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.
Mr. Blaine’s life could not be put into the nation, nor the life of any
strong, true man, at a time when it would be more valuable than now.
Men were men in earnest. They rose to par, and some, by a mathematical
process which redoubles energy and intensifies life, are cubed or
squared or lifted to the hundredth power; a premium is on them; they
are invaluable.
The governor issues his call for ten thousand men from Maine. Will Mr.
Blaine go? Mr. Garfield is in the state senate of Ohio, and president
of a college, but he drops all at once, and is soon at the front with
his regiment. His stay is short, however. Elected to congress, by
advice of President Lincoln he lays aside the dress of a major-general
on Saturday to enter the national House of Representatives, a
congressman in citizen’s dress, the following Monday.
What will Mr. Blaine do? He is speaker of the House, and that gives
his name a power in the state. He is wielding a powerful pen as editor
of the leading daily paper at Portland. Few men in the state have more
influence; some must stay; the state must be aroused and electrified;
an immense work of organization is to be done. It is a less
conspicuous, more quiet home-work, but it is of the utmost importance.
He stays, while many, like Garfield, go to return to do the statesman’s
work and make available the resources of the nation, and strengthen the
hands of the brave men at the front.
This was a work of vast importance in the conduct of the war. It was
power that was felt by both governor and president, by army and navy.
Mr. Blaine was on terms of intimacy with the governor of his state,--a
firm supporter of a faithful man. Very soon he was instrumental in
raising two regiments, and rallied thousands more to the standard of
the Union.
He became at this time chairman of the Republican State Central
Committee, and continued in this position for twenty years. He planned
every campaign, selected the speakers, fixed dates and places for
them, and so arranged all details, that no man of his ever disappointed
an audience. He knows the time of departure and arrival of every train.
He must do his part to see that the legislature continues Republican,
that the governor and his council are Republican, that congressmen and
senators of the United States are Republican, and that the war-power of
the state is not broken.
The great question for him to aid largely in settling is the worth of
the state of Maine to the nation. She must have governors that are in
full sympathy with the president; congressmen and senators that uphold
his administration.
In North’s History of Augusta, a valuable work of nearly a thousand
pages, it is recorded of Mr. Blaine that “probably no man in Maine
exerted a more powerful influence on the patriotic course pursued
than he. Ever active, always watchful, never faltering, he inspired
confidence in the cause of the Union in its darkest days.”
At the close of the first session of the legislature over which Mr.
Blaine presided, the leading Democrat in the House, a Mr. Gould, from
Thomaston, arose after remarks of great pathos and tenderness, and
presented this resolution:--
“_Resolved_, That the thanks of this House are presented to the
Hon. James G. Blaine, for the marked ability, the urbanity and
impartiality with which he has presided over its deliberations, and
for the uniform amenity of his personal intercourse with its members.”
He bore testimony to the “marvelous despatch with which the formal
parts of the business had been done, and so the session greatly
shortened.”