CHAPTER VI

THE STRUGGLE TO PROTECT PATENTS

In 1848 Cyrus McCormick's original patent expired. He applied to have it extended, and at once there began one of the most extraordinary legal wars ever known in the history of the Patent Office. It continued with very little cessation until 1865. It enlisted on one side or the other the ablest lawyers of that period--such giants of the bar as Lincoln, Stanton, Seward, Douglas, Harding, Watson, Dickerson, and Reverdy Johnson. The tide of battle rolled from court to court until the final clash came in the chamber of the Supreme Court and the halls of Congress. It was perhaps the most Titanic effort that any American inventor has ever made to protect his rights and to carry out the purpose of the Patent Law.

McCormick had strong reasons for believing that his patent should be extended. He was asking for no more than the Patent Office, on other occasions, had granted to other inventors. A patent was supposed to protect an inventor for fourteen years, and he had lost half of this time in making a better machine, and in finding out the best way to carry on the business. He had received from all sources nearly $24,000, and most of it had been swallowed up in expenses. He was still a poor man in 1848. He was no more than on the threshold of prosperity. And his peculiar difficulty, which gave him a special claim upon the Patent Commissioners, was the shortness of the harvest season. He had only three or four weeks in each year in which he could make experiments.

For eight years McCormick's claim was tossed back and forth like a tennis ball between the Patent Office and Congress. This delay threw the door wide open to competition. A score of manufacturers built factories and began to make McCormick Reapers, with trifling variations and under other names. If McCormick had won his case, they would have had to pay him a royalty of $25 on each machine. Consequently, they combined against him. They hired lawyers and lobbyists, secured petitions from farmers, and raised a hue and cry that one man was "trying to impose a tax of $500,000 a year upon the starving millions of the world."

One firm of lawyers in Cincinnati sent a letter to these manufacturers in 1850, saying that, "McCormick can be beaten in the Patent Office, and must be beaten now or never. If funds are furnished us, we shall surely beat him; but if they are not furnished us, he will as certainly beat us. Please, therefore, take hold and help us to beat the _common enemy_. The subscriptions have ranged from $100 to $1,000.... Send in also to Patent Office hundreds of remonstrances like this: We oppose the extension of C. H. McCormick's patent. He has made money enough off of the farmer."

Towards the end of this famous case, the anti-McCormick lobby at the Capitol became so rabid that Senator Brown, of Mississippi, made an indignant protest on the floor of the Senate. He said: "Why, Mr. President, if it were not for the people out of doors, people without inventive genius, people without the genius to invent a mouse-trap or a fly-killer, who are pirating on the great invention of McCormick, there would never have been an hour's delay in granting all that he asks. I know, and I state here, in the face of the American Senate and the world, that these men have beset me at every corner of the street with their papers and their affidavits--men who have no claim to the ear of the country, men who have rendered it no service, but who have invested their paltry dollars in the production of a machine which sprang from the mind of another man; and who now, for their own gain, employ lawyers to draw cunning affidavits, to devise cunning schemes, and to put on foot all sorts of machinery to defeat McCormick."

What worried McCormick most was not this consolidation of competitors, but the fact that a few farmers had signed petitions of protest against his claim. This was "the most unkindest cut of all." But he made no attack upon them. Manufacturers he would fight, and inventors and lawyers and judges--any one and every one, if need be, except farmers. "How can the farmers be against me?" he asked in amazement. "They save the price of the Reaper in a single harvest."

McCormick lost his suit, as he did a second time in 1859, and a third time in 1861. Not one of his patents was at any time renewed. Up to 1858 he had received $40,000 in royalties, but it had cost him $90,000 in litigation. From first to last he did not get one dollar of net profit from the protection of the Patent Office.

