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YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

1935

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
(From a rare photograph taken November 15, 1863. Now engraved for the first time.)

MEN OF ACHIEVEMENT

STATESMEN

NOAH BROOKS

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1893

Copyright, 1S93, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

^93 b

TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK

In the preparation of this work the author's
aim has been to present a series of character
sketches of the eminent persons selected for por
traiture. These selections of subjects have been
made for the purpose of placing before the pres
ent generation of Americans salient points in
the careers of public men, whose attainments in
statesmanship were the result of their own indi
vidual exertions and force of character rather
than of fortunate circumstances. Therefore,
these brief studies are not biographies. The au
thor had the good fortune of personal acquaint
ance with most of the statesmen of the latter
part of the period illustrated by his pen ; and he
considers it an advantage to his readers that they
may thus receive from him some of the impres
sions which these conspicuous personages made
upon the mental vision of those who heard and
saw them while they were living examples of
nobility of aim and success of achievement in
American statesmanship.

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. Henry Clay,  9
II. Daniel Webster  39
III. John C. Calhoun  69
IV. Thomas H. Benton,  91
v. William H. Seward,  119
VI. Salmon P. Chase,  143
VII. Abraham Lincoln, .  175
VIII. Charles Sumner,  223
IX. Samuel J. Tilden, .  255
X. James G. Blaine,  . 281
XI. James A. Garfield,  313
XII. Grover Cleveland  333

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FULL-PAGE
FACING
Abraham Lincoln, . . . (Frontispiece.) page
Henry Clay,  9
Daniel Webster,  39
John C. Calhoun  69
Thomas H. Benton  91
William H. Seward,  119
Salmon Portland Chase,  143
The Statue of Sumner, by Thomas Ball, in the Pub
lic Garden, Boston,  223
Samuel J. Tilden  255
James G. Blaine,  281
James A. Garfield  313
President Grover Cleveland,  333
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT PAGE
The House in which Henry Clay was Born, . 12
The Schoolhouse of the Slashes, ... 15
Henry Clay between Thirty and Forty, . . 19
Clay's Tomb at Lexington, Ky.,  36
Henry Clay's Bed, used by him for Fifty Years, 37
House where Webster was Born at Salisbury (now
Franklin), N. H., . . . 40
Webster when a Young Man,  43
Webster in Fishing Costume, ... .46
Webster's Home at Marshfield, Mass  53
The Webster Statue in Central Park, New York, . 58

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

I'AGE
Webster's Tomb at Marshfield,  68

Calhoun in Early Life, 
Calhoun's Home at Fort Hill, S. C, .
Calhoun's Library and Office,
Joining of the Central and Union Pacific,
The Sub-Treasury Building in Wall Street, New
York City, 
The Benton Statue at St. Louis,
Mr. Seward in Early Life, .
Mr. Seward's Home at Auburn, N. Y.,
The Garden at Auburn, . . . .
The Seward Statue, by Randolph Rogers, in Mad
isoN Square, New York, 
The House in which Mr. Chase was Born, at Cor
nish, N. H., . ....
The Chase Home at Keene, N. H.— Monadnock in
the Background, ....
Edgewood House, Mr. Chase's Residence at Wash
ington, D. C, 
Mr. Chase's Desk in the Library at Edgewood House,
The Negro-Pew. [An Actual View], ...
Lincoln's Approved Likeness,
Lincoln's Early Home at Elizabethtown, Ky.,
Lincoln's Wrestling-bout with Armstrong,
The Home of Lincoln at Springfield, III.,
The St. Gauden's Statue of Lincoln at Lincoln
Park, Chicago 
Stephen A. Douglas,
Gideon Welles, 
The National Lincoln Monument at Springfield, III., 211
House where Lincoln Died in Washington — 516
Tenth Street, N. W., . . . . .218
Death-mask of Lincoln  22 [
The Bust of Sumner in the Museum of Art, Bos
ton, BY HIS Friend, Thomas Crawford, . . 228

70 73
84
96
105 "5
127130 133139146
149 i5o169
171 176181igo19s
202206208

8 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

Charles Sumner  237
The Boston Home of Mr. Sumner, at 20 Hancock
Street,  243
The Rendition of Anthony Burns, .... 248
Sumner's Tomb in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, near Bos
ton,  253
The Tilden Homestead, where Mr. Tilden was
Born, at New Lebanon, N. Y., .... 260
Mr. Tilden's New York House, at No. 15 Gramercy
Park,  265
Mr. Tilden's Library in the Gramercy Park House, 270
Greystone, Mr. Tilden's Country Place, near Yonk-
ERS, N. Y  . . 275
Bryant Park, Fifth Avenue and Forty -second
Street, New York, and the Suggested Tilden
Library,  279
The Birthplace of Mr. Blaine at West Browns
ville, Pa  285
Mr. Blaine at Thirty Years of Age, .... 288
Where Mr. Blaine went to School at West Browns
ville, Pa.,  291
Mr. Blaine's Home at Augusta, Me  298
Mr. Blaine's Washington Home, at 17 Madison Place,
where he Died. — Formerly the Seward Man
sion,  307
Garfield's Boyhood Home,  316
The Garfield Monument at Washington, . . . 319
The Home of Garfield at Mentor, O., . . . 323
General Garfield in 1863,  324
The Garfield Monument at Cleveland, O., . . 328
The House in which President Cleveland was Born,
AT Caldwell, N. J.,  338
Gray Gables, Mr. Cleveland's Summer Home at
Buzzard's Bay,  342
"The Weeds," The Clevelands' Home at Holland
Patent, N. Y.,  345

Henry Clay.

STATESMEN

HENRY CLAY.
When Abraham Lincoln was forty-three years
old, that is to say in 1852, he was invited by the
citizens of Springfield, 111., to deliver a eulogy
on Henry Clay, who had just died. Among
other things, Lincoln said of the man whom
he had idolized through life : " His example
teaches us that one can scarcely be so poor
but that, if he will, he can acquire sufficient
education to get through the world respectably."
In this regard Clay and Lincoln were not much
unlike. Both were born into a lot of poverty ;
both rose to high distinction in the State. It
may be said, however, that the poverty of Lin
coln's boyhood was more abject and his lot
harder than Clay's.
Henry Clay was early known as the Mill Boy
of the Slashes. In later years, when he was a
candidate for the Presidency, this title was the
slogan of a hot political canvass and was thought
to be worth to Clay a great many votes. His
mother was a widow living in a low and swampy
district of Virginia known as the Slashes. As a

10 STATESMEN
lad, Henry was often sent to Daricott's mill, on
the Pamunkey River, riding on horseback, with
corn to be ground or meal to be brought home
for the family of seven boys and girls. The
neighborhood along the route of the boy's fre
quent travel knew the future statesman as the
Mill Boy of the Slashes.
There is a tradition that when Mrs. Clay, who
was left a widow in 1781, in the thick of the war
of the Revolution, when Henry was four years
old, was surprised one day by a visit from Gen
eral Tarleton on one of his raids through Vir
ginia. He threw on the table a handful of gold
and silver in payment for property taken by his
men, and it is told of the widow, that as soon as
Tarleton had' gone, she high-spiritedly swept up
the coin and threw it into the fire. She might
better have kept the money, for the family were
very poor.
Many years afterward, at a Fourth of July
dinner at Campbell Court House, Va., one Rob
ert Hughes gave this toast: "Henry Clay: he
and I were born close to the Slashes of old Han
over ; he worked barefoot, and so did I ; he
went to mill, and so did I ; he was good to his
mother, and so was I. I know him like a book
and love him like a brother." And a year
earlier than this, at a dinner at Lexington, Ky.,
in honor of him by his old friends and neigh
bors. Clay said : " In looking back upon my
origin and progress through life I have great
reason to be thankful. My father died in 1781,
leaving me an infant of too tender years to re-

HENRY a LAT 11
tain any recollection of his smiles or endear
ments. My surviving parent removed to this,
State in 1792, leaving me, a boy of fifteen years
of age, in the office of the High Court of Chan
cery in the city of Richmond, without guardian,
without pecuniary means of support, to steer my
course as I .might or could. A neglected edu
cation was improved by my own irregular exer
tions without the benefit of systematic instruc
tion. I studied law, principally in the office of a
lamented friend, the late Governor Brooke, then
Attorney-General of Virginia, and also under
the auspices of the venerable and lamented
Chancellor Wythe, for whom I had acted as
amanuensis. I obtained a license to practice
the profession from the judges of the Court of
Appeals of Virginia and established myself in
Lexington in 1797, without patrons, without the
favor or countenance of the great or opulent,
without the means of paying my weekly board,
and in the midst of a bar uncommonly distin
guished by eminent members. I remember how
comfortable I thought I should be if I could
make one hundred pounds, Virginia money, per
year, and with what delight I received the first
fifteen shillings fee. My hopes were more than
realized. I immediately rushed into a success
ful and lucrative practice."
What were the achievements of this poor Mill
Boy of the Slashes ? He was elected to the Gen
eral Assembly of the Kentucky Legislature in-
1803, appointed to the United States Senate to
fill a vacancy in that same year ; again elected

12 STATESMEN
to the Assembly and chosen Speaker of the
House in 1807 ; again sent to the United States
Senate to fill an unexpired term in 1809; elected
to the House of Representatives of the United
States in 18 11, and five times chosen Speaker of
the House ; United States Peace Commissioner
to Ghent in 18 14; re-elected to Congress the
next year; retired from public life for a brief

The House in which Henry Clay was Born.
period to retrieve his fortunes ; returned to the
Senate in 1823; Secretary of State under John
Quincy Adams; again in the Senate in 1831 ; re
elected to the Senate in 1836; resigned his seat
in 1842; nominated for the Presidency in 1839
and 1844, and re-elected to the Senate in 1849
and 1855. This was the career that opened be
fore the lad who rode to mill from the Slashes
and acquired the elements of a common-school
education in a log school-house near his birth
place. His mother married a second time, and his

HENRT CLAY 13
stepfather. Captain Henry Watkins, a resident
of Richmond, started him in life in a retail store
in the city of Richmond, but within a year his
bookish habits, his divine thirst for knowledge,
and his astonishing facility for acquiring almost
every variety of information so aroused the
admiration of the stepfather that the lad was
found a place in the office of the clerk of the
High Court of Chancery. Here was where he
made his first real beginning in public life. He
was tall, raw-boned, and lank, with a countenance
pleasing but not handsome ; and he was clad in
garments of homespun which did not improve
his personal appearance in the eyes of the town
lads among whom he took his place at a desk
where he began copying papers.
Later on, when he left Richmond to seek his
fortune in Kentucky, then the Far West of the
country, Clay did not make his way into condi
tions of very high civilization. Kentucky was
still known as the " Dark and Bloody Ground "
of Daniel Boone and the wild aborigines whom
he fought ; and although the city of Lexington
was a centre of social enlightenment for those
days and in those regions, it was, as compared
with Richmond, a crude and unkempt com
munity. Some years later, in 1814, Amos Ken
dall, who had migrated from New England to
Kentucky in search of profitable employment,
wrote in his diary : " I have, I think, learned the
way to be popular in Kentucky, but do not as
yet put in it practice. Drink whiskey and talk
loud with the fullest confidence and you will

14 STATESMEN
hardly fail of being called a clever fellow."
But through all these early and boisterous
scenes of Clay's life we find him reading — per
petually reading. As he, himself, has said, he
lacked that scholarly discipline and system of
acquiring knowledge which is essential to the
best mental training ; but he absorbed knowl
edge with great avidity and certainly did make
the most of his opportunities. Through life,
however, Henry Clay appears to have been
somewhat superficial, and those who have stud
ied his character and have noted how great were
his attainments, and with what skill his genius
seized upon such stores of learning as he had,
must needs regret that so great a mind could not
have been more thoroughly trained and better
equipped for the great duties which Henry Clay
in his lifetime undertook. His appeared to be a
mental disposition of intuitions and instincts.
He felt rather than knew ; he divined men's
thoughts and purposes, and his great eloquence
was always directed to their imaginations, their
prejudices, and their passions, rather than to
their understanding.
As a jury lawyer he was always eminently
successful. His eloquence, especially in his
early life in Kentucky, was regarded as some
thing phenomenal, and it is said of him that no
malefactor who had him for a defender was ever
convicted. His presence was commanding, his
figure tall, graceful, and distinguished. His ges
tures were large and sweeping, and his manner
of address was broad and free. His voice was

HENRY CLAY

15

melodious, with a prodigious range, sinking into
the lowest basso-profundo or rising in shrill and
almost feminine notes. The music of his voice
is represented as being something wonderful.
Most of his early practice was in the criminal

The School-house of tne Slashes.

courts of Kentucky, and the most remarkable of
these cases was one in which Clay was engaged
to defend a Mrs. Phelps, wife of a respectable
farmer, who was accused of the crime of murder,
having killed her sister-in-law. Miss Phelps, with
a musket, which in a moment of passion she
seized and fired, aiming at her victim's head. It
was impossible to deny that Mrs. Phelps had

16 STATESMEN
killed Miss Phelps, but the criminal was a wom
an of a respectable family, the wife of a respect
able man, and never before accused of any fault.
Clay's theory was that the deed had been com
mitted in a moment of "temporary delirium,"
and on that plea the jury, whose judgment had
been confused by the extraordinary plea of the
advocate, found that the woman was not sane
enough to be hanged, but was insane enough to
be kept in jail for a short time. This is proba
bly the first instance of " temporary insanity "
being used in the criminal courts of the United
States to secure the acquittal of an undoubted
murderer. In another case, that of one Willis,
of Fayette County, accused of a murder of pe
culiar atrocity. Clay succeeded in dividing the
jury so that they could not agree, and the de
fendant escaped conviction. At the second trial
of Willis, Clay argued that his client had once
been put in peril for his life and under the con
stitution of the State could not be placed in
jeopardy a second time. This being new doc
trine to the Court, Clay was forbidden to proceed
on that line of argument, whereupon the young
lawyer solemnly gathered up his papers and
stalked out of the room, throwing upon the
Court in grave tones the responsibility of deny
ing his just rights to a man on trial for his life.
The Court, astounded by this unexpected turn of
affairs, sent a messenger after Clay, who gra
ciously returned and secured from the jury a
verdict of not guilty. Years afterward, the cul
prit whom Clay had defended so successfully.

HENRY GLAY 17
met his counsel, being intoxicated, and cried,
" Here comes Mr. Clay, who saved my life."
" Ah, Willis, poor fellow," said Clay, " I fear I
have saved too many like you who ought to be
hanged." Clay excelled in sarcasm of finer touch than
those who were his compeers in Kentucky were
accustomed to employ. On one occasion, when
confronted in the House of Representatives by a
General Smyth, of Virginia, in a long debate,
Smyth, who was noted for his prosy and long-
drawn speeches, said to Clay, " You speak for
the present generation; I speak for posterity."
" Yes," replied Clay, " and you seem resolved to
continue speaking until your audience arrives."
In one of his speeches, giving a graphic descrip
tion of the arrival in Washington of a horde of
office-seekers on the advent of Andrew Jackson
to power, he said : " Recall to your recollection
the 4th of March, 1829, when the lank, lean,
famished forms from fen and forests and the four
quarters of the Union gathered together in the
halls of patronage, or, stealing by evening's twi
light into the apartment of the President's
mansion, cried out, with ghastly faces and in
sepulchral tones, ' Give us bread, give us Treas
ury pap, give us our reward.' England's bard
was mistaken. Ghosts will sometimes come,
called or uncalled."
Clay's popularity was very great. Even now
it is a tradition throughout the Southwest, and
living men, tottering on the verge of the grave,
recall his eloquence, his delightful and winning

18 STATESMEN
presence, his gracious ways and his great polit
ical disappointments, with feelings of mingled
grief and enthusiasm. His affluence of phrase,
his resonance of language and magnificence of
gesture gave him a power over the minds of
men that probably has never been equalled by
any American of any time. His noble and
generous heart, his sympathetic nature, and his
exuberant vitality made him everywhere a wel
come guest and an idolized friend and political
leader. When he was defeated for the Presi
dency by James K. Polk, in 1844, the grief of his
followers was so great that in those portions of
the country where his vote was strongest one
would have supposed a great national calamity
had settled upon the people. Abraham Lincoln
was one of those who idolized Clay, and he never
forgot the profound sorrow that overwhelmed
him when, to their utter amazement, he and his
neighbors learned that Henry Clay was defeated
for the Presidency.
Such was the turbulence of Clay's political
career that those who are old enough to recall
even the traditions of his memorable contests in
variably remember two grave charges that were
freely bandied during his political campaigns.
He was held up to public execration, especially
in the North, as a duellist and a gambler. His first
experience in the duello was provoked by the
insulting conduct of Colonel Joseph Hamilton
Daviess, one of the magnates of Kentucky, who
was then District Attorney of the United States.
In the course of a suit in which Clay defended a

Henry Clay between Thirty and Forty.
(Engraved by D. Nichols, from a miniature in possession of John M, Clay, Esq.)

20 STATESMEN
man who had provoked the wrath of Daviess,
Clay was notified by Daviess that he had better
desist from his defence. Clay promptly replied
that he would permit no one to dictate to him as
to the performance of his duty and that he " held
himself responsible" after the manner of the
code. Daviess sent Clay a challenge, which Clay
promptly accepted. The hostile parties had ar
rived on " the field of honor " when friends in
terfered and brought about an amicable settle
ment without bloodshed. A more serious affair
was that with Humphrey Marshall, who de
nounced Clay's first efforts in favor of a protec
tive tariff as the " claptrap of a demagogue." A
fierce altercation ensued, challenges were ex
changed, and the two men actually did meet on
the field of battle and both combatants were
slightly wounded before the seconds could inter
fere to prevent further mischief. But the most
famous of Clay's altercations was that which
grew out of one of his wordy encounters with
Andrew Jackson. One Kremer had printed in
a Washington paper a scandalous charge known
as the '' corrupt bargain," in which Clay was
alleged to have consented to throw his influ
ence 'for John Quincy Adams, candidate for
President, for a consideration. Clay published
a card in which he pronounced the author of the
story, " whoever he may be, a base and infamous
calumniator, a dastard, a liar, and if he dare un
veil himself and avow his name I will hold him
responsible, as I here admit myself to be, to all
the laws which govern and regulate men of

HENRY GLAY 21
honor." No duel came out of this. Kremer was
a ridiculous person, of whom Daniel Webster,
writing to his brother Ezekiel, in New Hamp
shire, said : " Mr. Kremer is a man with whom
one would think of having a shot about as soon
as with your neighbor, Mr. Simeon Atkinson,
whom he somewhat resembles." And Clay,
eventually having been very much ashamed of
threatening to challenge poor Kremer, subse
quently expressed his regret therefor in these
words : " I owe it to the community to say that
whatever I may have done, or by inevitable cir
cumstances might be forced to do, no man in it
holds in deeper abhorrence than I do that per
nicious practice (of duelling). Condemned as it
must be by the judgment and the philosophy, to
say nothing of the religion, of every thinking
man, it is an affair of feeling about which we
cannot, although we should, reason." Never
theless Clay actually did later than this meet on
the field of battle John Randolph, of Roanoke.
During the celebrated debate on the Panama
Congress, in Adams's administration, Randolph,
with his usual boldness of vituperation, char
acterized the administration, which included
Adams and Clay, as the " coalition of Blifil and
Black George — the combination unheard of until
now of the Puritan with the blackleg." That
Clay should fairly boil over with wrath when
he heard this is not to be wondered at. He chal
lenged Randolph, and the two men met, ex
changed shots, and both missed. Randolph, it is
said, was dressed in a loose flowing coat, and no

22 STATESMEN
one could say where in its voluminous folds
Randolph's spare and attenuated body was dis
posed. A bullet touched the coat. At the second
fire Clay's bullet inflicted a wound in the gar
ment, whereupon Randolph fired his pistol into
the air and said, " I do not fire at you, Mr. Clay,"
and then they shook hands and were again
friends. It should be remembered that all these
things happened in the early part of the present
century when " the code " ruled throughout the
Southern and Western States and a hostile en
counter on the " field of honor " was a much less
notable or even ridiculous affair than it would
be in these later and more peaceful days.
As I have just intimated, when the storms of
slander whirled upon the head of this gallant
" Harry of the West," the charge of gaming was
one of the most effective weapons in the hands
of those who endeavored to beat down the popu
larity of the gallant Kentuckian in the North
ern States. I remember to have seen, when a
lad, a coarse wood-cut with which the New
England States were flooded during the cam
paign of 1844, when Clay and Frelinghuysen
were national candidates against Polk and Dal
las. Clay's alleged vices were held up to public
execration in sharp contrast with the virtues of
Mr. Frelinghuysen, who was an upright Christian
gentleman. The cartoon represented Mr. Clay
seated at a gambling-table surrounded by the
implements of the trade, with bottles, decanters,
and pistols in thick array about him. On the
other side of a narrow partition was a picture

HENRY CLAY 23
of Mr. Frelinghuysen in gown and bands preach
ing to the heathen. There were indeed no limits
to the vulgarity, brutality, and libellousness of
the charges that were heaped upon Mr. Clay's
name. As of duelling, so of card-playing, it was then
common throughout the country, and gaming
for high stakes was not regarded with disfavor,
especially in the Southern and Southwestern
States. Clay was addicted to pleasure and
social amusements. After he had passed the
severe apprenticeship of his studious boyhood,
he seems to have emancipated himself and
thrown himself into the enjoyments of life with
a certain fierce fervor which follows a reaction
from a hard and barren life. William Plumer,
of New Hampshire, who was a member of the
Senate when Clay first took his seat in that body
in 1806, thus set down in his diary a very fair
estimate of the young Kentuckian's character:
" Henry Clay is a man of pleasure, fond of
amusements; he is a great favorite with the
ladies; he is in all parties of pleasure, out al
most every evening; reads but little — indeed,
he said he meant this session should be a tour
of pleasure. He is a man of talents, is eloquent,
but not nice or accurate in his distinctions. He
declaims more than he reasons. He is a gentle
manly and pleasant companion, a man of honor
and integrity." As this tribute comes from a
political opponent, we may be sure that it does
not err on the side of liberality.
In the diary of John Quincy Adams, written

24 STATESMEN
when he, Clay, Albert Gallatin, and others were
Commissioners of the United States at Ghent,
occur these words : " I dined again at the table
d'hote at one. The other gentlemen dined to
gether at four. They sit after dinner and drink
bad wine and smoke cigars, which neither suits
my habits nor my health, and absorbs time
which I can ill spare. I find it impossible, even
with the most r^gid economy of time, to do half
the writing that I ought." Adams was ten years
older than Clay and was brought up in the
ascetic and thin atmosphere of Boston ; and,
with similarly implied censure on another day,
he makes this entry : " Just before rising I heard
Mr. Clay's company retiring from his chamber.
I had left him with' Mr. Russell, Mr. Bentzon,
and Mr. Todd at cards. They parted as I was
about to rise." On this, one of Henry Clay's
biographers, Mr. Schurz, quietly remarks: "John
Quincy Adams played cards too, but it was that
solemn whist which he sometimes went through
with the conscientious sense of performing a
diplomatic duty." In another chapter of Mr.
Adams's diary, Mr. Middleton, of South Carolina,
is introduced as telling the story that Clay neg
lected to oppose a certain bill because "the
last fortnight of the session Clay spent almost
every night at the card-table, and one night
Poindexter had won from him eight thousand
dollars. This discomposed him to such a de
gree that he paid no attention to the business
of the House the remainder of the session. Be
fore it closed, however, he had won back from

HENRY GLAY 25
Poindexter all that he had lost except about
nine hundred dollars." One who knew Clay
very well, Nathan Sargent, long time Commis
sioner of Customs, Washington, says : " When
a candidate for the Presidency Mr. Clay was
denounced as a gambler. He was no more a
gambler than was almost every Southern and
Southwestern gentleman of that day. Play was
a passion with them ; it was a social enjoyment ;
they loved its excitement and they played when
ever and wherever they met, not for the purpose
of winning money from one another, which is
the gambler's motive, but for the pleasure it
gave them." I quote from Mr. Colton, who, in
speaking on this point says : " Mr. Clay never
visited a gambling-house in his life, and was
never seen at a gaming-table set up for that pur
pose. In the early periods of his public career
he played with his equals in society for the ex
citements of the game, but he never allowed a
pack of cards to be in his own house, and no
man ever saw one there. That he was once
in the habit of yielding to the seductive passion
is not more true than that he always con
demned the practice and for the most part
abstained from it." If I have given much space
to this often-repeated charge that Henry Clay
was a gambler, it may be pleaded that to one
who remembers the storm of obloquy which
was hurled over Clay, and all who supported
him, something should be permitted by way of
explanation of the cause of that now historic
commotion.

26 STATESMEN
Clay's first appearance in Congress must have
been significant to the elderly men who held
their seats in the dignified United States Senate.
It does not appear to have been noticed that this
accomplished, self-poised, and confident young
Kentuckian was not yet of legal age as a Sena
tor. As he was born April 12, 1777, and entered
the Senate December 29, 1806, he still lacked
three months and seventeen days of the age of
thirty-three years, which the Constitution of the
United States prescribes as a condition of eligi
bility to the Senate. His first beginnings in his
career as a legislator were characteristic. It has
always been the tradition of the Senate that a
new member should hold his tongue for a year,
except when answering to a roll-call or making
some unimportant motion. Clay immediately
plunged into the debates, as a matter of course.
On the fourth day after he took his seat he of
fered resolutions concerning the circuit courts
of the United States, and followed this up with
sundry important public measures, one of which
was an amendment to the Constitution concern
ing the judicial power of the United States.
With utmost freedom he took part in all the de
bates and astonished the Senators with pungent
sarcasms on men much older than himself. His
first speech was in advocacy of a bill to bridge
the Potomac River at Washington. Other bills
were in the same line of that policy of " internal
improvements " which was so ardently sustained
by Clay throughout his whole Congressional
career.

HENRY GLAY 27
The young republic, still weak and fcxhausted
from its long struggle for independence, was
being harassed by all the first-rate European
powers and occasionally nagged by some of the
smaller ones. The British Government was par
ticularly offensive in its insistence on the right
of search, and American grievances in this direc
tion so multiplied that within a very brief time
over nine hundred ships were seized by the Brit
ish and five hundred and fifty by the French.
American citizens were impressed as British
seamen, and the insolence with which our remon
strances were treated exasperated the young
Republican leaders, of whom Henry Clay was
now the most dashing and brilliant. Madison,
who was President, was a timid and vacillating
old man. Henry Clay, now Speaker of the
House, so arranged the important committees of
that body as to put them under control of the
party anxious and importunate for war with
Great Britain. It is not too much to say that he
fanned the flames of rising indignation and was
ready to proceed to any length to commit the
United States to warlike purposes. He took the
floor of the House to make speeches in favor of
placing at the disposition of the President a
large army. He spoke of war as a certain event,
and pointed out that the " real cause of British
aggression was not to distress an enemy, but to
destroy a rival." When the question was asked,
" What are we to gain by war ? " he replied with
ringing emphasis : " What are we not to lose by
peace ? — commerce, character, a nation's best

28 ,HTATESMEN
treasure, honor." His voice sounded like a clar
ion call throughout the republic. Indignation
meetings were held, resolutions adopted calling
on Congress to take action, and denouncing
Great Britain as an insolent tyrant whose pride
must be lowered. Clay proposed an invasion of
Canada, another siege of Quebec, and an ulti
mate peace dictated at Halifax.
Clay's patriotism, always undoubted and pas
sionate, was now at fever heat. With his magnif
icently dramatic air, he cried : " It is impossible
that this country should ever abandon the gal
lant tars who have won for us such splendid
trophies. Let me suppose that the genius of
Columbia should visit one of them in his op
pressor's prison and attempt to reconcile him to
his forlorn and wretched condition. Should we
say to him in the language of the gentlemen on
the other side, ' Great Britain intends you no
harm ; she did not mean to impress you, but one
of her own subjects having taken you by mis
take, I will remonstrate and try to prevail upon
her by peaceful means to release you, but I can-
, not, my son, fight for you.' If he did not con
sider this mockery, the poor tar would address
her judgment and say : ' You owe me, my coun
try, protection ; I owe you in return obedience.
I am not a British subject ; I am a native of
Massachusetts, where live my aged father, mv
wife, my children. I have faithfully discharged
my duty. Will you refuse to do yours ? ' " The
speech was concluded with these burning words :
" No matter what his vocation, whether he seeks

HENRY GLAY 29
subsistence amid the dangers of the sea or draws
it from the bowels of the earth, or from the hum
blest occupations of mechanic life, wherever the
sacred rights of an American freeman are as
sailed, all hearts ought to unite and every arm
be braced to vindicate his course. . . . But
if we fail, let us fail like men ; lash ourselves to
ovir gallant tars and expire together in one long
struggle, fighting for free trade and seamen's
rights." There was no withstanding this appeal.
The increase of the army was voted by Con
gress and the war spirit rose with rekindled
ardor. It is unnecessary to trace the history of the
War of 1812. After a succession of most brill
iant naval victories which shed great luster
upon the American name, the cause of the re
public began to falter and men talked of peace.
The diplomatic mission undertaken in the sum
mer of 1 8 14 by Adams, Clay, Bayard, Russell,
and Gallatin was to treat with the British Gov
ernment through its agents at Ghent. After a
long and wordy engagement between the com
missioners of Great Britain and the United
States, the terms of peace were finally agreed
upon. Clay throughout these negotiations
showed a certain intuitive knowledge of events
that were occurring behind the scenes and
which were utterly unknown to the world out
side until long afterward. As a fervid and high-
spirited patriot, he was greatly disappointed by
the outcome of the negotiations, and refused to
go to London, where he expected to be still fur-

30 STATESMEN
ther humiliated. But when the news of the
battle of New Orleans (which was fought after
peace had been concluded) reached Europe, his
crest arose once more with pride, and he said,
" Now I can go to England without mortifica
tion." It is a curious incident in Clay's career
that he should have been the most active inciter
of the War of 1812 and yet be compelled, as he
thought, to " eat humble pie " in order to con
clude peace at Ghent, the terms of which he
thought were to be dictated at Halifax. On the
whole, however, he was satisfied, and a year
later, in a debate in the House of Representa
tives, he acknowledged large responsibility for
the declaration of war, alluded to the fact that
the republic had been insulted and outraged by
Great Britain, France, Spain, Denmark, Naples,
and even by the little contemptible power of Al
giers, and in answer to the question, " What have
we gained by war? "he said: "Let any man
look at the degraded condition of his country
before the war, the scorn of the universe, the
contempt of ourselves, and tell me if we have
gained nothing by the war. What is our situa
tion now ? Responsibility and character abroad,
security and confidence at home."
It was in January, 18 16, that Clay became in
volved in the long contest which grew out of
the national bank project. He was liable to a
charge of inconsistency, as he had once opposed
the rechartering of the Bank of the United
States, but was now in favor of that institution.
His critics have said that, according to Clay's ar-

HENRY GLAY 31
guments, the bank was unconstitutional in 1811,
but was constitutional in 18 16, owing to a change
of circumstances. The conflict was long and ex
ceedingly acrimonious. Before it terminated.
Clay was involved in a bitter contest with An
drew Jackson and with his successor to the
Presidency, Martin Van Buren. With charac
teristic self-possession. Clay proposed a radical
change in the payment of members of Congress.
Their compensation was $6 a day for each day's
services. He introduced a bill to change it to
$1,500 a year, the law to apply to the Congress
then in session, which of course would involve
back pay to members then in commission. This
proposition provoked a storm of criticism, and
Clay for a time suffered a temporary eclipse of
his popularity. He was forced to take the stump
in Kentucky and advocate, as was the custom of
the times, his own re-election. In the canvass of
that year (18 16) Clay met in his district an old
and once ardent political friend, a Kentucky
hunter, who expressed his dissatisfaction with
Clay's vote on the compensation bill.
"Have you a good rifle, my friend?" asked
Mr. Clay.
"Yes."."Did it ever flash?"
" It did once."
"And did you throw it away?"
" No ; I picked the flint, tried it again and it
was true."
" Have I ever flashed except this once you
complain of?"

