Part 8

He is in a position of power and influence now; he is in the third office of the state. His ability will be tested; great presence of mind, quickness of decision, tact, and skill are needful. But he is ready and at his ease. He has the knowledge requisite, and experience seems born of the man. He fits wherever placed. He must know each member, and he knows them; he must be just, and fair, and honorable, and he is all of these by virtue of a broad, generous nature.

Mr. Blaine is speaker of the House of Representatives of the state of Maine, not because of any one good quality,--he is excelled in single qualities by many another,--but because of a large combination of good qualities, and these, cultivated to a high degree. This it is that wins; many a face is beautiful in some one or more of its features, but so distorted in others that the effect is bad, and beauty, which is the harmonious blending of many lines upon the canvas or features on the face, is lost. Character is the restoration of moral order in the individual; let this be broken by some defect, omission, or failure, some secret or overt act, and the harmony is lost, and a once fair character is marred.

Thus it is not so much the symmetry as the large and splendid combination of talents and genius which make him what he is. He simply does his best, and keeps himself at his best all the time. He anticipates every occasion, and has forces in reserve all the time, and they are brought forward, if his tactics are not known, very unexpectedly. The most telling points in all his earlier speeches are not brought out at first, and when they do appear you wonder why he did not produce them before, and this very wonder increases its power on you. This is rather a necessity, it would seem, because there is point and pith, and power all through.

A great year of destiny is before the nation; a mighty, conquering battle-year. Slavery refuses any concessions, and Liberty loves itself too well to be compromised. The great convention of Republicans in the old wigwam in Chicago is an event of so great importance that all minor events dwindle before it. James G. Blaine is there.

Excitement is at the highest pitch. The tone and temper of the North is felt and feared. The old Democratic party is shattered into fragments. It has several wings, but no body. The Union seems on the verge of dissolution. But strong men, tried and true, who cannot be brow-beaten and crushed; men who have not been deceived or intimidated, or despoiled of their convictions since the Whig party sold out to Slavery in 1852; men who have waited eighteen long, eventful years for the iron to get hot enough to strike, are there; there in their power; there, not to become demoralized, and drop their guns and run, but to stand firm and strong in a mighty phalanx, and do tremendous battle for tremendous right against tremendous wrong.

William H. Seward is the choice of men, but Abraham Lincoln is the choice of God. He has been fitting and training him for half a century, much as he trained Moses, the great leader and emancipator of his ancient people. They try in vain to elect their man. The way is hedged up; ballot after ballot is taken, but it cannot be done. Finally, the moment comes, and “honest old Abe” is crowned by the hand of a remarkable Providence, and God’s will is done.

Men shake their heads, but high yonder on his throne the King does his thinking. All is clear to him. Well-nigh a century of prayer is to be answered.

Mr. Blaine’s description of the sessions and impressions at Chicago, make the great, inspiring scenes live before the imagination, and show how his broad, eager mind took it all in.

Ten of the Maine delegation were for Seward, and six for Lincoln. A meeting was called, and an effort made by the Seward men to win the Lincoln delegates to their side. Wm. H. Evarts was then in his prime, and was called in to make the speech. He spoke for forty-five minutes, and his speech, it was said, was “a string of pearls.” Mr. Blaine stood just behind him, and though greatly delighted with the beauty and brilliancy of the address, remained a firm Lincoln man to the end.

He had no vote then, but he had a voice and a pen. From that time he was a great admirer and friend of Mr. Evarts. This convention greatly enlarged Mr. Blaine’s knowledge of men and acquaintance with them.

The party in the four years since Frémont and Dayton had been nominated at Philadelphia, under the goading provocations of Buchanan’s administration, the frequent exhibition of the horns and hoofs of Slavery, and the unwearied agitation in congress, and in every state, county, and town of the North, the East, and the West, had made a sturdy, constant, determined growth, a development of back-bone, and a kindling of nerve that imparted courage and sent joy to the heart.

It brought into the life of Mr. Blaine, more than ever, the life and grandeur, the power and greatness of the party to which he had wedded his destiny, giving his hand and his heart. He was in complete sympathy with every principle and every measure. No man living more fully, and clearly, and strongly, represents the ideas and purposes of the men then at the front,--the leading men to whom was entrusted the guidance and responsibility, for he himself was then at the front,--than does he.

He is, and has been, right through, the defender and conservator of all that was dear, and precious, and grand, then. Few men did more to help elect Mr. Lincoln, or to make his administration a power in the North. He was under fire constantly, but then he was firing constantly himself, and doing execution that told every hour for the nation’s good.

