XIII.CONGRESSIONAL CAREER CONTINUED.
T
THE 4th of March comes, and with it the fortieth congress, with Schuyler Colfax, of Indiana, still in the speaker’s chair; Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, and James G. Blaine are in the House. They were on their way up to the nation’s honors, and had seats near each other. The House, rather than the senate, is the place to look for presidents. There seems to be no special reason for it, unless it is that senatorial dignity and greatness are less approachable, not so easily grasped by the public mind, and farther away from the great masses of the people.
Mr. Blaine comes to the fortieth congress with the same soldierly spirit of fearlessness, the same scholarly spirit of intelligence, the same genial spirit of friendship, that have borne him through two former terms in Washington. He is now recognized as an adept in parliamentary law, and is put on with the speaker, Mr. Washburne, and others to revise the rules of the House,and is found reporting rule after rule for adoption. He is fairly in training now for the speakership, but before that can come he must be re-elected, and he has already been elected twice by way of compliment, as it is termed in Maine. But he is no dreamer, and so devotes himself to business, with enough to do, and no idle hours. He is quite methodical, and is heard frequently insisting upon the regular order of business, and that business on the speaker’s stand be attended to, and also that members attend the evening sessions for business. It worries him to see business of importance drag, and bills accumulate, and so the House get behind in its work. He uses every parliamentary method to prevent delays, and seldom is his way hedged up effectually when he has determined upon his course, and feels that fidelity to his trust requires expedition. He usually gets through without much opposition, for good nature in him begets it in others, and so when all are thus made willing, as by an opposite disposition they are made unwilling, it is an easy matter. But when the measure is at all political, as are some of the great measures which crystalize the war-victories into constitutional enactments, he is put upon his resources for ways and means, and is found usually to be as fertile as the occasion demands.
He is down in the Record as an editor, and this places him in relations of sympathy and friendship with journalists at the capital. He is known, and knows them, and shows by the favor of various acts of kindness that his editorial heart is still beating warm for the drivers of the quill. There are but three other editors besides himself in the House,—James Brooks, of New York city; Lawrence J. Getz, of Reading; and Adam J. Glassbremer, of York, Penn.
Gen. John A. Logan sits near enough to Mr. Blaine for them to get well acquainted, and they are soon found speaking upon the same question of appropriating seventy-five thousand dollars to purchase seed-corn for the South.
It is certainly a matter of peculiar interest to look in upon these men and see them at their work, all unconscious of the great future that lies before them; some of the time doing what seems like little things, as when Mr. Blaine moves “to exempt wrapping paper made from wood from internal tax,” and Mr. Garfield rises and says, “I ask the gentleman from Maine to allow an amendment by inserting the word ‘corn-stalks,’ which,” he added, “was a very important manufacture.” But all of these little things were part of the great internal-revenue tax bill, which was to bring millions into the treasuryof the nation, and so support the government, and pay the war-debt.
The impeachment resolutions were having a history in the House, and a reference to them brings out one fact very conclusively,—that Mr. Blaine was not hot-headed in the sense of rashness. Many were at this time,—about a year before the impeachment trial,—filled with alarm, excited, aroused, and bent upon the work at once; but Mr. Blaine was cool, attentive, collected, and studious of the great subject, and he saw that as yet the country did not demand it, and so he moved, the senate concurring, “That when the House adjourn, on Tuesday next, it be to meet on Monday, November 11, at twelve o’clock,M.” Some six months would intervene, and many objected. General Butler was there, and offered a vigorous protest. He was for war, vigorous, uncompromising, and merciless. But Mr. Blaine replied, “I would ask the gentleman from Massachusetts, through what convention of the people, through what organism of public opinion, through what channel of general information anywhere throughout the length and breadth of the land, this demand is made upon congress? [It was then March 23, 1867.] Sir, I maintain that out of the seventeen or eighteen hundred newspapers that represent the loyal Union party of this country,—and these arethe best indices of public opinion which a party has,—the gentleman cannot find twenty-five which regard the impeachment movement as one seriously to be undertaken on the part of congress at this time.”
