Part 15

And then, after adjournment, comes the great campaign, in which the thirteenth amendment is submitted to the suffrage of the people. Two-thirds of the states must endorse it to make it organic law, and this they do right heartily, and congress resumes its session the first Monday in December. It is the second session of the thirty-ninth congress, and the second of Mr. Blaine’s second term.

Mr. Blaine had a very eligible seat, at the left of the speaker, and well in front; almost within reach of him sat Garfield.

The first day of the session Mr. Blaine made a move for the repeal of the three cents per pound tax on raw cotton, which was finally carried. This was a move which affected every home, and especially the laboring classes; for older ones do not forget how enormously high cotton goods were in war times and subsequently, and so have little difficulty in understanding the importance of such a move. It was contended that it was a wrong principle to tax the raw production of the soil, and in conflict with the long-established policy of the nation.

Mr. Blaine’s resolves at this time came thick and fast, like resolutions at New Year’s, but with more purpose in them. Indeed his purpose is a noticeable feature of every move, and he could state it in the plainest kind of English, and it was his practice, after a bill was read, or resolution presented, to state its meaning, tell just what he meant by it, as the legal forms do not always make it at once apparent. He gives his reasons for the measure. For instance, volunteer officers could not be breveted in the regular army for meritorious service in the volunteer service. This he saw was wrong, and drew up a bill in regular form to right the matter, and then states what he means about it, and the facts that have moved him, generally move the rest. Almost nine-tenths of the new regular army was to be made up of the old volunteers, and he would have the old regular army laws changed so as not to discriminate against them and in favor of West Pointers.

There was no red-tape about him. He did not believe in it. It took too much time, and was too unjust. He believed in solid worth, and in rewarding it. He is a straight and constant American, and loves all who love America, and will not have them dealt unfairly with if it is in his power to prevent. Fair play is a term he often used during his early terms in congress. It seemed to express his ideal of honor. An unfair man was not respectable in his eyes. It was a right upon which he strenuously insisted for himself. He evidently had seen the old definition of freeman, “Who knows his rights and knowing dare maintain.”

And yet this genius of fair play which possessed him, kept him from being a bigot. His sense of justice would rebel against an outrage inflicted upon anyone. But it is getting to be a hot place in congress. Andrew Johnson has disappointed the hopes of the nation. He is not filling the place of the dead Lincoln, but rather dishonoring it, and articles of impeachment are originating in the House, summoning him before the bar of the senate because of “the crimes and high misdemeanors of which he is manifestly and notoriously guilty, and which render it unsafe longer to permit him to exercise the functions he has unlawfully assumed.” The air was filled with this matter of impeachment during the summer campaign, but on in the dead of winter there is no disposition to rush madly or blindly into it. It is but one of many things demanding attention.

Mr. Blaine is as conservative as he is radical. He combines in a very strong and decided manner many of the best characteristics of both. He does not rush into everything that comes before the House, but calmly surveys and studies, and comes to know the question in its bearings, and reaches conclusions, and with these truly gained and firmly held, he is ready for action.

The novelty of a thing makes him suspicious; he must know it through and through, for when he begins he will surely end. One comes to expect that when he presses a measure it will pass, and however much there may be to retard its progress, he will never lose sight of it until it goes through.

It seemed to be a time of political apostasy in the nation. Many are betraying their trusts, and a large number fall, politically, to rise no more. Many of the old war Democrats, like Andrew Johnson, were simply Democrats when the war was over. It seemed to be a sort of political reaction after the high pressure of the war. They were not prepared to accept all the results of the war. It was more than they had anticipated, and the result was an unwillingness to proceed, and so many called a halt; but Thaddeus Stevens in the House, and Charles Sumner in the senate, kept the work planned and the forces in motion. Mr. Stevens formed a strong friendship for Mr. Blaine, and as they were on the military committee together, he learned to respect his talents and prize his ability.

XIII.

CONGRESSIONAL CAREER CONTINUED.

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 treasury of 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 are the 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 certain persons 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 followed him 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 does _to_ ours.”

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 tinkling of 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 might say, 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 sobriety and 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 congress in 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 obligation imposed 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 of which 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.