De Alexander

In his speeches he had denounced wrongs and rebuked corruption, and his record as mayor displayed no disposition to enrich himself at the expense of his reputation.

That is the game, and if it cannot be played by fair means, trickery and corruption will accomplish it.

Suppose this offensive ring, with its unfinished courthouse and its thousand other schemes of robbery and plunder, controls the political power of the State and nation as it now dominates the metropolis, what honest Democrat can charge…

This corrupt oligarchy, continued the orator, his face flushed and his eyes flashing with anger, intends through Hoffman to control the entire patronage of the State, and if Seymour is elected it will grasp that of the whole country.

It cared nothing for the Democratic party except as it contributed to its selfish ends.

He wished the country delegates who had unconsciously aided its wire-pulling schemes to understand that it sought only its own aggrandisement.

Yet Tilden's guiding hand, with infallible sagacity, placed New York's thirty-three votes on Indiana and absolutely refused to move them.

But the foresight exhibited in changing from Church to Hendricks on the eighth ballot discovered a mind singularly skilled in controlling the actions of men.

In 1852 circumstances combined to prevent the nomination of the convention's first or second choice, and in the end, as a ball-player at the bat earns first base through the errors of a pitcher, Franklin Pierce benefited.

I was anxious that whenever we should leave this convention there should be no heart-burnings, no jealousy, no bitter disappointment; and I believe that in this result we have lifted the convention far above every such consideration.

And now, after all that has taken place here, I could not receive the nomination without placing myself in a false position.

When I said to my friends I could not be a candidate, I meant it.

When I said here, at an early day, that honour forbade my accepting a nomination, I meant it.

All other enthusiasms were as babbling brooks to the eternal thunder of Niagara.

Tilden, appreciating the importance of defeating Pendleton, at once directed all the resources of a cold, calculating nature to a solution of the difficult problem.

If nominated, he said, the Chief Justice would disintegrate the Republican party, carry Congress, and by uniting conservative Republicans and Democrats secure a majority of the Senate.

To him who understood the spirit of the Legal Tender Act of 1862, it seemed rank dishonesty to pay bonds in a depreciated currency, and he said so in language that did not die in the committee room.

As mayor of Brooklyn he kept the city's expenditures within its income, and in the constitutional convention of 1846 he stood with Michael Hoffman in preserving the public credit and the public faith.

In 1832, when barely in his twenties, he had denounced the policy of chartering banks in the interest of political favourites and monopolists, and the reform, soon after established, made him bold to attack other obnoxious fiscal systems.

Though but forty-six years old he had already made his existence memorable.

The poor loved him, the workmen admired him, and business men backed him.

There are times in which personal preference and personal popularity go far; but they are not these times.

Will you give them control in the United States Senate and thus in fact disfranchise the North?

Can you afford to erect such a government of blacks over the white men of this continent?

The Radicals, he said, not only propose to put the white men of the South under the blacks, but the white men of the North as well.