The Tboagbt and Character of Same1 J. Ti/dee: The Democrat -

As Inheritor

ROBERT KELLEY+

HOST of new slants on the political thought of the Jacksonians has recently become available in the A work of many historians. Little of a comparable

nature has been done for the Democrats of the Recon- struction period; if anything, they are simply described as pallid imitations of the Republicans, and no systematic attempt has been made to get inside their minds. The first step toward an understanding would seem to be a series of case studies of individual men from the perspectives provided by the new work on Jacksonian Democracy, leading eventually to some overall conceptions. It is the purpose of this essay to contribute toward this end by examining the thought of Samuel Tilden, the ex- Jacksonian who became through most of the 1870’s the leading figure in the Demo- cratic Party. 1

The key to his thinking lay first of all in his character. + T h e author, a member of Beta Beta chapter, is Associate Professor

of History at the UniversiLy of California, Santa Barbara. He was granted his Ph.D. by Stanford University (1953). He is the author of Gold vs. Grain: The Hydraulic Mining Controversy in Cnlifornia’s Sacremento Valley; A Chapter in the Decline of the Concept of L.aissez Faire and of articles and biographical articles published in the Journal of British Studies, Victorian Studies, the Colorado Quarterly, the Pacific Historical Review, T h e Encyclo- pedia Britannica, and the 1959 Britannica Book of the Year. This article is part of a larger study of Anglo-American liberalism from Gladstone to Woodrow Wilson.

The brilliant pamphlet, Jacksonion Democracy (Washington D. C.. 1958), produced by Charles Grier Sellers, Jr., for the American Historical Association’s Service Center for Teachers of History, is fundamental reading for anyone who wishes to understand the recent historiography of the period.

176

Samuel J. Tilden More than most men, perhaps, his personality was fixed in one mold, discernible from childhood and understandable in the context of that childhood. From a sickly youth in which he had no play group to the peak of his political power, Tilden moved through life a remote and lonely little man, erect and cold-mannered, largely friendless, admired but not liked. He had, therefore, the cast of mind of an outsider, the observer of life. Given the opportunity, he preferred to quantify human problems and relations; he enjoyed computing distances, populations, taxes, national income, and expenditures.

Similarly, he sought obsessively for precision and order in his personal life and in the world around him. Inflexible in his own life pattern, he found it hard to adjust to new conditions. Faced with facts in a jumble, he flung himself upon them consumedly until he could hammer them into tight, unbreakable patterns. This character made him a brilliant political administrator, for he loved working out the votes and factors in every precinct. His legal fortune came from this same inexhaustible talent for achieving understanding of complex situations.

* “ A philosophy,” Wil1i:im James observed, “is the expression of a man’s intimate character.” [Essays in Radical Empiricism and a Pluralistic Universe (New York, 1947). 11, 20.1 Hundreds of psychological studies in the past ten years have borne this statement out. What a man takes note of in his life, and elaborates in a philosophy, depends in large part upon his perceptual readiness: the vigilance to particular things about him which he has because of the special structure of his personality. See Gordon Allport. Pattern and Growth in Personality (New York, 1961), 263. Certainly Tilden was of the type which C. Frankel refers to as “geometers in politics.” Their style is cold and abstract, and their language prosy and unimaginative. Unconcerned with the mystical, emotional, or spiritual side of politics, they look to quantifiable facts. See “Liberalism and Political Symbols,” Antioch Review (September 1953), XII, 351-960.

3A1exander C. Flick, Samuel Jones Tilden: A Study in Political Sagacity (New I’ork, 1939). and John Bigelow, Life of Samuel J . Ti lden (New York, 1895), 2 vols., have been relied upon for the general information in this paper on Tilden’s life. Instructive here is Carl Jung’s classic formulation describing what he called the introverted type of personality: its obsessively analytical turn of mind, its rigid inflexibility, and its concern for absolute principles. See Psychological Types (New York, 1923).

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The Historian But his mind was more than an adding machine. It was

equipped, too, with dominating frameworks of thought. One of these came from his geographic location. Born in 1814, he grew up in a little New York village near Albany. Here he saw “the endless procession of emigrants passing by day, and often encamping by night on the little green in front of the house where I was living.” His mind was caught up by the vision of the great surge of migrants from Europe and the eastern states, moving westward through the Mohawk Valley to spread out in the far interior on the vast net- work of waterways and railroads which linked everything together.

His was a world that was mobile, a world of “fluid economics,” to use Parrington’s term. He was caught up in the dilemma which Marvin Meyers has seen facing all Jacksonians: the conflict between the lure of profitmaking in so buoyant an economy and the nostalgic pull of the Old Republic, when life was felt to be innocent, calm, and virtuous. Although he made millions in the railroad boom, he was wracked by the illnesses typical of inner tension. He talked frequently of the past, regarding “himself as a living ancestor. . . who gained courage by looking backward.” His mental set was not forward, joyous in contemplation of a brave new world, but backward, grieved at the steady snapping of the ties with the past.

The personal universe in which he was reared trained ‘Bigelow, Tilden, I, 356. This theme recum repeatedly as a major

element in his speeches. See: Speech, New York Constitutional Convention, September 11, 1867, in John Bigelow, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Samuel J . Tilden (New York, 1885), I , 350 (hereafter referred to as Writings); Speech, Union Square, New York City, September 17, 1866, ibid., I, 342; First Annual Message, Albany, January 5, 1875, ibid., 11, 37-38; Speech, Buffalo, August 10, 1875, ibid., 11. 214-215; Second Annual Message, Albany, January 4, 1876, ibid., 11, 238; Speech, New York City, November 8, 1877, i bid., 494.

6See Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (New York, 1954), 11, viii; Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (New York, 1960), 11-12; Flick, Tilden, 528.

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Samuel J. Tilden him rigorously in the Jacksonian categories and symbols. f~

Since his father was a close friend of Martin Van Buren, his family group was in a constant ferment of political entertainment and discussion. In this household Tilden played a special part. Because intelligence was much admired, his role - which was quite rewarding - was that of the bright recluse, the brainy youth who was sick most of the time, pampered, deferred to, and sought after for advice by the older people, who were his only close friends. The role of detached oracle was to be the one he played throughout his life.

The ethos of his family group was intensely historical. Members had fought in the Revolution, and they bitterly hated the British and all Federalists, whom they categorized together. Tilden listened in rapt attention to the stories told over and over again of the War and the exciting days of the early Republic when the great giants, Hamilton and Jefferson, had fought and founded the two parties. He absorbed an exciting sense of the immediacy of all these controversies. Once fixed in the political polarities of this family obsession, he never questioned its assumptions.

