[18] At the date of this note a judge of the Court of Appeals of the State of New York had been nominated and was running for the Presidency.
About the middle of January, 1877, and before the Electoral Commission had given its decision, I received a telegram from Washington that a friend of the Honorable S. S. Cox, then a representative in Congress from New York city, wished to confer with me in reference to the Presidential contest pending in Washington. Cox's friend proved to be Mr. Corbin, a brother-in-law of President Grant. I replied to my correspondent that he might arrange for an interview with me anywhere in New York city except in Mr. Corbin's house, Corbin at that time having a residence in New York city.
It was arranged that we should meet at the Westminster Hotel, about noon, on the 27th of January. I had known something of Corbin through my relations with Colonel Benton many years before, and had become slightly acquainted with him. What I did know of him disinclined me to give him my confidence. I had no idea of the motive which led him to invite this interview. He had intimated to Mr. Cox that he would talk with me, but with no other of Mr. Tilden's friends. The grounds for his taking me into his confidence exclusively was equally unintelligible, beyond the fact that we had been political friends of long standing as common friends of Senator Thomas Benton, of Missouri.
He opened the interview by giving at considerable length what he regarded as evidence of Senator Sherman's expectation that his brother the general would have been nominated at Cincinnati in 1876 instead of President Hayes, and of the intrigues already making for the general's nomination of 1880. At length he proceeded to speak for and in the name of his brother-in-law, the President. He said Grant wished to retire with grace and honorably from his office, and had no special interest in the success of either of the candidates whose fate was depending upon the action of the Electoral Commission. He said that for himself he preferred Tilden forty times to Hayes, and that all the ladies of Grant's family were champions of Tilden. He wound up by saying that if he could be useful in letting the President's views be known to Governor Tilden, when they might serve a useful purpose, he would be glad to do so, and that that was the special purpose of his inviting this interview.