XV.UNITED STATES SENATOR.
I
IT was generally understood in Maine that the Hon. Lot M. Morrill was serving his last term in the United States senate, and that Mr. Blaine was to be his successor; so that when Mr. Morrill was advanced to the secretaryship of the treasury in General Grant’s cabinet, it occasioned no surprise that Governor Connor appointed Mr. Blaine to the senate in his stead. He was just recovering from the partial sunstroke which felled him to the pavement while on his way to church, on a Sabbath morning, with Miss Abigail Dodge (Gail Hamilton), just prior to the Cincinnati Convention, and soon after his victory over Proctor Knott, during his persecution in the House. Next to the nomination at Cincinnati, nothing of a political nature could have been more grateful to him than this high honor from the governor of his state, in accordance, as the governor himself says, with the expectation of the people. Coming, as it did, at an illand weary time, it must have greatly refreshed and revived his spirits, to have new and larger evidence of the esteem and endorsement of those to whose interests his life was devoted.
On July 12, 1876, he took his seat as the colleague of Hannibal Hamlin in the senate. He is placed at once as chairman on the committee on rules, and on the committee on appropriations, and on naval affairs, besides on a select committee “on the levees on the Mississippi River.” This, for a senatorial start, was quite honorable to his judgment and ability.
There are many old traditions and customs, which amount to laws, so far as assigning positions of responsibility to new members is concerned, but there is no law which prevents a new member from taking the most advanced position possible by virtue of his wisdom and knowledge, and his ability in debate.
He could not well become entangled in the meshes of an intricate network of rules and regulations, which Butler, in acknowledging Mr. Blaine’s superior knowledge of in the House, had said he knew nothing about,—Blaine knew it all. His position made it necessary that he should, and now he was made chief in this department in the new branch of legislation to which he had succeeded. So he could not be held or hampered by any difficulty of this kind.Moreover, his acquaintance was well-nigh universal among the members, and some of them knew him a little better than they could have wished. He was also familiar with the methods and measures of the senate, having frequently been on joint committees with them during his early terms of service in the lower House, and then the general subjects of appropriations, naval, military, judiciary, manufactures, commerce, foreign affairs, finance, pension affairs, etc., these were the subjects with which he was accustomed to deal during all of his years in congress.
He was at home, and coming into the senate on the wave of popular excitement, which was of the same broad and sweeping character that surrounded Henry Clay, and which came so near giving him the nomination for the presidency then, he was not only at home in all his feelings of political association and public duty, but exceedingly prominent as well,—the one man of worth above all others, though the last to enter there.
He had no need to take front rank; he was there already, and gave himself to his work, not as a defeated man,—they had played but one inning then,—but as a victor, enjoying his promotion well, from the lower to the upper house of congress. He was nearing the goal, taking the honors by the way, just as Garfielddid, but unlike him, tarrying in the senate to enjoy them. It was a good place to be; grand enough to command the lives, in all their richness and maturity, of Sumner, Webster, Choate, of Hamlin, Fessenden, and Clay, of Wilson, Edmunds, Dawes, and galaxies by the score, representing every state in the Union. Great lights from every department of life shone there: scholars, teachers, authors, successful generals; culture, refinement, and every excellence.
Mr. Blaine brought with him from the House, his old spirit of freeness, and general adaptability and service. He had not come in to rest, be shelved, or fossilized. His old habit of thoroughness was on him still; he was not the man to change at six and forty years of age. He must still touch top, bottom, and sides of every question with which he dealt, and so he did.
He loved the truths of history, and took them whole, entire, lacking nothing, and not in a garbled form. This of course caused facts and figures to strike with telling power upon many a man’s coat of mail, or cause the shield to tremble with the power of his stroke. But he was there without apology, to do the strong, decisive work which marked the history of his life. He loved the state of his adoption, and the time had come when the pride of her glory should appear.