The presiding saint in his home was Thomas Jefferson. a Tamotsu Shibutani is exceptionally helpful here, directing our attention

to the critical importance of reference groups in the formation of systems of thought. Men tend to internalize the world-view of the groups within which they are reared, trained, and live. A key observation: “Each socialized person, then, is a society in miniature. Once he has incorporated the culture of his group [defined as the perspective they share], it becomes his perspective, and he can bring this frame of reference to bear upon all new situations that he encounters.” See his perceptive chapter, “Reference Groups and Social Control,” in Human Behavior and Social Processes: An Zntcractionist Appro~ch , ed. Arnold M. Rose (Boston, 1962), 128-147. The quoted sentences are from p. 132.

Speech, Chatham, Columbia County, September 24, 1868, Bigelow. Writings, I, 449; Flick, Tilden, 11. Allport refers to this general pattern of unchanging commitment as being “field-bound”: thinking takes place within fixed reference points. ’The individual cannot go comfortably out of what he believes. “By contrast, the more active, able, secure, relaxed individual is able to perceive and think in channels that are flexible and on the whole better adapted to the objective demands of the situation he finds himself in.” [Pattern and Growth in Personality, 270.1

179

The Historian When his Memoirs burst upon the world in 1829, a copy was immediately placed in the young Tilden’s hands. I t became his unfailing textbook of political economy, his Bible, his imperishable and unchallengeable source of inspiration. When he was twenty, he was quoting Jefferson; in his sixties, the Civil War behind him, he was doing the same.

But as Merrill Peterson has pointed out, Jefferson was so complex a figure that he presented conflicting faces to posterity. Did Tilden see the revolutionary who clamored for the unfettered right of the people to rule? Or did he see the careful constitutionalist, fearful of organized and remote power, who emphasized the primacy of the states and the limited powers of the central government?

Tilden saw the latter Jefferson. When he said in 1875 that the country needed a revival of Jeffersonian democracy, he emphasized the following things:

As the means of the reaction of 1800, Thomas Jefferson founded and organized the Democratic party. He stayed the advancing centralism. He restored the rights of the States and the localities. He repressed the meddling of government in the concerns of private business, remitting the management of the industries of the country to the domain of the individual judgment and conscience. 9

He inherited another theme as well. As Peterson observes, Jefferson’s great legacy was an ideology of conflict, a view

8See Merrill D. Peterson, The Jeflerson Image in the American Mind (New York, 1969, 29, for description of the impact of the Memoirs. “I read them over again and again,” Tilden said, “and thus became thoroughly imbued with Jeffersonian political ideas.” [Bigelow, Tilden, I, 15-16.] “A person who is somewhat isolated from real peopk,” Shibutani observes, “may . . . dedicate himself to a set of abstract principles learned from a book whose author he greatly admires.” r‘Reference Groups,” Human Behavior, 141.1

@Peterson, Jeflerson Image, 9-10 Letter, Tilden to N. Y. State Democratic Committee, August 1873, in John Bigelow, ed., Letters and Literary Mcniorials of Samuel J . Tilden (New York, 1908). I. 321 (hereafter referred to as Letters.) For other such references, see: Letter, Tilden to Columbia Sentinel, April 11, 1833, Bigelow, Writings, I, 23; Letter, Tilden to N n u York Standard and Statesman, February 14, 1834, ibid., I, 36-37; Speech, Democratic State Convention, Albany, March 11. 1868, ibid., I, 396.

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Samuel J. Tilden that politics is the scene of an implacable and eternal struggle between the aristocracy and the humble people. Tilden also dichotomized politics into good people by nature unsullied and bad ones by nature greedy and self-seeking. His writings were filled with such phrases as “the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry,” the “clear-headed and stout-hearted yeomanry,” the noble people with “their firmness and integrity of purpose,” the “moral sense and purpose of the community” always in danger from “its selfish and fraudulent interests.” lo

Through Van Buren and the intensely personal political world surrounding him, Tilden came into contact with influences and views which intensified his perspective. l1 He learned to identify his party with Van Buren’s struggle up- ward against the social hostilities of the Hudson Valley aristocracy. Even more dramatically he encountered Hamil- ton, who was almost more important to Van Buren than Jefferson. In Van Buren’s autobiography it is the giant figure of Hamilton, the fallen angel, that dominates the scene. In short, it was the antagonist who mattered. Van Buren saw the Democratic mission as that of fighting back Hamilton’s hatred for democracy and his malevolent scheme to install a banking system to buttress aristocratic power and destroy the republican constitution. 12 Here again, Tilden lived in

losee Speech, “Currency, Prices, and Wages,” New Lebanon, October 3, 1840, ibid., I , 158; Letter to Albany Argus, October 20, 1837, ibid., I, 75; Letter to Colu~nbia Sentinel, April 11, 1833, ibid., 1 , 19; Address, Buffalo. August 10, 1875, ibid., 11, 217.

l1 In each such group, “there develops a universe of discourse. Pertinent experiences are categorized in particular ways, and a special set of symbols is used to refer to them. . . . There are special norms of conduct, a set of values, a prestige ladder, and a common outlook toward life. . . . In each world there evolves a different historical orientation, selectively emphaaidng past events of special interest.” [Shibutani, “Reference Groups,” Human Behovior, 156-137.1

=See Martin Van Buren, “The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren,” ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, Annual Report of the American Historical Associatron for the Year 1918, 11, and Inquiry into the Origin and Coum of Political Parties in the United States (New York, l867), especially p. 166 of the latter for concise statement of his theory of politics.

181

The Historian an intellectual atmosphere that was redolent of 1800. When he carried into the Reconstruction Era a sense that the struggles of the Old Republic still lived, breathed, and were pertinent, he was still in possession of the mental set gained in the world of Van Buren and the Regency.

For Tilden, therefore, the enemy - the Federalists and their inheritors - played a central role. Because they were ever present and hungry for power, the “masses” stood in constant danger of losing their democracy, their freedom, and their right to the fruit of their own toil. As against the party of Jefferson, the antagonist party “has always been dominated by principles which favor legislation for the benefit of particular classes at the expense of the body of the people.”18 Had not the “whole course of an influential party aimed at a union of political with moneyed power?” he cried out to a Locofoco audience in 1838. “Has not that party sought to confine the elective franchise to the rich? Has not one of its great leaders declared that ‘Government ought to be founded on property’?” l4

Similarly, he charged that the Republicans sought revolu- tionary power by fostering illusions and wild ideas, discarding “the maxims and the habits of constitutional government for the expedience of the moment.’’ Ideas of “governmental meddling and centralism” dominate them, and “class interests hold [them] firmly to evil courses.’’lg Feeding upon the notion that political support may be bought by handing out favors and devoted to the pernicious conception that govern-

* Letter. Tilden to Committee from National Democratic Convention, October 6, 1884, Bigelow, Letters, 11, 653.

