Part 18
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 the outside 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, so that 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.”
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 their remote 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 give another 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, that for 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.”
XVI.
BLAINE AND GARFIELD.
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 dark days, 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 and strong 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. Garfield could 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 for their 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. Blaine lived 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.’”
“Under it all,” he says, “he was calm, and strong, 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 general _débris_ of 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,--the _premier_ of 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 could not 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’s hope, 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 did not 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 and subtle 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.