BY WILLIAM HENRY HURLBURT.

The United States being, and having been from the outset of their history, a Democratic Republic, it may well puzzle a European reader to understand why American “Republicans” should bewail a “Democratic” triumph, or American “Democrats” exult in the overthrow of a “Republican” party.

Yet it may not be impertinent to suggest that in no country are the names of political parties or factions commonly selected by a committee of philologists with an eye to making the national politics intelligible. What notions of English history are conveyed by the mere names of “Whig” and “Tory” or even of “Liberal” and “Conservative” to a person unfamiliar with the political history of England? What light is thrown on the history of Byzantium by talking of the “Blues” and the “Greens,” or on the history of Florence by casual references to the “Bianchi” and the “Neri”?

When one asks for the origin of such names, history is apt to give him no better answer than that of the small African child who was invited by a sympathetic lady to explain how she came to have six toes on one of her feet—“they growed so!”

This is so emphatically true of American political parties that my readers must pardon me if I take them back to the “beginnings of things” for an accurate perspective of the recent Presidential election in the United States, and of its significance.

The existing Constitution of the American Union was adopted in 1789 by the citizens of thirteen new-born Republics who had grown up to manhood in the then anomalous condition of subjects of the British Crown enjoying all the privileges and immunities of local self-government in thirteen distinct and independent colonies which differed among themselves in origin, in social traditions and habits, and in religion, almost as widely as Wales differs from Ireland, or Ireland from Scotland. These colonies had co-operated from time to time with the mother country for the common defence against a common enemy, colonial France. And they had been united under a temporary political bond in the great revolutionary war of 1776, by a common spirit of resistance to that Parliamentary despotism, tempered by corruption, which after the English Revolution of 1688 and the establishment of the House of Hanover assumed to itself the place originally held by the British Crown in the allegiance of these stalwart “Home-Rulers” beyond the Atlantic.

At the peace of Versailles in 1783 Great Britain found herself compelled to recognize the independence of all and of each of these colonies, which thenceforth took their places in the family of nations as separate and sovereign states. They were recognized in this capacity not in block, but severally and individually, each by its own territorial designation; and from the moment of such recognition each of them felt that it was absolutely free, and “of right ought to be free,” saving so far as it had bound itself to the then existing confederacy of 1778, to adopt any form of government which might suit the humor of its citizens, and to form any alliances advantageous to its own interests. The States were, indeed, at that moment bound together for certain specified purposes by a federal compact formed during the war in 1778; but this compact sate so lightly upon them that it was not only impossible to compel the several States into an exact fulfilment of confederate obligations, but very difficult even to induce them to get themselves properly represented under it for legislative and executive purposes at the then federal capital of Annapolis in Maryland. A striking illustration of this is given in a private letter, now in my possession, written by Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, the author of the Declaration of Independence of 1776, and eventually the founder of that great Democratic party under the Union of 1789, which now once more, after a quarter of a century of extra constitutional experiments in government, has been commissioned by the voters of the United States, in the election to the Presidency of Governor Cleveland of New York, to restore in all its parts, and re-establish on its original and enduring foundations, the sway of the Federal Constitution of 1789. Writing from Annapolis to a friend in Virginia in regard to the negotiations at Paris which had secured the recognition of American Independence, Mr. Jefferson, in December 1783, complains bitterly of the indifference of the States to this momentous event. Under the ninth article of the then existing confederate compact of 1778, the assent of nine States represented in the Congress at Annapolis assembled was necessary to the ratification of any treaty with a foreign power. The time fixed for the ratification by Congress of the Treaty of Versailles was rapidly running out at the date of the letter to which I refer, and the Congress had been long in session. “We had yesterday, for the first time, seven States,” exclaims Mr. Jefferson; and he goes on to express his concern lest the necessary quorum of nine States should not be assembled before the expiration of the term fixed for ratification in the treaty by which, after seven years of an exhausting war, their independence was to be established!

I dwell on this point in order to emphasise the truth, vital to any intelligent appreciation of the great change now impending in the administration of public affairs in the United States, that the commonwealths by which the American Union was established were, from the first, in the opinion of their inhabitants, sufficient each unto itself; and this because each of these commonwealths was indeed a well-organised body politic, the members of which had long managed their domestic affairs under one or another form of chartered authority, after their own fashion; and, for the protection within their own borders of life and of property, had adjusted to their several situations and necessities the maxims and principles of English liberty defined and guarded by law. These States were the creators, not the creatures of that “more perfect Union” which (the Confederacy of 1778 failing) was finally formed by them after all its features had been discussed, debated, and redebated, not only in a Convention of the States assembled for that purpose in 1787, but in the several States subsequently, with a fulness, vigor of thought, and intelligence which, in the opinion of others than my own countrymen, make the volumes of Elliott’s Debates on the Constitution the most valuable treasury of constitutional politics in existence.

The framers of the American Constitution of 1789 were no rude uninstructed settlers, summoned from the axe and the plough to improvise an orderly government. The traditions of the older States went back to the struggle between the prerogative and the taxpayers of England under the Stuart kings. Virginia, the “Old Dominion” of Elizabeth and the Restoration, with her Established Church, her College of William and Mary, and her legends of the Cavaliers, was in no hurry to believe that her consequence could be much enhanced by any merger of her sovereignty in that of a federal union with Charles the Second’s Crown colony of Rhode Island, and with the gallant little community which keeps green on the banks of the Delaware the memory of the self-sacrificing and heroic Thomas West. The colonial story of the great central State of New York had made its sturdy people familiar with those ideas of federated liberty on which the fabric of Netherlandish independence had been founded. The curious in such matters have found an indication of the extent to which the spirit of the Netherlands influenced the framers of the new American republic in the fact that when the style and title to be taken by the American President were under consideration, Washington inclined to the notion that the Chief Magistrate should be addressed and known as “His High Mightiness.”

Nor were the citizens of the youngest of the colonies disposed to put the control of their persons and their purses unreservedly into the hands of any imperial central authority.

After the Constitution of 1789 (to take the date from the day, April 30, 1789, on which Washington was inaugurated at New York as the first President of the United States) had been definitely adopted by eleven States, the two States of North Carolina and Rhode Island still withholding their ratification of the instrument, remained as foreign powers outside of the Union, the former until the 21st of November 1789, and the latter until the 29th of May 1790.

A notable date this last!

Never was a great compact more opportunely framed and ratified!

Almost upon the morrow of these final adhesions to the “more perfect Union,” the storm of the French Revolution broke upon the world, bringing with it great international convulsions which affected every nerve and fibre of the social, political, and industrial life of America, and tested to the utmost every seam and joint in the fabric of the new American Republic. The excesses of Jacobinism in France strengthened the doubts and fears of many excellent persons in America who had small faith in the capacity of the people for self-government on a grand scale, and who accepted the Constitution of 1789 not as a final and trustworthy frame of polity, but because, while they thought it, to use the language of one of the ablest of their number, “frail and worthless in itself,” they hoped to see it lead up to the eventual establishment of some such “splendid central government” as in our own times Mr. Seward, the true founder of the “Republican” party which has just been defeated in the United States, used to dream of and did his best to build up.