“Address to the Farmers, Mechanica and Workingmen of the State of New York, Tammany Hall, February 26, 1838, Bigelow. Writings, I, 86-87. Robert K. Merton, in Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, Ill., 1957), 300-304, makes observations concerning “negative reference groups” which are relevant here. This concept has been insightfully used by Lee Benson. The Concept of Jackonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton. 1961), to highlight the fact that in many ways it is the adversary that counts most in the shaping of political thought.

=Letter to Evening Post, New York City, February 7, 1863, ibid., I, 333; Speech, Syracuse, September 17, 1874, ibid., 11. 13.

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Samuel J. Tilden ment should protect and stimulate the economy, the Repub- licans attracted corruptionists as honey draws flies. T h e result was a corrupt party staffed by officeholders, contractors, jobbers, and a swarm of other seekers after government money, l8 who thrived in an atmosphere of hypocritical moralism, false finance, grasping centralism, and largesse to favored groups in the form of tariffs, bounties, and public works. From such despots, filled with a cavalier disregard of the Constitution, nothing good could come: l7

All history shows that reforms in government must not be expected from those who sit serenely on the social mountain-tops enjoying the benefits of the existing order of things. Even the divine Author of our religion found his followers not among the self-complacent Pharisees, but among lowly-minded fishermen. The Republican party is largely made up of those who live by their wits, and who aspire in politics to advantages over the rest of mankind, similar to those which their daily lives are devoted to securing in private business. 18

In particular, the enemy displayed that fatal tendency in human affairs, an urge to adventurous rashness in eco- nomic matters. A modest foray into content analysis shows the pervasiveness of Tilden’s concern on this score in some

Letter to State Democratic Committee, August 1873, Bigelow, Letters,

Speech, Democratic State Convention, Albany, March 11, 1868. Bigelow, Writings, I, 395-420; Letter to State Democratic Committee, August 1873, Bigelow, Letters, I, 321; Letter to Jefferson Club, New Haven, March 30, 1882, Bigelow, Writings, 11, 518. A comparison with William Gladstone’s attack upon the Tories in his 1879 Midlothian campaign is revealing. They were interested, he said, only in the wealthy, thirsted after a government with strong and irresponsible powers, played upon prejudices and passions to gain power, sought to meddle with economic matters by introducing tariffs, and liked an active, adventurous national policy. See Robert Kelley. “Mid- lothian: A Study in Politics and Ideas;’ Victorian Studies (December 1960).

Letter to Committee from National Democratic Convention, October 6, 1884, Bigelow, Letters, 11, 653-654. Benson, Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, has made it clear that this description of the social division between parties is hardly to be accepted as accurate. It is much more realistic to think of parties as almost evenly balanced ethnic alliances. However, as Marvin Meyers establishes in the preface to the Vintage edition of The Jacksonian

I, 323-324.

IV. 119-140.

The Historian of the writings and speeches of his Jacksonian period. He condemned: 19

1833: rashness and extravagance in action or opinion inconsiderate and extravagant generalizations the impulse of passion extravagant doctrines transient enthusiasms speculative beliefs

new-fangled doctrines exaggerated ideas stimulating to constantly increasing excesses excitement in banking and trade

rash adventures in a rising market tempting the enterprising from the ordinary pursuits

diverting from agriculture to trade and speculation attracting swarms of settlers by visions of easy and

traversing the country to engage in traffic and

streets being filled with speculators mercantile excitement and speculation hazardous adventures

0 improvidence and unproductive expenditure wild and ruinous projectsz0

1837:

1840:

of industry

sudden wealth

specula tion

- Persuasion, the role of such visions of party as that held by Tilden is critically important. Properly qualified, they are instructive when accepted on their own terms.

-1 have been guided in this approach by John A. Garraty’s innovative article, “The Interrelations of Psychology and Biography,” Psychological Bulletin (November 1954), LI, 569-582, in which he describes methods of content analysis which can be helpful to historians.

mThese have been drawn from: “Van Buren and the Nullifiers.” Columbia Sentinel, September 12, 1833, Bigelow, Writings, I, 22-26; Open

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Samuel J. Tilden As Marvin Meyers has observed, the Jacksonians spoke

to the fears of their countrymen, while the Whigs spoke to their hopes. Surrounded by swift change, novel measures, and all the allurements and perils of a fluid economy, they preached “a decalogue of moral prohibitions” rather than “an articulate set of social ends and means.” 21 They yearned for a calm reliance upon the smooth and supposedly rational operations of nature.

With Tilden concepts of nature were paramount. He always cast his thought in the shape of naturalistic images - some of them mechanistic, others vividly biological. 22 The following phrases throw light upon this dimension of his thought:

1837: the ordinary friction of the great machinery of trade the excess [of currency] would go abroad to find a

By a universal law, all the parts of a common level

circulation [of currency] tend to a level. 1838:

All the laws of Nature harmonize, and it is only when some of them are violated that convulsion ensues. -

Letter to William Leggett, New York Times, March 25 and April 4, 1837, ibid., I, 45-54; Letter to Albany Argus, September 28, 1837, ibid., I, 57-64. Speech “Currency, Prices, and Wages,” New Lebanon, October 3, 1840, ibid.,

s1 Jacksonian Persuasion, 254. Revealing comparison may be found in Glyndon G. Van Deusen, “Some Aspects of Whig Thought and Theory in the Jacksonian Period,” American Historical Review (January 1958), LXIII,

“That Tilden, always remote from people and from life, dwelt in a world of abstractions, is understandable. Hc was of the type described by Edward Shils as having an “interior need to penetrate beyond the screen of immediate concrete experience.” Symbols which “are more general than the immediate . . . situations of everyday life, and remote in their reference in both time and space” take their attentions. They constitute an identifiable social class, the intellectuals. r‘The Intellectuals and the Powers: Some Perspectives For Comparative Analysis,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (October 19583, I, 5-22.]

185

I, 103-161.

305-322.

The Historian 1840:

thanks to the beneficent regulation of the laws of

Currency is to business what the blood is to the

Property diffuses itself through the masses who have

trade!

animal system.

produced it.

1860: They are interlaced with each other by the number-

less ties which spring up and grow around and grow over individuals living in one community.

the compacted, intertwining fibres which bind the atoms of human society into one formation of natural growth

the influence of the several parts of the social mechanism

with freedom to such of these people as overflow into the Territories

0 It [the Republican Party if ruling the South] would have neither the nerves of sensation, which convey intelligence to the intellect of the body politic, nor the ligaments and muscles which hold its parts together, and move them in harmony.

1863: the organism of Government

0 The whole value of the arrangement by which our world is kept in its place in the solar system is in the balance between two opposing forces. . . . So it is with the adjustment of powers between the State and Federal governments.

