PRESIDENT CLEVELAND'S JUDGES
I earnestly supported William B. Hornblower against the opposition
of Senator Hill, when he was nominated by Mr. Cleveland for
Judge of the Supreme Court of the United States. I was then
on the Judiciary Committee. I made very careful inquiry,
and had reason to believe that the best lawyers in New York
thought highly of him. Judge Gray told me that Mr. Hornblower
had argued a case in the Court not long before, and that as
the Judges walked out Judge Blatchford said to him: "I hope
you have as good a man in your Circuit to succeed you, when
the time comes, as we have in ours in Mr. Hornblower to succeed
me."
I did not, however, support Mr. Wheeler H. Peckham. The newspapers
circulated the story extensively that--to use the phrase of
one of them--I "led the opposition." That was not true. I
expected to vote for Mr. Peckham until just before the vote
was taken. I had communicated my expectation to support him
to Senator Vilas, who had charge of the case. I thought before
the vote was taken it was my duty to tell him I had changed
my mind. So I went round to his seat and told him. Nobody
else knew my purpose till I voted.
I had no political sympathy with Senator Hill, still less
with the claim often imputed to the Senate by writers of
newspapers, but of which I have never seen the slightest
evidence, that Senators have the right to dictate such appointments.
But I thought Mr. Cleveland ought not to have made such an
appointment without consulting Mr. Hill, who was a lawyer
of eminence and knew the sentiment of the majority of the
Democratic Party. Mr. Cleveland had nominated in succession
two persons to an office which ought to be absolutely non-
partisan, who belonged to a very small company of men devoted
to his personal fortunes, who had bitterly attacked Mr. Hill.
I should not, however, have deemed this objection sufficient
to justify a vote against Mr. Peckham, but for the fact that
I became satisfied he was a man of strong prejudices, with
little of the judicial temper or quality about him, and quite
likely to break down under the strain of heavy responsibility.
I urged Mr. Vilas to ask President Cleveland to send in the
name of Mr. Hornblower again, having some hope that the Senate
would reconsider its action in his case. But President Cleveland
solved the difficulty quite skilfully by sending in the name
of Senator White of Louisiana, a most admirable gentleman
and Judge, and afterward, when there came another vacancy,
that of Rufus W. Peckham of New York, both of whom were confirmed,
I believe, without an objection.
I just referred to Senator William F. Vilas, of Wisconsin.
I should like to put on record my great esteem for his character
as a man, and the excellence of his service as a Senator.
He was on the Judiciary Committee while I was Chairman, and
also for a time when his party had the majority. He was industrious,
wise, conservative, courteous, and fair, a most admirable
lawyer, full of public spirit, well acquainted with the mechanism
of the Government, and doing always much more than his full
share of the work of the Committee and of the Senate. I hope
the country may have again the benefit of his great ability
in some department of the public service.
Chief Justice Fuller said with singular felicity:
"Mr. Justice Lamar always underrated himself. This tendency
plainly sprung from a vivid imagination. With him the splendid
passions attendant upon youth never faded into the light of
common day, but they kept before him as an ideal, the impossibility
of whose realization, as borne in upon him from time to time,
opposed him with a sense of failure. Yet the conscientiousness
of his work was not lessened, nor was the acuteness of his
intellect obscured by these natural causes of his discontent;
nor did a certain Oriental dreaminess of the temperament ever
allure him to abandon the effort to accomplish something that
would last after his lips were dumb."
Matthew Arnold says in one of his essays that Americans lack
distinction. I have a huge liking for Matthew Arnold. He
had a wonderful intellectual vision. I do not mean to say
that his three lectures on translating Homer are the greatest
literary work of our time. But I think, on the whole, that
I should rather have the pair of intellectual eyes which can
see Homer as he saw him, than any other mental quality I can
think of. But Mr. Arnold has never seemed to me to be fortunate
in his judgment about Americans. He allows this quality of
distinction to Grant, but denies it, for all the world, to
Abraham Lincoln. The trouble with Mr. Arnold is that he
never travelled in the United States, when on this side the
Atlantic. He spent his time with a few friends who had little
love for things American. He visited a great city or two,
but never made himself acquainted with the American people.
He never knew the sources of our power, or the spirit of our
people.
Yet there is a good deal of truth in what he says of the
Americans of our time. It is still more true of the Englishmen
of our time. The newspaper, and the telegraph, and the telephone,
and the constant dissemination of news, the public library
and the common school and college mix up all together and
tend to make us, with some rare and delightful exceptions,
eminently commonplace. Certainly the men who are sent to
Congress do not escape this wearying quality. I know men
who have been in public office for more than a generation,
who have had enormous power and responsibility, to whom the
country is indebted for safety and happiness, who never said
a foolish thing, and rarely ever when they had the chance
failed to do a wise one, who are utterly commonplace. You
could not read the story of their public career without going
to sleep. They never said anything worth quoting, and never
did anything that any other equally good and sensible man
would not have done in their place. I have a huge respect
for them. I can never myself attain to their excellence.
