XVI.BLAINE AND GARFIELD.
T
THESE names will be forever linked together in American history. Not as the names of Lincoln and Seward. They had little in common except massive powers and a common work, without any special affinities or friendships other than of a public and political nature. They were, indeed, friends in a large sense, and each worthy of the other, constituting largely the nation’s head, when the greatness of statesmanship is head, and the loyalty of statesmanship is heart, was the demand of the hour. It was the cause and circumstance that brought their great lives in unison. And yet we are not told that in any sense they were like David and Jonathan,—one at heart in a personal love, as they were one in mind, devoted to the great concern of the nation’s perpetuity.
But Mr. Garfield and Mr. Blaine, when young men far from their prime, entered together the thirty-eighth congress in 1863. Those were darkdays, and side by side they fought out in congress halls the great battle for Liberty and Right against Slavery and Wrong. No contest commanded talent of a higher order. No men supremer in those great qualities which give to greatness the sovereign right to dictate the destiny of mighty interests, and crown, as personal achievements, those interests with a glory imperishable,—none better, braver, truer, armed to the point of triumph, ever stood up against incarnate wrong, to wage the sharp, decisive engagement to final conquest, than did these men and their noble compeers. They entered the lists when the breath of battle blew hottest, when the land was darkest with shadows of the war-cloud, when the nation was saddest from loss of noble sons by land and sea, when desperation was stamped in the face of the foe and rankled in his heart. Like Spartans, there they stood, pouring their vital energies into the current of the nation’s life, until the end of war, and all its fruits were gathered in and secured in safety within the iron chest of the constitution’s sure protection.
It was not for four years, but for thirteen, that they thus held each other company in their high service of the nation and the world. Such fellowship as this, rich with every element of honor, could but weld their hearts in unity.As they grew up into those expansive lives, rare and fragrant with the choicest gifts of nature, and rich with deeds worthy of the noblest powers, so that the highest honors of the nation seemed theirs, they grew not apart, but together. Thinking and speaking, writing and contending, for the same great measures, their lives ran in the same great channels.
The friendship of soldiers who have toiled and endured together, is felt by thousands in our Republic to-day, and the feeling grows deeper and stronger as the years go by. This is general, and is common to all, but it is enduring and sincere. Yet there were special, particular friendships, more personal in their nature, that sprang up like beautiful plants, upon this larger field. These are not forgotten or destroyed. The strength of life is in them, and the growth of years is on them. The immortality of time is theirs. So in the narrower field, when the life-giving service of years, wrought into the structure of a nation redeemed, these men added to the charm and glory of the broader and more general interest, the grace of a special personal friendliness.
They were just dissimilar enough for this. They were both large, strong men in physique, and yet not large and portly in the sense of large and needless bulk of flesh; but fine andstrong frames, with massive heads set squarely upon broad shoulders; arms that swung with power; bodies filled with health,—not shrunken, dwarfed, or withered,—and good, stout limbs, that held them well in air, and moved with speed of the same strong will that commanded and controlled their utterance. There were ease and grace in every motion. They stood erect and bore themselves with the dignity of kings, and yet the merest child was beloved by them. If the one was deeper and more metaphysical than the other, that other was broader, richer in generalization,—marshalling his well-armed troops of knowledge from every field where Right had conquered Wrong, and moving his battalions with the speed of a swifter march. They were never left to be bitter contestants at any point; neither had ever plunged the iron into the soul of the other, or done aught to hinder the cause of the other’s promotion.
Early in their congressional career they were both stamped as future candidates for the presidency. They were so thought of and talked about. But Mr. Blaine’s prominence as a speaker of the House of Representatives had given him earliest the greater prominence in this direction, and from various quarters it was being thrust upon him. But they were friends, and had no bickerings and jealousies on this account. Garfieldcould wait, and would. He did not put himself forward, nor seek it at the hands of friends. He would rather bide his time, and help another. But that other was not Mr. Blaine, though they were friends. It was a matter of honor, of state-pride, and of duty, that he gave his suffrage and his power to John Sherman, of his own state of Ohio, who had done such magnificent service in the treasury in paying the national debt and resuming specie payment. And his great, honest speech was so brilliant and earnest for his friend at home, that it turned the mind of the convention toward him.
When the crisis came they crowned him, and on the instant the news was flashed into the presence of Mr. Blaine, while still the cheers went up in that great assembly in Chicago; he sent his congratulations to his friend, and said, “Command my services for the great campaign.” They were friends and brothers still, each worthy of the other’s highest honor, truest devotion, and fullest praise. Political lying could not befoul the heart of either with any member of that brood of vipers which inhabit this sphere in other breasts. They knew too well the nature and the tactics of the foe. I have seen a soldier dead upon the field, so blackened with blood and powder from the fray, that three stood by and claimed him fortheir different companies, and none perchance were right.
