ? We may well ask. Would our country be what it is now, if it had not been for the greatness of our patriotic ancestors? Let me hear from you by letter as often as convenient, and send me such books as you think will help me. They can be forwarded through the courtesy of our member of Congress. Faithfully and most lovingly your son, ULYSSES. To his father he writes from West Point : I find much here that makes me love my dear native land more than ever. I am happy in the fact that this stronghold of nature is safely in the hands of the United States. Do you know, father, that it is called the Gib- raltar of America? * * * * As I return from my walk, refreshed by the exercise, inspired by the grand and varied scenery, and better pre- pared for my studies, I pass by the cemetery of the Academy, where some of our cherished dead repose. Here is the monument erected by our grateful country to the brave hero, Kosciusko, who fell on the field of battle, on American soil, fighting for the liberties of mankind. You remember, father, the line that is recorded of him : "And Freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell." I am rendered serious by the impressions that crowd upon me here at West Point. My thoughts are frequently occupied with the hatred I am made to feel towards trai- tors to my country, as I look around me on the memorials that remain of the black-hearted treason of Arnold. I am full of a conviction of scorn and contempt, which my young and inexperienced pen is unable to write in this letter, toward the conduct of any man who, at any time, could strike at the liberties of such a nation as ours. If ever men should be found in our Union ba^e enough to make the attempt to do this : if, like Arnold, they should secretly seek to sell our national inheritance for the mess of pottage of wealth, or power, or section — ■ West Point sternly reminds me of what you, my father, would have your son do. As I stand here in this national fort, a student of arms under our country's flag, I know full well how you would have me act in such an emergency. I trust my, future conduct in such an hour would prove worthy the patriotic instructions you have given. Yours obediently, ULYSSES SYDNEY GRANT. Had the boy who wrote these letters a good and gentle nature ? Was he well grounded, or Senator Corikling^s Great Speech at New York. afloat? When did he lose the moral sense which there speaks out? From West Point he went to act a subordi- nate part in the Mexican war. lie acted it bravely, modestly and well. The Mexican war being over, his pay in the regular army would have gone on, and he might have lived in peace and idleness at the public cost, but, unwilling to be a drone, he became a tanner. THE "TANNER. OF GALENA." — WHAT HE TANNED. Mr. Sumner withers him by reminding us that "he tanned hides at Galena for a few hun- dred dollars a year." He did not masquerade as a wood-chopper; he did not figure in pic- torials as a farmer ; he did not go round telling " what he knew about " anything that he didn't understand himself; he minded his own busi- ness, and let other people's business alone ; but he worked with his hands as a hewer of wood, which he sold in the market, and wrought out a living for his family and himself. From the breaking out of the rebellion, his ca- reer is a " thrice-told tale " — the world knows it by heart. When the flag sank at Sumter, he did not wait to be called. Without commission, command, uniform, or shoulder-straps, he start- ed for the field, and grasping the Stars and Stripes, he carried them through a blaze of victo- ries such as no mortal man before him had won. While Senators who now hawk at him were lolling for a fourth term on cushions, and evis- cerating encyclopedias, books of quotations, and classical dictionaries, the Tanner of Galena swept rebellion from the Valley of the Mississip- pi, and the Father of Waters went unvexed to the sea. Lincoln and Stanton, who reposed unmeas- ured confidence in him, called him at once from the victorious fields of the West to the Depart- ment of the Potomac, that Golgotha, where army after army, the very flower of the nation, had melted away. He came to the wilderness of Virginia, when that traitorous Commonwealth had become the rendezvous of the allied armies of rebellion, and when the rebel chiefs were boasting that in the fastnesses of the Blue Ridge they could defy the world in arms. He march- ed from Washington, and he measured no back- ward step until he had set his foot upon the shattered fragments of the greatest military power an invading army ever overthrew. He solved the problem which had baffled all others, and preserved a nationality after the world thought it had gone down. How stood he then? The nation leaned and reposed upon him, and blessed him. Both hemispheres gazed at him, as the prodigy and wonder of the age. The Democrats sought his consent to nomi- nate him for the Presidency without platform or pledge, but he declined. His integrity taught him that when a party chooses a candidate from the other side, somebody is to be cheated ; and by Giant's consent no one ever was or ever will lie cheated. But the Democratic managers ddored him, and saw him only resplendent with greatness and with virtues. He was not unfit for President then ; he was the fittest of all his countrymen. He did net become unfit until three years' experience had ripened and enlarged his knowledge. He did not become unfit while the patronage held out, and while unclean fingers were allowed to fumble it. In his recent modest letter of acceptance he says, "Experience may guide in avoiding mis- takes inevitable with novices in all professions and in all occupations." WHAT THE NEW YORK WORLD SAID. He was a "novice" when the New York World, then as now, the ablest opposition paper, said on the I ith of April, 1865 : Gen. Grant's history should leach us to discriminate better than we Americans are apt to do between glitter and solid work. Our proneness to run after demagogues and spouters may find a wholesome corrective in the study of such a character as his. The qualities by which great things are accomplished are here seen to have no necessary connection with showy and superficial accom- plishments. Ulysses S. Grant, the tanner, Ulysses S. Grant the unsuccessful applicant for the post of City Surveyor of St. Louis, Ulysses S. Grant, the driver into that city of his two-horse team, with a load of wood to sell, had within him every manly quality, which will cause the name of Lieut. -Gen. Grant to live forever in history. His career is a lesson in practical democracy — it is a quiet satire on the dandyism, the puppyism, and the shallow affectation of our fashionable exquisites, as well as upon the swagger of our plausible, glib-tongued dem- agogues. Apply to Gen. Grant what test you will ; measure him by the magnitude of the obstacles he has surmounted, by the value of the positions he has gained, by the fame of the antagonist over whom he has triumphed, by the achievements of his most illustrious co-workers, by the sureness with which he directs his idomitable energy t» the vital point which is the key of a vast field of opera- tions, or by that supreme test of consummate ability — the absolute completeness of his results — and he vindicates his claim to stand next after Napoleon and Wellington among the great soldiers of this country, if not on a level with the latter. WHAT HORACE GREELEY SAID. He was not quite a novice when Horace Greeley said these things : Grant and his policy deserve the very highest credit. The people of the United States know Gen. Grant — have known all about him since Donelson and Vicksburg — they do not know his slanderers, and do not care to know them. While asserting the right of every Republican to his untrammeled choice of a candidate for next President until a nomination is made, I venture to suggest that Gen. Grant will be far better qualified for that momen- tous trust in 1872 than he was in 1868. We are led by him who first taught our armies ta conquer in the West, and, subsequently, in the East also. Richmond would not come to us until we sent Grant after it, and then it had to come. He has never yet been defeated, and never will be. He will be as great and successful on the field of politics as on that of arms. Yes : Gen. Grant has failed to gratify some eager aspirations, and has thereby incurred some intense hatreds. These do not and will not fail, and his admin- istration will prove at least equally vital. We shall hear lamentation after lamentation over his failures from those whose wish is father to the thought : but the American people let them pass unheeded. Their strong arm bore him triumphantly through the war and into the White House, and they still uphold and sustain him : and they never failed and never will. He was not altogether a novice when, in Sep- tember, 1871, Mr. Greeley wrote, and sent to the Republican State Convention for adoption, these resolutions : II. In this alarming crisis in City and State affairs, the Republican party refers all good citizens to its record, as G The President and His Slanderers. their warrant for giving it their fullest confidence and support in the campaign, now formally opening, of the honest men against the thieves. ll ab ilishi a slavery. It led in the suppression of the rebellion. Ii | n served and enlarged the Union. It promptly reduced the enormous forces thus required lo a peace fa It li is redtlced the debt over two hundred and fifty millions of dollars in the last three years. It has simultaneously reduced public taxation over two hundred and fifty millions of dollars per annum. 1 1 ii is preserved peace on the border. Ii lias w in a friendly adjustment of the threatening troubles with Great Britain. 111. For its conspicuous share in this beneficent rec- er.i we endorse the Xatioiuil Republican Adminis- tration. These resolutions were written only a little while ago, ami all the slanders to this day in- vented against the President, had long been cur- rent then. "gift-taking." But let us go back a moment, to Grant, be- fore he seriously thought of being President, and when he was only the idol of the nation. Returning from the field, covered with glory, but poor in money, the affluent, whose fortunes he had saved, met him with munificent offerings. In this they followed the customs of ancient and modern times. The austere republics of antiquity enriched and ennobled their heroes returning from vic- tory. England, with an unwritten Constitution, and an omnipotent Parliament, which a lawyer •nee said " could do anything but make a man a woman," has enriched her Generals both by acts of Paxliament and by voluntarysubscriptions. In the United States, the Constitution does not permit Congress to act in such matters ; here they rest wholly in the voluntary action of individuals, and that public presentations to heroes involved turpitude in givers or recipi- ents, has been first found out by the spurious re- formers and libelers now clamoring for notice. Wellington received from his Government, and his neighbors, more than $3,000,000. British citizens of Calcutta made him presents, the officers of the army gave him $10,000, the House of Commons voted him $1,000,000, and a mansion and estate were purchased for him by subscription, at a cost of $1,300,000. Besides this, he was three times ennobled, twice by Eng- land, and once by Spain. Oliver Cromwell, for deeds done in civil war, received $32,500 a year in gifts. Marlborough was given a stately palace and a splendid for- tune. Nelson and his family were ennobled, and received $70,000. Jewels and money were given to Fairfax for services in civil war. The Generals and Admirals of England and France have generally been recipients of great pecuniary benefits. In England and elsewhere, the custom of presents to public men has gone beyond the army and the navy. Richard Cob- den, a civilian, in token of political service only, was t;iveii by subscription three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Tohn Bright has just received costly gifts. America, younger and poorer, with few wars to breed heroes, has been less lavish than older , but Americans have not been stingy. Gen. McClellan, perhaps, begins the list of largely-rewarded Generals. His active service ended before the war was over, and his Demo- cratic admirers, prior to nominating him for the Presidency, presented him a costly house and a large purse, amounting in all to a hundred thousand dollars. To Sherman, Sheridan, Farragut and Grant large sums were given. To Stanton's family and to Rawlins's, were given more than a hun- dred thousand each. Were these things dishon- orable? Was it wrong for Gen. Grant to accept such gifts ? The charge is an insult to the nation who witnessed and applauded the proceeding ; it is an imputation upon those who gave, as much as upon him who received. It cannot have been dishonorable or improper for him to accept a gift, without being dishonorable and improper to offer it. How mean must the cant and snivel we hear seem to the people of Germany just now. Bis- marck, though Chancellor and Prime Minister, has just received as a gift, in token of his ser- vices in the recent war, a magnificent landed estate, worth more than was given to all our Generals ; and Bismarck, in like token, has been made a prince. Gen. Von Mokke, for his services in the German- Franco War, has been given $300,000 ; and Germany has set apart from the French indemnity fund, four million dollars, to be distributed in gifts to her heroes. Do you believe that any German, or any man with a German heart in his bosom, will ever be mean enough to throw these gifts in the face of those who earned and accepted them ? If there is a man mean enough to do it, he will be safer in the Greeley menagerie than he would be in any hiding place in Germany. Yet gift-taking, forsooth, is paraded by po- litical Pharisees. One thing is noticeable ; the men who screech about gift-taking are those who never gave a cent, and who were never openly offered a cent — certainly not for any hon- orable service rendered to their country. The charge that Grant accepted any gift after he be- came President, or after he was nominated, is wholly false. He has accepted nothing of value since his first nomination — not even a carriage and horses — although Lincoln, and Buchanan, and Pierce, and Taylor, andother Presidents, did accept carriages and horses after their election. "GIFT-BEARING GREEKS." But it is said that men who subscribed to gifts have been appointed to office, and the insinua- tion is that they were appointed because they subscribed to gifts. The fact that hundreds who gave have never been appointed to anything would of itself seem to disprove the charge that official patronage has been used to re-pay gifts. Only three — or at most four — contributors to the funds raised for Gen. Grant have ever been offered appointments, and it would seem far-fetched to explain the se- lection of three for a reason applying to more than three hundred who were never selected at all. But the facts answer the charge. MR. A. T. STEWART AND MR. BORIE. Mr. A.T. Stewart subscribed to the Grant fund; so did every leading man in the City of New Senator Conkling's Great Speech at JVeio York. York who then supported the war and the Re- publican Party. No man on Manhattan Island who would have been thought of for the Cabinet refused to subscribe. A man of wealth and prominence belonging to the Union party at that time, who had refused to share in an offering to a Union General, would have been as mean and as marked as a member of a church who should refuse to pay his part to the minister. The call was general, and for the wealthy who had sup- ported the war to give was a matter of course. When Gen. Grant became President, had he nam- ed for his Cabinet E. D. Morgan, George Op- dyke, Jackson S. Schultz, William E. Dodge, Henry Clews, or any other leading merchant or banker who supported him, it would have turned out that he too was a "gift-bearing Greek." The same thing is true of Mr. Borie, of Phila- delphia, the late Secretary of the navy ; the only difference being, that Mr. Stewart was willing to accept office, and Mr. Borie utterly refused andde- clinedit, consenting at last, under protest, to serve only for a short lime. These Cabinet Ministers wereselectedfortwo reasons: First, theirsupposed fitness, and second, becausetheywerenot "politi- cians." Mr. Stewart's success and mastership of the details of a vast and varied business convinced the President that he might render great services as Secretary of the Treasury. Mr. Borie, a retired merchant and importerand shipper andship-own- er, was believed to have large experience and knowledge applicable to the navy department. These facts by themselves might not have caused these two selections, because other men might have been found qualified, and at the same time known in political affairs. THE TRIBUNE AT THE BOTTOM OF IT. The New York Tribune, and the newspapers which followed it, or chimed in with it, had more to do than all else, with bringing about the nomination of Mr. Stewart and Mr. Borie, and of others unknown in public affairs. The Tribune had vociferated against "politi- cians"; it had conjured the President to avoid " politicians," and had proclaimed again and again that the country had a right to expect of Gen. Grant that "politicians" would not be put in high places, but that new men would be brought in. Listening to this hollow bluster, echoed in many public journals, the President was misled as to the popular judgment. His own wisdom taught him that if you want a lawyer you should select a man who has prov- ed himself a lawyer ; that if you want a doctor, you had better take one who has been tried; and so if you want an agent to manage public affairs, you had better take a man experienced in such affairs. But Mr. Greeley insisted that a Cabinet should be chosen upon the principle on which he is trying to be President, viz., passing over all the men whom you know to be fit, and tak- ing a man at a venture with no reason to believe him to be fit. Indeed, Mr. Greeley once told the President that, in his opinion, offices should never be given to those who could take care of themselves, but should be kept for those who couldn't make a living in any other way. Much has been said about President Grant's choice of his Cabinet, but