Samuel J. Tilden

Samuel Jones Tilden (9 February 1814 to 4 August 1887) was an American barrister and politician who served as the fifteenth Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America from 1883 to 1887. He was the first Prime Minister to hold the office at the head of the Liberal Federal Democrats, the reform party assembled in the 1870s out of the anti-machine movement, and his ministry is the party’s first. He sat in the House of Commons for the Gramercy division of New York City from 1877, and had earlier been Premier of the Province of New York.

His national reputation rested on work done before he held federal office. Between 1871 and 1873 he directed the prosecution of the Tweed Ring, the organisation that had governed New York City and, through it, much of the Province, and which had removed public money in quantities that nobody has ever finally settled. He did it with bank ledgers, warrant books and comparison of accounts rather than with oratory, and the method mattered as much as the result. The reform associations of the 1870s took the prosecution as proof of their central proposition: that a machine was not a moral condition but an arrangement of offices, contracts and payrolls, and that an arrangement could be taken apart. The party those associations became treats the prosecution as its founding act, which is an unusual thing for a party to have instead of a manifesto.

Tilden was commissioned by Governor-General Rutherford B. Hayes in 1883, in Ernest III’s name, after James G. Blaine lost the ability to sustain the confidence of the Commons. The ministry that followed was short, its legislative record deliberately narrow, and its consequences larger than its statute book. The Public Service Act 1883 put appointment to the offices of the Union on examination and took the greater part of the public service out of the gift of ministers and party organisations. The Public Contracts and Accounts Act 1885 required competitive tender, published the contracts of the Union and gave the examiners of the public accounts a power of inquiry on their own motion. Together they are known in later parliamentary writing as the Tilden Settlement, and the permanent, politically neutral civil service that a modern Prime Minister complains about is their direct descendant.

The ministry also continued the retreat from Reconstruction, and no account of it is honest that treats that as a footnote. Tilden repealed nothing. The American Rights Act of 1866 stood, the Fourth Amendment of 1873 stood, and the federal government under his ministry brought fewer prosecutions against the organised violence in the former rebel polities than the ministry before it, which had brought fewer than the ministry before that. The marshals were not reinforced. Troops were not sent. The residual functions of the freedmen’s bureau were distributed among departments that did not perform them. A government founded on the proposition that public authority must be made to work administered the one part of the settlement that depended on federal will less than its predecessors had, and it did so while its own officers were being audited for probity to a standard nothing else in the Realm was then held to.

Tilden’s defenders, then and since, answer that corrupt enforcement is weak enforcement, that a marshal’s service padded with ghost appointments protects nobody, and that the reform of the machinery was a precondition of anything else. The answer has force and does not dispose of the charge. The Governors-General of the same decades made the same observation privately and could do nothing with it: Hayes received evidence of racial violence, pressed his Prime Minister on it in audience, and granted assent on advice when the ministry narrowed enforcement anyway, because Tilden commanded the Commons and he did not.

He left office in 1887 in failing health, handed the government to Grover Cleveland and died within months, on 4 August 1887. He never married and left one of the largest estates any holder of the office has left. The greater part of it went to the endowment of a free public library in the Province of New York, on the argument that the public’s access to knowledge stands with its access to honest courts, and the Tilden Trust remains a founding element of that institution.

Early life

New Lebanon and the Tilden household

Tilden was born on 9 February 1814 at New Lebanon, in the eastern hill country of the Province of New York, the fourth surviving child of Elam Tilden and Polly Younglove Jones. The family was not grand and was not poor. It held land, kept a store and a small manufactory of patent medicines, and occupied the position in a country town that carries influence without wealth: the household to which neighbours brought disputes, notes to be witnessed and questions about what the law required.

Elam Tilden was the source of his son’s politics and of a good deal of his manner. He was a man of settled opinions, considerable local standing and a habit of correspondence with men of much greater consequence than himself, and the house at New Lebanon received a stream of visiting politicians of the Province through the 1820s and 1830s. His son grew up listening. He was not, in the ordinary sense, taken into public life; he was simply present while it was conducted at his father’s table, and by the age of eighteen he was drafting arguments that his father’s correspondents took seriously enough to answer.

The household was also anxious about health, and with reason. Tilden was a sickly child in a family that lost children, and the anxiety attached itself to him permanently. He was dosed, watched, sent away for air and excused from exertion. The effect on his character was more lasting than the effect on his constitution, which turned out to be tougher than anyone expected. He acquired the habits of a man who expects to be interrupted by illness: he worked in concentrated bursts, delegated nothing he could do himself, and reduced everything he could to paper, because paper survives an absence.

Health and interrupted schooling

His formal education was broken repeatedly and never fully repaired. He attended the local schools, was withdrawn, was sent to an academy, was withdrawn again, and reached his twenties with a body of reading far in advance of his qualifications. He entered Yale College in 1834 and left within the year on grounds of health, then completed such studies as he completed at the University of the City of New York, chiefly in its law department.

The pattern left him with a lifelong distrust of credentials and a lifelong respect for demonstrated competence, which is a combination that later found its way into a statute. The argument of the Public Service Act 1883, that a candidate for the offices of the Union should be examined on what the office requires rather than presented on the strength of who he is, is recognisably the argument of a man who had been unable to acquire the ordinary marks of a gentleman’s education and had done the work anyway.

It also left him solitary in a way he never quite lost. He formed close friendships, but they were formed in adulthood and conducted largely by letter, and he had none of the automatic fraternity that a completed college career supplied to the American professional class of his generation. Colleagues who found him cold were describing something real. Those who knew him well described a man of considerable warmth who had never learnt the ordinary means of showing it and had stopped trying by about thirty.

The bar

He was admitted to the bar of the Province of New York in 1841, at twenty-seven, later than most. His practice began in the ordinary way, with small commercial work, collections and the drafting of instruments, and it was in that unglamorous ground that he found what he was good at.

Tilden’s talent was for the reconstruction of a transaction from its records. Given a company’s books, a set of contracts and the correspondence of the men who made them, he could establish what had actually happened, in what order, and to whose benefit, and could set it out so that a court or a committee could follow it without taking anything on trust. It is a narrow gift and a rare one, and it made him, within a decade, one of the most sought-after commercial counsel in the Realm.

He was never an advocate in the theatrical sense. He addressed juries seldom and courts without ornament, and observers agreed that his opening statements were among the least entertaining in the profession and among the hardest to answer. His cross-examination was conducted almost entirely by putting documents to a witness and asking him to explain them, a method that is tedious to watch and extremely difficult to survive.

The New York bar

Railway reorganisation

From the late 1840s Tilden’s practice turned to the railways, and the railways made him rich. The Realm’s railway building of that generation was financed by instruments that its promoters did not always understand and its investors frequently did not, and the resulting failures produced a body of work in reorganisation, receivership and the reconstruction of insolvent companies that had no established rules and required somebody to invent them.

Tilden became the man to whom the bondholders of a broken railway came. He would take the company’s records, establish what had been spent and on what, identify which securities had a genuine claim on which assets, and construct a plan of reorganisation that the holders would accept because he could show them the arithmetic. He was paid in fees and, characteristically, in the reorganised securities themselves, which is how a barrister of modest origins came to leave one of the largest estates the office of Prime Minister has known.

His critics have never let this go, and they are entitled not to. The reform Prime Minister made his fortune in the least transparent corner of nineteenth-century commerce, from companies whose charters had been obtained in provincial legislatures by means he would later legislate against, and he did it without apparent unease. His answer, given in committee rather than in public, was that he had never held a public office while doing it, had never taken a fee from a public body, and had made his money by putting other men’s affairs in order rather than by extracting anything from the public purse. That answer satisfies the letter of the objection and does not entirely dispose of it.

The document as instrument

What the railway practice gave him, more valuable to the Realm than the money, was a method. By the 1860s Tilden had worked through the internal records of dozens of large enterprises and had learnt something that most reformers of his generation did not know: that an organisation which is systematically diverting money must keep records of the diversion, because the diverters have to be paid and have to be paid in agreed shares.

This is the whole of the Tilden method and it is not complicated. Fraud on a large scale requires distribution. Distribution requires arithmetic. Arithmetic leaves traces in bank accounts, warrant books and ledgers, and those traces can be recovered and compared even when every participant is silent and every direct witness is unavailable or bought. A conspiracy that could not be broken by testimony could be broken by division.

He tested the method on commercial defendants for twenty years before he turned it on a political organisation, and by 1871 it was fully formed. The reform movement that later became a party did not invent this approach and did not understand it particularly well. What it understood was that the approach had worked, and that a movement which had been complaining about corruption in general terms for a generation now possessed a demonstration.

The fortune

By 1870 Tilden’s income was among the largest at the American bar and his holdings were substantial: railway securities principally, with bank stock, city property and a country place on the Hudson at Greystone which he bought later and used chiefly for convalescence. He lived at 15 Gramercy Park in New York City, in a house he remodelled to hold his library, and he spent very little of what he had.