The North was surely aroused as never before, on fire with a great and mighty excitement that rolled in waves and billows from ocean to lake, and lake to gulf. There was no general on the side of Slavery that could command all the forces. It had come to be in fact a house divided against itself. Their convention at Charleston was broken up, and Mr. Douglas nominated at Baltimore, and two other candidates, Breckenridge and Bell, elsewhere. The serpent seemed stinging itself to death. But in the great party of the North there is a solid front, no waver along the entire line. They simply fight their great political battle after the true American style of the Fathers, in a most just and righteous manner, and for a cause most just and righteous.

Mr. Blaine was on the stump, as he had been the year before, making speeches that the people loved to hear. The campaign usually closed in Maine in September, when the state officers were elected, and as the convention in Chicago was held in May, they had but three months to do the work that other states did in five months. Owing to the illness of his old friend and business partner, he edited the _Kennebec Journal_ for five or six months during the summer and autumn of 1860, so that he was back upon his old ground during the great campaign, sitting at the same desk.

The people loved him, and he loved them. “Send us Blaine,” would come from all over the state. “We must have him, we will have him.” And he would go. It seemed as if he would go farther, do more, and get back quicker than any other man, and seemingly remember everybody.

Ex-Gov. Anson P. Morrill, his old political friend and neighbor says, “I would go out and address perhaps an acre of people, and be introduced to a lot of them, and like enough, in six months or a year, along would come a man and say, ‘How are you? Don’t you know me?’ and I would say ‘No,’ and then the man would turn and go off; but Blaine would know him as soon as he saw him coming, and say, ‘Hello,’ and call him by name right off.

“There,” he said, and he laid his gold-bowed spectacles on the table, and continued, “a little better than a year ago he was in here, and we sat at this table, and the spectacles laid there, and he took them up and said, as he looked at them closely, ‘If those are not the very same gold-bowed spectacles you bought in Philadelphia in 1856.’

“‘Why, how do you know?’ I asked in surprise.

“‘Why I was with you, and you bought them at such a place on such a street.’

“And that,” said the governor, “was twenty-six years before. Now did you ever hear of anything like that? I didn’t. Why, I’d even forgotten that he was there. I tell you that beat me; and I asked him ‘what made you think of it now?’

“‘O, I don’t know,’ said Mr. Blaine, ‘I just happened to see them lying there, and thought of it.’

“Well, it must be a good thing for you to remember things that way.”

“And he simply replied, without any boasting, or in a way to make his honored friend feel that he felt his superior faculty in the least,--

“‘O, yes, it is, at times.’”

Gov. A. P. Morrill is a fine sample of a real down-east Yankee, of the old style; a man of sterling worth and integrity, and of the hardest of common sense, and takes a special pride in Mr. Blaine, as he was at one time of great assistance to him in a political way.

“The first time I saw Blaine,” he said, “was the night before my inauguration; he called at my hotel and wanted a copy of my address. He was simply a young man then, very pleasant in his manner. But how he has grown. Yes, that is the secret of it; he has been a growing man ever since, and so he has come right up and gone right along.”

His own re-election to the legislature is a minor matter in the campaign of ’60, in comparison with the election of Mr. Lincoln president. As this state votes earlier than many of the others, the effort is to roll up a large majority, and have great gains, so as to carry moral power with it, and thus encourage other states who are standing with them in the contest.

It is interesting to note the position of parties or presidential candidates at this time. Mr. Lincoln would prohibit by law the extension of slavery. This was exactly the position of the candidate with him for vice-president, the Hon. Hannibal Hamlin, a strong friend of Mr. Blaine.

Mr. Hamlin had originally been a Democrat of the Andrew Jackson type, but when the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited the extension of slavery, was repealed, he entered the Republican party at its formation, and as candidate for governor in Maine in 1856, was a powerful factor in breaking down the Democratic party.

Mr. Breckenridge would extend slavery by law, and was of course the slave-holders candidate. Douglas, the candidate of the Northern Democrats, would not interfere; simply do nothing to procure for slavery other portions of the fair domain of Liberty to despoil. This, of course made him unpopular in the South, where the demand was for more states to conquer for our “peculiar institution.” The cry of the Douglas Democrats,--and they counted their wide-awakes by the thousand, who marched with torch and drum,--“The Constitution as it is, and the Union as it was.” The Bell and Everett faction were simply for saving the Union without telling how.

What a field these four great armies, each with its chosen leader, occupied, and each conducting a hot, fierce campaign, determined to win, and determined to believe they would win. Slavery was the great disturbing element. It was all a question of how to deal with this monster.

Mr. Lincoln was elected, and Blaine was again on the winning side.

But Mr. Blaine had another great interest in the political campaign of this year. A Mr. Morse, of Bath, had been in congress from another part of the third Maine district, in which Augusta is located, and it was thought time for a change, and Gov. A. P. Morrill wanted Blaine to run, but Morse was a strong man and Blaine was young, and a new man comparatively, and though he was speaker of the House of Representatives, he thought it not prudent at that time to subject himself to such a test. “Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.”