1871:

1877: 0 millions of unorganized, isolated atoms of human

society

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Samuel J. Tilden Even personal accumulations, after the owners have

left them, sink into the mass which society in the aggregate owns, and undergo a fresh distribution.

A party is a living being, having all the organs of

In 1876 as Governor of New York he delightedly expati- ated upon his habitual mode of thought-the analysis of society through the use of statistics and scientific analogies - in an address to the budding Association for the Advancement of Social Sciences:

You assume that the complex phenomena of society, its grand tides of movement, its successions of changes, growth and decay of populations, mortality, pauperism, crime, are capable of being analyzed, studied, and reduced to formulas. Now, gentlemen, it seems to me that no more important object of investigation could be presented to the human mind. I am quite sure that the application of the same philosophy which has achieved such grand results elsewhere will astonish you. . . . Even those uncertain things that depend on the human will are capable of being studied, of being analyzed, of being classified, and their results stated. For Tilden, such analytical methods pierced through the

screen of immediate experience - confusing, chaotic, scramble - to reveal the greatest insight of all:

Gentlemen, how is it that this great multitude of individual wills and individual tastes, acting separately and independently, find themselves averaged and compen- sated until everything tends to and everything results in an equilibrium of forces? It is that the Divine Being has impressed upon everything order, method and law. 24

sa All of these were drawn (with one exception) from statements contained in Bigelow, Writings, and only page references will be made here: I, 68-70,

496. See also Bigelow, Letters, 11, 687. %Address of Welcome to the Saratoga Conference of the Association for

the Advancement of Social Science. September 5, 1876, Bigelow, Writings, 11. 375-379. (Italics added.)

187

1885:

eyes, ears, and feeling. 28

86, 129, 130, 158, 294, 295, 306, 318, 325-32G, 335, 485; 11. 11. 191, 197, 489,

The Historian During Tilden’s lifetime many public issues clamored

for attention. However, he operated within an intellectual tradition that equipped him with concern for only some of them. The Jeffersonian cluster of enemies and problems gave Democrats a “false consciousness”: a program of action which ignored new and pressing problems such as labor exploitation and the need for control of the irresponsible use of power by capitalists in industry. 26 In addition, the selective perceptions of his own personality meant that he was alive to only some of the items on the Jeffersonian agenda. He talked little of many issues which agitated others such as democracy, equality, tariffs, the rural image of innocence and purity, the power of judges, or internal improvements. Although they had some prominence in his thought, they were overshadowed by three central concerns: corruption, race, and monetary policy.

The problem of corruption, of course, is the issue most directly associated with Tilden in textbooks on American history. He crushed the Tweed Ring, capped this eminence by a dramatic fight with the Canal Ring as governor of his state, then lost the presidency in the most corrupt electoral count in American political history.

Tilden had a theory of government ready at hand when major corruption arose after the Civil War. It had always been the Jeffersonian thesis that the Federalists and their successors wanted to govern by making their rule profitable to certain classes. The task of Jackson’s party was to disassemble the vast corrupt apparatus of bounties, tariffs, special incorporations, banking acts, and monopolies. 28 It was, therefore, a tragic blow to find that the most ambitious

MThe term, used perceptivelj by Peterson in The Jefferson Image, 70, comes from the sociologist Karl Mannheim. It refers to “an orientation to traditional norms with which action in the existing situation cannot comply.” See his Ideology and Utopia, tr. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York, 1936), 94-97.

aa ‘I ‘Dismantling’ and ‘restoration’ were the key terms in my analysis of the moral posture of Uacksonians] vis-a-vis the Jacksonian economic world.” [Marvin Meyers, Jacksonion Persuasion, 161-162, 212.1

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Samuel J. Tilden and creatively ingenious corruption in the nation was going on within his own party, in his own state, in the form of the Tweed Ring. Torn by an unavoidable conflict between his political values and his intense loyalty to his party - “From boyhood to death,” Flick observed, “the . . . Party . . . took the place of wife, children, and church.”27- he finally gave himself to the job of pursuing Tweed, staying with it year after year until the Ring was crushed com- pletely. 28

In the midst of the fight he was able to categorize the problem so that it did not violate his basic conviction that centralized power and corruption went hand in hand. “The cancer which reached a head in the municipal government of the metropolis,” he said in a characteristic utterance, “gathered its virus from the corrupted blood which pervades our whole country. Everywhere there are violated public and private trusts. The carpet-bag governments are cancers on the body politic even more virulent than the New York Ring.” 20 The Tweed Ring grew out of a local application of centralism. The Albany legislature had taken the power of self-government from the people of the City of New York and had placed it in the hands of a small self-appointed commission, which then proceeded, unchecked by the people, to divide up the municipal treasury. “It is the experience of human government,” he warned, “that abuses of power follow power wherever it goes.”

That Tweed was a test of the democratic proposition was

Flick, Tilden, 532. “This is the most controversial period in Tilden’s life. Was he a

reluctant dragon who acted only when the Times exposed the corruption? Certainly, his slowness to move until incontrovertible evidence was at hand was no more than typical of his habitual mode of operation. For the anti- Tilden view, see Mark D. Hirsch, “Samuel J. Tilden: The Story of a Lost Opportunity,” American Historical Heoieru (July 1951). LVI, 788-802.

“Pamphlet, “The New York City Ring: Its Origin, Maturity, and Fall,’’ (New York, 1873), Bigelow, Writings, I, 600.

so Municipal Reform Message to the Legislature, Albany, May 11, 1875, ibid., 11, 119-135.

189

The Historian painful knowledge to Tilden’s generation. Men felt it as a wound upon the spirit. “Fellow-citizens,” Tilden said in 1875, “it is not to ourselves alone that we are to look when we consider what is involved in this controversy. The whole United States, and indeed other countries, are interested in it. The cause of free government has been dishonored and imperilled by the abuse, maladministration, and peculations that have recently prevailed in this country.”31 It was in this context that “reform” to much of Tilden’s generation meant primarily administrative reform. Having purified the vessel of his state, Tilden’s great appeal in 1876 was largely as a symbol of purification, the cleansing of the Republic.

The Jacksonians were hostile to abolitionists, because they distracted attention from issues closer to home. Work- ingman movements had also a deep distrust of abolitionists, who seemed so indifferent to the “wage slavery” which existed in the North. Generally hostile to slavery in the abstract, workingmen spent little energy in attacking it, concentrating instead upon their own objectives.92 Also, Van Buren and the Dutch farmers from whom he sprang - who voted overwhelmingly Democratic - had strong prejudices against free Negroes. The Dutch farmers had owned slaves, did not like having them taken away, and vigorously opposed social and political equality for them. 38 The Catholic Irish - ninety-five percent of whom voted Democratics4 - were violent enemies of New York City’s free Negroes because of

Speech, Utica, August 12, 1875, ibid., 11,227. See Ralph Henry Gabriel. The Course of Amcrican Democratic Thought (New York. 1956), for the pervasiveness of the conviction that America’s primary mission was to justify democracy to the world.