The parsimony was not moral display. He was indifferent to comfort in the way that people who have been ill for long periods often are, and he found the ordinary machinery of a wealthy life more trouble than it was worth. He kept a small household, entertained a good deal and without ceremony, and gave away money privately and steadily throughout his life in amounts nobody discovered until his executors went through the accounts.

What he did not do was buy political influence, and his enemies looked hard. He financed his own campaigns and a considerable part of the reform associations’ work, and the party that emerged from those associations took its rule against institutional money partly from his example, on the ground that a body demanding clean public finance cannot be funded like the organisations it exists to break.

Politics before the Civil War

Free soil and the Barnburners

Tilden entered politics in the 1830s in the radical wing of the Province’s popular party, and his formation was in the faction rather than in the party. He was, in the vocabulary of the time, a Barnburner: a hard-money, anti-monopoly, anti-charter radical who held that the great danger to a free polity was the special privilege granted by a legislature to a private interest, and that the ordinary form of corruption in the Realm was the charter obtained by influence.

That doctrine matters because it is the seed of everything he later did. The objection to a corrupt charter is not that the men who obtained it are wicked. It is that a legislature which can grant a monopoly will be paid to grant one, and that the remedy is a general law under which anyone may incorporate rather than a particular favour that must be bought. Tilden argued this before he was thirty and never abandoned it, and it is the same argument he made about appointments, contracts and audits forty years later. Corruption follows discretion; remove the discretion and the corruption has nowhere to attach.

On slavery he took the free soil position: opposition to extension, no proposal for interference where it existed, and a willingness in 1848 to break his own party over the question. His record on the subject is respectable for a northern politician of his generation and no better than that. He treated slavery as a political and constitutional problem to be contained, not as a moral emergency that reorganised every other question, and the distinction is visible in his conduct thirty years afterwards.

The Assembly and the conventions

He sat in the Assembly of New York in 1846, and the session was formative. He worked on the provincial convention of that year, which rewrote the Province’s constitution, and his contribution was in the least admired and most useful part of the work: the article restricting special legislation, requiring general incorporation laws and limiting the power of the legislature to pledge the Province’s credit to private undertakings.

He returned to the Assembly briefly in 1872 during the Tweed prosecutions, and sat in the second provincial convention of 1867. In each case his interest was in the machinery rather than in the declarations. He drafted, he sat in committee, he compared the text of proposals against the records of what had happened under the existing text, and he showed no interest at all in speaking on the floor.

Contemporaries found this incomprehensible in a man of his ability, and it cost him for years. A provincial politician who does not speak and does not seek office is easily mistaken for a man without ambition, and Tilden was allowed by the organisation he belonged to to accumulate an intimate knowledge of how it worked without anybody taking the trouble to be careful in front of him. The Tweed Ring made the same mistake and it was fatal to them.

The war

Tilden’s conduct during the Civil War is the least attractive part of his record and he never explained it satisfactorily. He supported the Union, opposed the rebellion, subscribed to loan issues and gave professional advice to the Province’s authorities without fee. He also spent a good deal of the war in correspondence with men who thought the war a mistake, argued against measures he considered constitutionally irregular, and criticised the war ministry’s conduct of finance and contracts in terms that were substantially correct and extremely unwelcome.

The criticism of the contracts was, in retrospect, the beginning of his national argument. The Realm’s war procurement was carried on at speed, in enormous volume, by departments with no capacity to check what they were buying, and it produced fraud on a scale that the Realm has never fully documented because the papers were never systematically examined. Tilden said so at the time, in private and in memoranda that circulated among the Province’s commercial men, and the war ministry regarded him as a nuisance.

What he did not do was make the argument publicly while the fighting continued, and he was reproached for that from both directions afterwards: by those who thought he should have pressed it, and by those who thought that a man who had held his tongue during the war had no standing to lecture the peace. He appears to have concluded that the objection to wartime profiteering could not be made without weakening the war, and to have found the conclusion uncomfortable enough that he did not repeat the reasoning in later years.

The Tweed Ring

What the Ring was

The organisation that Tilden broke was not a party and was not a conspiracy in the ordinary sense. It was a set of offices held simultaneously by men who had agreed how to divide what those offices controlled, and its strength lay in the fact that every one of them was lawfully in place.

William M. Tweed and his associates held, between them, the machinery by which New York City incurred obligations, certified that the work had been done, authorised payment and audited the result. The same interest that awarded a contract inspected it. The same interest that inspected it approved the voucher. The same interest that approved the voucher supervised the officer who audited the account. There was no point in the chain at which an independent person was required to look at anything, and the Ring’s members had not needed to break a single rule to arrange this. They had won elections, been appointed to offices, and taken the powers those offices carried.

Nor was the organisation simply predatory. It was, for a considerable part of the city’s population, the only public authority that worked. It found employment, paid for funerals, intervened with landlords and magistrates, met immigrant ships and supplied on demand the services a formal civic structure did not supply to people it did not regard as its concern. The Realm’s reform literature has generally understated this, and the understatement is one of the reasons the reform tradition took so long to build a popular base in the cities. A machine that answers when nothing else answers is not defeated by proving that it steals.

The scale of the theft

The sums have never been settled and the argument about them continues. The Ring’s method was the inflated voucher: the city contracted for work, the work was performed or partly performed or not performed, the contractor rendered an account many times the value of what had been supplied, and the difference was divided. A plastering account of a few thousand pounds was rendered at a figure that would have plastered the Province. Furniture, ironwork, carpets and the fitting of a single county building consumed sums that had built harbours.

Estimates laid before the courts and the provincial committees in the 1870s ranged from four millions to thirty millions of American Pounds, and the range is honest rather than careless: nobody could say how much of the expenditure represented work actually done, because the officers who would have certified it were the officers taking the money. The best modern estimates rest on Tilden’s own reconstruction and are conventionally given as a figure the Realm’s historians decline to make precise.

What is not in doubt is the effect on the city’s credit. New York borrowed to pay for the work, the debt was real whatever the work was worth, and the burden of servicing it fell on ratepayers for a generation. The Ring’s defenders said it had built a city. It had also mortgaged one.

Why the prosecution was difficult

The obstacles were formidable and they were institutional rather than personal. The city’s records were in the Ring’s custody. The city’s law officers were the Ring’s appointees. The magistrates before whom a complaint would be laid held their places by the Ring’s favour, and the juries drawn in the city’s courts were drawn from panels the Ring’s officers prepared. Witnesses who might have testified were employees, contractors or officeholders who would lose everything by speaking and had no protection if they did.

Direct proof of the agreement was therefore unavailable in the ordinary way, and the reform committees that had been demanding action for years had nothing but the obvious. They knew what was happening. They could not prove it in a form a court would accept, and their inability to do so had itself become an argument for the Ring, whose members observed accurately that after a decade of accusation nobody had proved anything.

There was also the difficulty that most of what had been done was not obviously criminal on its face. A contract lawfully let, a voucher lawfully certified and a warrant lawfully drawn are lawful acts, and the offence lay in the concealed agreement behind them. To reach the agreement, a prosecutor had to establish that the pattern of payments could have no innocent explanation, which meant establishing the pattern.

The arithmetic of the warrants

Tilden’s contribution was to prove the agreement from the accounts, and the demonstration is still taught.

Beginning in 1871 he obtained, by process and by the cooperation of a small number of bank officers who had begun to understand what their institutions were being used for, the accounts of the contractors who had been paid by the city and the accounts through which those payments were subsequently distributed. He then did what nobody had thought to do: he compared them, payment by payment, over a period of years, and calculated the proportions.

What emerged was that the sums leaving the contractors’ accounts and arriving in the accounts of the Ring’s members were not random. They were fractions, and the fractions were constant. Payment after payment, across different contracts, different trades and different years, the same proportions recurred: a fixed share to one account, a fixed share to another, a fixed share to a third. No innocent explanation of a constant division exists. A pattern of that kind is an agreement, and an agreement of that kind is a conspiracy, and Tilden set the whole of it out in a schedule that a court could follow line by line.

The schedule was the case. It did not depend on a witness who could be bought, frightened or discredited, and it could not be answered by character evidence, because it was arithmetic. When the analysis was published it also did something the courts could not do: it made the Ring’s members answerable to people who had no legal training whatever, because anybody can see that the same fraction turning up twenty times is not a coincidence.

The prosecutions

The litigation ran from 1871 to 1873 and took several forms at once, which was deliberate. Criminal proceedings were brought where the evidence would carry a conviction. Civil actions were brought in the name of the city and the Province to recover the money, on the reasoning that a defendant who could not be imprisoned might still be stripped. Proceedings were brought to remove officers from their places, and the papers laid before the Assembly of New York produced the removal of judges whose conduct the ordinary process could not reach.