The influence of these doubts and fears upon the politics of the new American Republic was fortunately met and countered by the genius and the faith of a group of great American statesmen, the friends and associates of Thomas Jefferson; and the fundamental divergence between the controlling ideas of the two great parties which now occupy the field of American politics goes back to this closing decade of the eighteenth century. When the existing Constitution was first submitted by the Convention of 1787 to the people and to the States, those who, with Alexander Hamilton of New York, and James Madison of Virginia, advocated its adoption were called “Federalists”, and those who, with Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, and Patrick Henry of Virginia, opposed it as threatening the rights and sovereignty of the States, were called Anti-Federalists. After its adoption the latter party took the name of “Strict Constructionists,” their object being to bind down the administration of the new system to the closest and most rigid interpretation of the powers conferred by the States upon the Federal Government; while their opponents were styled “Broad Constructionists.” Both parties happily had such confidence in the patriotism and wisdom of Washington that he came into power as first President by a unanimous vote, and selected his first cabinet from the leaders of both the great parties which had contended over the adoption and the construction of the new Constitution. At the first session of the first Congress, in 1789, ten amendments to the Constitution were adopted, embodying a Bill of Rights to secure the liberties of the citizens of the several States, and explicitly reserving to the several States “respectively” or to the people, “all the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the States.” These amendments Thomas Jefferson counselled the friends of Home Rule and State Rights to accept as an adequate guarantee of both. His wise advice was taken, and the great political party which was formed under the Constitution took, at his suggestion, the name of the “Republican Party.” The name was appropriate enough to that party which held each State of the new Union to be indeed an independent “Republic,” and regarded the “Federal” Government as the agent and protector of the “Republican” independence of each State.

It gathered to itself a kind of passion, too, in the popular heart from the then very general conviction that the leaders, at least, of the “Federalist” party secretly desired to see these “Republics” disappear into some form of centralised monarchy.

As the French Revolution grew more portentous and interesting, and its agents busied themselves with efforts to draw America into the European contest as an ally, or rather as a dependency, of Republican France, the political antagonism of the “Federalists” and the “Republicans” grew dangerously high and hot. Men wore French or English Cockades in the streets of New York and Philadelphia. A distinguished public man of Massachusetts once told me that his earliest recollection of any political event took him back to a day on which a friend of his father, who was a leading Federalist of Massachusetts, met him in the streets coming home from school, and, giving him a bright Spanish dollar, said, “Now, Jack, run as fast as you can to your father’s court, and tell him from me that Robert Spear’s head has been cut off, and he must give you just such another dollar!” News came at long intervals then from Europe to America, and the tidings of the fall of Robespierre had that morning reached Boston.

Under the stress of these emotions the “Republicans” took to denouncing the “Federalists” as “Monocrats” and “Anglomen,” and the “Federalists” retorted by reviling their opponents as “Jacobins” and “Democrats.”

The “Federalist” party held its own during the two Presidencies of Washington, and elected John Adams to succeed the “Father of his country” in 1796. Under the Presidency of Mr. Adams the “Federalists” lost their heads, and the “Republicans” in the year 1800 took possession of power under the first Presidency of Thomas Jefferson. They had for some time been known commonly as “Democratic Republicans,” and in the ninth Congress which met under the second Presidency of Jefferson in 1805 they boldly took the name of “Democrats,” in the spirit of good Bishop Willegis, who put the wagoner’s wheel into his coat-of-arms, and like the “Gueux,” the “Huguenots,” and the “Roundheads,” extracting “glory out of bitterness.”

From that time to this the “Democratic” party has continued to be what Jefferson made it, the party of “Home Rule” as opposed to centralisation, and of a strict construction of the organic law by which the provisions and the limitations of Federal power are sanctioned and defined, as against that plausible paternalism under cover of which, in the language of a great living leader of the Democratic party, Senator Bayard of Delaware, “the general government assumes guardianship and protection over the business of the private citizen, and functions of control over matters of domestic and local interest.”

If I have enabled my readers to estimate aright the vital importance attached by the people of the several States in the formation of the Constitution to the recognition of the rights and the reserved sovereignty of the States, they will not be surprised to learn that when Thomas Jefferson established the Democratic party upon this recognition as its fundamental principle he secured for the Democratic party such a profound and permanent hold upon the confidence and the affections of the American people as can never be shaken while the Union remains what it was meant to be. For forty years after his first Presidency, no combinations succeeded in wresting from the Democrats the control of the executive authority. The only apparent exception to this statement confirms it. In the Presidential election of 1824, the electoral ticket of General Jackson, the leading Democratic candidate, received a considerable majority of the votes of the people; but as there were four candidates in the field, and General Jackson did not secure a majority of the votes of all the electoral colleges, the choice of a President went, under the Constitution, into the lower House of Congress, in which the members vote for a President not individually as representing the people, but by delegations as representing the sovereign States. John Quincy Adams secured a majority of the delegations; but such was the popular indignation that in the next House of Representatives President Adams found himself confronted by an overwhelming opposition; and at the end of his term of office General Jackson was made President by a majority of more than two to one against him. Jackson was twice elected, and transmitted his power to his Secretary of State, Martin Van Buren of New York, in the election of 1836. Between the years 1840 and 1860 the predominance of the Democratic party was but twice disturbed. In 1840 the Democratic President Van Buren, being a candidate for re-election, was defeated after a very severe struggle by General Harrison, the candidate of a conglomerate party which, for lack of a better, had taken the name of the “Whig” party, and which represented in a general way the Anti-Democratic classes of the country, and more particularly the banking interests and the Protectionists, of whom more hereafter. The real and brilliant leader of this party, Henry Clay of Kentucky, had been deprived of the presidential nomination through the machinations of a nominating device unknown to the Constitution, called a “Presidential Convention;” and though the Whig candidate secured a great majority in the electoral colleges, thanks to the skill with which his managers played upon the financial distress of the country caused by a great business panic in 1837, yet when he unexpectedly died at the end of a single short month after his inauguration, the Vice-President elected with him and who succeeded him, Mr. Tyler of Virginia, originally a Democrat, was found to be opposed to the rechartering of a United States Bank; and a bill passed by both Houses for that purpose, which had been indeed the main purpose of the leading Whigs in promoting the election of Harrison and Tyler, was twice vetoed by him. This was the first lesson given to the American people of the potential importance of the Vice-Presidency in case of the death or disability of the President. Curiously enough, the same lesson, which has been repeated several times since, has, in every instance, with one exception, followed upon the election of a President by Anti-Democratic votes.

Henry Clay, who was enthusiastically nominated and supported by the “Whig” party for the Presidency at the close of President Tyler’s administration in 1844, was defeated by the Democratic nominee, Mr. Polk of Tennessee, under whom the annexation of the magnificent Republic of Texas to the United States was consummated, with its inevitable corollary of a war with Mexico, that republic refusing to acknowledge the right of the people of Texas to sever their connection with the Mexican States. This war led immediately to the cession by Mexico to the United States of New Mexico, California, and the Northern Pacific coast of the old Spanish dominions in North America, and ultimately to the settlement of the boundary lines on the Pacific between the dominions of Great Britain and the United States. At the close of President Polk’s administration, the “Whigs,” who had been disheartened and “demoralised” by the defeat of their “magnetic” leader, Henry Clay, in 1844, made a second effort to capture executive power. The occasion was offered to them by a schism in the Democratic party, which had begun on personal grounds when Ex-President Van Buren, who desired a renomination, was set aside in 1844 for Mr. Polk, and which was intensified on broader issues by the determination of many Northern Democrats not to permit the extension of slavery into the vast and splendid territories acquired under President Polk.

It is far from being true, as I shall presently show, that the “Republican” party, so called, of our own times, which has just been defeated under Mr. Blaine, originated the political action in the United States which finally led to the extinction of slavery as an act of war by President Lincoln. The “Republican” party of our own times, deriving its origin from the “Federalists” of the last century, through the “Whigs” of 1840, has been recently and not unfairly described by Mr. John Bright as the “party of Protection and Monopoly.” This is so far true that it represents those tendencies to a plausible paternalism in government, and to a consolidation of the Federal power at the expense of Home Rule and State sovereignty, which found expression in Federalism at the beginning of our history; which threatened the secession of New England and the establishment of an “Eastern Empire” when Louisiana was purchased from France under President Jefferson; which waged the “war of the banks” against President Jackson; and which founded the “Whig” party of Henry Clay upon the doctrine that the Federal Government might lawfully and constitutionally levy taxes upon the consumers of imported goods for the express purpose of enhancing the profits of domestic manufacturers.