those who know its inside his- tory know that the very men who are now hound- ing the President warmly approved of the persons, named, especially of Mr. Stewart. THE LAW AND THE TRUTH IN MR. STEW- ART'S CASE. The provisions of law making Mr. Stewart ineligible were as much out of the minds of others as of the President. Mr. Stewart was unanimously confirmed by the Senate, as were the other Cabinet nomina- tions now said to be so bad ; and yet there sat Sumner and Tipton, and Schurz and Trumbull, and the other new-light oracles, and appointed, because the President without the Senate could not appoint, A. T. Stewart and the rest. Sev- eral old statutes forbid importers to hold such places, and upon the President's attention being called to this, he submitted to the Senate a sug- gestion that the law be so changed as to allow Mr. Stewart to act as Secretary of the Treasury. When he reflected on the subject, however, the President did what no small man could have done. He saw the error ; he did not say the Senate was as much to blame as he was, or as ignorant as he was, or that the Senate, having confirmed Mr. Stewart, must reconsider its action or share the responsibility of getting out of the predicament ; but he took the whole blame himself. He said, " This is my mistake; I will correct it." He immediately withdrew his message recommending the law's repeal, and then he did the disagreeable duty of appri- sing Mr. Stewart that his proffered deed of trust, pronounced sufficient by certain Senators, now ranting "reformers," would not do, and that nothing would do except to resign and let another take the place. The President's man- liness in meeting everything and shirking nothing on this occasion, raised him greatly in the estimation of all just beholders. He offen- ded Mr. Stewart, and impaired his friendship, and yet the bald pretense is now made that he used official power to recompense a gift. MR. MOSES H. GRINNELL. Mr. Moses H. Grinned was a subscriber to the Grant fund. He was appointed Collector of New York, greatly to the satisfaction of Mr. Greeley and the motley crew which follows him. Did you ever hear that Grinnell's subscription was any objection to his appointment ? . When Mr. Grinnell resigned the Collectorship he be- came a Tribune martyr. He then asked the President for the Naval Office, and the President yielded to his request. Did you ever hear this objected to because Grinnell was a "gift-bear- ing Greek " ? When members of Congress and Senators from other States, Massachusetts for one, urged the President to appoint Mr. Lafiin Naval Officer, Mr. Grinnell was displaced, and then the very men who now prate about ap- pointing those who made presents, denounced the President for ingratitude to Grinnell, on the ground that Grinnell had subscribed money for the President. As Nasby would say, "sich is life." No man who knows President Grant, unless he be knave or fool, for a moment believes that the President ever dreamed of prostituting his of- fice to pay a debt of his own, or to bribe, or re- ward, or repay the givers of money to him. 8 The President and Ills Slanderers. THE PRESIDENT'S RICHES. The " Liberal " idea of decency and manly war, forces me to speak of another thing which will grate upon your ears. The political scav- engers pretend that the President has grown rich, as President, by illicit gain, and they parade his property by millions. We have fallen on sorry times, when the Chief Magistrate of the country, with a fame so great and pure, must give account of his private property in an- swer to electioneering falsehoods. The Presi- dent would disdain to do it ; I have no author- ity to do it ; 1 do not assume to do it on his behalf; but on behalf of the party and the cause he represents I venture to state the facts. At Galena, where he "tanned hides," he owned a house, and during the war he invested the savings from his pay in some lots in Chi- cago, and in some shares of street railway stock. Mrs. Grant inherited her share in her father's farm in Missouri, and they bought out the other heirs with a portion of the hundred thousand dollars presented by citizens of New York. This one hundred thousand dollars also paid for a house in Washington, which was subse- quently sold to Gen. Sherman, and a cottage and grounds were bought at Long Branch after the Washington house was sold. The people of Philadelphia presented a house, which rents for about two thousand dollars a year. This completes the property of the President, with one exception. Some years ago he purchased ten thousand dollars, in nominal value, of the stock of the Sen- eca Stone Company ; to this day it has paid nothing, partly because the President has inter- fered to prevent Seneca stone being adopted as building material for the Government. One of the plans submitted for the new State Depart- ment required the use of Seneca stone, and, be- cause of his being a stockholder, the President refused to allow the plan to be even considered. The other stockholders complained of this, say- ing they were punished because the President owned stock ; the President replied, expressing his regret, and saying that he would sell his stock or give it away, except for imputations cast upon him by political opponents because of his ownership ; but he deemed it unsuitable even to seem to defer to such calumny by parting with his stock. Here, then, is the sum total of the President's possessions ; and they embrace no cigars smug- gled in the dispatch bag, no costly works of art or rare wines bestowed by foreigners, no testi- monials sent from other lands, in gratitude for efforts to tarnish the fair fame of his country. Every dollar he owns came from sources open as the day, and every month of his Presidency has made him poorer than the month before ; and yet the country and Congress are disgraced by inuendoes and poisonous hints that vast wealth has been amassed in the Presidential office. ■• GRANT NO MONEY-MAKER AND NO OFFICE- SEEKER. Had wealth gained in office been Grant's aim, he would never have been President. As General of the Army he stood the foremost man of all the earth. His pay was for'life, and was nearly, if not quite, as great annually as the Presidential salary. In money value and money-making opportunity, as well as in ease and freedom, his position then was unmeasurably better than the Presidency for four years or eight. We know the Presidency sought him, and not he the Presidency ; but had avarice been his thought, he would have refused the Presidency, and kept the life-place of General. The Presidential salary has not lured him now. We hear of " his pretentions," and of his "in- sisting upon being a candidate"; yet, first and last, he never made himself a candidate, and never, to my knowledge, has he expressed a wish to be re-elected. So far from it, that for more than a year his friends were uneasy with solicitude lest he should withhold absolutely the use of his name. In place of dividing or hazarding the Repub- lican Party by seeking a renomination, he never consented to stand a second time until he was assured on every hand that the party demanded him as the only man who could not be beaten ; and my firm conviction is, that, had no asper- sion been cast upon him, he would personally gladly be mustered out. More than a year ago, expressing to me pri- vately his earnest wish to leave public toil, he said that at West Point he counted the days, the hours, and even the minutes to elapse, be- fore he should be graduated, and that, with a like eagerness, he counted the time that would complete his Presidential service ; and often, before vindictive injustice had roused him to resistance, those who knew him best, and among them the ablest and purest members of the Senate, continually expressed solicitude lest he should refuse to run again, and leave the party distracted by rivalries, and with no candidate so strong. But when the shower of mud, and the beating of gongs, and the foul-mouthed uproar burst upon him, all felt that we were safe. Grant never scares well at all, and is never driven when courage can make a stand ; and the two debts the Republican party owes to the deserters who have attempted to betray it are, first, that they cleansed and reformed the party by leaving it ; and second, that they have insured it a candidate who, in the words of Horace Greeley, "never has been defeated and never will be." The assaults made upon him at once swelled the tide in his favor, and the determination to renominate him soon became obvious even to those who hated most to see it. Then came the next effort to throw dust in tne people's eyes. The New York Tribune, and other journals, which for a year had been doing the worse than menial offices of the Democratic party, raised a yell that "the office-holders were going to renominate Grant." This bald tale had its run until the Philadelphia Convention met. It then turned out that, among seven hun- dred and fifty delegates, there were not thirty office-holders, a thing unexampled in American politics. No National Convention of the party in power ever met before, in which men holding offi- cial station were not largely present. Perhaps no single precinct in the whole country so effectu- ally gave the lie to the pretense that the office- Senator Conklhu/\s ^Great^Spcech at New York. 9 holders controlled the people, as the Seventh Ward of the City of Boston, the ward in which Mr. Sumner lives. There, under his own vine and fig tree, where he carefully superintended the selection of "office-holders," the primary meeting brought out unusual numbers ; the Re- publicans turned out en masse and voted unani- mously for Grant. Mr. Sumner, in his opposi- tion, could not command a vote. THE PHILADELPHIA CONVENTION — HENRY WILSON. The roll-call in the National Convention was answered by a chorus of States, and with a unanimity and a spirit which made the Conven- tion the most remarkable ever held, and the in- dorsement the most flattering and pronounced ever given to a candidate. The announced wish of Mr. Colfax to withdraw from public life, left the Convention without unity of sentiment as to the second place on the ticket ; and the choice fell upon the man whom Mr. Wade has well described "as the incarnation of American citi- zenship." Born a child of poverty and toil, the Natick Cobbler, during a long life of purity and public service, had won a place in the respect and good will of his countrymen which made it fit that the second office in the Republic should be held by Henry Wilson. Without the contrast between his colleague and himself, the prize might not have fallen to him. But the inexcusable con- duct of Mr. Sumner led the Convention to pre- fer Mr. Wilson for Vice-President, for his own great merit, and also because his nomination would record a national judgment against the pretention that the party belongs to any man, or is subject to the whim or dictation of any knot of men, however petted in the past. Mr. Wil- son has been a Senator many years, a Senator during Gen. Grant's whole military and civil ser- vice. He has at all times upheld Republican measures, and therefore is answerable, as he wishes to be, for the acts of the party and the policy of the Administration. The objections to either candidate apply to both, and can be argued together. The Administration is on trial. Charges are made against it, and the Republican ticket de- serves defeat unless these charges, as far as they are worthy of notice, can be fully met. If such charges were ever canvassed before in a Presi- dential election, they were used as make-weights to go with other and very different things. Never before were such charges alone the theme of popular consideration. WASHINGTON AND OTHERS SLANDERED. Never before did a political party plant itself upon personalities and scandal, and upon noth- ing else. George Washington was visited with loathsome abuse by his political opponents. During the pendency of Jay's treaty, to which Washington was earnestly devoted, Chief Justice Marshall informs us that Washington's — " military and political character was attacked with equal violence, and it was averred that he was totally destitute of merit, either as a soldier or a statesman. The calumnies with which he was assailed were not confined to his political conduct : even his qualities as a man were the subjects of detraction. That he had vio- lated the Constitution in negotiating a treaty without the previous advice of the Senate, and in embracing in that treaty subjects belonging exclusively to the Legislature, was openly maintained, for which an impeachment was publicly suggested ; and that he had drawn from the Treasury for his private use more than the salary an- ( nexed to his office, was asserted without a 'blush. This last allegation was said to be supported by extracts from the Treasury accounts, which had been laid before the Legislature, and was maintained with the most unblush- ing effrontery. Though the Secretary of the Treasury denied that the appropriation made by the Legislature had been exceeded, the atrocious charge was still confi- dently reported, and the few who could triumph in any spot which might tarnish the lustre of Washington's fame felicitated themselves in the prospect of obtaining a victory over the reputation of a patriot, to whose single I hey ascribed the failure of their political plans. —Marshall's Life oj 'Washington, Vel. /, page 267. 1 )o you discover any likeness here ? Is there in the revolting ugliness of these attempts to blacken Washington's name anything to remind you of what is going on around us now ? Jack- son was brutally defamed, and even charged in a public print with the paternity of colored bas- tards. The Convention which nominated Polk hung but from the balcony a full length daub of Henry Clay, bespattered with blood, holding a pistol in one hand and a pack of cards in theother. These were revolting brutalities indeed, but there is one marked difference between the scan- dals hurled at Washington, Jackson, Buchanan, Lincoln and others, ami those now flung at Grant. The public measures, the political policy of these other Presidents, was in each case opposed and criticised, and the sting of personal calumny was used as a spur to the main contest. Now, personal abuse is the Alpha and Omega on one side. John Quincy Adams was besmeared with rancorous aspersion on account of his appoint- ments to office, as his father had been for appoint- ing relatives to office, but the issue at the same time was always made upon grave political ques- tions. What political policy of Grant or his Admin- istration does the opposition assail ? What part of the present policy do they propose to reverse or alter ? What part dare they avow or admit they mean to change? Lay your finger on it if you can. Hard words you can find, vague, cloudy, sweeping denunciations ; but take up, one by one, the important positions and meas- ures of the Administration, and except the San Domingo Treaty, if that be an exception, where is the specific thing upon which issue is made? Let me state the case in another form. Sup- pose all the slurs and flings and vile gossip against Grant are true— suppose you admit the whole of them — what do they signify ? Suppose he has appointed a dozen relatives to office; suppose he has failed to appreciate the claims of certain politicians ; suppose presents had been given him after he was President ; suppose the idea of making A. T. Stewart Secretary of the Treasury was as foolish as every reformer says it was now ; suppose there was no express law authorizing two young military friends to write in his office and carry his messages. Put it to- gether, and what of it ? If you want a man to pilot a ship, or lead an army, or try a cause, or build a house, or set a broken arm, or run a locomotive, what do you care so long as he does his work well, whether he is too fond ol his relations, or doesn't like certain politicians, or has subjected himself to envious 10 The President and Ills Slanderers. sneers by having presents given to him? All these things are aside from the purpose. "They are tithing, mint, anise and cummin." Has he made a good President ? That is the question. SAN DOMINGO. Let us examine the evidence ; and, first of all, let us take up the charges and evidence against him. The San Domingo treaty, unlike going to Long Branch, or smoking a cigar, or riding in a palace-car, was a matter of public business, and is, therefore, a topic not despicable or un- worthy. His guilt and his innocence in this respect can all be briefly stated. The Monroe doctrine is one of the traditions of the country, and of both political parties. The Monroe doctrine means opposition to ac- quisitions on this continent by European Powers. When President Grant came in no such question was pending, but such a question soon arose. An agent from the Dominican Republic pre- sented himself to the President, saying that the people of Dominica, few in numbers, but rich in one of the most fertile isles of any sea, lying close to our shores, waited to come under the American flag ; and, that failing to do so, they would look to a European alliance. The Pres- ident made no reply, and afterward a second envoy appeared repeating these statements, with glowing accounts of the fertility and resources «f the Island of San Domingo. Gen. McClellan, Admiral Porter, Commis- sioner Hogan, and others, had previously ex- amined and reported upon the island, and had strongly stated its advantages as a coaling sta- tion, a naval station, a military key to the Gulf of Mexico, and as an area prolific in coffee, sugar-cane, rice, dye-stuffs, mahogany, and other valuable woods, and in other products of the tropics, besides iron, copper, gold and salt. With this information before him, the Presi- dent could not turn a deaf ear and a closed eye to so grave a matter. He caused two or three discreet persons to go, unexpected and unob- served, to San Domingo, learn all they could, and make report. This being done, the Presi- dent was convinced that the matter should be entertained, put in the form of a treaty, and submitted to the judgment of the Senate and the country. THE PRESIDENT CALLS ON MR. SUMNER — A QUESTION OF VERACITY. A treaty was proposed and reduced to writ- ing, and the President, with none of the "pre- tention" which Mr. Sumner imagines, paid Mr. Sumner the deference of going to his