Charles O’Conor conducted much of the litigation as special counsel and did it superbly. Tilden was not the advocate; he was the man who built the case, organised the evidence, directed the strategy and financed a good deal of it out of his own pocket when the public bodies concerned proved reluctant to vote money for proceedings against their own patrons. He also took the political risk, which was substantial. He was attacking the dominant organisation of his own province and the one to which he himself had belonged, and he did it while the organisation still controlled the offices that could ruin him.

Tweed was convicted, escaped, was retaken and died in custody. Others fled the Realm, several to countries with which no arrangement for their return existed, and a proportion of the money went with them. The recoveries were partial and disappointing to those who had expected restitution. The removals from office were the more durable result: the men who had held the machinery were separated from it, and the offices themselves were reconstructed so that the same combination could not be assembled again in the same way.

What the prosecution did not reach

The honest account records the limits. The Ring’s leaders were destroyed and the organisation was not. The neighbourhood structure that had made it strong survived the removal of the men at the top, because it rested on services people needed and continued to need, and within a decade it had produced new leaders and a considerably more careful set of arrangements.

The money was largely not recovered. The greater part of what had been taken had been spent, transferred abroad or converted into property that the civil actions could not reach, and the ratepayers of New York City serviced the debt regardless.

Nor did the prosecution reach the interests on the other side of the transactions. Contracts require contractors, and the contractors who rendered the inflated accounts were respectable men of business whose names appeared on the subscription lists of the reform associations. A few were proceeded against. Most were not, and the reason offered at the time was that the evidence against them was weaker, which was true, and the reason offered since is that the reform movement was substantially composed of the commercial class from which those men were drawn, which is also true. Tilden did not answer the point, then or later, and the omission is the strongest single objection to the moral shape of his career.

The prosecution as a founding act

Why a prosecution rather than a manifesto

Political parties ordinarily begin with a statement of what they want. The Liberal Federal Democrats began with a demonstration of what could be done, and the difference has marked the party ever since.

The reform associations of the 1860s had not lacked programmes. They had produced addresses, resolutions, pamphlets and a considerable literature of complaint, and they had achieved almost nothing, because the complaint was general and the answer to a general complaint is a general denial. What they lacked was proof that the thing they described was real, that it had a mechanism, and that the mechanism could be dismantled by lawful means without a revolution, a purge or a change in human nature.

The Tweed prosecution supplied all three. It established that a machine of that scale could be broken by process; that the breaking required no new powers, only the use of existing ones by somebody who wished to use them; and that the proof lay in records the machine itself had kept. A movement that had been asking to be believed could now point at something.

That is why the party dates itself from a criminal and civil proceeding rather than from a convention, and why its founding text is a statute it did not pass, the Parliamentary Reform Act 1859. Both choices say the same thing about it. The LFD does not derive its authority from a doctrine of the good society. It derives it from two demonstrations that particular pieces of machinery were made honest, and it has spent a century and a half arguing that the rest of the machinery can be made honest in the same way.

The method as a doctrine

The generalisation from the prosecution was made rapidly and by other men. Tilden himself was cautious about it and remained so, but the reform associations drew from the Tweed case a set of propositions that hardened into the party’s doctrine within a decade.

The first was that corruption is arithmetic before it is anything else, and therefore detectable. The second was that it requires the concentration of related powers in a single interest, and is therefore preventable by separating them. The third, and the most consequential, was that the individual character of officeholders is nearly irrelevant to the outcome, because a structure that permits diversion will find men to conduct it whatever the moral tone of the age.

That third proposition is the party’s real inheritance from the prosecution and the source of most of what is distinctive about it. It is the reason the LFD has always preferred rules to appeals, examination to selection, tender to discretion and publication to assurance. It is also the reason its opponents have found it bloodless, and the reason its own critics on the left have observed that a party which regards character as irrelevant has some difficulty explaining why anybody should want the offices to be honest in the first place.

Premier of New York

The provincial ministry of 1875

The prosecution made Tilden a public figure against his inclination, and the reform organisations of the Province put him into provincial office because there was nobody else with a comparable claim. He became Premier of New York in 1875, holding the confidence of the Assembly at the head of a combination of reform members, a portion of his own former party and a body of members from the commercial districts who had voted the other way all their lives.

The ministry lasted two years and was conducted in the manner that later characterised his federal government. He took no interest in the ceremonial side of the office and delegated it. He asked for the papers on everything. He installed the practice, unusual at the time, of requiring departments to state in writing what a proposal would cost and who would receive the money, and of refusing to consider proposals that did not.

It was not a popular administration and was not intended to be. Its measures were technical: the reorganisation of provincial contracting, a general law of incorporation replacing a body of special charters, the reform of the Province’s assessment and collection of revenue, and the tightening of the rules governing the sums the Province could pledge to private undertakings. Provincial politics found the whole business tedious, which Tilden regarded as evidence that it was working.

The Canal Ring

The provincial ministry’s principal action was against the canal contractors, and it was the Tweed case performed a second time on a different body of records.

The Province’s canals were maintained under contracts let by provincial officers, and the contracts had for years been let to a combination which arranged among itself who should bid, at what figure, and what should be paid to whom. The work was performed badly or not at all, the accounts were rendered and certified, and the officers responsible for inspection were part of the arrangement. It was smaller than the Tweed Ring, less visible because it operated in the counties rather than in the city, and harder to reach because the contracts were formally regular.

Tilden’s ministry applied the same method: obtain the accounts, compare the bids, establish the pattern of who had bid against whom and at what margins, and show that the distribution of the work could not have arisen from competition. The demonstration was conclusive, the prosecutions and removals followed, and the canal contracting of the Province was reorganised on a tendering basis that has been amended many times and never abandoned.

The political consequence was that the reform argument was no longer a city argument. The Tweed Ring could be dismissed by rural members as a metropolitan disease. The Canal Ring was rural, respectable and Protestant, and its exposure by the same man using the same technique made the reform case general in a way that a hundred addresses had not.

The limits of a provincial reform

Tilden left the provincial premiership in 1877 having learnt the lesson that took him to the Commons. A polity ministry can reform a polity, and the Realm has forty-nine of them.

The federal machinery he could not touch from Albany was the machinery that mattered most to the reform movement: the customs houses, the post offices, the land offices, the marshals’ service, the federal courts’ clerkships and the enormous body of federal appointments distributed through the polities as the reward of party service. Every one of them was in the gift of a federal minister, and every one of them was the point at which a federal ministry purchased the loyalty of a provincial organisation. A Province could clean its own offices and remain, in its politics, entirely dependent on the offices that a Prime Minister controlled.

He said so publicly on leaving office, in one of the few speeches of his career that anybody quoted afterwards, and stood for the Commons at the general election of 1877.

The founding of the Liberal Federal Democrats

The reform associations

The party was assembled in the 1870s from a collection of bodies that had existed separately for a decade: municipal reform societies, chambers of commerce, bar associations, university men, the editors of a group of newspapers and reviews with a national circulation and no party allegiance, and a substantial body of the professional classes who had no political home they were willing to admit to.

What they had in common was a target rather than a programme. The long ascendancy of the Conservative and Crown Union after Reconstruction had, in their account, quietly converted the public business of the Realm into private property: offices distributed as patronage, contracts let to friends, city governments run as concerns, and a federal administration in which nobody could establish what had been bought or from whom.

They were not a party of the left at the outset and did not describe themselves as one. A great many of them were commercial men who had voted CCU and would have continued to do so had the CCU been governing honestly, and the early programme was administrative rather than social: appointment by examination, competitive tender, published accounts, an independent audit, and the separation of party organisation from public employment. The party’s later position on the centre-left was arrived at over decades and would have surprised most of the men in the room.

The convention and the name

The formal constitution of the party in the 1870s produced the three-word name that has been misread ever since, and the middle word is the one that causes the trouble.

Liberal carried its nineteenth-century sense: government limited by law, careers open to talent, free trade and free inquiry, and hostility to privilege however acquired. Democrats was, in the 1870s, a claim against the machines rather than for a franchise the Realm already substantially had, and asserted that a party could be popular without being bought. Federal was the diagnosis.

Tilden’s part in the founding was smaller than the party’s own tradition suggests, and he was uncomfortable with the whole proceeding. He distrusted conventions, disliked the word Democrats on the ground that it invited exactly the confusion it later produced, and argued that the movement’s strength lay in being a demand rather than an organisation. He was overruled by men who pointed out, correctly, that a demand cannot form a ministry.

The meaning of Federal

The word does not mean centralising and never did. It means the federal machinery: the administration, the courts, the electoral system, the public accounts and the procedures by which the government of the Realm is actually carried on.

The founding generation held that the corruption they opposed was not a moral failing of individuals but a defect of machinery, and that the remedy was accordingly structural. The name records the diagnosis. A party that believed corruption to be a defect of character would have demanded better men, and would have had nothing to propose when better men were unavailable, which is most of the time. A party that believed it to be a defect of machinery could propose an examination, a tender, an audit and a published account, and could keep proposing them irrespective of who happened to be in office.