But no blackening powder of the enemy, no mud of march, no dust of camp, or any other creature, could so bespatter or besmear these men so they should fail to know and love each other. The battle had been long and hard, and desperate to them. Neither could be pierced or fall without the other’s notice, and full well they knew that such hard pressure of the enemy would bring them to desperate straits. But this did not cause them to fear or falter, but to rush on, through blinding and begriming powder-smoke, to victory. They could but smile at the enemies’ reports of battle, and of the skill and bearing of both general and troops, just as when a paper crossed the lines in Rebellion times the truth came not always with it. Some one must bear the wrath of those whose flag was ever in the dust, and whose broken ranks were reeling in defeat. Hard names and lies were but the sparks,—the flint flash from the clash of arms,—they but consume themselves, then die away. No man, since all the hate of treason had blackened Lincoln and our leading men with crimes imaginary, had had his name politically tarnished with darker words of calumny than the wise, the good, the sainted Garfield; and yet Mr. Blainelived so close to him, so well knew the health and the beauty of his inward life, the strength and soundness of his character, the boldness of his purpose, purity of his motive, and the cleanness of his record,—as history shall record it,—that his voice resounded as it never had done, from city to city, from state to state, in support of the man and in vindication of his cause; and the wreath was on his brow, and multitudes stood, with uncovered heads, to do him honor. His old, tried friends, who had watched, and studied, and known him for twenty years had sent him back to congress for the ninth time. The legislature of Ohio had given him their suffrage and elevated him spontaneously, without his presence or his asking, to the senatorship. The convention had nominated, and the people elected him to the presidency, and all despite the flinging of mud and the breath of slander. “He was met,” says Mr. Blaine, “with a storm of detraction at the very hour of his nomination, and it continued with increasing volume until the close of his victorious campaign:—
“‘No might, nor greatness in mortality,Can censure scope; back-wounding calumny.The whitest virtue strikes; what king so strong,Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue.’”
“‘No might, nor greatness in mortality,Can censure scope; back-wounding calumny.The whitest virtue strikes; what king so strong,Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue.’”
“‘No might, nor greatness in mortality,
Can censure scope; back-wounding calumny.
The whitest virtue strikes; what king so strong,
Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue.’”
“Under it all,” he says, “he was calm, andstrong, and confident; never lost his self-possession, did no unwise act, spoke no hasty or ill-considered word. Indeed, nothing in his whole life is more remarkable than his bearing through those five full months of vituperation. The great mass of these unjust imputations passed unnoticed, and with the generaldébrisof the campaign fell into oblivion.”
The friendship of Mr. Blaine never waned. He was true as steel. And when the honors of the nation, who had honored him, were in Garfield’s hands, the chiefest and the best were for his first best friend, whom he called to the highest place in his cabinet,—thepremierof the nation. This was no mere compliment. It was an official act. The success of his administration, which was his greatest care, depended largely upon his secretary of state. He must be clean as well as competent,—a king in skill and scholarship, as well as brother, friend. It must then have been an act of his best judgment, as well as an expression of regard. And yet it was as well respect for the millions, represented by the large and strong delegations who voted for him with such strength of purpose for five-and-thirty times.
Four months, less two days, he sat at his right hand in the highest counsels of the country, a wise, and honored, and trusted man. He couldnot have been there had not Garfield known him,—but he did know him through and through, and because he knew him so thoroughly and well, he placed the keeping of the nation’s wisdom, integrity, and honor before the world, and in the great world abroad, into his hands.
“The heart is wiser than the head,” and knows more deeply into life and character, than simple, abstract thought can penetrate. It receives and knows the whole man as a whole, knows him as a person in his every element of personality in reason, conscience, affections, will; knows him by the touch of moral reason, for pure intellect may act alone comparatively in abstract questions, of metaphysical thought, but the heart never. The true enlightenment is here. It is the abode of motive, purpose, plan,—out of it are the issues of life itself.
We are ignorant of those we hate, as the South was of the North before the war, and hence her braggart boasts. But those whom we know deeply, fully, truly, we love deeply, fully, truly. Love lights the path of reason, when it carries the whole reason with it, and furnishes by reciprocal acts of confidence data for its guidance. And thus we love our way into each other’s lives, while reason thus enlightened, helps us on.
It was thus with these great men of the nation’shope, her honor, and her trust. They sat, they stood, they walked, they talked together, their great hearts open as the day, shining full upon each other. And as they shone thus on each other’s life, there was a blending, and so a mutual life, an interlacing, twining, locking, and so a unity.
Every walk in life furnishes its friendships; and the greater the walk may be, the greater are the friendships; for the greater the affinities, the broader the sympathies, the purer, sweeter, more supreme the life; for the true life is never isolated, but unstarved in every part. The king has his queen, the Czar his Czarina. Only the small-souled men are shrunken hearted, while large, capacious spirits take in worlds.
