The 4th of March comes, and with it the fortieth congress, with
Schuyler Colfax, of Indiana, still in the speaker’s chair; Rutherford
B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, and James G. Blaine are in the House.
They were on their way up to the nation’s honors, and had seats near
each other. The House, rather than the senate, is the place to look
for presidents. There seems to be no special reason for it, unless it
is that senatorial dignity and greatness are less approachable, not
so easily grasped by the public mind, and farther away from the great
masses of the people.
Mr. Blaine comes to the fortieth congress with the same soldierly
spirit of fearlessness, the same scholarly spirit of intelligence,
the same genial spirit of friendship, that have borne him through
two former terms in Washington. He is now recognized as an adept in
parliamentary law, and is put on with the speaker, Mr. Washburne,
and others to revise the rules of the House, and is found reporting
rule after rule for adoption. He is fairly in training now for the
speakership, but before that can come he must be re-elected, and he
has already been elected twice by way of compliment, as it is termed
in Maine. But he is no dreamer, and so devotes himself to business,
with enough to do, and no idle hours. He is quite methodical, and is
heard frequently insisting upon the regular order of business, and
that business on the speaker’s stand be attended to, and also that
members attend the evening sessions for business. It worries him to
see business of importance drag, and bills accumulate, and so the
House get behind in its work. He uses every parliamentary method to
prevent delays, and seldom is his way hedged up effectually when he
has determined upon his course, and feels that fidelity to his trust
requires expedition. He usually gets through without much opposition,
for good nature in him begets it in others, and so when all are thus
made willing, as by an opposite disposition they are made unwilling,
it is an easy matter. But when the measure is at all political, as are
some of the great measures which crystalize the war-victories into
constitutional enactments, he is put upon his resources for ways and
means, and is found usually to be as fertile as the occasion demands.
He is down in the Record as an editor, and this places him in relations
of sympathy and friendship with journalists at the capital. He is
known, and knows them, and shows by the favor of various acts of
kindness that his editorial heart is still beating warm for the drivers
of the quill. There are but three other editors besides himself in the
House,--James Brooks, of New York city; Lawrence J. Getz, of Reading;
and Adam J. Glassbremer, of York, Penn.
Gen. John A. Logan sits near enough to Mr. Blaine for them to get well
acquainted, and they are soon found speaking upon the same question of
appropriating seventy-five thousand dollars to purchase seed-corn for
the South.
It is certainly a matter of peculiar interest to look in upon these men
and see them at their work, all unconscious of the great future that
lies before them; some of the time doing what seems like little things,
as when Mr. Blaine moves “to exempt wrapping paper made from wood from
internal tax,” and Mr. Garfield rises and says, “I ask the gentleman
from Maine to allow an amendment by inserting the word ‘corn-stalks,’
which,” he added, “was a very important manufacture.” But all of these
little things were part of the great internal-revenue tax bill, which
was to bring millions into the treasury of the nation, and so support
the government, and pay the war-debt.
The impeachment resolutions were having a history in the House, and
a reference to them brings out one fact very conclusively,--that Mr.
Blaine was not hot-headed in the sense of rashness. Many were at this
time,--about a year before the impeachment trial,--filled with alarm,
excited, aroused, and bent upon the work at once; but Mr. Blaine was
cool, attentive, collected, and studious of the great subject, and he
saw that as yet the country did not demand it, and so he moved, the
senate concurring, “That when the House adjourn, on Tuesday next, it be
to meet on Monday, November 11, at twelve o’clock, M.” Some six months
would intervene, and many objected. General Butler was there, and
offered a vigorous protest. He was for war, vigorous, uncompromising,
and merciless. But Mr. Blaine replied, “I would ask the gentleman from
Massachusetts, through what convention of the people, through what
organism of public opinion, through what channel of general information
anywhere throughout the length and breadth of the land, this demand is
made upon congress? [It was then March 23, 1867.] Sir, I maintain that
out of the seventeen or eighteen hundred newspapers that represent the
loyal Union party of this country,--and these are the best indices
of public opinion which a party has,--the gentleman cannot find
twenty-five which regard the impeachment movement as one seriously to
be undertaken on the part of congress at this time.”
It is exceedingly difficult for us now to go back to a year before the
extraordinary spectacle of an impeachment trial of the President of the
United States, and recall all the circumstances and the state of the
country at that particular time. The best minds in the House seemed to
be with Mr. Blaine in his feeling, that there was no immediate demand
or warrant for the impeachment of the president. His acts were public,
and known to the people, and from them to their representatives in
congress must come the demand. Moreover, the resolutions of impeachment
had been in the hands of a special committee for some months, but they,
agreeing with Mr. Blaine, saw no cause for impetuous action.
