Republican National Convention

“ I believe that my doctrine is for the good of the people. I believe that the Republican party will see the error of its way, and, although I may never be permitted again to address a Republican National Convention, I shall live in the hope that before I die this great party will come to a thorough understanding of the silver question and treat it solemnly and with the keenest interest in support of all the people. ”

“ The Republicans of the United States, in National Convention assembled, renew their allegiance to the principles upon which they have triumphed in six successive Presidential elections, and congratulate the American people on the attainment of so many results in legislation and administration by which the Republican party has, after saving the Union, done so much to render its institutions just, equal and beneficent—the safeguard of liberty and the embodiment of the best thought and highest purposes of our citizens. ”

“ Therefore with unspeakable interest will the country watch the National Convention at Philadelphia. It may be an assembly (and such is my hope) where ideas and principles are above all personal pretensions, and the unity of the party is symbolized in the candidate; or it may add another to Presidential rings, being an expansion of the military ring at the Executive Mansion, the senatorial ring in this Chamber, and the political ring in the custom-houses of New York and New Orleans. A National Convention which is a Presidential ring cannot represent the Republican Party. ”

“ While it was in the power of this Democratic Convention to antagonize the Republican party with a platform, simple, reasonable and just to all sections, on which the votes of all sections could be asked, it became divided into a Northern and a Southern faction, and wholly lost the opportunity of appealing to a national spirit of harmony and good-will. ”

“ The Republicans of New York welcomed the outcome of the Democratic national convention. There was a time in its preliminary stages when the Liberal movement, blending principle and resentment, had assumed alarming proportions. Discontent with the Administration, stimulated by powerful journals, seemed to permeate the whole Republican party, and the haste of prominent men to declare themselves Liberals, recalling the unhappy division in the last State convention and the consequent falling off in the Republican vote, added to the solicitude. ”

“ No state district can have so few Republicans in it as not to be entitled to a representative in the national Republican convention equal to that of the most unanimously Republican district in the country; and a Republican State is accorded as full a representation in a Democratic convention as is the most Democratic of her sister States.
We had to pass through several stages of development before the present system of election by convention was reached. At the first two presidential elections the electors were left free to vote as their consciences and the Constitution bade them ”

“ While I know that the reform sentiment in the Republican party is growing, I do not think, I regret to say, that it will be strong enough in the National Convention to beat the “machine-men,” without outside aid. ”

“ The political power of this country has always shown itself superior to the judicial power—the latter ever shaping and basing its decisions on the policy of the dominant party. A pledge, therefore, by your convention to secure national protection in the enjoyment of perfect equality of rights, civil and political, to all citizens, will so define the policy of the Republican party as to open the way to a full and final adjustment of this question on the basis of United States supremacy. ”

“ If the Democratic leaders would and could call a National Convention, to meet in May and formally throw up the sponge, making no nominations, but simply inviting their followers to find “their own” wherever they could, there would be no difficulty at once in organizing a great reform party, with the best elements of the Republican party as its leaders. ”

“ France had no sooner established a republican form of government than she manifested a desire to force its blessings on all the world. Her own historian informs us that, hearing of some petty acts of tyranny in a neighboring principality, "the National Convention declared that she would afford succor and fraternity to all nations who wished to recover their liberty, and she gave it in charge to the executive power to give orders to the generals of the French armies to aid all citizens who might have been or should be oppressed in the cause of liberty." ”

“ In the same year, he was elected as a delegate to the Republican State convention, this being an acknowledgment of the interest he had taken in the party, and the skill and energy he had shown in advocating its policy. He began the practice of law in 1859, and was highly successful from the first. ”

“ Again the clerk calls the roll of the States, and each chairman of a delegation announces the votes from his State. In the Republican convention a majority of the number of delegates voting is sufficient to nominate; but no nomination is possible in the Democratic convention except by a vote of two-thirds of the delegates. Then follows the selection of a candidate for Vice-President. In this choice the attempt is made to secure some man who will add strength to the party, and who comes from a different section of the country from that represented by the candidate for the Presidency. ”

“ The Republican party was conspicuously a party of the people in both its origin and formation. Instead of being organized and promulgated from a national centre, it began in local and community meetings. During the first two years of its existence these local bodies extended themselves to state conventions. Finally, in its third year, it essayed a national convention and a national organization. In this movement Michigan, which had been the scene of the party's birth and of its first state convention, fittingly took the lead. ”