Perhaps the country never possessed two men at the same time who had more friends of the solid and reliable sort than these men, who admired and loved to honor, and honored because they loved, and this because they lived out their splendid natures before their countrymen, hating every mean thing, loving and praising the good. They were not dark, unfathomable mysteries, enigmas, puzzles, problems, staring at you, unsolved, and daring you to the thankless task, and promising but the gloom of deeper shadows; you felt you knew them. They didnot stand aloof, daring you mount up to them, but coming down, they sat beside you, and made you feel akin, and not blush out your feelings of a doomed inferiority; and this great-heartedness, beating responsive to the strong, warm touch of nature, made them friends.
Garfield did not live to draw the picture of his Blaine, but Blaine has lived to draw the picture of his Garfield.
“It is not easy,” he says, “to find his counterpart anywhere in the record of American public life. He, perhaps, more nearly resembles Mr. Seward in his supreme faith in the all-conquering power of a principle. He had the love of learning, and patient industry of investigation to which John Quincy Adams owes his prominence, and his presidency. He had some of those ponderous elements of mind which distinguished Mr. Webster, and which, indeed, in all our public life, have left the great Massachusetts senator without an intellectual peer.
“Some of his methods recall the best features in the strong, independent course of Sir Robert Peel, to whom he had striking resemblance in the type of his mind and the habit of his speech. He had all of Burke’s love for the sublime and the beautiful, with, possibly, something of his superabundance. In his faith and his magnanimity; in his power of statement andsubtle analysis; in his faultless logic, and his love of literature; in his wealth and mode of illustration, one is reminded of that great English statesman of to-day,—Gladstone.”
But the nation seems to commemorate most fittingly the friendship of those two men, when in the person of its representatives and senators it selects to deliver the eulogy of the dead president. Not any of his colleagues in the House from his native state, however long or well they may have known him; nor his colleague in the senate; no governor of his honored state; his loved and cultured pastor, nor any other man than Blaine,—his chosen counsellor in the great affairs of state; he who was with him when, on that quiet, happy morning in July, they rode slowly to the depot, and “his fate was on him in an instant. One moment he stood erect, strong, confident in the years stretching out peacefully before him;—the next he lay wounded, bleeding, helpless, doomed to weary weeks of torture, to silence, and the grave.”
And now, as the hand of Mr. Blaine draws aside the curtain, let us look in upon the final scene in the life and death of his great friend, and see, as he saw, the man so deeply, truly loved by the great nation he had just begun to rule so well.
“Great in life, he was surpassingly great in death. For no cause, in the very frenzy of wantonness and wickedness, by the red hand of murder, he was thrust from the full tide of this world’s interest; from its hopes, its aspirations, its victories, into the visible presence of death, and he did not quail. Not alone for the one short moment in which, stunned and dazed, he could give up life, hardly aware of its relinquishment; but through days of deadly languor; through weeks of agony, that was not less agony because silently borne; with clear sight and calm courage he looked into his open grave. What blight and ruin met his anguished eyes, whose lips may tell? What brilliant, broken plans; what baffled high ambitions; what sundering of strong, warm manhood’s friendships; what bitter rending of sweet household ties! Behind him a proud, expectant nation; a great host of sustaining friends; a cherished and happy mother, wearing the full, rich honors of her early toil and tears; the wife of his youth, whose whole life lay in his; the little boys not yet emerged from childhood’s day of frolic; the fair, young daughter; the sturdy sons, just springing into closest companionship, claiming every day and every hour the reward of a father’s love and care; and in his heart the eager, rejoicing power to meet all demands. Before him, desolation and great darkness! And his soul was not shaken.
“His countrymen were thrilled with instant, profound, and universal sympathy. Masterful in his mortal weakness, he became the centre of a nation’slove; enshrined in the prayers of a world. But all the love and all the sympathy could not share with him his suffering. He trod the wine-press alone. With unfaltering front he faced death. With unfailing tenderness he took leave of life. Above the demoniac hiss of the assassin’s bullet he heard the voice of God. With simple resignation he bowed to the divine decree.
“As the end drew near, his early craving for the sea returned. The stately mansion of power had been to him the wearisome hospital of pain, and he begged to be taken from its prison walls, from its oppressive, stifling air, from its homelessness, and its hopelessness. Gently, silently, the love of a great people bore the pale sufferer to the longed-for healing of the sea, to live or to die, as God should will, within sight of its heaving billows, within hearing of its manifold voices. With wan, fevered face tenderly lifted to the cooling breeze, he looked out wistfully upon the ocean’s changing wonders; on its far sails, whitening in the morning light; on its restless waves, rolling shoreward to break and die beneath the noonday sun; on the red clouds of evening, arching low to the horizon; on the serene and shining pathway of the stars. Let us believe that in the silence of the receding world he heard the great waves breaking on a further shore, and felt, already upon his wasted brow, the breath of the eternal morning.”