The misreading has been permanent and the party has never successfully corrected it. Every generation of American commentary has assumed that a party calling itself Federal must want a stronger centre, and every generation of the party has explained that it wants a centre that works and has no view about how large it should be. The explanation is accurate. It has never once been interesting enough to displace the misreading.

No institutional money

The rule against institutional money was adopted in the 1880s, during and immediately after Tilden’s ministry, and it followed from his own practice and from an argument he made repeatedly: that a party demanding clean public finance cannot be funded like the organisations it exists to break.

The consequence was chronic poverty, which the party has always treated as evidence of good faith and its opponents as evidence of incapacity. Both are right. The LFD has never been able to match the organisational reach of its rivals in the industrial polities, and its inability to do so is the direct result of a rule adopted at the moment of its greatest success, by people who had just proved what money does to a public body and were not inclined to make an exception for themselves.

The Commons and the opposition to Blaine

Gramercy

Tilden entered the House of Commons at the general election of 1877 for the Gramercy division of New York City, one of the constituencies created out of the metropolitan entitlement that the Parliamentary Reform Act 1859 had granted the city without conditions. He held it until 1887 and never faced a serious contest in it, which says less about his popularity than about the district, a professional and mercantile quarter that would have returned him against anyone.

He was sixty-three, in indifferent health, and arrived in a chamber where the man he had come to oppose was at the height of his powers. James G. Blaine had formed his ministry in the same year, had a majority, had the confidence of the commercial interest and possessed the parliamentary gifts that Tilden entirely lacked.

Tilden’s early years in the Commons were accordingly unimpressive to watch and productive in the only way that mattered to him. He made few speeches, sat on committees, and began the systematic examination of the ministry’s papers that occupied him for six years.

The Committee of Public Accounts

The instrument he used was the Commons’ oldest and least regarded: the committee that examines the public accounts, a body whose independence from the ministers it examines had been secured by the Second Amendment to the Charter in 1809 and which had spent most of the intervening seventy years producing reports nobody read.

Tilden read them. He then began requiring the departments to produce the papers behind them, and within three sessions the committee had become the most feared body in Parliament. Its method was his: obtain the contracts, obtain the accounts of the contractors, compare the tendered figures across years and departments, and put the resulting schedules to the officers concerned with a request for an explanation.

What it produced was not a scandal in the ordinary sense. There was no single revelation and no minister was destroyed. What emerged instead, session by session, was a picture of the ordinary conduct of federal business: rail charters granted on terms nobody had costed, land conveyed without valuation, supply contracts let without competition to houses whose partners subscribed to party funds, customs establishments carrying appointments that corresponded to no work, and departmental estimates constructed so that Parliament could not tell from them what any activity of the Union actually cost.

An extra-parliamentary movement in Parliament

The harder problem was converting a movement of associations into a body that could take office, and Tilden was better at it than his manner suggested.

The reform members returned in 1877 and afterwards were an awkward parliamentary material: independent, professionally successful, unaccustomed to being told what to do, and disinclined to accept the discipline that a parliamentary party requires. A good many of them regarded organisation itself as the disease. Tilden’s argument to them was the one he had lost at the founding convention and now made in reverse: that a demand cannot form a ministry, that a ministry is the only thing that can carry a statute, and that a movement which refused to organise was choosing permanent virtue over any result.

The party that entered 1883 in a position to take office was therefore his construction as much as anyone’s, and it was held together by two things. The first was the committee work, which gave a disparate body of members a common activity and a shared body of knowledge. The second was the plain fact that the alternative to organising was watching the Blaine ministry continue, which by 1882 the reform members found intolerable.

Accession to the premiership

The fall of the Blaine ministry

Blaine’s government did not fall on a scandal. It fell because it ran out of the ability to hold its own benches together, and the reform committee’s six years of accumulated schedules were a substantial part of the reason.

By the beginning of 1883 the ministry’s difficulty was structural. Its majority depended on members whose local organisations were sustained by federal appointments, and those appointments had been so exhaustively catalogued in the committee’s reports that defending them had become the ministry’s principal parliamentary business. A government whose supporters must vote every week to protect their own patronage from publication is a government spending its authority on the least defensible ground available to it, and Blaine, who understood parliamentary arithmetic better than most, saw what was happening before his colleagues did.

He resigned when it became clear that he could no longer sustain the confidence of the Commons. There was no defeat on supply, no motion carried against him and no crisis. There was the ordinary and slightly undignified process by which a ministry discovers that it can no longer be certain of a division, and a Prime Minister who preferred to go while the choice was still his.

The commission

Governor-General Rutherford B. Hayes waited for clear parliamentary evidence and then commissioned Tilden promptly. He imposed no conditions, sought no undertakings on the reform programme, and did not ask Blaine to remain as a caretaker of his own choosing. Tilden’s authority came from the Commons, not from Hayes’s considerable personal admiration for him.

The sequence was constitutionally exact and is used in the Realm’s teaching as an example of it. Blaine tendered his resignation. Hayes established, through the ordinary channels and without conducting an inquiry of his own, that Tilden could command a majority. The commission issued in Ernest III’s name. No reserve power was engaged, no advice was refused, and the King’s part was the formal commission and nothing beyond it.

Tilden kissed hands at sixty-nine, in poor health, at the head of a party that had existed for less than a decade and held nothing like a majority of the Commons on its own.

The first Cabinet

The government he formed was a combination and was understood to be one. The LFD supplied the Prime Minister, the law officers and the departments most directly concerned with the reform programme. The remainder of the Cabinet was drawn from the reform-minded members of the CCU benches who had crossed to bring the ministry into being, and from a body of independents whose price for support was a share of the offices they had spent six years arguing should not be distributed as a price for support. The irony was noticed at the time and Tilden did not pretend otherwise.

Abram S. Hewitt went to the Exchequer, which was the ministry’s most important appointment and its most surprising. Hewitt was an iron master, a man of business rather than a reform enthusiast, and his selection signalled that the government intended to be believed by the commercial interest while legislating against its convenience. The two men had been friends and allies for twenty years and the Chancellor was the only member of the Cabinet who argued with the Prime Minister as an equal.

The Cabinet met more often than its predecessors and decided less in the room. Tilden’s practice, formed in a law office, was to settle business bilaterally with the minister concerned on the basis of a written submission, and to bring to Cabinet a decision already reached and a paper already drafted. Collective responsibility held absolutely, as it always has. What his colleagues complained of, in memoirs written afterwards, was that they were rarely present at the moment anything was determined.

The civil service settlement

The Government House demonstration

The most important single event in the making of the merit civil service happened in a building that governs nothing, and it was not the Prime Minister’s doing.

Hayes had come to the vice-regency in February 1881 unable to secure merit appointment for the public service and unwilling to leave the argument unmade. He therefore applied the principle to the only establishment he controlled. Posts in the vice-regal household at Government House were advertised, candidates were examined, and appointments were made on the result rather than on connection or on the recommendation of a party organisation. At the time this was regarded as an eccentricity and was reported as one.

It worked, visibly and quickly, and the visibility was the point. The objection to examination had always been practical rather than principled: that the offices required qualities a paper could not test, that men appointed on merit would be clerks without judgment, and that the whole scheme was an academic fancy that would collapse on contact with the work. Hayes’s household disposed of the objection in the most awkward possible way, by running better than the establishments around it while anybody who cared to could come and look.

The civil service followed two years later. The Realm’s permanent, politically neutral public service, which survives changes of government intact and is one of the constraints a modern Prime Minister complains about most, began as a demonstration project in the servants’ hall of the Crown’s American residence, and the Prime Minister who carried it into statute was entirely willing to say so.

The Public Service Act 1883

The Act was the first substantial measure of the ministry and was introduced within months of its formation. It was drafted principally by Dorman B. Eaton, who had spent a decade on the question and who became the first chairman of the commission the Act created.

Its provisions were narrower than the reform associations wanted and were narrow deliberately. It established a Public Service Commission independent of ministers, with power to prescribe examinations. It brought a schedule of offices of the Union within a classified service to which appointment could be made only from among candidates who had been examined and placed. It provided that promotion within the classified service should be on merit assessed by the department and reviewable by the commission. It prohibited the assessment of officeholders for party funds, a practice which had converted a large part of the federal establishment into a standing subscription list. And it provided that an officer of the classified service should not be removed for political opinion or for refusal to render political service, with a right to written reasons and to review.

The schedule of classified offices covered rather less than half the federal establishment at commencement, and the Act gave the ministry power to extend it by Order in Council. That power was the mechanism by which the settlement grew, and it is the reason a modest statute produced an institution. Every subsequent ministry extended the schedule, including ministries that had opposed the Act, because the political cost of extending it was nil and the political benefit of removing a class of appointments from the reach of one’s successors was considerable.

