It was generally understood in Maine that the Hon. Lot M. Morrill
was serving his last term in the United States senate, and that Mr.
Blaine was to be his successor; so that when Mr. Morrill was advanced
to the secretaryship of the treasury in General Grant’s cabinet, it
occasioned no surprise that Governor Connor appointed Mr. Blaine to the
senate in his stead. He was just recovering from the partial sunstroke
which felled him to the pavement while on his way to church, on a
Sabbath morning, with Miss Abigail Dodge (Gail Hamilton), just prior
to the Cincinnati Convention, and soon after his victory over Proctor
Knott, during his persecution in the House. Next to the nomination
at Cincinnati, nothing of a political nature could have been more
grateful to him than this high honor from the governor of his state,
in accordance, as the governor himself says, with the expectation of
the people. Coming, as it did, at an ill and weary time, it must have
greatly refreshed and revived his spirits, to have new and larger
evidence of the esteem and endorsement of those to whose interests his
life was devoted.
On July 12, 1876, he took his seat as the colleague of Hannibal Hamlin
in the senate. He is placed at once as chairman on the committee on
rules, and on the committee on appropriations, and on naval affairs,
besides on a select committee “on the levees on the Mississippi River.”
This, for a senatorial start, was quite honorable to his judgment and
ability.
There are many old traditions and customs, which amount to laws, so far
as assigning positions of responsibility to new members is concerned,
but there is no law which prevents a new member from taking the most
advanced position possible by virtue of his wisdom and knowledge, and
his ability in debate.
He could not well become entangled in the meshes of an intricate
network of rules and regulations, which Butler, in acknowledging Mr.
Blaine’s superior knowledge of in the House, had said he knew nothing
about,--Blaine knew it all. His position made it necessary that he
should, and now he was made chief in this department in the new branch
of legislation to which he had succeeded. So he could not be held or
hampered by any difficulty of this kind. Moreover, his acquaintance
was well-nigh universal among the members, and some of them knew him a
little better than they could have wished. He was also familiar with
the methods and measures of the senate, having frequently been on
joint committees with them during his early terms of service in the
lower House, and then the general subjects of appropriations, naval,
military, judiciary, manufactures, commerce, foreign affairs, finance,
pension affairs, etc., these were the subjects with which he was
accustomed to deal during all of his years in congress.
He was at home, and coming into the senate on the wave of popular
excitement, which was of the same broad and sweeping character that
surrounded Henry Clay, and which came so near giving him the nomination
for the presidency then, he was not only at home in all his feelings
of political association and public duty, but exceedingly prominent as
well,--the one man of worth above all others, though the last to enter
there.
He had no need to take front rank; he was there already, and gave
himself to his work, not as a defeated man,--they had played but one
inning then,--but as a victor, enjoying his promotion well, from
the lower to the upper house of congress. He was nearing the goal,
taking the honors by the way, just as Garfield did, but unlike him,
tarrying in the senate to enjoy them. It was a good place to be; grand
enough to command the lives, in all their richness and maturity, of
Sumner, Webster, Choate, of Hamlin, Fessenden, and Clay, of Wilson,
Edmunds, Dawes, and galaxies by the score, representing every state
in the Union. Great lights from every department of life shone there:
scholars, teachers, authors, successful generals; culture, refinement,
and every excellence.
Mr. Blaine brought with him from the House, his old spirit of freeness,
and general adaptability and service. He had not come in to rest, be
shelved, or fossilized. His old habit of thoroughness was on him still;
he was not the man to change at six and forty years of age. He must
still touch top, bottom, and sides of every question with which he
dealt, and so he did.
He loved the truths of history, and took them whole, entire, lacking
nothing, and not in a garbled form. This of course caused facts and
figures to strike with telling power upon many a man’s coat of mail, or
cause the shield to tremble with the power of his stroke. But he was
there without apology, to do the strong, decisive work which marked the
history of his life. He loved the state of his adoption, and the time
had come when the pride of her glory should appear.
The old House of Representatives had been devoted, as a gallery of art,
to portraits and statues of the great men of the nation. Two were to be
selected by each state from the record of their leading men.
The statue of William King, the first governor of Maine, in 1820 and
1821, was presented with speeches in the senate by both Mr. Hamlin and
Mr. Blaine. In reciting briefly the history of Mr. King, Mr. Blaine
relied wholly upon Massachusetts authority, and he added, “To have
given anything like a sketch of Governor King’s life without giving his
conflict with Massachusetts, touching the separation of Maine and her
erection into an independent state, would have been like writing the
life of Abraham Lincoln without mentioning the great Rebellion, which,
as president of the United States, he was so largely instrumental in
suppressing.”
These words he uttered in vindication of himself from certain
restrictions placed upon him, and he closed by saying “that he notified
the senators from Massachusetts that he should feel compelled to
narrate those portions of Mr. King’s history that brought him in
conflict with the parent state.”