Many other inventors were fairly treated by Congress. Fulton, for example, was presented with a bonus of $76,300. Willmoth, who improved the turret of a battleship, received $50,000. Professor Page, for making an electric engine, was given $20,000. Morse was awarded $38,000. The patents of Goodyear, Kelly, Howe, Morse, Hyatt, Woodworth, and Blanchard were extended. The protection of inventors had been a national policy--an American tradition. In the phrasing of Daniel Webster: "The right of an inventor to his invention is a natural right, which existed before the Constitution was written and which is above the Constitution."

The benefit of the Reaper to the nation, and the fact that McCormick was its inventor, were admitted freely enough. Senator Johnson, of Maryland, estimated in 1858 that the Reaper was then worth to the United States $55,000,000 a year. D. P. Holloway, the Commissioner of Patents, sang an anthem of eloquent praise to McCormick in 1861. "He is an inventor whose fame, while he is yet living, has spread through the world," he said. "His genius has done honor to his own country, and has been the admiration of foreign nations. He will live in the grateful recollection of mankind as long as the reaping-machine is employed in gathering the harvest." Then, in an abrupt postscript to so fine a eulogy, this extraordinary Commissioner adds: "But the Reaper is of too great value to the public to be controlled by any individual, and the extension of his patent is refused."

The truth seems to be that McCormick was too strong, too aggressive, to receive fair play at the hands of any legislative body. The note of sympathy could never be struck in his favor. He personally directed his own cases. He dominated his own lawyers. And he fought always in an old-fashioned, straight-from-the-shoulder way that put him at a great disadvantage in a legal conflict. Also, he was supposed to be much richer than in reality he was. He had made money by the rise in Chicago real estate. By 1866 he had become a millionaire. And his entire fortune was assumed by opposing lawyers to be the product of the Reaper business.

It is to be said, to the lasting honor of South Carolina, that she gave a grant of money to Whitney, out of the public treasury, as a token of gratitude for the invention of the cotton gin. But no wheat State ever gave, or proposed to give, any grant or vote of thanks to Cyrus McCormick for the invention of the Reaper. The business that he established was never at any time favored by a tariff, or franchise, or patent extension, or tax exemption, or land grant, or monopoly. Single-handed he built it up, and single-handed he held it against all comers. If, as Emerson has said, an institution is no more than "the lengthened shadow of one man," we may fairly say that the immense McCormick Company of to-day is no more than the lengthened shadow of this farm-bred Virginian.

By 1855 McCormick realized that the Federal Government was not the impartial tribunal that he had believed it to be. He saw that he could not depend upon it for protection, so he made a characteristic decision--he resolved to protect himself. He, too, would hire a battery of lawyers and charge down upon these manufacturers who were unrighteously making his Reaper and depriving him of his patents. He engaged three of the master lawyers of the American bar, William H. Seward, E. N. Dickerson, and Senator Reverdy Johnson, and brought suit against Manny and Emerson, of Rockford, Illinois, for making McCormick Reapers without a license.

Then came a three-year struggle that shook the country and did much to shape the history of the American people. Manny and Emerson, who were shrewd and forceful men, hired twice as many lawyers as McCormick and prepared to defend themselves. They selected as the members of this legal bodyguard, Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, Edwin M. Stanton, Peter H. Watson, George Harding, and Congressman H. Winter Davis.

It was a battle of giants. Greek met Greek with weapons of eloquence. But Stanton out-classed his great co-debaters in a speech of unanswerable power which unfortunately was not reported. The speech so vividly impressed McCormick that in his next lawsuit he at once engaged Stanton. It awoke the brain of Lincoln, as he afterwards admitted; and drove him back to a more comprehensive study of the law. It gave Lincoln so high an opinion of Stanton's ability that, when he became President several years later, he chose Stanton to be his Secretary of War. And it gripped judge and jury with such effect that McCormick lost his case. It was a wonderful speech.