32 STATESMEN
"No.""And will you throw me away?"
" No, no," said the hunter with much emotion,
grasping Clay's hand, "never; I will pick the
flint and try it again."
Returned to Congress and again chosen
Speaker, Clay speedily found himself in an em
barrassing position. He had been a candidate
for the Presidential election in the preceding
November. It turned out that Jackson had nine
ty-nine electoral votes, Adams eighty-four, Craw
ford forty-one, and Clay thirty-seven. No one
having received a clear majority of all the votes
cast, the election was thrown into the House
of Representatives, of which Clay was Speaker.
This was Clay's first great disappointment. He
had hoped to be one of the three higher candi
dates on the list, which' would have made him eli
gible to receive the vote of the House in the can
vass now about to open. Being the fourth in the
list, he was ruled out ; and now he was regarded
as the President-maker. His impulsive tempera
ment naturally felt the keenness of this great
disappointment ; and he did not sustain his defeat
with much composure or fortitude. The friends
of each of the three leading candidates courted
and flattered Clay, who was supposed to hold the
balance of power. His predilections were early
in favor of John Quincy Adams. It is now a
matter of record, although then unknown, that he
had expressed his intention to throw his influ
ence for Adams long before any advances were
made to him by Jackson's friends. This, how-

HENRY GLAY 33
ever, was not revealed to the friends of the other
candidates. As soon as Clay's intentions became
manifest, Jackson's friends charged upon Clay
that he was a party to a corrupt bargain. This
was the foundation of the celebrated " Bargain
and Corruption" scandal which agitated the
country for months and years thereafter. The
assertion of the Jackson men was that Clay had
agreed to support the candidacy of Adams on
condition that he, Clay, should be made Secre
tary of State in the event of Adams's election.
In those days the Secretary of State was usually
regarded as the legitimate successor of the Pres
ident, in whose Cabinet he was first minister.
Adams was elected and Clay became his Secre
tary of State, but in that place he was exceed
ingly uncomfortable, and although his motives
in accepting the portfolio of the State Depart
ment were absolutely pure, his temperament did
not fit him for the routine duties of the office
and he pined for the turbulence and excitement
of the House of Representatives, in which he had
achieved his greatest triumphs as a statesman
and politician. Returning speedily to the House,
he threw himself with great enthusiasm and
spirit into the discussion of burning questions
then animating Congress. Of the more impor
tant matters that engaged his attention then
and previously we should recall his defence of
the Spanish-American republics, his so-called
American system of a protective tariff, internal
improvements (to which he was sincerely and
uncompromisingly devoted), and finally, slavery
3

34 STATESMEN
and the compromise measures growing out of
agitation of the slavery question during his long
service in Congress. He was identified with
many measures intended to compromise with
the extreme and radical views of statesmen of
both parties. Indeed, in his later years his best
efforts were always directed to the adjustment
of differences which seemed wellnigh impossible
of settlement. He was the father of the Mis
souri Compromise,, by which the extension of
slavery north of the northern parallel of 36° 30'
was prohibited, and also of the compromise of
1850, the support of Avhich was so fatal to the
political fortunes of more than one Northern
statesman. This disposition to compromise gave
him the title of " The Great Pacificator."
Through all this strenuous and exciting epoch
in his public life. Clay never forgot the dis
tressed and the oppressed of other lands. His
sympathies went out not only to the Spanish-
American republics, but to Greece in her
struggle for independence, to Hungary, and
even to the enslaved Africans of our own coun
try. He was well called " a Southern man with
Northern principles." When reproached in a
Northern State with being a slaveholder, he
instantly offered to free his slaves if those who
reproached him would undertake their main
tenance, and through all his life he was a con
sistent although possibly mistaken supporter of
the project of colonizing free and emancipated
colored persons in Africa. Up to the date of
his death he was an ardent supporter of the

HENRY GLAY 35
American Colonization Society, and perpetually
referred to it and its machinery as the most
hopeful means for redeeming our country from
the curse of slavery.
The great disappointment of his life was his
defeat in the Presidential election of 1844. There
was reason to suppose that he would have car
ried the State of New York by a small majority,
which would have given him the election, but
the Liberty party, representing the abolition
sentiment of the State, had now become suf
ficiently strong to assert itself and to divide
the vote so that the State cast a majority of
five thousand and eighty votes for James K.
Polk. Clay was deeply mortified at his de
feat and complained that his friends had cru
elly deceived him. His prestige suffered, and
his personal feelings were painfully wounded.
There was no recovery from an overthrow so
overwhelming as this, and his later years were
doubtless clouded by gloomy views of the sin
cerity of human affection, the fallacy of human
hopes, and the gratitude of the republic. He
had said on one occasion that he had " rather
be right than be President." Doubtless, he felt
that he was right, and still he failed to reach
the Presidency. Later, and while he was still
smarting under the sting of what he believed to
be undeserved disgrace, he spoke at Lexington,
Ky., in favor of gradual emancipation. Among
his audience was Abraham Lincoln, who had
journeyed thither from Springfield to hear the
great Whig leader whom he loved so well.

36

STATESMEN

Clay's Tomb at Lexington, Ky.

Lincoln was greatly disappointed with the
speech, which was written out and read and
lacked the spontaneity and fire which Lincoln
had anticipated. At the
close of the meeting, Lin
coln secured an introduc
tion to the great man and
was invited to Ashland.
The disappointment of the
speech was deepened by
his intercourse with Clay.
Long afterward he said of
Clay that though he was
polished in his manners,
hospitable and kindly, he
betrayed a certain con
sciousness of superiority and an almost offen
sive imperiousness. This deeply wounded the
sensitive soul of Lincoln. He felt that Clay
did not regard him or any other person as his
equal. This lesson added to Lincoln's experience
of human nature and was referred to by him in
after life as a disappointment almost as wound
ing as the defeat of Henry Clay for the Presi
dency. The examples of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster
are often cited as proving that America's greatest
statesmen do not reach the Presidency. In the
public career of Clay were four sharp and pain
ful disappointments. As we have already seen,
he was defeated in 1824, when Andrew Jackson
was chosen by the House of Representatives.
Again, in 1840, he hoped to be nominated by the

HENRY GLAY

37

Whig National Convention, but was distanceo
by General William Henry Harrison. He was
actually nominated, but defeated, in 1844, when
Polk was elected. Finally, in 1848, he expected

Henry Clay's Bed, used by him for fifty years,
to receive the nomination of his party convention
at Baltimore, but was again disappointed. Gener
al Taylor, the hero of the Mexican war (a war to
which Clay gave no countenance) being the
nominee. At this point Clay's patience broke
down and he refused to support the nomination

38 STATESMEN
before the people, choosing rather to sulk in his
tent. Henry Clay died in Washington, June 29, 1852,
in the seventy-sixth year of his age, preceding
Webster to the grave only five months. With
lamentation and mourning that filled all the land,
the great leader was borne to his beloved Ken
tucky, where a magnificent monument reared by
the hands of his admirers marks his last resting-
place.

Daniel Webster.

IL
DANIEL WEBSTER.
There are three scenes in the life of Daniel
Webster which may be regarded as marking
three stages in his long and wonderful career :
I. His father's means were limited, and the
narrow circumstances of the family seemed to
restrict his boyish ambitions to the humblest
walk of life ; but his father, without saying a
word to the boy, had resolved that Daniel should
have a college education ; and one day, riding
in the farm wagon to the town where the lad
was to be put under the tutorship of a compe
tent teacher, the father briefly, almost grimly,
communicated his intentions to the boy. Young
Daniel, overcome by the unexpected good fort
une opening before his eyes, laid his face upon
his father's shoulder and burst into tears. The
homely homespun country lad saw before him
the possibilities of a high career.
2. In January, 1830, while he was a United
States Senator from Massachusetts, it fell to his
lot to defend his native New England from the
attacks of a representative Southerner, General
Hayne, of South Carolina, in the Senate. It was
a momentous period in the history of the coun
try. That reply was made at the zenith of Web-

40

STATESMEN

ster's life. It is the place of all others where he
grandly stood forth as a parliamentary orator, a
master of eloquence. The world even now turns
and looks upon that historic scene with awe and
admiration. At this point doubtless culminated
the fame and the intellectual power of Daniel
Webster.

House where Webster was Born at Salisbury (now Franklin), N. H,
3. In May, 1852, Webster, now past his man
ly prime, crippled by an untoward accident,
stood on the grand rostrum of Faneuil Hall, in
Boston, an entrance to which had been previ
ously denied him by the city authorities. He
had not long since lost a part of his great popu
larity in consequence of his course upon the
slavery question, and many of his former friends
had fallen away from him. Whittier had writ-

DANIEL WEBSTER 41
ten of him that sad, bitter rebuke contained in
the poem entitled " Ichabod." Five months
later the great Webster was laid to rest by the
sea he loved so well.
The condition of the country at the time of
Webster's boyhood (he was born in 1782) was
one of extreme poverty and bareness of the lux
uries of life. In one of his later addresses he
said : " It did not happen to me, gentlemen, to
be born in a log cabin, but my elder brothers and
sisters were born in a log cabin and raised amidst
the snowdrifts of New Hampshire at a period
so early that when the smoke first rose from
its rude chimney and curled over the frozen hills
there was no similar evidence of a white man's
habitation between it and the settlements on the
rivers of Canada." School facilities were few
and far between, and sometimes it was necessary
for the lad to follow the schoolmaster from ham
let to hamlet, boarding away from home, in order
that he might secure the primitive education
thus put within his reach. The hard and barren
soil of New Hampshire did not yield rich re
turns to the farmers who struggled for a living
in the region of the " frozen hills " of which he
spoke. His school-days were days of privation,
and yet he made great advances in acquiring
knowledge, and was considered the quickest boy
in school. His memory was astonishingly re
tentive, and he seemed to have considered that
a book was not merely to be read, but to be
committed to memory. He tells in his diary of
his gaining the reward of a jackknife offered to

42 STATESMEN
the boy who should be able to recite the great
est number of verses from the Bible. When his
turn came he arose in his place and reeled off
verses until the schoolmaster was fain to cry
" Hold ! enough ! " A cotton handkerchief, on
which was printed the Constitution of the United
States in colored letters, gave him the means of
reading and fixing in his mind forever the words
of that famous instrument. He was reckoned in
the sparsely settled neighborhood as a prodigy
of learning, and his delicate frame, big eyes, and
musical speech were famed throughout the
region. Of that period of his life he says : " I
read what I could get to read, went to school
when I could, and when not at school was a
farmer's youngest boy, not good for much for
want of health and strength, but expected to do
something." He tended the saw-mill and " did
the chores " of the house and farm.
His brother Ezekiel and himself divided be
tween them the humble labors of the home.
Ezekiel, who was Daniel's best-beloved friend
and brother, usually took the laboring oar.
There is an anecdote of the father calling out to
the boys who were playing in the barn, " What
are you doing, Daniel ? " His reply was, " Noth
ing." " And what are you doing, Ezekiel ? "
" Helping Daniel." And so through life it was
Ezekiel who helped Daniel. On another occasion
the two lads were allowed to go to a fair in a
neighboring town, each furnished with a little
pocket money. When they returned in the even
ing Daniel was overflowing with animal spirits

DANIEL WEBSTER

43

and enjoyment. Ezekiel was silent. The mother,
inquiring as to their day's doings, finally asked
Daniel what he had done with his money.
" Spent it," was the reply. " And what did you
do with yours, Ezekiel ? " " Lent it to Daniel,"
said the elder brother. As one of his biog-

Webster when '=> Young Man.

raphers has said, " that answer sums up the story
of Webster's home life in childhood. Everyone
was giving or lending to Daniel of their money,
of their time, their activity, their love and affec
tion. This petting was partially due to Web
ster's health, but it was also in great measure

44 , STATESMEN
owing to his nature. He was one of those rare
and fortunate beings who without exertion
draw to themselves the devotion of other people
and are always surrounded by men and women
eager to do and suffer for them." In manhood
he loved his friends with a love passing that of
woman; his great passionate and affectionate
nature knit to him with bands of steel his chosen
friends, and up to the day of his death some of
these devoted and worshipful ones ministered to
his wants and his comfort and his luxury with
unstinting hand.
In his biography of Webster, Mr. George T.
Curtis, speaking of his own return to Boston for
a few hours, while Webster's life was slowly
ebbing away, says : " A gentleman rang at my
door and called me out. As I met him he placed
in my hand a thick roll of bank-notes, desiring
me to convey it to Mr. Webster. When I asked
him from whom it came, he mentioned the name
of a venerable and wealthy citizen of Boston,
who had learned that Mr. Webster was dying,
and who had said that at such a time there
ought to be no want of money in Mr. Webster's
house." While we applaud the generosity of the
giver, it is impossible to restrain a feeling of pro
found regret that anything should have made
this charity even apparently needful.
In due course of time he went to Dartmouth
College, where his rustic dress and manners pro
voked the ridicule of his new associates. He
found it difficult, if not impossible, to take part
in some of the exercises of the school, such as

DANIEL WEBSTER 45
declamation and so on, in Avhich he was expect
ed to engage ; but he speedily developed a rare
faculty for absorbing knowledge, and not only
became proficient in Latin and Greek, but read
ily acquired ancient and modern history, and be
came familiar with the drift of public events in
this country and in Europe. So great was his
reputation in the college and its neighborhood
as a speaker and writer, that the people of the
town of Hanover invited him to deliver an ora
tion on July 4, 1800. He was then eighteen years
old. This was his first public performance
which was printed. It is characterized by the
high-flown language of the sophomore, and was
doubtless received with every demonstration of
admiration and applause. He denounced France,
then unfriendly to the United States and under
the domination of Bonaparte, whom the young
orator styled " the gasconading pilgrim of
Egypt." He was graduated in due course in
August, 1 801, without either special credit or
special mention. The straitened circumstances
of the family made it necessary that he should
at once begin to support himself. While in col
lege he had added to his slender income in ev
ery possible way, and he now accepted the post
of school-teacher in the town of Fryeburg, Me.,
considering himself a lucky young fellow to
have secured the job.
Ezekiel Webster, who appears to have been a
man of extraordinary parts, manifested a dispo
sition to follow in his younger brother's foot
steps. After many anxious family councils, it

Webster in Fishing Costume,
i^Froin Peter Harvey's ¦' Reminiscences and Anecdotes oj Daniel Wedster.")

DANIEL WEBSTER 47
was decided that this step might be taken, the
good mother of the house saying, in answer to
the remonstrances of the father, " I will trust the
boys." Daniel's life at Fryeburg was a hard one.
The home farm was heavily mortgaged, and
Ezekiel, who was now in college, was no longer
the prop and stay as he had been of the house.
Daniel manfully carried his share of the burdens,
and out of school-hours copied deeds and other
legal papers, an occupation which he detested, in
order that he might give all his salary to his
brother preparing for college.
Ezekiel Webster lived to attain eminence in
the profession of the law. He was a man of high
talent and much professional learning ; he was
in person and physique not unlike his brother,
the " godlike Daniel." He died very suddenly
in the court-room, at Concord, N. H., while ad
dressing a jury. He was then only forty-nine
years old, and had he lived would have doubt
less reached great fame as a lawyer. Years
later, when time had so assuaged his bitter grief
that he could speak tranquilly of his brother's
death, Daniel Webster said of him who was
gone : " He appeared to me the finest human
form that I ever laid eyes on. I saw him in his
coffin— a tinged cheek, a complexion clear as the
heavenly light."
Daniel Webster was a good teacher. His dig
nity, even temper, and firmness commanded the
respect of his pupils, and wherever he went he
produced an impression upon those whom he
met. Those who could in later years recall his

48 STATESMEN
young manhood in Fryeburg, invariably spoke
of his imposing presence and his wonderful
eyes. He was known in the village as "All-
Eyes." He devoured with keen zest every book
upon which he could lay his hands, and in a sin
gle winter exhausted the resources of the little
circulating library of Fryeburg. His memory
seems to have been like iron ; an impression
once made was ineradicable. On his death-bed
he quoted a phrase, " The Jackdaw in the Stee
ple," from a poem of Cowper's, which none
about him could recall, and the strangeness of
which led some of them to suppose his mind
was wandering.
It is impossible to think of Webster at any
period of his life as other than the grand, im
posing figure that looms up in history and in the
memory of the few who survive him. His form
in his manhood was tall, massive, and command
ing ; his face was rugged, and his overhanging
brows were projected over deep and cavernous
eyes in which gloomed and glowed a wonderful
tropical light. There was, indeed, about his
presence and in his habit of thought a certain
Oriental flavor that seemed strangely foreign to
New England and to the cold and inhospitable
climate in which he was reared.
The costume in which he generally appeared
on public occasions has become historic. He
wore a dress-coat of blue cloth, with brass but
tons ; a buff waistcoat cut low and showing an
expanse of white shirt-bosom, and on his nether
limbs trousers of black cloth. On these occasions.

DANIEL WEBSTER 49
too, he wore low-cut shoes and white stockings,
and about his neck was swathed a white lawn tie
in many folds, as was the custom of the time, and
over this was turned his high collar. In this
garb his portrait has been painted many times,
and this is the outward Webster that comes to
the mental vision of every man who ever saw
him in public. It is impossible to conceive of
him as being at any time and under any circum
stances a trivial or undignified person. He
always was on dress-parade. He was always
statuesque, and his was always a figure to compel
respect. It was said of him that when a stranger
he passed through the streets of Liverpool, Eng
land, casual wayfarers looked after him and said,
" That must be a king ; " and on one occasion
when with a friend he had had sudden occasion
to enter a New Haven bar-room, the keeper of the
place, startled and astonished by the grandeur of
Webster's appearance, said breathlessly, " That
man ought to be President at the very least."
Yet the testimony of his intimates shows that
his disposition was playful, and we know that he
took great delight in the smallest details of house
and home keeping. He had an immense fund of
humor. He was fond of the pleasures of the table
and chose his viands and his wines with anxious
and appreciative care. While he was Secretary
of State, and an important treaty — that which
settled the Northeastern boundary question —
was coming to a vote in the Senate, he paused
-in the midst of the burdens of State and wrote a
letter to his farmer in New England, giving ex-
4

50 STATESMEN
plicit directions about the care of certain salt
hay, the building of a piggery, and other similar
matters. There are extant many letters giving charm
ing glimpses of the man in undress, as we may
say. One of these is addressed to John Taylor,
who had charge of his farm in Franklin, N. H.
It was written just after Webster's famous 7th
of March speech, delivered in 1852, when the
great Senator was overwhelmed with the bitter
ness of the political contest then raging, not only
about him in Washington, but all over the coun
try. Thus he begins : " John Taylor. Go ahead.
The heart of the winter is broken and before the
first day of April all your land may be plowed.
Buy the oxen of Captain Marston if you think
the price fair. Pay for the hay. I send you a
check for $160 for these two objects. Put the
great oxen in a condition to be turned out to be
fattened. You have a good horse team and I
think in addition to this four oxen and a pair of
four-year-old steers will do your work."
After giving directions of this kind with great
minuteness and admonishing Taylor that he
wants " no pennyroyal crops," and that his
mother's garden must be kept in the best order
at any cost, he turns to politics, as if it were im
possible to keep his thoughts out of the com
motion going on about him, and says :
" There are some animals that live best in the
fire, and there are some men who delight in heat,
smoke, combustion and even general conflagra
tion. They do not value the things which make

DANIEL WEBSTER 51
peace ; they enjoy only controversy, contention,
and strife. Have no communion with such per
sons either as neighbors or politicians. You have
no more right to say that slavery ought not to
exist in Virginia than a Virginian has to say that
slavery ought to exist in New Hampshire. This
is a question left to every State to decide for
itself, and if we mean to keep the States together
we must leave to every State this power of de
ciding for itself. . . . John Taylor, you are a
free man ; you possess good principles, you have
a large family to rear and provide for by your
labor. Be thankful for the government which
does not oppress you, which does not bear you
down by excessive taxation, but which holds out
to you and to yours the hope of all the bless
ings which liberty, industry, and security may
give. John Taylor, thank God morning and
evening that you are born in such a country.
John Taylor, never write me another word upon
politics." Webster, through all his life, was easily in
fluenced by others, especially when those others
had won his confidence and affection. His con
duct in the matter of the lucrative court-clerk
ship offered him in 1804, when he most needed
money, was a good example of this trait. His
brother Ezekiel was then manfully fighting his
way to college ; Daniel was occasionally earning a
little money in the law office of Mr. Christopher
Gore, of Boston, when the judges of the Court
of Common Pleas, in which his father practised
in New Hampshire, offered Daniel the place of

52 STATESMEN
clerk at a salary of $1,500 a year. To the
young law student this was a princely income ;
it would be equal to five or ten thousand dollars
in these days. That income would enable him
to smooth Ezekiel's road to the hill of learning,
lift the home mortgage and lighten the labors of
his father's lasst years. He joyfully prepared
to return to New Hampshire and enter upon
his profitable and welcome duties. To his in
tense astonishment and disappointment, Mr.
Gore coldly expressed his disapproval of the
change. He pointed out the danger that he
might be removed at any time by the favor of
the judges, that the salary might be reduced, and
that it led to nothing, and would block any
great career that might open before him. Dazed
and dumbfounded by this unexpected presenta
tion of the case, Webster reluctantly admitted
its justness, and, much to the amazement of his
father, declined the post. It was well. Never
theless, even the narrowing labors of that small
office could not have long crippled or hedged in
the genuis of Daniel Webster.
His first great legal argument was that in the
celebrated Dartmouth College case which was
argued in 1818 before the United States Supreme
Court. As a lawyer, he had a certain divine in
stinct to seize upon the points of any case which
was committed to him. On one occasion an im
portant lawsuit was put in his hands by a firm
of lawyers to argue before the United States
Supreme Court. The briefs in the case were
sent to him in Washington by the hand of a

DANIEL WEBSTER

53

junior member of the law firm, and when Web
ster looked the papers over he said : "And is this
all?" The younger man said timidly: "There
is another point which I have presented to the
firm, but which they thought not material," and
then he stated the case. Webster's eyes glowed
and he said : " My dear sir, that is the point ; " and
on this he won the case. The Dartmouth Col
lege case was one in which the Legislature of the

Webster's Home at Marshfield, Mass.
State of New Hampshire had interfered with
the interior government of the college and had
attempted to change its course of direction.
Webster's contention was that " the principle in
our constitutional jurisprudence which regards
a charter of a private corporation as a contract
and places it under the protection of the Consti
tution of the United States debarred the Legisla
ture from interfering." The decision in the case,
which was made February, 1819, affirmed th.e
ground taken by Webster and established a prec
edent in law which was of the highest importance.

54 ,STA TESMEN
It cannot be said that as a jury lawyer Web
ster always relied upon the law in the case. In
a celebrated murder trial in which he appeared
for the prosecution in Salem, Mass., in 1830,
he was said to have fairly terrified the jury in
to conviction. Captain White, a retired and
wealthy sea-captain of Salem, had been mur
dered in his bed. J. F. Knapp and others as ac
cessories were accused of the crime. It was in
this trial that he made a wonderful argument in
which he described the circumstances of a mur
der, the inmost feelings of the slayer and his
stealthy escape. In his address to the jury oc
curs the celebrated passage, when, speaking of
the crime of murder, he said : " It betrays his dis
cretion, it breaks down his courage, it conquers
his prudence. When suspicions from without
begin to embarrass him and the net of circum
stance to entangle him the fatal secret struggles
with still greater violence to burst forth. It
must be confessed, it will be confessed ; there
is no refuge from confession but suicide, and
suicide is confession."
So, in the Dartmouth College case, although
that was not, as one might well suppose, a cause
with which to move an audience profoundly, it
is true of Webster that those who heard his clos
ing sentences listened with faces wet with tears.
Professor Chauncey Goodrich, of Yale College,
who heard this remarkable speech and wrote an
account of it, says that Webster closed with these
words : " Sir, you may destroy this little insti
tution ; it is weak ; it is in your hands. I know

DANIEL WEBSTER 55
it is one of the lesser lights in the literary hori
zon of our country. You may put it out. But
if you do so, you must carry through your
work. You must extinguish, one after another,
all those greater lights of science which for
more than a century have thrown their radiance
over our land. It is, sir, as I have said, a small
college. And yet there are those who love
it." " Here," says Professor Goodrich, " the feel
ings he had thus far succeeded in keeping
down broke forth. His lips quivered ; his firm
cheeks trembled with emotion ; his eyes were
filled with tears ; his voice choked, and he
seemed struggling to the utmost to gain that
mastery over himself which might save him
from an unmanly burst of feeling.
The whole seemed mingled throughout with the
recollection of father, mother, brother, and all
the privations and trials through which he had
made his way into life. Everyone saw that it
was wholly unpremeditated, a pressure on his
heart, which sought relief in words and tears."
It was then that the great loving heart of Web
ster spoke in most moving eloquence.
It was as an occasional orator that Webster
achieved his greatest fame, possibly with the
single exception of his celebrated reply to
Hayne. The oration at Plymouth, Mass., de
livered on the two hundreth anniversary of its
settlement, December 22, 1820, was perhaps the
first of his greatest oratorical discourses. The
first Bunker Hill oration, delivered in June,
1825, was a work of the greatest splendor. Mag-

56 ,STA TESMEN
nificent in conception, luminous with the grand
est imagery, flowing like the full volume of a
river, it at once commanded the attention of the
entire nation. It was spoken, it would appear,
not so much to the few thousands that clustered
around the foundations of Bunker Hill monu
ment as to the republic, to posterity. This
was one of the first, if not the first, of the great
orations of Webster that took their place in the
literature of the country and were embodied in
the text-books of the schools for the inspira
tion of the youth of the republic. The passage
beginning " Venerable men, you have come
down to us from a former generation," it is said,
so thrilled the audience that one could see the
play of light and shade as it swept over the sea
of upturned faces before the speaker. The im
pression which this speech made upon those who
heard it was probably more vivid than that left
by any other of his later occasional orations.
Another splendid display of his eloquence was
the eulogy on Adams and Jefferson, delivered in
Faneuil Hall, Boston, 1826. Of that speech, the
passage which purports to be a speech delivered
by John Adams when the signing of the Decla
ration of Independence was under discussion, it
is explained that Webster deliberately invented
the whole. Many school-boys have declaimed
the immortal words beginning " Sink or swim,
live or die, survive or perish," undef the im
pression that these were the real words of
John Adams ; but Webster never pretended
that they were. In a letter to an inquiring

DANIEL WEBSTER 57
friend, written in 1846, Webster said: "The
Congress of the Revolution sat with closed
doors; its proceedings were made known to the
public from time to time by printing its journal,
but the debates were not published. So far as I
know, there is not existing in print or manu
script the speech or any part or fragment of the
speech delivered by Mr. Adams on the question
of the Declaration of Independence." Webster
goes on to say : " The speech was written by me
in my house in Boston the day before the de
livery of the discourse in Faneuil Hall. A poor
substitute I am sure it would appear to be if we
could now see the speech actually made by Mr.
Adams on that transcendentally important oc
casion." It has been said by some of the indiscreet and
intemperate admirers of Webster's genius that
many if not all of his greatest orations were com
posed upon the spur of the moment and that his
greatest efforts were purely extemporaneous and
suggested by the circumstances immediately
about him. I have somewhere seen an anecdote
to this effect : His oration on Alexander Hamil
ton was delivered at a public dinner in New
York, and when he approached that passage in
which he used the memorable words applied to
Hamilton, " He smote the rock of the national
resources and abundant streams of revenue
gushed forth," etc., in making a gesture, the
orator broke a drinking-glass and cut his finger,
and as he slowly wrapped a napkin about the
bleeding wound', the figure of the gushing stream

58

STATESMEN

was suggested by the incident. This is clearly
a misconception, as Webster had in his mind the
figure of Moses smiting the rock in the wilder
ness. And we have the as
surance of those who knew
him best, Mr. George T.
Curtis and Mr. Peter Har
vey, that all his great fo
rensic and oratorical efforts
were the result of care
ful preparation. Webster
himself said of his reply to
Hayne, that as a matter of
fact that speech had been
lying in his mind and in the
pigeon-holes of his desk for
more than a year. It was
prepared for another oc
casion, but was not deliv
ered ; and Webster declared that if Mr. Hayne
had intended to make a speech to fit that which
Webster had already, he could not have come
nearer to it than he did. Once when asked if
certain of his speeches were delivered at brief
notice, he opened his great eyes with an expres
sion of astonishment and said : " Young man,
there is no such thing as extemporaneous acqui
sition." Webster spoke extemporaneously con
stantly while he was in the Senate, and he in
tended to convey by this remark that knowledge
could not be acquired without study, and that
study was necessary to acquire the knowledge
which informed all of his speeches.

