.1 TS&7 *• ~^w E 415 .9 .T5 G7 Copy 1 Horace Greeley upon Tilden. TILDEN'S Responsibility for Election Frauds. TILDEN IN FAVOR OF TREATING WITH THE REBELS. TILDEN as a LEGISLATOR iO\^ -■>, \ \ nssfc / HORACE GREELEx UPON TILDEN. TILDEN'S RESPONSIBILITY FOR ELECTION FRAUDS. The gigantic frauds upon the ballot-box committed in the city of New York in 1868, by which John T. Hoffman was chosen Governor and" the success of the Tweed Ring se- cured, are now confessed and notorious. By these frauds New York City was made in that year to return as cast nearly 113,000 Democratic votes in a total of 156,000 votes, while, in spite of the increase of population, there have since that time never been cast in that city over 137,500 votes, and the Democratic party has never pretended to have cast more than 86,700 votes. While part of the fraud was certainly commit- ted by illegal voting, most of it was accomplished by fraudu- lent counting. The following papers show how that fraudu- lent counting was prearranged, and how Samuel J. Tilden acquiesced in and, to say the least, did not interfere to pre- vent the use of bis name in carrying out the foul conspiracy : About one week prior to the election the following circu- lar was issued by the Democratic State Committee, of which Samuel J. Tilden was chairman. Its genuineness has been admitted under oath. "PRIVATE AND STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL. " Rooms of the Democratic State Committee, ) October 27, 1868. J " My Dear Sir — Please at once to communicate with some reliable person in three or four principal towns, and in each io\< ^j\ .dully city of your county, and request him (expenses duly arranged for this end) to telegraph to William JVL Tweed, Tammany Hall^ at the minute of closing the polls, not waiting for the count, such person's estimate of the vote. "Let the telegraph he as follows': " ' This town will show a Democratic gam (or loss) over last year of (number), or this one is sufficiently certain. This town will give a Republican (or Democratic) majority of - — .' " There is of course an important object to be attained by a simultaneous transmission at the hour of closing the polls, but no longer waiting. Opportunity can be taken cf the usual half-hour lull in telegraphic communication over lines before' actual results begin to be declared, and before the Associated Press absorb the telegraph with returns, and interfere with in- dividual messages ; and give, orders to watch carefully the count. "SAMUEL J. TILDEN, " Chairman" Of course the "important object to be attained " was, in fact, to form an estimate of the Republican majority in the honest rural districts, so as to be sure to overcome it by a fraudulent count in the city. Unfortunately, the conspiracy succeeded. And now, six years afterwards, Samuel J. Tilden seeks the suffrages of the same people whom he allowed to be defrauded by the use of his name. What Horace Greeley thought of these frauds, and Mr. Tilden's share in them, is shown in the following letter which he published in the Tribune of October 20, 1869 : LETTER TO A POLITICIAN. To Samuel J. Tilden, Chairman Democratic State Committee : Sir — You and I are growing old. We came here young from the country, and have! lived and struggled side by side for nearly forty years. We have participated ardently in man„ political struggles, always on different sides. t On one very important point, however, your bitterness as a pa/ '^an has impelled you to ignore and come short of your du\ :i - ; zen and a professed upholder of government by the peo t ■ ^ob this dereliction i here arraign you. 1 allude to u J nervation of the purity of the ballot-box. You and rew up in the country, and are familiar with elections as /e conducted. We both know that, except in a few districts where the voters are all on one side, it is morf ly impossible that any considerable proportion of fraud- ulent votes should there be polled. I do not believe that the illegal vote in the rural districts was ever one per cent, of the whole number polled, even when there was no registration of legal voters. How different is the case in cities, and especially in this Babel, you very well know. Long as you have lived on Gramercy Park, and eminent in social position and fortune as are the inhabitants of that favored locality, you could not tell, with intwenty, which of the residents in sight of your front door are, and which are not, entitled to vote ; you could not make a list of the legal voters residing on that square, .iiich would even approach accuracy. How it must be, then, with the nomadic denizens of our " back slums," and of our great tenement houses — how utterly impossible it is that any one should know which among them are, and which are not legal voters, and whether a man who offers to vote at 11 a. m. at one poll has or has not already voted several times at dif- ferent polls, and whether he is or ^s "ot on his way ^.vote \ ^ * >w -j^octfully Km •*till oftener at other polls, you cannot help knowing if you I rould. I can imagine how a man may shut his eyes to many things which he deems it convenient not to know ; but I must speak of what you must know, however you may wish or seek to be ignorant of it. The matter to which I call your attention is vital to the very existence of free, popular govern- ment. Whenever it shall be