"'I answered,' said Mr. Tilden, 'that it was a matter of very little consequence to me whether it could or not; but that it was of great consequence to me that I should do what I thought best for the country.'
"Every act and every expression of his during the war, so far as it has come under my cognizance, was in full accordance with this position, and, what is more, in entire harmony with the whole tenor of his life.
"Better than any person that I knew, he comprehended the irreconcilability of the forces that were arraying themselves against each other in the country. Exaggerating, perhaps, the danger of attempting to rule the country by a sectional party, he deemed it the part of wise statesmanship to postpone as long as possible, in the hope, through the mediatorial offices of time and its inevitable changes, of avoiding a collision.
"No one contested the force of his reasoning on this subject; but they derided his apprehensions of a civil war. So preposterous did they appear to the impassioned multitude in the North, that I remember myself to have been asked by one of his personal friends whether he was quite in his right mind on the subject.
"In 1860, after the failure of the Democratic party at Charleston--though he was then and had been for several years withdrawn from political life--he did not hesitate openly to proclaim his conviction that the dissolution of the Democratic party and the attempt to govern the country by a party like the Republican, having no affiliation in the Southern States, would inevitably result in civil war. He was asked to fill a vacancy in the delegation from New York at the adjourned meeting of the Democratic convention of that year in Baltimore. In that body he made two speeches, in which he portrayed, as an inevitable consequence of a sectional division of the Democratic party, a corresponding division of the States and an armed conflict. These speeches were described by those who heard them as inspired by a solemn sense of patriotic duty and a most vivid perception of impending dangers. After the election of Mr. Lincoln, and when the dangers he had foretold were becoming realities, he took part in several conferences in which Hamilton Fish, the late Charles H. Marshall, the late Daniel Lord, Moses H. Grinnell, the late Wm. B. Astor, Moses Taylor, William B. Duncan, Richard M. Blatchford, A. A. Low, and other gentlemen of more or less prominence participated; and on two of these occasions he made speeches in which he sought to impress upon his hearers a juster sense than was generally entertained of the threatened dangers, and of the fittest means of averting them.