ROSCOE CONKLING

NOMINATING GENERAL GRANT FOR A
THIRD TERM

Roscoe Conkling was born at Albany, N. Y., 1829. At the age of thirteen he entered the Mount Washington Collegiate Institute in New York City, where he studied several years, and in 1846 entered the law office of Spencer and Kernan. He was admitted to the bar in 1850, and in the same year was appointed district attorney of Oneida County. In 1858 he was elected Mayor of Utica. Toward the close of his second term he resigned this office to enter Congress. He was chosen United States senator in January, 1867. In a speech in the Senate, Conkling advocated the bill that proposed the formation of an electoral commission. After the election of Garfield, he, with his colleague, Thomas C. Platt, claimed the right to control federal appointments in New York State on the ground of previous agreement with the President. He opposed the appointment of William H. Robertson as collector of the port of New York, and after the appointment was confirmed, Mr. Conkling and Mr. Platt resigned their seats in the Senate, expecting a confirmation of their attitude by reëlection by the Legislature. In this they were disappointed, however, Warner Miller and Elbridge G. Latham being sent to the Senate in their stead. From this time Conkling engaged in law practice in New York. He died in 1888 from the effects of exposure in the great "blizzard" of that year. The speech below was made at the National Convention in Chicago, 1880. Another of his speeches is given in Volume I.

Do you ask what state he hails from?

Our sole reply shall be:

He hails from Appomattox

And its famous apple tree.

OBEYING instructions I should never dare to disregard, expressing also my own firm conviction, I rise in behalf of the state of New York to propose a nomination with which the

country and the Republican party can grandly win. The election before us will be the Austerlitz of American politics. It will decide whether for years to come the country will be "Republican or Cossack." The need of the hour is a candidate who can carry the doubtful states, north and south; and believing that he more surely than any other can carry New York against any opponent, and carry not only the North, but several states of the South, New York is for Ulysses S. Grant. He alone of living Republicans has carried New York as a presidential candidate. Once he carried it even according to a Democratic count, and twice he carried it by the people's vote, and he is stronger now. The Republican party with its standard in his hand is stronger now than in 1868 or 1872. Never defeated in war or in peace, his name is the most illustrious borne by any living man; his services attest his greatness, and that the country knows them by heart. His fame was born not alone of things written and said, but of the arduous greatness of things done; and dangers and emergencies will search in vain in the future, as they have searched in vain in the past, for any other on whom the nation leans with such confidence and trust. Standing on the highest eminence of human distinction, and having filled all lands with his renown— modest, firm, simple, and self-poised-he has seen not only the titled, but the poor and the lowly, in the utmost ends of the world rise and uncover before him. He has studied the needs and defects of many systems of government, and he comes back a better American than ever, with a wealth of knowledge and experience added to the hard common sense which so conspicuously distinguished him in all the fierce light that beat upon him throughout the most eventful, trying, and perilous sixteen years of the nation's history.

Never having had "a policy to enforce against the will of the people," he never betrayed a cause or a friend, and the people will never betray or desert him. Vilified and reviled, truthlessly aspersed by numberless presses, not in other lands, but in his own, the assaults upon him have strengthened and seasoned his hold upon the public heart. The ammunition of calumny has all been exploded; the powder has all been burned once, its force is spent, and General Grant's name will glitter

as a bright and imperishable star in the diadem of the Republic when those who have tried to tarnish it will have moldered in forgotten graves and their memories and epitaphs have vanished utterly.

Never elated by success, never depressed by adversity, he has ever, in peace as in war, shown the very genius of common sense. The terms he prescribed for Lee's surrender foreshadowed the wisest principles and prophecies of true reconstruction.

Victor in the greatest of modern wars, he quickly signalized his aversion to war and his love of peace by an arbitration of international disputes which stands as the wisest and most majestic example of its kind in the world's diplomacy. When inflation, at the height of its popularity and frenzy, had swept both houses of Congress, it was the veto of Grant which, single and alone, overthrew expansion and cleared the way for specie resumption. To him, immeasurably more than to any other man, is due the fact that every paper dollar is as good as gold. With him as our leader we shall have no defensive campaign, no apologies or explanations to make. The shafts and arrows have all been aimed at him, and lie broken and harmless at his feet. Life, liberty, and property will find a safeguard in him. When he said of the black man in Florida, "Wherever I am, they may come also," he meant that, had he the power to help it, the poor dwellers in the cabins of the South should not be driven in terror from the homes of their childhood and the graves of their murdered dead. When he refused to receive Denis Kearney, he meant that the lawlessness and communism, although it should dictate laws to a whole city, would everywhere meet a foe in him, and, popular or unpopular, he will hew to the line of right, let the chips fly where they may.

His integrity, his common sense, his courage, and his unequaled experience are the qualities offered to his country. The only argument against accepting them would amaze Solomon. He thought there could be nothing new under the sun. Having tried Grant twice and found him faithful, we are told we must not, even after an interval of years, trust him again. What stultification does not such a fallacy involve? The Amer

ican people exclude Jefferson Davis from public trust. Why? Because he was the arch traitor and would be a destroyer. And now the same people are asked to ostracize Grant and not trust him. Why? Because he was the arch preserver of his country; because, not only in war, but afterward, twice as a civic magistrate, he gave his highest, noblest efforts to the Republic. Is such absurdity an electioneering jugglery 'or hypocrisy's masquerade?

There is no field of human activity, responsibility, or reason in which rational beings object to Grant because he has been weighed in the balance and not found wanting, and because he has had unequaled experience, making him exceptionally competent and fit. From the man who shoes your horse to the lawyer who pleads your case, the officer who manages your railway, the doctor into whose hands you give your life, or the minister who seeks to save your soul, what now do you reject because you have tried him and by his works have known him? What makes the presidential office an exception to all things else in the common sense to be applied to selecting its incumbent? Who dares to put fetters on the free choice and judgment which is the birthright of the American people? Can it be said that Grant has used official power to perpetuate his plan? He has no place. No official power has been used for him. Without patronage or power, without telegraph wires running from his house to the convention, without electioneering contrivances, without effort on his part, his name is on his country's lips, and he is struck at by the whole Democratic party because his nomination will be the death-blow to Democratic success. He is struck at by others who find offense and disqualification in the very service he has rendered and the very experience he has gained. Show me a better man. Name one, and.I am answered; but do not point, as a disqualification, to the very facts which make this man fit beyond all others. Let not experience disqualify or excellence impeach him. There is no third term in the case, and the pretense will die with the political dog days which engendered it. Nobody is really worried about a third term except those hopelessly longing for a first term and the dupes they have made. Without bureaus, committees, officials, or emissaries to manufacture sentiment in

his favor, without intrigue or effort on his part, Grant is the candidate whose supporters have never threatened to bolt. As they say, he is a Republican who never wavers. He and his friends stood by the creed and the candidates of the Republican party, holding the right of a majority as the very essence of their faith, and meaning to uphold that faith against the common enemy and the charlatans and the guerrillas who from time to time deploy between the lines and forage on one side or the other.

The Democratic party is a standing protest against progress. Its purposes are spoils. Its hope and very existence is a solid South. Its success is a menace to prosperity and order.

This convention, as master of a supreme opportunity, can name the next President of the United States and make sure of his election and his peaceful inauguration. It can break the power which dominates and mildews the South. It can speed the nation in a career of grandeur eclipsing all past achievements. We have only to listen above the din and look beyond the dust of an hour to behold the Republican party advancing to victory with its greatest marshal at its head.