DANIEL WEBSTER 59
It has been said, too, that in oratory Webster
was a sculptor rather than a painter. This
seems a too subtile definition. Certainly many
of his orations glow with light and color, and
his powers of description were often simply pic
torial. In his reply to Hayne he pictures the
patriots of Massachusetts and South Carolina
marching shoulder to shoulder as they went
through the Revolution, or standing hand in
hand around the administration of Washington,
and in the wonderful peroration of that great ad
dress, as he raised hiseyes to the glass skylight
of the Senate chamber and saw the colors of the
Republic waving from the flagstaff, he ex
claimed : " Let their last feeble and lingering
glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the
republic, now known and honored throughout
the earth, still full-high advanced, its arms and
trophies streaming in their original lustre, not
a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star ob
scured." This was full of color.
Webster loved color and bigness and vast
ness. Among all his creatures on his farm none
were so dear to him as his great oxen, and in his
last days he had these slow-moving animals
driven up to his window where he could look
at them, hear their breathings and gaze into
their great eyes as he reclined within. The
illimitable sea with its mysterious vagueness,
Niagara with its terrific downpour and its re
sounding roar, and the great peaks of the White
Mountains, all moved him profoundly. The ca
thedrals of Europe and the enormous bulks of

60 STATESMEN
masonry that he saw in England seemed to have
impressed him more than anything else he be
held. These appealed to his sense of grandeur ;
their mere greatness may be said to be akin to
the somewhat grandiose quality of his own dis
position. He was always monumental ; even his
familiar talk was pervaded with a certain unex
pectedness of illustration that was most original.
On one occasion when the Senate had had an
all-night session and the Senators were doz
ing in their chairs, one who sat near Webster,
aroused by the noise of the janitor opening the
shutters in the upper part of the great room,
said : " What is that — are they letting in the
day-light?" "They are letting out the dark
ness," was Webster's reply in his deepest, grum-
mest, bass voice, as he nodded in his chair.
As to his public life it is only necessary to re
call these dates: He was first chosen a repre
sentative to the lower house of Congress from
the Portsmouth,. N. H., district, and took his
seat in May, 1813, while the young republic was
still engaged in the war with Great Britain.
Two years later he was re-elected, and at the
end of this his second term he retired from public
office and moved to Boston, where he sought and
obtained an enlargement of his already lucrative
law practice. It was said that at this time he
had the amplest income of any lawyer in the
United States — $20,000 — which was a great sum
for those days, being named as the average of
his earnings. In 1822 he was again elected to
Congress as a representative from the Boston

DANIEL WEBSTER 61
district. He continued in the House of Repre
sentatives until 1827, when he was chosen United
States Senator from Massachusetts for the term
of six years. He was re-elected in 1833 and in
1839, but retired from the Senate in 1841 to ac
cept the office of Secretary of State under Presi
dent Harrison. When John Tyler succeeded to
the Presidency, after the death of General Har
rison, Mr. Webster was the only member of the
Harrison Cabinet to remain in office, and in
1842 he concluded the famous Ashburton treaty,
which defined the Northeastern boundary be
tween the United States and Canada. He re
tired from the State Department shortly after
and remained in private life until 1845, when
again he was returned to the Senate by the State
of Massachusetts and remained a member of
that body during the Mexican war and the ad
ministration of President Taylor. When Taylor
was succeeded by Fillmore, on the death of the
former, in 1850, Mr. Webster again entered the
Cabinet as Secretary of State and held that
office up to the day of his death.
It is probable that Webster's ambition to reach
the Presidency was kindled during the exciting
period that followed his great speech in reply to
Hayne, when he was offered much applause.
This was in 1830. Ten years later he was a for
midable competitor for the Whig nomination
which was carried off by General Harrison.
Again, in 1844, he seemed to come near realizing
his hopes, but was defeated by Henry Clay.
Once more, in 1848, he contested the nomination

62 STATESMEN
at Baltimore and was confessedly and bitterly
disappointed by the nomination of General Scott.
In all these cases We aster's chagrin and dis
appointment were doubtless very great, but it
was not until repeated failures had somewhat
soured his naturally sweet and genial disposition
that he made open demonstration of his disgust.
He did not hesitate to say that one of these
nominations was not fit to be made, and that
another successful candidate was merely the rep
resentative of " availability." As Secretary of
State his name will always be identified with
several events of great importance in the his
tory of the republic. His settlement of the
Northeastern boundary question, his attitude
towara General Jackson in the great United
States bank war, his letter to Mr. Hulseman,
the Austrian ambassador, concerning the Hun
garian rebellion, his management of the case
of the steamer Caroline, and other matters
growing out of our ticklish relations with Can
ada, are among the points which stand out prom
inently in his career as a minister of state.
In debate Webster was not only dignified, but
urbane and kindly disposed and chivalrous tow
ard those engaged against him. He never
descended to personalities, never took unfair
advantage of an adversary, and never resorted
to any tricks of sophistry to confuse an oppo
nent. In one of his letters from England, speak
ing of his visit to the British Parliament, he
said : " I have liked some of the speeches very
well ; they generally show excellent temper, po-

DANIEL WEBSTER 63
liteness, and mutual respect among the speak
ers. When, shortly after his famous 7th of March
speech, 1850, he returned to Massachusetts, his
friends went through the form of asking the
Board of Aldermen for the use of Faneuil Hall.
To their infinite consternation and wrath that
favor was denied. The persons composing a
majority of the Board of Aldermen belonged
to a peculiar political combination known as
the Coalitionists. Webster's 7th of March
speech was by them believed to be a bid for
Southern support in his coming campaign for
the Presidential nomination. It is true that
for the first time in his life he appeared to have
forsaken his principles and was now disposed
to temporize with the slave power. He had
lost favor in New England, and throughout
the North his speech on the compromise meas
ures of that year had been received with
mingled incredulity and scorn. But no words
can express the indignation of the stanch Whigs
of Boston, who worshipped Webster as an idol,
when it was suddenly made known that the
doors of Faneuil Hall were closed against this
demi-god. He spoke, however, to a great throng
that gathered about the hotel where he was
stopping, and unconsciously added fuel to the
flames by making use of one or two unfortunate
phrases, which were picked up and commented
upon by a hostile press. One of these was that
Massachusetts men must " conquer their preju
dices" and support the Fugitive Slave law, a

64 STATESMEN
measure then regarded by the people whom he
addressed with the bitterest execration. The
use of Faneuil Hall was subsequently tendered
to him by the city government in the most ob
sequious manner ; but his engagements made it
impossible for him to speak at that time, and his
last appearance there was one year later. In the
meantime he had not publicly spoken in Boston,
and the belief that he would take occasion now to
refer to last year's denial of the privileges of the
hall drew together a great crowd. It was past
two o'clock in the afternoon when Webster, broken
with the cares of state, harassed by infinite dis
appointment, oppressed by the sense of declin
ing power and popularity, and hampered by a
lameness resulting from a recent accident, rose
to speak; but instead of addressing himself to
any discussion of the event which was upper
most in men's minds — his previous exclusion from
Faneuil Hall — he contented himself by saying:
" This is Faneuil Hall — open," and passed on to
the consideration of the state of the country and
to other matters very remote from those which
oppressed the mind of the people. A practical
New Englander, standing in the crowd, said
" that word ' open ' weighed about five tons."
When he spoke in front of his hotel, he said :
" Break up the Whig party ! And what will be
come of Me ? " Those who heard this portentous
question, for a moment seemed to think that a tre
mendous disaster hung over the nation as he thus
spoke. The end of the world seemed to be nigh.
Although Webster has long since been dead,

DANIEL WEBSTER 65
controversy over his attitude on several impor
tant political questions of his day still is liable to
start up at any time. Was his course on the
tariff statesmanlike ? Did he sacrifice principle
for personal expediency when the slavery com
promises of 1850 came up for discussion ? It has
been argued in his behalf that as New England
was not in favor of a protective tariff in 1826,
and was in favor of it a few years later, Web
ster was entirely justified in changing sides as
his constituents changed. This was not exactly
harmonious with his contention that he was an
independent- Senator — independent of his con
stituents to a certain degree. It remains true
that he changed sides on the tariff question
within the space pf two years.
On the slavery question his attitude was still
less satisfactory. It is impossible to resist the
impression that Webster's inclination to tempo
rize was due to his unconquerable desire for a
Presidential nomination. No living man had de
nounced the institution of American slavery in
words more bitter and burning than his. He
had studiously refrained from any appearance of
meddling with slavery in the States in which it
already existed. But he had urged that its ex
tension must not be thought of. Yet, when the
compromise measures of 1850 were up, he was
willing to support the Fugitive Slave law and to
leave the question of slavery in the new Terri
tories to the laws of nature. This was the funda
mental of the 7th of March speech— a speech
which revolted New England against him.
5

66 STATESMEN
There is one phase of Webster's character
which cannot ' be evaded in any biographical
sketch or discussion of his career. His income,
as I have said, was at times very great ; it might
have been greater ; but in any event, whatever
his earnings may have been, it is clear that he
was incapable of husbanding his resources and
of keeping out of debt. After he went to Bos
ton he was always in debt. His friends, who
were many and devoted, were constantly called
upon to supply the deficiences of his bank ac
count. Even in his youth he was indifferent to
debt, and in his later years this indifference in
creased beyond all reason. He not only never
saved, but he lived beyond his means. He loved
handsome things, a fine library, great herds of
cattle, a noble estate, and an ample domain. He
was accused by his enemies of selling his influence
for gain. Doubtless these accusations were un
founded, but his reputation for thriftlessness and
debt-incurring probably gave ground for sus
picion with many who would have liked to think
well of him. Even in his last days, when he was
ill and should have been taking his ease, he ac
cepted a large fee in the celebrated Goodyear
india-rubber litigation because he was in debt.
" This fee," he said, " I must have, for it will
pay fifteen thousand dollars of my debts, and
that is what I am striving to do ; it is what, if
my life is spared, I mean to do. If I can pay my
debts I shall die in peace, a happy man." But
he died insolvent. The trusts which he made in
his will of property and money, which for him

DANIEL WEBSTER 67
had no real existence, were undertaken by his
friends who, when he lay in his tomb at Marsh
field, discharged obligations and prosperously
administered his estate. A day or two before
he died he said : " I should like to provide some
thing for my family and not leave them to the
cold charity of the world, but Providence guides
and overrules ; I cannot help it and therefore I
submit to it." There is something profoundly
pathetic in these words of the great man. It was
lamentable that he should have been so left that
his last days should have been embittered by
thoughts of ¦ poverty. He was incapable of sav
ing, large though his means were ; but it should
be added that his bounty was as broad and gen
erous as his personal desires. He was a spend
thrift, and he gave as ungrudgingly to others as
to the gratification of his own appetites and
passions. '
It has been said of him that he was a mag
nificent animal. On this phase of his character
we need not look. It is enough to know that he
was a transcendent genius, a great power in the
land, a defender of the nationality of the States, an
unerring expounder of the Federal Constitution,
and unalterably devoted to the perpetuity and
integrity of the Union. In his last hours we see
him lying in the darkness and seclusion of his
house by the sea at Marshfield, his large, sad
eyes turning to look through the silent watches
of the night upon the light that showed the flag
of his country waving from the masthead of a
little shallop moored by the shore.

68

STATESMEN

True to his dignified habits of thought and or
atorical expression, feven in those last hours he
gathered his family and friends about him and
discoursed of his relations to his God, of his love
and affection to his family, and of the immortal
ity of the -soul. After a moment of silence, he
roused himself and looking eagerly around asked :
" Have I — wife, son, doctor, friends, are you all
here ? — have I on this occasion said anything un
worthy of Daniel Webster? " Dramatic and dig
nified to the last, he said but little more. Past
midnight, when it was supposed he would never
speak again, he roused himself with the memor
able words, " I still live." From this he sank by
slow degrees, and when the bright autumnal
Sunday morning of October 24, 1852, dawned
goldenly upon the shore, the bells of Marsh
field told to listening ears that a great man was
dead.

John C Calhoun.

in.
JOHN C. CALHOUN.
There were three bright particular stars
shining in the political sky of the American
republic during the first half of the nineteenth
century. Each burned with a lustre of his own.
Calhoun, Clay, and Webster formed this con
stellation. The genius of John C. Calhoun
shone with the cold, clear frosty starlight of
a Northern atmosphere. Although Calhoun was
a Southron born and bred, there was nothing
tropical in his temperament or his character.
His logic was pitiless and cold, his reasoning im
placable, his intellect calm.
There is something melancholy, too, about his
career. He left very little material for a per
sonal biography, and not much is known con
cerning his individuality and private life. The
fire of his genius burned itself out in a hope
less defence of the darling institution of slavery,
and he died just as the fabric which he had so
painfully reared was beginning to topple to its
fall. It is needless at this late day to make any ar
gument to prove the intellectual greatness of Cal
houn. His place in the great triumvirate has
been fixed by the muse of history and by the

70

STATESMEN

concurrent opinion of more than one generation.
No breath of slander ever stained his name, and
though he had ambitious dreams of his arriving
at the highest office in the gift of the American
people, his course was singularly free of even
the semblance of self-seeking ; and it does not

Calhoun in Early Life.
appear that he was ever swerved from the line
of obvious duty by any anxiety for the Presi
dential office and its opportunities, honors, and
allurements. The fatal defect in his moral and
mental equipment was the hallucination that
governed it. He believed in the inmost of his
being that slavery was right and good, only

JOHN C. GALHOUN 71
good, and that slavery as it then existed in the
domestic institutions of the South could live
there and in the territories to be acquired, com
patible with the Federal Union and as undis
turbed (if men did well), as any of the humblest
and least important domestic concerns of either
section of the Union. At that time Seward
had not published his startling statement that
there was an irrepressible conflict between the
two systems of labor. Lincoln had not pro
claimed the doctrine that the Union could not
exist half slave and half free. Calhoun spent
seven years of his early manhood in the North
— four years at Yale College and three at the
law school of Litchfield, Ct. Yet in that time
he failed to gain any clear idea of the temper
of the Northern people on the slavery ques
tion or to discern that they had any moral ideas
whatever on the problem that was to be the
one great burden of his mature life and his old
age. He was a young lawyer just beginning to
practice at the bar at Abbeville, S. C, when
the first mutterings of the war with England
(1812) began to be heard. He was an ardent,
youthful patriot when the bloody affair of the
Chesapeake and the Shannon, off the coast of
New England, occurred, in 1807, and he was
one of the committee of citizens of South Car
olina to draw up an indignant protest against
Jthat outrage upon the seas. He was twenty-nine
years old when, in 181 1, he first took his seat
in the lower house of Congress, to which he

72 STATESMEN
had been elected and which met in special ses
sion in the crisis of the last great struggle be
tween the republic and Great Britain. Of
his private life we know very little. He seems
to have destroyed much of that variety of docu
ment which is known after a marl's death as his
" literary remains." His correspondence, memo
randa, and other private papers were bequeathed
to a friend living in Virginia, under certain re
strictions, and it is said that during the War
of the Rebellion much of this accumulation
was lost or destroyed. He was a planter and
a slave-owner, and his estate at Fort Hill, S. C,
was well managed and prosperous. His slaves
were well treated and they came to him as
an umpire, judge, and friend. A rigid justice
characterized his management and regulated
all his doings with the highest and the low
est. One biographer says that " his counte
nance at rest was strikingly marked by decision
and firmness ; in conversation or when speak
ing, it became highly animated and expressive.
His large, dark, brilliant, penetrating eyes
strongly impressed all who encountered their
glances. When addressing the Senate he stood
firm, erect, accompanying his delivery with an
angular gesticulation. His manner of speaking
was energetic, ardent, and rapid, and marked by
a solemn earnestness which inspired a strong be
lief in his sincerity and deep conviction. He
very rarely indulged in figures of speech, and
seldom left any doubt as to his meaning." He
appears to have been utterly destitute of either

74 STATESMEN
wit or humor. Nathan Sargent says of him :
" Able as Mr. Calhoun certainly was, he found
an antagonist in Mr. Clay too adroit and ready
for him. He required time to prepare his matter
and arrange his ideas, even to select his words.
Mr. Clay did not, at least in a personal contro
versy. As he said, he was self -poised, ever
ready, he could fire off-hand without rest. Mr.
Calhoun, on the contrary, must have time to load
and take deliberate aim. In doing so he was
sure to hit and penetrate the most vulnerable
point of his antagonist, but while he was doing
this his antagonist would have hit him in a half
dozen places."
I have said that he was destitute of humor,
but he was sometimes the cause of wit in others.
Even Webster, who seldom employed any pleas
antry in his speeches in the Senate, was pro
voked into a humorous sally when Calhoun, on
going into the Cabinet of John Tyler, landed in
the camp of his former enemies. Webster re
ferred to a mock play written in England by
some wit to ridicule the sentimentality of a cer
tain German school of literature. Two strangers
meet at an inn ; suddenly one springs up and ex
claims : " A sudden thought strikes me ; let us
swear eternal friendship." The offer was in
stantly accepted. Mr. Webster graphically de
scribed the contest in which he and his friends
and Senator Calhoun and his friends were and
had been long engaged, and when victory was
at last apparently m their grasp, the South Caro
lina Senator suddenly cries out to his enemies.

JOHN G. GALHOUN 75
" Halloo ! a sudden thought strikes me ; I aban
don my allies ; they have always been my op
pressors ; let you and I swear eternal friend
ship." It is curious to note how Calhoun advanced
his lines of the defence of slavery from year to
year. His attention had been attracted to the
breaking out of abolitionism in the North. He
deprecated these distant attacks upon the cher
ished institution of slavery, and he appeared to
think that the Northern Senators were blamable
because they did not by some process which he
did not himself explain suppress the words which
so excited his anger. He appeared to think that
wordy fulminations from Washington or from
the South would deaden or misdirect the moral
sense of the North, then very slowly awakening
to the enormity of the crime of human slavery.
Suddenly, in January, 1836, his attention was
aroused by the appearance in the Senate of peti
tions for the abolition of slavery in the District
of Columbia. The attacks of these abolition
petitions were not in the least directed against
slavery in the States, but solely against slavery
in the District ; but from his point of view all
petitions on the subject of slavery were in them
selves a " foul slander on nearly one-half of the
States of the Union." It made no difference to
him that their ultimate result was unpromising.
His objection was that unless an undoubted pro
vision of the Constitution compelled the receiv
ing of such petitions, it was the duty of the Sen
ate to reject them at the door. He took the

76 STATESMEN
ground that Congress had no jurisdiction what
ever over the subject of slavery in whatever
form it might be presented, and no more power
over it in the District of Columbia than in the
States. The Senate, however, decided to re
ceive the petitions and then to reject them.
His next line was drawn at the exclusion
of so-called " incendiary documents " from the
mails. These documents were tracts, books, or
papers containing arguments designed to show
that human slavery was wicked and that its
maintenance was not in any way economical to
the States in which it existed ; but it pleased
Mr. Calhoun and others to assume that these
documents were incendiary, because, as they
said, they were designed to foment insurrection
and risings among the people held in slavery.
His contention was that " the internal peace and
security of the States are under the protection
of the States themselves, to the entire exclusion
of all authority and control on the part of Con
gress. It belongs to them and not to Congress
to determine what is or what is not calculated to
disturb their peace and security." President
Jackson had recommended that the mails should
be closed to all publications tainted with the
spirit of abolitionism, and he invited Congress to
pass a law prohibiting " under severe penalties
the circulation in the Southern States, through
the mails, of incendiary publications intended to
instigate slaves to insurrection." As a matter of
fact, no such publications had ever been issued,
and what the President reall)^ wanted was to ex-

JOHN G. GALHOUN 77
elude from the mails all printed matter designed
to shake any man's faith in the morality and
righteousness of slavery. Calhoun introduced a
bill providing that postmasters who knowingly
transmitted or delivered papers treating of slav
ery in any way contrary to the laws of the State
should be punished by fine and imprisonment.
His theory was that the State, and not the Fed
eral Congress, should determine what should be
regarded as contrary to the laws bearing upon
this question.
His next step was that slavery in the abstract
was not an evil, as many (even slaveholders)
had admitted that it was. He took the high
ground that negro slavery was " a positive
good," and said : " The relation now existing in
the slave-holding States between the two races is,
instead of an evil, a good, a positive good." And
his argument was that the negroes were bene
fited by slavery because their moral condition
was better than it would have been in the wilds
of Africa, and that it was a blessing for native-
born Americans of the negro race to be kept in
slavery because it had been a blessing to their
ancestors for generations back. He said : " The
white or European race is not degenerated. It
has kept up with its brethren in other sections
of the Union where slavery does not exist. It is
odious to make comparisons, but I appeal to all
States whether the South is not equal in virtue,
intelligence, patriotism, courage, disinterested
ness, and all the higher qualities which adorn
our nature."

78 STATESMEN
Once more he advanced his lines when new
territory was acquired by the United States.
His theory was that the Constitution permitted
slavery everywhere until it was deliberately
recognized or deliberately disallowed by legal
statutes. Singularly enough, he clung loyally
and tenaciously to the idea that slavery and the
Union could exist together amicably, and what
ever were his vagaries on the subject of States
rights and nullification, it must be said of him
that up to his latest breath he continued sin
cerely devoted to the Federal Union. He was
not a disunionist ; he did not plot for a dissolu
tion of the Union, and it is gross injustice to
charge him, as some have charged him, with
being ready to consent to the establishment of a
Southern confederacy in order that he might be
the president of a new republic after having
failed in his ambition to be President of the
Federal Union. As early as 1839 ^^ astonished
the Senate by asserting with great vehemence
that " a dissolution of the Union had ever been
and would for all future time remain an imagi
nary danger." Referring to the compromise
tariff he said : " It terminated honestly and fairly,
and without the sacrifice of any interest, one of
the most dangerous controversies that ever dis
turbed the Union or endangered its existence,
not the danger of dismemberment, as we learn
from the Senator [Buchanan] was anticipated
abroad. No, the danger lay in a different direc
tion. Dismemberment is not the only mode by
which our union may be destroyed. It is a fed-

JOHN G. GALHOUN 79
eral union, a union of sovereign States, and can
be as effectually and much more easily destroyed
by consolidation as by dismemberment. . . .
The constant struggle is to enlarge and not to
divide, and there neither is nor ever has been
the least danger that our union should ter
minate in dissolution." At another time, in a
letter to the citizens of Athens, Ga., he said, re
ferring to the peculiar institution of the South :
" The Constitution has placed in our power am
ple means, short of secession or disunion, to pro
tect ourselves."
More than any other, Calhoun was responsible
for the annexation of Texas, although he pas
sionately denied all responsibility for the war
with Mexico which followed and which he sup
ported with languor. War was always distaste
ful to him, although he sounded the clarion-call
to arms when the country was in danger from
the aggressions of England and France. Being
called by President Tyler to fill the place of
Secretary of State, from which office Webster
had been conveniently shuffled out, he put on
foot negotiations for the annexation of Texas.
By an ingenious device this was called at that
time the re-annexation of Texas, the territory
having been part of what was known as the
Florida purchase when the contiguous territory
became absorbed into the Federal Union. By
some miscarriage of diplomacy, as Southern
statesmen always declared, that region lying west
of Louisiana and east of the Rio Grande be
came the property of Mexico. When the prov-

so STATESMEN
ince declared its independence from Mexico, it
was well understood that this was only a step
preliminary to demanding admission into the
Federal Union. While negotiations were pend
ing, a treaty for annexation having been rejected
by the Senate, James K. Polk was nominated by
the Democrats as the advocate of immediate
annexation, and at the next succeeding session
of Congress the project was again renewed, and
Calhoun, who had returned to the Senate, be
came one of its most ardent supporters. After
a series of adventures not altogether creditable
to American diplomacy or American good faith,
the country was plunged into war with Mexico.
Calhoun, while publicly accepting the imputation
of being the author of the annexation of Texas,
insisted that the responsibility for the war be
longed to the President, who had violated the
Constitution by sending troops on his own per
sonal authority into the disputed territory.
Finally, annexation being an accomplished
fact, the question of slavery in the Territories
again came before Congress for settlement.
Calhoun not only denied any power of Congress
to exclude slavery from the Territories, but in
still stronger terms denied the power to do it on
the part of the inhabitants or legislators of those
Territories. His , contention was that only a
sovereign State could legislate on the subject of
slavery. He suggested that the Constitution of
the United States, extending into the Territories
acquired from Mexico, would operate to repeal
the existing local Mexican laws abolishing sla-

JOHN G. GALHOUN 81
very. And again he insisted that if the South
wished to save the Union or save herself, she
must arouse to instant action and hold no con
nection with any party in the North not pre
pared to enforce the guarantees of the Constitu
tion in favor of the South.
He was a "strict constructionist," to use a
phrase very familiar in those days as relating to
slavery and the Constitution, but he was some
what inconsistent when other matters were in
volved. For instance, he was early one of the
most ardent supporters of the policy of internal
improvements. He projected a national road
from Washington to New Orleans via Abing
don, Va., Knoxville, Tenn. ; thence through Ala
bama, passing near Cahawba, and so on to New
Orleans. This, of course, was not a railroad,
but a great national highway, the iron horse not
then having made his appearance on the conti
nent. Among other of his schemes for the bind
ing of the Union together by arteries of com
merce were the opening of an inland navigation
from New York to Savannah by a canal from
New York to Philadelphia; the canal uniting the
Delaware and Susquehanna Rivers ; a canal from
Chesapeake Bay to the Potomac at Washington ;
the Dismal Swamp Canal, uniting Chesapeake
Bay with Albemarle Sound, -and so on to Savan
nah ; the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, as a channel
of commerce for the great West, and a national
highway from Washington to Buffalo. All of
these public improvements were on lines wliich
in these later days would be regarded as strain-
G

82 STATESMEN
ing the Constitution of the Republic rather se
verely. In 1825, in a speech to his neighbors
at Abbeville, S. C, he said: "No man would
reprobate more pointedly than myself any
concerted union between States for interested
or sectional objects. Such concert would be
against the spirit of our Constitution, which was
intended to bind all the States in one common
bond of union and friendship." And yet only a
few years after this he was pleading for a " con
certed union " which should defend slavery and
put that institution so far above the flying ar
rows of its adversaries that it would be forever
impregnable. A study of the history of statesmen often re
veals strange contradictions and startling changes
in political opinions. For example, when prep
arations for the war of 1812 engaged the atten
tion of the younger politicians of South Carolina,
the patriotic New Englanders were attracted by
their boisterous patriotism, and the idea was en
tertained in both sections that it was possible to
form a coalition between South Carolina and
New England to put down the "Virginia Dy
nasty," as it was called, whose narrow and anti-
commercial policy had greatly annoyed both
sections. And yet the time came when New
England and South Carolina were virtually arm
ing themselves against each other and declaring
a policy of non-intercourse.
It is not certain whether Calhoun will be best
known in history as the ardent defender of slav
ery or as the great nullifier. The States rights

JOHN G. GALHOUN 83
doctrine of Calhoun and his school was not, as
its supporters maintained, necessarily secession
or war, though it might lead eventually to both,
as we have already seen. Calhoun insisted, with
strange lack of logic, that the union of the States
was really more secure by the establishment of
his theory of States rights than it could be in
any other way. The tariff of 1828 was extremely
distasteful to the people of South Carolina, and
the Calhoun school of politicians resolved that it
should not be enforced. Calhoun's argument
was that the State, having determined to protect
its citizens by an act of nullification, would put
an impassable barrier in the way of any penalty
or sentence imposed by the Federal courts in
consequence of an act of obedience to the State
statute. Nullification was an act by the State
nullifying within the borders of that State any
law of the Federal Congress which might be dis
tasteful to a majority of the citizens of the State.
Calhoun contended that nullification did not dis
turb the legal relation between the State and the
Union, but rather confirmed it. He said that
the States had " entered " the Federal Union and
that that entrance implied a free action on their
part without binding any of the States to irre
movable consequences thereafter. Force could
not be employed by the Federal Government
because the question was a moral one, and no
physical resistance could be taken.
The Legislature of South Carolina, in Novem
ber, 1832, passed an ordinance declaring the
tariff act of 1828 null and void. It was also de-

Calhoun's Library and Office.