house, in place of sending for him to confer with him as Chairman of the Committee of Foreign Rela- tions, and to ascertain whether he favored the treaty, and would support it. The interview took place in the presence of two witnesses, Gen. Babcock and Col. John \V. Forney. These two witnesses, in addition to the Pres- ident, affirm that Mr. Sumner distinctly de- clared himself in favo.'of the treaty, and stated that he should support it. Col. Forney testifies as follows : I was present at Mr. Sumner's residence when Presi- dent Grant called and explained the Dominican treaty to the Senator, and, although I cannot recall the exact words of the latter, / understood him to say tliat he ■would most cheerfully support the treaty. At the Pres- ident's request, 1 remained to hear his explanation, and am free to add, that such is my deep regard /or Air. Sumner, that his endorsement of the treaty went very far to stimulate me in giving it my own support. I have already said this much to Mr. Sumner, who, hmv- ever, claims that other information since obtained has shaped his present action. (Signed) J. W. FORNEY. This statement is true, or it is wilfully false ; because although P'orney might have misunder- stood Mr. Sumner at the time, he cannot be mis- taken in the fact that Mr. Sumner afterward admitted that he had changed his mind. Gen. Babcock certifies in writing that after the inter- view with the President, he and Mr. Sumner read and examined the treaty carefully together; and that at the close of the interview, Mr. Sum- ner said, " That he could not think of doing otherwise than supporting the Administration in the matter"; and further, " that there was no ob- jection to the instrument as a whole." Yet Mr. Sumner, having meanwhile taken offense because his views and wishes in other matters were not deferred to, became incensed at the President and Mr. Fish, denounced them, and among other things the San Domingo treaty, and raising an issue of veracity with three witnesses, denied that he ever intimated that he would give the treaty his support. His version of the interview with the President is, that the President came to his house and was proceeding to unfold the San Domingo matter, when he (Sumner) broke in with the subject of an appointment in which he was interested ; and that when the President returned to the treaty, he (Sumner) evaded the point altogether by a studied ambiguity. Here are Mr. Sumner's words, delivered to the Senate : "He (the Presi- dent) proceeded with an explanation which I very soon interrupted, saying, 'by the way, Mr. President, it is very hard to turn out Gov. Ash- ley ; I have just received a letter from the Gov- ernor, and I hope I shall not take too great a liberty, Mr. President, if I read it. I find it excellent and eloquent, and written with a feel- ing which interests me much.' I commenced the letter and read two pages or more, when I thought the President was uneasy, and I felt that I was taking too great a liberty with him in my own house, but I was irresistibly impelled by loyalty to an absent friend, while I was glad of this opportunity of diverting attention from the treaty. As conversation about Gov. Ashley subsided, the President returned to the treaty, leaving on my mind no very strong idea of what they proposed, and nothing with regard to the character of the negotiations. My reply was precise. The language is fixed absolutely in my memory : " ' Mr. President,' I said, 'lam m Administration man, and whatever you do, will always find in me the most careful and candid consideration.' . My language, I repeat, was precise, well considered, and chosen in advance : ' I am an Administration man, and whatever you do will always find in me the most careful and candid consideration.' " Mr. Sumner did not deny that the President acted upon the belief that heapproved the treaty, nor did he deny that he left the President so to act, without ever informing him that he had Senator Conklintfs Great Speech at Nexo York. 11 changed his mind, or been misunderstood. Yet Mr. Sumner in the Senate assailed the President personally and bitterly ; and in a published in- terview in Chicago with Major Chamberlain, a man of character and veracity, who had been a Union officer, and was then connected with the Press, Mr. Sumner charged the 1 'resident with venality and jobbery in the San Domingo Treaty. In consequence of these and other like occur- rences, it was proposed to send three Commis- sioners to San Domingo, at no cost beyond their expenses, to investigate and clear up the whole matter, and to ascertain whether, as Mr. Sum- ner had charged, lots in San Domingo had been staked off and marked with the names of the President and others. The inquiry seemed fair to most of those who opposed and to those who favored the treaty, but Mr. Sumner resisted the inquiry inch by inch, and after a majority of the Foreign Rela- tions Committee had joined him in denouncing it, he insisted that it should be referred to that Committee. The same familiar parliamentary maxim about putting a " child to nurse with those who care not for it," upon which he rung the changes so often in the French Arms affair, was quoted to him in vain. When the sale of arms was to be inquired into, Mr. Sumner slandered the Senate for appointing a committee all in favor of investigating, because the committee was not biased in favor of convicting somebody, but the San Domingo inquiry he insisted should go to a committee of which a majority had declared in advance against any inquiry at all. At the end of a protracted and stubborn con- test, Congress authorized a Commission to be sent ; not, however, till Mr. Sumner had de- nounced the President for not taking it upon himself, of his own authority, to send a Com- mission without asking permission of Congress. Now we hear from Mr. Sumner, not that the President shrinks from his prerogatives, but that he arrogantly oversteps them. Mr. Wade, Dr. Howe of Boston, and Pres- ident Andrew D. White were selected as Com- missioners. They visited San Domingo, and made a report which few of the American peo- ple have read, but which will be read when the din and passion of to-day are forgotten. The report explodes utterly every calumnious pre- tense, and presents a statement which leaves no room to doubt the duty of the President to con- sider as he did the acquisition of San Domingo, and to urge it upon the attention of the Senate and the country. HOW THE PRESIDENT SHAMED HIS AC- CUSERS. In transmitting this report to Congress the President did his last act in the matter. With the report he sent a Message, to which a Minis- ter from one of the first Powers of the earth told me he called the attention of his Government, as one of the most remarkable State papers of which he had knowledge. In that Message stand these words : " The mere rejection by the Senate of a treaty nego- tiated by the President, only indicates a difference of opinion between two co-ordinate departments of the Gov- ernment, without touching the character or wounding the pride of cither. Rut when such rejection I simultaneously with the charges, openly made, o! cor- ruption on the part of the President, or those employed by him, the case is different In llich case the l the nation demands investigation. This has been accom- plished by the report of the Commissioners herewith transmitted, and which fully vindicates the purity of the motives and ai tion of those who represented the United States in the negotiation. And now my task i : an. I with it ends all personal solicitude upon the subject. " My duty being .'one, yours begin* : and 1 gladly hand over the whole matter to the judgment of the American people, and of their Representative, in Con- gress assembled. The facts will now be spreacrbefore the country, and a decision rendered by that tribunal whose convictions so seldom err, and against whose will I have no policy to enforce. M y opinion re- mains unchanged ; indeed, it is confirmed by the report that the interests of our country and San Domingo alike invite the annexation of that Republic. In view of the difference of opinion upon this subject, I suggest that no action be taken at the present session beyond the print- ing and general dissemination of the report. Before the next session of Congress the people will have considered the subject, and formed an intelligent opinion concerning it, to which opinion, deliberately made up, it will be the duty of every department of the Government to give heed, and no one will more cheerfully conform to it than myself. " This was the utterance last year of the man whom we are told is swollen with " pretension " and "ungovernable personality." Among the glaring absurdities heaped upon the San Domingo matter is the allegation that the war was made upon the Republic of Hayti. The foundation for this is that a vessel or two cruised in that part of the ocean during the ne- gotiations. Not a gun was fired, nor a pocket- pistol, nor a percussion cap, and the only war- like demonstration ever heard of was that a sea- captain sent up a sky-rocket from the deck of his vessel. The purpose of this sky-rocket, or where the stick came down, has never been ascertained. This, in brief, is the story of the San Domin- go affair. I do not refer to it to champion the treaty or argue its merits ; that is another mat- ter. My purpose is to show you that the part acted by the President was the part of an hon- est, modest man, walking in the path of the Constitution and of his predecessors. Previous Administrations had eagerly sought a foothold in the West Indies. A naval station and a harbor there have long been deemed an urgent necessity. Andrew Johnson and Gov. Seward made a treaty agreeing to pay Denmark seven millions and a half in gold for the Island of St. Thomas. The principal production of St. Thomas is earthquakes, and the Senate re- fused to buy earthquakes at the price agreed upon ; but it is not known that Mr. Sumner or anybody else denounced the making of the treaty. Andrew Johnson and Gov. Seward made a treaty with Russia, agreeing to pay seven mil- lions and a quarter for Alaska, in gold. No- body was ever sent to examine Alaska. When the treaty was made we had never looked upon a man who had set foot upon it ; we had heard of its icebergs and floods, and it seemed a white elephant ; but the Senate agreed to the treaty. The Chairman of Foreign Relations changed his mind on that treaty also. He started against it, but, touched by the master hand of the sage of Auburn, he suddenly turned and made a glowing speech in its behalf. The speech, 12 The President and His Slanderers. bound in Turkey morocco, was sent to the crowned heads of Europe, and its author sits in a picture, with the Russian Minister and Secre- tary of State, consigned to immortality by the pencil of Leutze. Franklin Pierce, with the whole Democracy at his back, attempted to force Spain to cede Cuba to us. Pierre Soule was sent out as Min- ister to Spain, and on his way stopped in the city of New York. There he was serenaded by the Order of the Lone Star, a band of avow- ed Cuban filibusters, and, addressing the crowd in the street, he declared that Cuba should be "torn from the old Spanish Wolf." In the face of this outrage and affront to a friendly power, President Pierce suffered Soule to sail for Spain ; he proceeded to Aix-la-Cha- pelle, and there Soule, James Buchanan, John V . Mason and August Belmont, all American Ministers to foreign countries, sat down and signed the Ostend Manifesto. This paper, caught up and endorsed by the whole Demo- cratic party, argued the imperative necessity for self-defense of a foothold in the West Indies, and, upon the plea of necessity, stated without a blush the Rob-Roy doctrine that might makes right, and avowed that if Spain would not sell Cuba it should be taken by force. After all these things, the same men who justified them denounce as monstrous the idea of paying one million and a half for a territory next our own shores, with one of the finest har- bors in the world, with an area as large as Connecticut, Vermont and Massachusetts, with a soil and climate better than Cuba, and with only a handful of people. We pay Cuba $58,000,000 a year for products of slave labor. We buy nearly all the slave-raised coffee of Bra- zil ; and here is an island on which would grow all that Cuba and Brazil send here ; and a Presi- dent is denounced as knave and fool for submit- ting to the people its purchase for one and a half million dollars ! The scheme may be unwise ; upon that ques- tion 1 wait for further light and better judgment; but the public sense will never run so mad as to crucify a public servant for submitting it to the wisdom of the people. "REMOVAL" OF MR. SUMNER. It may not be amiss here to allude to the effort to rouse indignation over the so-called "removal" of Mi. Sumner from the Committee of Foreign Relations. Mr. Sumner was never "removed" at all. All Senate committees die at the end of each session. All Senate committees are created anew at the beginning of each session. Mr. Sumner had been selected repeatedly for the l 'hairmanship of the Committee referred to, and the question was always, looking over the whole Senate, who would be the most useful, and, all things considered, the best man for the place. At the time in question, and for rea- sons easily stated, the Senate thought it would not be wise to select Mr. Sumner again for that Committee, and he was selected for another. This was not done because Mr. Sumner op- posed San Domingo, nor because he changed sides upon that question, nor because the Presi- dent or the Secretary of State wanted, or did not want, Mr. Sumner on this committee or on that. The reasons were wholly different. They were reasons of the Senate alone, and reasons which have governed the formation of parliamentary committees everywhere since such committees were known. The Committee on Foreign Affairs, in either House of Congress, ought not only, like other committees, to re- present the majority of the body, but, for pe- culiar reasons, it must be composed of men who can and will consult freely with the President, the Secretary of State, and their assistants. This is especially tme of the Chairman, he be- ing the organ of the Committee. Mr. Sumner not only wielded his position as Chairman in opposition to the majority of the Senate upon several important questions, and boasted in the Senate that the Committee could not be changed, but his conduct and lan- guage in public and in private had rendered it impossible for him to hold communication with those whom it was indispensable to confer with, and impossible for them to confer with him. Men cannot do business conveniently with those whom they denounce and insult continu- ally, nor with those toward whom they assume offensive superiority ; and the time came, with Mr. Sumner, as Chairman, when the Senate was left in ignorance, and business delayed for weeks, for lack of information from the State Department, merely because Mr. Sumner did not hold communication with it. The simple, indeed the only, cure for all this, was to select another Chairman. This was done, and nothing more j and it turned out that treaties, six or seven in number, having long lain buried in the Committee, after the change of Chairman were at once brought up and ratified. Yet this action of the Senate in managing and expediting its own business, has been made a grave matter for public consideration, and thrust at the President, who had no more to do with it than the Senate has to do with deciding how many vegetables the President has on his table. I leave this matter after asking one question. Is there one man on this continent, except Mr. Sumner, who could with propriety have clung to a position after his associates who conferred it were unwilling he should retain it ; is there one other man who would have supposed that his being on this committee or on that, would "jar the harmony of the universe " ? "nepotism." Let me go on with the charges against the President. Few of them figure more largely than appointing relatives to offic-e. Mr. Sumner has staggered the nation by the weight of the dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other big books which he has dumped upon us, to show what " nepotism " is. He finds it charged that Popes had Nephews, and lavished upon them the moneys of the church ; and he thinks that where a public office is to be filled, and a good man is appointed at the same pay any other man would receive, a case has occurred like that of the Popes, provided the man who makes the appointment, and the man wdio gets it, are related to each other. This, if not a useful, is a wonderful discovery. Senator Conklin^s Great Speech at New York. 13 From the morning of time, common sense lias distinguished between creating a useless and lu- crative sinecure and bestowing it on a relative, and selecting a relative to do a service required to be done. When Hannibal and Frederick the aniel W. Adams, Hallgarten & l'.i >., Drake Bros., Edward Brandon, Closson & Hayes, N. P. Stanton, Boyd, Falls & Vincent, Plane & Van Emburgh, Taylor Brothers, John YV. Brown, B. M. Nevas, Cornelius Esselstyne, John R. Currie, Hedden, Winchester & Co., Glendinning, Davis & Armory, 1 I Joseph Bra it in, E. B. v. Sixty-seven Members of the Republican Gene- ral Committee of New York, Cornelius Itortle, John M. Welch, Henry Tridler, H. V. Esselstyne, H. H. Rockfeller, P. E, Van Alstyne, J. W. C. Hogeboom, Matthew Hale, E. M. M I tyne, George 1 lawson, l ' I r rns, Silas F. Smith, N. Lapham, Republican General Committee of Kings County, New York, and re.»d;nts of Brooklyn, N. Y.. no in number, E. W. Leavenworth, and others, residents of Syracuse. Besides these many others recommended Mr. Murphy's appointment; this list includes only those who addressed me. It does not include any of the recommendations made to the Presi- dent or to the Secretary of the Treasury. You will, I trust, pardon the time given to these facts; if it were right to detain you, many others might be stated, showing the injustice and falsehood which have been piled upon the President, and upon me, in this regard. The whole pretense, that the friends of Gov. Fenton were ostracised because they were his friends, is ' the veriest sham that could be palmed off upon the public ; and yet the argument of spoils is used without a blush to extenuate