6 or 7 August 1876 • Elmira, N.Y. (Paraphrase and transcript: MTB , 2:581, UCCL 05983)
Eighteen hundred and seventy-six was a Presidential year—the year of the Hayes-Tilden campaign. Clemens and Howells were both warm Republicans and actively interested in the outcome, Clemens, as he confessed, for the first time in his life. Before his return to Hartford he announced himself publicly as a Hayes man, made so by Governor Hayes’s letter of acceptance, which, he said, “expresses my own political convictions.”1explanatory note His politics had not been generally known up to that time, and a Tilden and Hendricks club in Jersey City had invited him to be present and give them some political counsel, at a flag-raising.2explanatory note He wrote, declining pleasantly enough, then added:
“You have asked me for some political counsel or advice: In view of Mr. Tilden’s Civil War record my advice is not to raise the flag.”3explanatory note
Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–93), governor of Ohio, had accepted the Republican nomination for president in a letter of 8 July 1876. It is transcribed in the Appendix “1876 Nominations for President”click to open link.
The following was the invitation (CU-MARK) :
On McDermott’s envelope, Clemens wrote: “Flag-raising. | Declined.” On 28 June 1876, at the Democratic national convention in St. Louis, Samuel J. Tilden (1814–86), governor of New York, had been nominated as presidential candidate; on 29 June, Thomas A. Hendricks (1819–85), governor of Indiana, had been nominated as vice-presidential candidate (New York Times: “How the Thing Was Done,” “Nomination of Candidates,” 29 June 1876, 1, 2; “The Ticket Completed,” 30 June 1876, 1).
Tilden had called for the defeat of Lincoln in the election of 1860, anticipating that his policy on slavery would make civil war inevitable. When the South seceded, Tilden favored compromise, but when the conflict actually began he espoused a rapid and forceful suppression of the rebels. Nevertheless, although the Lincoln administration more than once sought his advice on the prosecution of the war, Tilden remained a controversial opponent of its policies, particularly its suppression of dissent, and took little direct part in the war effort (Tilden 1885, 1:289–340; Annual Cyclopaedia 1886 , 817–18). For Clemens’s extended comments on Tilden, see 14 Sept 1876 to Howellsclick to open link, and 24–30 Sept 1876 to Unidentifiedclick to open link.
Paraphrase and transcript, MTB, 2:581.