Governor Wright, a Democratic predecessor of Governor Cleveland in the executive chair of the “Empire State,” who had supported the renomination of Ex-President Van Buren in 1844, led, until his sudden and lamented death in 1847, the opposition of Northern sentiment, after the annexation of Texas, to any extension of slavery beyond the limits assigned to it by the famous “Missouri Compromise” of 1820. The Whig forerunners of Mr. Blaine were discreetly silent on the subject, and the question was thrown into the arena of political discussion and agitation by a Democratic Member of Congress from Pennsylvania, Mr. Wilmot, who, during the boundary negotiations with Mexico, introduced and moved the adoption of a “proviso,” that “no part of the territory to be acquired should be open to the introduction of slavery.”

This “proviso” was obviously unnecessary to the exclusion of slavery from any “part of the territory to be acquired,” for negro slavery had been long before abolished in New Mexico and in California under Mexican law; and the Democratic party of the United States had laid it down as a cardinal principle of Democratic policy, involved indeed, as many Democrats thought, in the principle of Home Rule, that there was “no power in Congress to legislate upon slavery in the Territories.” The introduction of the “proviso” therefore led, and could lead, solely to an immediately sterile, but eventually most dangerous, inflammation of the public mind on the question of the relations of slavery, as an institution already existing within the Union, to the politics of the country. The “proviso” was defeated in Congress; but the discussion had aroused the abolitionists of the North on the one hand, and the extreme pro-slavery men at the South on the other side, into loud and angry debate; and the opportunity of “forcing an issue” was seized by Mr. Calhoun of South Carolina, a man of the highest character and of keen intellect, who honestly believed that the South must be sooner or later driven in self-defence to withdraw from the Union, and who had brought his State and himself in 1832, on the question of the right of a State to “nullify” a Federal law, within striking distance of the executive authority wielded by the iron hand of President Jackson.

Mr. Calhoun introduced into the Senate, on the 19th of February, 1847, a series of resolutions denying the right of Congress to pass any law which would have the effect of preventing any citizen of a slave State from carrying slaves as his property into any territory. No vote was taken on these resolutions, but they served Mr. Calhoun’s purpose of awakening public sentiment at the South to the threatening attitude of the anti-slavery sentiment at the North.

The “Whigs,” with whom Mr. Lincoln then acted, profited adroitly by this excitement in both sections. They avoided the subject of slavery altogether, and nominated for the Presidency in 1848 General Taylor, a slaveholder of Louisiana, who had won a wide and well-deserved popularity as a military commander in the Mexican war, and a man of “moderate” views on all subjects. With him they associated Mr. Fillmore, a respectable citizen of New York. The friends of Ex-President Van Buren united in that State with the anti-slavery men in an independent nomination of Ex-President Van Buren and Mr. Charles Francis Adams, as the candidates of a new third party which took the name of the “Free Soil” party. This party declared that Congress had no right to interfere with slavery in the States in which it already existed; that it was the duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in the Territories; and that Congress had a constitutional right to abolish slavery in the Federal district of Columbia, which is the seat of the Federal Government. The result of all this was the election of Taylor and Fillmore, who received 163 votes in the electoral colleges against 127 cast for Cass and Butler, the Democratic candidates, and a popular plurality over those candidates of less than 150,000 in a total of somewhat less than 3,000,000 votes.

But the “Whig” triumph was short-lived. The gold discoveries in California gave such a sudden and tremendous impetus to the settlement of the new Pacific empire of the Union as “forced the hand” of the new Administration; and General Taylor dying in July 1849, while Congress and the country were hotly contending over the social and political organization of that new empire, his successor, Mr. Fillmore, with Daniel Webster as his Secretary of State, threw the weight of the Administration against the anti-slavery agitation and in favor of what were called the “Compromise Measures” of 1850. These measures admitted California without extending to the Pacific the boundary line between free and slave territory fixed by the “Missouri Compromise” of 1820, and left slavery untouched in the Federal district. Of course such a compromise neither quieted the alarms of the slaveholding South nor satisfied the aggressive abolitionists of the North. But the country accepted it, and at the next Presidential election, in 1852, the Democratic candidate, General Pierce of New Hampshire, was elected by an overwhelming majority, carrying four of the New England States, the great Middle States of New York and Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois at the West, all the Southern States, excepting Kentucky and Tennessee, and the new State on the Pacific, California. He received 254 electoral votes against 42 thrown for his Whig antagonist, General Scott, who had led the armies of the Union to their crowning victories in Mexico, and who had been a conspicuous military personage in the United States ever since the second war of 1812 with Great Britain.

There could scarcely have been a more decisive proof than this election gave that the Democratic party of the United States is really the permanent and enduring “party of the people,” without distinction of sections; for the tremendous victory won by General Pierce was distinctly due to the general, though, as it proved, the mistaken, impression of the masses of the people, that the irritating question of slavery in its Federal relations had been taken out of the arena of politics by the “Compromise Measures” of 1850. This was so clear that the opponents of the Democratic party, representing the shattered elements of the Whig party and the friends, as Mr. Bright would say, of “Protection and Monopoly,” changed front suddenly and concentrated all their efforts on a revival and extension of the anti-slavery agitation, as being the only program which offered them a hope of breaking down again, even for a time, the ascendency of Democratic principles. In this effort they were naturally seconded not only by the Northern abolitionists, but by the extreme partisans of slavery at the South. The value of slave property had been enormously increased by the sudden development of trade and manufactures all over the world, and especially in Great Britain and the United States, which resulted from the gold discoveries in California and Australia, and from the adoption, first in the United States under a great Democratic Secretary of the Treasury, Robert J. Walker, in 1846, of a liberal tariff, and then, in Great Britain, of what is not perhaps with perfect accuracy called the “Free Trade” policy of Mr. Bright and Mr. Cobden. One might almost say that the cotton manufacturers of Lancashire and New England fell into a conspiracy to delude the slaveholders of the South into those dreams of a vast slaveholding empire surrounding the Gulf of Mexico, which began, at the period of which I now write, to shake the foundations of the Union by fascinating the minds of grasping and ambitious men in that part of the United States.

In February, 1853, before the inauguration of President Pierce, a Democratic Senator, Mr. Douglas, of Illinois, who had been an unsuccessful candidate for the Presidential nomination in the preceding year, took the occasion presented by a bill for organizing a new Western Territory, Nebraska (which included the two now existing States of Nebraska and of Kansas), to propose a repeal of the old “Missouri Compromise,” to which I have more than once alluded. By this measure—a “Federalist,” not a Democratic measure—adopted in 1820, it was provided that slavery should never be carried into any Territory north of the fixed line of 36° 30´ north latitude. I have already mentioned that Congress refused to extend this line to the Pacific during the discussions which attended the admission of California in 1850; and I am sure that no one who knew Senator Douglas will differ from me now, when I say that he undoubtedly hoped by urging the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which was voted by Congress the 25th of May, 1854, to get the whole question whether slavery should or should not be introduced into new Territories, and so into the new States of the Union, relegated from the domain of Congressional action into that of “popular sovereignty.” It was not the purpose either of the small minority at the South who desired disunion as the first step towards the founding of a “semi-tropical empire,” or of the more considerable minority at the North who preferred the risk of disunion to the toleration of slavery under the American flag, that this question should be taken out of the domain of Congressional action, and the expectations of Senator Douglas were disappointed. The repeal of the “Missouri Compromise” simply turned Kansas into a battle-ground. It led rapidly up to a succession of armed conflicts within that Territory between organised bands of Northern and of Southern “emigrants,” which set fire to the popular passions in both sections of the country, “swamped” the attempt of a section of the now disbanding “Whig” party to capture power by organising the prejudices of race and of religion into a secret political order of “Native Americans” or “Know-nothings,” and gave vitality and success to the more serious and sustained efforts of a much larger section of the “Whigs,” who devoted themselves to founding a new party which should combine the permanent objects “of Protection and Monopoly” with the temporary and immediate object of restricting slavery within the limits of the then existing slave States. Thanks to this section of the “Whigs,” the modern “Republican Party” was formed in 1854, which, after precipitating the country into civil war by the election of President Lincoln (against whom it revolted, as I shall show, when he had carried through to victory the terrible task it imposed upon him), after retarding the pacification of the Union for years by its policy of military “reconstruction” at the South, and after inflicting upon the taxpayers of the United States burdens undreamed of by the original “Whigs” in their most extravagant days of “paternalism,” has now finally come to the ground under the candidacy of two of its most thoroughly representative leaders, Mr. Blaine and General Logan.