It was evidently designed to be a matter of wholesome restraint, that
this preliminary step had been taken. A great many speeches were made
under the resolution to adjourn, upon the impeachment question.
Mr. Garfield said, “The gentleman said I desired congress to remain in
session for two reasons; first, to compel the appointment of certain
persons to office [there were several hundred postmasters to be
appointed and confirmed], and second, for the purpose of impeaching the
president. I call his attention to the fact, that I made no allusion
whatever to the question of impeachment; I have nothing to say in that
direction until I hear from the committee. I expressed it as my opinion
merely that the President of the United States would be very glad to
have the fortieth congress adjourn, and this I understood from the
friends of the president.”
Mr. Boutwell, taking part, said, “The great and substantial reason is
that whether this House shall proceed to impeach the president or not,
the majority of the people of this country, South and North, black and
white, loyal and rebel, have pretty generally lost confidence in him.”
“That is true,” said Mr. Blaine.
“Whether this loss of confidence be based upon facts of his character,
or measures of his public policy, or upon suspicion or prejudice
merely, I do not propose now to inquire. The great fact is, the people
of the country everywhere have lost confidence in the wisdom, if not in
the honesty, of his administration.”
Mr. Blaine. “The gentleman will allow me to inquire whether he thinks
that our staying here will restore confidence in the president.”
“No, Sir.”
Mr. Blaine held the floor under a certain rule of congress, and gave
his time to others as they desired to discuss the question, but at
the end was firm as a rock. His mind was unchanged, and from this
and other instances the truth appears, that as he used only facts,
figures, testimony, experience, written or related evidence of a
personal character, and that he could not be gainsaid, and was never
metaphysical, _a priori_, or theorizing in his discussions, so nothing
but facts or figures, something tangible and real, influenced him. The
sailing of an eagle might be very beautiful, and elicit feelings of
admiration and sublimity, but it did not influence his judgment.
Only the kind of arguments he used to influence other minds would
influence his,--and when his mind was made up, it was from just these
sources of evidence that are so convincing, so incontrovertible, giving
strength to the mind, and putting granite under the feet of the man.
As one has said, “I believed, therefore have I spoken”; so with him,
he believed, and therefore spoke. No surface-current, only the deep
under-current, moved him.
Mr. Blaine has great accuracy in the use of language, and although
off-hand and often under peculiarly distracting circumstances, one
who followed him quite closely through his various utterances, did
not discover a grammatical mistake until near the end of the fortieth
congress, and that was possibly a mistake of the printer, and very
slight in itself, using “to” for “at” in the phrase “strike at the
senate committee clerks more than it does _to_ ours.”
Congress adjourned on the 30th of March until the 21st of November,
unless a quorum was present the 3d of July, and if so a session would
be held. A brief session of two weeks was held, but Mr. Blaine was
not there. He and Elihu B. Washburne and another congressman were in
Europe. It was Mr. Blaine’s first trip. Liverpool was visited, and
commercial interests were studied. Imagination seldom furnishes right
impressions. No one about whom we have heard ever looks as we expected
he was going to. It always gets great men too large on the outside,
and enormous cities either too large or too small, as the case may be.
Liverpool was immense; it has to be so. Almost limitless is England’s
foreign trade. What men they must have been to make their island so
important as to compel the commerce of the world to visit them! It was
wonderful; the ships and cargoes for all of India, for Egypt, for all
of Europe, for Australia, for America, and the Indies, for Mexico,
China and Japan.
It was indeed a study for him whose mind must find the merits of every
subject. It was not simply a matter of landing safely and boarding a
train for London. The war was but two years over. The Alabama was not
forgotten, nor all of England’s mischief. Ships and shipping in all
their construction and competition had been the study of years to him,
and to take in those busy scenes upon the Mersey and the Clyde, was but
the reading of a new book to one familiar with the language.
They reach the great metropolis. Parliament is their objective point.
Few will have more brains than they bring with them, or know more about
their affairs of state; but the study is to be long and careful, and
they are to know more fully the inner life and character of those who
have made laws for half the world. Day after day, week after week,
the great Head Centre in all its ramifications is studied at shortest
possible range.
But Scotland and Ireland must be visited, for they are the home of his
ancestors. He breathes the air, he sees the sky, he presses the sod, he
touches the heather. He is really, truly there. The dream of boyhood
days, when he stood by grandfather’s knee, and heard of the old clans,
the blowing of the horn, and the echoes down the valleys, of the cows
and sheep, and the tinkling of the bells, the clash of arms and the
battles won; and now he is there, thrilled with the memories and the
ancient scenes. The old castles, quaint, and moss-covered, and grand,
and the people with their fresh look and fiery eye, vigilant ever to
the end of time. What valleys and mountains and peoples are there; what
rivers and lakes and loud-sounding sea! Surely nothing short of an
affair of the Stuarts would compel them to quit their strongholds and
their homes, their native heather, and flee to other lands, so far, so
very far away as it was then, back in that olden time.