Yet I would as lief spend my life as an omnibus horse as live
theirs.
But we have occasionally some delightful exceptions. It
so happens that some of the best, most attractive men I have
known, were from the South. They are men who stood by the
Southern people through thick and thin during the Rebellion,
and in resisting every attempt on the part of the victorious
Northern majority to raise the colored people to a political
equality. They have all of them, I believe, been Free Traders.
In general they have opposed the construction of the Constitution
which has prevailed in New England and throughout the North,
and in which I have myself always believed.
I have never had much personal intimacy with any of them.
I have had some vigorous conflicts with one or two of them.
Yet I have had from each before our association ended, assurances
of their warm personal regard. One of them, perhaps, on the
whole, the most conspicuous, is Lucius Q. C. Lamar. His
very name, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus, indicates that his
father must have looked for his example for his son to follow
far away from the American life about him.
Lamar was one of the most delightful of men. His English
style, both in conversation and in public speaking, was fresh
and original, well adapted to keep his hearers expectant and
alert, and to express the delicate and subtle shades of meaning
that were required for the service of his delicate and subtle
thought.
He had taken the part of the South with great zeal. He told
me shortly before he left the Senate that he thought it was
a great misfortune for the world that the Southern cause had
been lost. He stood by his people, as he liked to call them,
in their defeat and in their calamity without flinching or
reservation. While he would, I am sure, have done nothing
himself not scrupulously honorable, and while there was nothing
in his nature of cruelty, still less of brutality, yet he
did not stop to inquire into matters of right and wrong when
a Southerner had got into trouble, by reason of anything a
white Democrat had done in conflict with the National authority.
Yet Mr. Lamar desired most sincerely the reconciliation of
the sections, that the age-long strife should come to an end
and be forgotten, and that the whole South should share the
prosperity and wealth and refinement and contentment, which
submission to the new order of things would bring.
He was a far-sighted man. He was not misled by temporary
excitement or by deference to the majority of his political
friends who were less far-sighted than he, into any mistakes.
When there was an attempt to break faith in regard to what
was called the Wheeler compromise in the Democratic House,
Mr. Lamar interposed and prevented it. Just after the count
under the Electoral Commission had been completed, there was
a very dangerous movement to delay action on the returns from
Vermont, which would have prevented the completion of the
work before the 4th of March. Mr. Lamar put forth all his
powerful influence among his Democratic associates on the
floor of the House, and saved the peace of the country. He
knew very well that the cause of the South, as he would have
called it, and the cause of the Democratic Party itself, would
not be promoted by a new civil convulsion, still less by any
breach of faith.
He voted against the free coinage of silver in spite of the
fact that the people of his State earnestly favored it, and
against the express instructions of its Legislature. In 1874,
at a time when the passions of the Civil War seemed to blaze
higher, and the angry conflict between the sections seemed
to blaze higher even than during the war itself, he astonished
and shocked the people of the South by pronouncing a tender
and affectionate eulogy on Charles Sumner. He testified to
Sumner's high moral qualities, to his intense love of liberty,
to his magnanimity, and to his incapacity for a personal
animosity, and regretted that he had restrained the impulse
which had been strong on him to go to Mr. Sumner and offer
him his hand and his heart with it. It would have been almost
impossible for any other man who had done either of these
things to go back to Mississippi and live. But it never shook
for a moment the love for Lamar of a people who knew so well
his love for them.
Afterward Mr. Lamar was made an Associate Justice of the Supreme
Court of the United States. I voted against him--in which
I made a mistake--not because I doubted his eminent integrity
and ability, but because I thought that he had little professional
experience and no judicial experience, and that his health--
he was then beginning to show signs of the disease which
ended his life shortly after--was not sufficient for undertaking
the great study and the labor which the new office would require.
He was not long on the Bench, and was not greatly distinguished
as a Judge. But he wrote a few opinions which showed his
great intellectual capacity for dealing with the most complicated
legal questions, especially such are apt to arise in patent
cases.
He was a delightful man in ordinary conversation. He had
an infinite wit and great sense of humor. He used to tell
delightful stories of queer characters and events that had
come within his own observation. My relations to him for a
good while were entirely antagonistic. We had some very
sharp controversies. He would never tolerate any expression,
in his presence, of disrespect to Jefferson Davis. He would
always meet the statement that Mr. Davis was a traitor with
a vigorous denial. When I made a motion excepting Jefferson
Davis from the benefit of the bill to pension the soldiers
of the Mexican War, Mr. Lamar compared him to Prometheus,
and me to the vulture preying upon his liver. He was the
last person from whom I should have expected an expression
of compliment, or even of kindness in those days. Yet when
the question of my reelection was pending in 1883 and the
correspondent of a newspaper which was among my most unrelenting
and unscrupulous opponents thought he might get some material
which would help him in his attacks, called upon Mr. Lamar
in the Democratic cloak room, and asked him what he thought
of me, Mr. Lamar replied in language which seems almost ridiculous
to quote, and which was inspired only by his indignation
at the attempt to use him for such a purpose: "Sir, Massachusetts
has never been more powerfully represented in the Senate,
not even in the time of Daniel Webster, than by Mr. Hoar."
