These names will be forever linked together in American history. Not
as the names of Lincoln and Seward. They had little in common except
massive powers and a common work, without any special affinities
or friendships other than of a public and political nature. They
were, indeed, friends in a large sense, and each worthy of the
other, constituting largely the nation’s head, when the greatness of
statesmanship is head, and the loyalty of statesmanship is heart, was
the demand of the hour. It was the cause and circumstance that brought
their great lives in unison. And yet we are not told that in any sense
they were like David and Jonathan,--one at heart in a personal love,
as they were one in mind, devoted to the great concern of the nation’s
perpetuity.
But Mr. Garfield and Mr. Blaine, when young men far from their prime,
entered together the thirty-eighth congress in 1863. Those were dark
days, and side by side they fought out in congress halls the great
battle for Liberty and Right against Slavery and Wrong. No contest
commanded talent of a higher order. No men supremer in those great
qualities which give to greatness the sovereign right to dictate the
destiny of mighty interests, and crown, as personal achievements, those
interests with a glory imperishable,--none better, braver, truer, armed
to the point of triumph, ever stood up against incarnate wrong, to
wage the sharp, decisive engagement to final conquest, than did these
men and their noble compeers. They entered the lists when the breath
of battle blew hottest, when the land was darkest with shadows of the
war-cloud, when the nation was saddest from loss of noble sons by
land and sea, when desperation was stamped in the face of the foe and
rankled in his heart. Like Spartans, there they stood, pouring their
vital energies into the current of the nation’s life, until the end of
war, and all its fruits were gathered in and secured in safety within
the iron chest of the constitution’s sure protection.
It was not for four years, but for thirteen, that they thus held each
other company in their high service of the nation and the world. Such
fellowship as this, rich with every element of honor, could but weld
their hearts in unity. As they grew up into those expansive lives,
rare and fragrant with the choicest gifts of nature, and rich with
deeds worthy of the noblest powers, so that the highest honors of the
nation seemed theirs, they grew not apart, but together. Thinking and
speaking, writing and contending, for the same great measures, their
lives ran in the same great channels.
The friendship of soldiers who have toiled and endured together, is
felt by thousands in our Republic to-day, and the feeling grows deeper
and stronger as the years go by. This is general, and is common to all,
but it is enduring and sincere. Yet there were special, particular
friendships, more personal in their nature, that sprang up like
beautiful plants, upon this larger field. These are not forgotten or
destroyed. The strength of life is in them, and the growth of years is
on them. The immortality of time is theirs. So in the narrower field,
when the life-giving service of years, wrought into the structure of a
nation redeemed, these men added to the charm and glory of the broader
and more general interest, the grace of a special personal friendliness.
They were just dissimilar enough for this. They were both large, strong
men in physique, and yet not large and portly in the sense of large
and needless bulk of flesh; but fine and strong frames, with massive
heads set squarely upon broad shoulders; arms that swung with power;
bodies filled with health,--not shrunken, dwarfed, or withered,--and
good, stout limbs, that held them well in air, and moved with speed of
the same strong will that commanded and controlled their utterance.
There were ease and grace in every motion. They stood erect and bore
themselves with the dignity of kings, and yet the merest child was
beloved by them. If the one was deeper and more metaphysical than the
other, that other was broader, richer in generalization,--marshalling
his well-armed troops of knowledge from every field where Right had
conquered Wrong, and moving his battalions with the speed of a swifter
march. They were never left to be bitter contestants at any point;
neither had ever plunged the iron into the soul of the other, or done
aught to hinder the cause of the other’s promotion.
Early in their congressional career they were both stamped as future
candidates for the presidency. They were so thought of and talked
about. But Mr. Blaine’s prominence as a speaker of the House of
Representatives had given him earliest the greater prominence in this
direction, and from various quarters it was being thrust upon him.
But they were friends, and had no bickerings and jealousies on this
account. Garfield could wait, and would. He did not put himself
forward, nor seek it at the hands of friends. He would rather bide his
time, and help another. But that other was not Mr. Blaine, though they
were friends. It was a matter of honor, of state-pride, and of duty,
that he gave his suffrage and his power to John Sherman, of his own
state of Ohio, who had done such magnificent service in the treasury in
paying the national debt and resuming specie payment. And his great,
honest speech was so brilliant and earnest for his friend at home, that
it turned the mind of the convention toward him.
When the crisis came they crowned him, and on the instant the news was
flashed into the presence of Mr. Blaine, while still the cheers went up
in that great assembly in Chicago; he sent his congratulations to his
friend, and said, “Command my services for the great campaign.” They
were friends and brothers still, each worthy of the other’s highest
honor, truest devotion, and fullest praise. Political lying could not
befoul the heart of either with any member of that brood of vipers
which inhabit this sphere in other breasts. They knew too well the
nature and the tactics of the foe. I have seen a soldier dead upon the
field, so blackened with blood and powder from the fray, that three
stood by and claimed him for their different companies, and none
perchance were right.