“ The Pittsburg Convention was to be merely preliminary to the National Convention, but it developed unexpected enthusiasm, and it was seen by the friends of freedom that at last a great National Party was in the field, determined to oppose slavery to the utmost, and to remain until the victory should be won. ”

“ The platform demanded universal amnesty and a liberal policy, no more land grants to corporations, and denounced repudiation. The Republicans met in their Fifth National Convention at Philadelphia, June 5th, in the Academy of Music. There was no question but that President Grant would be renominated, and the only contest was that between Henry Wilson and Schuyler Colfax for the nomination for Vice-President. William Claflin, of Massachusetts, called the meeting to order and named Morton McMichael as temporary Chairman. ”

“ With these ideas uppermost in our minds, we went into that Convention, determined to preserve in its purity the original idea upon which the party was founded; determined never to sell out the moral character and the great future of the Republican cause for the treacherous glitter of plausible combinations, brought about by trade and compromise; determined rather to risk a defeat than to lose our own identity in the chase after a delusive phantom of party success; in one word, determined to have a Republican platform, and upon it a Republican candidate. ”

“ I attended the Liberal Republican Convention at Cincinnati on the first of May, where I was delighted to meet troops of the old Free Soilers of 1848 and 1852. It was a mass convention of Republicans, suddenly called together without the power of money or the help of party machinery, and prompted by a burning desire to rebuke the scandals of Gen. Grant's administration, and rescue both the party and the country from political corruption and misrule. ”

“ If indorsed, we shall have greater hope of triumph within the Union. If denied, in my opinion, the States-Rights wing should secede from the convention, and appeal to the whole people of the South; without distinction of parties, and organize another convention upon the basis of their principles, and go into the election with a candidate nominated by it, as a grand constitutional party. But in the Presidential contest a black Republican may be elected. ”

“ It was our conviction that if the Convention should fall into the fatal error of attempting to change the faith and policy of the party, as we would change our dress, it would quickly find out that the Republican party is essentially the party of independent men, that its power rests upon public opinion, and that it can do no wrong with impunity. ”

“ We became slightly cynical at times, in the way of Americans who talk politics heart-to-heart. The national convention, where there is a thrill in the sonority of the very names of the far-flung commonwealths as they are recited on roll-call, is, on the face of it, a glorious expression of democracy at work. But in actual operation every one knows that a national convention is only nominally representative. The delegates in their appointed places are not free and independent American citizens, assembled, as we would believe, to exercise their best judgment as trustees of the “folks back home.” ”

“ I have no doubt that every member of the late convention has exceptions to some part of the system proposed. Their constituents have the same, and if every objection must be removed, before we have a national government, the Lord have mercy on us.
Perfection is not the lot of humanity. Instead of censuring the small faults of the constitution, I am astonished that so many clashing interests have been reconciled—and so many sacrifices made to the general interest! The mutual concessions made by the gentlemen of the convention, reflect the highest honor on their candor and liberality ”

“ If the Republican Convention rejects these, it shows that it obeys the behest of the machine politicians to whom the most valuable qualities of a candidate are the most serious objection, and I shall, as an independent American citizen, govern my course accordingly. I know a good many who will do likewise. ”

“ Had the gentlemen who compose it been willing to withdraw themselves from the field, as they were invited to join in doing, for the common good, by the Independent Republican candidates, this act would have encouraged the hope that a new convention, freely chosen by the people, and unembarrassed by claims of existing candidates, might have brought forth the needed guarantee of party emancipation and public reform. ”

“ The Democrats in Congress, both North and South, had very generally favored this "settlement," and there was now no division in the party except as to men. The candidates were Cass, Buchanan, Douglas, and Marcy; and the National Convention assembled on the first of June. The platform of the party began with the declaration of its "trust in the intelligence, the patriotism, and the discriminating justice of the American people" ”

“ And when the delegates of the prescribed "free, white, male" order met in convention, they proved themselves nothing above human, very like the so-elected conventions of other States, and retained all legislative power within the limits of the original congressional permit. The same is true of the rebel States, in which the President now finds the people destitute of all civil government; when he specifies who may vote, when he excludes any class from the ballot-box, he makes it impossible for "the people" to form a republican government. ”

“ Important declarations in political platforms are never the result of accident, but are always the result of design. They are always born of conditions existing in the constituents of the party that gives the utterance. The Republican convention at St. Louis was a representative body of a great party in the country, and the men who went there and represented their several constituencies understood the conditions at home. ”