Edmunds.  It was clear at an early hour that the nomination of Mr. Edmunds was impossible.  He was put into the combat by Governor Long with a splendid speech, and the mellow eloquence of George William Curtis was for him, and Carl Schurz was a counsellor who upheld the banner of the lawyer statesman of Vermont.  The conclusion was to stick to Edmunds; and they stuck until the last, and frittered away their influence.  They were in such shape they might, by going in force, at a well-selected time and in a dramatic way, have carried the convention with them.  They could not, however, get their own consent to go for Logan, or Arthur, or either of the Shermans; and so Blaine was overruled and nominated.

He did a wonderful work in the campaign, and was himself apparently satisfied at last that his apprehensions as to New York had been unwarranted.  Still his words came back to me often during the heat of the summer and the fierce contest.  “I cannot carry New York; we shall lose it, perhaps by just a little—­but we shall lose it;” and so we did.  As the vote was counted the plurality of Mr. Cleveland over Mr. Blaine in the decisive State was one thousand and forty-seven.  Gail Hamilton says, in her “Life of Blaine,” of the New York election, that there was a plurality claimed on election day for Cleveland of fifty thousand, and “the next day the figures came down to seventeen thousand; then to twelve thousand; the next day to five thousand, and at length dwindled to four hundred and fifty-six.”  The election was on the 4th, and it was nearly two weeks before a decision was announced.  General Butler “openly proclaimed that the New York vote for himself was counted to Cleveland.”  The “just a little” by which Blaine was beaten was on the face of the returns one thousand and forty-seven, and John Y. McKane was ten years afterward convicted of frauds that were perpetrated as he willed, that amounted to thousands.  There was a fraud capacity in the machines of many times the plurality by which Blaine was defeated, and there never was a rational doubt that it was exerted.  A change of six hundred votes would have given the Plumed Knight the Presidency, and outside the Solid South he had a popular majority, “leaving out the protested vote of New York and Brooklyn, of nearly half a million.”  Mr. Blaine, when it became known that the New York vote was held to be against him, and civil war was threatened if the returns were rectified, telegraphed to friends asking their opinion of the New York situation; and I had the honor to be one consulted.  My reply was that the New York influences that had prevailed to cause the declaration of a plurality for Cleveland would be sufficient to maintain that determination.  Then came the opportunity of those unkindly toward Mr. Blaine to charge him with forcing himself on the Republican party and ruining it with his reckless candidacies, and I thought the facts within my knowledge should be given the public, and wrote to General Sherman, asking him to allow me to publish the correspondence between himself and Blaine, proving that the nomination, instead of being forced by Blaine for himself, was forced upon him; and I wrote to Blaine also, to the same effect.  I received from the General the remarkable letters following: