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He was the representative of a district of his western home state in congress; in his fourth term or so I think at this time. The experience I am telling came during that congress when the Hayes-Tilden controversy was up, the intensest congress Washington has known since the Civil War. It was not a time specially suited to meditation about God in the halls of congress.
In neither of the cases just mentioned had there been a question as to how any State had voted. It was simply that no person had received a majority of all of the electoral votes cast. The method of settlement was clearly pointed out by the Constitution. As already indicated, the case was wholly different in the Hayes-Tilden controversy. The question then was as to how certain States had voted.
He was there, as in his college days, at the Hayes-Tilden contest, by grace of a friend whose influence had been sufficient to secure him his opportunities. The parallel was in his mind, and he regarded it with self-approval. He had chosen his course and chosen it wisely. It had led him to the greatest peace-making in history. There was a little more self-revelation.
The time is coming, if it has not already arrived, when among fair-minded and intelligent Americans there will not be two opinions touching the Hayes-Tilden contest for the presidency in 1876-77 that both by the popular vote and a fair count of the electoral vote Tilden was elcted and Hayes was defeated; but the whole truth underlying the determinate incidents which led to the rejection of Tilden and the seating of Hayes will never be known.
The contradictory promptings, not always crooked; the double constructions possible to men's actions; the intermingling of ambition and patriotism beneath the lash of party spirit; often wrong unconscious of itself; sometimes equivocation deceiving itself in short, the tangled web of good and ill inseparable from great affairs of loss and gain made debatable ground for every step of the Hayes-Tilden proceeding.
Only eleven years had elapsed since the close of the Civil War, and its after-effects still worked like an obnoxious ferment in the State's political conditions; closely allied with this was the influence of the Hayes-Tilden contest, all of which commanded a large proportion of my speech.
In fact, for fully ten years after the close of the war the collection of Southern "outrages" and their display before Northern audiences, was the chief work of Republican politicians. In 1876, during the Hayes-Tilden canvass, the opening speech which furnished what is called "the key-note of the campaign" was made by Mr.
The rhetorical trick of belittling the matter by speaking of it as "fisticuffs" will not pass in this discussion. When the South Carolina negroes on election day looked into the rifle-barrels of the Red-shirt clubs, it was no matter of fisticuffs. When every statesman in our country was eagerly seeking a peaceful solution of the Hayes-Tilden dispute, it was not fisticuffs that they feared.
"I got my first real sight of politics," he said, "when I was a boy in Cornell University. My great chum there was young Morton, a son of the Republican war governor of Indiana. The Hayes-Tilden contest over the Presidency was being decided. Morton and I used to run away from Ithaca to Washington during that absorbing fight.
The contradictory promptings, not always crooked; the double constructions possible to men's actions; the intermingling of ambition and patriotism beneath the lash of party spirit; often wrong unconscious of itself; sometimes equivocation deceiving itself in short, the tangled web of good and ill inseparable from great affairs of loss and gain made debatable ground for every step of the Hayes-Tilden proceeding.
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