The old House of Representatives had been devoted, as a gallery of art, to portraits and statues of the great men of the nation. Two were to be selected by each state from the record of their leading men.
The statue of William King, the first governor of Maine, in 1820 and 1821, was presented with speeches in the senate by both Mr. Hamlin and Mr. Blaine. In reciting briefly the history of Mr. King, Mr. Blaine relied wholly upon Massachusetts authority, and he added, “To have given anything like a sketch of Governor King’s life without giving his conflict with Massachusetts, touching the separation of Maine and her erection into an independent state, would have been like writing the life of Abraham Lincoln without mentioning the great Rebellion, which, as president of the United States, he was so largely instrumental in suppressing.”
These words he uttered in vindication of himself from certain restrictions placed upon him, and he closed by saying “that he notified the senators from Massachusetts that he should feel compelled to narrate those portions of Mr. King’s history that brought him in conflict with the parent state.”
In less than a month after the statue of Governor King was placed in the national gallery, by a unanimous vote of the senate, Mr.Blaine was before that body with a speech of his usual force and energy, upon the absorbing question of hard money. The subject had been discussed in the House, and their action sent to the senate, and Mr. Blaine had offered a substitute for their bill, which contained three very simple provisions, as he said, viz.:—
1. “That the dollar shall contain four hundred and twenty-five grains of standard silver, shall have unlimited coinage, and be an unlimited legal tender.
2. “That all the profits of coinage shall go to the government, and not to the operator in silver bullion.
3. “That silver dollars or silver bullion, assayed and mint-stamped, may be deposited with the assistant treasurer at New York, for which coin-certificates may be issued, the same in denomination as United States notes, not below ten dollars, and that these shall be redeemable on demand in coin or bullion, thus furnishing a paper-circulation based on an actual deposit of precious metal, giving us notes as valuable as those of the Bank of England and doing away at once with the dreaded inconvenience of silver on account of bulk and weight.”
He cites an exclusively gold nation like England, which, while it may have some massive fortunes, shows also the most hopeless andhelpless poverty in the humblest walks of life. But France, a gold-and-silver nation, while it can exhibit no such fortunes as England boasts, presents “a people who, with silver savings, can pay a war indemnity that would have beggared the gold-bankers of London, and to which the peasantry of England could not have contributed a pound sterling in gold, nor a single shilling in silver.”
Mr. Blaine’s sense of justice, and national honor, and national pride were injured by making a dollar which, in effect, was not a dollar,—was not worth a hundred cents.
“Consider, further,” he says, “what injustice would be done to every holder of a legal-tender or national-bank note. That vast volume of paper-money—over seven hundred millions of dollars—is now worth between ninety-eight and ninety-nine cents on the dollar in gold coin. The holders of it, who are indeed our entire population, from the poorest to the wealthiest, have been promised, from the hour of its issue, that the paper-money would one day be as good as gold. To pay silver for the greenback is a full compliance with this promise and this obligation, provided the silver is made as it always has been hitherto, as good as gold. To make our silver coin even three per cent. less valuable than gold, inflicts at once a loss ofmore than twenty millions of dollars on the holders of our paper-money. To make a silver dollar worth but ninety-two cents, precipitates on the same class a loss of well-nigh sixty millions of dollars. For whatever the value of the silver dollar is, the whole paper issue of the country will sink to its standard when its coinage is authorized and its circulation becomes general in the channels of trade.
“Some one in conversation with Commodore Vanderbilt during one of the many freight competitions of the trunk lines, said, ‘Why, the Canadian road has not sufficient carrying capacity to compete with your great line!’
“‘That is true,’ replied the Commodore, ‘but they can fix a rate and force us down to it.’
“Were congress to pass a law to-day, declaring that every legal-tender note and every national-bank note shall hereafter pass for only ninety-six or ninety-seven cents on the dollar, there is not a constituency in the United States that would re-elect a man that should support it, and in many districts the representative would be lucky if he escaped with merely a minority vote.”