A thorough examination of the complexity of workingman attitudea toward antislavery is in Joseph G. Rayback, ”The American Workingman and the Antislavery Crusade,” Journal of Economic History, 111 (1943). 152- 163. See also Arthur M. Schlesinpr, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston, 1946),

Benson, Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, 8, 208-213, 295-297. For 232, 424-427.

Van Buren’s views, see “Autobiography,” 132-138. and Znquisy, 354-358. a Benson. Concefit of Jacksonian Democracy, 16.5-176.

190

Samuel J. Tilden competition for unskilled jobs. The very idea of abolition was anathema to them, for they feared a flooding of Northern labor markets with released slaves. The draft riots in New York City were “the bloodiest race riots of American history.” Laborers - among whom the poorer Irish predominated - hunted down Negroes and killed them, driving thousands more from the city permanently. 36

There were intellectual roots, as well, to Jacksonian race ideas. Jefferson’s famous Query XIV of the Notes on Virginia held that Negroes were naturally inferior in both body and mind to whites. To many Jeffersonians, this word from Holy Writ was final. 3* Also, abolitionism was an idea which emanated from self-conscious religious groups. If there was any legacy, as Peterson has pointed out, which Jefferson handed down, it was a vigorous secularism. *‘ Most agnostics and freethinkers were active Jacksonians, with Tammany Hall a prominent headquarters. On issues such as temper- ance, Sunday laws, prayers at meetings, party differences were “distinct, passionate, and enduring.” 38

Furthermore, the whole idea of abolitionism violated Zuissez-fuire. An activist government was exactly the enemy of the Jacksonians. The Puritans in politics gave the impression that there were so many things to be done. The voice of the people must be felt1 The government must be used. 38

=Albon P. Man, Jr., “Labor Competition and the New York Draft Riots ,of 1863,” Journal of Negro History, XXXVI (1951) 375-405; Williston H. Lofton, “Northern Labor and the Negro during the Civil War;’ ibid., XXXIV (1949), 251-273: and same author, “Abolition and Labor,” ibid., XXXIII (1948) 249-283.

=Philip S. Foner, ed., The Basic Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1944), 147-149. Peterson, The Jefferson Image, is essential on this whole subject: 167, 172-173, 175-176.

Ibid., 92-93. Benson, Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, 35. 1R6-200.

-Ibid., 213. Leon Litwak‘s thorough and perceptive new study of the Northern Negro - North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States (Chicago, 1961) - is basic to an undentanding of this whole problem. On the attitudes of Northern Democrats, including Tilden, see pp. 84-90.

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The Historian Against this background it is clear that Tilden’s ideas

on the Negro were derivative. 40 He fought abolitionists and votes for free Negroes for years and was always caustic about moralistic reforms. 41 Indifferent about slavery - he soon forgot like Van Buren the enthusiasms of the Free Soil movement - he largely retired from politics during the 1850’s and concentrated upon building his fortune.

In 1860, however, he was shocked out of this retirement. Terribly moved at what was happening to his country, in the late days of the presidential campaign he published the “most influential of all his public writings” - the Kent Letter. 4a It was a cry of despair, the lamentation of a mind shocked by passion, desperately seeking reason in an irra- tional situation.

The letter was a long one, containing much on political theory which has no place here. His central assertions were upon slavery. Tragically, he said, a vast part of the northern population had assumed that something had to be done about slavery, even though - by the Constitution - slavery in a Southern state was no more the Federal government’s

While derivative, it is probable too that Tilden’s Personality was predisposed to racial prejudice. “Particularly interesting,” Allport observes, “is the discovery that people who are rigid in their perceptions and style of thinking tend to be prejudiced against Negroes, Jews, and other groups.” [Pattern and Growth in Personality, 269.1 The same author’s chapter, “The Prejudiced Personality,” in his major study, The Nature of Prejudice (New York, 1958), provides keen insights into this problem. An important concern for Tilden was purity in government: he divided people into categories of “good” and ”bad”; had to have things neat and precisc; kept himself an observer, remote from life; found safety and his life’s work within his party; and never questioned the authoritative dogmas of Jefferson. These characteristics are remarkably similar to Allport’s listing of the likely qualities of a prejudiced personality: moralism, dichotomization, need for definiteness, externalization of conflict, institutionalism, authoritarianism. [p. 374.1

41 See Open Letter to William Leggett, New York Tirries, March 23, 1837, Bigelow, Writings, I, 43-44; Bigelow, Tildoa, I, 57 and 120-122; Flick, Tilden, chapter VI; Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, 464-465; Benson, Concept of Jack- sonian Democracy, 318; Letter to John Taylor and Andrew Kirk, October 3, 1855, Bigelow, Writings, 1, 279-283.

Letter to William Kent, October 26, 1860, ihid., I, 289-330. (It appeared first in the New York Evening Post, October 30, 1860.)

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Samuel J. Tilden concern than slavery in Brazil. At the very least, Northeners said, it must be kept where it was and not allowed to spread. Nothing, Tilden said, opened up a bleaker future. Forced to subsist upon dwindling resources, the growing Negro and white population would suffer poverty and despair. Discour- aged, the whites would free their slaves as no longer profitable and emigrate alone, leaving behind the unambitious Negro, who would turn the Southern states into so many black republics. Was this what Northerners wanted?

As for the view that consequences should not deter from doing what moral right and duty commanded, Tilden was caustic. “No man,” he said, “has the right or duty to impose his own convictions upon others.” Certainly this was true when what was involved was a mere theory which held that “slavery is a wrong, without reference to any condition of time, place, or circumstances.”

There was a master philosophy which needed to be consulted once again for unfailing guidance: Let it alone. The briefest study of the course of the westward movement showed that it followed paths set down inflexibly by the determinants of geographic conditions and the culture carried with them by the emigrating groups. Therefore, the “current of Northern emigration does not deviate largely from certain parallels of latitude. The current of Southern emigration, tending in the same general direction, spreads out, perhaps deflects, to the southwest.” More importantly, the Northern current is several times as large in volume as that in the South, and it “tends to press southwardly the line where the two touch each other.”

Thus Southern migration moved to the southwest, carry- ing slavery with it, “withdrawing and moving toward the tropics,” following the curve of the Gulf shore southward. Furthermore, profitable cotton culture in the Deep South meant that slaves were being bought from the states of the upper South, lamentable though this be in what it does to

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The Historian slave families (Van Buren made the same hollow sound of mild regret about Dred Scott). The Border States, therefore, were being steadily drained of their slaves and by natural forces being transformed into white states.