the acts of those who, for two years, have been plotting the destruction of the party. This clap-trap about improper appointments is the same in substance as that heard in the time of Jackson, and of John Quincy Adams, and there is less cause for it relatively now then there was then. MR. SUMNER AND MR. GREELEY HATE "PRETENSION." It is as untruthful, as the pretense that the "President is a quarreler," that he insisted upon a renomination, or that he is a pretentious man. The President is charged with "pretension" by Mr. Sumner in a speech written and printed be- forehand, in which Mr. Sumner speaks of him- self, and praises himself, one hundred and fifty- six times, and flatters himself thoroughly and copiously, twenty times. But Sumner is nothing to Greeley. Greeley thinks Grant "pretentious" too, and Greeley at the Boston Jubilee, in ex- plaining his own fitness for the Presidency, modestly spoke of himself twenty timos in ten minutes — this is twice a minute. Had Sumner used the personal pronoun at the same rate no printing office would have had big I's enough to set up the speech. THE "MILITARY RING." But we may not stop here in counting the President's crimes;— he has, we are told, a "military ring" at the White House, and turns 18 The President and Ills Slanderers. the White House into a "military barracks." When he moved into the White House he heard soldiers patroling in the hall, and when he asked them what it meant, they said they were Presi- dent Johnson's body guard ; he told them he wanted no guard, and sent them to their quar- ters. The next day he gave orders removing all troops from Washington, and not a military company has ever been there since. The "military ring" consists of three young men who write for the President without a farthing of expense to the Treasury. The President is authorized by law to employ and pay Secretaries. The gentlemen who assist him were on his staff in the war, and are now on the staff of Gen. Sherman ; their commissions are their own ; the President cannot take them away ; and now, in time of peace, Gen. Sher- man does not require their services. One of them is detailed to oversee .the public parks, and the other to assist the President, which they do from love of the man, and without a cent of pay beyond what they would draw if they sat at Gen. Sherman's head-quarters, doing nothing. This is the whole of it ; exactly like the case of Col. Bliss and his father-in-law, President Taylor, or the case of Donelson and Jackson, or the case of Andrew Johnson and the three or four army officers who assisted him. It saves several thousand dollars a year, does the public business, and nobody is harmed. "sea-side loiterings." The catalogue of the President's atrocities jwould be incomplete without one other thing. During ten or twelve weeks of heat and fever and ague at Washington, his family go to a cottage at the sea-side, and he goes and comes from there to the Capital. It is eight hours from the White House to the cottage, with two mails a day and a tele- graph every instant. Nothing can occur, how- ever suddenly, demanding his attention, with- out his being within immediate call ; yet this is the occasion of constant hullabaloo. Gov. Hoffman leaves his Slate and resides at New- port, R. I. , for the summer. Mr. James Brooks, though member of Congress, goes to China and Japan, not returning even when Congress meets. Gen. Jackson used to spend weeks at the Rip Raps in Hampton Roads, where no in- telligence could reach him from Washington in days, and then only by special messenger, and whence he could not return for days, if sent for. No telegraph, railroad, daily mail, or even steamboat, plied there then. President Adams, separated from Massachusetts by a stage-coach ride of many days, used to spend weeks at his home. Washington passed much of his time at Mount Vernon, and even that was further re- moved in communication with the Capital then, than Long Branch is now. Rulers in all countries have felt at liberty to tarry a distance from their official residence during a portion of the year ; but no examples, experience, or common sense stand in the way of the cruciners of Grant. The public, however, will be satisfied with one feet, viz : that no instance has yet been discovered or pretended, in which anything, however small, was neglected or left undone because the President Mas absent. This one fact answers a hurricane of abuse. I have discussed, perhaps, at inexcusable length, the paltry and personal slanders drag- ged into the campaign, and yet nothing has been said of the blameless, simple, daily life of the President, nor of his innocence of a quar- relsome disposition. He quarreled with Lee, and every other rebel while the rebellion lasted. He settled that quarrel, and has never quarreled since, unless it be quarreling not to obey intolerable dicta- tion, and simply to let alone men who oppose and denounce him. If there be any charge against the President which have escaped me, I will speak of it, if any one will bring it to mind. If there be none, let us rise from gossip to history ; from scandal to business. Let us turn from the man to the magistrate, and scan his official record and stewardship. WHAT THE ADMINISTRATION HAS DONE — FOREIGN AFFAIRS. What has the Administration done in three years? First, it has maintained our rights with every foreign power, and kept the peace with all the world. Gov. Seward said to me last year after he had girdled the earth with his travels, " How remarkable is our success in foreign affairs ; but two years ago Russia was our only friend in Christendom, and now America has not an enemy in the world." He proceeded to say that this good result came from the tem- perate and just course of our Government. Mr. Sumner has lately told us that we are in a " mud- dle' with everybody." Can any of you tell with whom we are in a "muddle?" Can any of you name a sea, a continent, or an island where our flag is not respected ? Can any of you name a commercial centre in which our securities are not sought ? Can any of you name a power which denies a right to one American citizen ? Spain's release of Dr. Houard, whose American citizenship is very doubtful, leaves no contro- versy, no contested matter, with any power on earth, save England. With England, preceding Administrations failed to settle large and dangerous questions. This Administration has composed them all in one treaty, applauded by the country and the world as one of the best products of statesman- ship and civilization. Recently, a difference arose as to the construction of the treaty, and England was unwilling and afraid to submit the question to the tribunal to which it plainly belonged. The British Government took the ground that they had agreed to a treaty which did not contain what they intended ; that their meaning was not set down in language so plain that they were willing to trust it to the arbitra- tion at Geneva ; and they insisted that we should withdraw part of our claims. This was a strange position, and involved a humiliating admission ; it was saying virtually that their agents had not been able to cope with ours. Indeed this was said without disguise, and with taunts, in the British Parliament. There is nothing here surely to wound American pride. Senator ConkUnfs Great Speech at New York. 19 England, with a Parliament eight hundred years old, renowned for centuries in exploits of diplomacy, sent five of her trained men to bar- gain with an infant nation scarce out of its swaddling clothes ; an agreement was made, written and signed, and afterward England dis- covered that it did not read as she says she thought it did, and so she threw up the sponge, and cried out that she had been outfought and outwitted in her own field of law and diplomacy. Noblemen ajul University men were England's Commissioners — they sealed the treaty with signet rings bearing ancient coats-of-arms ; but the gossips said that one of our untitled and self-educated Commissioners had nothing to seal with except a button. This seems the story over again of the poor boy with a pin-hook and twine, who caught more fish than the rich boy with the rod, the reel, the line of silk, and the best of fish-hooks. England's refusal to go to trial, unless we would agree not to prove or argue part of our case, was met on our side by the statement that we insisted upon having the law settled for the future in regard to indirect damages so called. Our Government insisted that hereafter Eng- land should never demand any damages from us, except such as she admitted to be within the law of nations now. Upon this ground the Presi- dent declined to withdraw any of our claims, saying, however, that indirect losses would not be pressed, provided by agreement between the parties, or by a decision of the Court, we could be guaranteed for the future against similar lia- bilities. Negotiations ensued, resulting in a supplemental article or clause of the treaty, and before this was finally accepted the tribunal at Geneva did, what we all the while maintained its right todo, and made adecision good for the fu- ture as well as the present, and good for us as well as for England, denying the right of one nation to recover certain kinds of damage from another. By this rule we will settle with England as often as she is a belligerent and we a neutral ; and if she is content, we should be. We are to be the neutral hereafter ; we shall have no more rebel- lions ; no foreign power will be impatient to get up a war with us ; but England, differently situated, with her elbows hitting the elbows of other nations, may not be so fortunate ; and when her commerce and her cause suffers from American citizens, or from cruisers or privateers built in America, we will measure to her the rule of damages she asks for now. Whether England keeps or breaks the treaty, it will remain the greatest event of diplomacy in our history. Had Hamilton Fish rendered no other public service in his life, his ability, devotion and success in this great matter would inscribe his name high up on the roll of illustrious names. The only error pretended in the management of the Ala- bama claims has been the maintenance of views of which the noisiest advocate always has been Mr. Sumner ; but even he has not succeeded in producing a "muddle" with any foreign power, not even with the aid of his friend Schurz, by his romances and vagaries, touching the sale, by American merchants, of arms to France. FINANCES, DEBT, TAXES, RETRENCHMENT, The public debt has been paid as no one dared expect or hope. The present Adminis- tration found a national debt <>f $2,700,000,000. During Andrew Johnson's Administration the whole reduction of this debt was $13,655,668. The annual interest account was $128,502,- 102.24. The annual expense account averaged $179,271,680; making an annual draft upon the Treasury of $307,773,782.24. This annual draft was met by internal taxes and customs duties. Under Andrew Johnson annual taxes aver- aged as follows : Internal taxes $162,194,491 29 Customs duties 193,691,069 70 The country was flooded with paper money, and trade deranged with inflated prices. Cur- rency ranged from thirty-five to seventy-one cents on the dollar. Our opponents scouted our ability to reduce the debt ; they said that no such debt ever had been paid or ever would be. The National Democratic Convention of 1868 declared against its payment in coin and in favor of subjecting it to taxation. Such was the condition of things confronting us in March, 1869. Up to July I, 1872, there has been paid of principal of the debt $333,976,- 916.39. This is a payment every month of $8,349,422. It is a payment already of 13 2I-IOO per cent, of the whole debt, and at the same rate of payment not a dollar would remain in twenty-one years. Saving of annual interest in coin, $20,000,000. About $300,000,000 has been refunded at <\}4 and 5 per cent., saving an annual interest of $3,000,000, and up to the maturity of the new bonds $20, 000, 000, and paving the wayto refund- ing $ 1,000,000,000 more at still lower interest. The premium on gold has been reduced from forty per cent, to twelve per cent. Great reduction of taxes preceded and fol- lowed Gen. Grant's inauguration. Since he came in, and prior to the last session of Congress, annual internal taxes were reduced $55,212,000. Tariff annually reduced $29,526,- 409,09. Total, $84,738,409.09. Despite these reductions, the increase of revenue accounted for under Gen. Grant over the same period preced- ing is $84,994,049.74. At the last session of Congress taxes were further reduced (annually) $62,000,000. This cuts off pretty much all internal taxes, except on whiskey, beer, tobacco and banks, and a portion of the stamp tax ; the income tax dies this year. Tea and coffee, for the first time in our memory, are wholly free. The people have paid heretofore $18,000,000 annu- ally on tea and coffee. At the same time, with this work of reduction, pensions to soldiers have been largely increased, and large appropriations made to improve rivers and harbors. At their wits' end how to meet these facts, our enemies have started a new idea. WHAT HAS THE ADMINISTRATION TO DO WITH PAYING THE DEBT? From Washington down, every Administration has been tried by its financial results. But now 20 The President and Ills Slanderers. we hear that the authorities deserve no credit for paying the debt, that the people have paid it. Of course the people have paid it, but who has honestly collected and accounted for the money? Who has reduced the expenses ? Who has up- held the public credit? Who has cheapened the interest? Who has wisely applied the money ? Who has made the greenback in your pocket, that used to be worth only half its face, almost as good as gold ? The people paid taxes under Andrew Johnson twice as great as they pay now. Why was not twice as much of the debt paid then? Why was only $13,000,000 of the debt paid then, with extravagant taxa- tion? Under Andrew Johnson, the whiskey ring, the contractors, and other "Liberals," preyed upon the revenue so, that it is calculated one-quarter of the whole was lost. Under the present Administration, after taxes were lessened $84,000,000 a year, collections increased $84,- 000,000. Did the people do that? If one of your agents made a given amount of money go twice as far as an agent before him had done, would it be you, or the agent to be credited or blamed? But look a little further. The expenses every- where have been reduced, and so reduced that they are less per capita this year than they were under Washington, and less than they were un- der any Administration since, with only four ex- ceptions, and in case of these four the advantage is only apparent and but a few cents. Com- pare the year i860 under Buchanan, with last year, 187 1. In i860, the population being 3 I »443.i 2 i» the expenses were $1.95 for each person ; 1871, population 38,555,983, expenses $1.76 for each person. There is one great dif- ference between these two years not shown by the figures. In 1S60, the whole amount expended for public buildings, improvements of rivers and harbors, and other public works throughout the country, was only $2,913,371.48. In 1871, such public improvements were made and paid for, to the amount of $10,733,759.05. If allowance be made for these lasting im- provements, greater during the last two years than before, the actual cost per head of govern- ing the country under Grant, is as small as it ever was since the foundation of the Government. In 1858, the War Department cost $25,679,- 121.63. In 1S59, it cost $23,154,720.53. In i860, under Floyd, the accounts of the Department were not closed, but went over in part to Lincoln's Administration. In 1871, the War Department cost $22,376,- 981.28. Taking the whole running expenses of the Government, for the Executive, Legislative and Judicial Departments, including the Army and Navy, and Foreign Ministers, Consuls, and Agents, the cost in i860 was $61,402,408.64. The same account in 1871 was $68,684,613.92. With new States and Territories, with seven millions more population, with new Courts, and the Internal Revenue establishment, the whole excess of cost in 1871, over i860, was $7,282,205.28. Here is an increase of thirteen per cent, of cost, with an increase of twenty-five per cent. of population, saying nothing of increased de- mands. , The "Reformers" had not looked up these figures when Mr. Trumbull stated at Cooper Institute, that the expenses of the Government, aside from interest and pensions, ought to be not more than thirty-three per cent, greater now than before the war ; it turns out that the in- crease is only about one-third as much as he thinks it should be. CIVIL SERVICE REFORM. During the present year large additional re- ductions are to come ; internal revenue districts are to be reduced to eighty in all ; supervisors of revenue to ten in all ; deputies and assistants will vanish with the taxes they heretofore col- lected, and only a skeleton of the revenue es- tablishment will be left. Four millions and a half will be saved this year in the cost of con- ducting the Internal Revenue Bureau. The Freedmen's Bureau, established by Lin- coln and Stanton, and Sherman and Howard, and vetoed by Andrew Johnson, which has cost much money and done much good, is this year to be finally wound up. These things added to the pruning which the army and navy and Indian and revenue service have undergone, make this the best Adminis- tration in civil service reform the country ever had. In civil service reform Grant is the pio- neer President. No one before him inaugura- ted or proposed it. Andrew Johnson, a deser- ter from his party, had, by using appointments as bribes and threats, made patronage a mere corruption fund. Who found fault then ? The whole Democratic party justified and applauded it. Where were our virtuous and edifying Re- formers then, Trumbull and the rest ? The Tenure of Office act only required the assent of the Senate to removals, but the Democrats made war even upon that, holding that the Pres- ident should be left absolute and unfettered. When Grant came in he help to perfect the pre- sent Tenure of Office law, so as to put a check upon himself. In three Messages the President has urged civil service reform, and has given it his whole influence. Under a mere permission not requiring anything of him, he appointed a Board