Abraham Lincoln, who made no speech at all, was the one who derived the most benefit in the end from this lawsuit. It not only aroused his ambitions, but gave him his first big fee--$1,000. This money came to him at the precise moment when he needed it most, to enable him to enter into the famous debate with Douglas--the debate that made him the inevitable candidate of the Republican party. It is interesting to note how closely the destinies of Lincoln and McCormick were interwoven. Both were born in 1809, on farms in the South. Both struggled through a youth of adversity and first came into prominence in Illinois. Both labored to preserve the Union, and when the War of Secession came it was the Reaper that enabled Lincoln to feed his armies. Both men were emancipators, the one from slavery and the other from famine; and both to-day sleep under the soil of Illinois. No other two Americans had heavier tasks than they, and none worked more mightily for the common good.

Of all McCormick's lawsuits, and they were many, the most extraordinary was the famous Baggage Case, which lasted for twenty-three years--from 1862 to 1885. It was probably the best single instance of the man's dogged tenacity in defence of a principle. The original cause of this trial was a comedy of mishaps. A McCormick family party of six, with nine trunks, boarded a train at Philadelphia for Chicago. The train was about to start, when the baggage-master demanded pay for 200 pounds of surplus baggage. The amount was only $8.70, but McCormick refused to pay it. He called his family out of the train and ordered that his trunks be taken off. The conductor refused to hold the train, and the trunks were carried away. Mr. McCormick at once saw the president of the railroad, J. Edgar Thompson, who telegraphed an order for the trunks to be put off at Pittsburg. The McCormicks set out for Chicago by the next train. At Pittsburg they learned that the trunks had been carried through to Chicago. And the next day, in Chicago, when McCormick went to the Fort Wayne depot, he found it a mass of smoking cinders. It had caught fire in the night, and the nine trunks had been destroyed.

McCormick sued the railroad for $7,193--the value of the trunks and their contents. Repeatedly he won and repeatedly the railroad appealed to higher courts. After twenty years the worn and battered case was carried up to the nine Justices of the United States Supreme Court. They decided for McCormick. But even then the railroad evaded payment for three years, until after McCormick's death. Then the president of the road signed a check for $18,060.79, which was the original value of the nine trunks plus twenty-three years' interest.

McCormick did not for a moment regard this case as trivial. It involved a principle. Once when a friend bantered him for fighting so hard over a small matter, he replied, "My conscience, sir! I don't know what would become of the American people if there were not some one to stand up for fair dealing." His victory did much to teach the railroads better manners and a finer consideration of the travelling public. Soon after the conclusion of the case, a trunk belonging to a relative of the McCormicks was destroyed on the New York Central. It value was $1,300, and one of the railroad's lawyers promptly sent a check, saying, "We don't want to have a lawsuit with the McCormicks."

For these numerous lawsuits McCormick paid a terrible price, both in money and friendship. He acquired a reputation as "a man who would law you to death." He brought down upon himself to a remarkable degree the hostility of his competitors, and prevented himself from receiving the full credit and prestige that he deserved. Instead of being revered as the father of the Reaper business, he was feared as an industrial Bismarck--a man of unyielding will and indomitable purpose, who regarded his competitors as a pack of trespassers in an empire that belonged by right to him.

The truth is that this situation did not arise because of the natural perversity of either McCormick or his competitors. In his later life, McCormick proved that he could co-operate with his equals in the most harmonious way, in a new business enterprise. His competitors, too, were for the most part men of ability and uprightness. Neither in their public nor private lives, was there any stain upon the honor of such men as Wood, Osborne, Adriance, Manny, Emerson, Huntley, Warder. Bushnell, Glessner, Jones, and Lewis Miller. But these men were all newcomers. They were beardless striplings compared to McCormick. He had made and exhibited a successful Reaper twenty years before the first of them began. His father had grappled with the problem of the Reaper before most of them were born. It was inevitable, therefore, that there should have been an unspanable gap between the two points of view. McCormick stood alone because he _was_ alone. He and the Reaper had grown up together in long hazardous years of pioneering, through ridicule and poverty and failure. It was his dream come true. And in the same spirit with which he had fought to create it, he also fought to hold it, and to protect it from men to whom it was not a dream and a life-mission, but a mere machine.