In less than a month after the statue of Governor King was placed in
the national gallery, by a unanimous vote of the senate, Mr. Blaine
was before that body with a speech of his usual force and energy, upon
the absorbing question of hard money. The subject had been discussed
in the House, and their action sent to the senate, and Mr. Blaine had
offered a substitute for their bill, which contained three very simple
provisions, as he said, viz.:--
1. “That the dollar shall contain four hundred and twenty-five grains
of standard silver, shall have unlimited coinage, and be an unlimited
legal tender.
2. “That all the profits of coinage shall go to the government, and not
to the operator in silver bullion.
3. “That silver dollars or silver bullion, assayed and mint-stamped,
may be deposited with the assistant treasurer at New York, for which
coin-certificates may be issued, the same in denomination as United
States notes, not below ten dollars, and that these shall be redeemable
on demand in coin or bullion, thus furnishing a paper-circulation based
on an actual deposit of precious metal, giving us notes as valuable as
those of the Bank of England and doing away at once with the dreaded
inconvenience of silver on account of bulk and weight.”
He cites an exclusively gold nation like England, which, while it may
have some massive fortunes, shows also the most hopeless and helpless
poverty in the humblest walks of life. But France, a gold-and-silver
nation, while it can exhibit no such fortunes as England boasts,
presents “a people who, with silver savings, can pay a war indemnity
that would have beggared the gold-bankers of London, and to which the
peasantry of England could not have contributed a pound sterling in
gold, nor a single shilling in silver.”
Mr. Blaine’s sense of justice, and national honor, and national
pride were injured by making a dollar which, in effect, was not a
dollar,--was not worth a hundred cents.
“Consider, further,” he says, “what injustice would be done to every
holder of a legal-tender or national-bank note. That vast volume of
paper-money--over seven hundred millions of dollars--is now worth
between ninety-eight and ninety-nine cents on the dollar in gold coin.
The holders of it, who are indeed our entire population, from the
poorest to the wealthiest, have been promised, from the hour of its
issue, that the paper-money would one day be as good as gold. To pay
silver for the greenback is a full compliance with this promise and
this obligation, provided the silver is made as it always has been
hitherto, as good as gold. To make our silver coin even three per cent.
less valuable than gold, inflicts at once a loss of more than twenty
millions of dollars on the holders of our paper-money. To make a silver
dollar worth but ninety-two cents, precipitates on the same class a
loss of well-nigh sixty millions of dollars. For whatever the value of
the silver dollar is, the whole paper issue of the country will sink to
its standard when its coinage is authorized and its circulation becomes
general in the channels of trade.
“Some one in conversation with Commodore Vanderbilt during one of the
many freight competitions of the trunk lines, said, ‘Why, the Canadian
road has not sufficient carrying capacity to compete with your great
line!’
“‘That is true,’ replied the Commodore, ‘but they can fix a rate and
force us down to it.’
“Were congress to pass a law to-day, declaring that every legal-tender
note and every national-bank note shall hereafter pass for only
ninety-six or ninety-seven cents on the dollar, there is not a
constituency in the United States that would re-elect a man that should
support it, and in many districts the representative would be lucky if
he escaped with merely a minority vote.”
Mr. Blaine’s sympathies in this discussion were with the people, and
although he had passed out of that popular branch of congress, as it is
called, most nearly connected with them, he could not in any sense be
divorced from them, and so, although before men of great wealth, his
plea was for the laboring class,--for those who made the country strong
and rich,--and so in continuing his speech he pleaded for them; and it
will bring them nearer to him to-day to recall his strong and earnest
words, which, even in the staid and formal senate, with its infinite
courtesies and conservative venerations, has a heart to smile, and good
cheer sufficient to applaud, as they did this close of his hard-money
speech. These were his final utterances:--
“The effect of paying the labor of this country in silver coin of full
value, as compared with irredeemable paper,--or as compared, even, with
silver of inferior value,--will make itself felt in a single generation
to the extent of tens of millions--perhaps hundreds of millions--in
the aggregate savings which represent consolidated capital. It is the
instinct of man from the savage to the scholar--developed in childhood,
and remaining with age--to value the metals which in all tongues are
called precious.
“Excessive paper-money leads to extravagance, to waste, and to want, as
we painfully witness on all sides to-day. And in the midst of the proof
of its demoralizing and destructive effect, we hear it proclaimed in
the halls of congress, that ‘the people demand cheap money.’ I deny
it. I declare such a phrase to be a total misapprehension--a total
misinterpretation of the popular wish. The people do not demand cheap
money. They demand an abundance of good money, which is an entirely
different thing. They do not want a single gold standard that will
exclude silver, and benefit those already rich. They do not want an
inferior silver standard that will drive out gold, and not help those
already poor. They want both metals, in full value, in equal honor, in
whatever abundance the bountiful earth will yield them to the searching
eye of science, and to the hard hand of labor.