“Would it not, on the whole, be better to let the black man go toward the tropics as best he may, bond or free,” Tilden asked, leaving “white men for the governing power” in the regions left behind? What wise man in possession of these facts could feel that he should “deal with them on any artificial system of human devising?” But,

It is too late! It is too late! We are upon the breakers. Whose eye quails now? Whose cheek blanches? It is not mine, who felt “a provident fear” and have done all I could. . . . My mind is filled, my heart swells with the thought, that yon wave which towers before us will engulf more of human happiness and human hopes than have perished in any one catastrophe since the world began.

If ever a world-view were revealed by a public writing, Tilden’s is here. Almost all of the elements are included: the abstractions, the atmosphere of remoteness and scientific observation, the hostility to coercive moralism, the complete unconcern for the Negro, and the triumphant application of laissez-faire, the “master philosophy.” He was proud of this effort. I t was to be widely printed and reprinted and to make him a considerable reputation.

He continued to fight abolition. Helping Horatio Seymour with his inaugural address as governor in 1862, he put in a passage predicting that abolition of slavery to restore the Union would create a military despotism. He founded in New York City the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge, which among other things was actively anti- abolition.49 In 1864 he stood before Wall Street bankers

“Man. “Labor Competition and the Draft Riots,” 375-405, so terms the Society. See its Papers (August 1863), No. 12, in which Samuel F. B. Morse sought to prove by copious biblical quotations and ethical arguments that slavery was a good thing, “one of the indispensable regulators of the Soda1 system, divinely ordained.” Ip. 10.1

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Samuel J. Tilden and merchants and lashed out at abolition as a “crude scheme of philanthropy,” an attempt to reconstruct human society which could only fail. How could the laws of New York and Vermont be imposed upon the South? We must depend upon somebody to run the South after the war, and since Northerners cannot do it, and the former slave is obviously unfit for self-government, reliance, he said, must ultimately be placed upon the white race. 44

In 1868, as chairman of the Democratic Party in New York, he returned to the topic for his last major effort. T h e Republicans had made the “black race” the governing power in the South for one reason: to get twenty senators and fifty representatives. They were afraid of the Northern reaction to their wild Reconstruction policies. Therefore, three million barbarian Negroes would be placed in a position where they with their fanatical Northern leaders, could rule over the North:

The grim Puritan of New England-whose only child, whose solitary daughter is already listening to the soft music of a Celtic wooer - stretches his hand down along the Atlantic coast to the receding and decaying African and says: “Come, let us rule this continent togetherl”

T h e three-million Negroes would have ten times as many senators as the four-million whites of New York state! Joining with their Northern allies, they would doubtless vote to admit Negroes to the suffrage in Northern states and take i t away from Irishmen and Germans. “Do you think they would not assert the superior rights of negroes born in this country over foreigners?”

It could not work. America was a great experiment which could only succeed if its people had intelligence and virtue. I t was a biologically-limited partnership between citizens, one that was intimate and complex. Who had been admitted to this partnership in the past? Only those who

USpeech to Wall Street Bankers and Merchants, November 1, 1864. Tilden Papers, Manuscript Division, New York Public Library.

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The Historian 3 could be taken naturally into the family. Those whose

entrance into the family was repugnant to Americans must always be “separate and incapable of amalgamation with the mass.” For this reason, therefore, America had always refused to admit into its self-governing partnership “inferior or . . . mixed races.” He had opposed, he said, the annexation of Mexico precisely on this ground. Certainly the swarming millions of Chinese could never be admitted, nor the Indians.

On the other hand, immigrants from Europe had pro- vided superb stock for the nation. “Races have a growth and culture,” Tilden observed, “as well as individuals.” Immigrants came simply to rejoin their kindred. They were admitted to the family openly; indeed, such liaison would doubtless lead to a higher type of mankind. But as to the Negro? Reverting to his most powerful imagery, he put it categorically :

In our body politic, as in the human system, what can be digested and assimilated is nutrition; it is the source of health and life. What remains incapable of being digested and assimilated can be only an element of disease and death. The question in respect to it is always this, - whether the vital forces are strong enough to prevail over it and excrete it from the system.45

“Any author is easy,” William James once observed, “if you can catch the centre of his vision.”4s Despite his strictures on the foregoing matters, the primary focus of Tilden’s mind was not upon corruption or race, but upon

Speech, Democratic State Convention, Albany, March 1 I, 1868, Bigelow, Writings, I. 395-420. The relentless biological images could be justifiably traced, in all probability, to the biological determinism which pervaded his age. S e e Richard Hofstadter, Social Uawinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (Boston, 1955), for the classic study of these influences. Valuable also on “scientific” racism in these decades is Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in Amm‘can Life (Garden City, N. Y., 1957). It should be pointed out that Tilden’s health was permanently shattered from childhood, and internal medicine absorbed him as an amateur occupation. Flick felt that illness was the dominating fact of Tilden’s life. See Bigelow, Retrospections of an Active Life (New York, 1909-1913) V, 303, for graphic description in detail of what this meant in Tilden’s daily life.

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Samuel J. Tilden society as an economic unit. He looked at the nation with an economist’s eyes. Such matters as money, banking, and taxation absorbed him all his life. They were satisfyingly intricate and mechanical, they called for quantified analysis, and his capacity to deal with them gave him great prestige in his party. As historians have noted, Jacksonians generally did not understand money questions. Tilden did. He read and understood Adam Smith, obviously learned David Ricardo intimately, gained mastery of an immense amount of economic data, and served as a party oracle. 47

His economic thought passed through several phases. He was first absorbed by the fight over the United States Bank, which began just as he entered politics. He was a bitter antagonist. His first public writing, at the age of nineteen, condemned the Bank as part of a world-wide conspiracy:

[The] capitalist class had banded together all over the world and organized the modern dynasty of associated wealth, which maintains an unquestioned ascendency over most of the civilized portions of our race, and which is now striving to extend its dominion over us . . . . A heart- less, soulless moneyed power - a tyranny sternly inexorable and unrelenting . . . . It will assemble around it all the rich and aristocratic, giving unity to their efforts and wielding their energies, till finally, as with advancing time wealth accumulates and poverty becomes inore excessive, A MONEYED ARISTOCRACY will hold undisputed sway over this now free and happy people.‘s Five years later he stood before a tumultuous Locofoco

crowd in Tammany Hall and cried out that the link between government and moneyed power was unnatural, corrupt,

Essays in Radical Emfiiricisnr and a Pluralistic Universe, 11, 87. ’‘ Merrill Peterson, for example, remarks that the Jacksonians had little

knowledge of financial management, only fears. [fetferson Image, 78.1 By modern judgment, Tilden’s economic writings show “a high degree of economic sophistication. . . . He [was] obviously exceedingly well informed about what economists were saying and about the monetary and other economic problems of his day.” Memorandum to author from Professor Walter Mead, Department of Economior. UCSB, November 7. 1962.