to prepare rules and regulations govern- ing appointments, and establishing competitive examinations ; and these rules he has diligently put in force ; and yet he is railed at by men who quarreled with him, merely because they could not control more patronage. Could any President have done more? He might have appointed his enemies, and turned out his friends. Nothing else would have silenced the pack now barking at his heels. DEFAULTERS DETECTED AND PUNISHED. Remorseless rigor has ferreted out and pun- ished delinquents and defaulters. Most of them have not been men appointed by Grant, but those whose crimes began under past Adminis- trations ; some of them have been men, recom- mended by " Reformers," now mouthing about bad appointments ; but wherever found, they have been caught, if possible, and when caught, nothing has protected them. Senator Conkling*s Great Speech at New York. 21 Hodge, a Faymaster, and a Democrat in politics, embezzled for years under Andrew Johnson, but was jiever detected till after Grant came in; then he was hurried to a penitentiary. Norton, Money-Onler Superintendent in the New York Post-office, began his depredations under Andrew Johnson, and took more than $30,000, but was never found out till last year ; then he was arrested, and it turned out that Horace Greeley was one of the postmaster's bondsmen. A prosecution is in progress, and if Mr. Greeley shouldn't happen to be elected, he will be obliged to pay up — the amount is $1 15,- 428.71 and interest. It is upon such facts as these that "Reformers" and other Democrats make hue and cry about defalcations under Gen. Grant. Will any of you name the Democratic official thief who was ever punished by Democrats? The City of New York has swarmed with plunderers, from the Big "Boss" to the littlest wiggler of Tammany Hall ; they are all Demo- crats, and their guilt of stealing tens of millions has been notorious for more than a year. Gov- ernor, Judges, District Attorney, Sheriff, po- lice, all are Democrats, but not a thief has been punished, nor a stolen dollar recovered back. All these thieves are for Greeley ; they all shout for Greeley and "Reform," and all curse Grant. The Homestead policy has been extended so as to give a hundred and sixty acres of land to every soldier and sailor who served for ninety days, and was honorably discharged. American ship-building has received the first real encouragement for years. By the recent Tariff act, all materials for ship-building will, by means of drawback, come in duty free, and thus American ship-yards will be enabled to compete, as to materials, with the ship-yards of the world. "CENTRALISM." — HOW CONGRESS HAS CEN- TRALIZED. American citizens, high and low, rich and poor, black and white, whether in Spain, on the high seas, or in the South, have been protected. But this is called "centralism." Every civilized government may protect its citizens in the utter- most ends of the earth, but when the United States interposes to check murders, and burn- ings, and barbarities at which humanity shudders, perpetrated by thousands, and overawing all local authority, it is suddenly discovered that we are in danger of "centralism." This discovery is made by Mr. Greeley and the very men who cried the loudest for the Ku-klux law. Here are Greeley's words, spoken June 12, 187 1, after he came back from the South : " I hold our Government bound by its duty of pro- tecting our citizens in their fundamental rights, to pass and enforce laws for the extirpation of the execrable Ku- klux conspiracy ; and if it has not the power to do it, then I say our Government is no Government, but a sham. I therefore, on every proper occasion, advocated and justified the Ku-klux act. I hold it especially desi- rable for the South ; and if it does not prove strong enough to effect its purpose, I hope it will be made stronger and stronger." The law here spoken of is the law exactly as it exists today, including the habeas corpus suspension, which has now expired by its own limitation. No other act of "centralism" has been en- acted of late, unless it is an amendment of the Election law, vehemently demanded and ap- proved by Mr. Greeley. Hear what he said about it only a few months ago : " It is urged by the Democratic organs tint the law is to be enforced in State and municipal elections. This is done to make it more obnoxious, it that be possible, to their party. But, unfortunately this is an error. The law applies only to Presidential and Congressional elec- tions, though we heartily wish it could be made to apply to all others." The "centralism" of this law consists in al- lowing the Courts, upon the application of ten citizens, to appoint two persons, one from each political party, to watch the polls at which members of Congress and Presidential electors are to be chosen. These watchers have no power to arrest any one or to do anything ex- cept to look on as witnesses and see whether fraud takes place — and this without a farthing of compensation or expense. Do you think any honest voter wdl be offended by this ? Will any honest man object to so harmless a safe- guard against fraudulent voting and fraudulent counting? Since theTammany exposures no man doubts that the voice of the ballot-box has been stifled for years by election frauds ; and here is a law which can do no harm, and under which the Democrats themselves said, we had the only approach to a fair election in New York that had happened for years. REAL DANGERS ARE STATE RIGHTS AND REBEL CLAIMS. No, my friends, the cry of "centralism" is a mere fetch; the real danger is the other way. De- centralization, which means State Rights in the old pestilent secession sense, is the real danger. You need to stand guard against the doctrine of paramount State sovereignty which ushered in rebellion, and which, if it gain head, will usher in the payment of the rebel debt, the payment of rebel pensions, the payment of losses from the ravages of the war, and a brood of dire heresies. This is no chimera. Democrats and "Re- formers " struck hands, at the last session, in admitting rebels to the Court of Claims, to re- cover for their cotton captured in the war ; and every Democrat, with most of the new converts in the Senate, voted to pay from the Treasury rebel claimants, for carrying the mail in the Southern States after they went into rebellion ; an act which Republicans prevented after a weary contest. " Centralism " is a mere goblin. Whenever Congress transcends the Constitution the Court will so decide, and the people will apply the corrective. But watch you, and pray to be de- livered from that dogma of State independence, which once drenched the land in blood and covered it with taxes and with mourning. All the "centralism" we have now is a strong and stable Government, under which the nation pros- pers, with safety to property, labor, liberty and hfe. Woe to the day, and woe to the hour, when the people change it off, for, they know not what. A contented mind is great riches ; and to let well enough alone is the sum of wisdom. 22 The President and His Slanderers. CANT AROIT INVESTIGATIONS. With some minds the greater the humbug, the greater t lie sensation. The country is filled with factional out-cry, and one of the catch- words is "investigations." "Reformers" in the Senate wasted weeks and months in at- tempting to mislead the public in this respe&t. It was brazenly pretended that men like Buck- ingham of Connecticut, and Hamlin of Maine, and Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, and Howe of Wisconsin, and Anthony of Rhode Island, and other of the best and purest statesmen of the nation, attempted to cloak fraud and stifle inquiry. The New York Tribune and other unprincipled newspapers published pretended speeches which were never made, put into the mouths of Administration Senators, as uttered in caucus, by myself among others, declaring that the Administration should not be investi- gated. Nothing could be more false. No friend of the Administration ever objected to the most searching and sweeping investigation, but always the contrary. The only men who thwarted or delayed investigation were our opponents. They did, as I will show you. On the first day of the session I offered a re- solution instructing the Military Committee to investigate the case of Hodge, and see whether anybody else was at fault, and what could be done to close the door for the future. Mr. Trumbull insisted that there should be one and the same committee to investigate everything. lie moved such an amendment, and in such form as to make Carl Schurz Chairman, the plan of the " Liberals " being to make Mr. Schurz charioteer of a mud-machine to befoul the party during this canvass in the name of the Senate. We urged that one committee could not in- vestigate everything, and that to make the work thorough it must be parcelled out to dif- ferent committees. This was met with a storm of electioneering flings and insinuations, which consumed days. Finally, to bring the matter to an end, we acquiesced in having a single committee to which all investigations should go. Every man of sense must see that if the object was full and speedy inquiry , this was not the way, and so the event proved. When the Committee was raised, I moved an investigation of the New York Custom House ; Mr. Trumbull passionately objected, and through the resolution over by a point of order. As soon as a majority could do so, it was taken up and passed ; the Hodge resolution followed, and other resolutions, and what was the result? The Committee, thus over-loaded, was able only to complete the Custom House inquiry, and this snowed under everything else. The Hodge in. titer, and other things, wait ; and when the Presidential election is over, and there is nothing to be made by clap-trap and bun- combe, we shall be permitted probably to refer them to appropriate committees. When the French arms resolution was offered by Mr. Sumner, the Republican Senators offered to vote the investigation instantly; but Mr. Sum- ner objected, and asked its postponement. When h£ moved it again, all other business was at once laid aside, and again the majority offered to vote for the inquiry. But Mr. Sum- ner insisted upon speech-making, and he and Schurz went at it, attempting to prove in advance all the dismal rigmarole of a false and foolish preamble. Of course, their speeches could not go un- answered to the counrty, lest silence should seem to give consent ; and so days and weeks were wasted, when in five minutes the pre- tended object could have been accomplished. The pretended object was not the real object, as everybody knew ; the aim was political effect, and for this the " Reformers " would be- smirch the Government, even though the cru- sade disgraced us, or involved us with foreign Powers. The result, as you know, was ruinous to those who began it. The French arms investigation is a fair sample of the rest. We had, in all, in the two Houses, fourteen committees set on the Administration. Such a thing was never heard of before. No Administration was ever so put under a microscope; or pried into with mali- cious eyes. What did it all amount to? Direct- ly and indirectly, these investigations probably cost, in time, money, and neglect of legislation, millions of dollars — and who is benefited ? No- body, but the Administration they were intend- ing to destroy. The President, and those for whom he is responsible, have come out like pure gold tried by the fire, brighter than be- fore—the country pays the bills, and the "Re- formers " curse in their sleeves at their ill-luck. KU-KLUX DOINGS. The only investigation of value related to the condition of the South. The Committee on Southern Outrages made a report full of fright- ful lessons. In ten States an organization exists known as the " Ku-Klux Klan," or "Invisible Empire of the South. " 1 1 is a resurrection of the remains of the rebel army. Gen. Forrest, of Fort Pillow, was its chief head, or "Grand Cy- clops." It is a secret oath-bound band. Its object is to kill and drive out "Radicals" and "carpet-baggers," and to intimidate the blacks from voting against the Democratic party. Speaking to those who have not read the evi- dence, the existence, the nature and the deeds of these assassins are so incredible, that I dare not ask you to accept them on my word. Let me state a few things contained in the report, and proved by much testimony. Gen. Forrest admits his belief that the order is 500,000 strong. In the two Carolinas, Geor- gia, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida, IOO counties have been kept under a reign of terror. One of the obligations of membership is to com- mit perjury as a witness or a juror. Many lead- ing wealthy men are among the actors, and until Congress interfered, the State authorities were powerless, or unwilling to enforce the laws ; barbarous atrocities occurred nightly, but no one was punished or even arrested. Whites and blacks were murdered and robbed, their houses burned, and nameless deeds done by disguised bands. In fourteen counties of North Carolina, eigh- teen murders were done, and 315 whippings oc- 'Senator Conkling's Great Speech at New York; 23 curred. In nine counties in South Carolina, forty murders and over two thousand other out- rages. In twenty-nine counties of Georgia sev- enty-two murders and 126 whippings. In twenty-six counties of Alabama 215 murders, and 116 other outrages. In twenty counties of Mississippi twenty-three murders, and seventy- six other outrages, and in a single county of Florida 153 murders. In these ninety-nine counties 426 murders were done, and 2,909 other acts of violence. The object in all this, as extorted from many witnessess, was "to put down Radical rule and negro suffrage." Thus scourged, the people of the South piteously appealed to Congress for pro- tection. A committee was sent to the Southern States to learn the facts, and a law was passed authorizing the United States Courts to act in the matter. The same law authorized the sus- pension, for a limited space, of the habeas cor- pus, in case it should be necessary. Under this act of Congress, at the January term of Court in South Carolina, 501 men were indicted by the Grand Jury for these crimes of violence. In the Northern District of Mississippi, 490 were indict- ed, and in the Southern District of Mississippi, 152. In North Carolina, 98 1 men were indicted. In South Carolina, five of these culprits were immediately tried and convicted, and fifty-three of them pleaded guilty. At the next term others were tried, and many more pleaded guilty. In the other States the Courts are at work meting out justice. These are the offenders in whose behalf Wade Hampton and others raised money and employed counsel. Reverdy Johnson and Henry Stanbery were the counsel, and I read a passage from Mr. Johnson's argument to the jury : But Mr. Attorney-General has remarked, and would have you suppose, that my friend and myself are here to defend, to justify, or to palliate the outrages that may have been perpetrated in your State by this association of Ku-klux. He makes a great mistake as to both of us. I have listened with unmixed horror to some of the testi- mony which has been brought before you. The outrages proved are shocking to humanity ; they admit of neither excuse nor justification : they violate every obligation which law and nature impose upon man ; they show that the parties engaged were brutes, insensible to the obliga- tion of humanity and religion. The action of Congress and the President has put an end to much of this bloody business ; but stopping murder is called " centralism," and we are being stoned for that. SOUTHERN STATE GOVERNMENTS — AMNESTY. The South has been for years a fertile field for electioneering sensations. The State Gov- ernments in some of the Southern States have been weak and bad, and the " Liberals " want to try us for that. What have we to do with it ? Why, they say we imposed political disa- bilities on the rebels. Who imposed political disabilities on rebels? We are told the people pay the debt, but we never hear that the peo- ple imposed the disabilities ; yet they did. The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, ratified by the Legislatures of three-quarters of the States, is the disability under which rebels have been. That amendment does not touch the right to vote, but leaves every rebel a voter. It touches only the right to hold office. It pro- vides that the men who took an oath to support the Constitution, and then fought against it, thus adding perjury to treason, shall not hold office ; and it further provides that Congress, by a two-third vote, may relieve them. It is foolish to pretend, all being allowed to vote, that the majority could not rule ; it is absurd to pretend that the few rebels, who are perjured as well as traitors, were the only fit men to elect State officers and legislators. It follows that the Fourteenth Amendment is not the cause of bad men being elected to office in the Southern States. The truth is, as was abundantly proved before the Ku-Klux Committee, that capable, educated men, eligible to office, refused to ac- cept it, and refused to vote, and persuaded the rebels generally not to vote, all for the purpose of frustrating reconstruction in the South, and making it odious. Amnesty or want of amnesty had nothing to do with jobs in Southern Legislatures, any more than in our own. No man has ever asked to be relieved who has not been relieved prompt- ly ; indeed, history has no instance of such for- bearance and mercy as has been granted to the ringleaders of rebellion. Not one was ever visited with the least pen- alty, except being barred from office, for com- mitting perjury as well as treason, and bills for relief began at once, and all who asked soon re- ceived forgiveness. Whether a general act, nam- ing no one, but covering rebels in a body, was a compliance with the Fourteenth Amendment, may well be doubted ; be this as it may, the President recommended, and Congress on the 2 1st of last May adopted, such an act. It would have passed weeks earlier, but that "Liberals" who pretended to be for a " Civil Rights bill " by itself, voted avowedly to make it as obnoxious as possible, and then, when it became part of the Amnesty bill, some of them voted against it and others dodged — and this when two votes would have carried it. And now, when not more than one or two hundred men in the whole South are left ineligible to office, and these are men who still defy and spurn the Constitution, we are gravely told that "amnesty " is a great issue before the American people. Amnesty, as an issue, is as dead as the politi- cians who prate about it. It is about as vital as Mr. Sumner's published reason for supporting Mr. Greeley, namely, that Greeley was born the same year that he was himself. "Peace, good will toward men," have been for three years national watch-words. Even the old Indian scares have failed to bring on Indian wars, which were always contractors' wars. For the first time in our history an Indian peace pol- icy has triumphed, massacres have been prevent- ed, the whites and the Indians alike have been spared, and millions saved to the nation. WHY CHANGE?