“New York is for Ulysses S. Grant. Never defeated–in
peace or in war–his name is the most illustrious borne by living man.
His services attest his greatness, and the country–nay, the world–knows
them by heart. His fame was earned not alone by things written and said,
but by the arduous greatness of things done….
Standing on the highest eminence of human distinction, modest, firm
simple and self poised, having filled all lands with his renown, he has
seen, not only the high-born and titled, but the poor and the lowly, in
the uttermost ends of the earth, rise and uncover before him. He has
studied the needs and the defects of many systems of government, and he
has returned a better American than ever, with a wealth of knowledge and
experience added to the hard common sense which shone so conspicuously
in all the fierce light that beat upon him during 16 years the most
trying, the most portentous, the most perilous in the Nation’s
history.
Vilified and reviled, ruthlessly aspersed by unnumbered presses, not in
other lands, but in his own, assaults upon him have seasoned and
strengthened his hold on the public heart. Calumny’s ammunition has
all been exploded: the powder has all been burned once–its force is
spent–and the name of Grant will glitter, a bright and imperishable
star in the diadem of the Republic, when those who have tried to tarnish
it have moldered in forgotten graves, and their memories and their
epitaphs have vanished utterly.
Never elated by success, never depressed by adversity, he has ever in
peace as in wear, shown the very genius of common sense. The terms he
presented for Lee’s surrender foreshadowed the wisest prophecies and
principles of true reconstruction. Victor in the greatest war of modern
times, he quickly signalized his aversion to wear and his love for peace
by an arbitration of international disputes (the Treaty of Washington,
which settled with the United Kingdom the Alabama Claims) which stands
the wisest, the most majestic, example of its kind in the world’s
diplomacy.
With him as our leader we shall have no defensive campaign. We shall
have nothing to explain away. We shall have no apologies to make. The
shafts and arrows have all been aimed at him, and they lie, broken and
harmless, at his feet….
Show me a better man. Name one, and I am answered. But do not point as a
disqualification to the very experience which makes his man fit beyond
all others...One week after the Democratic convention we shall have
heard the last of this rubbish about a ‘third term.’ Nobody now is
really disquieted by a third term except those hopelessly longing for a
first term, and their dupes and coadjutors…
Gentlemen, we have only to listen above the din and look beyond the dust
of an hour, to behold the Republican Party advancing, with its ensigns
resplendent with illustrious achievements, marching to certain and
lasting victory with its greatest Marshal at its head.”
For the text of a campaign speech delivered by
U.S. Grant on behalf of Republican nominee James A. Garfield during the
1880 presidential campaign, see: http://www.nationalcenter.org/USGrant.html
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