The chief spirit of the new “Republican” party was Ex-Governor Seward, the leader of the Whigs of New York, a consummate politician, “honest himself,” as one of his special friends said of him, “but indifferent to honesty in others,” who labored with uncommon skill and adroitness for six years to build the new organisation up into Presidential proportions, only to experience the common fate of such party leaders in the United States, and to find himself set aside by his own Republican Convention of 1860, at Chicago, in favor of the then relatively obscure Western candidate Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois.

The old name “Republican” used by the party of Jefferson was taken by the new party for the express purpose of dissimulating, as far as might be, its “Whig” parentage, and of thus recommending it to the widespread and growing anti-slavery element among the Democrats of the North and West. The Whig origin and tendencies of the new party, however, clearly appeared in the demand made in its first platform of 1856 for “appropriations by Congress for the improvement of rivers and harbors.” It selected as its first Presidential candidate in 1856 Colonel John C. Fremont of California, an officer of the army who had married the daughter of an eminent Democratic senator, Mr. Benton of Missouri, and who had acquired a kind of romantic popular prestige as “the Pathfinder of the Rocky Mountains” by an expedition across the continent. With him was associated as Vice-Presidential candidate a man of more political weight and force, Mr. Dayton, a Whig leader, of New Jersey, who afterwards rendered the country distinguished services as Minister to France under President Lincoln. Mr. Buchanan of Pennsylvania was nominated by the Democrats to succeed President Pierce in 1856. In the “platform” then adopted the Democratic party met the “Protectionist” tendency of the new “Republican” organisation by declaring “that justice and sound policy forbid the Federal Government to foster one branch of industry to the detriment of another;” denounced the attempt of the Whig “Know-Nothings” to organise a crusade against Catholics and citizens of alien birth; and in the matter of slavery reaffirmed “the compromise of 1850,” and committed itself to “the determined conservation of the Union and the non-interference of Congress with slavery in the territories or the district of Columbia.”

The new “Republican party” in its “platform” of 1856, let me here observe, raised no question touching slavery where slavery then existed, but pronounced it to be “both the right and the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery;” this latter attack on the Mormons being a bid for votes at the West and an appeal to the religious prejudices of the East.

A third remnant of the old “Whigs,” meeting in Baltimore in September 1856, appealed to the country to beware of “geographical parties,” adopted the nomination made by the Whig “Know-Nothings” of Ex-President Fillmore, and asserted that in Kansas “civil war” was “raging,” and that the Union was “in peril.” The contest was conducted by the Republicans at the North very much on the lines on which the first Whig victory of 1840 had been won—by the organisation, that is, of “Pathfinder Clubs” and processions, with brass bands, bonfires, and all the paraphernalia of “politics by picnic,” and a large popular vote was cast for the Republican candidate. But Mr. Buchanan, nevertheless had a majority of nearly 500,000 votes over Colonel Fremont at the polls in a total vote of about three millions, and he was elected President by 174 votes in the Electoral College, eight votes being cast by Maryland for Mr. Fillmore, and 114 votes being cast for Colonel Fremont, if the five votes of Wisconsin were properly included in that number—a very grave question as to that point being raised by the undisputed fact that the electoral votes of Wisconsin, which, under an obviously wise precept of the Constitution, ought to have been cast on the same day with the electoral votes of all the other States of the Union (December 3, 1856), were not cast until the next day (December 4) because the electors were prevented by a snowstorm from reaching the capital of the State in season to comply with the behest of the organic law.

Events moved rapidly after the election of President Buchanan. In spite of a great financial panic in 1857, the commerce of the United States, under the salutary rÉgime established by Democratic Secretaries of the Treasury, advanced beyond all former precedent. The net imports of the United States increased from 298,261,364 dollars in 1856, the year of Mr. Buchanan’s election, to 335,233,232 dollars in 1860, the last year of his administration, and the exports from 310,586,330 dollars in 1856 to 373,189,274 dollars in 1860. The sea going tonnage of the Union ran up to that of Great Britain;[4] and never had the country been so prosperous as during this period of Democratic ascendancy and relative fiscal freedom.

But while the managers of the new sectional Republican party worked night and day to develop and consolidate their voting power at the North and West, and availed themselves skilfully of every exciting incident in the history of the day to fan the passions of the people into flame, a sharp conflict was raging within the Democratic ranks between the Administration and the followers of Senator Douglas, which the leaders of the disunion movement at the South carefully and skilfully fomented, and which culminated in an open secession from the Democratic National Convention at Charleston in April 1860.

The Convention was adjourned to meet at Baltimore in June. There a second secession of Southern delegates occurred, followed by the nomination for the Presidency of Senator Douglas. A few days later the seceders, meeting in a Convention of their own, nominated Vice-President Breckenridge of Kentucky. In the meantime on the 9th of May a convention of “moderate men” of all shades of opinion had assembled in Baltimore, and nominated two eminent members of the disbanded Whig party, Mr. Bell of Tennessee and Mr. Edward Everett of Massachusetts, for the Presidency and the Vice-Presidency; while the now confident Republicans, gathered in Convention at Chicago on the 16th of May, had selected not Ex-Governor Seward of New York, but Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, as their candidate.

Of course, with such a prospect of success before them as the Democratic disorganisation offered, the managers of this Convention of the Republicans adroitly threw all questions but the “burning questions” of the hour as far as possible into the background of their operations. But while they declared themselves in favor of the preservation of “the Federal Constitution, the rights of the States, and the union of the States,” they did not forget to record their desire for such an “adjustment” of the “duties on imports” as “should encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country,” under which rather vague phraseology lay concealed the purpose of organising a new tariff for protection—a purpose which was carried into effect by the Republicans at Washington as soon as the subsequent secession from Congress of the Southern members made it practicable.

With the first election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, and his inauguration in March, 1861, we come upon a sudden and complete “solution of continuity” in the political history of the United States. Of the total popular vote of the country, amounting to 4,680,193, thrown on the 4th of November, 1860, Mr. Lincoln received but 1,866,452, being thus left in a popular minority of no fewer than two million, two hundred and thirteen thousand, seven hundred and fifty-one votes! It is impossible in the face of these figures to doubt that if the tremendous issue of peace and war between the two great sections of the Union, which really lay hidden in the ballot-boxes of the Union on that November day, had been never so dimly perceived by the American people, the verdict of the nation would have made an end that day of the new “Republican,” party. But neither Mr. Lincoln himself, nor Mr. Seward, nor any considerable number of the Republican voters of the North and the West believed, or could be made to believe, in the reality of this issue. It came upon them all and upon the country at last, after all the agitation and all the warnings of years, like “a thief in the night,” and coming upon the country it suspended for four long and dismal years the normal action of the constitution, and the normal development therefore of public opinion through the channels of constitutional politics.

It is juggling with phrases to say that from the 5th of March, 1861, to the 15th of April, 1865, Mr. Lincoln was, in any true sense of the words, a President of the United States with a political party at his back. He was to all intents and purposes a war dictator of the Northern and Western States, maintaining with all the resources of those sections of the country the fabric of the American Union against the armed and persistent efforts of thirteen sovereign States banded together in a confederacy to make an end of its authority and its existence so far as concerned its relations with them and with their inhabitants. To this colossal task Mr. Lincoln brought, as I think the most impartial critics of his administration in my own party now admit, most rare and remarkable gifts of character and of mind. It has been not uncommon among those who, since his death, have constituted themselves the special eulogists of this extraordinary man, to represent him as struggling from the first, not merely against the enormous difficulties arrayed in his path by the energy, and wealth, and determination of the seceding Confederacy, but against the ill-will and infidelity to his trust of the Democratic President whom Mr. Lincoln was elected by the North and the West to succeed. This is not the place for any vindication in this point of President Buchanan. He has had no lack of critics within the ranks of my own party. But no man who was present during that fateful winter of 1860-61 in Washington, and who was really conversant with men and things there, will need to be told that but for President Buchanan’s fidelity to his constitutional oath, and to the behest of the party which elected him in 1856 to “uphold the Union,” the Civil War would probably have begun in Washington itself before Mr. Lincoln set foot within the capital.

On the day of Mr. Lincoln’s inauguration, a day never to be forgotten by any American who witnessed the scene, it was the presence by the side of Mr. Lincoln of his great Northern Democratic rival, Senator Douglas, which more than all the bayonets of the troops assembled for the protection of Washington by General Scott, under orders from President Buchanan, convinced the most intelligent of the Southern men that the Union was not to be dissolved like snow in the sunbeams, and gave all the weight of the Democratic masses of the North and West to the new President’s deliberate declaration that the forts and property of the United States would be “held and occupied” by all the power of the unseceded States.

The one member of Mr. Lincoln’s Cabinet who from the beginning foresaw the gravity of the impending contest, and who put the whole pressure of his personal influence upon the new President almost to the extent of compelling him into asserting his authority by force of arms, was not the Whig who had organised the “Republican” party, Mr. Seward, It was Mr. Montgomery Blair, a “Democrat” by training, the son of the confidential adviser of President Jackson and the brother of a Democratic general in the Union armies who was afterwards nominated for the Vice-Presidency on the same ticket with Governor Seymour of New York in 1868 by the Democratic party. Mr. Montgomery Blair himself left Mr. Lincoln’s Cabinet in July 1864, escaped the war made by the “Republican” party under Sumner and Stevens upon the friends of President Lincoln, after the assassination of the President by a melodramatic madman, and became a trusty ally of Governor Tilden of New York, the Democratic candidate who was elected to the Presidency of the United States in 1876 by a popular majority of nearly 300,000 votes in a total poll of a little over 8,000,000, and by a majority of one vote in the electoral colleges, only to be defrauded of his office by the audacious tampering of a cabal of Republican office-holders with the votes of three Southern States.

It is not my purpose, and it would swell this paper beyond all reasonable limits, to sketch here, even in outline, the political annals of the quarter of a century which stretches now between the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and the election of Governor Cleveland in 1884. I may assume my readers to have a general knowledge of the main features of this period of American history. No intelligent man can be familiar even with the distorted and partial presentation of those features which has hitherto passed current on both sides of the Atlantic, without asking himself what the magic virtue can be which has carried the great Democratic party of the United States steadily onward through so many years of exclusion from executive power and such storms of systematic obloquy, enabling it amid the passions of a fierce sectional conflict to retain such a popular support throughout the North and West as has persistently threatened the tenure of the Federal authority by its all-powerful and never over-scrupulous opponents, giving it again and again control of the popular branch of the Federal Congress, and commanding for it, as soon as the restoration of the Union became in truth an accomplished fact, an unquestioned majority of the suffrages of the American people.

My object has been to indicate the true answer to this question by setting forth the foundations on which the Democratic party of the United States was planted by its great leaders in the very dawn of our national history.

No man ever learned by practical experience of the responsibilities of power to appreciate the solidity of these foundations more thoroughly than President Lincoln. A “Whig” by his early political affiliations and an active and successful politician in times of high party excitement, President Lincoln was not a partisan by temperament, and nothing is more certain than that he came during his practical war-dictatorship to very sound conclusions as to the essentially ephemeral character of the political organisation which had lifted him into that trying and dangerous post. He had no respect at all for professional “philanthropists,” and not much for loudly “philanthropic” politicians. The abolitionist agitators of the North instinctively disliked and distrusted him. The ablest of their number, Mr. Wendell Phillips, sneered at him as being not “honest exactly, but Kentucky honest.” It was no confidence in President Lincoln, but the political necessity of the moment, which compelled the extreme Anti-Democratic leaders of the Republican party to acquiesce in his renomination in November 1864, with a Democratic ex-Senator from the South, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, as his associate on the Presidential ticket. Of this fact President Lincoln himself was well aware. Nor was he blind to the popular and political significance of that Presidential election of 1864. In spite of all that could be done by an army of Federal office-holders larger than the armed force which Mr. Seward at the outset of the civil war had imagined would be adequate to “suppress the rebellion;” in spite of the combined influence of the “Republican” local governments in the Northern and Western States; in spite of military force brought to bear openly upon the polls in regions undisturbed by war; in spite of the overshadowing fact that the issues of the great civil war were still being fought out in the field, the Democratic party of the North and West confronted the Republican President at the polls in November 1864 with a popular vote of nearly two millions out of four millions cast in those sections of the Republic! The exact figures show that General M’Clellan, whose popularity with the Democratic party was based upon his fame as the creator of the Union army of the Potomac and upon his expressed loyalty to the principles of the Constitution as the Democratic party holds them, received, in November 1864, 1,802,237 votes in the North and West, or within a few thousands of the 1,866,452 votes which were cast for Mr. Lincoln himself in November 1860!

President Lincoln had shrewd sense enough to see that as the maintenance of the authority of the Union had only been made possible to him by the unswerving determination of the Northern and Western Democratic party that the authority of the Union should be maintained under the Constitution, so the restoration of peace within the Union could only be achieved by accepting the Democratic construction of the position and the rights of all the States in the Union under the Constitution, of the seceded as well as of the unseceded States; and he had patriotism enough to resolve that peace should be restored within the Union, no matter what became of the ephemeral “Republican” party which had been called into existence and carried into power chiefly by the force of the sectional passions which had found final expression in the civil war. He had gone beyond the Constitution under the war power in abolishing slavery, and he knew that in abolishing slavery he had abolished the vital impulse to which the “Republican” party owed its existence. He knew too that the extreme “Republican” partisans by whom he was surrounded knew this as well as he, and he was thoroughly aware that there were among them men like Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, who were prepared and determined if possible to keep the sectional passions which slavery had evoked alive and burning after slavery itself should have disappeared, and to organise for themselves a new lease of power at the expense of the peace of the country and of the happiness and prosperity of millions of their fellow-countrymen.

At the beginning of the war President Lincoln had met the challenge thrown down to him by the Confederate War Department on the lines indicated by a great Democratic jurist, the late Judge Black of Pennsylvania, in his “Opinion upon the Powers of the President,” prepared at the request of President Buchanan, in whose Cabinet Judge Black had successively held the posts of Attorney-General and of Secretary of State.

If one of the States (wrote Judge Black) should declare her independence, your action cannot depend upon the rightfulness of the cause upon which such declaration is based. Whether the retirement of a State from the Union be the exercise of a right reserved in the Constitution, or a revolutionary movement, it is certain that you have not in either case the authority to recognise her independence or to absolve her from her Federal obligations. Congress or the other States in Convention assembled must take such measures as may be necessary and proper. In such an event I can see no course for you but to go straight onward in the path which you have hitherto trodden—that is, execute the laws to the extent of the defensive means placed in your hands, and act generally upon the assumption that the present constitutional relations between the States and the Federal Government continue to exist until a new order of things shall be established either by law or by force.

The seceding States attempted to establish “a new order of things by force,” and maintained that attempt for four years with such resolution, pertinacity, and courage as more than once brought them within what an eminent English statesman would perhaps call such a “measurable distance” of success as may well explain the conviction expressed in England at one period of the struggle, that Jefferson Davis had “established a nation.”