— WHO ASKS IT? Such is the Administration, and such the stable prosperity and the wholesome condition of things, ai home and abroad, which we are asked to trade off for we know not what. To suppose it will be done would be to brand free government as a failure, and to insult the sense of the American people. 24 The President and His Slanderers. What is the change offered us ? Does any- body know ? When did the necessity for any change arise? Certainly not when in Septem- ber, 1870, Mr. Greeley called the Reform movement " a conspiracy to destroy the Repub- lican party;" not in September, 1871, when Mr. Greeley drew resolutions fully endorsing the present Administration; not on the 5th of Jan- uary, 1S71, when in a speech Mr. Greeley said, " I venture to suggest that Gen. Grant will be far better qualified for that momentous trust in 1872 than he was in 1868 ;" not when in Feb- ruary, 1871, Mr. Greeley said that a defeat of the Republican party in the nation would be a "disgrace and humiliation " ; not only a year ago, when Mr. Greeley said: When a Republican Convention, fairly chosen after free consultation and the frank interchange of opinion, shall have nominated Republican candidates for Presi- dent and Vice-President, wc shall expect to urge all Re- publicans to give them a hearty, effective support, whe- ther they be or be not of those whose eriginal preference has been gratified. Not on the 25th of April, 1872, when Mr. Greeley placed his hostility to President Grant squarely and solely on the ground of certain ap- pointments in the City of New York. Who were the discoverers of the need of a change? Who called the Cincinnati Convention? Did the business men of the country call it? Did the public-spirited, the unselfish, and the patriotic call it ? Every one knows that it was the work of the political "outs." A few re- spectable men were drawn in, but the great body of the movers were, as Greeley used to say of the Democrats, "the very scum " of politics. Nearly every man whose name appeared was either a disappointed office-seeker, a man with a grievance, or a man of bad character. Such a "reform" movement will never be seen again, unless the disreputable women of the lasd should strike and start a "liberal" movement to reform the virtuous women of the land. There is an effrontery bordering the sublime in professional corruptionists, the worst and most notorious, starting up to berate honest people. From such effrontery came a convention, which, from beginning to end, was managed to cheat and defraud the respectable men who were drawn into it and the public generally. That the nomination was bartered and bellowed through we are assured by the best who were present; and now the Democratic party has died by its own hand, and gone for eternal pun- ishment to Horace Greeley. MR. GREELEY AND HIS "CLAIMS." An examination of the fitness of Mr. Greeley, and his claims to public confidence, is the duty of every citizen. That he has shown great talent as an editor and writer, all admit, but nearly all else claimed for him now, I deny. The very talents he has shown un§t him for the i'i idency. It is said that a greal debt is due and unpaid by the Republican party to Mr. Greeley. The account stands very differently, as most persons understand it. Does not Mr, Greeley owe much to the Re- publican party? That party gave him wealth, fame and influence. His talent and industry were his own ; but the Tribune was sustained as a party organ, and was made a mine of wealth by the Republican party. Who does not know that Republicans, whether private citizens or postmasters, or other "office-holders," or country editors, or committee-men, have made common cause for years for the Tribune, have organized clubs, pushed and begged for subscrip- tions, and made the Tribune what it was? Who does not know that this year tens of thousands of Republicans paid their money in advance for the Tribune, while yet its claws were half concealed, holding itself out as a Republican paper, and that the money thus ob- tained by false pretense is kept to sustain the paper in its present gross and knavish course. Who does not know that the position given Mr. Greeley by the Republican party, did more than all else to make the sale of his book called the "American Conflict," which is said to have paid him more than a hundred thousand dollars. He sent canvassers to solicit subscribers for this book, and who subscribed, who paid him a fortune for it ? Was it the Democrats or the no-party men, or was it those to whom he now says "he owes nothing?" It is true that Mr. Greeley has seldom been intrusted with office, though he has long sought office from the Whig and Republican parties. This, however, is simply from want of confidence in his practical judgment and consistency. Prior to 1854, Mr. Greeley's extreme craving for office was not understood, and his letter to Gov. Seward, November II, 1854, dissolving the "political firm of Seward, Weed & Greeley," because office had not been given him, amazed the public. In this letter, after referring to some of the offices he wanted from the Whig party, and upbraiding Gov. Seward for not appointing him to some office in 1837, he says : Now came the great scramble of the swell-mob of coon minstrels and cider-suckers at Washington, I not being counted in. Several regiments of them went on from this city ; but no one of the whole crowd — though I say it who should not — had done so much toward Gen. Harrison's nomination and election as yours respectfully. I asked nothing, expected nothing ; but yon, Gov. Sew- ard, ought to have asked that I be Postmaster of New Let me speak of the late canvass. I was once sent to Congress for ninety days, merely to enable Jim Brooks to secure a seat therein for four years. ******* But this last Spring, after the Nebraska question had created a new state of things at the North, one or two personal friends, of no political consideration, suggested my name as a candidate for Governor, and I did not dis- courage them. * * * * I am sure Weed did not mean to humiliate me, but he did it. The upshot of his discourse (very cautiously stated) was this : if I were a candidate for Governor, I should beat not myself only but you. Perhaps that was true. But, as I had in no manner solicited his or your support, I thought this might have been said to my friends rather than to me. I suspect it is true that I could not have been elected Governor as a Whig. But had he and you been favorable, there would have been a party in the State, ere this, which could and would have elected me to any post, without injuring myself or endangering your election. It was in vain that I urged that I had in no manner asked a nomination. At length. I was nettled by his language — well intended, but very cutting, as addressed by him to me — to say, in substance, "Well, then, make Patterson Governor, and try my name for Lieutenant. To lose this place is a matter of no importance, and we can see whether I am really so odious." Senator Co/iMintfs Great Speech at New York. Having quoted from the early letters of Presi- dent Grant, it seems but fair that I should read from an early effusion of Mr. Greeley's also, and beside, I want you to see how the keenest men in the Whig Party regarded Mr. Greeley's aspira- tions and qualifications. Job once expressed a wish that his "adversary had written a book"; ■ — had Mr. Greeley been the adversary then, a letter would have satisfied Job just as well. While he belonged to the Republican Party, Mr. Greeley was a candidate for Governor several times, for Senator, for Representative, and for other offices ; always being defeated in the nom- ination or election, except when once chosen for a ninety-days term in Congress, when made Presi- dential elector in 1864, and when he ran for the Constitutional Convention under a law insuring his election, without regard to the number of votes. WHAT MR. GREELEY DID WHEN IN OFFICE. The Republican Party has been blamed for not gratifying Mr. Greeley's ambition for office, but the mass of the party, though appreciating his eccentric genius, has believed him erratic, and not possessed of the practical wisdom, mod- eration, or business capacity to make a useful or safe official. As often as he has been tried in public station he has failed. His brief career in Congress was a sad fiasco ; he more than once excused his course by saying that he voted without understanding the question, and had voted as he did not mean to. (Congressional Globe, 1848-49, vol. 20, pp. 269, 336). He in- volved himself in questions of veracity, which compelled him to retreat from his statements ; and on one occasion was confronted on the floor by members, who flatly testified to the untruthfulness of what he said. (Globe, as above.) Libels, published in his paper, sub- jected him to indignities, and even to worse embarrassments. His course in the Constitutional Convention was a series of peevish attempts to assume everything and do everything, and resulted in his impatiently and prematurely quitting his post, after pouring upon members a volley of oaths. Even the task of acting as chairman of a local committee, last year, brought him into dilemmas and apparent breaches of his word, which a man of common discretion would have avoided. His affiliations with men have shown him a poor judge of human nature, and the ease with which the designing impose upon him has always excited the sympathy of his friends. The worst men have stuck to him and used him, with no more power on his part to shake them off than a ship has to shake off its barnacles. His man- agement of every business, except editing a news- paper, has shown him wanting in business capa- city ; and as an editor he has always lacked a balance wheel to keep him from absurd incon- sistencies. His investments of money with the shiftless and the dishonest ; his embarking in ventures with Tweed, and lending his name to men un- worthy of trust, can be excused only on the ground of want of sound judgment. His Four- ierism, and Agrarianism, attest a mind given to vagaries like this : on one occasion he insisted that there could be no property in land, because property was the product of human labor, and that land, like air, belonged to God Almighty, and could not be owned by man. Building a barn where a man could not stand, and was washed away, planting turnips where turnips could not grow, trying to substitute cab- bages for tobacco, and then assuming to teach farmers in all the varying climates and soils of the continent, what to raise, and how to plow, and when to hoe, can only pass as the grotesque and harmless antics of a man of oddities, flat- tered by many, and most of all by himself. " A jack of all trades is master of none," and "what he knows about farming," would show Mr. Greeley a universal genius, if it were not for what he could learn from those he assumes to teach. The overweening confidence with which he holds his opinions, and the rude vehemence with which he utters them, make the suddenness with which he changes them the plainest proof of insincerity or unsoundness ; while the epithets and libels with which he pursues those he hates or envies, shows a strangely unchristian and un- bridled nature. Mr. Greeley's own traits of character, as seen by his party associates, have made it better for him and for the public that he should not hold office, and when Andrew Johnson nominated him after he bailed Jefferson Davis, as Minister to Austria, rumor is greatly at fault if Senators who now support him, even all those who then belonged to the Republican party, could be in- duced to vote for his confirmation. Truthful history will never record that when Horace Greeley deserted the Republican Party for a Presidential nomination, lie owed the party nothing ; or that the party owed him a great and unpaid debt ; or that the party was wrong in not selecting such a man for high public trusts. The verdict will be rather that he spoke like a scheming ingrate, when on the 1 2th of June, 1871, he said to a street audience, "I am perfectly willing to pass receipts with the Republican Party, and say that our accounts are now settled and closed." MR. GREELEY'S RECORD — DID HE HELP SE- CESSION. Mr. Greeley's deeds are all to be found ia words. His record has not been written for him by false and hostile hands ; he has written it himself. How far it is the record of a man fit to be trusted, in peace and possibly war, with the affairs of this great nation, will appear sufficiently without going back of the rebellion. In i860 Mr. Lincoln was elected, and before he was inaugurated seven States seceded from the Union. They did not secede believing that the twenty-one millions of the North would de- ny their right, and desolate their land by war. Common sense proves that they relied upon a divided sentiment in the Northern States. They thought the Democratic party, in part at least, would maintain their right ; and they thought also with good reason, that the Repub- lican party could not be brought to coerce them, or make war upon them. This expectation of 26 Tlie President and Ills Slanderers. sympathy in the North while the Gulf States were hesitating, turned the scales in favor of se- cession ; and no man in all the land did, or could do, so much as Horace Greeley to create the expectation upon which secession took place. The New York Tribune was at that time the leading Republican organ, and beyond and above all other papers, it spoke for the Repub- lican party. Its editor claimed the credit of having just overthrown Gov. Seward at Chicago, and this, for the time being, completed its su- premacy in the Republican party. Holding this position of unchallenged authority, hear what it said to men not yet daring to plunge into the Red Sea of Revolution. The election returns in 1S60 had not come in when the Tribune began to incite secession. On the 9th of November, i860, Horace Greeley published this editorial. : And now. if the Cotton States consider the value of the Union debatable, we maintain their perfect right to discuss it. Nay, we hold with Jefferson to the inalien- able right of communities to alter or abolish forms of government that have become oppressive or injurious ; and if the Cotton States shall decide that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. The right to secede may be a revo- lutionary one, but it exists nevertheless ; and we do not see how one party can have a right to do what another party has a right to prevent. We must ever resist the asserted right of any State to remain in the Union, and nullify or defy the laws thereof : to withdraw from the Union is quite another matter. And, whenever a con- siderable section of our Union shall deliberately resolve to go out, we shall resist all coercive measures designed to keep it in. We hope never to live in a Republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets. On the 17th of December, i860, just before South Carolina seceded, South Carolina being the first State to go, Mr. Greeley published the following editorial : We have repeatedly asked those who dissent from our views of this matter to tell us frankly whether they do or do not assent to Mr. Jefferson's statement in the De- claration of Independence that Governments "derive their just powers from the consent of the governed ; and that whenever any form of government becomes destruc- tive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government," &c, &c. We do heartily accept this doctrine, believing it intrins- ically sound, beneficent, and one that, universally ac- cepted, is calculated to prevent the shedding of seas of human blood. And if it justified the secession from the British Empire of three millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of five millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861. If we are mistaken on this point, why does not some one attempt to show wherein and why ? For our own part, while we deny the right of slave-holders to hold slaves against the will of the latter, we cannot see how twenty millions of people can rightfully hold ten or even five, in a detested Union with them by military force. ****** We could not stand up for coercion, for subjugation, for we do no: think it would be just. We hold the right of self-government sacred, even when evoked in behalf of those who deny it to other.-,. So much for the ques- tion of principle. ****** We fully realize that the dilemma of the incoming Ad- ministration will be a critical one. It must endeavor to up- hold and enforce lb : laws as well against rebellion I ! 