PREFACE OF THE EDITOR

At an early period of his life Samuel J. Tilden seems to have had a sense of its importance not ordinarily felt by youth of his age. This may be accounted for in part by the circumstance that while barely out of his teens, both by pen and speech, he had secured the respectful attention of many of the leading statesmen of his generation. At school he preserved all his composition exercises, and from that time to the close of his life it may well be doubted if he ever wrote a note or document of any kind of which he did not preserve the draft or a copy. As the events with which he had to deal came to assume, as they naturally did, increasing importance with his years, one or more corrected drafts were made of important papers, most, if not all, of which were carefully preserved.

As what may fitly enough be termed Mr. Tilden's public life covered more than half a century, during most of which time he was one of the recognized leaders of one of the great parties of the country, the public will learn without surprise that the accumulations of social, political, and documentary correspondence which fell into the hands of his executors, to be measured by the ton, embraced among its topics almost every important political question by which this nation has been agitated since the accession of General Andrew Jackson to the Presidency in 1829.

A collection of Tilden's Public Writings and Speeches was published in 1885, only a year before his death, but very little of his private correspondence appeared in that publication.

The duty imposed upon his executors of looking through such a vast collection of papers and selecting such as would be profitable for publication has been a long and a very tedious one. They indulge the hope, however, that the volumes now submitted will be found to shed upon the history of our country during the latter half of the last century much light unlikely to be reflected with equal lustre from any other quarter. It will also, they believe, help to transmit to posterity a juster sense than as yet generally prevails of the majestic proportions of one of the most gifted statesmen our country has produced.

Tilden may be said to have fleshed his maiden sword in politics as a champion of President Jackson in his war against the recharter of a United States bank of discount and deposit. He next became somewhat more personally conspicuous as a fervent champion of Mr. Van Buren's substitute for the national bank, now known as the Assistant Treasury.

In 1848 he led the revolt of the Democratic party in New York State against the creation of five slave States, with their ten slave-holding Senators, out of the Territory of Texas. Among the immediate results of this revolt were the defeat of General Cass, the Democratic candidate for President, and the development of a Free-soil party, which later took the name of the Republican, nominated and elected Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency—synchronously with which, and for the first time in the nation's history, the decennial census of 1860 disclosed the fact that the political supremacy of the nation had been transferred to the non-slave-holding States.

Though averse to resisting the secession of the slave States by flagrant war, Tilden did his best and much during the war to prevent an irreconcilable alienation of the people of the two sections, while at the same time building up for himself a reputation in his profession scarcely second to that of any other in the country; and by it, before he had reached the fiftieth year of his age, a fortune which made him no longer dependent upon it for his livelihood.

The first public use he made of this independence was to retrieve the fortunes of the Democratic party by delivering the city of New York from a municipal combination which was threatening it with bankruptcy.

Of Tilden's many achievements as a public servant, it may well be doubted if there was any for which he deserves so much honor as for his part in the overthrow of this pillaging combination, familiarly known as the Tweed Ring, nor any for which it seems so entirely impossible to have then provided another equally competent leader who could and would have given the time, incurred the expense, and assumed the risks that Mr. Tilden did when, with no personal advantage in view, he boldly consecrated several of what might have been the most lucrative years of his professional life to this desperate battle with intrenched municipal villany.

The people of the State were not slow to realize that a man with the courage, power, and resources exhibited by Mr. Tilden in this memorable conflict was precisely the kind of man needed by them for Governor; and while yet wearied with the fatigue and covered with the dust of this municipal struggle, he was constrained by his admirers to enter the lists as a candidate against General Dix, the Republican candidate for that office. The result was a change of about 100,000 votes from the number by which Governor Dix had been elected two years before, and Tilden's triumphant election to his place.

Without doffing his armor, and even before his investiture with his new robes of office, he instituted an elaborate investigation of the canals of the State; so that he had been but a few weeks in office before he was engaged with numerically a far more formidable foe than the one over which he had just triumphed, but one for which his official position happily equipped him with far superior resources. His triumph over the Canal Ring of the State was consequently so short, quick, and decisive as to give him a national reputation, and to make him, long before his term of office at Albany expired, the inevitable candidate of his party to succeed General Grant for the Presidency. He was unanimously nominated by the Democratic National Convention, held at St. Louis in 1876, on the second ballot, and was elected by a popular majority of over 250,000. He was then destined to receive a distinction never shared by any President of the United States, of being an elect of the people for that office, which, by the operation of a tribunal unknown to the Constitution, was given to another.

For the remaining ten years of his life Tilden's health prevented his being wholly a candidate or wholly not a candidate, so reluctant were his numerous friends to give up all hope of such a restoration of health as would enable him to resume once more the leadership of his party. In this they were disappointed.

Thus for more than half a century Mr. Tilden was a shaper and a maker of American history. What kind of history and by what means it was made these volumes are expected to render more clear to the world, and his fame perhaps more enduring.

Mr. Tilden's life, like that of Israel's second king, was, as we have seen, a life of almost constant warfare, and of course he was always more or less liable to be viewed by partisan eyes and judged with only partial justice. None of us can judge himself quite correctly until he can look back upon his conduct after a considerable lapse of years. So we only see a public man as he is entitled to be seen, as Moses was permitted to see his Lord: after He had passed. It is to be hoped that sufficient time has elapsed since Tilden was taken from us to enable us to see by the reflection of his life in this correspondence how lofty was the plane of his entire public life, and how correctly he judged his qualifications for a successful political career when he said that his party standards were too high for the multitude. They were too high, unquestionably, for what is commonly understood as success in politics. It would have been easy for him—as these pages will show—to have been President had his ethical standards been nearer the average of those of the parties of his time.

Without presuming to institute any invidious comparisons, I have no hesitation in expressing my conviction that neither in the writings, speeches, or literary remains of any President of the United States thus far will be found more suggestions profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for the instruction of any American who aspires to be a maker of a nation's laws or an administrator of them, than will be found in Mr. Tilden's Writings, Speeches, and Correspondence.

With the permission of Messrs. Houghton & Mifflin, I have prefixed to these volumes an "Appreciation" of Mr. Tilden by the late James Coolidge Carter, which originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly of October, 1892. Mr. Carter's eminence at the American bar and forum, and his relations, both personal and professional, with Mr. Tilden, give value to his judgment of his deceased friend which, both for the honor of himself and of Mr. Tilden, is entitled to all the prominence that can be given to it in these volumes.