Vermont watchman and State journal. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1836-1883, 1882-12-27
The Dorsey Correspondence.

Elk Senator s. W. Dorsey has published
through the New York Herald several col
umns Of his correspondence with General
Garfield and other republican leaders, during
the campaign OF 1880. However he may
have hoped by this act to help himself or to
punish those who have brought him to the
bar of justice for his offenses against the
laws Of his country, it does not appear that
he has in any way indicated his innocence
Of the crimes alleged against him, and 1t is
difficult to find in the correspondence any
reasonable ground for discriminating Gar
field. Mr. Dorsey's star route dongs had
not been exposed in the fall of 1880. He
had been entrusted with the management Of
the republican campaign. He was energetic,
vigilant and skillful. Garfield was an ar
dent, greathearted man. He had from his
position as the republican nominee for pres
ident great deal at stake in the contest
He expressed his appreciation of the labor
performed in advancing his election, whether
by Dorsey or any one else with an ELUSIVE
ness, an unreserve, an innocence which was
entirely characteristic Of the man. In this
correspondence he showed himself mortal ;
but mortal who, unlike the cool, calculat-
ing, mercenary man, could feel thrill of
grateful emotion for favors rendered and ex-
press his feelings with unstinted fervor This
seems to be about all that the correspondence
shows against the dead president, and in a
thousand ways the people had learned these
qualities long before the Dorsey letters were
published and for them had appauded and
loved their possessor. He who sees in
these letters any analogy to the Grim.
mating cypher kilograms which were sent
from and received at Gramercy Park
in 1876 must delight in pretexts for believ-
ing the innocent guilty of apses from the
ways of honest procedure. And those who
regarded General Garfield as the incarnation
of better and purer political methods, and
have grown eloquent over the cause for
which Garfield died." who have sought to
invest their own little political coterie with
an odor of sanctity by sppropriating his
name, must awake from their self.imposed
delusion with feeling of ohagrin to find
what was always clear to the average OBJ
seventeen holy order on the same floor
with the machine politicians whom they
have so unsparingly revied and anathema-
tized. In what way Garfield's methods
were better than Arthur's, in what respect
the formers "policy," mythical creation,
was entitled to generation, while the latters,
fully developed and statesmanlike, has
been bitterly misrepresented and unreason-
ably criticised, has never been clear to can.
did, thinking men, and certainly this cor
respondence does not go to clear up the
doubts which large class of his fellow
citizens have always had as to the justice or
disinterestedness of the apotheosis of Gar
field by fractional political element. Mis-.
representation of Garfield dead seems to
have been used to give point to misrepre-
sentation of the living and to partisan warfare
upon his successor. Injustice to the dead
greater than to the living has been done by
these self.constituted interpreters of the
martyred presidents purposes. Garfield
was honest, his aims were high, his charac-
ter was transparent, and it is probable that
his administration would have closed with a
reasonable realization of the hopes inspired
by his election. His misfortune is that his
cruel fate has been seized upon by politicians
and used for political capital. He has been
placed in position which, living, he would
have scorned to occupy, and it is undeniable
that from this fact the letters published by
Dorsey derive whatever power they may
have to throw a shadow over the departed
statesman's name.