It is exceedingly difficult for us now to go back to a year before the extraordinary spectacle of an impeachment trial of the President of the United States, and recall all the circumstances and the state of the country at that particular time. The best minds in the House seemed to be with Mr. Blaine in his feeling, that there was no immediate demand or warrant for the impeachment of the president. His acts were public, and known to the people, and from them to their representatives in congress must come the demand. Moreover, the resolutions of impeachment had been in the hands of a special committee for some months, but they, agreeing with Mr. Blaine, saw no cause for impetuous action.
It was evidently designed to be a matter of wholesome restraint, that this preliminary step had been taken. A great many speeches were made under the resolution to adjourn, upon the impeachment question.
Mr. Garfield said, “The gentleman said I desired congress to remain in session for two reasons; first, to compel the appointment of certainpersons to office [there were several hundred postmasters to be appointed and confirmed], and second, for the purpose of impeaching the president. I call his attention to the fact, that I made no allusion whatever to the question of impeachment; I have nothing to say in that direction until I hear from the committee. I expressed it as my opinion merely that the President of the United States would be very glad to have the fortieth congress adjourn, and this I understood from the friends of the president.”
Mr. Boutwell, taking part, said, “The great and substantial reason is that whether this House shall proceed to impeach the president or not, the majority of the people of this country, South and North, black and white, loyal and rebel, have pretty generally lost confidence in him.”
“That is true,” said Mr. Blaine.
“Whether this loss of confidence be based upon facts of his character, or measures of his public policy, or upon suspicion or prejudice merely, I do not propose now to inquire. The great fact is, the people of the country everywhere have lost confidence in the wisdom, if not in the honesty, of his administration.”
Mr. Blaine. “The gentleman will allow me to inquire whether he thinks that our staying here will restore confidence in the president.”
“No, Sir.”
Mr. Blaine held the floor under a certain rule of congress, and gave his time to others as they desired to discuss the question, but at the end was firm as a rock. His mind was unchanged, and from this and other instances the truth appears, that as he used only facts, figures, testimony, experience, written or related evidence of a personal character, and that he could not be gainsaid, and was never metaphysical,a priori, or theorizing in his discussions, so nothing but facts or figures, something tangible and real, influenced him. The sailing of an eagle might be very beautiful, and elicit feelings of admiration and sublimity, but it did not influence his judgment.
Only the kind of arguments he used to influence other minds would influence his,—and when his mind was made up, it was from just these sources of evidence that are so convincing, so incontrovertible, giving strength to the mind, and putting granite under the feet of the man.
As one has said, “I believed, therefore have I spoken”; so with him, he believed, and therefore spoke. No surface-current, only the deep under-current, moved him.
Mr. Blaine has great accuracy in the use of language, and although off-hand and often under peculiarly distracting circumstances, one who followedhim quite closely through his various utterances, did not discover a grammatical mistake until near the end of the fortieth congress, and that was possibly a mistake of the printer, and very slight in itself, using “to” for “at” in the phrase “strike at the senate committee clerks more than it doestoours.”
Congress adjourned on the 30th of March until the 21st of November, unless a quorum was present the 3d of July, and if so a session would be held. A brief session of two weeks was held, but Mr. Blaine was not there. He and Elihu B. Washburne and another congressman were in Europe. It was Mr. Blaine’s first trip. Liverpool was visited, and commercial interests were studied. Imagination seldom furnishes right impressions. No one about whom we have heard ever looks as we expected he was going to. It always gets great men too large on the outside, and enormous cities either too large or too small, as the case may be. Liverpool was immense; it has to be so. Almost limitless is England’s foreign trade. What men they must have been to make their island so important as to compel the commerce of the world to visit them! It was wonderful; the ships and cargoes for all of India, for Egypt, for all of Europe, for Australia, for America, and the Indies, for Mexico, China and Japan.
It was indeed a study for him whose mind must find the merits of every subject. It was not simply a matter of landing safely and boarding a train for London. The war was but two years over. The Alabama was not forgotten, nor all of England’s mischief. Ships and shipping in all their construction and competition had been the study of years to him, and to take in those busy scenes upon the Mersey and the Clyde, was but the reading of a new book to one familiar with the language.