What events have transpired since that 1720, nearly one hundred and
fifty years before. What events in Europe, England and America. What in
India and the Orient; and yet the man of eighty had sat, a boy of five,
upon his grandsire’s knee who had rounded out his four-score years, and
a boy of ten had walked with him upon the highlands, and so could bring
the messages of that far-off time to present generations.
As Mr. Garfield had “during his only visit to England busied himself
in searching out every trace of his forefathers in parish-registries
and ancient army-rolls,” so his inheritor of the nation’s honors traced
back the stock from which he sprang to mountain, glen, and castle,
which had rung with the name he bore. He too might say, sitting with a
friend in the gallery of the House of Commons, “that when patriots of
English blood had struck sturdy blows for constitutional government and
human liberty, his family had been represented.”
But they continue their journey, and cross the English channel from
Dover to Calais, and soon are in the capital of the French Empire.
Napoleon III is there in his glory. Two years later his traveling
companion, Hon. E. B. Washburne, is to be United States minister at his
court, and not long after a prisoner in Paris during its siege in the
Franco-Prussian war.
Mr. Blaine’s knowledge of French serves him, and enables him to
secure all the general information he desired. He was not among free
institutions now, and felt the keen chill in the very atmosphere. But
in visiting the French Assembly there was a show of liberty, like
an eagle in a cage. It was a noisy, tumultuous scene, with a jargon
indescribable and largely unintelligible. Few things are wilder, except
the ocean in a storm, than the deliberative assembly of the French
nation when measures of special importance are pending. But the great
city, with its multitudes of people, is full of attractions.
The Tuilleries is visited, and the Champs Elysées, the great armies
so soon to reel in the shock of war, and learn a lesson of sobriety
and contented home-life that shall give to the French of the future
a greatness that has in it more of the element of stability and
permanency, and so tone down their mercurial and volatile nature. The
Rhine is visited, and Florence.
Relaxation and rest are great objects of the visit. The malaria of the
Potomac at Washington, which gets into the bones of congressmen, and
senators, and presidents, must be gotten out of him, and he made ready
for greater service and larger conquests.
History is all about him; the nations of Europe are within his
reach; their capitals are visited, and they are studied from life.
Impressions deep, and strong, and lasting are made. Plutarch’s old
method of comparisons and contrasts still serves him, and he gets his
knowledge in classified, compact forms. The people and their condition,
their rulers and the laws, interest him as much as the great, queer
buildings, the splendid palaces, the magnificent cathedrals, the
varied works of art, and the giant mountains, the beautiful villages,
valleys, and lakes, and all that is picturesque in nature. Switzerland
is a charm; Italy a delight, and the whole journey a joy. He returns a
broader, deeper, wiser man, to live a stronger, richer life in a larger
world.
He was in his seat at the beginning of congress in November. Eight
men are there from Tennessee, whose right to seats is challenged. The
impeachment question has gained prominence, and he joins in the search
for evidence. He does not want hearsay, but official documents, and so
he introduces a resolution, calling upon the general commanding the
armies to communicate to the House any and all correspondence addressed
by him to the president upon the removal of Secretary Stanton and
General Sheridan, and General Sickles as well; and also with reference
to the proposed mission of the general of the army to Mexico in 1866.
But his great friend, Senator Fessenden, is now secretary of the
treasury, and this gives the financial question a new interest, and he
comes to the front in a most vigorous manner as vindicator and defender
of the secretary’s financial policy, in one of his great speeches on
the currency.
It is quite early in the session, only five days after congress
convened. His friend, Mr. Washburne, had taken the initiatory step by
moving they go into committee of the whole on the state of the Union.
Mr. Dawes was in the chair, and the question related to the reduction
of the currency. Erroneous and mischievous views had been put forward,
regarding the nature of the public obligation imposed by the debt of
the United States. Various forms of repudiation had been suggested.
Mr. Pendleton, the recent Democratic candidate for vice-president,
and General Butler, of Massachusetts, had assumed the position that
“the principal and the interest of United States bonds, known as the
five-twenties, may be fairly and legally paid in paper currency by the
government, after the expiration of five years from the date of the
issue.”
And just here we get a view of Mr. Blaine’s power of analysis; the
ability of his mind to grasp a subject in its great features and
fundamental principles; to bring to the surface its underlying points
or elements of strength and weakness, so classified and arranged as to
state them in logical and convincing propositions, and all of them most
practical in their character.
1. “The position contravenes the honor and good faith of the national
government.” And this was the final view adhered to by the best
statesmen of the Republican party.