Mr. Blaine was in a good position, and growing rapidly, and so he urged the strong and sagacious governor to try it himself, and Blaine went into the campaign and helped achieve the victory,--for victory it was by seven thousand majority.

Mr. Blaine, it would seem, who possessed an instinct for journalism so wonderful and fine, possessed one equally well-developed for politics. He well-knew that his rapid promotion would awaken jealousies, prejudice, and envy, and also that he needed and must have time to grow. There was one at least in the state legislature who had been in congress, and he did not wish to “advance backward,” as the colored servant of the rebel General Buckner called it.

Mr. Blaine is a man of caution and carefulness, because he is a man of great thoughtfulness and deliberation. When he has thought a subject through, and it is settled, and he feels just right, he is ready, and his courage rises, and so he moves with great power and determination. If the action seems rash to any, it is because they are not informed upon a subject upon which he is conversant.

Mr. Blaine had seen his man nominated at Chicago, and triumphantly elected over a stupendous, well-organized, and desperate opposition. He himself is returned to the legislature. His friend, Ex-Gov. A. P. Morrill, is secured for congress, and Israel Washburn, Jr., a grand Republican, elected governor over the man who felt and learned to fear the power of Mr. Blaine in the legislature the year before, Ephraim K. Smart. But, notwithstanding all of these triumphs, and the prospective cleansing and regeneration of the country, the present condition is most appalling.

Secession is the chief topic throughout the South, and in every debating society in every college, and in every lyceum in every town or city, the question is being discussed with the greatest warmth, “Can a Southern state secede?” or “Can the government coerce a state?” The old doctrine of state rights and state sovereignty is the form of the topic in other quarters.

With many the question was clear on the asking of it; with others the constitutional powers of self-preservation, of self-existence, and self-perpetuation had to be presented with the arguments and the acumen of a statesman. Perhaps Mr. Blaine, as an editor, never dealt with a question in a more masterly way. It was the question of the hour continually forcing itself upon attention.

It was the constant assertion of the Southern press that they would. They believed all sorts of unkind things about the great and kindly Lincoln. The fact is, the South had never before been defeated in a contest for the presidency when slavery was involved in the issue. This was their pet and idol. They would guard it at all hazards. Fanaticism they regarded as the animus of the anti-slavery movement, and an abolitionist to them was a malefactor.

A grave responsibility now was on those who “broke down the adjustments of 1820, and of 1850.” But the year was closing, and the glare of a contest more fierce than that through which we had passed, was on the nation. It seemed inevitable. They had grown so narrow, intolerant, and cruel, that the light of present political truth did not penetrate them.

“Southern statesmen of the highest rank,” said Mr. Blaine, “looked upon British emancipation in the West Indies as designedly hostile to the prosperity and safety of their own section, and as a plot for the ultimate destruction of the Republic.” They were suspicious, and filled with alarm; and it was needless, as the action of Mr. Lincoln in proclaiming emancipation was only when, in the second year of the war, it was necessary.

The era of peace seems breaking with the hand of cruel war. It was night to them, but a glorious day to us.

We close this chapter with this fresh, new poem of the time, by Whittier.

At a time when it was rumored that armed men were drilling by the thousands in Virginia and Maryland, for the invasion of Washington before February, so as to prevent the announcement in congress of Lincoln’s election, in the same issue of the _Kennebec Journal_, was a poem by John G. Whittier, closing with these lines:--

“The crisis presses on us; face to face with us it stands, With solemn lips of question, like the sphinx in Egypt’s sands! This day we fashion Destiny, our web of Fate we spin; This day for all hereafter choose we holiness or sin; Even now from starry Gerizim, or Ebal’s cloudy crown, We call the dews of blessing, or the bolts of cursing down.

“By all for which the Martyrs bore their agony and shame; By all the warning words of truth with which the prophets came; By the future which awaits us; by all the hopes which cast Their faint and trembling beams across the blackness of the Past; And in the awful name of Him who for earth’s freedom died; Oh, ye people! Oh, my brothers! let us choose the righteous side.

“So shall the Northern pioneer go joyful on his way, To wed Penobscot’s waters to San Francisco’s bay; To make the rugged places smooth, and sow the vales of grain, And bear, with Liberty and Law, the Bible in his train; The mighty West shall bless the earth, and sea shall answer sea, A mountain unto mountain calls, ‘_Praise God, for we are free!_’”

VIII.

SPEAKER OF THE MAINE LEGISLATURE.