“The two metals have existed side by side in harmonious, honorable
companionship, as money, ever since intelligent trade was known among
men. It is well-nigh forty centuries since ‘Abraham weighed to Ephron
the silver which he had named in the audience of the sons of Heth--four
hundred shekels of silver--current money with the merchant.’ Since that
time nations have risen and fallen, races have disappeared, dialects
and languages have been forgotten, arts have been lost, treasures
have perished, continents have been discovered, islands have been
sunk in the sea, and through all these ages, and through all these
changes, silver and gold have reigned supreme as the representatives
of value--as the media of exchange. The dethronement of each has been
attempted in turn, and sometimes the dethronement of both; but always
in vain! And we are here to-day, deliberating anew over the problem
which comes down to us from Abraham’s time--_the weight of the silver_
that shall be ‘current money with the merchant.’”
As Mr. Blaine resumed his seat, it is said, in brackets, there was
protracted applause; and so much was there that the vice-president,
William A. Wheeler, of New York, felt compelled to say, “Order! The
chair assuming that the galleries are ignorant of the laws of the
senate, gives notice that if applause is repeated they will be promptly
cleared.”
This cannot fail to suggest the fact beyond a doubt, that he had lost
none of his old-time fervor, and that he proposed to allow no right of
the people to slip from them, so long as he held place and power in
their interest, and had a voice to lift in their defence.
The great business of congress is done by committees, as is well known,
and their reports are discussed, amended, and acted upon, endorsed or
rejected.
Mr. Blaine’s committee on appropriations was one of the most difficult.
Demands are almost innumerable, and to act intelligently requires a
large knowledge of every department of the government; of the military,
the great postal lines and offices, and the new ones being built,
custom-houses, forts, arsenals, navy-yards, etc.; and this work must be
done by the committees, working not early, but late.
He was specially fitted for the committee on naval affairs, as he had
gone over the whole question of ship-building and shipping while in the
House.
We find him actuated by the same feelings of humanity and carefulness,
as actuated him years before, but now more conspicuously, because in a
larger, loftier sphere.
He presents bills for the relief of the families of those who perished
on the United States dredge-boat “McAlister”; to enlarge the power
and duties of the board of health in the District of Columbia; to
amend the Pacific Railroad act by creating a sinking-fund. He moved to
investigate charges against Senator M. C. Butler, of South Carolina.
We find Mr. Blaine showing an appreciation for that old soldier of the
Republic, in the Mexican war and the war of the Rebellion, Hon. James
Shields, of Missouri, by presenting a bill to make him a major-general.
General Shields had a bullet through his body in Mexico, at Buena
Vista, and a silk handkerchief drawn through his body in the track of
the wound, and now he is honored as an old man; but he does not live
long to enjoy it. He was a hardy, heroic, faithful man and soldier, and
worthy of the repeated honors conferred upon him by his state and by
the nation. It was a generous impulse of a kindly heart that prompted
this honor in the senate for the aged soldier.
The bureau of engraving and printing was remembered by him in a bill to
provide that department with a fire-proof building.
When the bill was before the senate to pension the soldiers of the
Mexican war, Mr. Hoar offered a resolution by way of amendment:
“Provided, further, that no pension shall ever be paid under this act
to Jefferson Davis, the late president of the so-called Confederacy.”
Twenty-two were found to vote against it. The discussion grew now
almost intolerable. Nearly every rebel sympathizer from the South
spoke against it; among them were Garland, Bailey, Maxey, Thurman,
Gordon, Lamar, Morgan, Coke. Strong hearts were stirred against their
utterances, and strong words uttered for the Union cause.
“There is no parallel to the magnanimity of our government,” said
Mr. Blaine, in reply to Lamar’s charge of intolerance. “Not one
single execution, not one single confiscation; at the outside only
fourteen thousand out of millions put under disfranchisement, and
all of them released, and all of them invited to come to the common
board, fraternally and patriotically, with the rest of us, and share a
common destiny for weal or for woe in the future. I tell the honorable
gentleman it does not become him, or any Southern man, to speak of
intolerance on the part of the national government; rather, if he speak
of it at all, he should allude to its magnanimity and its grandeur.”
The great boldness with which Mr. Blaine stood up against the
usurpations of the solid South is a lasting honor to him. He desired
to place on record, in a definite and authentic form, the frauds and
outrages by which some recent elections were carried by the Democratic
party in the Southern states, and to find if there be any method
to prevent a repetition of those crimes against a free ballot. One
hundred and six representatives had been elected recently in the
South, and only four or five of them Republicans, and thirty-five of
the whole number had been assigned to the South, he said, “by reason
of the colored people.” In South Carolina, he speaks of “a series of
skirmishes over the state, in which the polling places were regarded as
forts, to be captured by one party and held against the other, so that
there was no election in any proper sense.” The information came from a
non-partisan press, and without contradiction so far as he had seen.