The night before the assembling, Mr. Tilden’s two or three leading friends on the Committee came to me and said: “We can elect you Chairman over Cox, but no one else.” I demurred at once. “I don’t know one rule of parliamentary law from another,” I said. “We will have the best parliamentarian on the continent right by you all the time,” they said. “I can’t see to recognize a man on the floor of the convention,” I said. “We’ll have a dozen men to tell you,” they replied. So it was arranged, and thus at the last moment I was chosen.
I had barely time to write the required “key-note” speech, but not to commit it to memory, nor sight to read it, even had I been willing to adopt that mode of delivery. It would not do to trust to extemporization. A friend, Colonel Stoddard Johnston, who was familiar with my penmanship, came to the rescue. Concealing my manuscript behind his hat, he lined the words out to me between the cheering, I having mastered a few opening sentences.
[Illustration: From a photograph owned by F. H. Meserve THOMAS F. BAYARD of Delaware
From a photograph by Brady FRANCIS KERNAN of New York
From a photograph, copyright by C. M. Bell
From a photograph, copyright by C. M. Bell JOSEPH E. McDONALD of Indiana
From a photograph by Brady JOHN W. STEVENSON of Kentucky
SENATORS OF THE DEMOCRATIC “ADVISORY COMMITTEE” IN THE HAYES-TILDEN CONTEST]
Luck was with me. It went with a bang--not, however, wholly without detection. The Indianians, devoted to Hendricks, were very wroth. “See that fat man behind the hat telling him what to say,” said one to his neighbor, who answered, “Yes, and wrote it for him, too, I’ll be bound.”
One might as well attempt to drive six horses by proxy as preside over a National Convention by hearsay. I lost my parliamentarian at once. I just made my parliamentary law as we went. Never before nor since did any deliberative body proceed under manual so startling and original. But I delivered each ruling with a resonance--it were better called an impudence--which had an air of authority. There was a good deal of quiet laughter on the floor among the knowing ones, though I knew the mass was as ignorant as I was myself; but, realizing that I meant to be just and was expediting business, the Convention soon warmed to me, and, feeling this, I began to be perfectly at home. I never had a better day’s sport in all my life.