JOHN G. CALHOUN 85
clared that the payment of duties should not
be enforced within the State, and that any at
tempt on the part of the Federal Government
to enforce its laws would absolve the State from
all connection with the Union and it would im
mediately establish a separate and independent
government. Secession would ensue if nullifi
cation were not agreed to by the Federal Gov
ernment. Great excitement in South Carolina
followed the passage of this ordinance, and Pres
ident Jackson replied to it with a proclamation
and a message to Congress threatening to apply
physical pressure to the rebels of the Palmetto
State. It was even said (although this statement
was never verified) that Jackson threatened to
hang Calhoun " as high as Haman." Jackson
was a bold and sometimes reckless officer, but
nobody knew better than he that he had no
power to hang even a rebel leader, and Calhoun's
personal courage was certainly equal to any
emergency, and it would be unjust to suppose
that he was for a moment deterred from his
course by any menace from General Jackson.
Various expedients to dissolve the terrifying
complication were proposed from the different
States. While warlike operations were going
on under the orders of President Jackson and
General Scott, Clay introduced in Congress a
new tariff which practically abandoned the
policy of protection and conceded to South
Carolina the principle for which she was con
tending. Peace was restored, and Calhoun and
the nullifiers consented to postpone secession.

86 STATESMEN
Clay's compromise bill, according to Thomas H.
Benton, " made its first appearance in the House
late in the evening, when members were gather
ing up their overcoats for a walk home to their
dinners, was passed before their coats had got
on their back, and the dinner which was waiting
had but little time to cool before the astonished
members, their work done, were at the table to
eat it." South Carolina was appeased and the
Union saved.
One of the most picturesque incidents in the
career of Calhoun was his final break with Pres
ident Jackson. Calhoun was a Cabinet minister
during the Florida campaign, in which Jackson,
as commander of the Federal forces, had carried
things with a high hand. Without instructions,
and without authority of law, he had conducted
executions and had moved his troops in disre
gard of international law or usage. ^ His course
was severely criticised by the strict construc
tionists, but it commanded enthusiastic applause
from the people of the United States. Years
afterward, when Jackson was President and Cal
houn was serving a second term as Vice-Presi
dent, with an expectation of succeeding to the
Presidency, the celebrated Eaton scandal broke
out. Mrs. Eaton was the wife of Senator Eaton,
of Tennessee, and by her light conduct had
brought scandal upon herself and her husband.
The wives of Cabinet ministers and other high
functionaries refused to recognize Mrs. Eaton.
Among others, Vice-President Calhoun and Mrs.
Calhoun fell under the ban of President Jack-

JOHN G. CALHOUN 87
son's displeasure, that functionary having en
deavored to dragoon Washington society into
receiving Mrs. Eaton on terms of favor. With
great rage and honest indignation. President
Jackson regarded as his enemy every man who
would not accept Mrs. Eaton.
Unfortunately for the Vice-President, General
Jackson about this time learned that Calhoun,
when in the Cabinet, was one of those who
strongly criticised General Jackson's reckless
ness in his operations against the Seminoles in
Florida. Doubtless the General in this matter
had acted in good faith, but President Monroe
and the Cabinet, including Calhoun, did not agree
with the view which Jackson then took of his
own course. Calhoun insisted that the capture
of Pensacola was an act of war against Spain
and a violation of the Constitution, and that he
had not only acted without but against his own
instructions. Now (April, 1830) Calhoun's posi
tion on the Florida question was revealed to
Jackson. This, added to the opposition of the
Calhoun family in the matter of Mrs. Eaton, set
Andrew Jackson in a towering rage. The breach
with Jackson was irreparable. It was the death
blow of the Presidential aspirations of Calhoun,
who, in the language of one of the historians of
the period (William Wirt), " had blasted his pros
pects of future advancement forever." Jackson
was thenceforth his bitterest foe, and every parti
cle of influence that he had was thrown against
Calhoun and in favor eventually of Martin Van
Buren. Von Hoist, in his account of this grand

88 STATESMEN
breaking-up, says : " Calhoun himself remained
to the end of his life firmly convinced that Van
Buren was the engineer who had constructed the
ingenious battery for the explosion. Though
there is no documentary proof of it, yet it can
be hardly doubted that Van Buren did in fact
take part in devising the scheme, but he was too
wary and too cunning in such transactions ever
to do himself what could be d,one as well or even
better by some devoted friend."
It may be said of Calhoun that after this alien
ation, which resulted in one of the bitterest dis
appointments of his life, he was in reality a
party by himself. For even in his ardent and in
cessant defence of slavery and pitiless crusade
against all who dared to wag their tongues
against that institution, he did not always have
with him the sympathy and support of the slave-
holding politicians of his own section. He failed
to see that resolutions and speeches, which he
multiplied indefinitely, could not smother the
volcanic fire that was slowly gathering head
under the crust of Northern society. He seemed
to think that these " words, Avords, words " ought
in some way to silence the growing clamor of
the North against the cherished institutions of
the South. He lamented the destruction of the
equipoise which had existed in the Senate be
tween the slave-holding States and the non-slave-
holding States. With constant iteration he
turned to this as the source of all his woes. To
this single idea, the defence and elevation of sla
very, he remained true to the last.

JOHN G. GALHOUN 89
His health gradually failed, and though his eye
did not lose its brilliancy or his intellectual force
abate, it was plain that his days were numbered,
and on the 4th of March, 1850, having been ab
sent from the Senate many weeks, he appeared
in the chamber supported by his friends, who
escorted him to his seat. The so-called compro
mise measures of 1850 were under discussion, and
he asked permission of the Senate, being too
feeble to deliver his address, that his friend.
Senator Mason, of Virginia, should read it for
him. The address was, in fact, only a recapitula
tion of what had been urged again and again in
the South and by the Southern Senators on the
floor, charging an aggression by the general gov
ernment and the North on the rights of the
South, and insisting that the true purpose of the
North was to destroy slavery in the States where
it had existed since the original articles of con
federation were agreed to. " The strongest cord
of a political character," he said, " consists of the
many and strong ties that have held together the
two great parties. If this agitation goes on, the
same force, acting with increased intensity, will
finally snap every cord, when nothing will be left
to hold the States together except by force."
His speech over, the great nullifier and de
fender of slavery, who had spent his latest
breath for the preservation and perpetuation
of slavery, withdrew. He died on the 31st of
March, 1850. He was eulogized by Webster,
Benton, and other distinguished statesmen who
were his contemporaries.

9(t STATESMEN
From the day of his death until the Confed
erate flag fell at Appomattox the logical con
sequences of his life and teachings went on
and on, increasing in force and intensity until
the fabric that he had so laboriously reared
fell in ruins. To the last moment he mani
fested the deepest interest and concern in the
troubles of his country. " The South, the poor
South, God knows what will become of her,"
murmured his trembling lips ; but he died with
that serenity of mind which only a clear con
science can give on the death-bed. On Feb
ruary 12, 1847, he said in the Senate: "If I
know myself, if my head were at stake I would
do my duty, be the consequences what they
might." It was his solemn conviction that
throughout . his life he had faithfully done his
duty both to the Union and to his section. Be
cause as he honestly believed slavery to be good,
" a positive good," he had never been able to see
that it was impossible to serve at the same time
the Union and his section.

¦/

Thomas H. Benton.

IV.
THOMAS H. BENTON.
In one of the public squares of the city of St.
Louis there stands a bronze statue of Thomas H.
Benton. The right hand points westward, and
on the pedestal are inscribed these words :
" There is the East.
There is India."
It is odd that so little is said by the biographers
of Benton about his early, incessant, and active ef
forts to promote the building of a railway across
the continent. He was one of the first statesmen
of the country to advocate the building of such
a road. He was one of the earliest to direct the
adventurous explorations in the far West, and to
encourage overland transit by wagon to the Pa
cific coast. He was engaged in these labors long
before the discovery of gold in California. While
the right of American possession of the mouth
of the Columbia was as yet unsettled, he threw
himself into the contest for the acquisition of
that territor)'^ with tremendous zeal ; and as early
as 1 8 19 he wrote on all these topics. When he
entered Congress, in 1820, he expounded his proj
ects for overland communication, and renewed
his attempts to induce the Government to engage
in the great enterprises of road-building and ex-

92 STATESMEN
ploration. In the prosecution of this work, he
sought out hunters, trappers, and voyageurs, and
absorbed their information, pumped them dry of
all the facts which they had acquired ; and as a
more correct scientific knowledge of the unknown
wilderness became accessible, his views took shape
in the proposals that finally culminated in the
building of the great Central Pacific Railroad.
Of course, when the plans for building the
Pacific Railroad were finally adopted, gold had
been discovered in California, and the United
States had secured a foothold upon those distant
shores ; and Benton, with intense pride in his
country, and more broad in his nationality than
many of the statesmen of that period, did not
stop to consider whether there should be a North
ern or a Southern trans-continental road, but he
argued boldly for the proposed central route
which was subsequently adopted. He showed
the character of the region through which this
line should run, the ease by which the passes
through the Rocky Mountains could be utilized,
and he prophesied a great and rapid increase of
States and communities as one of the results
which would certainly follow the building of the
road. In the course of one of his speeches,
he made an interesting comparison of the courses
of trade and commerce at different periods of
the history of the world, and argued that, as
we had finally reached the Pacific coast we had
taken the position where our trade with the king
doms of the Orient would make us independent
of Europe.

THOMAS H. BENTON 93
Years before, when the Mississippi River
seemed to be the most remote western border of
our Republic, and when nobody had penetrated
the boundless wilderness that stretches to the
foot of the Rocky Mountains, and when nobody
supposed we could ever people so vast a terri
tory as that which then lay unclaimed far to the
westward, Benton had said that the Rocky Moun
tains should be our natural frontier line on the
westward, a barrier beyond which we could not
pass ; and he had expressed his belief that on the
Pacific coast there would grow up a friendly re
public. But when the discovery of gold and the
acquisition of California changed all this, he, too,
changed his view of the situation, and held that
we should have, wherever possible, no boundaries
but the two oceans. In considering the estab
lishment of the great marine lines across the
Pacific Ocean debouching from California, we
should never forget the prophetic words of Ben
ton, " There is India."
Benton was pre-eminently a Western man. He
possessed all the traits of the aggressive, alert,
and self-asserting pioneers of the West. It was
in the great community of which he formed so
picturesque and towering a figure, that was orig
inated the once familiar phrase, " Manifest Des
tiny." Benton believed in the future vastness
of his country, and with his boastful and some
times inflated oratory he forever preached the
doctrine of Manifest Destiny. In every direc
tion wherever territory was to be acquired, to
the southwest, westward, and northwest, there

94 STATESMEN
his voice was ever directed, ringing and incit
ing to action and to acquisition the cheerful and
ready ranks of his fellow-Westerners.
It should be borne in mind that in the earlier
years of Benton's time, all the territory lying
westward of the Ohio, whether to the south or
to the north, was known by the comprehensive
title of " The West." At that time the line of
demarcation between the East and the West was
far more distinct than that which separated the
North from the South, and as the latter boundary
became sharper and more intense, so did the line
betwixt East and West become more vague
and more distantly removed from the Eastern
States. Benton not only favored the opening and ex
tension of lines of communication with the wild
and trackless Northwest, but also with Mexico
and with the territories which we subsequently
acquired by the Mexican war. He advocated
the establishment of military posts on the Upper
Missouri, one of which is now known by his
name. Fort Benton ; and throughout his career
he incessantly pleaded for the cultivation of ami
cable relations with the Indian tribes, their re
moval to reservations where they should be
amply protected, and the development of the
regions from which they had been taken. In
land navigation and great post roads, military
roads, and trading trails to the far Southwest,
were among his hobbies, of which it must be
confessed he had many. The treaty with Spain
by which we secured Florida and other acquisi-

THOMAS H. BENTON 95
tions were matters that greatly cheered the soul
of Benton, even before he entered the Senate.
In one of his speeches when the Florida pur
chase was under consideration he said : " The
magnificent valley of the Mississippi is ours,
with all its fountains, springs, and floods, and woe
to the statesman who shall undertake to surren
der one drop of its water, one inch of its soil, to
any foreign power." We can well understand
how these brave words fell with kindling effect
among the masterful and ambitious Westerners.
Benton was born in North Carolina, and his
mother, early left a widow, took her young brood
of children to a tract of land owned by her hus
band, twenty-five miles south of Nashville. On
this land the family plantation was laid out, and
in due course of time " Widow Benton's tract "
became Bentontown, a name under which it is
known to this day. Here Thomas Hart Benton
was reared under the tender care and firm man
agement of his mother, a woman of the highest
type. In the library left by his father the lad
found a goodly array of the best books of that
period. These he studied with a devouring
eagerness, and he has said in his autobiography
that his knowledge of English history was largely
drawn from the voluminous " State Trials " which
formed a part of this library. Benton's educa
tion does not appear to have been at any time
directed by any other guidance than his own
tastes and notions of what was desirable, except
when, later on, under the encouragement of older
friends, he mastered the intricacies of the law

1' ^^\'-.s; ' .>^^x*'^i/'^"*^nAVc^liir

Joining of the Central and Union Pacific.
The continent spanned-scene at Promontory Point, Utah, May lo. 1869. The culmination of plans advocated for many years
by Benton.
(From the only existing photograph J

THOMAS H. BENTON 97
and was admitted to the bar. Of his mother he
says in his autobiography : " All the minor virt
ues, as well as the greater, were cherished by
her, and her house, the resort of the eminent
men of the time, was the abode of temperance,
modesty, decorum ; a pack of cards was never
seen in her house. From such a mother all the
children received the impress of future character,
and she lived to see the fruits of her pious and
liberal cares — living as a widow above fifty years
— and to see her eldest son half through his
Senatorial career and taking his place among the
historic men of the country, for which she had
begun so early to train him. These details de
serve to be noted, though small in themselves, as
showing how much the after life of the man may
depend upon the early care and guidance of a
mother." Benton lived a temperate and abste
mious life ; he was a total abstainer from his
youth, never used tobacco, never played a game
of chance, and did not as a rule attend public
amusements. When questioned about his tem
perate habits, later in life, he used to say : " My
mother did not wish me to drink wine or spirits,
and I never have."
In his autobiography, referring to his wife,
who was long an invalid, he said : " Mrs. Benton
died in 1854, having been struck with paralysis in
1844, and from the time of that calamity her hus
band was never known to go to any place of fes
tivity or amusement." His literary work, which
was great and laborious, was done at her bedside
during these years of pain and languishing.
7

98 STATESMEN
But there was another side to Benton's char
acter. He lived in a time of turbulence, and a
certain warlike roughness then pervaded all
ranks of society in the West. His first notable
quarrel was with Andrew Jackson in the streets
of Nashville, Tenn. His brother Jesse and Will
iam Carroll had become involved in a duel.
Jackson was Carroll's second, and although no
blood was shed in the duel, the two Bentons,
Carroll, and Jackson and some of their friends,
were drawn into a disgraceful fracas. Jackson
advanced upon Colonel Benton and struck him
over the head with a riding-whip. A general meUe
followed, pistols and knives were freely used,
and Jackson came out of this promiscuous con
test with a bullet in his left shoulder. Later, in
St. Louis, while Missouri was yet a Territory,
and Benton was editing a paper and slashing
around recklessly in every direction, he was
drawn into a more serious quarrel with one
Lucas. The result was a duel, in which Lucas
was killed. They had fought twice on Bloody
Island, near St. Louis, a well-known duelling re
sort. On the first occasion both were wounded ;
on the second, Lucas fell. A biographer of
Lucas's family has recently remarked, with un
conscious humor, of the senior Lucas : " This
gentleman was one of the most remarkable men
who ever settled west of the Mississippi River.
Toward the close of his life Judge
Lucas became melancholy and dejected, the re
sult of domestic affliction, for six of his sons met
death by violence." It is barely possible that

THOMAS H. BENTON 99
the five sons, of whom we have no other mention,
came to their deaths by quarrels provoked.
At that time duelling was common through
out the United States, more especially in the
South and West, and on the frontier a man was
not only expected to be called to engage in a
duel as principal or second occasionally, but
also to challenge whenever he considered his
" honor " called in question.
The affray with Jackson was in 1813, and in
his autobiography (dictated when Benton was
on his death-bed, in which he speaks of himself
in the third person) the writer referred to the
Nashville fracas with profound regret, and
added : " A duel at St. Louis ended fatally, of
which Colonel Benton has not been heard to
speak except among intimate friends, and to tell
of the pang which went through his heart when
he saw the young man fall, and would have given
the world to see him restored to life. As the
proof of the manner in which he looks upon all
these scenes, and his desire to bury all remem
brance of them forever, he has had all those
papers burnt which relate to them, that future
curiosity or industry should not bring to light
what he wishes had never happened."
The bringing in of Missouri as a slave State,
with human bondage expressly provided for in
its constitution, caused an intense excitement
throughout the country. It was this act which
resulted in the adoption of what was known as
the " Missouri Compromise." Although Benton
was himself averse to the further extension of

100 STATESMEN
slavery, he did not hesitate to advocate the ad
mission of the new State with slavery in its con
stitution, and doubtless his newspaper was a tre
mendous factor in the problem which was solved
by the final admission of the State.
He was now elected to the Senate, and al
though some details of the constitution of the
new State remained unsettled, he at once took
his seat. In the somewhat self-conscious auto
biography which I have just quoted, Benton
thus speaks of his election to the Senate : " From
that time his life was in the public eye, and the
bare enumeration of the measures of which he
was author and the prime promoter would be al
most a history of Congress legislation. The
enumeration is unnecessary here. The long list
is known throughout the length and breadth of
the land, repeated with the familiarity of house
hold words from the great cities of the seaport
to the lonely cabins of the frontier, and studied
by the little boys who feel an honorable ambi
tion beginning to stir within their bosoms and a
laudable desire to know something of the history
of their country." It is melancholy to reflect
that although scarcely three-quarters of a cen
tury has passed, " the little boys" of whom Ben
ton speaks with so much assurance probably
know very little of " the measures of which he
was author."
In the Senate, which he entered in 1820, he
served thirty consecutive years. His talents,
which were very great, and his energies, which
were tremendous, were devoted to an infinite

THOMAS II. BENTON 101
variety of useful measures. The land laws of
the country early engaged his attention. A pio
neer himself, he devoted all his activities to re
forming the statutes and to facilitate the means
by which public lands could be occupied and
owned by actual settlers. He advocated the
securing to all actual settler; of land title by pre
emption, a periodical reduction of prices after
the lands had been a long time in market, and
donations of homesteads to worthy and indus
trious persons who might be too poor to buy.
With a dogged persistence peculiarly his own,
Benton forced his views upon these subjects
upon Congress year in and year out, in season
and out of season. He lived to see nearly every
one of these principles finally adopted into the
land system of the United States, with the ex
ception of the homestead law, which was passed
by both houses of Congress and vetoed by Bu
chanan. That law, however, finally became op
erative in 1862, during the administration of
Abraham Lincoln.
The system of electing President and Vice-
President by the so-called Electoral College was
' arlother topic which early engaged his attention.
He advocated in 1824 an amendment to the Con
stitution to abolish the Electoral College and to
make the vote more nearly come straight from
the people. On this topic he said : " I should
esteem the incorruptibility of the people, their
disinterested desire to get the best man for Pres
ident, to be more than a counterpoise to all the
advantages which might be derived from the

102 STATESMEN
superior intelligence of a more enlightened but
smaller and therefore more corruptible body. I
should be opposed to the intervention of electors,
because the double process to elect a man would
paralyze the spirit of the people and destroy
the life of an election itself. Doubtless this ma
chinery was introduced into our Constitution for
the purpose of softening the action of the demo
cratic element, but it also softens the interest of
the people in the result of the election itself. It
places them at too great a distance from their
first servant. It interposes a body of men be
tween the people and the object of their choice
and gives a false direction to the gratitude of the
President elected. He feels himself indebted to
the electors who collected the votes of the peo
ple, and not to the people who gave their votes
to the electors." Our later experience in politi
cal affairs has shown that Benton in this case
was partly right and partly wrong.
Very much to his credit, too, was his attitude
on what was called the Spoils System. In his
autobiography he makes it a point to say that
none of his blood relations had ever asked for
office and none had ever mingled in any schemes
for the division of patronage. During Jackson's
time was imported into the system of national
government the plan of making public office a
reward for partisan service. Benton, later in
life, said : " The expiration of the four years' term
came to be considered as the termination and
vacation of all the offices on which it fell and the
creation of vacancies, to be filled at the option of

THOMAS H. BENTON 103
the President." He added : " I consider sweep
ing removals as now practised by both parties a
great political evil in our country, injurious to
individuals, to the public service, to the purity
of elections, and to the harmony and union of the
people. ... It converts elections into scram
bles for office and degrades the Government into
an office for rewards and punishments, and di
vides the people of the Union into two adverse
parties, each in its turn as it becomes dominant
to strip and proscribe the other."
Although a slave-holder from a slave State,
Benton, with his broad-minded and generous
instincts, could not look with any degree of tol
erance upon the extension of slavery into' the
Territories, and when John C. Calhoun began to
proclaim his fine-spun theory of State rights and
the right of nullification, Benton was by the side
of Andrew Jackson battling for the Union and
opposing nullification. His attitude in this long
and arduous contest made him the life-long foe
of Calhoun, who, though he forgave others who
fought against him, notably Clay and Webster,
the two Whigs, could not forgive Benton, the
Jacksonian Democrat. When the project to an
nex Texas came before the people of the United
States, Benton raised his voice against the
scheme. He boldly and forcibly disclosed the
real motives of the promoters of this great en
terprise, and said that although it was mixed up
with speculative jobs and political intrigues, dis
union was at the bottom of it all. He said that
the cry had already been raised : " Texas without

104 STATESMEN
the Union rather than the Union without Tex
as," and he said that "a Southern confederacy
stretching from the Atlantic to the Californias
is the cherished vision of disappointed ambition.''
He was with Jackson also in his war upon the
United States Bank, and early in 1831 he liad
moved against a recharter of that institution,
thus showing himself really in advance of Jack
son in his hostility to the bank. He did not
assail the bank as unconstitutional, but rather
dwelt upon the aspects of the case which would
be more likely to attract public attention. He
said that the bank had too much power over the
people and the Government, over business and
over politics, and was too much disposed to exer
cise that power to the prejudice of freedom and
equality which should prevail in a republic.
He said : " I am willing to see the charter ex
pire without providing any substitute for the
present bank. I am willing to see the currency
of the Federal Government left to the hard
money mentioned and intended in the Constitu
tion." Again he said : " Gold and silver are the
best currency for a republic. It suits the men of
middle property and the working-people best,
and if I was going to establish a workingman's
party it should be on the basis of hard money —
a hard-money party against a paper party." Ut
terances like these, which attracted wide atten
tion both in this country and in Europe, gave
him the nickname of " Old Bullion," a title by
which he was known to the day of his death.
One of Benton's darling projects was the devel-

The Sub-Treasury Building in Wall Street, New York City.

106 STATESMEN
opment of what is called the Sub-Treasury sys
tem of the United States. It was first made
known under the title of the Independent Treas
ury Bill. He succeeded in getting it through
the Senate twice. The first time it was lost in
the House of Representatives, but on the sec
ond venture, toward the close of President Van
Buren's term, his firmness and pertinacity were
rewarded. The bill passed the Senate by a con
siderable majority, went through the House after
a bitter contest, and became a law. From this
arose the system which to the present day is
satisfactorily known as the Sub-Treasury.
Another of his hobbies (if a statesman's views
can be called a hobby) was the repeal of the salt
tax. The Government laid an odious tax upon
salt, and while he devoted himself to the general
subject of the tariff in regard to specific abuses,
he advocated with great persistence the plan of
making salt free ; and on all occasions, whether
pertinent or not, with dogged persistence he
lugged in the salt tax and insisted upon its repeal.
In his " Thirty Years' View," speaking of him
self and his attacks on this odious duty, he says :
" He called it a heartless and tyrant tax, as inex
orable as it was omnipotent and omnipresent; a
tax which no economy could avoid, no poverty
could shun, no privation escape, no cunning
elude, no force resist, no dexterity avert, no
curses repulse, no prayers could deprecate."
To this he added : " Twelve years have passed
away, two years more than the siege of Troy
lasted, since I began this contest. Nothing dis-

THOMAS H. BENTON 107
heartened by so many defeats in so long a time,
I prosecute the war with unabated vigor, and
relying upon the goodness of the cause, firmly
calculate upon ultimate and final success." One
cannot help thinking that although the tax was
odious and doubtless oppressive, the eloquence,
erudition, and legal learning lavished upon at
tempts to abolish it were hardly in proportion
to the extent of the evil complained of.
Benton not only loved work for work's sake,
but his spirit was indomitable, defiant, and ag
gressive. He was simply unable to comprehend
the meaning of the word " defeat.'' Repulsed
again and again, he returned to the attack with
a freshness and vigor that bore all before it. His
will was iron, his purpose inflexible, and doubt
less a great proportion of the successes in his
long and stormy career were due to his persist
ence rather than to the intrinsic merits of the
cause advocated. His support of the Sub-Treas
ury scheme and its ultimate success is one ex
ample of his triumph after many defeats, and
his magnificent and picturesque crusade at the
head of the so-called expungers is another. Jack
son was not willing to rest on his laurels when
he had succeeded in defeating all attempts to re-
charter the United States Bank, but in the sum
mer of 1833 he ordered the deposits of the United
States Government removed from the bank and
placed in certain State banks. These institutions
were subsequently known as the " pet banks."
Jackson met with some difficulty in getting a
Secretary of the Treasury who would venture

108 STATESMEN
upon such a step, but he finally found one in
Roger B. Taney, a man who afterward, as Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court of the United
States, was able to do much more mischief than
he did as Secretary of the Treasury. A tre
mendous storm broke out in Congress over the
removal of the deposits. Clay introduced a res
olution directing their return. This was defeated
in the House, and Clay then introduced in the
Senate a series of motions, the most important of
which was his famous resolution censuring Pres
ident Jackson for his action in regard to the de
posits. This resolution was finally passed by a
small majority, and Jackson, frantic with rage,
sent in a written protest, which the Senate re
fused to receive. The country was agitated, the
Jacksonians and anti-Jacksonians furiously assail
ing each other over the question. Benton imme
diately began a vigorous campaign for the ex
punging of the resolution of censure from the
record of the Senate. He was met with an oppo
sition quite as vigorous as his own, headed by
Calhoun, Clay, and Webster. Finally, at the very
close of Jackson's administration, Benton found
himself able to make the move which was carried
to a prosperous conclusion. The Expungers held
a caucus and agreed to prevent any adjournment
until the resolution of expunging was finally car
ried. Benton, like the prudent general that he
was, provided in one of the committee rooms
" an ample supply of cold hams, turkeys, rounds
of beef, pickles, wines, and cups of hot coffee," to
which the faint-hearted and weary Expungers oc-

THOMAS H. BENTON 109
casionally resorted to refresh themselves withal ;
and at last the Secretary of the Senate was or
dered by resolution to dra,w black lines around
the offensive entry in the Senate journal. Jack
son, to show his gratitude and appreciation of
the services of the Expungers, gave them and
their wives a great dinner at the White House,
Benton sitting at the head of the table.
The really heroic era of Benton's long career
was that in which he fought for the National
Union and defended the Republic against the
insidious schemes of the nullifiers and secession
ists. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had ex
pressly excluded slavery from the territory from
which Kansas and Nebraska were afterward
carved. When the bill to repeal this compromise
came up in the Senate, Benton attacked it with
enormous vigor, characterizing it as "a bungling
attempt to smuggle slavery into the territory and
throughout all the country up to the Canada line
and out to the Rocky Mountains." By the repeal
of the Missouri Compromise, slavery and freedom
were left to shift for themselves in the vast re
gion now occupied by all of the States west and
north of Missouri. The compromise, Benton
contended, was right, but no greater concession
of principle should be made. The time had now
come, he said, when the extension of slavery
should be opposed in every constitutional way,
and " it was an outrage to repeal a compromise
which in its very nature was humiliating to the
North." Said he : " The South divided and took
half, and now it will not do to claim the other half."