Mr. Blaine’s sympathies in this discussion were with the people, and although he had passed out of that popular branch of congress, as it is called, most nearly connected with them, hecould not in any sense be divorced from them, and so, although before men of great wealth, his plea was for the laboring class,—for those who made the country strong and rich,—and so in continuing his speech he pleaded for them; and it will bring them nearer to him to-day to recall his strong and earnest words, which, even in the staid and formal senate, with its infinite courtesies and conservative venerations, has a heart to smile, and good cheer sufficient to applaud, as they did this close of his hard-money speech. These were his final utterances:—
“The effect of paying the labor of this country in silver coin of full value, as compared with irredeemable paper,—or as compared, even, with silver of inferior value,—will make itself felt in a single generation to the extent of tens of millions—perhaps hundreds of millions—in the aggregate savings which represent consolidated capital. It is the instinct of man from the savage to the scholar—developed in childhood, and remaining with age—to value the metals which in all tongues are called precious.
“Excessive paper-money leads to extravagance, to waste, and to want, as we painfully witness on all sides to-day. And in the midst of the proof of its demoralizing and destructive effect, we hear it proclaimed in the halls of congress, that ‘the people demand cheap money.’ I denyit. I declare such a phrase to be a total misapprehension—a total misinterpretation of the popular wish. The people do not demand cheap money. They demand an abundance of good money, which is an entirely different thing. They do not want a single gold standard that will exclude silver, and benefit those already rich. They do not want an inferior silver standard that will drive out gold, and not help those already poor. They want both metals, in full value, in equal honor, in whatever abundance the bountiful earth will yield them to the searching eye of science, and to the hard hand of labor.
“The two metals have existed side by side in harmonious, honorable companionship, as money, ever since intelligent trade was known among men. It is well-nigh forty centuries since ‘Abraham weighed to Ephron the silver which he had named in the audience of the sons of Heth—four hundred shekels of silver—current money with the merchant.’ Since that time nations have risen and fallen, races have disappeared, dialects and languages have been forgotten, arts have been lost, treasures have perished, continents have been discovered, islands have been sunk in the sea, and through all these ages, and through all these changes, silver and gold have reigned supreme as the representatives ofvalue—as the media of exchange. The dethronement of each has been attempted in turn, and sometimes the dethronement of both; but always in vain! And we are here to-day, deliberating anew over the problem which comes down to us from Abraham’s time—the weight of the silverthat shall be ‘current money with the merchant.’”
As Mr. Blaine resumed his seat, it is said, in brackets, there was protracted applause; and so much was there that the vice-president, William A. Wheeler, of New York, felt compelled to say, “Order! The chair assuming that the galleries are ignorant of the laws of the senate, gives notice that if applause is repeated they will be promptly cleared.”
This cannot fail to suggest the fact beyond a doubt, that he had lost none of his old-time fervor, and that he proposed to allow no right of the people to slip from them, so long as he held place and power in their interest, and had a voice to lift in their defence.
The great business of congress is done by committees, as is well known, and their reports are discussed, amended, and acted upon, endorsed or rejected.
Mr. Blaine’s committee on appropriations was one of the most difficult. Demands are almost innumerable, and to act intelligently requires alarge knowledge of every department of the government; of the military, the great postal lines and offices, and the new ones being built, custom-houses, forts, arsenals, navy-yards, etc.; and this work must be done by the committees, working not early, but late.
He was specially fitted for the committee on naval affairs, as he had gone over the whole question of ship-building and shipping while in the House.
We find him actuated by the same feelings of humanity and carefulness, as actuated him years before, but now more conspicuously, because in a larger, loftier sphere.
He presents bills for the relief of the families of those who perished on the United States dredge-boat “McAlister”; to enlarge the power and duties of the board of health in the District of Columbia; to amend the Pacific Railroad act by creating a sinking-fund. He moved to investigate charges against Senator M. C. Butler, of South Carolina.
We find Mr. Blaine showing an appreciation for that old soldier of the Republic, in the Mexican war and the war of the Rebellion, Hon. James Shields, of Missouri, by presenting a bill to make him a major-general. General Shields had a bullet through his body in Mexico, at Buena Vista, and a silk handkerchief drawnthrough his body in the track of the wound, and now he is honored as an old man; but he does not live long to enjoy it. He was a hardy, heroic, faithful man and soldier, and worthy of the repeated honors conferred upon him by his state and by the nation. It was a generous impulse of a kindly heart that prompted this honor in the senate for the aged soldier.
The bureau of engraving and printing was remembered by him in a bill to provide that department with a fire-proof building.
When the bill was before the senate to pension the soldiers of the Mexican war, Mr. Hoar offered a resolution by way of amendment: “Provided, further, that no pension shall ever be paid under this act to Jefferson Davis, the late president of the so-called Confederacy.” Twenty-two were found to vote against it. The discussion grew now almost intolerable. Nearly every rebel sympathizer from the South spoke against it; among them were Garland, Bailey, Maxey, Thurman, Gordon, Lamar, Morgan, Coke. Strong hearts were stirred against their utterances, and strong words uttered for the Union cause.
“There is no parallel to the magnanimity of our government,” said Mr. Blaine, in reply to Lamar’s charge of intolerance. “Not one single execution, not one single confiscation; at theoutside only fourteen thousand out of millions put under disfranchisement, and all of them released, and all of them invited to come to the common board, fraternally and patriotically, with the rest of us, and share a common destiny for weal or for woe in the future. I tell the honorable gentleman it does not become him, or any Southern man, to speak of intolerance on the part of the national government; rather, if he speak of it at all, he should allude to its magnanimity and its grandeur.”
The great boldness with which Mr. Blaine stood up against the usurpations of the solid South is a lasting honor to him. He desired to place on record, in a definite and authentic form, the frauds and outrages by which some recent elections were carried by the Democratic party in the Southern states, and to find if there be any method to prevent a repetition of those crimes against a free ballot. One hundred and six representatives had been elected recently in the South, and only four or five of them Republicans, and thirty-five of the whole number had been assigned to the South, he said, “by reason of the colored people.” In South Carolina, he speaks of “a series of skirmishes over the state, in which the polling places were regarded as forts, to be captured by one party and held against the other, sothat there was no election in any proper sense.” The information came from a non-partisan press, and without contradiction so far as he had seen.
This was his resolution in the senate:—
“Resolved, That the committee on the judiciary be instructed to inquire and report to the senate, whether at the recent elections the constitutional rights of American citizens were violated in any of the states of the Union; whether the right of suffrage of citizens of the United States, or of any class of such citizens, was denied or abridged by the action of the election-officers of any state in refusing to receive their votes, in failing to count them, or in receiving and counting fraudulent ballots in pursuance of a conspiracy to make the lawful votes of such citizens of non effect; and whether such citizens were prevented from exercising the elective franchise, or forced to use it against their wishes, by violence or threats, or hostile demonstrations of armed men or other organizations, or by any other unlawful means or practices.“Resolved, That the committee on the judiciary be further instructed to inquire and report whether it is within the competency of congress to provide by additional legislation for the more perfect security of the right of suffrage to citizens of the United States in all the states of the Union.“Resolved, That in prosecuting these inquiries the judiciary committee shall have the right to send for persons and papers.”
“Resolved, That the committee on the judiciary be instructed to inquire and report to the senate, whether at the recent elections the constitutional rights of American citizens were violated in any of the states of the Union; whether the right of suffrage of citizens of the United States, or of any class of such citizens, was denied or abridged by the action of the election-officers of any state in refusing to receive their votes, in failing to count them, or in receiving and counting fraudulent ballots in pursuance of a conspiracy to make the lawful votes of such citizens of non effect; and whether such citizens were prevented from exercising the elective franchise, or forced to use it against their wishes, by violence or threats, or hostile demonstrations of armed men or other organizations, or by any other unlawful means or practices.