11 ■ ■ President must fulfil the obligati ui-i assumed in his inauguration oath, no matter how shamefully his predecessor may have defied them, We fear that Southern madness may precipitate a bloody that all must deplore. But if ever "seven or eight States" send agents to Washington to say, "We want to go out of the Union," we shall feel constrained by devotion to human liberty to say, let them go ! And ive do not see how we could take the other side, without coming in direct conflict with those rights of man whirh. we hold paramount to all political arrangements, how- ever convenient and advantageous. On the 24th of December, i860, Mr. Greeley published the following editorial : Most certainly we believe that Governments are made for peoples, not peoples for Governments— that the " lat- ter derive their just power from the consent of the gov- erned :" and whenever a portion of this Union, large enough to form an iri&ependent, self-subsisting nation, shall see fit to say authentically to the residue, "We want to get away from you," we shall sav— and we TRCST SELF-RESPECT, IF NOT REGARD FOR THE PRINCIPLE OF SELF-GOVERNMENT, WILL CONSTRAIN THE RESIDUE OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO SAY— "go!" We never yet had so poor an opinion of our- selves or our neighbors as to wish to hold others in a hated connection with us. Two months later, Feb. 23, 1861, five days after the inauguration of Jeff. Davis as Presi- dent, Mr. Greeley published the following editorial : We have repeatedly said, and weonce more insist, that the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Dec- laration of American Independence, that Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, is sound and just ; and that if the slave Statfs, THE COTTON STATES, OR THE GULF STATES ONLY, CHOOSE TO FORM AN INDEPENDENT NATION THEY HAVE A CLEAR MORAL RIGHT TO DO SO. We have said, and still maintain, that, provided the Cotton States have fully and definitely made up their minds to go by themselves, there is no need of fighting about it ; for they have only to exercise reasonable patience, and they will be let off in peace and goodwill. When- ever it shall be clear that the r-reat body of Southern people have become conclusively alienated from the Union, and anxious to escape from it, WE WILL DO OUR BEST TO FORWARD THEIR VIEWS. Are not these manifestoes sickening when we remember the furious cries of war by which they were followed ? Can any man doubt the great part they played in fomenting secession and stimulating rebellion ? When Alexander H. Stephens, in the Georgia Convention, which passed the ordinance of secession, attempted to stem, the secession tide, Robert Toombs put him down, and carried the Convention, by reading these Tribune articles. Union men who resisted secession were silenced throughout the South by these and similar quotations from Mr. Greeley ; the Tribune became the hand-book to "fire the Southern heart." FRANK BLAIR'S TESTIMONY AGAINST MR. GREELEY. I do not ask Democrats to take my word for this ; let me call their last candidate for Vice- President to the stand, and make him testify. Here is what Gen. I* rank P. Blair said in the Senate, P'ebruary 17, 1871, when explaining how secession gained the upper hand in the South : We all know the instance of a very distinguished man, Alexander PL Stephens. We :ill know that, as a mem- ber of the Georgia Convention, he contended with eloquence and ability in favor of the Government of the United States ; and I have been informed that the only re- ply which was made to that eloquent appeal of his to support the Government was the reading, by Mr. Toombs, of a paragraph from the New York Tribune, in which it was declared that it the Southern people chose to secede they had as much right to separate themselves from the Northern Slates .> , our ancestors had in 1776 to separate themselves from the mother country. That paragraph did appear in the Tribune, and every Senator here will bear it in Ins recollection. I remember to have seen it, and I remember the discouragement which fell upon us in Missouri and throughout the other Senator Coupling's Great Speech at New York. 27 Southern States where Union men were attempting to band themselves together and ti> maintain the Govern- ment, when it was announced by that paper, a leading paper in the Republican party at that time, that the Se- cessionists had as much right to separate themselves from the Northern States as had our ancestors in 1776 to abandon the mother country. ****** I remark upon the case of Mr. Stephens, who was a zealous friend of the Union, who spoke in the Georgia Convention ably and eloquently against the secession of his State, and who was responded to in that Convention simply by the reading of a p iragraph from the New York Tribune, which was at much as to say that they had nothing to apprehend from the North if they decided to go out 0/ the Union, because here was one of the leaders of the Republican party of the North announcing to them that if they desired to go out they could do so, and had as much right to do Si> as our forefathers had to separate themselves from the mother country. Mr. Howard -May I ask the Senator from Missouri whether, in his opinion, the paragraph in the New York Tribune to which he refers was a justification, in whole or in part, for the treason of Mr, Stephens? Mr. Blair — I will reply that I do not consider that anything justifies treason, and I do not think the conduct of the Secessionists of the South justified that traitorous expression of opinion on the part of the Tribune, for I regard it as traitorous. I say, Sir, that it did as much to discourage the efforts of the Union men in the South as anything that occurred at that period. It was simply a declaration which those accepted, I suppose, and were glad to accept, who wished to rid themselves of the Union, that they might go out in peace, that they would not be pursued, that war would not follow their step ; and this did a great deal to prevent resistance on the part of the Union men at the South at the time to the establishment of the de facto Government to which they were subjected. — Congressional Globe, Part 2, 3d Session 41st Congress ; PP- 1.344, 1.345- These statements, made by Gen. Blair, created some sensation. The Tribune tried to break their force, and on the 20th of February, 1 87 1, Gen. Blair returned to the charge prepared with proof. Here is what he said : When speaking on this subject the other day, I gave from memory certain deductions of the New York Tri- bune, then as now the most influential organ of public opinion in the Republican party in this country, and spoke of the unhappy influence of this paper at that time, in giving encouragement to the Secessionists and in discouraging the efforts of the Union men in the South. ***** I now quote the extracts from that paper to which I referred, and the Senate and the country can judge whether my statement or that of the Senator is the cor- rect one. On the 9th of November, i860, the New York Tribune said : [Here he read some of the articles already quoted, and resumed :] Mr. Stephens, of Georgia, and many others who have since been disfranchised, breasted the storm with heroic courage. Regardless of popularity, and thinking only of the peace and happiness of the country, they struggled against secession, and warned the people of the disaster they would encounter. On the other hand, Mr. Greeley assured them these dangers were all imaginary, and in- sisted that "they should go in peace," that they had a clear "moral right to go." ****** Words were never uttered mire fatal than these to the peace of the country. Mr. Stephens was defeated in his effort to prevent secession in Georgia by a few votes only, and nothing is more certain than that these were obtained by Mr. Greeley's declaration that secession was rightful and would be peaceable. I have been informed that these declarations were read in the Georgia Convention as a full reply to the warnings of Mr. Stephens. The refusal of Georgia would undoubtedly have arrested the movement. Who, then, is more directly responsible than Mr. Greeley, and those who acted with him at the North, for the blood which has drenched this land ; and who is more directly responsible than Mr. Greeley for the vindictive spirit which animates the dominant party in the proscription which has pursued and is still pursuing the whole people of the South ? Nor was Mr. Greeley's reiterated advice the result of an honest error. No man understood better than he did the" use that would be made of hi : da I. nations, and how effective they would be in promoting di 1 union. The editor of the Tribune 1 opi rati d with the seces- sion movement, not because he sympathised with the ob- jects of its authi irS, but because he and t ho, e for whom he spoke preferred parting with the South t'> partnership and equality under the Constitution. -Congressional Globe, same volume ; pp. 1,426, 1,427. Whoever reads Mr. Greeley's utterances, now in question, will see that he assumed to give advice in a supreme public emergency ; that at the critical and vital point, which must decide between union and disunion, between peace and war, Mr. Greeley threw his whole weight and influence on the fatal side. He upheld the full right of secession ; he denied the whole right of coercion ; he insisted that slaves fleeing from masters in arms agaitist the Government must be captured and returned ; and he protested against the continuance of the Union, after force was needed to preserve it. MR. GREELEY ORGANIZES VICTORY. Advancing to the next step in Mr. Greeley's career, we find him on the war-path. Mr. Lincoln had called for troops, and youths untrained and untaught in war, and unseasoned to hardships, flocked to Washington. General Scott, then the oldest and foremost soldier of the Republic, was in command. He had around him all the men whom the nation had educated as soldiers, except those who forsook the flag, and in the judgment of them all, lime was need- ed to drill men and horses, before ventur- ing an onward movement upon an entrenched and fortified foe. Mr. Greeley, an editor, who had never seen a battle, or studied a campaign, or learned anything of war, assumed the office of dictator. With his great engine, the Tribune, he fanned the flame of popular impatience and overbore the authority and the judgment of military men by a hurricane of clamor for an instant movement. "On to Richmond !" daily clanged out with great shocks of sound from the Tribune, and drove the army headlong to Bull Run. Men who had not learned to limber or unlim- ber guns, and horses unbroken to manoeuvre artillery, were driven pell mell upon the masked battery of the rebels. James S. Wadsworth had gathered up many of these green horses, on the spur of the occasion, and paid for them himself. Wadsworth went with them to the fated field, and there, bareheaded, with his white locks streaming in the winds, tried by heroic daring to supply the want of drill. But patriotism, and bravery, and dash, would not avail; the attack was premature — "some one had blundered" — a meddler had blundered, and had wrecked an army. "On to Richmond " was the incarnation of conceit and folly, as it was the slogan of head- long war ; and yet it was the shout of the same man who, a few short weeks before, by the cry of secession and of anti-coercion, had lured and bated millions with mad hopes and promises. Let me read you the motto flung out by the Tribune July 1st, 2d, 3d, and 4th, the order for Bull Run : Thf Nation's War-Cry ! Forward to Richmond • Forward to Richmond ! The Rebel Congress must not 28 TJie President and JUs Slanderers. be allowed to meet there on the 20th of July ! By that date the place must be held by the national Army. On. the 1st of July, twenty days before Bull Run, Mr. Greeley cast upon Gen. Scott the im- putation of treason to his flag, in these words : "Did you pretend to know more about military matters than General Scott r" asked a few knaves, whom a great many simpletons know no better than to echo. "No, sir! we know very little of the art of war, and Gen. Scott knows a great deal. There is no ques- tion on this point and never has been." The real question which the above is asked only to shuffle out of sight -is this : Docs Gen. Scott (or whoever it may be) contemplate the same ends, and is he ani- mated by like impulses and purposes with the great body 0/ the loyal, liberty-loving people 0/ this country ? Does he stand up square on the line of 54 deg. 40 min., or is he squinting towards 36 deg. 30 min. ? Does he want the rebels routed, or would he prefer to have them conciliated ? When you answer these questions, you touch the marrow of the problem, which all the gas about Gen. Scott's military knowledge and our want of it is in- tended to dodge. ATTEMPTS TO SHIFT BLAME TO OTHERS. When tidings came of the defeat and carnage at Bull Run, Mr. Greeley sank under the weight of his fearful responsibility. The first symptom of recovering his self-possession was a frothy effort to lay the blame at the door of others. On the 23d of July, two days after the battle, he said : We have fought and been beaten. God forgive our rulers that this is so, b it it is true, and cannot be dis- guised. The Cabinet, recently expressing in rhetoric better adapted to a love-letter, a fear of being drowned in its own honey, is now nearly drowned in gore; while our honor on the high seas has only been saved by one daring and desperate negro, and he belonging to the merchant marine. The "sacred soil" of Virginia is crimson and wet with the blood of thousands of Northern men, needlessly shed. The great and universal question pervading the public mind is : " Shall this condition of things continue?" A decim ited and indignant people will demand the immediate retirement of the present Cabinet from the high places of power, which, for one reason or another, they have shown themselves incompetent to fill. Give us for the President capable advisers, who comprehend the requirements of the crisis, and are equal to them ; and for the army, leaders worthy of the rank and file, and our banner, now drooping, will soon float once more in triumph over the whole land. With the right men to lead, our people will show themselves unconquerable. Caught and impaled in this attempt to roll his own guilt upon the shoulders of others, here is his next explanation. Observe how, on the 27th of July, he coddles up to Gen. Scott, whom he had tried to dishonor less than four weeks before : We have confessed our own terrible mistake in the premises, and arc trying to amend it. Gen. Scott has been equally ingenuous and candid. " It was a miscal- culation of forces," he says of the recent disaster. That is the real truth. None of us had any idea of the im- mense numbers and tremendous enginery of war that the rebels had silently collected around their position at Manassas Junction. Whoever ordered or planned the attack on that position was utterly unaware of their strength. See again, how, eighteen months later, he sought in another way to lay the ghost of Bull Run : I did urge that the great Union Army, rotting in idle- ness and debauchery about Washington, should advance upon the rebellion it was called out to put down. It have '1 >ne SO .1 m >nth earlier than it did — not a part of it, but the whole, and it might have bean tri- umphantly in Richmond, and the rebellion half sup- pressed before the day of Bull Run. How needless, how wanton, was that disaster — how disgraceful to those who might and should have prevented it, history will establish. — Tribune, Feb. 2, 1863. This is not all of this lamentable record — it contains yet other pitiable things, but these will do. It was in the agony of a later hour, tortured by dire meddling again, that Lincoln is said to have exclaimed, "What will quiet Horace Greeley, he gives me more distress, and does the country more harm than Jefferson Davis." How Mr. Greeley's interference tortured Mr. Lincoln, may be gathered from a letter written by Mr. Lincoln, Aug. 22, 1862. Here it is: Hon. Horace Greeley.— Dear Sir : I have just read yours of tbe 19th inst., addressed to myself through the New York Tribune. If there be in it any state- ments or assumptions of fact which I may know to be erroneous, I do not now and here controvert them. If there be any inferences which I may believe to be falsely drawn, I do not now and here argue against them. If there be perceptible in it an impatient and dictatorial tone, I waive it in deference to an old friend whose heart I have always supposed to be right. As to the policy I " seem to be pursuing," as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. * * * NIAGARA FALLS "PEACE NEGOTIATIONS." Mr. Greeley, early in Mr. Lincoln's Admin- istration, became his enemy. This Mr. Lin- coln knew and was ever on his guard. This is noticeable in the Niagara Falls peace affair. Mr. Greeley had been for secession when seces- sion might have been avoided, he had been for battle when the time had not come, he had been in turn for war and peace when each was impossible, and early in 1864, when the rebel- lion was about to collapse, and when everything depended upon keeping the North erect with united and undaunted front, Mr. Greeley fell into a swoon of despondency and blamed our authorities for not trying to make peace. From the beginning of the war, Canada has been the refuge of the spies, detectives, and hangers-on of the rebellion. On the 5th of July, 1864, one W. Cornell Jewett, an irre- sponsible and half insane adventurer, wrote Mr. Greeley a letter, saying that Geo. N. Sanders wanted him to come to Niagara Falls and hold a private interview with those authorized to make peace. Mr. Greeley, the day after he re- ceived the letter, wrote to Mr. Lincoln. His letter shows him full of the subject, and com- pletely persuaded that he had received a great and genuine revelation. He inclosed, ready- made, his "plan of adjustment." He was go- ing to wind up the whole rebellion by paying $40o,ooo,ooototheslaveStates, "loyal andseces- sion alike" for slaves, and by several other things, closing his plan with these words : "It may save us from a Northern insurrection. " In his Ietterhe said: "A wide-spread conviction that the Gov- ernment and its prominent supporters are not anxious for peace, and do not improve proffered opportunities to achieve it, is doing great harm now, and is morally certain, unless removed, to do far greater in the approaching elections." He also put in his letter exaggerated statements of the extremity to which the country had come, and appealed to Mr. Lincoln to enter into the negotiation. Mr. Lincoln saw through the whole thing at Senator Conklinc/s Great Speech at New York. 29 a glance ; lie saw that Mr. Greeley had been gulled, and he saw that he must humor him or rouse his ire. Accordingly he wrote to him as follows: "If you find any person, anywhere, professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis, in writing, for peace, embracing the res- toration of the Union and the abandonment of slavery, whatever else it embraces, say to him he may come to me with you," etc. Mr. Greeley replied, caviling with the President's letter, say- ing that they would not show their credentials, etc., and using these words : "Green as I may be, I am not quite so verdant as to imagine any- thing of the sort." Receiving