Republican factions

CHAPTER V

THE COLLAPSE OF THE STALWARTS, 1880

THE independent members of the Republican Party exerted a continuous influence after 1872, and by their threat to repeat the secession of that year brought pressure to bear upon the professional rulers of the party. The widespread corruption in national and local administrations, revealed or suggested by the exploits of Tweed, the gold conspiracy of Gould and Fisk, the Crédit Mobilier scandal, the whiskey ring, and the salary grab, kept them resolved to struggle against the election of spoilsmen to national office. In the spring of 1876 the meeting of the independents at the Fifth Avenue Hotel was a warning to the Republican Convention to be careful in its nomination. The selection of Hayes was acceptable to them, and his pledges to reform the national administration followed by his appointment of Carl Schurz as Secretary of the Interior found favor in the independent group.

The main body of the Republicans were "Stalwart" or "Half-Breed," according to their preference for leaders. Senator Roscoe Conkling was the most prominent of the Stalwart leaders, and included among his political intimates most of the men who had been identified with the two administrations of Grant. The Half-Breed faction commonly avowed an interest in reform as opposed to the open cynicism of many of the Stalwarts. James G. Blaine, their most prominent leader, and John Sherman were less identified with machine politics and more with the substance of government than most of the Stalwarts. Both groups were offensive to the independents, and both found reasons for an aversion to the political policies of Hayes, as the latter undertook to fulfill his pledge for good government. The anger of the party leaders at the structure of the

holders in politics

Cabinet was intensified by an executive order issued in June, 1877, forbidding office-holders to take Officeactive share in party management. A bill to hinder the collection of assessments upon officeholders had been passed the summer before, but the new order struck at the best recognized fact in party organization. "The decision is undoubtedly the forerunner of the most important new departure in modern politics," said the Chicago Tribune. Public officials everywhere held party offices as national committeemen or as members of the party organization in the States. The political existence of many of these was tied up with the advantage they enjoyed from their dual capacity, and the summer conventions were watched for evidence as to the effectiveness of the reform. "He will need the zealous support of all good men of both parties," said the New York Herald. In New York, Alonzo Cornell, chairman of the State Republican Committee, defied the order, and continued to hold on to his office as naval officer of the port of New York. In Wisconsin Colonel E. W. Keyes treated it with more respect and abdicated his State chairmanship rather than be displaced from the post-office at Madison.

Public attention was directed to the New York Custom House by the insubordination of Cornell, and the knowledge that he and Chester A. Arthur, collector of Arthur and the port, were Stalwarts who stood high in the Cornell councils of Senator Conkling. The Treasury Department, under whose administrative jurisdiction they fell, was in process of investigation by direction of Sherman, and was reported to be a nest of political appointees more interested in serving Stalwart policies than in earning the salaries they received. It was rumored that the President had determined to displace both officials, and Senator Conkling hurried home from a European trip to dominate the New York Convention, and to fight the President. In December "we saw to it that the President's plan was foiled," said Thomas C. Platt, chief assistant of Conkling. The Senate refused to confirm the nominations of Theodore Roosevelt and

L. B. Prince as successors to Arthur and Cornell, and the Stalwart officials continued at their posts until the close of the session in 1878, when Hayes summarily suspended them from office. Conkling denounced the suspension in fury as party treachery, but the Senate finally permitted the removal of the officers.

The breach between Hayes and the Stalwarts was widened by the political martyrdom of Arthur and Cornell, but the independent Republicans were not drawn any closer to the President. In the Interior Department and the Treasury Schurz and Sherman were encouraged to make their appointments on the basis of merit, but the President found appointive offices for Florida and Louisiana Republicans whose jobs had been lost when he withdrew the troops from the South, and he temporarily closed the breach in the party by sending Half-Breed members of his Cabinet to help the Conkling forces in the New York campaign of 1878. "We shall not have a political millennium until the people want it" was the comment of Leslie's in 1877. The independents resented the President's inability to divorce himself completely from politics, and the personal isolation of Hayes continued to the end of his administration.