110 STATESMEN
Against this insidious aggression of the slave
power, Benton spoke with great boldness and
warmth. He said : " I have stood upon the Mis
souri Compromise for about thirty years, and
mean to stand upon it to the end of my life. It
is a binding covenant upon both parties, and the
more so upon the South, as she imposed it."
Benton's noble and manly fight was in vain.
He incurred the implacable hostility of the slave
power of the South and of its leaders in the Sen
ate. His patriotic and determined attitude final
ly cost him his seat in the Senate, and from this
point onward, we may say, the tide ran against
him. His enemies, in the midst of his fight against
the extension of slavery into the Territories, cir
culated a series of resolutions which were based
upon those of Calhoun, declaring that Congress
had no power over the question of slavery in the
Territories. These were sent to all of the slave-
holding States, and were finally introduced into
the Missouri Legislature. The Missouri resolu
tions were insolent and almost traitorous in tone,
and demanded that slavery should be permitted
to exist in all new States hereafter to be admitted,
and instructed their Senators to vote according
ly. When these resolutions came to Congress,
where they were introduced by Benton's col
league, Atchison, they were boldly denounced
by Benton as treasonable and offensive in the
highest degree. He said that they did not ex
press the true opinions of the voters of Missouri,
and he would appeal from the Legislature to the
people. Benton's colleague was subsequently

THOMAS H. BENTON 111
known as " Dave " Atchison, and was one of the
leaders of the border ruffians who invaded Kansas
in the early and stormy days of that Territory.
But Benton's protests were in vain. The issue
between the two sides, " the Hards," as Benton's
followers were called, and " the Softs," was now
sharply defined. Benton went home to Mis
souri, stumped the State from one end to the
other, and in a series of many wonderful speeches
advocated the doctrines which he had proclaimed
in the Senate and which had been contravened
so contemptuously by the Legislature of the
State. Neither faction was able to secure a ma
jority of the Legislature which was to have the
duty of electing a successor to Benton, whose
term was about to expire ; and, after a deadlock
lasting some weeks, the Whigs went to the sup
port of the " Softs " and elected Benton's oppo
nent; and so, after serving the State and the
Nation faithfully for thirty years in the United
States Senate, Benton was turned out for hav
ing stood manfully and loyally by the Union.
It is impossible to avoid a comparison at this
point between Benton and some of the Northern
Senators, notably Silas Wright, of New York, and-
Daniel Webster, of Massachusetts. A Southern
man from a slave-holding State, Benton did not
hesitate to oppose the extension of slavery into
the Territories, to condemn the fugitive slave
act of 1850, and to stand manfully and effectively
against the slavery extremists and disunionists.
He rose to meet every emergency, and up to the
latest hour of his Congressional life could always

112 STATESMEN
be counted upon in the ranks of the devoted
patriots who defended the Union and its institu
tions of freedom.
When defeated for the Senate, he was not in
the least cast down by this apparently over
whelming reverse. Although now an old man,
he kept up the fight as bitterly as ever, and in
1852 was returned to the House of Representa
tives as a Union Democrat. Defeated for a sec
ond term in the House, he took the field, indefati
gable as ever, as a Union Democratic candidate
for Governor of Missouri. The fight was a tri
angular one. The Native Americans, or Know
Nothings, had set their candidate in the field ; the
secession Democrats another; and Benton was
the choice of the Union Democrats. Although
seventy-four years old, his mind was as vigorous
as ever, and with all the freshness and buoyancy
of his early manhood he plunged into one of the
most strenuous and exhaustive political fights of
his lifetime. During the course of his campaign
he traversed the entire State, travelling in all
twelve hundred miles and making forty speeches,
each one of which was two or three hours in
length. Again, however, he was destined to
meet with defeat. The vote was quite evenly di
vided among the three candidates, but Benton
was the third in the race, and the extreme pro-
slavery men elected their candidate by a small
plurality. At last his political race was run.
Very soon after he lost his seat in the House
of Representatives, he set out to finish his " Thirty
Years' View," a work of the first importance

THOMAS H. BENTON 113
in political history, which he had undertaken
while in the Senate. He now returned to this,
and took it up with refreshing zest. This com
pleted, he tackled another task, an " Abridgment
of the Debates of Congress ; " and when his house
burned down, destroying his materials and partly
completed volumes, he resumed his labor next
day as though nothing had happened. It was
this spirit of unconquerableness that carried him
through his strenuous and stormy career with so
long a train of successes following.
In 1856 he voted, like the sturdy old partisan
he was, for James Buchanan, although his son-in-
law, John C. Fremont, whom he greatly admired,
was candidate against Buchanan. Benton took
much pride in Fremont's achievements and in his
courageous and dashing expeditions. In his
"Thirty Years' View" he finds it impossible
to conceal his amusement and satisfaction over
the fact that his daughter, Mrs. Fremont, sup
pressed orders countermanding Fremont's second
expedition in 1844. Fremont had left his home
in Missouri when these orders arrived from the
War Department, and Mrs. Fremont, opening
the dispatches, as requested by her husband
on his departure, saw that if they were for
warded, Fremont would be obliged to return.
She withheld them, with the knowledge and
warm approval of her father. Benton, speaking
of this (to him) amusing incident, said that " this
hinderance should be charged to the account
of West Point officers, to whose pursuit of easy
service Fremont's adventurous expeditions were
8

114 STATESMEN
a reproach." Benton, it should be said, lost no
opportunity to gibe the West Pointers, whom he
hated with a perfect hatred. He had himself
been commissioned in the United States army
and had served as lieutenant-colonel in the war
of 1812, when he was an aide-de-camp to General
Jackson. Some of Benton's attacks upon the
army and navy, both of which had within his..
lifetime covered themselves with glory in our
contests with Great Britain, were inspired by
partisan prejudice rather than any sound objec
tion to the little navy and army then maintained
at the expense of the Government. He ridiculed
every measure designed to promote the efficiency
of either branch of the public service, and in
sisted upon a reduction of both arms of the ser
vice to what he called " a peace footing."
Posterity should not lose sight of Benton's
wise and prophetic estimate of the growth of the
Republic in the Northwest. When our dispute
over the Northwestern boundary began, it was
urged that the region demanded by Benton and
his supporters was not valuable for tillage or for
mining. Benton tartly replied : " We want it, any
how; " and when imminence of war with Great
Britain was urged by the more timorous mem
bers of the Senate, he flung out this note of de
fiance : " I think she will take offence, do what
we may in relation to this territory. She wants
it herself, and means to quarrel for it if she. does
not fight for it. . . . Neither nations nor
individuals ever escape danger by fearing it ;
they must face it, and defy it. An abandonment

\ ^ \\Upl/^/'

v^ ^¦

The Benton Statue at St. Louis.

116 STATESMEN
of a right for fear of bringing on an attack, in
stead of keeping it off, will inevitably bring on
the outrage that is dreaded." This was while
the Nation was still harassed by the progress
of the Texas annexation scheme in the South
west. James K. Polk was elected on the basis
of a settlement with England which should give
us as our northern boundary fifty-four degrees
and forty minutes, the slogan of his campaign
being " 54-40, or fight." History records, how
ever, that in the final settlement of that problem
our boundary-line on the north was fixed at 49,
by which we lost the magnificent territory now
occupied by Manitoba, the Northwest Territory,
and British Columbia, thereby interposing a for
eign power between our own possessions and
those which we have since acquired from Russia.
It should be said that Benton acquiesced in this
settlement without much ado.
Benton was not a great orator, as Webster
was, but he was a powerful pleader and an in
domitable spirit, and his nature was cast in a
heroic mould. Like most of the public speakers
of his time, he affected classic allusion and plen
tifully interlarded his speeches with references to
the ancients. He had a great fondness for a bar
barous phrase of his own invention which he
called the " principle demos krateo." This phrase,
which he had borrowed from the Greek, he used
and misused on every possible occasion in speak
ing and in writing. Like others of his time, he
drew copiously from Greek and Roman history
to illustrate his meaning ; as we have seen, the

THOMAS H. BENTON 117
Trojan war was made use of by way of illustrat
ing his fight against the salt tax.
One of his biographers (Roosevelt) has paid
to Benton this just tribute, with which this im
perfect sketch may very properly be concluded :
" He was a faithful friend and a bitter foe. He
was vain, proud, utterly fearless, and quite un
able to comprehend such emotions as are ex
pressed by the terms despondency and yielding.
Without being a great orator or writer, or even
an original thinker, he yet possessed marked .
ability, and his abounding vitality and marvel
lous memory, his indomitable energy and indus
try, and his tenacious persistency and personal
courage, all combined to give him a position and
influence such as few American statesmen have
ever held. His character grew steadily to the
very last. He made better speeches and was
better able to face new problems when past
three-score and ten than in his early youth or
middle age. He possessed a rich fund of politi
cal, legal, and historical learning, and every sub
ject that he ever handled showed traces of care
ful and thorough study. He was ever courteous
except when provoked. His courage was proof
against all fear, and he shrank from no contest,
personal or political. He was sometimes narrow-
minded, and always wilful and passionate, but
he was honest and truthful. At all times and in
all places he held every good gift he had com
pletely at the service of the American Federal
Union." Benton died in the city of Washington in 1858,

118 STATESMEN
to his latest breath, and while he could scarcely
speak above a whisper, keeping up his laborious
habits. In these last dying moments he dictated
the autobiographical sketch which has been re
ferred to in the early part of this chapter, and
died leaving his " Abridgment of Debates " in
complete.

William H, Seward.

V.
WILLIAM H. SEWARD.
Young men will read with sympathy William
H. Seward's account of his first striking out for
himself, at the age of seventeen. His father was
a gentleman of education, some wealth, and high
social and political position, in Central New
York. Harry Seward, as he was called in his
boyhood, was sent to Union College, Schenec
tady. A disagreement between Harry and his fa
ther arose out of some financial matters. Young
Seward coniplained, in his own account of this
affair, written many years afterward, that the
more rigid his economy, the more limited was the
appropriation for his expenses. Finally, the mis
understanding was increased, as he says, " by the
intrusion of the accomplished tailors of Schenec
tady," whose bills his father thought were unrea
sonable ; and as the lad could not submit to the
shame of loss of credit, he resolved upon inde
pendence and self-maintenance. Accordingly, on
the first of January, 1819, without any notice to
his father or anyone else, he left Union College,
as he thought forever, and went to New York by
stage-coach, where he took passage with a fellow-
student for Savannah. After an uneventful voy
age of seven days from New York, the vessel

120 STATESMEN .
anchored in the river at Savannah, and he rode
by stage wagon to Augusta, where he hired a
gig, which landed him at Mount Zion, and he
was among friends from Orange County, N. Y.
Not being any longer able to hire a conveyance,
he took the road on foot to Eatonton, the capital
of Putnam County, Ga. ; he soon found himself
with nine shillings and sixpence. New York cur
rency, soiled with the wear of travel, and almost
unable to resume his journey ; but he finally made
his way to Eatonton, where he met the treasurer
of the State, who was one of the Board of Direc
tors of the Union Academy of Eatonton. After
a cursory examination of the young man, the
Directors agreed to accept him as preceptor of
the new institution at the munificent sum of one
hundred dollars a year and his board. As the
academy was not yet finished, the directors
agreed to compensate him for the delay by fur
nishing him with a horse and carriage in which
he could travel in any part of the State, and in
the interval he was to be boarded among the
directors without charge. This important mat
ter being disposed of, one of the directors of the
institution said : " I am going to state some
thing which, if you prefer, you need not reply.
In your absence from the meeting of trustees
they asked how old you were. I answered that
I thought you were twenty. They replied that
that seemed very young for such an enterprise."
Mr. Seward says in his account of this incident :
" I candidly confessed to my generous patron
that I was only seventeen." " Well," said he.

WILLIAM H. SEWARD 121
"we will leave them to find that out for them
selves." In brief, then, Harry Seward had run away
from home to undertake the management of the
Union College at Eatonton, Ga., where, as he
fondly hoped, he was concealed from the pur
suit of his family. He was very much dismayed,
however, by the intelligence that a packet of let
ters had been transmitted to Richardson, Presi
dent of the United States Branch Bank at Sa
vannah, from the paternal Seward, at Florida,
N. Y. , in which was a letter from the father to
the son describing the paternal anguish and so
licitude caused by the young fellow's flight from
college and from home. The senior Seward im
plored his wandering boy to return, and he sent
the necessary funds to pay his expenses and for
the bills that he had incurred in the meantime.
Young Seward sent his father an Eatonton news
paper which contained an advertisement an
nouncing to the people of the State of Georgia
that " William H. Seward, a gentleman of talents,
educated at Union College, N. Y., had been du
ly appointed principal of the Union Academy,"
etc. His indignant father, having read the
newspaper advertisement, informed the presi
dent and trustees of the college who and what
kind of a person this new principal of their acad
emy was ; that " he was a much-indulged son
who, without just cause and provocation, had ab
sconded from Union College, thereby disgracing
a well-acquired position and plunging his parents
into profound shame and grief." The upshot of

122 STATESMEN
this business was that young Seward, a few weeks
later, returned to college, and in due course was
graduated with all the honors.
It was during these six months in Georgia that
he first came in contact with Southern slavery.
In his " Autobiography," he says : " Although the
planters were new and generally poor, yet I think
the slaves exceeded the white population." No
jealousy or prejudice at that day was manifested
in regard to inquiries or discussions of slavery,
but at the same time there were two kindred
popular prejudices highly developed. One was
a suspicion, amounting to hatred, of all emanci
pated persons, or free negroes, as they were
called. The other a strong prejudice of ah ab
stract nature against the lower class of adventur
ers from the North, called ' Yankees.' The plant
ers entertained me always cordially, as it seemed
from a regard to my acquirements, while the
negroes availed themselves of every occasion to
converse with a stranger who came from ' the big
North,' where they understood their race to be
free, but which they believed to be so far distant
as to be forever inaccessible to them." Seward
gained the confidence and esteem of the negroes
without exciting any jealousy on the part of their
masters. The effect of his observations, he says,
was to confirm and strengthen the opinions he
had already entertained adverse to slavery.
It should be said that in his childhood slavery
had not yet been abolished in the State of New
York. He early discovered in his own home
that, besides his parents, brothers, and sisters,

WILLIAM H. SEWARD 123
all of whom occupied the parlor and principal
bedrooms of the mansion, there were in the
family two black women and one black boy, who
remained exclusive tenants of the kitchen and
the garret over it. The lad found their apart
ment much more attractive than the parlor, and
their conversation a relief from the severe de
corum that there prevailed. He knew that
these people were black, but he did not know
why, and if his parents ever uttered before him
a word of disapproval of slavery, there was cer
tainly nothing that he ever heard that made him
think the negroes inferior to the white person.
The two younger of his father's slaves attended
school and sat by his side if they chose, but he
noticed that no other black children went there.
Later on in life, after Seward had taken to
himself a wife and was on a tour through North
ern Virginia, in 1835, he saw this spectacle at
a country tavern where he had arrived just at
sunset : " A cloud of dust was seen slowly com
ing down the road, from which proceeded a con
fused noise of moaning, weeping, and shouting.
Presently reaching the gate of the stable-yard,
it disclosed itself. Ten naked little boys, be
tween six and twelve years old, tie,d together
two and two by their wrists, were all fastened to
a long rope and followed by a tall, gaunt white
man, who with his long lash whipped up the sad
and weary procession, drove it to the horse-
trough to drink, and thence to a shed, where
they lay down on the ground and sobbed and
moaned themselves to sleep. These were chil-

124 STATESMEN
dren gathered up at different plantations by the
trader, and were to be driven down to Richmond
to be sold at auction and taken South." This
piteous scene made an impression indelible in
the mind of Seward.
It was on this same journey, when homeward
bound, that Seward and his wife passed through
Washington, where he was permitted an infor
mal interview with President Jackson, of whom
he received a vivid impression. Jackson's man
ner was courtly but dogmatic, and he said of
him : " On every subject, of whatever magnitude,
the President was peremptory, and it must be
added that, as far as his opinions were expressed,
they were intelligent and perspicuous." As I
have said, Seward's circumstances were easy.
He early learned to save from his professional
earnings. He never lived extravagantly, but
hospitably, to spend freely and give liberally.
He was considered aristocratic in his tastes and
pursuits, and was certainly brought up in an
atmosphere of refinement and culture somewhat
unusual to those early times. His tastes were
literary, and although he naturally took to poli
tics as soon as he had arrived at the years of
manhood, his pursuits were always scholarly
and refined. His versatility was early a marked
characteristic, and he seemed to turn his mind to
a great variety of diverse occupations with equal
success and facility. His " Autobiography "
bears on every page the impress of an original,
if not a profound, mind. Domestic in his habits
and devoted to his children, he turned from the

WILLIAM H. SEWARD 125
cares and anxieties of a statesman's career to im
press upon his boys lessons of morality, good
breeding, and patriotism, which are among the
choicest treasures of his long and useful life.
For example, to one of his little boys, when he
was away from home, he wrote this charming
letter :
" My Dear Boy : I have written a letter to
Augustus, and I write one now to you. I write
it with red ink so that you may know them
apart. The people where I am staying are very
nice people, but there is a boy here that does
one very naughty thing. I saw yesterday on
the mantel-piece a saucer filled with the shells
of birds' eggs. Now, it is wicked to take away
their eggs from the pretty little birds. It is dif
ferent altogether from taking the old hen's eggs
away from her. Hen's eggs are good to eat and
it is right to take them. The hen does not know
how many eggs she has, and therefore she does
not feel sorry when you take them all away but
one, and she is such an ignorant old creature that
she wouldn't know it if you should take away her
last egg and put a paper one in its place. But
the little birds' eggs are not good to eat ; they
know how many eggs they have, and they are
very sorry and mourn many days if you take
them away. This same naughty boy got up
yesterday morning, took his gun, and shot a very
pretty little yellow-bird. He brought it into the
house, laid it on the table, and it lay there all the
morning. At noon he threw it away. Now, do
you think the little boy was any happier because

126 STATESMEN
he had killed that harmless little yelloW-bird?
Perhaps the bird has left little ones in her nest,
and they too must have died before this time."
Seward's entrance into public life was early.
When he was less than twenty-three years old
he embarked in the political contest then raging,
as an advocate of the election of John Quincy
Adams, and he drew up a very strong, striking,
and pungent address, in which he arraigned the
"Albany Regency " and denounced the methods
of Martin Van Buren's supporters. The Albany
Regency was composed of leading politicians of
the Jackson stripe, who held the political for
tunes of the State of New York as in a grasp of
iron. It was against this Regency that Seward
was to be pitted, later on. His election to the
State Senate was a great victory. T'he Whig
party, which had originated in opposition to the
Jackson administration and the Albany Regency,
nominated Seward for Governor in 1834. He
was defeated by William L. Marcy, who had a
fair majority. At this time he was thirty-three
years of age, and it is a curious illustration of
the narrowness of the political prejudices of the
time, that he was assailed by his opponents for
his extreme youth and his red hair. Mr. Seward's
hair was a warm auburn in tint. In his " Auto
biography" he has narrated an amusing incident
which occurred when he was at Long Branch,
N. J., the year after his defeat. A benevolent-
looking old gentleman said : " Excuse me, sir, if I
ask you an obtrusive question, but I see by the
papers that there was a candidate for Governor

WILLIAM H. SEWARD 127
in your State last fall — the one who was defeated —
whose name was the same as yours. Pray, was
he any relative of your family?" Mr. Seward
had to admit that he was a near relative.
" Not your father, was it, sir ? "
" No, not my father."
A pause ensued, and then, overcpme by curi
osity, the old gentleman returned to the attack:
" Could it have been a brother of yours ? "

Mr. Seward in Early Life.
" Well, Mr. T.," said Seward, " I may as well
confess to you that I am myself that unfortunate
man." " Dear me," said the other, with unaffected
surprise and sympathy, " I never should have
thought it, and so young, too ; I am very sorry.
How near did you come to being elected ? "
" Not very near. I only got a hundred and
sixty-nine thousand votes."
" A hundred and sixty -nine thousand votes and

128 STATESMEN
not elected," was the astonished reply. " Why,
that is more than all the candidates together ever
get in New Jersey. A hundred and  good
heavens, sir, how many votes does it take to
elect a man in New York ? "
The redness of Mr. Seward's hair was taken
up and commented upon by some of his news
paper friends, who set forth in a most elaborate
way that Esau, Cato, Clovis, William Rufus, and
others of a lofty race of red-haired heroes, re
sembled Seward in this highly important re
spect ; while others showed how many of the
greatest names in history were achieved in
youth. In those days of ferment parties rose
and fell on what would now be considered very
slight issues.
Perhaps the most momentous crisis in the po
litical history of New York was that brought on
by the Anti-Masonic movement in 1828-9. In
September, 1826, William Morgan, an inhabitant
of Batavia, in the county of Genesee, was ar
rested on the charge of petty larceny and was
conveyed to the common jail in the county of
Ontario, Canandaigua. He was taken from jail
by citizens of Canandaigua, put in a closed car
riage and clandestinely driven to Lockport, and
thence to Fort Niagara, on the banks of the Ni
agara River. There for a time all trace of him
disappeared. The story goes that he was taken
from Fort Niagara and in some way summarily
put to death. The explanation of this curious
transaction was that he was a Freemason who
had conceived the notion of making public the

WILLIAM H. SEWARD 129
secrets of the order ; that he had prepared a book
which was then in type in a printing-office in
Batavia, and was about to be published. The
printing-office was forcibly attacked and burned
down in the night to destroy the partly prepared
book, and it was charged that this outrage and
the supposed murder of Morgan were the work
of the Freemasons. An intense excitement broke
out in the coufities west of Cayuga Lake, and in
due time spread throughout the State, and even
into other portions of the Northern States. The
presidential election of 1828 was coming on
and the Anti-Masonic party grew to be an im
portant political factor. It was during this tre
mendous Anti-Masonic excitement that a political
phrase, since well known, came into use. A body,
said to be that of William Morgan, had been
found in the Niagara River. It was never thor
oughly identified, but Thurlow Weed, Mr. Sew
ard's closest political friend and ally, was said to
have declared that "it was a good-enough Mor
gan until after election."
Curiously enough, the Anti- Masonic excite
ment assumed proportions big enough to carry it
into a national canvass, and in 1831 Mr. Seward,
visiting Massachusetts, thought it worth while to
have an interview with John Quincy Adams on
the subject of re-entering public life as the na
tional candidate of the Anti-Masons. Mr. Sew
ard describes John Quincy Adams as "a short,
rather corpulent man, of sixty and upward. He
was bald ; his countenance was staid, sober al
most to gloom or sorrow, and hardly gave an in-
0

130

STATESMEN

dication of his superiority over other men. His
eyes were weak and inflamed. He was dressed
in an olive frock-coat, and cravat carelessly tied,
and an old-fashioned light-colored vest and panta
loons. It was obvious that he was a student just
called from the labors of his closet." To this mi
nute description, which indicates Seward's ha
bit of close observation, is added this comment :
" As I left the house, I thought I could plainly
answer how it happened that he, the best Presi-

Mr. Seward's Home at Auburn. N, Y.

dent since Washington, entered and left the office
with so few devoted personal friends." Years
afterward, Seward wrote a biography of John
Quincy Adams, which to-day stands among the
very best personal histories ever written by an
American. As I have said, Seward early imbibed ideas
hostile to slavery, and he took an active part in
forming those advance columns of the friends of
human liberty which finally swept the Northern
States. He was a second time a candidate for

WILLIAM H. SEWARD 131
Governor of New York, in 1838, and was elected
over Marcy by a handsome majority. During
his candidacy he was again assailed for the red
ness of his hair and his extreme youth, and it
was in vain pleaded that he was four years older
than when he had before been a candidate. An
other charge against him was in reference to
transactions with the Holland Land Company
and their tenants, who were in possession of cer
tain wild lands in Chautauqua County ; but a
more important issue in the campaign was raised
by the Anti-Slavery Society, which propounded
to the candidates in nomination three questions:
First. In regard to granting fugitive slaves trial
by jury. Second. In regard to abolishing dis
tinctions and constitutional rights founded solely
on complexion. Third. In regard to the repeal
of the law which authorized the importation of
slaves into New York and their detention as such
during a period of nine months. In a calm
reply, Seward, while avowing his firm faith in
trial by jury, and saying that the more humble
the individual the stronger is his claim to its
protection, and declaring his opposition in clear
and definite terms to all human bondage, refused
to make any ante-election pledges as to his ac
tion upon specific measures. He declared that
these must actually come before him for his de
cision. The greater part of the followers of
the Anti-Slavery leaders were satisfied with these
answers, although the leaders themselves were
not. Seward's election was hailed with the wildest

132 STATESMEN
enthusiasm by the New York Whigs, and his
inauguration and administration were regarded
as matters of the highest political importance.
During his administration of the governorship
a controversy arose between him and the Gov
ernor of Virginia regarding the return of three
sailors who were charged with the. crime of aid
ing a slave, who secreted himself on board their
vessel, to escape from bondage. Governor
Seward took high ground in his reply. The
laws of the State of New York, he said, did not
recognize property in man, and to aid a person
therefore to escape from slavery was not a
crime. His exposition of natural law and of the
law of slavery was masterly and unanswerable,
and in the long controversy that followed, Vir
ginia was finally driven to the extreme of threat
ening to dissolve the Union. The Virginia
Governor appealed to other States, and finally
in great wrath resigned his office. The Virginia
legislature passed an act requiring that all New
York vessels in ports of Virginia should be
searched before they were permitted to sail, for
slaves that might be secreted on board. A sim
ilar controversy arose between New York and
Georgia during Governor Seward's administra
tion, with a similar result. In all these cases
Governor Seward maintained an attitude of
calm, courteous, but immovable opposition to
the claims of slavery. This position he steadily
maintained through all his public career. While
he was Governor he proposed to extend the
right of suffrage to the negroes of New York,

WILLIAM H. SEWARD

133

slavery having in the meantime been abolished,
and this with other public utterances placed him

among the foremost opponents of
slavery within the Whig party.
As Governor of New York, Sew
ard advocated and carried through a just and lib
eral policy. During his administration imprison-

134 STATESMEN
ment for debt was abolished, the cause of general
education was advanced, internal improvements
were made, and foreign immigration fostered.
Elected to the United States Senate in 1849,
he early took occasion to declare his sentiments
on the then dominant topic — slavery. In a
speech on March 11, 1850, the admission of Cali
fornia being under consideration, he said that
there was " a higher law than the Constitution
which regulated the authority of Congress over
the national domain — the law of God and the in
terests of humanity." This phrase was denounced
by the defenders of slavery as treasonable. Eight
years later, in a speech delivered at Rochester,
N. Y., he referred to the "irrepressible conflict"
then going on, which could only end in the
United States becoming either entirely a slave-
holding or non-slaveholding nation. These two
phrases clung to Seward all through his public
career, and will long be associated with his name.
Seward's habit of mind, however, was not com
bative, and, with his habitually gentle disposi
tion, he avoided all unnecessary controversy.
Even when he was Secretary of State in Lin
coln's administration, his habit of looking on the
bright side of things was thought by many to be
one of the causes of the slowness with which the
war was prosecuted. He believed that Provi
dence would deal with slavery as it dealt with
other things, which came to an end in the course
of time without confusion and without violence ;
and he persuaded himself that the war, when it
did come, was nothing more than a temporary

WILLIAM H. SEWARD 135
disturbance. It was even said of him, and not
denied, that he was in favor, as Secretary of
State, of diverting the nation from the great is
sue before it by provoking a foreign war; but
there never was any question as to Seward's lof
ty patriotism, and his sincere devotion to the
cause of human freedom and the rights of man.
When the Republican party, in i860, had ar
rived at a point where there was a possibility
that it might triumph on account of the divisions
in the Democratic party, Seward was the most
prominent candidate for the Presidential nom
ination. The convention met in Chicago amidst
the greatest excitement. By many the nomina
tion of Seward was thought a foregone conclu
sion. He was the leading Republican of the
Eastern States, well known for his learning, emi
nent legal ability, and, above all, for the pure
and honest administration of his high office as
Governor of the State of New York. No other
name but his so evoked the enthusiasm of the
masses of the people of the States east of the
great lakes, and intense was the surprise of hun
dreds of thousands of persons when the compar
atively unknown prairie lawyer and rail-splitter,
Abraham Lincoln, was nominated in place of the
statesman, William H. Seward.
Looking back upon these stirring historic
events, it now seems as though an overruling
Providence had so contrived matters, apparently
in the hands of men, that another man, trained
in a rougher and harder school than Seward,
should be elected to furnish the excuse for the

136 STATESMEN
Southern revolt and lead the nation through fire
and blood to human freedom.
By a curious combination of circumstances,
some of the most conspicuous rivals of Lincoln
in the race for the Presidential nomination were
taken into his cabinet. Edward Bates, of Mis
souri, who was one of these, was made Attorney-
General, and William H. Seward, by common
consent, was regarded as the only person to
whom to entrust the portfolio of the Secretary
of State. It is very likely that Seward, with his
long training, his charming habit of self-compla
cency, and his knowledge of men and affairs, re
garded himself as likely to be the real interior
spirit of the Lincoln administration. With this
view he outlined a presidential inaugural ad
dress and defined a policy for the new adminis
tration to follow. It is hardly necessary to say
thatLincoln was the absolute President and mas
ter of the situation, and that Seward, who was
wise and shrewd, very soon learned to take the
measure of the new man from the West and to
accept his own position, the duties of which he
discharged with wonderful ability, and with .a
certain graciousness of manner that has never
been excelled by any statesman in that place.
His conduct of the foreign affairs of the Re
public during the trying times of the civil war
was in every respect masterly, patriotic, and cal
culated to win, as it did, the respect and admira
tion of the civilized world. The affair of the
Trent was one of the incidents of his adminis
tration which at one time threatened to draw us