Upon the failure of the Confederate experiment, President Lincoln, in spite of the bitter and threatening hostility to him of a number of the most conspicuous leaders of the Republican party in and out of Congress, wisely and consistently determined to adhere to the position involved in Judge Black’s opinion that the constitutional relations between the States and the Federal Government could not be and had not been shaken by the contest. After the Confederate Government had abandoned Richmond, he visited that capital as President of the United States, and in words made pathetic and historical by the deplorable and senseless crime which was so soon to shock the country and the civilised world, proclaimed his intention to administer the Government “with malice towards none, with charity for all.” In his last public speech, delivered on the 11th of April, 1865, two days only before his assassination, he spoke of the seceded States as already restored to their places in the Union, and said of them in his quaint and homely fashion that, “finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had been abroad.” Mr. Gideon Welles of Connecticut, to whom the portfolio of the Navy had been given by President Lincoln in his first Cabinet, as a representative of the Democratic wing of the then newly-organized “Republican” party, tells us that at a Cabinet meeting held on the last day of President Lincoln’s life, April 13, 1865, the President urged all the members of the Cabinet to exert their influence to get all the State Governments of the lately seceded States of the South “going again before the annual meeting of Congress in December.” This meant, of course, that President Lincoln intended and expected the lately seceded States to send to Washington their proper and constitutional quota of senators and representatives freely elected under the local franchise in each of those States. His purpose was to secure the ratification by the seceded States of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery formally, and then to accept them as in all respects States within the Union. In the Emancipation Proclamation of the 22nd of September, 1862, which President Lincoln had issued avowedly as a war measure, he had taken pains to declare that his object in prosecuting the war as “Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy” of the United States, was, had been, and would be, “practically to restore the constitutional relation between the United States and each of the States and the people thereof in which that relation was or might be suspended.”

This was not at all the object of the unscrupulous and reckless leaders who took command of the “Republican” party upon the death of President Lincoln, and under whom Mr. Blaine first made a figure upon the field of Federal politics.

A clear line will be drawn by the historian between the war administration of the President who upheld the Union and the dismal epoch of Southern reconstruction which followed—an epoch of unconstitutional Congressional despotism, mitigated only from time to time by the personal authority of General Grant. The story of the relations of General Grant as President of the United States with the party which found itself compelled to take advantage of his unbounded popularity as the surest means of retaining its grasp upon authority at Washington will one day constitute a most interesting and instructive chapter in the history of government, but it lies outside the scope of this paper. That General Grant would gladly have co-operated with President Lincoln in carrying out his plan of re-establishing the Union on Democratic and constitutional lines may be inferred not only from the fact which he has stated, that the only vote he ever cast before the civil war was for a Democratic President, but from the more significant fact that he was so fully convinced of the readiness of the Southern States to accept the results of the civil war in good faith, that, immediately after the accession of President Johnson in 1865, he urged upon the President the importance of throwing a combined army of Union and of Confederate soldiers into Mexico for the purpose of expelling the French under Bazaine, and compelling Maximilian to abandon the hopeless attempt to found an empire in the land of the Montezumas which eventually cost that gallant but unfortunate prince his life. President Johnson eagerly adopted General Grant’s suggestion, but the Secretary of State Mr. Seward, opposed it, and Mr. Seward’s objection was fatal. “It cost Maximilian his life,” General Grant tells us, “and gave Napoleon the Third five more years of power in France.” He might have added that it cost the people of the Southern States ten years of the most odious and corrupting mal-administration recorded in modern history—mal-administration which, but for the solid political capacity and the traditional common sense and patriotism of the Americans of the Southern States, must have reduced the fairest portion of the North American continent to a social and industrial chaos without precedent in the annals of modern civilisation.

The evil influences of that dark epoch extended themselves in all directions North and South, cropping out in organised official peculations, in shameless political dishonesty, in reckless speculation, in monstrous lobbying, and in incredible excesses of public extravagance, based upon such a system of inordinate and unconstitutional taxation as no American in his senses could have been brought, before the outbreak of the civil war, to believe would ever for a moment be tolerated by the American people.

It was to make an end of all this that the people of the United States in 1876 elected one Democratic Governor of New York to the Presidency. Defeated then of their will by the Republican agents of reconstruction, the people of the United States had now at last in 1884 compelled their voice to be heard and to be respected. With the inauguration of Governor Cleveland in March 1885, the Federal Government of the United States will be once more organised upon the enduring Democratic foundations of respect for Home Rule at the South and at the North, in the East and in the West, and of a strict limitation of the functions of the Federal Government to the powers granted and prescribed to it by the Constitution.

If I have done anything like justice in this necessarily hasty sketch to the origin and development of the Democratic party of the United States, my readers will not need to be told that its advent to power at this time opens a new and most important chapter in the annals of the American Republic. It involves much, very much more than the transfer of executive power from one to another set of administrative officers.

It closes definitely an era of such political disease and corruption in the United States as I have preferred rather to indicate than to dwell upon here. Work of that sort, in my judgment, may as well be confined to the domestic laundry. Quite enough of it has been done for the edification of mankind at large by certain of my countrymen who have hitherto found it more convenient to bewail the political profligacy of those to whom “respectable Republicans” chose to surrender the control of the Republican party after the murder of President Lincoln “cried havoc and let slip the dogs of faction” than to co-operate resolutely with the great Democratic party in making the Union once more solid, and settling it upon its only possible foundations—Home Rule and a strict construction of the Constitution.

It is easy to draw dramatic pictures of the demoralisation of American politics; but there is more significance surely for thoughtful men in the returns, which show that the candidacy of Mr. Blaine and Mr. Logan has cut down the plurality of the Republican party in “moral” Massachusetts from more than fifty thousand to ten thousand votes; in Illinois, from over forty thousand to fifteen thousand; in Michigan, from more than fifty thousand to barely two thousand; in Ohio, from more than thirty thousand to eleven thousand. It has made the Democratic Governor of New York President by an electoral majority of 37 votes and a popular plurality of about 400,000 votes. Less is to be learned of the deep and lasting currents of popular thought and feeling in the United States from an elaborate study of the absurd abominations of Republican “Reconstruction” at the South than from the handwriting of fire on the polling-places of the Empire State which illuminated the Belshazzar’s Feast of Mr. Blaine’s “millionaires” on the eve of the Presidential Election of 1884!

In a certain sense, President Cleveland will occupy a position not unlike that of President Lincoln at the outset of his first Presidency. But the task of the Democratic chief magistrate who goes to Washington with a great historical party at his back, to restore the well-understood metes and bounds of the Federal authority over thirty-eight free and independent States will be a less troublesome and in its immediate results ought to be an infinitely more benign and grateful task, than that of the reluctant war dictator who found himself, against all his expectations, driven by angry sections, with a mixed and undisciplined mob of placemen, of monopolists, and of philanthropists behind him, into cutting with the sword the Gordian knot of slavery, at the risk of severing with it forever the golden bands of the Union, and those “mystic chords of memory” of which he spoke with such a wistful pathos in his inaugural address. Some points of resemblance may be found, too, between the personal histories of Lincoln and of Cleveland. Like Mr. Lincoln, Governor Cleveland comes of an old American stock. His family name smacks of Yorkshire, and his direct ancestors established themselves in Massachusetts nearly two hundred years ago. One of the family, a Cambridge man, and a clergyman of the Anglican Church, died at Philadelphia under the roof of his friend Benjamin Franklin twenty years before the American Revolution. Another, who sat in the Legislature of Connecticut, and who was a minister of the Independents, is remembered as an early advocate in that “land of steady habits” of the abolition of African slavery, and this at a time when the worthy citizens of Massachusetts thought it expedient to keep the Bay State clear of negro blood by ordaining in their organic law that any African “not a subject of our faithful ally the Emperor of Morocco” who ventured twice across the Massachusetts border should be on each occasion whipped, imprisoned and sent away, and that if this did not restrain his ardor, he should upon his third advent be so dealt with as to put an effectual stop to his travels.

