Part 7

Mr. Blaine entered the year with the same great purpose, and the same bold enunciation of principles. He was a true knight. His pen was mightier than the sword. It was never idle, never cold. From home to office, and office to senate, and back to office and home he went, day by day, wherever truth and right could be served.

Washington’s birthday came soon, and with it the Republican gathering at Pittsburgh, and then the great convention that nominated Frémont and Dayton at Philadelphia, in the summer of 1856;--Blaine was there; it was on his native heather. Never had men listened so intently since the farewell address of Washington; rarely had they thought, and felt, and resolved so deeply. Conscience and will, intelligence and love, were in all they thought, and said, and did. They chose their men for standard-bearers, and fought out the hard, bitter fight. It was a good fight, and they kept the faith.

It was on his return from the convention in Philadelphia that he was selected, of all who went, to report to the citizens at home. It was his first oratorical effort in Augusta, if not his first since leaving college. His pen had done the work. There had been no demand for oratory. He surprised himself and astonished his hearers, and from that hour the door was open for him to enter the state legislature.

An old friend and neighbor of Mr. Blaine has, since his nomination, given the following sketch of the speech:--

“This was his first public effort. He was then twenty-six years of age. Although remarkably ready and easy of speech and holding a practiced and powerful pen, he had an almost unconquerable repugnance to letting his voice be heard, except in familiar conversation, where his brilliant powers of statement and argument, his marvelous memory of dates and events in political history, and his acquaintance with, and keen estimate of the public men and parties of the day, were the delight and wonder of all who listened to him. The writer well recalls the trepidation, at once painful and ludicrous, with which he rose to address the meeting. In confronting the sea of faces, almost every one of which was known to him, he seemed to be struggling to master the terror that possessed him. He turned pale and red by turns, and almost tottering to the front, he stood trembling until the generous applause which welcomed him had died away, when, by a supreme effort, he broke the spell, at first by the utterance of some hesitating words of greeting and thanks, and then gathering confidence, he went on with a speech which stirred the audience as with the sound of a trumpet, and held all present in breathless interest and attention to its close. From that moment Mr. Blaine took rank among the most effective popular speakers of the day; but it may be doubted if among the many maturer efforts of his genius and eloquence upon the political platform or the legislative tribune, he has ever excited an audience to a more passionate enthusiasm, or left a profounder impression upon the minds and hearts of his hearers.”

His editorials of this year would fill a large volume, and all bold, trenchant, and uncompromising in tone. His experience of the year before had just fitted him for this hard, strong work. The temptation is exceedingly great to make copious extracts, for it is our single effort to cause the man to appear in all the just and worthy splendor of his enduring manhood, and if a scar is found in all of wide research, no hand shall cover it.

Not alone the great cause, but the great men who embodied it, were to him an inspiration. Next to books, men were his study. He studied the nation in them, and all the questions they incarnated. Henry Wilson was to him an inspiration. “All praise to the cold and lofty bearing of Henry Wilson at the Philadelphia convention,” he writes of him in his issue of June 22, 1854. And all the great, strong men of the party loomed up before him at full stature, and had a large place in his affections. They were the apostles of liberty to him.

The last year of Mr. Blaine’s journalistic career in Augusta was tame compared with other years, and yet the paper continued a splendid specimen of what the leading paper at the state capital ought to be,--rich in every department, and justly noted for the courage and acumen of its editorial writings.

The great presidential campaign had resulted in the election of James Buchanan, to whom the _Richmond Enquirer_ immediately gave this friendly word of caution: “The president elect will commit a fatal folly if he thinks to organize his administration upon any other principle than that of an avowed and inflexible support of the rights and institutions of the slave-holding states. He who is not with us is against us, and the South cannot attach itself to an administration which occupies a _neutral_ ground, without descending from its own lofty and impregnable position.”

In announcing the cabinet of Mr. Buchanan and the Dred Scott decision in the same issue, Mr. Blaine says,--“The conquest of slavery is complete. President, cabinet, congress, judiciary, treasury, army, navy, the common territory of the union are all in its hands to be directed as its whims shall direct.” The five great acts in the drama of national shame and degradation he mentions as, “the Fugitive Slave Act, repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the raid on Kansas, election of James Buchanan, and the supreme court decision in the Dred Scott case.”

It was a great deal for the nation to endure, but it was the thing to arouse the nation to the iniquity to be overthrown by the Republican party in the next election. Five of the nine judges were from the South, and two of the others, Nelson and Grier, were selected with special regard to their fidelity to the slave-holding interests of the South.

But there was some honor and joy in the fact that Hannibal Hamlin was Governor of Maine, and United States senator elect. His inaugural address Mr. Blaine heads,--“A Paralytic Stroke.”