WILLIAM H. SEWARD 137
into war with England, while we were yet en
deavoring to put down a gigantic rebellion at
home. Captain Wilkes, of the United - States
ship San Jacinto, had taken from the British pas
senger steamer Trent two rebel commissioners
on their way to England — Messrs. Mason and
Slidell. Their return was demanded by the Brit
ish Government, and for a time it seemed as
though the United States Government must
either submit to a gross humiliation in surren
der or go to war, either of which was to be pro
foundly deplored. Secretary Seward, by refer
ring this question to an unsettled and vexatious
dispute with England, which had been raised
during the war of 1812, contrived to extricate
the United States Government from a most
baffling dilemma, and to save at once the honor
and the credit of the nation. The rebel commis
sioners were restored to the British flag.
As a lawyer, Seward distinguished himself by
befriending the poor and needy, the friendless
and the stranger. His chivalrous love of fair
play was aroused whenever he heard the cry of
the enslaved or the oppressed. He defended
persons who were accused of having aided in the
escape of fugitive slaves, and in many ways man
ifested his sympathy with those who were in
distress and apparently under the ban of the law.
Here are two or three extracts from his occa
sional addresses that may be taken as his points
of doctrine:
" If all the internal improvements required to
cross this State were to be made at once, the

138 STATESMEN
debt which would be created would not impair
the public credit or retard the public prosperity
a single year. The expenses of a single year of
war would exceed the whole sum of such cost."
" Wealth and prosperity have always served
as the guides which introduced vice, luxury, and
corruption into republics ; and luxury, vice, and
corruption have subverted every republic which
has preceded us that had force enough in its in-
corrupted state to resist foreign invasion."
" The perpetuity of this Union is, and ought to
be, the object of the most persevering and watch
ful solicitude on the part of every American
citizen." In 1865, when President Lincoln was assas
sinated in the city of Washington, the band of con
spirators who had planned the murder of the Pres
ident had also included Seward and some other
members of the cabinet in their deadly scheme.
One of the assassins, swiftly and unexpectedly
gaining entrance at the street door, mounted to
the chamber where Seward was lying ill in his
bed. The conspirator, armed with a knife, threw
himself upon the sick man and stabbed him
in several places, but was prevented from instant
ly killing him by the attendant, a male nurse.
While the attendant and the assassin were strug
gling together, Seward craftily rolled himself
over and fell between the bed and the wall, and
before the wretch could go further, help came
and Seward's life was saved. For days he lin
gered between living and dying, his face so
gashed with the assassin's knife that it was with

WILLIAM H. SEWARD

139

J

>^'y'

m: ^'^^ ¦

The Seward Statue, by Randolph Rogers, in Madison Square, New York.
difficulty that he could be fed. After many
days of pain and confinement he was permitted
to be bolstered up in bed and look out upon the
summer sky. Fearing the effect that the news
would have upon the enfeebled invalid, Seward
had not been told of the details of the conspiracy
nor of the death of Lincoln ; but as his eyes
sought out the familiar objects from the window

140 STATESMEN
of his sick-room, he saw the flag on the White
House at half-mast. Instantly divining all that
had happened, he said : " The President is dead,"
and relapsed into silence, while the tears coursed
down his scarred and wounded face.
During Johnson's administration Seward was
able to resume his place in the State Department,
and, greatly to the disappointment of some of
his friends, he supported the policy of the Presi
dent, which was somewhat at variance with that
of Lincoln. Many of his friends fell away from
him, and he doubtless endured in silence and in
sorrow the obloquy to which he was exposed by
reason of his willingness to administer the affairs
of the State Department during the administra
tion of a man whose policy was highly objection
able to the party that had elected Lincoln, and to
which Seward had so long been faithful.
An important incident of Seward's service in
the State Department during Andrew Johnson's
administration was the purchase of Alaska from
Russia by the United States Government, a trans
action which Seward conducted with great skill
and diplomatic ability. His name should be for
ever associated with that surprising state stroke.
On his retirement from the State Department
Seward undertook a journey around the world,
accompanied by members of his family. It was
a unique and wonderful journey, occupying
more than a year. Everywhere the aged states
man was received with the most impressive
demonstrations of respect and veneration. In
foreign lands, where one would scarcely expect

WILLIAM H. SEWARD 141
the name of an American to have penetrated, he
was greeted with a certain impressiveness that
was a wonderful tribute to his fame and to his
prominence. On his return to Auburn he said,
in a little speech to his neighbors who greeted
him at his own house : " In the course of my
wanderings I have seen, not all the nations, but
some of the nations of every race of the earth. I
have looked the whole human family in the face,
and taken by the hand and conversed with my
fellow-man in his lowest degradation and in his
highest state of civilization. I found no nation
so distant and no race so low that the character
of an American citizen did not secure to me, not
merely safety, but also respect, consideration,
and affection." This was in October, 1871. In
October of the next year he died.
In the early part of his career, in 1846, he de
fended and secured a fair trial for a negro ac
cused of murder, one Freeman. The man was
a half-witted creature, apparently incapable of
an)' appeal to his reason or to his intelligence,
and at one time there was every probability that
he would be lynched ; but Seward resolved to
give him the benefit of all his talents in order
that he should be fairly tried by a competent
court of justice. The man was deaf, deserted,
ignorant, and his conduct inexplicable on any
principle of sanity. Referring to this tragical
incident, Seward wrote of his proposed defence
of Freeman: "This will raise a storm of preju
dice and passion which will try the fortitude
of my friends, but I shall do my duty ; I care

142 STATESMEN
not whether I am ever to be forgiven for it
or not." Closing his argument on the trial,
Seward said : " In due time, gentlemen of the
jury, when I shall have paid the debt of nature,
my remains will rest here in your midst with
those of my kindred and neighbors. It is very
possible they may be unhonored, neglected,
spurned ; but perhaps later, when the passion
and excitement which now agitate this commu
nity shall have passed away, some wandering
stranger, some lone exile, some Indian, some
negro, may erect over them an humble stone,
and thereon this epitaph, ' He was Faithful.' "
The passions and excitements which agitated
the community of that time have long since
passed away, and possibly even the memories of
that remarkable trial have faded from the minds
of men ; but where Seward rests, in the embow
ered shades of Auburn, rises a marble monument
on which is engraved the epitaph of his choice,
" He was Faithful."

\^ ' '\ ' ^(,

it''".**!- ^.- , :-t
!.,.riiifeiir ¦'iwv^y

Wjm '''^-^

Salmon Portland Chase.

VI.
SALMON P- CHASE.
That is a long life which covers the years be
tween the first appearance of a steamboat on
Lake Erie and the end of the Civil War, the im
peachment of Andrew Johnson and the second
election of General Grant. A boy, twelve years
old, born in Cornish, N. H., in 1808, and des
tined to be Chief-Justice of the United States
and the great Finance Minister of his time, jour
neyed from New England to that remote and al
most unknown region, " The Ohio," in 1820. He
was Salmon Portland, son of Ithamar Chase, of
a distinguished New England family. He was
early left fatherless, and when a young lad was
invited by his uncle. Philander Chase, the Prot
estant Episcopal Bishop of Ohio, to be received
into his household at Worthington, O. Chase,
in his autobiographical notes, said : " I tried to
find out where I was going, and got some queer
information. ' The Ohio,' as the country was
then called, was a great way off. It was very
fertile. Cucumbers grew on trees ! There were
wonderful springs whose waters were like New
England rum ! Deer and wolves were plenty,
and people few." The lad began his journey, in
charge of his elder brother Alexander, who was

144 STATESMEN
going West with the intention of joining Gen
eral Cass's expedition into the Indian country ;
and another member of the party was Henry
R. Schoolcraft, who afterward became distin
guished as a writer on Indian ethnology, cus
toms, and traditions.
The little party at Black Rock, Lake Erie,
were to take passage on a novel craft, the steamer
" Walk-in-the- Water," for Cleveland. They were
detained by reason of the ice in the lake. It was
then April, 1820, and when they did finally em
bark, the steamer was towed part way by several
yoke of oxen attached to a tow-line, walking on
the bank ; and when they were forced to leave
the shore, the steamer was helped in her prog
ress across the open lake by sails as well as by
steam. Nevertheless this method of navigation
was greatly admired for its speed and its nov
elty. Arriving at Cleveland Alexander Chase and
Schoolcraft left the lad behind, where he was
to wait for company to take charge of him to
Worthington. During his tarry here he amused
himself and earned a little money by ferrying pas
sengers across the Cuyahoga. On this incident
was founded a pleasing tale written for boys by
J. T. Trowbridge, and entitled " The Ferry-Boy
and the Financier." Chase's brief experience on
the Cuyahoga would hardly warrant any person
in giving him the title of a ferry-boy, as his
doings in that line were very limited. But we
may be grateful to Mr. Trowbridge, the writer
of the book, for his laudable endeavor, because

SALMON P. CHASE 145
having written to Chase, in 1863 and 1864, for
information on which to build his entertaining
story, he was favored with many letters from the
great man, in which may be found some autobio
graphical notes of great value, which probably
otherwise would never have been written.
The lad was finally taken into the charge of
two young men who were going to Worthing
ton, and they went forward in company. " The
settlement of the country," wrote Mr. Chase, in
later years, " was only begun. Great forests
stretched across the State. Carriage-ways were
hardly practicable. Almost all travelling was
performed on foot or on horseback. The two
young men had two horses, and the arrangement
was that we were to ride and tie, that is to say,
one was to ride ahead some distance, then dis
mount and tie his horse, and walk forward. The
person on foot was to come up, take the horse,
ride on beyond the walker in front, then tie, and
so on. We pa,ssed through Wooster, staying
there overnight. This place seemed to me to
be a great one, and the lighted houses, as we
went in after dark, were very splendid. In three
or four days we reached Worthington. I entered
the town walking, and met my uncle in the street
with two or three of his clergy or friends."
The young lad, now domesticated with his
uncle, the Bislvop of Ohio, was expected to pur
sue his studies, already well begun, and to " do
chores." He was proficient in Latin and Greek.
and " Rollin's Ancient History " was read and
reread by him, as many modern boys might read
10

146 STATESMEN
a cheap novel. "A ludicrous incident of his
Worthington life," says one of his biographers,
J. W. Shuckers, " fastened itself strongly in his
memory. One morning the bishop and all the
older members of the family went away, leaving
the boy at home, with directions to kill and dress
a pig for the next day's dinner." " I had no

Tne House in which Mr. Chase was Born, at Cornish, N. H.
great difficulty," said Mr. Chase, " in catching
and slaughtering a fat young porker. A tub of
hot water was in readiness for plunging him in
preparatory to taking off his bristles. Unfortu
nately, however, the water was too hot, or per
haps when I soused the pig into it I kept him
there too long. At any rate, when I undertook
to remove the bristles, expecting that they would

SALMON P. CHASE 147
come off almost of themselves, I found to my dis
may that I could not stir one of them. In pig-
killing phrase, the bristles were ' set.' I pulled
and pulled in vain. What was I to do ? The
pig must be dressed. About that there must be
no failure. I thought of my cousin's razors, a
nice new pair, just suited to the use of a spruce
young clergyman as he was. No sooner thought
of than done. I got the razors and shaved the
pig from tail to snout. I think the shaving was
a success. The razors were damaged by the
operation, however, but they were carefully
cleaned and restored to their place. My im
pression is that, on the whole, the killing was
not satisfactory to the bishop, and that my cousin
did not find his razors exactly in condition for
use the next morning. But the operation had
its moral, and showed that where there is a will
there is a way." This humble and grotesque
experience in young Chase's life may very fairly
be taken as an indication of the stuff that was in
him. His will was indomitable, and whatever
he set out to do, from that day until the day he
laid down his life, was done.
Those were hard times in " The Ohio."
" Prices of all provisions were low. Corn was
ten and even six cents a bushel, the purchaser
himself gathering it in the field. Twenty-five
cents would buy a bushel of wheat, good and in
good order. There were no good roads, no ac
cessible markets, no revenue, and salaries were
small. I have heard the bishop say that his whole
money income as bishop did not pay his postage

148 STATESMEN
bills. It took a bushel of wheat to pay for the
conveyance of a letter over one hundred and
sixty miles." So when the good bishop was of
fered the presidency of Cincinnati College, in
1822, he accepted the place as offering a means
of deliverance from his hard and unprofitable
post at the head of the diocese.
Salmon P. Chase entered the college as a
freshman, but by extra study was very soon pro
moted to the sophomore class, in which he distin
guished himself by his industry and application.
His first public exercise was a year earlier, when
he delivered an original Greek oration. " My
subject," he says, "was Paul and John compared,
Paul being the principal figure. What trouble
I had to turn my English thoughts into Greek
forms ! The subject helped me, however, for it
allowed me to take sentences from the Testa
ment and thus abridge my labors ! " The orator
was highly successful, generously applauded,
and received the commendation of his uncle, the
bishop. While sophomore in Cincinnati College a mis
chievous student set fire to one of the desks.
Great was the consternation, and when the fire
had been put out the tutor began, with the stu
dents ranged in the class, with," Sophomore  ,
did you set fire to the desk ? " "No, sir." "Do you
know who did?" " No, sir." He reached the cul
prit. " Did you set fire to the desk?" Nothing
abashed, his answer was, " No, sir." " Do you
know who did ? " " No, sir." Says Chase : " I
saw I had to pass the ordeal, and determined to

150 STATBISMEN
tell the truth, but not to give the name of my
classmate, which I thought would be about as
mean as to tell a lie would be wrong. The
question came. ' Sophomore Chase, did you set
fire to the desk ? ' ' No, sir.' ' Do you know
who did?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Who was it?' 'I shall not
tell you, sir.' He said no more. The. case went
before the faculty, and I heard was the subject
of some discussion, but it was not thought worth
while to prosecute the inquiry."
The hard times grew harder, and even the
college was obliged finally to suspend opera
tions for the time, and Bishop Chase went to
England to raise means to establish a theologi
cal school. Young Chase returned to New
England, where his loving and zealous mother
thought that she could spare enough from her
scanty store, added to whatever sums he might
earn for himself meanwhile, to carry him through
Dartmouth College. " How little I appreciated
her sacrifices," he says, " and it is sad to think,
and tears fill my eyes as I do think, how late
comes true appreciation of them. Alas ! how
inadequately, until the beloved mother who
made them has gone beyond the reach of its
manifestation." Not long after his entry into Dartmouth
College he met with another characteristic
event, and also important as indicating the
ruggedness of his character. Some difficulty
occurred, in which a friend of his, one George
Punchard, a warm-hearted and generous fellow,
was involved. Chase had nothing to do with

SALMON P. CHASE 151
the affair, but took Punchard's part cordially,
because he believed him to be unjustly cen
sured. The faculty took the matter in hand and
Punchard was suspended. Chase waited upon
the President and remonstrated, but the Presi
dent intimated that the faculty was the proper
judge of that question, and had decided. Chase
said : " Then I desire to leave the college also,
for I do not wish to stay where a student is
liable to such injustice." " Had I consulted my
mother?" "No, but I wanted leave of absence
for a few days that I might do so." " You can
not have it," said the President. " Then, sir,"
said Chase, very respectfully, " I must go with
out it." " He saw my determination, and I think
really respected the motive which prompted it.
At any rate, he at last consented to the leave."
The young man's mother welcomed him, but
while she could not approve, she did not cen
sure him harshly for his course. Many years
afterward he said : " I could not help feeling
that I had done right in standing by my friend,
though I was sorry I had been obliged to leave
college." He eventually, however, returned to
college and graduated with credit, though with
out special distinction.
Leaving college after graduation, he made his
way to Washington, D. C, by slow -and eco
nomical stages, and there boldly proclaimed,
through the advertising columns of the National
Intelligencer, his intention to open, in the west
ern part of the city, a select classical school,
the special advantages of which were set forth

152 STATESMEN
with some minuteness, and the number of his
pupils was discreetly limited to twenty ; be
yond that he could not go. He waited patiently
and hopefully for the coming of the twenty pu
pils. One only was brought forward to regis
ter his name — Columbus Bonfils ; but, alas ! Co
lumbus Bonfils was the first and last pupil ; the
other nineteen never made their appearance.
Like many another young fellow cast adrift
in Washington, he bethought him of obtaining
a government clerkship. His uncle, Dudley
Chase, was a Senator from Vermont and an
influential friend and supporter of John Quincy
Adams, then President. Young Chase accord
ingly waited upon the great man at his lodg
ings, told the story of his unsuccessful efforts,
and besought his aid in securing a clerkship.
The Senator replied : " I once procured an of
fice for a nephew of mine and he was ruined by
it. I then determined I never would ask for
another. I will lend you fifty cents with which
to buy a spade, but I cannot help you to a clerk
ship." But Providence raised up friends for the
plucky young man, and having relinquished his
class of one, he was invited to take charge of
the boys' department of " Mr. Plumley's Select
Classical Seminary." This institution contained
eighteen or twenty scholars, among whom was
Salmon P. Chase's class of one, Columbus Bon
fils. Among other of the pupils of this academy
were sons of Henry Clay and William Wirt, the
latter then Attorney-General.
In September, 1827, Chase, steadily keeping

SALMON P. CHASE 153
in view his intention to study the law, entered
the office of Attorney-General Wirt, then in the
splendid maturity of his powers, and began his
labors as a student. But while he was zealously
and laboriously making his way in the world
against obstacles about which young men of
the present day can know very little, he did not
forget his principles as a friend of human free
dom. These had early been instilled into his
very being by his devoted mother and his uncle, .
the bishop. In 1828 we find his name attached
to a petition to Congress praying for the aboli
tion of slavery and the slave-trade in the Dis
trict of Colum.bia; and there probably was no
opportunity offered him to express his opinions
on the great subject of human liberty, then be
ginning to agitate all the people, that he did not
readily embrace. He looked into the Capitol
from time to time and listened to the debates of
Congress, which did not impress him favorably
with the "order and dignity of legislative pro
ceedings there.
In one of his letters to Mr. Trowbridge he
says : " I became slightly acquainted -with a num
ber of prominent characters, but was too diffident
to push myself into notice, possibly too proud to
ask for recognition, and preferring to wait for
it ; too indifferent, also (a more serious fault), to
what transpired around me to take much pains
to acquaint myself with the histories and men of
the hour. I made much too little use of the ad
vantages which a residence in Washington at
that period afforded. I was poor and sensitive,

154 STATESMEN
a young teacher, needing myself to be taught
and guided." But having been admitted to the
bar. Chase boldly said : " I would rather be first
twenty years hence at Cincinnati than at Bal
timore. As I ever have been first at school
and college, except at Dartmouth, where I was
much too idle, I shall ever strive to be first
wherever I may be, let what success will attend
the effort." LThese were the words of a brave
young spirit, resolved to turn again to the raw
but promising life of the West.^ To Cincinnati,
then, he went in March, 1830, was admitted to
the bar soon after, and began a lawyer's life.
He was a prodigious worker, and up to his
latest days, which were undoubtedly shortened
by his arduous and unceasing mental labors, he
spared himself not for a day, not for an hour,
but devoted himself with unremitting toil to the
accumulation of the knowledge that seemed to
him necessary in the vocation of life immediately
before him. Very soon after his arrival in Cin
cinnati he undertook and carried out a work of
great magnitude and importance, a new edition
of the statutes of Ohio. The codification of a
vast body of laws, dating from 1788 to 1833, in
clusive, a period of forty-six years, was the her
culean task which he calmly assumed and exe
cuted while yet scarcely twenty-two years of
age. The book is to this day a work of stand
ard value.
Those were times when fugitive slaves, escap
ing from the soil of Kentucky to the free soil of
Ohio, filled the whole Northwestern country

SALMON P. CHASE 155
with a vague feeling of trouble. Men were be
ginning to discuss the righteousness of human
slavery and question the justice of returning to
bondage those who had escaped from communi
ties in which slavery was recognized as a legal
and humane institution. In July, 1836, there oc
curred in Cincinnati an incident known in his
tory as the " Birney Mob," which undoubtedly
had much to do with coloring the political views
of Chase. James G. Birney was a Southern slave
holder, who, having emancipated his human
chattels, went to Cincinnati and established an
anti-slavery newspaper called The Philanthropist.
The sentiment of the city was pro-slavery, and
the appearance of the newspaper so angered
the people that the office was mobbed, the type
thrown into the street and the press into the
river. Chase viewed these lawless and outrage
ous proceedings with deep indignation, and the
circumstances of the Birney mob made an im
pression upon his mind so deep that he resolved
that he would inake a study of the whole ques
tion with a view to forming some opinion as to
the proper method of dealing with it. In one
of his letters to Mr. Trowbridge he says : " Since
1828 I had retained a profound sense of the
general wrong and evil of slave-holding, but I
thought the denunciations of slave-holders by
abolition writers too sweeping and unjust, and I
was not prepared for any political action against
slavery." Several other fugitive slave cases followed in
rapid succession, some of them being of a most

156 STATESMEN
heartrending and desperate character. One of
the most noted of these was the Van Zandt
case, in which an honest and well-meaning farm
er who had succored nine fugitive slaves was
concerned. The fugitives were sought to be
wrested from the custody of Van Zandt by two
volunteer ruffians who did not pretend to have
any authority of law. In the legal fracas which
followed. Chase became involved as counsel
for the defendant. Van Zandt. The case went
from court to court, and finally was appealed to
the United States Supreme Court, where Chase
appeared before the tribunal of last resort asso
ciated with William H. Seward. Chase's argu
ment before the United States Supreme Court
has passed into history as one of the boldest and
most powerful pleas for human liberty under the
Constitution of the United States ever made by
any lawyer. Of Mr. Seward's assistance in this
matter Chase wrote: "I regard him as one of
the very first public men of our country. Who
but himself would have done what he did for
the poor wretch Freeman? His course in the
Van Zandt case has been generous and noble,
but his action in the Freeman case, considering
his own personal position and the circumstances,
was magnanimous in the highest degree ! "
Chase at this time was known as the " Attor
ney-General for negroes ; " but when he had oc
casion to go into the slave-holding ground of
Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati, as he
often did, he was invariably treated with marked
respect and cordiality. Even the slave-holders

SALMON P. CHASE 157
paid tribute to his inflexible sense of justice and
his dignified resolution to do what he conceived
to be his whole duty by his fellow-men.
The Liberty party, in 1845, began to show its
head. The call for its first convention in Ohio
was written by Salmon P Chase and bore his
signature among others. He had generally been
identified with the Democratic party, and in
later years, although his continuance with that
party was neither intimate nor long, men were
accustomed to refer to him as having been early
affiliated with the Democracy. In an address
made in February, 1845, he said : " True democ
racy makes no inquiry about the color of the
skin or the place of nativity, or any similar cir
cumstance or condition. Wherever it sees a man
it recognizes a being endowed by his Creator
with original unalienable rights. In communi-
-ties of men it recognizes no distinctions founded
on mere arbitrary will. I regard, therefore, the
exclusion of the colored people as a body from
the elective franchise as incompatible with true
democratic principles." This utterance in later-
years returned to plague the speaker ; but to his
everlasting honor be it said, he never for an in
stant deviated from the fundamental principle
here laid down.
Ohio Democrats were earlier impregnated
with the idea that human slavery was wrong
and must pass away than were their brethren
in some of the Middle and Eastern States. It
was comparatively easy, therefore, in 1849, to
form a coalition by which Salmon P. Chase

158 STATESMEN
should be elected to the United States Senate.
As in Sumner's case in Massachusetts, later on,
it was a coalition of Free-Soilers and Democrats
against the Hunkers and Whigs. Mr. Chase de
clared his intention to act with the Independent
Democrats in all State issues so long as they
stood by the principles which were the basis
of the coalition. It may be said here that he
was twice elected for Governor and twice for
Senator, and one of the important results of the
upheaval which had made his election possible
was a repeal of the infamous Black Laws of the
State. These laws required colored people to
give bonds for good behavior as a condition
of residence in the State, excluded them from
the schools, denied them the right of testifying
in the courts when a white man was party on
either side, and subjected them to various other
unjust and degrading disabilities. With one ex
ception (the right to sit on juries) these laws
were swept from the statute-book.
In the Senate, into which Chase now made his
entry, the contest was over the proposition to
open to slavery the whole of the vast territory
acquired by the annexation of Texas, the Gads
den purchase, and the treaty of Guadalupe Hi
dalgo. The people of California had already
framed a form of government for themselves,
excluding slavery, and now awaited Federal
action. It is not necessary now to dwell upon
the long debate that ensued, but it must be said
that Senator Chase's arguments, when he ven
tured into the discussion, at once commanded

SALMON P. CHASE 159
attention and respect. His remarks were never
greatly extended. They were always concise
and to the point. For example, when Daniel
Webster proposed that physical law excluded
slavery from a portion of the new territory.
Senator Chase asked: " Is it true that any law
of physical geography will protect the new
Territories from the curse of slavery ? Peonism
was there under the Mexican law, and if peon- "
ism were not there to warn us, what may be
expected if slavery be not prohibited ? "
In the debate over the Fugitive Slave law, he
pleaded earnestly for some amelioration of the
iron statute which the slaveholders insisted upon
forcing upon the country. The right of trial by
jury, he urged, ought at least to be embodied
into the law. " If the most ordinary contro
versy," he said, " involving a contested claim to
$20, must be decided by a jury, surely a contro
versy which involves the right of a man to his
liberty should have a similar trial."
The repeal of the Missouri Compromise by the
passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill was another
opportunity which Chase readily embraced to
disclose his immovable position on the general
subject of human rights. He pleaded only that
the people of the Territories, acting through
their proper representatives in the Territorial
Legislature and subject to the limitations of the
Constitution, should be able to protect them
selves against slavery by prohibiting it. This
principle was steadfastly denied by the pro-
slavery Senators. When the battle was won for

-^^\4V/^<lv

\l r s?»,^ *

Edgewood House, Mr. Chase's Residence at Washington, D. C.