Examination and the classified service

The examinations themselves were the subject of the sharpest argument and the least of the practical difficulty. The reform associations wanted competitive examination on general education, on the reasoning that the Realm should recruit its administrators from the ablest young men available. Tilden wanted examination on the work, on the reasoning that an office exists to be performed and that the question is whether a candidate can perform it.

Tilden’s view prevailed and shaped the character of the American public service permanently. The examinations prescribed under the Act were practical: arithmetic and accounts for revenue offices, drafting and the law of the department for the legal establishments, technical papers for the surveying and engineering services. They were open to any subject of the Crown of the requisite age without regard to means, education or connection, and the omission of a property or education qualification was the single most democratic thing the ministry did.

The consequence was a service recruited more widely than the professions and considerably more widely than Parliament. It also produced, within a generation, an administrative class with an institutional loyalty of its own, which was exactly what the reformers intended and which every subsequent ministry has found irritating in proportion to its own ambitions.

What the Act did not cover

The limits were substantial and Tilden acknowledged them.

The Act did not reach the polities, and could not. The offices in the gift of a provincial premier, a mayor or a county board were beyond federal competence, and the machines that had produced the Tweed Ring lived there. The reform of polity establishments proceeded over the following seventy years at forty-nine different speeds, and in several polities it had not meaningfully begun by the First Great War.

It did not reach the highest appointments, which remained ministerial, nor the great body of local federal appointments which the schedule did not initially classify. It said nothing about the judiciary, whose patronage was not removed until an independent commission was created long afterwards. It said nothing about peerages, which were not constrained until honours were sold and the sale was proved. And it did nothing whatever about the offices of the Union in the former rebel polities except to make the men who held them harder to remove, a consequence which cut in both directions and which the ministry did not examine as carefully as it should have.

Procurement, audit and the public accounts

Competitive tender

The Public Contracts and Accounts Act 1885 was the ministry’s second measure and the one Tilden considered more important. It applied to the purchase of goods and services by the Union the rules he had spent forty years demonstrating that private companies required.

Contracts above a prescribed value were to be advertised, tendered for competitively and awarded on stated criteria, with the reasons for awarding otherwise than to the lowest conforming tender recorded in writing and laid before Parliament. Ministerial discretion in the award of contracts was not abolished, because it cannot be, but it was made to leave a trace. A minister could still award a contract to a friend. He could no longer do it without a document explaining why, which is a smaller thing than the reformers wanted and turned out to be a more effective one.

The Act also prohibited a contractor from subscribing to a party fund while holding a contract of the Union, a provision that was widely evaded through intermediaries within a decade and that nonetheless changed the practice of federal contracting more than any other clause in the statute, because evasion through an intermediary is itself evidence of consciousness of wrongdoing and Tilden had built his career on precisely that inference.

The examiners of the public accounts

The examiners had been independent of ministers since 1809 and had been, for most of that period, an office of registration rather than of inquiry. They received the accounts, checked the arithmetic, certified that the money voted had been spent under the heads for which it was voted, and reported to Parliament in language that concealed as much as it disclosed.

The 1885 Act gave them three things they had not had: a statutory right of access to the papers of a department without the department’s leave; the power to begin an inquiry on their own motion rather than only on reference; and the duty to report on whether money had been spent to any effect, rather than only on whether it had been spent lawfully. The third was the innovation and it was resisted hardest, because it converted the audit from a question of legality into a question of value and gave a body of officials a standing licence to comment on the wisdom of what ministers had done.

Tilden’s answer to the objection is the clearest statement he ever made of his own doctrine. He told the Commons that an account which shows that money was lawfully spent and does not show what it bought is not an account but a receipt, and that Parliament had been voting supply for a century against receipts.

Publication

The last element was the simplest and has proved the most durable. The Act required the contracts of the Union above the prescribed value to be published, and the accounts as rendered and as certified to be published with them.

The requirement gave Ledger Square, on the Charter Axis between the Palace and Parliament House, the function it has performed ever since. The display of public contracts on Audit Row had been an occasional civic gesture; after 1885 it was a statutory duty, and the arrangement by which the Crown stands at one end of the capital’s spine, the legislature at the other and the money in plain sight in the middle acquired the legal content that the plan had only ever implied.

Publication also produced the effect Tilden had predicted and his opponents had denied. Very few members of the public ever read a published contract. A small number of newspapers, competitors of the successful tenderer and members of Parliament with a grievance read them constantly, and the knowledge that they would be read altered what officers were prepared to sign. The doctrine that publication works through the few who look rather than the many who do not is the ministry’s clearest contribution to the theory of open government, and it is the argument the party still makes about freedom of information.

The doctrine of machinery

Corruption as a defect of machinery

The intellectual content of Tilden’s politics can be stated in a sentence and takes a long time to work out. He held that corruption is a property of arrangements rather than of persons, and that the useful question about a public body is not whether its officers are honest but whether it would be possible for them to be otherwise without anybody finding out.

The argument runs as follows. Any office carries a discretion. A discretion has a value to those affected by it, and that value will be bid for, by money where money is possible and by service, loyalty or advancement where it is not. Whether the bid succeeds depends not on the character of the officer, which varies unpredictably and cannot be legislated for, but on whether the transaction can be concealed. Concealment depends on whether any independent person is required to look, and whether what that person would see would show the pattern. Therefore the object of reform is not to find honest men but to arrange offices so that dishonest ones are detected, and to do it in a way that survives the departure of the reformers.

This is not a cynical doctrine, though it is regularly mistaken for one. It assumes nothing about the prevalence of vice and does not require the assumption. It says only that a system which depends on the virtue of its officers has made its integrity a matter of luck, and that a public body has no business being lucky.

The argument with the moral reformers

Tilden’s doctrine put him at odds with a large part of the movement that had made him, and the disagreement was never resolved.

The moral reform tradition of the Realm, which was strong in the churches, in the temperance societies and among the men who had come to public life through abolition, held that the corruption of the age was a symptom of a general decay of public virtue, and that the remedy was the elevation of public life: better men, higher standards, the mobilisation of respectable opinion, and the restoration of the office to the sort of person who would not think of abusing it. It was a serious position and it had achieved a great deal.

Tilden thought it useless and said so with less tact than the political situation required. Better men, he argued, are a temporary condition; the machinery outlasts them; and a reform which consists of putting virtuous persons into unreformed offices has arranged for its own reversal at the next election. The moral reformers replied, with force, that a doctrine which regards character as irrelevant supplies no reason for anybody to want the reform in the first place, that examinations and tenders are administered by persons who may themselves be corrupted, and that at the bottom of every honest system there is somebody who has decided to be honest.

The Realm has never decided between them. The exchange is reprinted in constitutional readers, both positions are taught, and the party Tilden founded has spent its whole existence on his side of it while being sustained, in practice, by supporters who hold the other.

The blind spot

The doctrine has a defect, and Tilden’s ministry is the standing demonstration of it.

A theory which locates public failure in machinery will notice the failures that machinery produces and will be systematically slow to notice the failures that machinery is not the cause of. The apparatus of exclusion being constructed in the former rebel polities during exactly these years was not a corrupt machine. It was a lawful, orderly, competently administered and scrupulously recorded system of denial, operated by officers who took no bribes, kept accurate accounts and would have passed any examination the Public Service Commission could have set. There was nothing in it for an auditor to find.

Tilden’s instruments were therefore blind to it, and so was he. A man whose method is the comparison of accounts will see a padded payroll and will not see a registrar lawfully applying a lawful test to keep lawful voters off a lawful roll, because the second leaves no arithmetic behind. The ministry’s reform apparatus was pointed at the wrong thing for the whole of its existence, and the honest statement of the case against him is not that his doctrine was wrong about corruption but that he governed as though corruption were the only way a state can fail its people.

Reconstruction and the retreat

What the ministry inherited

The Civil War had ended in 1863 and the settlement had been built in the years after it: the Emancipation Measure of 1 January 1865, the American Rights Act of 1866, and the Fourth Amendment of 1873. Ulysses S. Grant’s ministry from 1869 to 1877 had prosecuted the organised violence of the Companies with an energy that the Realm’s later record makes startling, and the years between 1870 and 1876 were the freest the former rebel polities would see for eighty years.

The whole of that enforcement rested on a legal theory and on a political will, and both were fragile. The theory was that a conspiracy to prevent the exercise of a right guaranteed by federal law was a federal offence even where the underlying assault belonged to the polity. It worked, and it was laborious: every prosecution required a federal right to be established at its heart, the marshals’ service was small, troops could protect a poll and could not protect a farm, and the whole apparatus depended on a ministry willing to spend political capital in polities where it would receive nothing in return.

The will went in 1877 with Grant, and the retreat began under Blaine without being announced. Tilden inherited it in 1883 in an advanced condition: fewer prosecutions each year, a marshals’ service that had not been increased in a decade, a freedmen’s bureau already closed, and appointed federal officers in the former rebel polities being replaced by elected ones on a timetable that answered to local pressure rather than to local conditions.