“Resolved, That the committee on the judiciary be further instructed to inquire and report whether it is within the competency of congress to provide by additional legislation for the more perfect security of the right of suffrage to citizens of the United States in all the states of the Union.
“Resolved, That in prosecuting these inquiries the judiciary committee shall have the right to send for persons and papers.”
The negro had become practically disfranchised; the true end of the war in his rightful liberty as a freeman, in the full sense of the term, was concerned; and the acts of government in making him a citizen, and his representation in congress according to the new allotment of thirty-five representatives for the colored population;—all these ends had been subverted, these rights abrogated, and the constitution, in its most sacred and dearly-bought amendments, violently ignored, and men were there with perjury on their lips and treason in their hearts, who had countenanced and upheld all of this.
“Let me illustrate,” Mr. Blaine says, “by comparing groups of states of the same representative strength North and South. Take the states of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana. They send seventeen representatives to congress. Their aggregate population is composed of ten hundred and thirty-five thousand whites and twelve hundred and twenty-four thousand colored; the colored being nearly two hundred thousand in excess of the whites. Of the seventeen representatives, then, it is evident that nine were apportioned to these states by reason of their colored population, and only eight by reason of their white population; and yet in the choice of the entire seventeen representatives, the colored voters had no more voice or power than theirremote kindred on the shores of Senegambia or on the Gold Coast. The ten hundred and thirty-five thousand white people had the sole and absolute choice of the entire seventeen representatives.
“In contrast, take two states in the North, Iowa and Wisconsin, with seventeen representatives. They have a white population of two million two hundred and forty-seven thousand,—considerably more than double the entire white population of the three Southern states I have named. In Iowa and Wisconsin, therefore, it takes one hundred and thirty-two thousand white population to send a representative to congress, but in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana every sixty thousand white people send a representative. In other words, sixty thousand white people in those Southern states have precisely the same political power in the government of the country that one hundred and thirty-two thousand white people have in Iowa and Wisconsin.”
And it is because this state of things continues and has threatened every presidential election since then, that the brave deed of standing in the presence of the perpetrators of the wrong, and unmasking its hideous mien, is still all the more worthy of notice, and demands an increased interest; and so we venture to giveanother sample of his old Plutarch method of contrast and comparison; the last few sentences of the speech, constituting as they did his peroration, and being so pointed, personal, and triumphant in tone and manner, revealing the man so clearly and forcibly, that we close our reference to the speech with them, and giving a summary of argument and powerful, homeward putting of truth, worthy of the honor of the great cause he pleaded, worthy of the dignity of the high place in which he spoke, and worthy of himself:—
“Within that entire great organization there is not one man, whose opinion is entitled to be quoted, that does not desire peace and harmony and friendship, and a patriotic and fraternal union, between the North and the South. This wish is spontaneous, instinctive, universal throughout the Northern states; and yet, among men of character and sense, there is surely no need of attempting to deceive ourselves as to the precise truth. First pure, then peaceable. Gush will not remove a grievance, and no disguise of state rights will close the eyes of our people to the necessity of correcting a great national wrong. Nor should the South make the fatal mistake of concluding that injustice to the negro is not also injustice to the white man; nor should it ever be forgotten, thatfor the wrongs of both a remedy will assuredly be found.
“The war, with all its costly sacrifices, was fought in vain unless equal rights for all classes be established in all the states of the Union; and now, in words which are those of friendship, however differently they may be accepted, I tell the men of the South here on this floor and beyond this chamber, that even if they could strip the negro of his constitutional rights, they can never permanently maintain the inequality of white men in this nation; they can never make a white man’s vote in the South doubly as powerful in the administration of the government as a white man’s vote in the North.”