But no blackening powder of the enemy, no mud of march, no dust of
camp, or any other creature, could so bespatter or besmear these men
so they should fail to know and love each other. The battle had been
long and hard, and desperate to them. Neither could be pierced or
fall without the other’s notice, and full well they knew that such
hard pressure of the enemy would bring them to desperate straits. But
this did not cause them to fear or falter, but to rush on, through
blinding and begriming powder-smoke, to victory. They could but smile
at the enemies’ reports of battle, and of the skill and bearing of both
general and troops, just as when a paper crossed the lines in Rebellion
times the truth came not always with it. Some one must bear the wrath
of those whose flag was ever in the dust, and whose broken ranks were
reeling in defeat. Hard names and lies were but the sparks,--the flint
flash from the clash of arms,--they but consume themselves, then die
away. No man, since all the hate of treason had blackened Lincoln and
our leading men with crimes imaginary, had had his name politically
tarnished with darker words of calumny than the wise, the good, the
sainted Garfield; and yet Mr. Blaine lived so close to him, so well
knew the health and the beauty of his inward life, the strength and
soundness of his character, the boldness of his purpose, purity of
his motive, and the cleanness of his record,--as history shall record
it,--that his voice resounded as it never had done, from city to city,
from state to state, in support of the man and in vindication of his
cause; and the wreath was on his brow, and multitudes stood, with
uncovered heads, to do him honor. His old, tried friends, who had
watched, and studied, and known him for twenty years had sent him back
to congress for the ninth time. The legislature of Ohio had given him
their suffrage and elevated him spontaneously, without his presence
or his asking, to the senatorship. The convention had nominated, and
the people elected him to the presidency, and all despite the flinging
of mud and the breath of slander. “He was met,” says Mr. Blaine,
“with a storm of detraction at the very hour of his nomination, and
it continued with increasing volume until the close of his victorious
campaign:--
“‘No might, nor greatness in mortality,
Can censure scope; back-wounding calumny.
The whitest virtue strikes; what king so strong,
Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue.’”
“Under it all,” he says, “he was calm, and strong, and confident;
never lost his self-possession, did no unwise act, spoke no hasty
or ill-considered word. Indeed, nothing in his whole life is more
remarkable than his bearing through those five full months of
vituperation. The great mass of these unjust imputations passed
unnoticed, and with the general _débris_ of the campaign fell into
oblivion.”
The friendship of Mr. Blaine never waned. He was true as steel. And
when the honors of the nation, who had honored him, were in Garfield’s
hands, the chiefest and the best were for his first best friend, whom
he called to the highest place in his cabinet,--the _premier_ of the
nation. This was no mere compliment. It was an official act. The
success of his administration, which was his greatest care, depended
largely upon his secretary of state. He must be clean as well as
competent,--a king in skill and scholarship, as well as brother,
friend. It must then have been an act of his best judgment, as well
as an expression of regard. And yet it was as well respect for the
millions, represented by the large and strong delegations who voted for
him with such strength of purpose for five-and-thirty times.
Four months, less two days, he sat at his right hand in the highest
counsels of the country, a wise, and honored, and trusted man. He
could not have been there had not Garfield known him,--but he did
know him through and through, and because he knew him so thoroughly
and well, he placed the keeping of the nation’s wisdom, integrity, and
honor before the world, and in the great world abroad, into his hands.
“The heart is wiser than the head,” and knows more deeply into life and
character, than simple, abstract thought can penetrate. It receives
and knows the whole man as a whole, knows him as a person in his every
element of personality in reason, conscience, affections, will; knows
him by the touch of moral reason, for pure intellect may act alone
comparatively in abstract questions, of metaphysical thought, but the
heart never. The true enlightenment is here. It is the abode of motive,
purpose, plan,--out of it are the issues of life itself.
We are ignorant of those we hate, as the South was of the North before
the war, and hence her braggart boasts. But those whom we know deeply,
fully, truly, we love deeply, fully, truly. Love lights the path of
reason, when it carries the whole reason with it, and furnishes by
reciprocal acts of confidence data for its guidance. And thus we love
our way into each other’s lives, while reason thus enlightened, helps
us on.
It was thus with these great men of the nation’s hope, her honor, and
her trust. They sat, they stood, they walked, they talked together,
their great hearts open as the day, shining full upon each other. And
as they shone thus on each other’s life, there was a blending, and so a
mutual life, an interlacing, twining, locking, and so a unity.
Every walk in life furnishes its friendships; and the greater the
walk may be, the greater are the friendships; for the greater the
affinities, the broader the sympathies, the purer, sweeter, more
supreme the life; for the true life is never isolated, but unstarved
in every part. The king has his queen, the Czar his Czarina. Only the
small-souled men are shrunken hearted, while large, capacious spirits
take in worlds.