generally understood that the re- sults of elections are not determined by the ballots of legal voters, but by frauds in voting or frauds in counting, then the advent of avowed, unequivocal despotism must be near at hand. Between the rule of an Emperor and the rule of a clique of ballot-box shifters, every intelligent man must prefer the former as less rapacious and more responsible. When honest citizens shall avoid the polls, asking " What is the use of voting ? the result is already fixed," the days of the Re- public will be numbered. Between a ruler who prohibits voting altogether and the gang who make it a sham by filling the ballot-boxes with illegal votes, or miscounting those actu- ally cast, the sway of the former is every way preferable. Mr. Tilden, I have been voting here for 37 years, and an active politician for more than 30 of them, and I appeal to God for my sincerity and to my public record for a witness, that in all those years I have earnestly sought and labored to \v >. our elections decided by legal votes and none other. S r • how great are the temptations and the facilities /& right of suffrage so general as ours to poll illegal / 1 have openly and actively favored every effort to shut. /a out and keep the suffrage pure and legal. That every legal voter should have a full and fair opportunity to vote once at each election — that no one should be enabled to vote more than once — and that none but legal voters should be allowed or empowered to vote at all — such has been my con- stant aim. I have not confined my©elf to barren professions, but hai-e shown ray faith by mv works. ^ ; Jft How is it with you ? You hold a most responsible and influential position in the counsels of a great party. You could make that party content itself with polling legal votes if you only would. In our late Constitutional Convention I tried to erect some fresh barriers against election frauds. Did you ? The very little that I was enabled to effect in this direction I shall try to have ratified by the people at our en- / suing election. Will you? Mr. Tilden, you cannot escape responsibility by saying, with the guilty Macbeth, "Thou canst not say I did it; never shake Those gory locks at me," for YOU WERE AT LEAST A PASSIVE ACCOMPLICE IN THE GIANT FRAUDS OF LAST NOVEMBER. Your name was used, without public protest on your .part, in circulars sowed broadcast over the State, whereof the mani-^' fest intent was to " make assurance doubly sure " that the frauds here perpetrated should not be overborne by the honest vote of the rural districts. And you, not merely by silence, but by positive assumption, have covered ■'" ^ frauds with the mantle of your respectability. On the principle that " the receiver is as bad as the thief," YOU ARE AS DEEPLY IMPLICATED IN THEM TO-DAY AS THOUGH YOUR NAME WERE TWEED, O'BRIEN, OR OAKEY HaLL. Mr. Tilden, you and I were ardent participants in the struggle of 184:0 wherein Martin Van Buren was ousted from the Presidency by General Harrison. You know how thoroughly our city was absorbed in that contest, wherein every man, woman, and child, took a deep and lively inter- est. Our elections were then held throughout three days. There was a registration freshly enacted which blacklegs had not yet learned to circumvent, the Right of Suffrage was as widely diffused as it now is, and no one ever complained that r V a single legal voter was unable then to poll his vote. And though our city has since largely increased its population, the lower Wards were quite as populous then as they are to-day — several of them more so. They' were fall of boarding-houses crowded with clerks and mechanics ; many of these covered sites since given up to great warehouses and manufactories ; their denizens have moved up town, over to Brooklyn, or out on some of the railroads that lead into the open country. Practically the lower Wards are being given up to commerce, and no longer shelter by night the multitudes who throng their streets by day. Now look at the vote of four of these Wards in 1840 and 1868 respectively : Wards. President, 1840. Governor, 1868. / Harrison. Van Buren. Griswold. Hoffmann. IV 1,138 1,177 480 3,830 VI 806 1,223 369 5,032 VII 1,707 1,728 1,265 6,895 XIV 1,142 1,393 726 4,526 4,793 5,521 2,840 20,283 Van Buren's majority, 726. Hoffman's majority, 17,443. Mr. Tilden, you know what this contrast attests. Right well do you comprehend the means whereby the vote of 1868 was thus swelled out of all proportions. There are not twelve thousand legal voters living in these Wards to day, though they gave Hoffman 17,443 majority. Had the day been of average length it would doubtless have been swelled to at least 20,000. There was nothing but time needed to make it 100,000, if so many had been wanted and paid for. Note, Mr. Tilden, I call on you to put a stop to this busi- ness. You have but to walk into the Sheriff's, the Mayor's, and the Supervisor's offices in the City Hall Park, and say that there must he no more of it — say it so that /here shall be no doubt iltat you mean it — and we shall have a, tolerably fair elec- tion once more. Probably a good part of the 50,000 sup- plied last fall with bogus naturalization certificates will offer to register and to vote. Some of them pretending not to know that they are no more citizens of the United States than the King of Dahomey is — but very few will vote repeatedly unless paid for it, and we shall not be cheated more than 10,000 if you simply tell the boss workmen that there must be no more illegal voting instigated and paid for. Will you do it f Your reputation is at stake. The cow- ardly craft which " Would uot play false, and yet would wrongly win," will not avail. If we Republicans are swindled again as we were swindled last fall, you and such as you will he re- sponsible to God and man for the outrage. Prosecutors, magistrates, municipal authorities, are all in the pool ; we have no hope from the ministers of justice, and the villains have no fear of the terrors of the law. 1 appeal to you, and anxiously await the result. Yours, HOKACE GKEELEY. WHAT MR. GREELEY THOUGHT OF MR. TILDEN IN 1860— FOURTEEN YEARS AGO. In November, 1860, Mr. Tilden had written and printed a traitorous letter; thereupon, Mr. Greeley said of him in the Tribune : " Mr. Tilden is an aged man, u^ with all decorous veneration ; but wii wish to treat him allow us respectfully 10 to suggest that when he merely desires to be pathetic and im- pressive, he will do well to avoid falling into the broad farce of inane and insane exaggeration. "Mr. Tilden was one of those Anti-Slavery Democrats who, in 1848, defeated and crushed Gen. Cass, because he would, not go with them for the Wilmot Proviso. Now he writes letters encouraging treason and stimulating disunion, because a conservative old Whig, like honest Abe Lincoln, is on Tuesday next to be elected President. " 'In life's last scene, what prodigies surprise, Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise. From Marlb'rough's eyes the streams of dotage flow, And Swift expires a driveler and a show.'" SAMUEL J. TILDEN AS A REBEL SYMPATHIZER. In April, 1861, at the outbreak of the war, there was held in New York City the famous meeting known as the Union Square Meeting, in which everybody, except the most ultra sympathizers with treason, participated. Even Fernando Wood attended, and was one of the speakers ; but Samuel J. Tilden refused to join in the call for the meeting, or to give- it his support. Hon. Samuel Sloan, a prominent Democrat, now Presi- dent of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, and Mr. Tilden's friend, called upon him and urged him to take- part in the meeting, but he utterly refused, because he had no sympathy with its objects. Mr. Tilden's subsequent course shows that he was at least consistent in his opposition to the war. He was not only a member of the Democratic National Convention held at / 11 Chicago, in August, 1864, but he moved the appointment of the Committee on Resolutions, and was a member of the sub- committee to whom their preparation was especially entrusted. \ The Convention met during some of the darkest days of the war. After the battles of the Wilderness our advance had been checked before Petersburg. The futile explosion of "the mine," and the attack on Cold Harbor had caused enor- mous losses to our troops. In the preceding month Early had cut the railroad between Baltimore and Philadelphia, and advanced upon Washington till his forces were literally with- in range of the Capitol. Grant was calling for additional troops, and, only thirteen days before the Convention met, had written to one of the loyal Governors that "the end is not far distant if Ave are only true to ourselves. Their [the rebels] only hope now is in a divided North." In this condition of things Samuel J. Tilden took steps to have, not only a divided North, but to secure an abandonment of the war, and the making of a treaty with rebels in arms. Mr. Tilden, in the Chicago Convention, joined in reporting and favored a traitorous resolution in the following words : " Resolved, That this Convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that, after four years of failure to restore the Union by experiment of war, during which, under the pretence of a military necessity, or war power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, and public liberty and private right alike trodden down, and the material prosperity of the country essentially impaired — justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that IMMEDIATE EFFORTS BE MADE FOR A CESSATION OF HOSTILITIES, with a view to an ultimate Convention of the States, or other peaceable means, to the end that^ at the earliest practicable moment, peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States." 12 With such a record Samuel J.Tilden now seeks to be elect- ed Governor of the loyal State of New York in place of the gallant patriot John A. Dix. And he seeks this because, af- ter having supported Tweed during his whole career, having by Tweed's consent presided over the Democratic State Con- vention in 1870 after the attack had been opened upon the Ring* and having carefully held his tongue until the Ring was beaten, he then suddenly blossomed out as an Anti-Ring Reformer ! HOW TILDEN PERFORMS PUBLIC DITTIES. Mr. Tilden was a member of the Legislature in 1872. How he attended to his duties appears from the following re- cord : During the session of the Legislature the yeas and nays were called 1,8G3 times. Mr. Tilden was present and voted only 98 times; he was absent and not recorded 1,585 times. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS LIBRARY OF CONGRESS inn 011932 910 3 % ■ j>