no answer from the President, three days afterward, July 13, he wrote: "I have now information on which I can rely, that two persons duly commissioned, and empowered to negotiate for peace, are, at this moment, not far from Niagara Falls," etc. In this letter he ap- peals to Mr. Lincoln "to act in the premises, and to act so promptly that a good influence may even yet be exerted in the North Carolina elec- tion next month." Mr. Lincoln replied, "I am disappointed that you have not already reached here with those Commissioners. If they would consent to come on being shown my letter to you on the 9th inst., show that and this to them, and if they will come on the terms stated in the former, bring them. I not only intend a sincere effort for peace, but I intend that you shall be a per- sonal witness that it is made. " Mr. Greeley applied for "safe conduct" for four persons, and this being granted, he set sail on his mission, never suspecting he was the victim of a fraud, and not seeing how Mr. Lincoln regarded it. HOW MR. LINCOLN WAS FALSELY PLACED. Reaching Niagara, he instantly put himself into communication with Sanders, Thompson & Co., who at once informed him that they had no authority whatever to make peace, or to talk about it, but they were pleased that the United States had at last come forward proposing terms; and they graciously offered Mr. Greeley, if the President would protect them, to go through the United States down to Richmond, and see what the rebels would do about it. Mr. Greeley, in place of denouncing the cheat and repelling the impertinence, and clearing the President's skirts by showing the two letters which he had been instructed to show, went into a correspondence with these brazen impostors. Learning what was going on, Mr. Lincoln dispatched a confi- dential messenger post haste with a document dated July 18, 1864, signed by himself and ad- dressed "To whom it may concern." This doc- ument stated that authorized propositions of peace would be fairly met, provided "the integ- rity of the whole Union and the abandonment of slavery " was embraced. The messenger, by order of the President, hastened to Niagara Falls, and, taking Mr. Greeley with him, crossed the river, and delivered the paper in his presence to the rebel tricksters. It contained exactly what the President di- rected Mr. Greeley to show them in the first in- stance, yet it was the first notice given them of the President 'sv,uc([uiiements. . Taking advantage of this concealment by Mr. Greeley, Thompson & Co. pretended to be taken by surprise, and wrote Mr. Greeley a long letter, full of insolent and electioneering denunciation of Mr. Lincoln and the Government. They stated that Mr. Greeley made the first advance to them, which they say "was accepted by us as the evidence of an unexpected but most grati- fying change in the policy of the President!" They further say, that they had believed "that this conciliatory manifestation on the part of the President of the United States would be met by them (Jeff. Davis & Co.) in a temper of equal magnanimity ! " They then denounced the Presi- dent for changing his mind, and not doing what Mr. Greeley had been led to expect. On receipt of this letter, in place of setting the President right, by telling them that from the beginning he had held throughout but one and the same position, Mr. Greeley left the Presided to rest under the imputation of bad faith. Before taking his departure, Mr. Greeley sent word to the rebel "Commissioners" "that he regrets the sad termination of the initiatory steps taken for peace, in consequence of the change made by the President" &c. No change had in truth been made by the President, and first and last there was no room to charge bad faith or a change of mind, excepting the false position in which Mr. Greeley had placed the President, by disobeying his instructions, and failing to exhibit his shrewd and guarded letter. When Mr. Lincoln came to know what had been done, feeling indignant at the way his con- fidence had been abused, he wrote to Mr. Gree- ley for permission to publish the correspondence, omitting only such points as carried an exag- gerated idea of our military and political condi- tion ; this request Mr. Greeley refused, unless all parts of the letters were published. Upon this conduct of Mr. Greeley, Mr. Lincoln com- mented in these words : "I have concluded that it is better for me to submit for the time to the consequences of the false position in which I consider he (Greeley) has placed me, than to subject the country to the consequences of pub- lishing these discouraging and injurious parts." After Mr. Lincoln's death these facts and letters all came out. Mr. Lincoln had delivered them in confidence to Mr. Raymond, who, in his life of Lincoln, exposes Mr. Greeley with a severity from which I abstain. But several things are undeniable. First, Mr. Greeley was gulled by a shallow swindle ; second, he not only bit at the bait, but pressed the matter upon Lincoln, in a manner showing his intention to carp at him unless he yielded to his views ; third, Lincoln punctured the fraud at a glance, and yet Greeley did not see it ; fourth, Greeley bungled the whole affair at Niagara, or else purposely violated the repeated instructions of the President ; fifth, he tamely submitted to the most unblushing effrontery and imposition from the rebels ; sixth, he expressly admitted and stated that Lincoln had been fickle or untruthful, when he knew he had not ; and, finally, when Lincoln sought to vindicate him- 30 The President and Ills Slanderers. self by making the truth public, Greeley stifled the truth by threatening if it was told, to publish matters having no bearing on the case, but which would deeply wound the public interest. Who can wonder that Mr. Stanton proposed the arrest of Mr. Greeley for holding unauthor- ized and injurious intercourse with the enemy? MR. GREELEY AS FINANCIER. War and diplomacy were not enough for Mr. Greeley, and he soon turned financier, and assumed to dictate the financial policy. He first opposed the Legal Tender act, but unex- pectedly came out in its favor, and continued to advocate paper money, until the channels of trade were glutted with it, and gold went up to 2S0. To guard against injustice to Mr. Greeley, at this point let me read you his own words, on the ioth of February, 1S62 : " We shiver on the brink of a bottomless abyss of Shin- plaster circulation. Congress must provide funds for the vigorous and immediate prosecution of the war for the Union, and it seems to have been settled that it shall take the short and easy method of making treasury notes a legal tender. We utterly dissent from this conclusion," etc. After he had changed his mind, and as late as February 19, 1S64, he would charge sym- pathy with the rebellion upon a man who pp- posed greenbacks, or advocated specie payment. Here is an editorial of February 19th, 1864, in which Mr. Greeley says : "When, therefore, we hear that the Government ought to luxve Maintained, or ought now to resume, specie pay- ments, me know that the speaker means that it ought to give up the contest and let the rebels trhimph." With the vast issue of "Legal Tender" notes, business, of course, expanded, and merchandise and property were bought at double and treble their old prices, to be paid for in paper. In this condition of things Mr. Greeley violently demanded the resumption of specie payments. Practical men saw, as the event has proved, the wisdom of a gradual approach to a specie basis ; it was as certain then as it is now, that to com- pel payment in gold of debts contracted in paper worth less than half as much as gold, would be to strew our land with wreck and ruin. Moreover, it would have been impossible, without a miracle, for Government, banks, or people to pay specie when Mr. Greeley de- manded it. Men of sense everywhere cried out against such an attempt, and demanded to know how we could suddenly resume. Mr. Greeley was ready with answers. The chief answer was : " The way to resume is to resume !" On the I2th of January, 1866, he said that more "six per cent, untaxed bonds " should have been put out, and in that way, " every obstacle 01 1 'lie part 0/ the treasury to an instant resumption should have been over come." On the 5th of June, 1867, he came out with this staggering programme. I commend it to free-traders, property owners, anti-income tax men, and all men blest with no better sense than common sense : We believe in taxing so as to pay tlie debt in ten years. To do this, the national revenue should be about $500,000,000 per annum, or the same as in 1866. Had it been kept there, we might have celebrated our country's centenary on the 4th of July, 1876, completely out of debt. And we hold that this might have been done, by taxing with steady purpose to diminish the number 0/ idlers, or uselessly employed persons, and increase the proportion of productive workers, without prejudice to the national growth or prosperity. Here, for example, are a good many thousands of our people who have in- comes of $10,000 up to $1,000,000 per annum. Suppose these were to pay ten per cent, income tax, what of it* They will live less sumptuously, or board less bounteously for a few years— that is all. They will still enjoy every comfort, and will be growing richer if they choose. Of late, Mr. Greeley has outrun everybody in denouncing the income tax ; but hear what he used to say. Here are his views, fune 10, 1863 : One of the fairest and most productive sources of British revenue is the income tax assessed on all incomes in the United Kingdom above $750 per annum. Our corresponding tax exempts incomes from taxation to the amount of $600, but exacts three per cent, on all above that amount, and five per cent, on all excess over $10,000 per annum. In other words : "here is a tax which does not at all affect the laboring class, but which reaches nearly every one above them." Compare this with what he said Dec. 10, 1869: We do not believe there is a tax levied by the Govern- ment so onerous upon so large a class of people as the income tax. It is not equal — its exactions are unjust ; and it discriminates against persons of limited means. Again, June 26, 1S69, he thus delivered him- self: The income tax is one of the worst ever levied, inquis- itorial, unequal, and offering a premium fur perjury. We trust its days are nearly numbered — that it will be the very next of our heavy war burdens removed. These are a few of the gems of Mr. Greeley's financial theories, and those who did not accept them were visited with epithets and reproach. I ask business men to look back now, and think what would have happened had Horace Greeley been President then. With this one passage before you, would you as business men, trust Mr. Greeley to run a cider mill and financier for it? In case of war, how all would lean on him as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy. In case of a financial crisis how steady he would be. In case of riot in New York, or outbreak in the South, how his name would strike terror into babes and men. In case of storm, next to going to sea in a wash-tub, what would be so safe as the admin- istration of such a man ? He who changes his mind often, upon the greatest matters, should be tolerant of differences of opinion. HOW MR. GREELEY TREATS THOSE WHO DIFFER FROM HIM. See how Mr. Greeley deals with those who differ with him. Here are specimens of his editorials interesting to Democrats : All do know that there are several hundred thousand mulattoes in this country ; and we presume that no one has any serious doubt that the fathers of at least nine- tenths of them are white Democrats, and we are told that those Democrats, if they will have yellow children, might better than otherwise treat the mothers respect- ively as wives after the laudable pattern of that eminent Democrat, Vice-President Richard M. Johnson. — Dec. 10, 1867. Every one who chooses to live by pugilism, or gamb- ling, or harlotry, with nearly every keeper of a tippling- house, is politically a Democrat, — Jan. 7, 1868. Senator ConMlng's Great Speech at New York. Point wherever you please to .in election district which you will pronounce morally rotten, given up in great part to debauchery and vice, whose voters subsist mainly by keeping policy offices, gambling houses, grog- shops and darker duns of infamy, and that district will be found at nearly or quite nearly every election giving a majority for that which styles itself the " Democratic" party. Take all the haunts of debauchery in the land, and you will find nine-tenths of their master-spirits active partisans of that same Democracy. What is the instinct, the sympathetic cord, which attaches them so uniformly to this party? Will you consider? We thereupon ask our contemporary to state frankly whether the pugilists, blacklegs, thieves, burglars, keep- ers of dens of prostitution, etc., etc., were not almost unanimously Democrats. A purely selfish interest attaches the lewd, ruffianly, criminal and dangerous classes to the Democratic party. ♦This would amount to six in a bed, exclusive of any other vermin, for every Democratic couch in the State of New York, including those at Sing Sing aud Auburn. When the rebellious traitors are overwhelmed in the field and scattered like leaves before an angry wind, it must not be to return to peaceful and contented homes, they must find poverty at their firesides and privation in the anxious eyes of mothers and the rags of children ! MR. GREELEY AS A POLITICIAN. Eccentricity and fickleness are Mr. Greeley's traits. As a politician, he has bolted and ad- vised bolting ; he has opposed the nomination or election of every President who has been chosen for thirty years ; he has quarreled with every Administration ; he has assailed the char- acter of those he differed with wantonly and savagely ; he has imputed corruption to others merely for not voting or thinking as he did ; he sought by intrigue the defeat of Mr. Lincoln after he was nominated the second time, and as late as September 2, 1864, wrote secret letters, which have since come to light, to concoct mea- sures to prevent Lincoln's election ; he strove to poison President Grant against capable and honest Republicans, and advised him to exclude from his councils men trained in public affairs ; he has recommended unfit men for office, and insisted on their appointment ; after endorsing and applauding everything involving principle, or relating to the public interest done by the Administration, he has struck at the President on account of "patronage," and bolted the party, after manoeuvring more than a year to get its nomination. On the 4th of May, 1871, he wrote William Larmore, who had inquired whether he would be a candidate for President before the Republi- can Covention this year : " I fully propose also never to decline any duty or responsibility which my political friends see fit to devolve upon me," and having thus put himself in the field, he started for the South to make speeches, in one of which he asserted over again the right of secession, and in another hoped for the time when his countrymen would feel pride in Lee and Stonewall Jackson. He apologized for Tammany robbers, enjoy- ing from them at the same time an immense ad- vertising patronage, and blocking the wheels of reform after the Tammany frauds were known to the whole nation ; he colluded with men known to be in the interest of Tammany Hall, and whom he had previously so branded himself, to prevent the Republican party being purged of Tammany influence ; for two years b< f! open desertion, he sought to divide and destroy the Republican party of New York, and traduc- ed many upright men because of their resistance to the domination of corruptioriists ; and, finally, in signing the call for the Cincinnati Convention, which adopted the Free Trade Missouri Plat- form, he turned his back on the only political principle or idea prominent for the last ten years, of which he had not before been on both sides. CONCLUSION. Yot in the blind staggers of faction the Amer- ican people are challenged to scan and decide upon this record. Such a coalition, and such a nomination, mean chaos and disorder. You see this already in North Carolina, where the American Hag is showered with stale eggs, and where the mob refuses to allow honored citizens born there to 'speak ; and you will see it at every step until the curtain falls in November. "Liberal Republican" movements have been tried in other States, and, until the results were felt, they succeeded. They tried in Virginia nominating a Republican for Governor, on a bargain with the Democrats; many Republicans were entrapped and Virginia is cursed with a rule which the best Democrats are ashamed of. They tried in West Virginia a fusion between "outs" and Democrats, and now West Virginia holds debate in her Constitutional Convention on the question of nullifying the Constitution of the United States, and depriving the blacks of the right to vote. They tried in Tennessee a move- ment of bolters and Democrats, and the result is the destruction of common schools, in which 190,000 children were cultured. They tried the experiment in Missouri, and the fruit it bore is a Democratic State Govern- ment and Frank Blair in the Senate. In all these cases, one side or the other was cheated, and the public interest was harmed, and now it is proposed to attempt the same thing on a national scale. No wonder that leading Democratic journals and a large body of Democrats refuse to be parties to such chicanery, and no wonder that it draws to itself, as no other movement ever did, the very worst elements, North and South. The issue stands before you. On the one side is safe, tried and stable Government; peace with all nations, and prosperity at home, with business thriving, and debt and taxes melting away. On the other side is a hybrid conglomeration made up of the crotchets, distempers, and per- sonal aims of restless and disappointed men. What ills might come of committing to them the affairs of the nation no judgment can fathom, no prophecy can foretell. The result is very safe, because it rests with the same generation which was given by Provi- dence to see through the darkness of the rebel- lion, and that generation cannot be blinded now. HAg'12 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ' » II ii" mm n II 013 789 107 4