It was with feeling of great pleasure that in 1886 I saw
Harvard confer her highest honor on this delightful Mississippian.
He was, in his time, I think, the ablest representative,
certainly among the ablest, of the opinions opposed to mine.
He had a delightful and original literary quality which, if
the lines of his life had been cast amid other scenes than
the tempest of a great Revolution and Civil War, might have
made him a dreamer like Montaigne; and a chivalrous quality
that might have made him a companion of Athos and D'Artagnan.
His eulogy on Calhoun, with whom in general he sympathized,
was a masterpiece of eloquence, but his eulogy on Charles
Sumner, which probably no other man in the South could have
uttered without political death, was greater still. It was
a good omen for the country. At the moment he uttered it,
I suppose Charles Sumner was hated throughout the South with
an intensity which in this day of reconciliation it is almost
impossible to conceive. Yet Mr. Lamar in his place in the
House of Representatives dared to utter these sentences:
"Charles Sumner was born with an instinctive love of freedom,
and was educated from his earliest infancy to the belief that
freedom is the natural and indefeasible right of every intelligent
being having the outward form of man. In him, in fact, this
creed seems to have been something more than a doctrine imbibed
from teachers, or a result of education. To him it was a
grand intuitive truth, inscribed in blazing letters upon the
tablet of his inner consciousness, to deny which would have
been for him to deny that he himself existed. And along with
the all-controlling love of freedom he possessed a moral sensibility
keenly intense and vivid, a conscientiousness which would
never permit him to swerve by the breadth of a hair from what
he pictured to himself as the path of duty. Thus were combined
in him the characteristics which have in all ages given to
religion her martyrs, and to patriotism her self-sacrificing
heroes."
After speaking of the kindness of Mr. Sumner to the South,
and his spirit of magnanimity, he added:
"It was my misfortune, perhaps my fault, personally never
to have known this eminent philanthropist and statesman.
The impulse was often strong upon me to go to him and offer
him my hand, and my heart with it, and to express to him my
thanks for his kind and considerate course toward the people
with whom I am identified. If I did not yield to that impulse,
it was because the thought occurred that other days were coming
in which such a demonstration might be more opportune and less
liable to misconstruction. Suddenly and without premonition,
a day as come at last to which, for such a purpose, there
is no to-morrow. My regret is therefore intensified by the
thought that I failed to speak of him out of the fulness of
my heart while there was yet time."
That Mr. Lamar well understood what was to be the effect
of this wonderful speech upon the whole country is shown
by his letter to his wife the next day, in which he says: "I
never in all my life opened my lips with a purpose more single
to the interests of our Southern people than when I made this
speech."
I said of this speech in an article in the _North American
Review:_
"The eloquent words of Mr. Lamar so touched the hearts of
the people of the North that they may fairly be said to have
been of themselves an important influence in mitigating the
estrangements of a generation."
The following letter explains my absence from the Senate
when Judge Lamar's death was announced:
WASHINGTON, D. C., January 29, 1893
_My Dear Madam:_
I was kept in bed, under the orders of my physician, the
day the death of your husband was announced to the Senate.
I regret exceedingly that I could not be in my place to express
my sense of the great public loss and my warm personal admiration
for his great qualities of intellect and of heart. I served
with him in the House of Representatives for more than four
years, and in the Senate for more than eight years. It was
a stormy and exciting time. We differed widely on very grave
questions, and this difference was more than once very sharply
manifested in public; but the more I knew him, the more satisfied
I became of the sincerity of his patriotism, of his profound
and far-sighted wisdom, of the deep fountain of tenderness
in his affectionate and simple heart, and of his brave and
chivalrous quality of soul. I was more than once indebted
to him for very great kindness indeed, under circumstances
when I do not think he supposed it would ever come to my knowledge.
Some of his judgments on the Supreme Bench are characterized
by marvellous beauty and felicity of style. He maintained
his place on that great tribunal to the satisfaction of his
friends and that admiration of his countrymen, in spite of
failing health and of the fact that the best years of his life
had been given to other studies than that of the law.
It is a good omen for our country that the friends and disciples
of Charles Sumner unite with the people of Mississippi in
their reverence for this noble and manly character.
I am faithfully yours,
GEORGE F. HOAR
Mrs. Lamar.