@ Bigelow, Tilden, I , 39-41.

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The Historian and a scheme for beggaring the industrial masses. The Bank had been destroyed; now the system of depositing Federal funds in state banks must be abandoned for the ultimate step, the Independent Sub-Treasury plan. There must be complete separation of bank and state, a reform as important as separation of church and state. 48

His scope, however, was broadening. He began to consider such larger issues as currency, national productivity, and the distribution of wealth. These considerations led in 1840 to the major economic statement of his life, given in a long speech before a party gathering. 5O

To begin with, he wanted to establish irrefutably the social value of a stable currency. The speculative currency fluctuations which unscrupulous bankers launched subjected farmers to an “unseen cause” which disappointed their wisest calculations and overwhelmed them “in sudden ruin, [destroying] the tranquility of [their] fireside.” Laborers suffered cruelly, for their wages always trail, never lead, rising price levels. Whig policies made such calamities inevitable, for they believed in central banks which “regulate” the currency. Such systems by giving enlarged power to rash and adventurous men simply lead to violent rises and equally destructive panics - in both of which clever financiers profit.

What was the answer? First of all, be clear about currency’s real nature. It “is to business what the blood is to the animal system.” Just as too much blood created agonies of congestion, so too little created enervation and collapse. A proper balance, only created by natural forces, was established by a beautifully operating international system. “The necessary amount of the currency in a

@Address to the Farmers, Mechanics and Workingmen of the State of New York, Tammany Hall, February 26, 1838, Bigelow, Writings, I, 79-87.

sDAddre.ss, “Currency, Prices, and Wages.” New Lebanon, October 3. 1840, ibid., I, 103-161. Afterwards, Condy Raguet, perhaps the leading Jacksonian economist, wrote in high praise and asked for copies to “send a friend in England, who knows how to appreciate the truths of political economy.” [Bigelow, Tilden, I, 93-94.]

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Samuel J. Tilden country,” Tilden said, “is just so much as will keep the channels of circulation filled to a level with the currencies of the rest of the commercial world.” When prices became too high in one country, specie was exported as buyers sought their products elsewhere, the result being a subsidence in the amount of money and a corresponding drop in prices. This mechanism delighted Tilden by its regularity and balance. However, its essence was self-operation. Attempts to “regulate” its ebb and flow could only destroy it. Each bank, therefore, should be left entirely on its own, without central regulation, thus applying the principle of equal freedom “which has been found equally salutary in politics, in religion, and in business.”

What was the real foundation of wealth in a country? Not currency management. I t was production. Under “free and equal laws” the whole productivity of an industrial system was equitably divided by natural forces. If the government consumed too much, or shifted income by unequal legislation, then the system was upset. The key must be, therefore, high productivity and no hindrances to its distribution.

How was productivity made high? First, by security of property in the most comprehensive sense. Workingmen had to be assured that what they earned would not be taken from them in taxes, as in exploitive European economies. The motive to labor was not necessity, but the “enjoyment of its fruits” and the promise of bettering one’s condition. Also, freedom of industry was essential, because men would choose the most productive activity if left to themselves. Unequal legislation, monopolies, and exclusive privileges diverted labor and therefore lessened production. This, in turn, altered the distribution of what was produced “invariably to the injury of the laboring classes.” 61

’”The argument over whether to manage currency or to let it operate freely within certain rules established by Congress is still going on. Tilden would presently be classed with the University of Chicago school on the

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The Historian These views were frequently repeated, largely unchanged,

until the 1870’s, when Tilden began speaking out strongly on economic matters, his own political star being on the rise. 62 The great question which absorbed all parties was the inability of the economy to recover after the crash of 1873. Tilden, always a “sound money” man, now condemned as a “vague notion” the view -which he had earlier agreed to - that prices followed currency inflation automatically. The currency had already been inflated with greenbacks, and yet recovery did not come. Therefore, the cause must lie elsewhere. It must be lack of demand caused by uncertainty and inadequate capital. The uncertainty arose from the experimentation with inconvertible paper money that had been going on since the Civil War. T o this extent the depression was a currency problem. Not until business- men could be certain as to the monetary standard would - issue. His international mcrney flow description was an excellent statement of David Ricardo’s “Price-Specie Flow Mechanism,” which dominated monetary thought until the 1930’s. The view that prices fluctuate directly with the amount of currency is now called “the naive version” of the quantity theory of money. Much of what Tilden said in this address about real wages, productivity, and convertible currency was exceptionally penetrat- ing and sophisticated. [Mead memorandum.]

6Recent writings have completely re-cast the financial history of the postwar period, making it clear that it is a far different and more complicated story than the standard Beardian account, and its derivatives, have described it to be. This essay cannot place Tilden’s thought against all of this background, but it should be pointed to as essential for any complete understanding of his monetary views. “Sound money” was hardly a mono- chrome capitalist idea; inflation was indeed a problem in New York and New England for special reasons; “soft money” was actually a tariff, making alignments on that issue much clearer: Tilden’s position in the 1876 campaign was much less an openly “sound money” one than is usually stated: the big argument was over when to resume, not resumption itself. These and many other new understandings will require a major overhauling of the generally accepted view of Reconstruction monetary policy. See Robert P . Sharkey, Money, Class, and Party: An Economic Study of Civil War and Reconstruction (Baltimore, 1959). and Irwin Unger. Men, Money and Politics: The Specie Resumption Issue, 18654879 (Ann Arbor, Univ. Microfilms, 1958).

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Samuel J. Tilden they begin investments again and create employment. 69 In his speech accepting the gubernatorial nomination in 1874, he put it succinctly:

The fruits of a false and delusive system of government finances are everywhere around us. All business is in a dry-rot . . . . Inflation no longer inflates . . . . The truth is that our body politic has been overdrugged with stimulants. 54

More important to Tilden now, however, was taxation. The mounting theme in his annual messages and occasional speeches as Governor of New York was what he felt to be the mountainous load of taxation that the country was carrying. I t obsessed him. The immense costs of the Army in the South and the heavy expenditures for internal improvements that Republicans had set in motion absorbed so much capital, he said, that not enough was left in the hands of private citizens to get the economy going again. Tilden practiced rigorously what he preached on this issue. As governor he reduced taxation breathtakingly by practically eliminating expenditures on the Erie Canal to the point where taxes were less than a third of their former level. 66

Within this framework the views to which Tilden gave expression in his presidential campaign are now under-

See Address, Syracuse, September 17, 1874, Bigelow. Writings, 11, 9-14; First Annual Message, Albany, January 5, 1875, ibid., 11, 23-74; Second Annual Message, Albany, January 4, 1876, ibid., 237-295.

Address of Acceptance of Gubernatorial Nomination, September 17, 1874, ibid., 11, 10-11.