Perhaps the country never possessed two men at the same time who had
more friends of the solid and reliable sort than these men, who admired
and loved to honor, and honored because they loved, and this because
they lived out their splendid natures before their countrymen, hating
every mean thing, loving and praising the good. They were not dark,
unfathomable mysteries, enigmas, puzzles, problems, staring at you,
unsolved, and daring you to the thankless task, and promising but the
gloom of deeper shadows; you felt you knew them. They did not stand
aloof, daring you mount up to them, but coming down, they sat beside
you, and made you feel akin, and not blush out your feelings of a
doomed inferiority; and this great-heartedness, beating responsive to
the strong, warm touch of nature, made them friends.
Garfield did not live to draw the picture of his Blaine, but Blaine has
lived to draw the picture of his Garfield.
“It is not easy,” he says, “to find his counterpart anywhere in the
record of American public life. He, perhaps, more nearly resembles Mr.
Seward in his supreme faith in the all-conquering power of a principle.
He had the love of learning, and patient industry of investigation to
which John Quincy Adams owes his prominence, and his presidency. He
had some of those ponderous elements of mind which distinguished Mr.
Webster, and which, indeed, in all our public life, have left the great
Massachusetts senator without an intellectual peer.
“Some of his methods recall the best features in the strong,
independent course of Sir Robert Peel, to whom he had striking
resemblance in the type of his mind and the habit of his speech. He had
all of Burke’s love for the sublime and the beautiful, with, possibly,
something of his superabundance. In his faith and his magnanimity; in
his power of statement and subtle analysis; in his faultless logic,
and his love of literature; in his wealth and mode of illustration, one
is reminded of that great English statesman of to-day,--Gladstone.”
But the nation seems to commemorate most fittingly the friendship of
those two men, when in the person of its representatives and senators
it selects to deliver the eulogy of the dead president. Not any of his
colleagues in the House from his native state, however long or well
they may have known him; nor his colleague in the senate; no governor
of his honored state; his loved and cultured pastor, nor any other man
than Blaine,--his chosen counsellor in the great affairs of state;
he who was with him when, on that quiet, happy morning in July, they
rode slowly to the depot, and “his fate was on him in an instant. One
moment he stood erect, strong, confident in the years stretching out
peacefully before him;--the next he lay wounded, bleeding, helpless,
doomed to weary weeks of torture, to silence, and the grave.”
And now, as the hand of Mr. Blaine draws aside the curtain, let us look
in upon the final scene in the life and death of his great friend, and
see, as he saw, the man so deeply, truly loved by the great nation he
had just begun to rule so well.
“Great in life, he was surpassingly great in death. For no cause,
in the very frenzy of wantonness and wickedness, by the red hand of
murder, he was thrust from the full tide of this world’s interest; from
its hopes, its aspirations, its victories, into the visible presence
of death, and he did not quail. Not alone for the one short moment
in which, stunned and dazed, he could give up life, hardly aware of
its relinquishment; but through days of deadly languor; through weeks
of agony, that was not less agony because silently borne; with clear
sight and calm courage he looked into his open grave. What blight and
ruin met his anguished eyes, whose lips may tell? What brilliant,
broken plans; what baffled high ambitions; what sundering of strong,
warm manhood’s friendships; what bitter rending of sweet household
ties! Behind him a proud, expectant nation; a great host of sustaining
friends; a cherished and happy mother, wearing the full, rich honors
of her early toil and tears; the wife of his youth, whose whole life
lay in his; the little boys not yet emerged from childhood’s day of
frolic; the fair, young daughter; the sturdy sons, just springing into
closest companionship, claiming every day and every hour the reward of
a father’s love and care; and in his heart the eager, rejoicing power
to meet all demands. Before him, desolation and great darkness! And his
soul was not shaken.
“His countrymen were thrilled with instant, profound, and universal
sympathy. Masterful in his mortal weakness, he became the centre of
a nation’s love; enshrined in the prayers of a world. But all the
love and all the sympathy could not share with him his suffering. He
trod the wine-press alone. With unfaltering front he faced death.
With unfailing tenderness he took leave of life. Above the demoniac
hiss of the assassin’s bullet he heard the voice of God. With simple
resignation he bowed to the divine decree.
“As the end drew near, his early craving for the sea returned. The
stately mansion of power had been to him the wearisome hospital of
pain, and he begged to be taken from its prison walls, from its
oppressive, stifling air, from its homelessness, and its hopelessness.
Gently, silently, the love of a great people bore the pale sufferer to
the longed-for healing of the sea, to live or to die, as God should
will, within sight of its heaving billows, within hearing of its
manifold voices. With wan, fevered face tenderly lifted to the cooling
breeze, he looked out wistfully upon the ocean’s changing wonders; on
its far sails, whitening in the morning light; on its restless waves,
rolling shoreward to break and die beneath the noonday sun; on the
red clouds of evening, arching low to the horizon; on the serene and
shining pathway of the stars. Let us believe that in the silence of the
receding world he heard the great waves breaking on a further shore,
and felt, already upon his wasted brow, the breath of the eternal
morning.”
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