It was, indeed, a time for great men to speak out, and this Mr. Hamlin did with power. So greatly had the _Journal_ prospered under the firm management of Stevens and Blaine, that they removed from the office at the corner of Oak and Water Streets, which it had occupied for twenty-four years, and at great expense, added new and improved machinery. This had scarcely been done a month when Mr. Blaine’s name disappears from its management. He had sold his interest in the paper for “a good, handsome price,” and invested it all, beside money loaned from a brother-in-law, in coal lands in Pennsylvania.

He urged his partner, Mr. Stevens, to sell out his interest and do the same. This investment, says Mr. Stevens, was very fortunate, and has yielded him handsome returns. But Mr. Blaine was wanted on the _Portland Daily Advertiser_. John M. Wood, a man of wealth, owned it, and was looking around for an able editor. Mr. Blaine had acquired a reputation as editor, and was offered the position, which he accepted at three thousand dollars a year salary, but never removed to Portland.

This year of 1857 is remembered as the year of the great financial crash. It was anything but a crash to Mr. Blaine. He had sold his paper, which he had brought into a leading position in state journalism, at a large advance, made a profitable investment of his funds, gone on a salary of the first-class, for the time, and also been nominated and elected a member of the state legislature, as one of the two representatives of the city of Augusta.

His popularity is seen in the fact that at the time of this seeming break-up, when if he had been a machine man with insatiable political aspirations he would certainly have held on to his paper, and parted with it at no price, he artlessly sells out and enters business about eighty miles from home. But the people wanted him. He would not leave their midst. He had served the cause of his espousal with ability and fidelity for three years, and the time had come to honor him.

It is not often that a man so young comes into an old established state, and in a time so brief makes for himself a name and a place so large.

It is only needful to read over the files of that paper from the first hour his pen touched it to see that he had made for himself a place so large. He had put himself into its columns, and so into the life both of the state and the nation. He lived, and thought, and wrought for that paper. That was the instrument of his power. The bold thunder of artillery is heard along its columns; the charge of cavalry and the sweep of infantry are seen and felt upon its pages. There is push, and dash, and rush, and swing, and hurrah along the whole battle-line where he stood and fought through those years. It was a manly fight. He stood squarely to the line. It was all upon the broad scale of the nation’s existence and welfare. He spoke the truth as such; he had no dreams to tell.

He took no vacation, but summer and winter was at his post. In July and August there is no relaxation, but the same dash of breakers on the shore. No wonder he was in demand elsewhere, and the fee was large. He was a business success, and had made a success of politics thus far. The first Republicans of Maine had gone into office mid the glow of his genius, and now his turn had come. It was a weekly before, but now it was a daily, and a seat in the legislature to fill beside. But he was abreast of the times, a full man, a large man, with immense capabilities of work, and a strong, tenacious memory, or he could never have done the work of two men steadily, and four men much of the time, and a man destined for leadership. He took to Portland all his powers, and soon was felt as fire is felt, or the rising sun, for foes and friends learned speedily of his presence. Every day was a field-day in politics then. It was a political revival all the year round. No ponds or pools were visible. There were currents in every stream. There was a mighty flood to the tides. The states were raising men and building characters. They were mining gold and minting it. Life then was a Bessemer steel-process; the heat was intense, and hydraulic pressure drove out all impurities. The great columbiads that did the execution were cast before the war; they were large of calibre and deep of bore, and thoroughly rifled, for it was the men who manned the guns in war times who made the guns man the rebellion.

The clouds are drawing water and marshaling forces for the sweep of a mighty storm,--the storm of a righteous judgment, of a holy justice. It was God’s storm and must come. Already the lightning played furiously along the sky, and mutterings of thunder could be distinctly heard. The air grew thick, and heavy, and dark. All signs were ominous. From throne to cloud, and cloud to brain, and brain to pen, the electric current flew. Men were thinking the thoughts of God. They were being filled with his vision and armed with his purpose. No times were grander since men had pledged their lives, and fortunes, and sacred honor at the shrine of Liberty, for its perpetuation; and now their sons from heights of manhood just as lofty, were breathing the same spirit and plighting the same faith. How men stretch upward to a kingly height when such grand occasions come, or wither and waste like froth on the billows that charge along the shore!

It was promotion to rank of greater influence when Mr. Blaine took his sceptre of power in Portland. Six times a week instead of once, he went out in teeming editorials to the people. Every department of the paper was enriched and felt the thrill of his presence. He was a graduate in journalism now. Its ways were all familiar. His study of it and experience had brought him the ability of hard, rapid work. It was the testimony of his old associate at Augusta, that he would go at once to the core of a subject, and get the wheat out of the chaff. The beginning and ending of an article, he said, were its heavy parts, and Mr. Blaine knew just where to look, whether in newspaper, review, or book.