Nothing was repealed

It has to be stated plainly, because the Realm’s argument about this period has often been conducted as though it were about repeal. Tilden’s ministry repealed nothing.

The Rights Act stood. The Fourth Amendment stood. The Emancipation Measure stood. No statute of the settlement was amended, no clause was narrowed by legislation, and no minister proposed that any of it should be. Tilden said in the Commons, more than once and in terms that his defenders quote and his critics do not dispute, that the equal protection of the law was not a policy of a government but a duty of the Union, and that no ministry had authority to reconsider it.

What his ministry did was administer it less. Prosecutions under the federal conspiracy theory were brought in smaller numbers in each year of the ministry than in the year before it. Applications from federal attorneys in the former rebel polities for the resources to bring more were refused or left unanswered, on grounds of economy, of doubtful prospects of conviction, and of the ministry’s general policy that the departments should live within their estimates. The marshals were not reinforced. Troops were not sent. The residual functions of the bureau were transferred to departments that did not perform them and were not required to report that they had not.

None of this required a decision that anyone could later point to, and that is the mechanism. A policy of enforcement is a stream of small affirmative acts, and a policy of abandonment is the absence of them. Nobody has to sign anything.

The economy argument

The instrument of the retreat under Tilden was the estimate, and the ministry’s own reform doctrine supplied its vocabulary.

A government committed to financial discipline, to departments living within their votes, to the elimination of establishments that could not justify themselves and to the auditing of public spending for value received had a ready-made and entirely respectable language for refusing money to an activity. The marshals’ service in the former rebel polities was expensive, produced few convictions relative to its cost, and could be shown in the ministry’s own new value-for-money audits to be an unsatisfactory employment of public funds. Every one of those statements was true. Together they were the machinery of abandonment, and they were operated by officials acting in perfect good faith under rules the Prime Minister had written.

This is the sharpest thing the Realm’s historians say about the Tilden Settlement and it deserves its edge. The audit reform that made the Union’s spending honest also gave a ministry an unanswerable technical basis for declining to spend on the one activity whose value could not be shown in an account, because what enforcement buys is a violence that did not happen, and no auditor can put a figure on that.

Tilden did not devise the argument as a cover and there is no evidence that he intended it as one. He built an instrument, the instrument did what instruments do, and he did not look closely at what it was being used for. A doctrine which holds that machinery matters more than character cannot then claim that the character of its author excuses what the machinery did.

The case made against him

The case was made at the time, continuously, and by people who knew exactly what they were describing.

The rights-enforcement members of the Commons, the Black churches and civic organisations of the former rebel polities, the associations built by the freed in the deliberate expectation of a hostile government, and the small body of northern advocates who had never accepted that the settlement was finished, all made the same argument in the same terms. Clean government language, they said, was the most respectable cover available for reducing expensive protection. The maintenance costs of the settlement were real. Underfunding it produced the same result as repealing it and left no record. A Prime Minister who spoke of economy without specifying what he would not economise on had not answered the question, and the freed communities had already worked out which line in the estimates the answer would be found in.

They also made a sharper point that is less often quoted. The ministry’s proudest achievement, the removal of appointments from political control, had a particular consequence in the former rebel polities that nobody in the Cabinet appears to have thought through. Black officeholders in those polities held their places overwhelmingly through federal appointment, because nothing else was available to them. A reform which made federal officers harder to remove protected the ones already in place, and a reform which replaced political appointment with local examination in polities whose local institutions were being reconstructed for exclusion handed the selection of federal officers to the very interests the settlement had been enacted against. The Act’s civil-service virtue and the Realm’s racial arithmetic pointed in opposite directions, and the ministry did not notice.

Frederick Douglass, who had left Government House in 1881 and was under no constitutional obligation to be quiet, put the objection in the form that has lasted: that a state which audits its accounts and does not count its dead has decided what it is prepared to know.

Tilden’s answer

Tilden’s answer was made in committee, usually in writing, and was always more convincing on paper than in a public address.

Corrupt enforcement, he argued, is weak enforcement. A marshals’ service whose payroll is padded with ghost appointments cannot protect anyone, because the ghosts do not ride. A court whose judges are appointed through machine connections cannot be trusted to apply the law to a defendant the machine protects. A federal establishment recruited by patronage in the former rebel polities is an establishment staffed by the nominees of the local interest, whatever the statute says about the duties of the office. The programme of institutional cleanliness was therefore a programme of institutional effectiveness, and clean government served the rights settlement in the only way anything could serve it, by making the instruments capable of the work.

He was not wrong about any of that, and it is the reason the argument has never been closed. The reformed instruments were better instruments. The service that emerged from the Public Service Act was more competent, less corruptible and more resistant to local capture than the establishment it replaced, and when the Realm eventually returned to the enforcement of the settlement in the middle of the twentieth century, it did so with an administrative apparatus that Tilden’s ministry had made possible.

His critics granted the point and pressed it further: economy must never become abandonment, and the question is not whether the instruments improved but whether they were used. Tilden acknowledged this. The acknowledgment did not reach the budget lines.

The verdict

The judgment the Realm has arrived at, and it has taken a century to arrive at it, is that both accounts are true and that the second one governs.

Tilden built the machinery on which the modern American state rests and used less of the machinery he inherited than the man before him. He did not begin the retreat and did not end it. He continued it, by the ordinary operation of a government that had decided the settlement was somebody else’s unfinished business, and he continued it with instruments of his own design that made the continuation look like good administration. Reconstruction ended in 1889, two years after he left office, by quiet withdrawal, with no statute, no proclamation and no debate, and the ministries of Blaine, Tilden and Cleveland are the three that carried it there.

The Governors-General of those decades watched it happen and could not stop it, and the record of Hayes’s audiences with Tilden is the clearest evidence in the Realm’s history of the limits of the Crown’s resident office. Hayes received the evidence of racial violence, entered it in the record, pressed his Prime Minister on enforcement in audience after audience, and granted assent on advice when the ministry acted otherwise, because Tilden commanded the Commons and he did not. Private objection preserved the accuracy of the record. It protected nobody.

Finance, tariff and the railways

Hard money

Tilden was a hard-money man of the strictest kind and his ministry governed the American Pound accordingly. He held that a currency is a promise, that a government which varies the value of the promise has taken property from the people who accepted it, and that the debtor relief obtainable by inflation is a transfer disguised as a policy.

The position was under continuous pressure. The agricultural polities of the west and the mining interest wanted an expansion of the currency, the argument had a genuine constituency and a genuine grievance behind it, and the ministry conceded almost nothing. Hewitt at the Exchequer defended the standard through four years of falling prices and rising rural anger, and the government’s refusal to move on the question cost it more support in the western polities than every reform measure combined.

The critics of the policy have the better of the distributional argument and the worse of the constitutional one. A creditor’s pound was protected; a farmer’s debt grew heavier every year in the goods required to service it; and a ministry which had described corruption as a transfer conducted in the dark was conducting a transfer in daylight and calling it discipline.

The tariff

On the tariff the ministry was divided and never settled. Tilden’s own position was for revenue duties and against protection, on the free-trade reasoning natural to a nineteenth-century liberal and on a further reasoning peculiar to him: that a protective schedule is a system of particular favours granted to particular trades by a legislature, and that everything he objected to about special charters applied to it with equal force.

He could not carry it. The protective interest was strong in the CCU members whose support sustained the ministry, strong in the industrial polities, and strong in his own Chancellor, who made iron. What the government achieved was a revision of the schedules which simplified a great deal, removed a body of duties that existed only because somebody had once asked for them, and left the structure of protection intact.

The reform of the customs establishment was more successful and less noticed. The customs houses had been the largest single reservoir of federal patronage in the Realm and the classified service reached them early, which removed at a stroke the appointments through which a federal ministry had for decades sustained the party organisations of the seaboard cities.

Rates and the railways

Tilden had made his fortune in railway law, and his ministry’s approach to the railway question was accordingly informed, cautious and disappointing to almost everybody.

The grievance of the shipping public was rate discrimination: the practice by which a railway charged different rates to different shippers for the same service, favoured its own connected undertakings, and rebated to the large at the expense of the small. Tilden understood the practice exactly, having advised on it, and accepted that it was a genuine abuse. What he would not accept was a general power in a public body to fix rates, on the ground that a discretion to fix a price is the largest discretion a government can create and would be bid for within a decade by exactly the interests the reform movement existed to defeat.

The ministry’s answer was procedural rather than substantive: publication of tariffs of charges, a prohibition on departure from the published tariff, and a requirement that the accounts of undertakings holding federal charters be rendered in a prescribed form. It was consistent with everything he believed and it was insufficient to the problem, and the regulation of the railways remained an unfinished argument that later ministries took up on quite different principles.