SALMON P. CHASE IGl
the pro-slavery cause, great was the jubilation of
the people who had for weeks crowded the gal
leries and lobbies of the Capitol waiting for the
determination of the question. It was dark in the
early morning of March 4, 1854, after a session
of seventeen hours, when the bill finally passed
the Senate. Senators Chase and Sumner walked
down the steps of the Capitol together. The
thunder of a cannon's salute by the victorious
slave-owners fell upon their ears. Said Chase :
" They celebrate a present victory, but the
echoes that they awake will never rest until
slavery itself shall die."
Nominated for Governor of Ohio by the Re
publican party in 1855, Chase stumped the
State, making a series of vigorous and effective
speeches. During his term of office the State
was repeatedly torn with dissensions over ques
tions raised by the attempt to return fugitive
slaves. It is noticeable, however, that public
opinion, since his first activity in the Van Zandt
and similar cases, had greatly changed for the
better. It was now thought necessary to apolo
gize for any attempt on the part of the United
States authorities and their sympathizers to ex
ecute the infamous and generally unpopular law
regarding fugitive slaves. Some of these cases
were of a peculiarly distressing character, the
celebrated case of Margaret Garner being one.
This was a peculiarly horrible affair, a fugitive
slave -mother undertaking to kill her offspring
rather than see them remanded again to bond
age. And it is possible that the tragicalness of
11

162 STATESMEN
this dreadful business, and the bloody heroism
of the slave mother, did much to stir the con
science of people who had been disposed to
apologize and defend the peculiar institution.
Under the circumstances, it is not surprising
that the stalwart and indomitable Republican
Senator from Ohio should develop an ambition
for the Presidential nomination of his party. It
is not certain that he aided materially in any of
the plans of his Ohio friends, which had for their
purpose his nomination in i860, by the National
Republican Convention at Chicago; but the
delegation from his State was not united, and
although his name was presented and figured
somewhat conspicuously in the list of candidates
before the balloting, he did not cut a great fig
ure in the convention. Abraham Lincoln was
nominated and elected. Very earl}'- in January
following Chase was invited to meet Lincoln
in Springfield. The President-elect cordially
greeted him, and said : " I have done with you
what I would not perhaps have ventured to do
with any other man in the country — sent for
you to ask you whether you will accept the ap
pointment of Secretary of the Treasury, with
out, however, being exactly prepared to offer it
to you." To this somewhat embarrassing prop
osition Chase replied that he was in an unpleas
ant position. He wanted no appointment, and
certainly could hardly reconcile himself to the
acceptance of a subordinate place. Lincoln told
him that he felt bound to offer the first place to
Seward, who, it will be remembered, was Lin-

SALMON P. CHASE 163
coin's chief opponent in the contest for the
Presidental nomination. Finally, however, soon
after Lincoln's arrival in Washington, Chase
was nominated and confirmed by the Senate,
much to his surprise, no word having passed
between the President-elect and himself mean
while. It was as the great Finance Minister of the
civil war that Chase's real genius was set to
work and his proudest laurels were won. The
condition of the Treasury when he took charge
was deplorable. The public finances were
greatly depressed ; Congress had been rent by
stormy factions, and a powerful body of the
Northern people protested passionately against
the existence of any power on the part of the
General Government to coerce the so-called se
ceding States. Chase's biographer, Mr. Shuck
ers, says of him : " His abilities and energies
soon manifested themselves to the people. He
re-established the public credit upon solid foun
dations. He created a currency which answered
all the vast requirements of the war, and was
beyond all precedent in the history of the country
popular among the people, and this, too, before
the suspension of cash payments. It is impor
tant to be remembered that that currency was
not at first a legal tender. He projected a sys
tem of national banks designed ultimately to
supersede all similar institutions existing under
State laws. The circulating notes of these banks,
secured both by private capital and by ample
deposits of government bonds in the Treasury of

164 STATESMEN
the United States, were intended to provide in
an emphatic sense a sound and uniform currency,
the benefits of which (embracing the whole
country and extending into the far future) were
to prevent the evils inseparable from disordered
issues. Under the general operation of his
measures the loans of the government were ab
sorbed with great rapidity, not only by domestic
purchasers, but by foreign investors, and more
important than any other consideration, the ad
ministration was enabled to meet the prodigious
expenditures entailed by the war, promptly,
surely, regularly."
Webster said of Alexander Hamilton : " He
smote the rock of the national resources and
abundant streams of revenue gushed forth."
How truly this may be said of Chase we may
gather from Blaine's comment in his " Twenty
Years of Congress," on the system of internal
revenue planned and put into operation by Secre
tary Chase : " Congress rendered the taxes more
palatable and less oppressive to the producers
by largely increasing the duties on imports by
the tariff act of July 14, 1862, thus shutting out
still more conclusively all competition from for
eign fabrics. The increased cost was charged to
the consumer, and taxes of fabulous amounts
were paid promptly and with apparent cheerful
ness by the people. The internal revenue was
bounteous from the first, and in a short period
increased to $1,000,000 per day for every secular
day of the year. The amount paid on incomes
for a single year reached $65,000,000, the lead-

SALMON P. CHASE 165
ing merchant in New York paying in one check
a tax of $400,000 on an income of $4,000,000.
. . . It was the crowning glory of Secretary
Chase's policy, and its scope and boldness en
title him to rank with the great financiers of
the world."
Nor were the operations of Chase's broad and
comprehensive mind confined to the finances of
the government. He was consulted in the con
duct of the war at almost every step, and where
Secretary Seward was deemed hesitating and
conservative. Secretary Chase was always bold,
aggressive, and progressive. He assisted in the
early formation of the army of volunteers, a
duty in which his active and thoughtful meas
ures to promote the efficiency of the Ohio mi
litia admirably fitted him. We are told that
Chase during this period often lamented that he
had not himself in early life turned his thoughts
to the study of military strategy. He had in
him many of the qualities that make a great
soldier. He never lost his mental balance or
self-possession ; in moments of the greatest ex
terior excitement, he was thoughtful, collected,
and calm. Horace Greeley once impetuously
declared at a breakfast - table in Washington,
during one of the dark periods of the war:
" Why does not President Lincoln make Gov
ernor Chase commander of the Army of the
Potomac ? If he had been, the war would have
ended in eighteen months."
When we reflect that Mr. Chase at one time
in his life seriously thought of taking holy orders,

166 STATESMEN
but did become a politician and a financier, his
regret that he had not been a soldier may seem
somewhat grotesque to one who does not know
how the stress and the strain of the civil war com
pelled many a man to wish that he too were a
strategist and a soldier. In one of his letters to
Mr. Trowbridge, before referred to. Chase said:
" While he was Secretary of War General Cam
eron conferred much with me. I never under
took to do anything in his department except
when asked to give my help, and then I gave it
willingly. In addition to Western border State
matters, the principal subjects between General
Cameron and myself were slavery and the em
ployment of colored troops. We agreed very
early that the necessity of arming them was
inevitable, but we were alone in that opinion. At
least no other member of the administration
gave open support, while the President and Mr.
Blair at least were decidedly averse to it."
And yet the time came when the employment of
colored troops in the suppression of the rebel
lion was not only accepted as a necessity, but was
eagerly demanded and approved by all the loyal
people of the North.
Chase's resignation of the office of Secretary
of the Treasury, in June, 1864, was the result of
a series of misunderstandings or disagreements
between himself and President Lincoln in relation
to Federal appointments. It must be admitted
that Chase's selections for office were not always
wise. Possibly they were in some instances bet
ter than those of the President, but he insisted

SALMON P. CHASE 167
with most autocratic vehemence that he should
be sole in authority in all matters pertaining to
the patronage of his high office, and while the
President often did defer to the Secretary's will
when it clashed with his own, there seems to
have been no time when the Secretary deferred
to the President's will when it interfered with
his ; or if he did, it was with ill grace, and after
several such disagreements Secretary Chase ab
ruptly left the Cabinet. His well-known ambi
tion to be President was very naturally revived
by the insidious flatterers who thronged about
him as soon as it was known that he had definite
ly quitted Lincoln's Cabinet with something like
a personal quarrel with the President. Many
politicians who had become dissatisfied with
Lincoln's policy, whether justly or unjustly,
thought they saw in the towering, figure of the
ex-Secretary of the Treasury an opportunity to
divide the party and to lead the more radical
elements to victory through his candidacy. The
nomination for the new Presidential term was
about coming on, and some of the ill-advised
friends of the ex-Secretary put forth frantic
efforts to secure his nomination. Among other
devices, a so-called secret circular was put out
by Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, and others.
Commenting on this ill-starred venture of the
anti-Lincoln Republicans, Blaine says : " These
various elements of discontent and opposition
clustered about Secretary Chase and found in
him their natural leader. He was the head of
the radical forces in the Cabinet, as Mr. Seward

168 STATESMEN
was the exponent of the conservative policy.
He had been one of the earliest and most zeal
ous chiefs of the Free Soil party, and ranked
among the brightest stars in that small galaxy
of anti-slavery Senators who bore so memorable
a part in the Congressional struggles before the
war. He was justly distinguished as a political
leader and an able and a versatile statesman. For
the part he was now desired and expected to
play he had a decided inclination and not a few
advantages. Keenly ambitious, he was justified
by his talents, however mistaken his time and
his methods, in aspiring to the highest place."
Chase had all along, clung to the proposition
that no President should have a second term of
office, and he had added the opinion that a man
of different qualities from those of Lincoln
would be needed for the next four years suc
ceeding his first term. A few days after the
appearance of the so-called secret circular of
Pomeroy, the Republican members of the Ohio
Legislature passed a resolution in favor of Lin
coln's renomination, upon which Chase with
drew his name as a candidate. It may be said
that the opposition to Lincoln's renomination
practically ended then and there, although it
still showed itself in fitful bursts of restlessness
before his renomination at Baltimore, in the
summer of 1864.
Later in that year, Roger B. Taney, that ex-
Secretary of the Treasury who had been re
warded with the great office of Chief Justice of
the Supreme Court of the United States by An-

170 STATESMEN
drew Jackson, for his subserviency in the mat
ter of removing the public deposits from the
United States bank, died. By a curious coinci
dence, another ex-Secretary of the Treasury,
but far more renowned, honest, and pure, was
nominated to take his place. While the office
remained unfilled, there, was great concern
throughout the country over the possible action
of President Lincoln. Sumner and many oth
er advanced Republicans besought Lincoln to
nominate Chase ; but, on the other hand, the
President was overwhelmed with expostulations
from his own friends, who besought him to re
member that the man whose nomination seemed
imminent had been his rival in the preceding
canvass for the Presidential nomination, and to
withhold from him this high honor. One day
during the pendency of this doubt I had occa
sion to see the President in his private office.
He was in gay humor, and asked what was the
news. I said : " Mr. President, there is no news."
" Very well," he said ; " what are people talking
about ? " " They are guessing who will be
Taney's successor," I said, jocularly. Instantly
his countenance fell, and, with a grave and seri
ous expression, he said, pointing to a huge pile
of telegrams and letters on his table : " I have
been all day and yesterday and the day before
besieged by messages from my friends all over
the country, as if there were a determination to
put up the bars between Governor Chase and
myself." Then, after a pause, he added : " But I
shall nominate him for Chief Justice neverthe-

SALMON P. CHASE

111

less." Chase's nomination was sent in to the Sen
ate December 6th, in a message written in Lin-

The Negro-Pew. [An Actual View.]
coin's own hand. His confirmation was imme
diate, and in the noble place of Chief Justice
the ex-Secretary, ex-Governor, and ex-Senator
filled the highest expectations of his friends and

172 STATESMEN
covered his enemies with confusion. He pre
sided over the deliberations of the Senate, as
required by law, when that body sat as a High
Court of Impeachment, listening to the charges
preferred by the House in the matter of Andrew
Johnson's alleged illegal proceeding in the at
tempt to remove Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary
of War. In the midst of the excitements and
factional heats that circled about the Capitol,
only one man seemed immovable, calm, and un-
impressible. That was the Chief Justice, who
in imperturbable dignity presided over the High
Court. To his wisdom, his calmness, and ju
dicial firmness that now historical tribunal owes
its highest claim to the respect and gratitude of
our people.
As Chief Justice, Chase's labors were ardu
ous and excessive. He had borne a tremendous
strain while he held the office of Secretary of
the Treasury, during the most trying period of
American history. He came to the duties of
the Supreme Bench with a consciousness that
his later activities had unfitted him for a judicial
post, but no one could ever see that he lacked
any of the qualities requisite for his duties. He
overcame any obstacles that he might himself
have seen by dint of the severest labor, and by
studies the extent of which probably not even
the members of his family fully realized. He
was a good judge, an honest jurist, and a stern,
severe patriot.
Undoubtedly the heavy tax upon his physical
strength, great though that strength was, hast-

SALMON P. CHASE 173
ened the catastrophe in which his powers were
finally involved in ruin. After one or two warn
ings in the form of slighter shocks, he was finally
laid on the bed of sickness by a severe stroke of
paralysis, from which he never recovered ; and
he died on the 7th of May, 1873, having passed
the age of seventy years.
"Chase's character was grave, serious, serene.
He had little or no sense of humor, and, as
his biographers have said, never told a story but
to spoil it. He took life seriously and with
a certain severity of conscientiousness which
to many seemed excessive Puritanism. He was
methodical, systematic, a rigid disciplinarian,
punctilious in regard to all the forms of official
and social intercourse, and he exacted of every
subordinate the same loyalty to duty and the
same exactness of statement which he himself
rendered as a matter of conscience and of habit.
His personal appearance was majestic and noble.
His commanding figure, six feet two inches
high, was admirably proportioned. His head
was massive ; his face wore an impress of dignity
which was sometimes awful. He lacked the
magnetism of Henry Clay and the godlike maj
esty of Daniel Webster ; but none who ever saw
his towering form moving through the corridors
of the Treasury Department, or clad in the
robes of the Chief Justice, can ever forget the
almost oracular appearance which inspired the
veneration and respect of those who looked upon
his figure or heard the slow, calm utterances of
his voice. He was respected, even venerated,

174 STATESMEN
but he was never "popular" in the sense with
which Americans use that word. His friends
were devoted to his fortunes, but they were not
reckoned as Clay and Webster reckoned theirs
— by hosts. His tastes were simple, his habits
domestic, and his private and public character
stainless. Demarest Lloyd, in an admirable sketch of
Chase, printed in the Atlantic Monthly soon
after the death of the Chief Justice, says : " His
will was his great power. This faculty in him
probably more than any other contributed to his
success. It was dominating and indomitable.
It yielded to no man and to no force. Its per
sistency was measured only by the length of
the task to be accomplished, and its firmness
increased with the weight of interests that de
pended upon it ; and while it no doubt short
ened his life, it again prolonged it. . . . All
through these exciting and arduous periods he
held himself firmly to his post. Then came the
first shock that prostrated him, and first^set the
term beyond which he could hardly endure ; at
this the will turned to repair its own ravages."
Of Salmon P. Chase it may be truly said that
his whole life was formed upon the moral incul
cated in his earliest youth — " Where there is a
will there is a way."

vn.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
It is difficult to see how anyone who believes
in God and in His watchful interest in the affairs
of nations and individuals, can study the story of
Abraham Lincoln and not be impressed with the
idea that here was a man divinely appointed and
trained for a certain work. In the earlier chap
ters of this book we have seen how persistently
the political power of slavery in the United
States asserted itself. Good and patriotic men
on both sides of the question had tried to put
aside slavery and all that hung on that institu
tion, so that it should no longer appear in public
affairs. Again and again they had, as they fond
ly thought, buried the whole matter so com
pletely out of sight that it never would be heard
of again ; but, like an uneasy ghost, it continually
came stalking in where it was neither expected
nor desired. This could not be otherwise, in the
very nature of things. Slavery was restless and
aggressive. It could not be confined to the States
in which it had existed for so many years unques
tioned. It was not the fault of the slave-holding
States that human bondage was first made law
ful within their borders ; and now that it was
there, it could not be got rid of.

Lincoln's Approved Likeness.

This picture is after a photograph of Lincoln taken in Washington in 1862, and
was given to Mr. Brooks by Mrs. Lincoln, with the remark that it was her hus
band's favorite likeness. When the picture, a miniature, was shown to Lincoln,
and Mrs. Lincoln's remark repeated to him, he said. " I don't know that I have
any favorite portrait of myself ; but I have thought that if I looked like any of the
likenesses of me that have been taken, I look most like that one." The picture has
never before been engraved.

ABRAHAM LINOOLN 177
What was more, slavery must have an outlet.
The natural increase of the slaves would soon
overstock the home market. There must be
some way of disposing of this increasing surplus.
Nor was this all. The area of the United States
was frequently being added to by the acquisition
of new territory in various directions. As these
new territories should enter the Union of States,
unless some of them came in as slave-holding
States, the non-slave-holding States would soon
outnumber those in which slavery existed; and
slavery needed legislation to enable itself to hold
its own where it was already established. This
law-making power could not be had if the free
States outnumbered the slave States. Calhoun,
who looked further ahead than most of the men
of his time, saw that unless the newly acquired ter
ritory would be evenly divided between the slave-
holding and the non-slave-holding States, the
cherished institution was doomed. He worried
greatly over the disturbance of the equilibrium
in the Senate in favor of the non-slave-holding
States, giving to these more votes in the Senate
than the slave-holding States had. He died be
fore this actually happened, but up to his latest
breath he insisted that every time a new State
was taken into the Union as a free State, another
must be taken in as a slave State.
It was this determination to preserve " the
equilibrium," of which Calhoun had so much to
say, that forced the question of slaivery to the
surface every time we acquired territory from
which new States were to be carved. As we
12

178 STATESMEN
were constantly increasing our area in this way,
slavery, anxious to secure an outlet and a market
for its chattels, and equally determined to keep
even the balance of power, if not inclining to its
own side, made itself heard in boisterous advo
cacy of its claiths. But the world was all the
while growing more and more disposed to re
gard human bondage as wrong and wicked, and
unless something were done to commit the whole
Republic of the United States to the perpetua
tion of slavery as a good thing, the time would
soon come when that would not only be im
possible, but the bolder sort of anti-slavery men
would even venture into an invasion of the right
to hold slaves in States in which slavery had ex
isted for many years without serious objection
from anybody.
By -dint of bullying, and by wheedling some
of the Congressmen from the non-slave-holding
States into their support, the representatives of
the slave-holding States managed to stave off for
a while the evil day when their absolute power
in national affairs would be broken. Clay helped
to postpone that day by compromises that gave
him the name of the " Great Pacificator." Ben
ton, a representative from a slave-holding State,
failed to see the necessity of providing room for
slavery to grow in ; or, if he did see it, he did
not care to make that provision. Webster was
the awful example of a great genius blinded by
a desire to keep friendly relations with a slave-
holding interest which his OAvn people at home
regarded with aversion. But Calhoun never for

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 179
a moment lost sight of the fact that, unless his
own people could maintain themselves against
the rising tide of anti-slavery sentiment in the
North and the insidious growth of free institu
tions in the newly acquired territories, slavery
would have to fight for its own existence or
would be obliged to leave the Federal Union,
which would bring on another kind of a fight.
Calhoun died while this catastrophe was draw
ing nigh, and when the forces that made it inev
itable were gathering cohesion. But the fight
came at last, when the politics of the country
showed that the free States were as strong as
the slave States : if not a little stronger then, they
would be in a clear majority before long.
Now let us look at the character and training
of the man who was to be the leader of the na
tion during that memorable and deadly contest
— Abraham Lincoln.
Many biographers lay great stress upon the
condition of poverty, even squalor, into which
Abraham Lincoln was born, as though that were
not common to the whole Western country. It
is true that Lincoln's parents were very poor.
His father, Thomas Lincoln, had migrated from
place to place ever since he had come to man's
estate, apparently always seeking for some fa
vored spot where the soil was rich enough to
maintain a man with little or no labor. It does
not appear that he ever found any such place,
but up to the day of his death he was looking
for it. When Abraham Lincoln was a boy (he
was born in 1809) the depression of trade and

180 STATESMEN
commerce throughout the towns and villages of
the old Thirteen States was very great The
War of 1 8 12 had been finished, and the condi
tion of the. country, after a brief period of pros
perity, was most deplorable. The value of im
ported goods brought into the United States
from foreign parts was nearly four times as great
as those exported. The public debt of the gov
ernment was $42,000,000, and the debts of the
several States added together were about one-
half that sum. Specie had gone out of the coun
try to pay for imports, and an almost worthless
paper currency flooded the States and Terri
tories of the West.
The consequences of a long embargo, when all
American ports were closed to commerce, noth
ing going out and nothing coming in, were still
felt in every town, city, and settlement in the
broad land. The manufacturing industries of
the republic were few and feeble, and imported
articles were so dear as to be out of the reach of
all but the rich. Thorns were used for pins, and
bits of bone or slices of corn-cob were used for
buttons ; and, except in times of plenty, crusts' of
rye bread served as a substitute for coffee, and
the dried leaves of currant-bushes were used in
place of imported tea. The common drink of
the people in the West was corn whiskey tem
pered with water, and the principal sustenance
of the settlers was the wild game with which
the woods swarmed. Bears, deer, woodchucks,
raccoons, wild turkeys, and other furred and
feathered creatures furnished the table and the

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

181

scanty wardrobe of the settlers. Every man
and boy was a hunter and a trapper. It was a
hard life; hard for the children, hardest for the
women. Abraham Lincoln in his eighth year was
tall, ungainly, fast -growing, long-legged, and

dressed in the garb of the frontier. He wore a
shirt of homespun cotton and wool, dyed, if col
ored at all, with a mixture from the roots and
barks of the forest. According to his own ac
count, he never wore stockings until he was " a
young man grown." His feet were covered
with rough cow-hide shoes, but oftener with

182 STATESMEN
moccasons made by his mother's hands or pro
cured from the Indians. Deer-skin leggings or
breeches and a hunting shirt of the same stuff
completed his outfit, except for the 'coon-skin
cap which adorned his shaggy head, the tail of
the 'coon hanging down behind as an ornament
and a convenient handle thereof.
It was in the autumn of 1816 that the Lincolns
took up their abode in the wilds of Indiana, hav
ing lately migrated from Kentucky. They lived
in a log cabin built from logs felled by the father,
Thomas Lincoln, with the slight assistance of
his boy. There was no floor to this abode but
the mother -earth, cleaned and pounded hard.
Later on, when by a second marriage the neces
sity came for putting on a better appearance, a
floor was laid of slabs of wood split from oak
and hickory logs, laid on joists of timber and
loosely kept in place by wooden pinions. Years
afterward, when the pioneer boy had become
the tenant of the White House, he could re
member how he lay in bed of a bitter, cold morn
ing, listening for his mother's footsteps rattling
the slabs of the rough oaken floor as she came
to rouse him from his pretended sleep.
Early the lad learned the use of the axe, the
maul, and the wedge. These, with the froe, a
clumsy iron tool, were required for the splitting
of rails and billets of wood to be used in the
rough architecture and manufacture of the home
and its furniture. The lad's sinews were hard
ened, his hands toughened, and his mind stored
with a knowledge of wood-craft and every vari-

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 183
ety of timber which he never forgot. The fam
ily was surrounded with the forests. The times
were superstitious, and the woods, to many of
the people, were filled with strange noises, mys
terious whisperings, and wild, uncanny creatures.
They heard the hollow murmur of distant streams
and the low hum that goes up continually from
the hidden life of the woods ; and in the silence
and mysterious darkness of the forest young
Lincoln found his most congenial place of medi
tation, though the hard-working lad had little
time for solitary thought and communing with
nature. But here, as he has himself said, he ac
quired habits of reflection, and he admitted that
he did not like work any better than other
boys of his age. He did like to spend hours in
roaming the wild-wood, and never to the latest
day of his life did he forget the traditions and
the scenery of the wilderness in which his boy
hood was spent.
Lincoln's mother died, in 1818, of a mysterious
disease known as the " milk sick," which ravaged
all that region, and is to this day recalled as a
strange and uncatalogued species of pestilence.
This was the lad's first great sorrow, and long
after, when the spot where she was buried had
been covered by the wreck of the forests, her
son was wont to say, " All that I am or hope to be
I owe to my angel mother ; " and the first letter
he ever wrote was written to a parson whom they
had known in Kentucky, and whom the family
now entreated to come and preach the funeral
sermon over the grave of Nancy Hanks Lincoln.

184 STATESMEN
Shiftless Thomas Lincoln was now the only
reliance of the little brood of children, the eld
est of which was Sarah, scarcely twelve years
old ; Abe, two years younger ; and Dennis Hanks,
an orphan cousin of young Lincoln, a little over
eight years old. After struggling with his ad
verse circumstances for a while alone, Thomas
Lincoln went off and procured for himself a
second wife. She was Sally Johnston, of Eliza
bethtown, Ky., and it was to her as much as
to his own mother that Abraham owed much
of his future comfort. He had already learned
to read at his mother's knee. The three books
he first absorbed were the Bible, " .^sop's Fables,"
and the " Pilgrim's Progress." On these three
were formed the literary taste of Abraham Lin
coln. So diligently did he study them that he
could repeat from memory many whole chapters
of the Bible, all of the striking passages of Bun-
yan's imniortal book, and every one of the fables
of .^sop. " The Life of Henry Clay," which
his mother had managed to procure for him,
was his fourth and one of his choicest treasures.
Ramsey's " Life of Washington," and another by
Weems, were added by slow degrees to his slen
der stock of books. Wherever he heard of a
book that could be borrowed, or even read on
the premises of the owner, thither he went and
gave the book- owner no peace until he had ab
sorbed it. With the coming of the step-mother,
who was a woman of thrift and energy, came
something like comfort into the log cabin of the
Lincolns. She brought with her bedding, knives

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 185
and forks, and numerous other things to which
the little family had been unaccustomed. Then,
as Lincoln said, he " began to feel like a human
being." Reading with him begot a desire to
write, and as paper was a luxury almost out
of the reach of the pioneer children of those
days, he smoothed shingles or took the smooth
side of a wooden shovel and composed there
on essays on topics of the time, and even occa
sionally tried verse-making. He learned to be
concise in his literary style by the circumscribed
character of his writing materials. He could
not use many words when writing with a big
piece of charcoal on a shingle. The future
President of the United States acquired that
habit of condensing his thoughts for which he
was afterward famous, in a severe school.
His step-mother said of him : " He read every
thing he could lay his hands on, and when he
came across a passage that struck him, he would
write it down on boards, if he had no paper, and
keep it by him until he could get paper. Then
he would copy it, look at it, commit it to memory,
and repeat it." In this way he collected a great
many things from books that he did not own and
could not keep, and at the age of ten he had set
up a commonplace book in which were written
the noble thoughts and melodious lines of fa
mous men. Later, but while he was yet a callow
youth, some of the literary productions of his
own were thought good enough for publication
in the county newspaper. Of schooling he had
very little. Occasionally a school-teacher would

186 STATESMEN
come into the neighborhood, miles away perhaps,
and the little brood of children — Abraham, his
sister, and his cousin Dennis — would be sent to
trudge through the wild-wood or through the
snow to the log schoolhouse.
When he was seventeen years old he walked
a long distance to attend court, where he heard
one of the famous Breckinridges, of Kentucky,
make a notable speech in a murder trial. The
lawyer's effort stirred the sleeping genius of the
lad, and from that day he practised speech-mak
ing. He would take up any topic that happened
to be uppermost in the rural neighborhood —
road-building, laying out trails, school-tax, boun
ty on wolves or bears — and, as he called it,
" speechify " to the gaping rustics who stood
around to hear him deliver his semi-humorous
and extemporaneous addresses. Sometimes he
would get up a mock trial and arraign an imag
inary culprit, and, himself acting as prosecuting
attorney, counsel for the defendant, judge, and
jury, go through the formula and the addresses
of a regular court. This entertainment inter
fered with the work of the people and was
forbidden by his father, who grumbled, " When
Abe begins to speak, all hands flock to hear
him." One notable thing about this lad was that
when he had begun to study anything he was
never satisfied until he had got to the root of it.
He wrote and rewrote all that he wanted to
commit to memory. No difficult problem would
he give up ; and when he encountered a fact

ABRAHAM LUjICOLN 187
which to him seemed inexplicable, he never
rested until it was explained and he had mas
tered its secret. In all things he was thorough.
Years afterward, when he was President, and a
person came to him with a story of a plot or
conspiracy, with very little information to back
up his tale, Lincoln said : " There is one thing I
have learned and you have not. It is only one
word — 'thorough.'" Bringing his hand down
on the table with a thump to emphasize his
meaning, he repeated, " Thorough."
Although he never played cards, never learned
to dance, never drank any intoxicating liquors of
any sort whatsoever, and never used a profane
word, he was an important figure in the rude
frolics of the settlement. He very soon acquired
an enormous store of amusing stories. He was
a good mimic, and in wrestling matches he was
renowned. When seventeen years old he had
attained his full height, six feet four inches ; and
a powerful and muscular youth was he. But his
giant strength was never used to oppress or to
annoy. In sport he tried his muscular powers
of endurance, and many a time he interfered as
a peacemaker to break up what seemed to be a
dangerous fight. Far and wide in the sparsely
settled country where he lived he was famed for
his good nature, his enormous strength, and his
readiness to lend a hand in any work or sport.
But we can well understand how he was re
garded with strange curiosity by the rude, unlet
tered pioneers, who scarcely understood why
this tough clodhopper should spend all his spare

188 STATESMEN
time in poring over books and in the writing
which to them seemed so mysterious and useless.
When he was eighteen years old he had his
first glimpse of the world outside the woody
settlement of Southern Indiana. He built with
his own hands a boat, which, being loaded with
products of the neighborhood, was paddled
down stream to the nearest trading-post, where
the cargo was disposed of. Here he saw a steam
boat coming up the river, and being engaged by
two wayfarers to take them and their trunks out
to the steamer from the bank, he was paid two
silver half-dollars, his first great earnings. " I
could scarcely believe my eyes," he said, years
afterward. " You may think it a very little thing,
but it was the most important incident in my life.
I could scarcely believe that I, a poor boy, had
earned a dollar in less than a day. The world
seemed wider and fairer before me. I was a
more hopeful and confident being from that
time." Two years later he went down the Mississippi
River to New Orleans as a flat-boatman, where
he had a series of entertaining adventures and
saw still more of the great world. Shortly after
his return his father moved again — this time to
Illinois — and on the fifteen-day journey to the
fat lands of Macon County, where the old man
expected to find milk and honey flowing, Lin
coln drove the ox-wagon which carried the house
hold goods ; and when the family once more cast
anchor, another log cabin was built, and Abra
ham not only played a man's part in felling the

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 189
logs and building the cabin, but also, with his
cousin, Thomas Hanks, he split the rails that
fenced in the fifteen acres which were to be put
under cultivation. This done, young Abraham
" struck out for himself." He was ready to do
work wherever he could get it, and again as a
flat-boatman he made another venture to New
Orleans, where he got his first glimpse of slav
ery. It has been put on record by one of his
companions that his heart bled, "and slavery
ran its iron into him then and there." He lived
several years at New Salem, one of those little
mushroom villages that rise and fall in the un
easy movement of a new population, and his
succeeding years were homeless, half the time
working and half the time idling, and without
any special aim in life except to gain food and
shelter. He was a pilot on a steamboat, clerk in
a store or a mill, and. drifting about from time
to time, always in pursuit of something better.
Somehow, " tending " a country store suited him
best; it gave him leisure to re.ad, study, and
meditate. As a wrestler and an athlete, the tall, gaunt
young Kentuckian soon acquired great fame,
and in an encounter with a party of overgrown
young men of Clary's Grove, a settlement not
far from New Salem, he gave them a test of his
quality. The entire gang were ready to break
in and interrupt a wrestling-bout between him
self and one Jack Armstrong, when his antag
onist, resorting to foul play, so roused the
wrath of Lincoln that, putting forth all his

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 191
giant strength, he flung Armstrong in the air,
the legs of the champion of the Clary's Grove
boys whirling madly around his head. At this
astounding performance the entire party made a
dead set against the new-comer, who was calmly
waiting their onset, when the vanquished cham
pion chivalrously demanded a truce. Shaking
Lincoln by the hand, he said : " Boys, Abe Lin
coln is the best fellow that ever broke into this
settlement. He* shall be one of us." Lincoln
by general consent became the peacemaker
and the arbitrator of all the petty quarrels
of the neighborhood ; shunning vulgar brawls
himself, he attempted to keep others out of
them, and when debate around the door of the
cross-roads store grew too animated and blows
came in to settle disputes, the terrific windmill of
Lincoln's long arms invariably brought peace.
One of the luxuries of that time with him was
a subscription to the Louisville Courier, then
edited by that famous Whig, George D. Pren
tice, and to secure the paper Lincoln denied
himself necessary clothing. He was studying
politics. The Black Hawk War, a disturbance in the
northern part of Illinois in 1832, called forth
his patriotism and energies, and at the head
of a little company of volunteers he marched
to the relief of the panic-stricken country. It
was here that he secured his first and only mar
tial honor. It was the title of Captain. In this
capacity he saved the life of an old savage who
had strayed from his own camp, and was res-