He always found what he wanted, and so was always armed to the teeth with fact and incident, with argument and illustration. He had the eye and ear and pen of the true journalist.

Some men have a peculiar faculty for getting at what is going on. They seem to know by instinct. It is not always told them, but they are good listeners, as all great men are. They are men of great industry; search and research are ever the order with them.

Some men are sound asleep when the decisive hours of life are passing, others seem ever awake It is this ability to see, and hear, and feel, to catch and ever know, that has made Mr. Blaine a living centre of the political intelligence of his time. As a student of history he had learned the ways of men and nations, the policies of governments, and the methods of their execution, their meteorology, mineralogy, and ways of navigation,--for nations have all of these, political weather, materials of construction, together with tides and currents in their affairs, besides rocks and reefs and coasts of danger. The right ways are always the great ways, the light the best ways.

All the light of any subject comes from the truth it holds within, and the man of mastery is the man of light and life and energy. It is unfilled capacity that makes of so many the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. Unfed, untrained, and unworked minds have filled the world with wrecks.

Mr. Blaine is climbing the ladder now. Coming up out of the ranks, as some must come, with worth or worthlessness.

“Heaven is not reached by a single bound, But we climb the ladder by which we rise.”

It was General Taylor’s great difficulty in Mexico to bring on a battle. This at times requires the ablest generalship; but this he finally succeeded in doing at Buena Vista, and so created the occasion of his greatest victory. This was a power in the tactics of Mr. Blaine. He was never afraid to attack, and never out of ammunition, however long the siege or strong the foe.

Soon after he entered the legislature Mr. Blaine encountered Ephraim K. Smart, one of the greatest men of his party, a man who had been in congress, and afterward was twice their candidate for governor. While in congress he had opposed the extension of slavery in Kansas, and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise which limited slavery to the Southern states; but now, during the Buchanan régime, when the party seemed hopelessly sold to slavery, he went back on his record, swore by the party, and stood by its record, regardless of his own.

Mr. Blaine was thoroughly posted, and when the time came turned it against him in debate. It was a time of danger at the nation’s capital; assaults were frequent, thrilling scenes were enacted everywhere. Each hour brought the country nearer the verge of war. Our man was fearless and he was strong,--strong in the right, strong in his knowledge of the situation, strong in the command of his powers; so with his ever aggressive spirit of true progress, he hurled his lance. With a merciless skill he unfolded the history of the man, with all of its inconsistencies, sophistry, and contradiction, and reaching the climax he held it up to view, and advancing towards him (his name was Ephraim), he said, with great dramatic power, “Ephraim is a cake unturned, and we propose to turn him.”

Imagine if you can the bewildered consternation of the man! It was one of Mr. Blaine’s first triumphs in the house, and a stride toward the speaker’s chair.

With this same spirit and power he did his work at Portland. His position afforded him the best opportunity for news of every sort, and his legislative work was largely in the line of his editorial, so that preparation for the one was fitness for the other. Yet life was full to the brim. He was a man of immense vitality, and is to-day, as almost daily intercourse with him can testify.

The first day of his duties in the legislature he is appointed chairman of a committee of five to inform the newly-elected governor, Lot M. Morrill, of his election. Thus he is recognized and honored as the chief one, worthy to represent the body in the presence of the governor.

A few days after, he presented a long, well-worded resolution that the house, in concurrence with the senate, according to certain forms of law indicated, proceed, upon the following Tuesday, at twelve o’clock, to elect a United States senator to succeed Hon. Wm. Pitt Fessenden, whose term expired on the fourth of March, of that year. Also an important resolution submitting an amendment of a legal character to their consideration, thus showing that his knowledge of law was utilized by him as a law-maker.

As one of the chairmen of the State Prison committee of the house he delivers a long speech upon the 17th and 18th of March in reply to one delivered by the same Hon. E. R. Smart, who had opposed resolutions presented by Mr. Blaine’s committee upon improving the present prison and building another.

Mr. Smart was evidently the aggressor, and very much his senior in age, but Mr. Blaine sharply tells him that large portions of his speech were irrelevant, having been delivered the night before in a democratic meeting downtown; calls him the Earl of Warwick to the Democratic Plantagenets; compares him, with great vigor, to a character in Gil Blas, who had written a book in support of certain remedies sure to cure, and which, though utterly futile, he argued with a friend he must continue to practice, because he had written the book, and so Mr. Smart must inflict his speech because he had written it.