Labour and the eight-hour movement

Industrial conflict

The ministry governed through four years of severe industrial conflict and had no doctrine adequate to it. Tilden’s political formation was in the radical hostility to privilege of the 1830s, which was an argument about charters and monopolies rather than about wages, and he brought to the labour question of the 1880s a set of instruments designed for a different problem.

His instinct was procedural and, within its limits, honourable. He held that a dispute is a matter for the parties, that a public authority intervenes only to keep the peace and to enforce contracts equally against both sides, and that the use of federal force in an industrial dispute is a grave step requiring a lawful request, a stated necessity and a recorded warrant. The ministry’s practice on federal deployment was stricter than its predecessor’s and the warrants it produced are unusually complete.

Strictness about warrants is not the same as neutrality about outcomes. The law the ministry enforced equally was a law that treated combination by employers as commerce and combination by workmen as conspiracy, and a government which applies an unequal law with scrupulous procedural regularity has produced an unequal result with a clean record. The Realm’s labour movement drew its own conclusions and did not thereafter look to the reform party.

Haymarket

The rally for the eight-hour day at the Haymarket in Chicago in 1886, the bomb, the trial and the executions fell in the last full year of the ministry and are the events of its term that the Realm remembers.

The prosecution was a prosecution of the Commonwealth of Illinois, conducted in its courts under its law, and the federal government had no authority over it. The American Rights Act of 1866 bound federal authority and did not reach the polities, and the plainest demonstration of what that limit meant is that a ministry whose entire doctrine was the sufficiency of evidence could watch a capital trial proceed on evidence that later inquiry found insufficient and had, in law, nothing whatever to say about it.

Tilden said nothing whatever. He was asked in the Commons and answered that the administration of criminal justice in a polity is the polity’s own, which was correct, and that the government would not comment on a proceeding before its courts, which was also correct. The convictions rested on evidence the pardons afterwards acknowledged to have been insufficient, and the pardons came too late for the men who had been hanged. The Realm’s labour tradition has never accepted that the correct constitutional answer was the whole of what the occasion required, and the trade societies that formed the Labour Representation Union in the following decade dated their case against the existing parties from those years.

The eight-hour day

Where the ministry could act it acted narrowly. The federal establishment was within its competence, and the classified service reforms were accompanied by the regulation of hours, leave and conditions in the offices and yards of the Union, on the reasoning that the Crown should be a model employer because it is the only employer a ministry can order about.

The measure was real and its scope was small. It touched a fraction of the workforce, it did nothing for the packing houses, the mills or the mines, and it was cited for thirty years afterwards by ministries wishing to demonstrate concern for labour without legislating for it.

Foreign affairs

The inheritance from Blaine

Tilden took no interest in foreign policy and made no secret of it. The hemispheric programme Blaine had built, the conferences, the mediation, the pressing of American good offices on the republics to the south, continued under officials who had constructed it, with a Prime Minister who read the papers, asked what it cost and rarely intervened.

Where his temperament showed was in the ministry’s enthusiasm for arbitration. A government whose head believed that most disputes are questions of record rather than of will was naturally drawn to a procedure in which two parties lay their documents before an impartial person and accept the result, and Hayes’s award in the Paraguayan boundary reference of 1878 was cited by the ministry as the model. The Realm’s later reputation in international arbitration owes something to a Prime Minister who regarded a treaty as a contract and a boundary as a question of surveying.

Exclusion, honestly administered

The restrictive Chinese immigration legislation of 1882 had been carried under Blaine and assented to by Hayes on advice, and Tilden’s ministry inherited it. It did not propose to repeal it, and it applied it.

The result is the most uncomfortable single illustration of the ministry’s doctrine. A statute of exclusion administered by a patronage establishment is evaded, inconsistently applied, and corrupted at the ports by officers who can be paid to look elsewhere. A statute of exclusion administered by an examined, salaried, audited and politically neutral service is applied uniformly and works. The reform of the customs establishment made the exclusion more effective, and the people it excluded were worse off in consequence of an improvement in the honesty of the American state.

The ministry never addressed the point and there is no evidence that it occurred to anybody in it. Hayes had pressed Blaine privately on treaty faith and equal protection for persons already within the Union’s jurisdiction, and pressed Tilden on the same ground with the same lack of result. It is the clearest available answer to the question of what an honest machine is worth when the purpose it has been given is unjust.

The Crown and the Governors-General

Ernest III

Tilden served throughout under Ernest III, who had acceded in 1878 and whose reign ran to 1936. The relationship was correct, distant and entirely conventional. The King neither chose the ministry nor directed it; the Prime Minister was made by the Governor-General in the King’s name on the confidence of the Commons; and the ministry’s business with the London Crown was conducted through the vice-regal office and consisted overwhelmingly of instruments requiring completion.

Tilden went to Britain once during his ministry, briefly and on medical advice as much as any other, and the audience he had of the King is recorded in a single line of the Court Circular. He was not a courtier, had no interest in becoming one, and appears to have regarded the monarchy in the way he regarded most inherited institutions: as a piece of machinery whose working he had examined and found satisfactory, requiring no attention from him.

Hayes and the audiences

The partnership with Rutherford B. Hayes was the strongest ministerial relationship of Hayes’s eight years and it was built on method rather than on warmth. Both men valued probity, documentary evidence, fiscal discipline and the exposure of patronage networks. The weekly audiences were methodical and unusually harmonious. Files mattered, claims were tested against records, and neither man required theatrical warmth to recognise the seriousness of the other.

Hayes supported the civil-service programme within constitutional limits and no further. Government House used merit appointment and he encouraged rules capable of surviving the ministry that enacted them, offering questions rather than clauses: how appointments would be reviewed, whether dismissal procedures were fair, how local patronage could be prevented from reappearing under new names. He did not draft the legislation, did not negotiate for it, and did not convert the Crown’s resident office into a reform ministry.

When scandals produced demands that the Governor-General dismiss a minister, Hayes refused. He required complete advice and lawful process and declined to use Crown authority as a punishment for ordinary ministerial failure or public outrage. Parliament determined confidence, committees investigated, courts punished offences, and the office he held could insist that the papers were complete and could not become an alternative prosecutor.

The warning

The substance of the disagreement between them was rights, and Hayes made it repeatedly.

His argument was that clean government was not enough: that a perfectly audited department could still fail to enforce equal law, that racial violence was continuing in the former rebel communities, and that formally restored institutions could participate in denial while keeping impeccable accounts. He received the evidence, entered it in the record, pressed the Prime Minister on enforcement and affirmed equal protection publicly without prescribing operations.

Some reformers disliked his insistence that administrative virtue had a rights content. Some civil-rights advocates answered that insistence without federal action was another form of cleanliness at a distance. Both criticisms were fair, and the constitutional position was exactly what Hayes said it was: the ministry commanded the Commons, the Crown’s resident office did not, and a policy the Governor-General considered morally inadequate was not the failure of constitutional government that alone could justify a reserve power.

Parliament, elections and Cabinet method

The arithmetic

The ministry’s parliamentary position was weak from the day it was formed and never improved. The LFD was a young party with a professional and metropolitan base, and it depended for its majority on reform-minded members elected under other colours and on independents whose support was given measure by measure.

Tilden went to the country in 1884 and the result confirmed the ministry without strengthening it. The reform programme was popular in the professional and university cities, in the commercial districts and among the readers of the reform press, and it moved nobody in the industrial polities or the rural interior, where the currency question and the tariff decided votes and the removal of patronage from the customs houses was regarded, correctly, as an attack on the local organisation. The government returned with its combination intact, its majority thin and its reason for existing largely enacted.

Governing without patronage

The most instructive administrative fact about the ministry is that it deprived itself of the instrument by which nineteenth-century governments held majorities together, and then had to hold a majority together.

A Prime Minister of that era commanded the machinery of the state very nearly as personal property, and the classified service removed a great deal of it deliberately and permanently. What Tilden had left was the Cabinet, the honours he declined to trade, and argument. He substituted for patronage a technique that his colleagues found extraordinary and his opponents found unanswerable: he supplied members with information. A member with a grievance about a departmental decision received the papers. A member intending to oppose a measure received the schedules on which it rested before the debate rather than after it. The practice cost nothing, made him a great many allies who did not much like him, and is the origin of the party’s long attachment to disclosure as a political instrument as well as a principle.

The end of the ministry

Why a reform ministry lasted four years

The shortness of the ministry has been treated as a puzzle and is not one. Four separate causes ran together and each would have been sufficient on its own.

The first is that a reform coalition is a coalition against something. The combination that carried Tilden into office in 1883 was united by the Blaine ministry’s record and by very little else, and once the Public Service Act and the Public Contracts and Accounts Act were on the statute book its members had no common purpose left. Its CCU wing wanted the tariff protected and got nothing; its western members wanted the currency expanded and got nothing; its own party wanted more of everything and had run out of things to want.