Richard Cleveland, a grandson of the Connecticut abolitionist, married the daughter of an Irish bookseller in Philadelphia, Miss Neale, and was the father of the new President of the United States. He was settled as a Presbyterian minister in the New Jersey village of Caldwell, and there on the 18th of March, 1838, Grover Cleveland was born. His father left New Jersey when he was but a child, and went in the service of the religious body to which he belonged to live in New York. The circumstances of the family were much better, I need not say, than those amid which the youth of Lincoln, the son of an emigrant Virginian, was passed in the wilds of Kentucky and Southern Illinois. But Grover Cleveland, like Lincoln, was early thrown upon his own resources. When he was a lad of sixteen his father died, and he was left to conquer for himself the education he was determined to have, and to make his own way in the world with such small help as a brother and an uncle could afford him, both of them battling with life, and both of them counting, not in vain, upon the young student’s aid in the maintenance of his widowed mother and her young family.

His twenty-first year found the future President admitted to the Bar in Buffalo, the chief city of Western New York. He distinguished himself from the outset of his professional career by his indomitable industry and his devotion to duty. These qualities soon secured for him the honorable but laborious post of Assistant District Attorney. He was not blinded by the glamor and glitter of the “great Civil War” to the rascalities of Reconstruction, but adopted the Democratic faith in politics, though living in a strongly Republican city. In 1870 he was elected Sheriff of Buffalo, and twelve years afterwards, having returned meanwhile to a successful practice at the Bar, the best citizens of Buffalo of all parties rallied to his support as the Democratic candidate for the Mayoralty, in a contest which curiously prefigured, on a smaller arena, the Presidential campaign of 1884. The taxpayers of Buffalo had been systematically plundered by a Republican “municipal ring,” just as the taxpayers of New York many years ago were plundered by the Democratic municipal ring of Tweed and Sweeney, of which so much and such unscrupulous use has been made by Republican writers and speakers to vilify the Democratic party. It has not usually occurred to these ingenious party trumpeters to insist upon the fact that the “Tweed ring” was broken and that its members were brought to chastisement mainly through the persistent efforts of two distinguished Democrats.

One of these was the late Charles O’Conor, in his time the acknowledged leader of the American Bar, and a Democratic candidate for the Presidency in opposition to the headlong and absurd nomination of Horace Greeley, a life-long Whig Protectionist, into which a Democratic Convention allowed itself to be cajoled, despite the manly protest of such true Democratic leaders as Senator Bayard at Baltimore in 1872. The other was Mr. Samuel J. Tilden, whose services against the Tweed ring led first to his election by the Democratic party as Governor of New York in 1874, and then to his election as President of the United States in 1876, the year of the great electoral fraud.

The task which these distinguished Democrats assumed in New York Mr. Cleveland took up in Buffalo, and carried through with such impartial energy and courage that before the expiration of the first year of his term of office as Mayor, he was invited by the Democrats of New York to enter upon the larger stewardship of the State executive. He had been chosen mayor of Buffalo in 1881, by a majority of 3,500 votes. He was chosen Governor of New York in 1882 by a majority of nearly 200,000 in a total poll of 893,000 votes. His opponent was Mr. Folger, a leading Republican, who had sat with distinction on the bench of the highest State Tribunal in New York, and who died the other day as Secretary of the Treasury in the Cabinet of President Arthur; and it is an open secret that the tremendous overthrow of the Republican candidate was partially due to the machinations of the friends of Mr. Blaine who had been dropped for cause from the Cabinet of President Arthur with some emphasis in December of the preceding year. It was the calculation of Mr. Blaine that the defeat of the President’s candidate in the President’s own State of New York in 1882 would materially damage Mr. Arthur’s chances and strengthen his own of securing a Republican Presidential nomination at Chicago in 1884. It was a good calculation, but whether the retrospect of the gubernatorial campaign of 1882 in New York is as gratifying now to Mr. Blaine as it was two years ago may perhaps be doubted.

As Governor of New York, Mr. Cleveland has shown himself what he was as Mayor of Buffalo—rigidly honest, indefatigable, simple in his personal tastes and habits, disdainful of the silly state, and the petty parade of official importance into which too many public servants of the United States have suffered themselves to be seduced during the reign of King Mammon at Washington. It has been his custom to walk every morning from the Executive Mansion to the Governor’s Rooms in the Capitol at Albany, and to spend the day there, incessantly occupied, but always visible to those who have had any real occasion to see him. It will be a wholesome thing to see the Presidential office once more administered in this unostentatious fashion. Mr. Cleveland may be called a representative of the Young Democracy, since he will go into the White House a bachelor, like the last Democratic President, Mr. Buchanan, but a young bachelor, the youngest President indeed yet elected. In his fidelity to the traditions of Jefferson, who rode up to the Capitol on horseback to be inaugurated, “hitched his horse to a post,” took the oath and went about his business, Mr. Cleveland will be supported by the new Vice-President—ex-Governor Hendricks of Indiana, who represents the stanch and experienced Democratic leaders who have borne the brunt of the intense political warfare of the last quarter of a century with unwavering courage and signal ability. As a representative in Congress, as a senator of the United States, as Governor of the great Western State of Indiana, and as the Democratic candidate for the Vice-Presidency on the same ticket with Governor Tilden in 1876, Mr. Hendricks has linked his name with the best traditions, and drawn to himself the general confidence of his party. On the 6th of February, 1869, what is called a “concurrent resolution” (which may be passed without requiring the assent of the President) was introduced into the Senate under the “Reconstruction” legislation of 1868, directing the President of the Senate to deal in a particular manner with the vote of Georgia as “a State lately in rebellion” and to allow that electoral vote to be alluded to only if the counting or omitting to count it would not effect the decision of the election in favor of either candidate. The candidates were General Grant and Governor Seymour of New York. Mr. Hendricks, then a Senator from Indiana, sustained with memorable force and conviction the right of Georgia to her proper and unqualified voice in the election. One Republican Senator alone voted against the “concurrent resolution,” and that Senator, Mr. Trumbull of Illinois, is now a recognised leader of the Democratic party in the State which gave Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency. At the second election of Grant—Horace Greeley having died immediately after the choice of the electors—most of the votes given against General Grant were given to Mr. Hendricks; and in the Democratic Convention of 1876 Mr. Hendricks who was the second choice of a majority of the Convention after Governor Tilden, was eventually nominated, almost against his will, for the Vice-Presidency. He is a man of fine presence and dignified manners, who will preside with ability and tact over that Upper House of the national Legislature which stands as the fortress of Home Rule and State Rights, founded upon the ideal constituency of State sovereignty, and set more safely beyond the reach of the gusts of popular passion than the hereditary principle in Europe.

The first duty of the President Elect will be the selection of his Cabinet officers. Under the American system these officers do not sit in Congress, and, with the exception of the Secretary of the Treasury, they are simply agents of the Executive. But it is customary to select them from the most prominent and influential men of the party, and with reference to the party strength in different sections of the country. To recite the names of the men, any one of whom would be accepted by public opinion in the United States as a fitting Cabinet Minister of the new President, would really be almost to call the roll of the Democratic Senators, now thirty-six in number out of a Senate of Seventy-six members, and of the Democratic Chairmen of Committees in the House, which as newly elected will be Democratic by a majority of between thirty and forty votes. The names of Mr. Bayard of Delaware, the leading candidate after Governor Cleveland at Chicago; Mr. Thurman of Ohio, long the leading Democratic, with Senator Edmunds as the Republican, “law lord” of the Senate, and the author of an Act enforcing upon the great Pacific railway corporations their obligations to the Government, which it has been left for a Democratic Executive to carry into effect; General McClellan; Mr. Pendleton of Ohio, to whom the country chiefly owes whatever measure of reasonable Civil Service reform it enjoys; Mr. McDonald of Indiana, Mr. Lamar of Mississippi, Mr. Hewitt and Mr. Kernan of New York, Mr. Garland of Arkansas, Mr. Beck of Kentucky, Mr. Palmer of Illinois, have been already discussed in the open councils of the party, and intelligent Americans of all opinions will admit that a Cabinet framed of such materials would deserve and command universal confidence. There are many other active and experienced party men whom it might be troublesome to replace in one or the other House of Congress, but there need be no fear that the new President will be at a loss to find able counsellors to aid him in discharging his great trust.