They reach the great metropolis. Parliament is their objective point. Few will have more brains than they bring with them, or know more about their affairs of state; but the study is to be long and careful, and they are to know more fully the inner life and character of those who have made laws for half the world. Day after day, week after week, the great Head Centre in all its ramifications is studied at shortest possible range.
But Scotland and Ireland must be visited, for they are the home of his ancestors. He breathes the air, he sees the sky, he presses the sod, he touches the heather. He is really, truly there. The dream of boyhood days, when he stood by grandfather’s knee, and heard of the old clans, the blowing of the horn, and the echoes down the valleys, of the cows and sheep, and the tinklingof the bells, the clash of arms and the battles won; and now he is there, thrilled with the memories and the ancient scenes. The old castles, quaint, and moss-covered, and grand, and the people with their fresh look and fiery eye, vigilant ever to the end of time. What valleys and mountains and peoples are there; what rivers and lakes and loud-sounding sea! Surely nothing short of an affair of the Stuarts would compel them to quit their strongholds and their homes, their native heather, and flee to other lands, so far, so very far away as it was then, back in that olden time.
What events have transpired since that 1720, nearly one hundred and fifty years before. What events in Europe, England and America. What in India and the Orient; and yet the man of eighty had sat, a boy of five, upon his grandsire’s knee who had rounded out his four-score years, and a boy of ten had walked with him upon the highlands, and so could bring the messages of that far-off time to present generations.
As Mr. Garfield had “during his only visit to England busied himself in searching out every trace of his forefathers in parish-registries and ancient army-rolls,” so his inheritor of the nation’s honors traced back the stock from which he sprang to mountain, glen, and castle, which had rung with the name he bore. He too mightsay, sitting with a friend in the gallery of the House of Commons, “that when patriots of English blood had struck sturdy blows for constitutional government and human liberty, his family had been represented.”
But they continue their journey, and cross the English channel from Dover to Calais, and soon are in the capital of the French Empire. Napoleon III is there in his glory. Two years later his traveling companion, Hon. E. B. Washburne, is to be United States minister at his court, and not long after a prisoner in Paris during its siege in the Franco-Prussian war.
Mr. Blaine’s knowledge of French serves him, and enables him to secure all the general information he desired. He was not among free institutions now, and felt the keen chill in the very atmosphere. But in visiting the French Assembly there was a show of liberty, like an eagle in a cage. It was a noisy, tumultuous scene, with a jargon indescribable and largely unintelligible. Few things are wilder, except the ocean in a storm, than the deliberative assembly of the French nation when measures of special importance are pending. But the great city, with its multitudes of people, is full of attractions.
The Tuilleries is visited, and the Champs Elysées, the great armies so soon to reel in the shock of war, and learn a lesson of sobrietyand contented home-life that shall give to the French of the future a greatness that has in it more of the element of stability and permanency, and so tone down their mercurial and volatile nature. The Rhine is visited, and Florence.
Relaxation and rest are great objects of the visit. The malaria of the Potomac at Washington, which gets into the bones of congressmen, and senators, and presidents, must be gotten out of him, and he made ready for greater service and larger conquests.
History is all about him; the nations of Europe are within his reach; their capitals are visited, and they are studied from life. Impressions deep, and strong, and lasting are made. Plutarch’s old method of comparisons and contrasts still serves him, and he gets his knowledge in classified, compact forms. The people and their condition, their rulers and the laws, interest him as much as the great, queer buildings, the splendid palaces, the magnificent cathedrals, the varied works of art, and the giant mountains, the beautiful villages, valleys, and lakes, and all that is picturesque in nature. Switzerland is a charm; Italy a delight, and the whole journey a joy. He returns a broader, deeper, wiser man, to live a stronger, richer life in a larger world.