The second is that the programme was finite by design. The party had a diagnosis rather than an agenda, and a diagnosis can be acted on once. Tilden’s doctrine did not tell him what a government should do after the machinery was honest, and he had no answer to the question when it was put to him, which it increasingly was.

The third is that he had given away the means of survival. A ministry without patronage in the 1880s was a ministry without whips who could offer anything, and the technique of governing by disclosure worked to build a majority for a measure and not to hold one together over years.

The fourth is that he was old and ill and everybody knew it. A party will endure a great deal from a leader who may recover and very little from one who plainly will not, and by 1886 the succession was being discussed openly in a manner Tilden found undignified and did not contest.

Retirement

He announced his retirement early in 1887 and conducted it in the manner of everything else he did, by memorandum. There was no defeat, no crisis and no attempt to hold on. He told the Cabinet, told the party, told the Governor-General, and left the arrangements to the constitution.

Hayes commissioned Grover Cleveland promptly on clear evidence of Commons confidence, without conditions and without designing a caretaker. Cleveland was not Tilden’s creature and did not pretend to be, but he had come to national politics out of the same provincial reform tradition, and the settlement he inherited he defended and extended. The reform programme therefore passed from a party that had been founded to demand it into a CCU ministry that administered it as ordinary government, which is the fate the LFD’s own reviews identify as the party’s permanent condition.

What the ministry left

The legislative record is short and the institutional record is not. Two Acts, a body of Orders in Council extending the classified schedule, a reorganised customs establishment, an audit with teeth and a requirement to publish are the whole of it, and out of them came the Realm’s permanent civil service.

Against that stands the other column, which the Realm has become steadily less willing to leave out of the account. The retreat continued through the ministry and was two years from completion when it ended. The exclusion legislation was applied more effectively than before. The labour question was answered with warrants and procedure. And the instrument of value-for-money audit which the ministry created was, from the moment it was created, available to any government that wished to defund an obligation it could not be seen to repeal.

Personal life

A bachelor premiership

Tilden never married. He was a bachelor his entire life, one of a very small number of Prime Ministers to serve without a spouse at the ceremonial level, and he treated the fact as a practical simplification rather than a loss.

He was not reclusive. He entertained extensively at Gramercy Park and at Greystone, corresponded very widely, and maintained close friendships of thirty and forty years standing, chiefly with lawyers, editors and men of business. What he did not do was form the kind of household that the ceremonial side of the premiership assumed, and the ministry’s official entertaining was accordingly conducted by the wives of colleagues and by his niece, who kept house for him for much of his later life.

The Realm has never made anything of it. There was no scandal, no speculation that survives in any source worth citing, and no evidence of an attachment. He appears to have decided early that his health and his work left no room for a marriage, and to have arranged his life on that basis without regret and without explanation.

Books and the library

His one extravagance was books, and it was a large one. The library at Gramercy Park was among the best private collections in the Realm, was built systematically over forty years, and was catalogued by its owner in a hand that his executors found easier to read than his correspondence.

It was a working collection rather than a cabinet of rarities. He collected law, history, political economy, the published papers of legislatures and, in great quantity, official reports: the accounts of public bodies, the returns of commissions, the evidence taken by committees. A man who believed that the truth about an institution lay in its records had assembled the records, and the collection is the clearest single piece of evidence about how his mind worked.

Manner and health

Contemporaries describing Tilden reached with unusual consistency for the same words: exact, cold, patient, formidable, dry. He spoke quietly, seldom raised his voice, and had a courtroom manner that his opponents described as the least enjoyable experience available in American public life.

The coldness was partly constitutional and partly the accumulated habit of a lifetime of illness. He was frequently unwell from childhood, suffered a serious collapse in the late 1870s and a further one during the ministry, and worked through both in a manner his physicians deplored. He had also the invalid’s economy of effort: he did not waste energy on charm, on ceremony or on the ordinary social maintenance of a political career, and he was disliked by a great many people who had never had a substantive disagreement with him.

Those who broke through described somebody quite different: funny in a dry and unexpected way, unusually attentive to the troubles of subordinates, and generous with money and time in a manner he took some care to conceal.

Death and the Tilden Trust

The last months

He left office in 1887 in declining health and did not recover. The last months were spent at Greystone, working, receiving visitors and settling his affairs with the thoroughness of a man who had spent his life on other people’s estates and did not intend to leave a muddle of his own.

He died on 4 August 1887, a few months after handing the government to Cleveland. The obituaries divided almost exactly along the lines the historians have followed since: the reform press treated the death as the close of a founding career, and the rights-enforcement press observed that the Realm had buried a man who had audited everything except the thing that mattered.

The will and the library

His estate, accumulated through decades of railway law and financial counsel, was among the largest held by any Prime Minister at death. He bequeathed the greater part of it to establish a free public library in the Province of New York, on the grounds that the public’s access to knowledge is as important as its access to honest courts, and the Tilden Trust became a founding element of that institution.

The bequest was litigated. Relations contested the will, the trust provisions were attacked as uncertain, and a substantial proportion of the estate was consumed or diverted before the courts were finished, which is an outcome of some irony in the case of a man who drafted for a living. What survived was sufficient, the library was built, and it holds his own collection.

The bequest is the act that complicates the austerity verdict, and later writers have made a good deal of it. A Prime Minister who leaves his fortune to public knowledge is not indifferent to the public. He may simply have expressed his concern for people through institutions rather than through warmth, which is itself an argument about what government owes and how it should be offered.

Public image and historical reputation

The contemporary image

The Realm of the 1880s found him admirable and could not warm to him. The bynames record it exactly: the Reform Prime Minister, the Great Reformer, and, more revealingly, the Auditor. The last was not affectionate and was not quite hostile either, and it is the one that stuck.

He was a gift to the reform press and a difficulty for his own party’s organisers, who could not make him into a popular figure and eventually stopped trying. The caricaturists drew him with a ledger. He was celebrated in the professional cities, respected in the commercial ones, disliked in the machine wards for reasons that were entirely rational, and largely unknown in the rural interior except as the man who had refused to expand the currency.

The reform verdict

On the reform record the Realm’s judgment has been settled for a century and is favourable. The Tilden Settlement did what it was designed to do, survived the ministry that made it, and produced an administration that is honest by international standards for reasons that are historical rather than accidental. Constitutional writers rate the audit and publication provisions of 1885 higher than the civil-service Act of 1883, on the ground that examination could have been reversed and publication could not.

The standard qualification is that he was pushing at an open door. Merit appointment had been demonstrated at Government House and was wanted by a large part of respectable opinion; the machines were unpopular; and the achievement lay in drafting and timing rather than in persuasion. It is a fair qualification and it does not much reduce the achievement, since drafting and timing are what ministries are for.

The rights verdict

On the rights record the judgment has moved a very long way and is still moving. The nineteenth-century accounts treated the retreat as background to a reform ministry. The twentieth-century accounts, written after the settlement was taken up again, treated it as the ministry’s central fact. The present position of the Realm’s historians is that the two records are one record, and that the doctrine which produced the reform is the same doctrine that produced the blindness.

His defenders say that he never denied the obligation, never proposed to reduce it, and built the instruments by which it was eventually enforced. His critics say that the obligation was denied in the estimates every year he governed, that his own audit reform supplied the language, and that a Prime Minister is answerable for what his government did and not for what he told his committee he believed. The argument is conducted every time the period is taught and it has not been resolved.

The party’s account

The Liberal Federal Democrats treat the ministry as more consequential than it looks and have always done so. Their case is that the civil-service reforms outlasted it and that the demonstration mattered more than the statute book: a reform party had won, governed and left something permanent behind, which was the argument the party had been founded to make.

The party’s account of the rights record is thinner and it knows it. The standing internal criticism, made most sharply by the party’s own left in the twentieth century, is that the founding generation’s doctrine contained no theory of what a state is for, and that a party which begins from the machinery will always be slow to notice a machine working perfectly at something evil. The party’s answer has been to extend its programme, to support the extension of the Rights Act and to be the largest party that says so, and its critics observe that this took most of a century.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Liberal Federal Democrats, the party whose founding act was his prosecution and whose first ministry was his
• James G. Blaine, 14th Prime Minister; the outward-motion ministry that Tilden’s reform ministry corrects
• Grover Cleveland, 16th Prime Minister; Tilden’s immediate successor, who inherits the reform tradition and carries it in a different direction
• Rutherford B. Hayes, Governor-General throughout Tilden’s ministry, who modelled merit appointment in his own household two years before the civil service adopted it
• Ernest III, in whose name the commission of 1883 issued
• American Civil War, whose settlement his ministry administered less than the ministries before it
• Parliamentary Reform Act 1859, the statute his party claims as its founding text
• Government House, where merit appointment was demonstrated before it was legislated
• Prime Minister, the office and its patronage, most of which his ministry removed

Categories

People · Prime Ministers · Liberal Federal Democrats · Reconstruction · The Gilded Age · Nineteenth Century