"In 1860, after the failure of the Democratic party at Charleston--though he was then and had been for several years withdrawn from political life--he did not hesitate openly to proclaim his conviction that the dissolution of the Democratic party and the attempt to govern the country by a party like the Republican, having no affiliation in the Southern States, would inevitably result in civil war. He was asked to fill a vacancy in the delegation from New York at the adjourned meeting of the Democratic convention of that year in Baltimore. In that body he made two speeches, in which he portrayed, as an inevitable consequence of a sectional division of the Democratic party, a corresponding division of the States and an armed conflict. These speeches were described by those who heard them as inspired by a solemn sense of patriotic duty and a most vivid perception of impending dangers. After the election of Mr. Lincoln, and when the dangers he had foretold were becoming realities, he took part in several conferences in which Hamilton Fish, the late Charles H. Marshall, the late Daniel Lord, Moses H. Grinnell, the late Wm. B. Astor, Moses Taylor, William B. Duncan, Richard M. Blatchford, A. A. Low, and other gentlemen of more or less prominence participated; and on two of these occasions he made speeches in which he sought to impress upon his hearers a juster sense than was generally entertained of the threatened dangers, and of the fittest means of averting them. "Earnestly as Mr. Tilden labored to avert the war and to thwart the measures which seemed to him calculated to precipitate it; anxious as he had been to contribute no fresh ingredient of hatred to the seething caldron; when, without any responsibility on his part, the war came, he never for a moment hesitated as to the course he was to pursue. He felt it to be the duty of every citizen to sustain the government in its resistance to territorial dismemberment. To those who thought, as did many then calling themselves Republicans, that on the whole it would be as well to consent to a peaceful separation, Mr. Tilden always answered that peaceful separation was an illusion; that the questions in controversy would be rendered infinitely more difficult by separation, and new ones still more difficult would be created; that, if the antagonized parties could not agree upon peace within the Union, they certainly would not have peace without the Union. They never could agree upon terms of separation, nor could they agree upon the relations to subsist between them after the separation; and, however lamentable might be the consequences, force could be the only arbiter of their differences.