He was in his seat at the beginning of congressin November. Eight men are there from Tennessee, whose right to seats is challenged. The impeachment question has gained prominence, and he joins in the search for evidence. He does not want hearsay, but official documents, and so he introduces a resolution, calling upon the general commanding the armies to communicate to the House any and all correspondence addressed by him to the president upon the removal of Secretary Stanton and General Sheridan, and General Sickles as well; and also with reference to the proposed mission of the general of the army to Mexico in 1866.
But his great friend, Senator Fessenden, is now secretary of the treasury, and this gives the financial question a new interest, and he comes to the front in a most vigorous manner as vindicator and defender of the secretary’s financial policy, in one of his great speeches on the currency.
It is quite early in the session, only five days after congress convened. His friend, Mr. Washburne, had taken the initiatory step by moving they go into committee of the whole on the state of the Union.
Mr. Dawes was in the chair, and the question related to the reduction of the currency. Erroneous and mischievous views had been put forward, regarding the nature of the public obligationimposed by the debt of the United States. Various forms of repudiation had been suggested. Mr. Pendleton, the recent Democratic candidate for vice-president, and General Butler, of Massachusetts, had assumed the position that “the principal and the interest of United States bonds, known as the five-twenties, may be fairly and legally paid in paper currency by the government, after the expiration of five years from the date of the issue.”
And just here we get a view of Mr. Blaine’s power of analysis; the ability of his mind to grasp a subject in its great features and fundamental principles; to bring to the surface its underlying points or elements of strength and weakness, so classified and arranged as to state them in logical and convincing propositions, and all of them most practical in their character.
1. “The position contravenes the honor and good faith of the national government.” And this was the final view adhered to by the best statesmen of the Republican party.
2. “It is hostile to the spirit and letter of the law.
3. “It contemptuously ignores the common understanding between borrower and lender at the time the loan was negotiated (which was by Jay Cooke & Co. in 1863, to the extent of five hundred million dollars), a large proportion ofwhich was purchased by foreign capitalists, and was very successful. Nothing was said about payment in gold, but payment in gold, both of principal and interest, had been the invariable rule from the foundation of the government.”
“Our government,” said Nathaniel Mason, “is a hard-money government, founded by hard-money men, and its debts are hard-money debts.”
Nothing was intimated to the contrary when the bill was passed and the bonds issued, and the duties on imports pledged to their payment, were to be paid in coin. The final point in his argument was:—
4. “It would prove disastrous to the financial interests of the government, and the general prosperity of the country,” by, of course, reducing the par value of the bonds and blockading their sale as they floated through the markets of the world.
It should be with some pride and glory now, after the honorable history of the national debt thus far, and which has given to the nation the credit of the world, that Mr. Blaine remembers that so early in the discussion, when the ideas of the many were crude, and only those of the few were clear, that he closed his speech with these splendid words,—words which embody the steady policy of the government from that time to the present:—
“I am sure,” said Mr. Blaine, “that in the peace which our arms have conquered, we shall not dishonor ourselves by withholding from any public creditor a dollar that we promised to pay him; nor seek by cunning construction and clever afterthought to evade or escape the full responsibility of our national indebtedness. It will doubtless cost us a vast sum to pay that indebtedness, but it will cost us incalculably more not to pay it.”
It took Gen. Benj. F. Butler two days to reply to this speech of Mr. Blaine’s, in which he bloomed forth as a greenbacker of fullest flower and strongest fragrance. This led Mr. Blaine to say:—
“We have a loan distinctly defined, well known to the people, that has a specific rate of interest, a certain time to run, and express condition on which it is to be paid; but the gentleman from Massachusetts is for brushing this all aside and placing before the country a species of legal-tender notes which have no fixed time to run, bear no interest, have no standard of value, and which the government is under no obligation to pay at any particular time, and which may indeed never be called in for redemption.”
And all of this reminded Mr. Blaine of a story:—
“I think the gentleman must have borrowedhis notions of finance from a man who failed a few years since in one of the eastern cities of Maine, and who wrote over his store-door, ‘Payment suspended for thirty days.’ A neighbor passing by said to him, ‘You have neglected to date your notice.’ ‘Why, no,’ said he, ‘I did not intend to date it; it would run out if I did.’ And so the gentleman was to issue a government legal tender that never runs out.”
The sitting of congress during the winter of 1867 and 1868, was long and tedious, extending from November on into July. Mr. Blaine was on the committee on appropriations, and had charge of the army-appropriation bill on its passage through the House. The army had been reduced to sixty regiments, and thirty-two million dollars asked to pay them, while before the war twenty-five million dollars for the army, consisting of only nineteen, or as Mr. Blaine put it, “a regiment under the Democratic administration preceding the war cost more than double in gold what it costs now under General Grant in paper, or in other words, that it cost on an average over a million of dollars in gold to a regiment then, and when General Grant was in charge, about half a million to a regiment.”
It required great patience, courage, and intelligence to stand by such a bill for two or three days, answer all questions, meet all objectionsand opposition, and keep sweet all through; for it was made a political question, as nearly every measure was, and so the opposition party would sit there and resist and vote in a bunch, but usually to no purpose. The great impeachment trial had come on, and was being conducted by the senate in the presence of members of the House.
This caused their adjournment after the morning hour until three o’clock, daily. The managers of the trial, chosen by the House, were John A. Bingham, George S. Boutwell, James F. Wilson, Benjamin F. Butler, Thomas Williams, John A. Logan, and Thaddeus Stevens.
Having faithfully performed all his work upon the great committee, and seen to it that every trust confided to him in congress was sacredly discharged, he procured an indefinite leave of absence, after being there day and night for some eight months, and not being one of the managers of the impeachment trial, and having no active part to take in its proceedings, and so he went home to conduct the summer campaign, giving himself, however, but two months for this purpose. He had been absent in Europe, the summer before, and now he had been re-nominated to congress for the fourth time, something unusual in the district, as he had been elected three times already.
It would not do to fail, having been thus honored by his party. So notwithstanding his long, hard siege in congress, and which had brought him more than ever into official communication with heads of departments and the general of the army, he devotes July and August to hard campaign-work, discussing before the people the great questions of the currency, and the war-debt, etc., that had filled his mind in congress. His experience there had been just the needed preparation for this field-work, which was little more than justifying their congressional actions and explaining them.
The great question of the campaign was, “hard or soft money,” as it was called. The seeds of the greenback heresy, it will be recalled, had been sown broadcast in Mr. Garfield’s Western Reserve district in Ohio, and the convention met to renominate him had declared for soft money, when he was called in for a speech. He was a hard-money man, and nothing else, and could not stultify himself. He was begged by friends not to antagonize the convention, but his firm reply was, “I shall not violate my conscience and my principles in this matter,” and so he made it known to the convention without any compromise. It was such an exhibition of courage, integrity, and of all manly power, that they nominated him at once by acclamation.
Mr. Blaine encountered the same heresy, and wrung its neck most vigorously. He was up in the art, as he had just had extensive experience in congress. But 1868 was a presidential year. U. S. Grant and Horatio Seymour were the candidates.
One president was being impeached, and another being elected. Mr. Blaine had done what was necessary for him in the case of one, and now was doing what he could for the other. He had not taken the most advanced grounds regarding the impeachment. He was quite inclined to be conservative; and while he did not oppose, neither did he vehemently demand it at all hazards. It was serious business, and he viewed it with the broad, comprehensive mind of a statesman.
It was like “tearing up the foundation of things,” as he said. He had a deep and delicate sense of honor about it. The president was the chief man of the nation, there by the suffrages of a great people. Results seem to show that all were finally brought to Mr. Blaine’s conclusions, if not to his temper of mind upon the subject. He simply did not make any violent speeches in its favor, as so many did, but acted effectively with his party for the right. His strength was used in the campaign. He wanted a new president of the right stamp, and knew that if faithful work was done, they would haveone in less than a year. So to this task he addressed himself with his accustomed energies, and not without success, which had come to be almost a matter of course, though hard, hot fights were made against him.
General Grant received two hundred and fourteen votes in the electoral college, to eighty-four for Mr. Seymour, and again the Republican sky was ablaze with great and wide-spread victory.