=C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction (New York, 1956) makes it clear that the major reason Southerners in Congress decided for Hayes in the Electoral Count controversy was because they knew that Tilden meant what he said about cutting spending on internal improvements. Montgomery Blair saw Tilden’s defeat as caused by precisely the same forces he and Tilden had fought in the Jacksonian period. “The jobbers and monopolists of the North made common cause with the Southern oligarchy,” who, like supporters of the Bank in Jackson’s Lime, wanted government help in the development of their enterprises. “Tom Scott’s railroad played the role in the seventia that Nick Biddle’s bank played in the thirties.” Ip. 228.1

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The Historian standable. 5e The “present depression in all the business and industries of the people,” he said, “which is depriving labor of its employment and carrying want into so many homes, has its principal cause in excessive governmental consump tion.” Because of spending policies, the country had only a specious prosperity before the crash of 1873. Federal taxes to pay off borrowed funds had grown so gigantic as to be an insupportable burden upon the economy. That it collapsed was no mystery. Spending had to be reduced sharply. “This reform will be resisted at every step; but it must be pressed persistently.”

Furthermore, a sound currency had to be established by the resumption of specie payments-not at a date set by statute, but gradually as funds became naturally available. 57

The means? “Public economies, official retrenchments, and wise finance” would provide the means for setting aside necessary resources. Without such preparations, “a legislative command fixing a day,” as the Republicans had done in the Resumption Act of 1875, “an official promise fixing a day, are shams. They are worse; they are a snare and a delusion to all who trust them.” Currency mismanagement, for that matter, had greatly aggravated all the troubles felt

”This is drawn from his only maior statement during the campaign, his letter accepting the nomination:‘ Albany, July 31, 1876, Bigelow. Wrhi?&, 11, 359-373.

O‘His sincerity on the sound money issue has been much disputed. See Horace S. Merriil, Bourbon Leader: Grover Cleveland and the Democratic Party (Boston, 1957), especially pp. 45-58, and the same author’s Bourbon Democracy of the Middle, 1865-1896 (Louisiana State University Press, 1953). especially pp. 2-3. 50-51, 104, 110-111, for the most extreme statement of a widely-held thesis that Tilden’s policy of sound money was only held to enrich himself and other capitalists whose investments would be made mare valuable. The fact that Tilden had been convinced of the need for sound money from his Jacksonian days and had no difficulty making millions during inflation- he made his fortune during the inflationary years of the 1850’s and the Civil War-places this thesis in doubt. When urged to back down on sound money during the campaign, he said he ”would rather lose a million votes than that ‘the mechanics, the servant girls and laboring men should be robbed of their earnings.’” [Flick, Tilden, 317-318.1 The work of Sharkey and Unger, referred to above, makes it clear that the traditional historical judgments on currency issues are fatally simplistic.

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Samuel J. Tilden by the people. There was uncertainty, parent to much suffering. Men could not calculate upon the future. Work- men were discharged while capitalists waited to see what would happen.

There was need for reform in other ways. The southern states had to be brought back into the Union, Tilden said- joining with this a meaningless statement as to the rights of Negroes being protected. The civil service had to be purified, and those in high elective as well as appointive office had to be replaced with men of high principle. The public business required that there be a great decrease in the number of public offices and an end to the idea that offices existed for the benefit of those who hold them. Because of this belief there had been “inefficiency, peculation, fraud, and malversation of the public funds [which had] . . . overspread the whole service like a leprosy.” The standard by which appointments were made had to be elevated. In time, tests of proved competency and fidelity should be patiently, carefully organized.

What, then, was the sum of Tilden’s thought in 1877? End government aid to business by terminating expenditures on railroads, port facilities, and all the rest of the internal improvements which so delighted the Republican heart and thereby allow an increase in the amount of money left in the pockets of private individuals by reduction of taxation; establish a sound currency, so vital to workingman and capitalist alike; clean out the corruption which had defiled the Republic; and let the southern white handle the race question by himself.

This prescription, of course, came right out of Jacksonian Democracy. T o explain why Tilden preserved it so un- changed has been a major purpose of this paper. Remote from the real world, devotedly “touching the bones” of Jefferson and cherishing the perspectives on the world which he had received so long before from the Jacksonians he had

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The Historian looked up to and admired, Tilden could not play the role of innovator. But the Jacksonian thought he delivered to the 1870’s had passed through the selective perceptions of Tilden’s personality and had come out bereft of the warmth, the humanity, and the multiformity and bustling creativity which had characterized so much of Jacksonian thinking. He had nourished the rational, quantifying, and impersonal side of Jacksonian reformism - those elements analogous to contemporary Benthamite liberalism in Britain. His views were logical, abstract, even-tempered, not lusty, growing, humane. 58

The extent to which he can be said to speak for the whole of Northern Democratic thought in the 1870’s is problematical. Probably the best that can be said is that his ideas were highly suggestive of his party’s general climate of opinion. To the extent that this was true, certain illuminating observations made by Harold Lasswell in his studies of the semantic and sociological aspects of leadership in political movements cast light upon Tilden’s ideas and role. In particular, Lasswell pointed to the ideological changes which take place when the first stage of a movement, dominated by idea creators, gives way to the second stage, in which specialists in administration take over. At that point the new leaders change the emphasis in ideas from innovation and inquiry to repetition and rationalization. Codification and vindication become the obsession, not a search for new symbols and new categories.6e

It would be difficult to sum up more accurately the dominant characteristics and concerns of Tilden’s thought. If it is seen from this perspective, his role in the party is clear: he was the careful trustee of an inherited estate. It would be up to others to bring in new sources of capital.

=It should be pointed out here that Tilden’s thought should also be understood against the background of the Benthamite liberalism which swept all of the English-speaking world in the decades of his young manhood, the 1830’s and 1840’s. Its emphasis was upon the application of dry reason to

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Samuel J. Tilden economics. Just as young Englishmen of precise and logical minds were drawn to Bentham’s quantified social calculus and absorption in problems of trade, so was Tilden. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.. points up aspects of the relationship between Jacksonians and English liberalism in The Age of Jackson (Boston, 1946), 320, 330-331. Influence of English writers on Tilden may be seen in Bigelow, Writings, I, 102, 141, 151, 154, 155, 229. His election to the Cobden Club in 1877 is described in Bigelow, Tilden, 11, 128-129, and Flick, Tilden, 419-420. The first three books he had read to him when he began to grow too ill for an active life were the lives of John Stuart Mill, James Mill, and Jeremy Bentham. [Bigelow, Tilden, 11,

“See Lasswell’s chapter “The Elite Concept,” in Harold D. Lasswell, Daniel Lerner, and C. Easton Rothwell, The Coniparative Study of Elites (Stanford, 1952), 6-21.

411.1

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