The policy of the new Administration is involved and indicated in the traditions of the party. In our foreign relations the United States under a Democratic President will ask nothing of Europe except a cordial maintenance of treaties, an extension of commercial relations under equitable conditions, a full recognition of the accepted rules of international law, a sedulous exemption everywhere of the persons and property of American citizens from unnecessary annoyance by arbitrary power. The State Department under President Cleveland may be expected to be administered, not in the swash-bucklering and speculative fashion which the Republican supporters of Mr. Blaine extolled during the late canvass as brilliant and enterprising, but in the self-respecting, self-contained, and dignified spirit which controlled our foreign relations under ex-Governor Marcy of New York thirty years ago, and which so honorably distinguished the administration of the same department under ex-Governor Fish of New York from that of sundry other high officers of State in the time of President Grant.

Upon the Treasury Department will fall the responsibility of dealing wisely and firmly with the most important domestic issue inherent in the resumption of executive power by the party of the Constitution. This can hardly be more authoritatively stated than it was a fortnight ago by the Vice-President Elect, Mr. Hendricks, in a speech delivered by him to the people at Indianapolis after the election:—

The watchword of the party in this contest, as in the contest of eight years ago, has been reform—executive, administrative, and revenue reform; an honest construction of the laws, and an honest administration of them. The revenue now collected exceeds the wants of an economical administration by $85,000,000. Because of this the Democrats say: “Let there be revenue reform; let that reform consist in part in the reduction of taxation.” Is it not patent to every man that there ought to be a reform here? The Democratic party this year came before the country with a clear and straightforward statement of the reform they intended to accomplish. In the national platform they declared that reform they would have. It was, first, that the taxation shall not exceed the wants of the Government economically administered; second, that taxation shall be for public purposes alone, and not for private gain or advantage; third, that in the adjustment care shall be taken to neither hurt labor nor harm capital; and fourth, that taxation shall be heaviest on articles of luxury and lightest on articles of necessity.

For now a quarter of a century the “Party of Protection and Monopoly” has persistently transgressed the limits set to the Federal authority by the Constitution, and used the earnings of labor and of capital, in the form of excessive taxes, to fertilise and fatten private enterprises.

This must stop. And when this stops, the manufacturers of England and of Europe may make up their minds to meet the competing exports of the United States in all those markets of the world from which American exports have been excluded by American legislation ever since the Whig-Republicans of 1861 laid their grasp upon our fiscal policy. It cannot stop too soon. The official returns of the exports of the United States show that during the fiscal year which ended on the 30th of June 1884, the exports of domestic merchandise from the United States to all parts of the world fell off in value $79,258,780, as compared with the exports for the year ending the 30th of June, 1883. Our exports of machinery fell off nearly a million dollars; of general manufactures of iron and steel more than a million and a quarter of dollars. There was a good deal of gunpowder burned in the year 1883-4, but the value of our exports of it fell off a quarter of a million of dollars. The value of our exports of flax and hemp fell from $547,111 in 1882-3 to $67,725 in 1883-4; our exports of agricultural implements declined during the last year more than a million of dollars in value; our exports of cotton goods, colored and uncolored, more than twelve hundred thousand dollars. Clearly Protection does not develop the manufactures of the United States. It “protects” the manufacturers (which is quite a different thing) against and at the expense of the consumers of the United States, and gives point to the Duke of Somerset’s assertion that “in no country has the power of capital been more invidiously exerted” than in the United States. If our foreign manufacturing friends had any money to spend on American politics, they would have done well to throw it into one pool with the contributions of Mr. Blaine’s two hundred millionaires!

Alexander Hamilton, the Federalist Secretary of the Treasury under Washington, was the first apostle of Protection in America, but in approaching the subject he “walked delicately,” like Agag. The Americans of 1789 established absolute free trade between all the sovereign States of the new Republic; nay more, during the negotiations for peace at Versailles in 1783, the American Commissioners offered Great Britain absolute free trade between the new States “and all parts of the British dominions, saving only the rights of the British chartered companies.” David Hartley, the philosophic writer on “Man,” one of the British Commissioners, had wisdom enough to see the immense importance of this offer, and urged the British Government to close with it. Lord Shelburne, I believe, agreed with him. But the king peremptorily refused to entertain a proposition which, had it been accepted, must have changed the whole subsequent course of the history of the two countries.

Down to 1809 no import duties were levied in the United States except for purposes of revenue only. High rates of duty were levied in 1816 after the war of 1812, not for “protection,” but in order to meet the exigencies of a most dangerous financial situation. In 1824, Henry Clay, backed by New England and the middle States, carried through a tariff to “protect American industry.” This was followed up by the tariff of 1828, known as the “Bill of Abominations.” But the Democratic sense of the country clearly saw that as the power to levy protective taxes must be derived from the revenue power it is of necessity incidental, and that as the incident cannot go beyond that to which it is incidental, Congress cannot constitutionally levy duties avowedly for Protection; and the Democratic party has never since departed, and never can depart, from this doctrine in its party action. In 1833, under President Jackson, “Protection” went down with Nullification. In 1846, under President Polk, the liberal Democratic tariff of Secretary Walker was framed, under which our exports increased from $99,299,766 in 1845, to $196,689,718 in 1851, and our net imports from $101,907,734 to $194,526,639. In 1856, under Democratic rule, our net imports were $298,261,364, in specie value, and our exports $310,586,330. In that year the Democratic Convention declared “the time has come for the people of the United States to declare themselves in favor of progressive free trade throughout the world.” Under Republican Protection, despite the development of the population, our net imports fell from $572,080,919 in 1874, to $455,407,836 in 1876, and our exports from $704,463,120 (mixed values, gold and inflated currency) to $655,463,969; and in 1876 the Democratic Convention declared, “We demand that all Custom House taxation shall be only for revenue.” Of course trade can never be said to be free excepting where, as in the internal commerce of the United States, no tax is levied on trade; and therefore so long as any revenue is raised by duties it is absurd, as Senator Sherman said in discussing the tariff question in 1867, to talk of a “free trade tariff.” But it cannot be denied that under the Democratic Revenue Tariff of 1846 a revenue of at least $140,000,000 would easily now be raised, and Senator Sherman, in the speech to which I refer, admitted that “the wit of man could not possibly frame a tariff” which should produce that sum “without amply protecting our domestic industry.” If this happens as an incident to raising such a revenue, American manufacturers will do well to be thankful for it. Had the monopolists succeeded in getting Mr. Blaine into the White House to thwart legislative reform of tariff taxation for four years more, a worse thing would have overtaken them. For it is unquestionable that a spirit of resistance to protective monopolies is moving through the country, and especially through that nursery of empire, the great North-West, which will not much longer be denied. The Democratic Convention at Chicago wisely took note of this when it made Mr. Vilas of Wisconsin, one of the most eloquent and popular of North-Western Democrats, permanent chairman of the body; and Mr. Vilas has stated the purposes and the convictions of the North-West with plainness of speech:—

The tariff (he says) is a form of slavery not less hateful because the whip is not exposed. No free people can or will bear it. There is but one course. The plan of protective robbery must be utterly eradicated from every law for taxation. With unflinching steadfastness, but moderately, without destructive haste or violence, the firm demand of freedom must be persistently pressed, until every dollar levied in the name of Government goes to the Treasury, and the vast millions now extorted for a class are left in the pockets of the people who earn the money. Resolute to defend the sacred rights of property, we must be resolute to redress the flagrant wrongs of property.

These are strong words. But they are only the echo from the land of the Great Lakes in 1884 of the liberal principles embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and sanctioned by the Constitution of the United States in 1789. Those principles are the life of the Democratic party. The Democratic party can only be opposed by opposing those principles. It can only be crushed by crushing them; and it is their inextinguishable vitality which guarantees the permanence of our indissoluble Union of indestructible States.—Nineteenth Century.