Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

ISSUES GREAT AND LITTLE

323

lating to avoirdupois has so caught the imagination of
political historians that it has come to be treated almost
as an attempt to knife the candidate in deliberate treachery. That idea is nonsensical, as the context shows. The
"good man weighing 250 pounds" was not Tilden or a
Tilden, it was true, but he was presented in the same editorial article as "pure, patriotic and good, a fit man to
be President." The reference to weight was a stroke of
Bartlett's characteristic playfulness, partly veiling disappointment, it is true, but in no way disloyal and, in fact,
merely repeating previous good-natured references to
Hancock's giant frame.
From both Bayard and Randall Dana had approving
letters as to the course of The Sun during the Hancock campaign. Senator Thomas F. Bayard wrote on September
20, 1880, when sending some inside information about the
abuse of federal power by subordinates of the Department of Justice and by John I. Davenport, the United
States commissioner and supervisor of elections:
I draw your attention to Woodford's violation of Devens's
order in a circular of intimidation. Read fully the testimony of
Mosher, the deputy of Davenport. If your blood does not boil
when you are through I mistake you greatly. The prevention
of voting by intimidation was the object and it was very successful. Can we not stop it this fall?
Randall wrote in the same sense, over and over again.
The unholy use of the War Department's troops and the
machinery of the Department of Justice for intimidation
at the polls under the successive Force bills which buttressed negro domination at the South was the thing surest
to make Dana's blood boil, as Bayard surmised; and this

was one of The Sun's foremost and most special issues in
Presidential elections from 1876 to 1892, and in many
State elections both South and North, and in the attempts
in Congress, successful and unsuccessful, at unjustly