No one read the signs of the times with a clearer understanding of their significance, all through the winter and spring of 1861, than the Speaker of the House of Representatives in the Legislature of Maine. The great duties that devolved upon him filled his mind with every important matter, but the overshadowing interests were all national,--the present and future of the country. They had become accustomed to threats and fears; this had grown to be the normal condition of the public mind. But the short, sharp question “What is the latest from Charleston, Richmond” and other points of prominence and activity in the South, showed how squarely up to the times people of the North were living; how loyal and zealous for the nation the masses were.

It was a higher compliment, in times so great in their demands for the profoundest deliberations of the best minds, to be put at the head, as the leader in positions of greatest power in the House.

Known and acknowledged worth could have been the only argument for an action so personal to the honor of the state and its power in the Union, and helpfulness to the nation in an emergency imminent with danger.

This man of one and thirty is lifted over the heads of old and respected citizens of soundest integrity. Is it an experiment, or do they know their man? The state has called to the helm a man who has been ten years in the congress of the United States; a man of largest experience and profoundest wisdom, nearly twice the age of the young speaker. But no mistake is made. He read in his youth books that Governor Morrill is reading to-day at the age of eighty-one; he has been a college-graduate for nearly fourteen years, and has won his present distinction upon the floor of the house where he now presides.

His duties are manifold. He must preside over the deliberations of the House, be a good parliamentarian, prompt and accurate in his decisions, as well as fair and impartial. He is dealing with freemen and citizens, and representatives of the people of the entire state. He must know every member, not by name, and face, and location in the House, but in characteristics and accomplishments, all the great interests of the state, as a whole, of its different sections, and in its Federal relations, so that he may wisely appoint the twenty-one important committees. He must know the business, education, experience, residence, and political principles of every member, so that he may know just who to appoint on banks and banking, on agriculture, military, pensions, manufactures, library, the judiciary, the militia, education, etc.

There are one hundred and forty-four members, twenty-three of whom are Democrats, and he must use them all. He must select two chairmen for each committee, and choose six or eight others to act with them, putting some of the more valuable men on several committees,--all must be treated with honor and fairness.

What did those one hundred and forty-four men see in James G. Blaine, away back in the stormy, perilous times of 1861, that led them to select him for that high and honorable position? He had not been a citizen of Maine six years, and had been in political life, officially, only two years. It was the man they saw, strong and splendid, just the man for the hour. They felt, instinctively, they could trust him; they knew him to be loyal and true, and capable, by the testimony of all their senses. He was quick and keen, and life itself in all of energy and endeavor; a born leader of men.

He had no wealthy and influential friend by his side, no one to say I have known him from childhood, and can recommend him as worthy of all honor, and all praise. He brought with him simply the name his mother gave him, with no prefix and no affix. He lived in no mansion, rode in no carriage, was attended by no courtiers in livery; he had no returns to make, no promises to give. The whole of him sat before them,--a refined and courteous gentleman, an elegant gentleman.

They could not mistake the powerful combination. They saw and felt its worth, and so the great party which had just come into power in the nation by electing its first president, honors itself by honoring him.

His short-cut words of acceptance are uttered. The senate and the new governor, Israel Washburn, Jr., are informed that the House is organized, and they proceed to business with energy and despatch.

But the great war for the Union is coming. The peace convention called by Virginia amounts to nothing. Mr. Crittenden’s resolutions are futile, though most conventions adopt them in Philadelphia and elsewhere. Southern states are actually seceding.

Mr. Lincoln is choosing and announcing his cabinet, with Seward as his Premier, but treason is rampant in the South, holding high carnival in state capitals, and even in the halls of congress. Mr. Lincoln is on his way to Washington. He reaches Philadelphia on Feb. 22d, at seven o’clock; is escorted to Independence Hall, where Theodore Cuyler, in whose office Mr. Blaine read law, receives him with an address of welcome, to which Mr. Lincoln replied, and “raised the national flag which had been adjusted in true man-of-war style, amid the cheers of a great multitude, and the cheers were repeated until men were hoarse.”

While these patriotic cheers were resounding through the old halls of Independence, the traitorous secretaries of the navy and of war were sending vessels to southern ports and forts. Thirty-three officers, among whom was Albert Sidney Johnson, abandon their regiments of the regular army in Texas, and join the rebels. But Lincoln is inaugurated, and the most pacific measures employed, but all of no avail; determined, desperate men are ruling the destiny of the South.

The South was in no condition of want at this time, but rather in a condition of prosperity, and its proud, haughty spirit seemed rather born of luxury and extravagance.

Mr. Blaine has shown that she had increased in ten years before the war three thousand millions of dollars, and this not from over-valuation of slaves, but from cultivation of the land by new and valuable appliances of agriculture. One state alone,--Georgia,--had increased in wealth three hundred millions of dollars. But South Carolina had commenced in October,--before Mr. Lincoln’s election even,--her correspondence upon the subject of secession. No wonder she was ready in the April following to inaugurate the war of the Rebellion.