Blaine was well-armed; had a wide array of statistics; had, indeed, been over the ground thoroughly the year before with the governor, and written it up for his paper, and showed himself competent to take care of his committee.

A short time before this he had made a handsome little speech in favor of a resolve introduced by this same leader of the Democracy, in which he desired a new county formed, and his own town of Camden made the shire-town, and yet Mr. Blaine’s measure, a necessity, and for the public good, is violently assailed.

A careful examination of the proceedings of the legislature prove this to be a fact, that Mr. Blaine was a devoted, constant, and faithful member; that about every motion he made was carried; and that he ranked in ability as a speaker, both in matter and method, with the best of them. His three years’ work as an editor had made him well acquainted with its members, and thoroughly conversant with the ways of the house, so that he was thoroughly at home in their midst, with none of the nervous diffidence which a new member from the country, however good and honest he might be, would be very likely to have. He spoke about as he wrote. He had written about five hundred good, solid editorials in the previous years, as they issued a tri-weekly during the session of the legislature, and in reporting its doings had caught the drift of its operations.

Moreover, he had a good business preparation for his work. He had been largely upon his own resources for ten years, and in the business management of his paper, and in studying up the business interests of the city and of the state, he had acquired experience and knowledge. No one, it would seem, can read the record of his speeches, short and long, or the motions he made, resolves he offered, without being impressed that he had a clear, strong way of looking at questions. He could tell the husk from the corn at a glance, and if he had anything to do with a member’s speech would tear off the husk without any ceremony and make quick search for the corn.

But the affairs of the country were in a bad way as Mr. Blaine was daily recording them. There had been over nine thousand business failures in the country in 1857 and 1858; or, to be exact, there were four thousand nine hundred and thirty-two in 1857, and four thousand two hundred and twenty-five in 1858, with a loss of three hundred and eighty-seven million four hundred and ninety-nine thousand six hundred and sixty-two dollars, a sum in those days of enormous proportion. Slave-holders, who had the power then, were urging the purchase of Cuba, at a cost of two hundred million dollars, for the purposes of slavery.

The country seemed to be at a stand-still, or going backwards. The state of Vermont had increased in population but one thousand six hundred and fifty-seven in ten years, from 1850 to 1860.

Senators Crittenden, of Kentucky, and Seward, of New York, had a passage of words in the senate, and apologized.

Fessenden had been re-elected to the United States Senate, and New Hampshire had gone Republican.

But Stephen A. Douglas had beaten Abraham Lincoln for the senate from Illinois by a vote of fifty-eight to forty-four, and Seward had introduced his famous bill for the repression of the slave trade, just to bring the Southern senators into position on that subject, and this only a year before Lincoln was nominated. It provided for ten steamers, as a part of the navy, to cruise along the coast of Africa, as the president might direct.

About this time Oregon is admitted as the second state on the Pacific coast.

Mr. Blaine deals with all the questions of the day with skill and effectiveness. A municipal election is going on in Portland, and Mr. Blaine does his part by tongue and pen to aid in achieving a Republican victory, which is triumphantly accomplished just as the legislature is closing. But Mr. Blaine has time to deliver his best speech of the session, on Friday before final adjournment on Tuesday, April 5th, after a session of ninety days. Now he has nearly nine solid months of straight editorial work. The one great object is ever prominent,--slavery must go, or it must be restricted and kept out of the territories. The country is in great commotion; state after state fights out its battles and wheels into line. In border states, especially, political revolutions are taking place. The gospel of Liberty is taking the place of the hard political doctrines of pro-slavery Democracy. Mr. Blaine has to fire at long range, so efficiently has the work been done at home, but it is cheering to see the beacons lighted along the coast of Maine, and to know that the bonfires are lighted all over the state. Men have already been trained and gone forth to do yeoman service in other states. The Washburns are in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, while Israel Washburn, Jr., has just been elected governor of the home state.

In 1860 Mr. Blaine is elected speaker of the House, although his colleague, William T. Johnson, of Augusta, was speaker the year before. The singular popularity of the man is thus demonstrated, as he takes the chair, escorted to it by his defeated competitor; his words are few but in the best of taste. Mr. Blaine said,--

“GENTLEMEN OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES:

“I accept the position you assign me with a due appreciation, I trust, of the honor it confers and the responsibility it imposes. In presiding over your deliberations it shall be my faithful endeavor to administer the parliamentary rules in such manner that the rights of minorities shall be protected, the constitutional will of majorities enforced, and the common weal effectively promoted. In this labor I am sure I shall not look in vain for your forbearance as well as your cordial co-operation. I am ready, gentlemen, to proceed with the business of the House.”