Grant

In September, 1879, General Ulysses S. Grant landed at San Francisco from his voyage around the world. His Return of arrival followed a long series of stories of state receptions accorded him wherever he had gone. He was received not only with the honors of royalty due to an ex-President, but as the greatest soldier of his day. As he traveled east across the States, with public banquets and civic receptions at every stop, his popularity, tarnished when he left the White House, resumed its fullest luster. His former comrades in arms felt their political power for the first time seriously. The prolonged Democratic filibusters against paying the army and the enforcement of the law by federal troops increased the public's distrust of politicians and its regard for Grant. He formally completed his trip by a visit to Philadelphia on December 16, where he was entertained at the great celebration at the Union League

under the direction of Senator Don Cameron, his former Secretary of War; and the next day Cameron, with the fame of Grant at its height, took up the reorganization of the Republican National Committee in order to make the renomination of Grant possible in 1880. "The reasons urged for the renomination of General Grant," said Harper's Weekly, are typified in a picture of a man on horseback withstanding a host of anarchists."

The Republican National Committee, when it met in Washington December 17, 1879, was without a head, since Zachary Chandler, its former chairman, had recently died. The friends of Grant took advantage of the vacant Pennsylvania seat on the committee to bring in Cameron. William H. Kemble, the Pennsylvania member whom he replaced, the reputed author of the spoilsman's phrase, “addition, division, and silence," was under indictment for bribery, growing out of the Pittsburgh riots of 1877. Cameron was elected chairman of the committee at once, and with the support of Conkling and Logan laid the plans to control the Chicago Convention in the following June.

1880

There was no thought of the renomination of Hayes to succeed himself. He had disclaimed a second term before starting on his first, and had not been under Nominapressure to reconsider his determination; nor did tions of he give active support to any other aspirant for the nomination. Blaine and Sherman were both brought forward by their friends, Sherman believing that the nomination was a fitting reward for his financial services, and Blaine stirring up the antipathies aroused against him in 1876 when his similar aspirations had been impeded by scandals connected with his career as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

In the Chicago Convention Grant could have been nominated if it had been possible for the Stalwart leaders to hold ⚫each State delegation to the unit rule. They contended that the majority of a delegation from any State had the right to determine the vote of the whole delegation as a unit. This claim was beaten on the floor of the convention after a

persuasive speech against it by General James A. Garfield, Congressman and Senator-elect from Ohio, and floor manager for Sherman. With the unit rule beaten, Grant's ‘old guard” of 306 faithful delegates clung together in vain Neither Sherman nor Blaine could command a majority of the convention, and after a long deadlock Garfield was nominated for the presidency on the thirty-sixth ballot

Having nominated Garfield, a Half Breed, the conven tion made overtures for party unity by nominating Chester A. Arthur as Vice-President. Goldwin Smith thought that the victory of Garfield represented "the purer and better part of the republican party," but the proceedings of the convention indicate that the majority was inspired chiefly by the desire to win. "We are not here, sir," said Flanagan, of Texas, whom the Chicago Tribune described as possessing "a truthful and ingenuous mind,' - "We are not here, sir, for the purposes of providing offices for the democracy. . . . After we have won the race, as we will, we will give those who are entitled to positions office. What are we up here for?"

A week after the Republican Convention the Greenback Party nominated James B. Weaver, of Iowa, for the presidency. The Chicago Tribune reporter, impressed perhaps by his recollection of Barnum's Greatest Show on Earth that had exhibited the preceding week on the lake front, called it a "side-show, and a funny one. . . . It was an idiotic trinity, composed of Fiatists, Labor-Union Greenbackers, and foreign Communists, with Free-Lovers, Woman-Suffragists, and fanatics of every description." The Greenback Convention at least knew what it wanted, which was more than could be said of the Democratic Party, which was still without a recognized leader except Tilden, who lay under the suspicion aroused by the cipher dispatches. At Cincinnati later in the month, the Democrats selected General Winfield Scott Hancock, "the Democratic Trojan horse," for their candidate; otherwise cynically described by the New York Sun as "a good man, weighing two hundred and fifty pounds."