192 STATESMEN
cued from instant death by Lincoln, who inter
posed, at the risk of his own Hfe, between his
soldiers and the wanderer. Returning home
— the war soon over — he was a candidate for
the Legislature, and was brought into contact
with many of the prominent men of the State,
and he took the stump in his own behalf. In
this venture he was defeated ; but the next year
he was more successful, and then served in the
State Legislature three terms. It was here that
his political ambition became aroused, and es
pousing the then popular policy of the Whigs
— internal improvements — he helped to project
a great variety of improvements, very few of
which ever took on material shape. But he did,
however, plume himself greatly on his success
in changing the capital from Vandalia to Spring
field — a piece of political management which in
later years he regarded with amusement and
contempt. In Springfield he now "hung out
his shingle " as a lawyer. He had read Black-
stone — almost committed the work to memory —
and had by practising in a small way among his
neighbors secured a fair legal education, and was
readily admitted to the Bar. He had under
taken small cases on trial before the local jus
tice of the peace, and had been " everybody's
friend." He had tried his hand, too, at survey
ing, and was in fact a jack-of-all-trades, readily
turning his hand to every form of activity re
quired in a raw, new country like that in which
he lived. His very first case in the United
States Circuit Court he threw up, with the dec-

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 193
laration that on careful examination he found all
the authorities on the other side and none on
his. This characteristic honesty of purpose and
frankness of opinion was only part and parcel of
his character, already well formed. He was the
protector of the innocent and the oppressed, the
prosecutor of wrong-doing, and, with his habit
of going thoroughly to the bottom of things,
was usually able to convince any jury of the jus
tice of his case ; and the appeals he made to rea
son were so fervid that his hearers were often
astonished and, as we may say, convinced against
their will.
On the stump, as a frequent candidate for
the Legislature, or an advocate of the political
claims of other men, he made himself so accept
able to the gatherings of the neighborhood that
he always drew a crowd wherever he went ; and
in the chats that followed as the concourse broke
up into groups when speaking was over, Lincoln
learned the ways and manners of the different
communities that came together, weaving their
lines of limited travel to and fro as these occa
sions came and went. His knowledge of human
nature and of the plain people, already very
great, was wonderfully increased by these expe
riences. He early put himself on record as op
posed to the further extension of the American
system of human slavery. He was one of two
signers to a protest on the subject of domestic
slavery, which was received and spread on the
journals of the General Assembly of Illinois.
The backwoods stories, the legends of Indian
13

194 STATESMEN
fightings and superstitions, the folk-lore of a
generation, and the latest political and social
gossip of the frontier were poured into the re
ceptive mind of the man who in later years was
to be a thoroughly equipped master of human
nature as human nature is developed in the life
of the American people.
In 1846 he was elected a Representative in
Congress, after several disappointments. His
competitor on the Democratic ticket was Peter
Cartwright, a famous backwoods preacher and
exhorter, whose popularity was supposed to be
so great that Lincoln would be literally nowhere
in the race ; but when Lincoln took the stump
for himself he had plenty of material for his ad
dresses to the people. The new State of Texas
had been just admitted to the Union, and the
slavery question was now once more before the
people for adjustment. One of the first acts of
his Congressional career, which was not an es
pecially brilliant one, was to offer a series of res
olutions calling on the President (James K. Polk)
to inform the House as to certain facts involved
in the war which followed the annexation of
Texas. Another was the introduction of a bill
to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia.
Thus early did he take his stand on the burning
question which was destined to occupy so much
of his life and energy in the years to come.
His term in Congress over, he sought from the
new Whig President, General Taylor, the place
of Commissioner of the General Land Office,
where he hoped to make useful the knowledge

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

195

that he had acquired as a land-surveyor, and to
help carry out some of his ambitious schemes for
internal improvements. He was disappointed,
and later on, when the Territorial Governorship
of Oregon was offered to him, he hesitated, but
finally declined it. Returning to Springfield, he

The Home of Lincoln at Springfield, 111.
took up his duties as an attorney, and again
plunged into politics, when the Kansas-Nebraska
bill of 1854 roused the country once more to- a
sense of impending danger from slavery. It was
at this time that he went to the Eastern States —
one of the few liberal Whigs of the West — to
support the nominees for the party. He appeared

196 STATESMEN
to look with disfavor on the Free Soil party, then
coming into existence, and claimed that the anti-
slavery proclivities of the Whig party were suf
ficient guaranty that that organization would
do its best to mollify the acerbities of the con
flict. The North was aflame with the excite
ment which followed the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise and the passage of Douglas's Kan
sas-Nebraska bill. Stephen A. Douglas returned
to Illinois, from which State he was United States
Senator, but was called to account for his stew
ardship. He made a speech at Springfield, 111.,
where, for the first time, he met in debate Abra
ham Lincoln, who was to be his most dreaded
adversary. Douglas spoke to the people in justi
fication of his course in Congress and in defence .
of the Kansas-Nebraska bill. Next day Lincoln
replied to Douglas, and all accounts agree that
his was a wonderful and memorable speech. It
was in this speech that Lincoln gave one of his
memorable sayings. When replying to Douglas
he said : " I admit that the emigrant to Kansas
and Nebraska is competent to govern himself,
but I deny his right to govern any other person
without that person's consent." At another point
in his speech he said : " In the view of Judge
Douglas, the question whether a new country
shall be slave or free is a matter of as utter indif
ference as it is whether his neighbor was to plant
his farm with tobacco or stock it with horned
cattle." At the close of a speech in Peoria, Iff.,
Douglas said to Lincoln : " You understand this
question of prohibiting slavery in the Territories

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 197
better than all the opposition in the Senate of the
United States. I cannot make anything by de
bating it with you. You, Lincoln, have here and
at Springfield given me more trouble than all
the opposition in the Senate combined." Doug
las appealed to Lincoln's magnanimity to agree
that there should be no more joint discussions,
and to this Lincoln reluctantly assented.
The Legislature elected that year in Illinois
(in 1854) was to choose a Senator who should be
a colleague with Douglas. When the election
was over it was found that the anti-Douglas men
were in a majority, but they were not united.
Some of them were in favor of Lyman Trumbull
and some of Abraham Lincoln, and after ten un
successful ballots Lincoln persuaded his friends
to vote for Trumbull, who was thereupon elected.
This generous concession on the part of Lincoln
solidified the anti-Douglas party in the Legis
lature, and was greatly praised by those who
knew that Trumbull had' never been the political
friend of Lincoln, but usually his opponent and
unfriendly critic.
In May, 1856, the Republican party of the
State of Illinois was born in a convention held
at Bloomington. Lincoln's advice was sought,
and he said : " Let us in building our new party
make our corner-stone the Declaration of Inde
pendence. Let us build on this rock, and the
gates of hell shall not prevail against us." And
Lincoln's idea was embodied in this resolution
adopted by the convention : " Resolved, that we
hold, in accordance with the opinions and prae-

198 STATESMEN
tices of all the great statesmen of all parties, for
the first sixty years of the administration of the
government, that under the Constitution, Con
gress possesses full power to prohibit slavery in
the Territories ; and that, while we will maintain
all constitutional rights of the South, we also
hold that justice, humanity, the principles of
freedom as expressed in our Declaration of Inde
pendence and our National Constitution, and the
purity and perpetuity of our government, re
quire that that power shall be exerted to prevent
the extension of slavery into Territories here
tofore free." In the election which followed,
Buchanan was the regular Democratic candidate,
Douglas having been defeated in the nominating
convention. John C. Fremont was the candi
date of the Republicans, and Millard Fillmore
of a third party known as the American party.
The campaign was virulent, feverish, and excited.
Lincoln took the field for the Republican ticket,
which was, however, defeated — although Bissell,
the Republican candidate for Governor of Illi
nois, was elected — the electoral vote of the State
being given to Buchanan.
Two years later, when the Senatorial term of
Douglas was drawing to a close, he was once
more pitted against Lincoln, who had now be
come the leader of the Republicans of" his OAvn
State. They refused to trust Douglas, and in
open convention declared that Abraham Lincoln
was their first and only choice for the United
States Senate to fill the vacancy about to be cre
ated by the expiration of Douglas's term of

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 199
office. The two candidates now took the field
in one of the most famous political contests ever
witnessed in this country. They arranged for a
series of joint debates at different points through
out the State. When Lincoln read the manu
script of his speech to an intimate friend, that
gentleman was dismayed by finding that the
key-note of the speech was in its first sentence :
" A house divided against itself cannot stand. I
believe this government cannot endure perma
nently half slave and half free." Lincoln's friends
urged that while this was all perfectly true, it
would be hardly discreet to make so bold and
radical an announcement at that time. People
were still very tender on the subject of slavery,
and the epithets " Abolitionist " and " Black
Republican " were freely bandied, much to the
chagrin of the followers of the new party. De
fending his phrase, " A house divided against it
self," Lincoln said in reply : " This proposition
has been true for six thousand years. I will de
liver the speech as it is written." And he did.
In the course of that address he said: " I do not
expect the Union to be dissolved ; I do not ex
pect the house to fall ; but I do expect it will
cease to be divided : it will become all one thing
or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery
will arrest the further spread of it, and place it
where the public mind will rest in the belief that
it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its
advocates will push it forward until it shall be
come lawful in all States, old as well as new.
North as well as South."

200 STATESMEN
This wonderful debate attracted multitudes of
people far and wide. Wherever the two cham
pions appeared, vast throngs of people congre
gated and listened with delight, or cheered with
boisterous enthusiasm their favorites as each
made what they considered to be unanswerable
arguments against each other. Lincoln's hercu
lean form towered far above the audience which
he addressed. His face was dark and seamed,
his eyes deep -set beneath overhanging and
shaggy brows ; beardless was his face, and a far
away look on his often-sad features at times
struck even casual observers as profoundly pa
thetic. But his manner, when he was alert, was
bright, and even jovial, and in speaking he im
pressed every one with his directness, simplicity,
good sense, clearness of statement, wit and hu
mor, and absolute fairness.
The two important topics before the country
then were the Dred Scott decision — by which
slavery was declared to be constitutional and
right and lawful in the Territories — and the
struggle then going on in Kansas between Free-
State and Slave-State men. Douglas's favorite
doctrine of popular sovereignty was to the effect
that the people in the Territories had the right
to vote slavery up or down as they liked ; but
the Dred Scott decision of Judge Taney was to
the effect that slavery was already in the Terri
tories. Obviously, these two propositions were
irreconcilable. It was Lincoln's purpose to com
pel Douglas to say whether he thought slavery
right or wrong in itself. In his view the

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 201
Dred Scott decision and the Douglas idea of
popular sovereignty could not be held together
in one man's belief. So he framed questions de
signed to bring the matter before Douglas in
such a shape as to oblige him to admit or deny
the abstract right of slavery. Lincoln's friends
remonstrated with him. " If you put that ques
tion to him," they said, " he will perceive that the
answer, giving practical force and effect to the
Dred Scott decision in the Territories, inevitably
loses him the battle, and he will therefore reply by
offering the decision as an abstract principle, but
denying its practical application. He will say
that the decision is just and right, but it is not to
be put into force and effect in the Territories."
" If he takes that chute," said Lincoln, " he can
never be President." Lincoln's anxious friends
replied, " That is not your lookout ; you are
after the Senatoiship." "No, gentlemen," he
said, " I am killing larger game. The battle of
i860 is worth a hundred of this." It is barely
possible that Lincoln even then saw so far ahead
as to think he might be the Republican candi
date for the Presidency in i860; but the chances
are that he was thinking of the battle for freedom
and not of himself. For his time had not yet
come. Douglas was elected United States Sena
tor, although the number of votes polled in the
election for members of the Legislature were more
in Lincoln's favor than in Douglas's ; but as there
were certain hold-over Senators whose votes were
to be counted in the election of United States
Senator, the real victory rested with Douglas.

202

STATESMEN

From that contest emerged the great, majestic
figure of Abraham Lincoln, easily the leader and
champion of the Free-Soil party of the West.
The joint debate attracted attention not only in
the West, but all over the United States, and
wherever the political situation was discussed

The St. Gauden's Statue of Lincoln at Lincoln Park, Chicago.
there was heard the name of Lincoln. His
greatest power as a debater was the charm of his
individuality. His voice was rather high and
shrill, his figure awkward, and his movements
ungraceful ; but the strong sympathetic ele
ment that dominated his nature was always
perceptible through everything he said or did.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 203
He was pre-eminently a man of the people, the
people's advocate ; he was of " the plain people."
He understood their joys, their sorrows, their
hopes, their ambitions. He entered more fully
into their sympathies than any public man who
ever lived, and as the contest drew on when the
last battle in the field of politics should be fought
between freedom and slavery, he gradually be
came the people's champion as against a great
wrong, rather than the champion and advocate
of any great moral or political principle. From
this time forth we must recognize him as speak
ing always in the capacity of an attorney for the
people. Not only here, but later on, when the
war for the Union had begun, and when it was
at its height, he always aimed to be the agent
and the instrument of the people.
The Republicans of Illinois at their annual
convention, in May, 1859, formally presented
Lincoln as their candidate for the Presidency
in i860. During the convention some of the
pioneers or earlier settlers of the State made
their entry into the hall of the convention with
the announcement that a Macon County Demo
crat had a contribution at the door. The curi
osity of the delegates was stimulated and they
looked to see two ancient fence-rails, decorated
with ribbons of red, white, and blue, borne into
the hall by Thomas Hanks, on the rails being
the inscription, " Abraham Lincoln, the Rail
Candidate for the Presidency in i860. Two
rails from a lot of three thousand made in 1830
by Thomas Hanks and Abe Lincoln, whose

204 STATESMEN
father was the first pioneer in Macon County."
Years afterward, Lincoln being asked if he
supposed those were the real rails that he and
Hanks had made, said : " I would not make
an affidavit that they were ; but Hanks and I
did make rails on that piece of ground, although
I think I could make better rails now, and I did
say that if there were any rails that we had split,
I should not wonder if those were the rails."
This was as near to verifying the authenticity
of those celebrated rails as Lincoln was willing
to go, and it may be added that he profoundly
disapproved of the whole proceeding.
Early in i860, Lincoln was invited to speak in
Brooklyn, N. Y., but the place of assembly was
finally changed to Cooper Union, New York,
one of the largest halls in the United States,
which was filled to overflowing with a tremen
dous crowd of people anxious to hear the noted
orator from the West. It is a matter of record
that when he rose to speak the people were dis
appointed. He was ill-dressed ; his bushy head,
with the stiff, black hair thrown back, was bal
anced on a long, lean head-stalk, and when he
raised his hands in an opening gesture, the im
pression he gave was one of great awkwardness.
The tones of his voice at first were low and
husky, and a visible expression of dismay spread
over the face of his audience ; but very soon
he roused himself, and as the magic of his elo
quence flowed out, men forgot his appearance,
and the man was lost sight of in the orator. It
may be said that this speech not only was brill-

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 205
iantly successful as an eloquent exposition of the
doctrines of the Republican party, but it gave
Lincoln great and instant vogue throughout the
older States of the Union. His theme was a say
ing of Douglas, " Our fathers when they framed
the government under which we live understood
the question (the question of slavery) just as well,
and even better, than we do now." His speech
was an inquiry into what the fathers who framed
the government thought and did about slavery,
and all who heard that address marvelled great
ly at its logic, its keen analysis, and its lucid and
unimpeachable English. The audience at times
was swept by a whirlwind of applause.
The time for holding the Republican National
Convention drew on, and that body assembled in
Chicago, June 17, i860. The candidates named
were William H. Seward, Abraham Lincoln,
Simon Cameron, Salmon P. Chase, Edward
Bates, and John McLean. Seward was at first
the leading candidate, but the enthusiasm in
the galleries and in the crowds that surrounded
the vast building where the convention was
held was probably a factor in the influences
that ultimately compelled the nomination of
Lincoln. He was nominated on the third bal
lot, a large majority of the anti-Seward men
finally going over to Lincoln and making his
nomination a certainty. The liberal wing of
the Democratic party nominated Stephen A.
Douglas, and the extreme pro-slavery wing nom
inated John C. Breckinridge. The campaign
that followed was conducted with tremendous

206 STATESMEN
and sincere enthusiasm on the anti-slavery side,
while the Democrats, divided between Douglas
and Breckinridge, fought in a half-hearted way,
and Lincoln was elected President by a majority
of fifty-seven electoral votes. Almost as soon as
this result was announced several of the States
announced their intention to leave the Union.

Stephen A. Douglas.
The ordinance of secession was adopted by
South Carolina, November 17, i860; by Missis
sippi, January 9, 1861 ; Florida, January loth;
Alabama, February nth; Georgia, January
19th ; Louisiana, January 25th, and Texas, Feb
ruary ist, and by the time Lincoln was ready
to leave Springfield for Washington to take
the oath of office, seven States had declared
themselves out of the Union.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 207
His inaugural address was an argument and a
plea. Among other things he said : " The power
confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and
possess the property and places belonging to the
government." This was in direct opposition to
the opinion of the " anti-coercionists," as they
were called, who said that the forts and military
posts and navy-yards in the Southern States be
longed to the seceding States as "their share"
of the property of the government. He also
argued against the possibility of complete sepa
ration, saying : " Physically speaking, we cannot
separate; we cannot remove our respective sec
tions from each other, nor build an impassable
wall between them." And while he showed
that they must remain face to face, either as
friends or enemies, and it would be more to the
advantage of both that they should make their
intercourse that of friends than as aliens, he
argued that the whole matter in dispute should
be left to all the people. He said : " While the
people retain their virtue and vigilance, no ad
ministration, by any extreme wickedness or folly,
can very seriously injure the government in the
short space of four years." Throughout his
speech he pleaded earnestly for union, peace,
and harmony ; but these arguments, it must be
said, were addressed rather to the North than
to the South. He desired that people should
see that no reasonable concession would be neg
lected and no entreaty unspoken to win back
and keep in the Union the wayward children of
the South. In the kindest language he showed

208

STATESMEN

how ill-advised secession must be, and asked that
for their own sakes the secessionists should de
sist from carrying out their mad plans. He in
sisted that while it was not their duty to destroy
the Union, it was his duty to preserve it, and
while he hoped to do this without war or blood

shed, he declared with emphasis that it was his
fixed purpose to do his whole duty by the whole
country. It is to be noticed that in the making-up of
the Cabinet four of the seven members thereof
had been candidates for the Presidential nomina
tion at Chicago. William H. Seward was Secre-

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 209
tary of State ; Simon Cameron, Secretary of
War ; Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treas
ury ; Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy ;
Montgomery Blair, Postmaster-General ; Caleb
B. Smith, Secretary of the Interior ; Edward
Bates, Attorney-General.
Lincoln's supposed rawness, his unfamiliarity
with statecraft, and his Western habits were by
many believed to unfit him for the higher duties
of statesmanship. More than one of his consti
tutional advisers was willing to take the respon
sibility of shaping the policy of the administra
tion and carrying out plans for the solution of
the appalling situation now forced upon the
country. Mr. Seward, for example, proposed to
divert the attention of the people from the
threatened war in the South by provoking a
series of foreign wars with other powers who
had perhaps given occasion for offence. But
with great calmness, Lincoln took into his own
hands the direction of affairs, and as "the attor
ney for the people of the United States," he now
began to organize ways and means, assisted by
the members of his Cabinet, to crush the Re
bellion. From this time forward he was steadily actu
ated by but one purpose — to save the Union.
For this he said he would sacrifice everything
else ; he would save the Union with slavery or
without it, he would save the Union by war or
without war, he Avould save the Union by using
civil and military power, or he would save it by
laying aside those powers so far as was practi-
14

210 STATESMEN
cable ; and the words most frequent on his lips
were, "The Rebellion by all means to crush."
In the conduct of the war which followed he
constantly deferred to the wishes of the people,
and when many of the more radical members of
the Republican party urged an immediate eman
cipation of the slaves, or similar measures, he
put them aside with various excuses; and al
though he incurred their dislike, if not their en
mity, by his apparently too conservative course,
he persisted in waiting until the time was ripe,
never hurrying events, but always listening for
the voice of the people. On one occasion, after
McClellan had ceased for some time to be com
mander of the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln
said to the writer of these lines : " I kept Mc
Clellan in command long after I had ceased to
expect that he would win any victories, simply
because I knew that his dismissal would provoke
popular indignation and shake the faith of the
people in the final success of the war." And if
Lincoln had any fixed and individual opinions
about the smaller details of the conduct of the
war, he never forced them upon the public or
upon those who were entrusted with the direc
tion of military affairs. He was so deferential
and so ready to accept the judgment of those
whom he believed to be superior to him in tech
nical knowledge, that he sometimes provoked
others who had great faith in his administrative
abilities, and possibly in his military knowledge ;
but at all times, by his vigor, his firmness, and
his unshrinking determination, Lincoln showed

v i^''ff^iiif'iii"miiidmmim

Tne National Lincoln Monunnent at Springfield, III.

212 STATESMEN
the world that he, and not another, was the Pres
ident of the United States.
He knew that " the plain people " were ready
from the first to fight in defence of the Union ;
he knew that they were not at first ready to fight
for the destruction of slavery ; and so he perpet
ually put off every movement that was designed
to promote the abolition of slavery, and called
constantly for soldiers to defend the Union. He
even went so far as to countermand the orders
of some of the generals in the field who were
willing to hasten the day of emancipation. It is
possible that he may have seen the ultimate
effect of this policy ; it is certain that if the
armies of the Union had early crushed the Re
bellion, slavery would have been saved. But
the events of the war, overruled by the hand of
Providence, prolonged the struggle beyond all
expectation, and finally made the further exist
ence of slavery an impossibility. In the long
contest that followed, the strongholds of slavery
were one by one demolished, and at last, by the
Emancipation proclamation issued by the Presi
dent, and later ratified by the action of Congress,
the death-blow was dealt to that institution.
On July 21, 1862, Lincoln's Cabinet was as
tonished when he laid before them the out
line of a proclamation declaring free the slaves
of all the States that should be in rebellion
against the United States on January i, 1863.
As a matter of fact, he had made up his mind
that this blow was inevitable, and the only ques
tion in his mind was when it should fall, and it

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 213
was to ask the advice of his Cabinet that he laid
before them this document. At the suggestion
of Secretary Seward the issuing of the proc
lamation was deferred for a time, as just then
disaster and defeat had met the armies in almost
every direction, and Seward thought that such a
proclamation would then sound like " the last
shriek of a perishing cause." The proclamation
was postponed. Other defeats followed, and
when Lee invaded Maryland, just before the bat
tle of Antietam, Lincoln made a vow that if the
Union army should now be blessed with success,
the decree of freedom should be proclaimed.
The victory of Antietam was won on September
17, 1862, and the Emancipation proclamation was
issued on the 22d of that month. After so many
years, slavery was dead.
There were yet other disasters in the field, and
it was not until the battle of Gettysburg had
been fought and the citadel of Vicksburg taken
that men began to see the day breaking. States
men and politicians worried the good President
with their plans for reconstructing the Union,
and with their objections to his plans. They
found fault with his readiness to adapt himself
to differing conditions in different States where
the Federal authority had been re-established,
and they found fault with the way in which he
put these things before the people. For example,
one night, when he had addressed a crowd of
cheering people who had come to greet him at
the White House after a famous victory by
Grant, he made use of the phrase " The rebels

214 STATESMEN
turned tail and ran." Not long afterward, when
he was to make a more extended address, I was
invited by him to be near him at the historic
window in the White House whence he was used
to speak to the people. Noting my look of sur
prise at the roll of manuscript he had in his hand,
just before we left the parlor for the upper part
of the house he said : " It is true that I don't usu
ally read a speech, but I am going to say some
thing to-night that may be important. I am go
ing to talk about reconstruction, and sometimes
I am betrayed into saying things that other peo
ple don't like. In a little off-hand talk I made
the other day I used the phrase ' Turned tail
and ran.' A gentleman from Boston was very
much offended by that, and I hope he won't be
offended again." On the way upstairs the Presi
dent turned to me and said, with a queer smile :
" The gentleman from Boston was Senator Sum
ner." The speech that night was a justification
of what had been done in Louisiana by way of
reconstruction, a provisional government having
been evolved from the military government that
had been set up after the occupation of the State
by the Federal forces. In the course of his ad
dress, which was clearly not what the vast and
jubilant crowd had expected, Lincoln said : " We
shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg
than by smashing it." But Sumner was no better
pleased with this than with the other figure of
speech ; for, in a letter fo Dr. Lieber next day,
he said : " The President's speech and other
things augur confusion and uncertainty in the

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 215
future, with hot controversy. Alas! alas!" And
in his tribute to Senator Collamer, later in that
year (1865), Sumner said: "The eggs of croco
diles can produce only crocodiles, and it is not
easy to see how eggs laid by military power can
be hatched into an American State."
But in all these things the people loved and
trusted Lincoln. They looked to him as their
father. The quaint title " Father Abraham "
with them meant something more than a hu
morous nickname. They knew that he wept
with them and laughed with them, that he sor
rowed in their sorrows and entered into their
affairs almost like a providence. The hold he
had upon the people was not so much by
virtue of a commanding intellect and a super
nal eloquence (though these were also his),
as rather by virtue of his loving and tender
heart, his profound sympathy with all sorts
and conditions of men, his unfailing patience,
magnanimity, and good nature, his abounding
charity for all, and above all, his homely like
ness to the plain people from whom he sprung,
and of whom he was one to the last day of his
life. Lincoln was renominated and re-elected in
the midst of the closing struggles of the civil
war. This was the final test of his power with
the people. There had been some factious op
position to his renomination. He had been
opposed in the national canvass by a military
commander, McClellan; and when his hour of
victory came it was by an overwhelming and

216 STATESMEN
tremendous popular vote, that left in the minds
of men no question of the undying and deeply
rooted love of the American people for Abra
ham Lincoln. In this day of triumph a lesser
man than he would have exulted over those
of his own political faith who were thus de
livered into his hand. But his great and mag
nanimous soul held no thought of unkindness
for those who had wounded him so deeply.
Serenaded at the White House on the night
next succeeding the November election of 1864,
he said: "Now that the election is over, may
not all, having a common interest, reunite in
a common effort to save our common country ?
For my own part, I have striven, and will strive,
to place no obstacle in the way. So long as I
have been here, I have not willingly planted a
thorn in any man's bosom. While I am deep
ly sensible to the high compliment of a re-elec
tion, it adds nothing to my satisfaction that
any other man may be pained or disappointed
by the result. May I ask those who were with
me to join with me in the same spirit toward
those who were against us ? "
Lincoln's second inaugural address should be
read with the first, if one would study the results
wrought out in Lincoln's mind by four years of
stress and strain as the head of the nation dur
ing a civil war. There are passages in this
second inaugural address that are matchless
in English literature. He was no longer the
father plaintively pleading with wayward chil
dren who insisted upon fighting ; he was rather

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 217
the elder brother lamenting the loss and woe
which their headstrong acts had brought upon
the people. He poured out the tenderness and
devotion of his great soul in these closing words:
" Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that
this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass
away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until
all the wealth piled up by the bondsman's two
hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall
be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn
with the lash shall be paid by another drawn by
the sword, as was said three thousand years ago,
so still it must be said, that ' the judgments of
the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'
With malice toward none, with charity for all,
with firmness in the right as God gives us to
see the right, let us strive to finish the work
we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to
care for him who shall have borne the battle,
and for his widow and his orphans, to do all
which may achieve and cherish a just and last
ing peace among ourselves and with all na
tions." Well may it be said, " No American
President had ever spoken words like these
to the American people. America never had
a President who found such words in the depths
of his heart."
Now came the closing scenes of the war.
Lee's army surrendered to Grant, and peace
was assured. The people went wild with joy ;
bonfires and illuminations lighted up the North
ern sky, and the city of Washington was a blaze
of light, as cannon boomed their warlike notes

218

STATESMEN

to proclaim that the war was over. In the midst
of this jubilation, our people were stunned by the
announcement that the good President had fallen
in the national capital, stricken by the hand of an
assassin. No words can picture the grief of the
nation as these appalling tidings went forth.
As by magic the scene was changed from one
of festivity and joy to one of mourning and

House where Lincoln Died in Washington — 5 6 Tenth Street, N. W.
lamentation. But the man and the hour had
come and gone. The American Union was
saved, slavery was destroyed, and peace at
last brooded over a long-distracted and bleed
ing country. His work done, Lincoln's life
less form was carried to his home in Spring
field, 111., where it was laid in the earth with
many tears. The attorney for the people, as
he always called himself, had prosecuted the
cause entrusted to his hands. Trained as he

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 219
had been in the hard school of poverty and
adversity, he had learned lessons of self-reliance
and self-denial ; he had learned the real value of
human freedom, and had slowly absorbed into
every fibre of his being the principles that lie
at the foundation of human liberty and of self-
government. His mission was ended.
They who complain, as certain analysts have
complained, that Lincoln's character, so strangely
and weirdly mixed, is a mystery, may rest in the
belief that all great geniuses are mysterious.
Shakespeare is a mystery so profound that men
have been put to the rash expedient of insisting
that there was no real personality in that name.
The subtle processes of mind by which a great
genius like Lincoln arrives at conclusions, divines
men's motives and foresees events from afar,
frames heaven-born truths in matchless words, or
utters sayings of the profoundest wisdom, can
never be understood by other men. It is useless
to waste words in attempting any divination of
the secret. It is even possible that the pos
sessor of these rare gifts cannot himself under
stand them. Lincoln was to the last degree a
reticent man. Although he had a certain free-
and-easy, broad manner of meeting friendly ap
proaches, there was in his nature a line beyond
which not even his closest intimates could pass.
None could be made uncomfortable by the feel
ing that he was repelled or excluded from that
intimacy; but, with all his geniality and free
dom of manner, he was never confiding of his
innermost thoughts and emotions. Perhaps

220 STATESMEN
this reserve deepened the mystery of his being.
It certainly did veil the inner recesses of his
character. He was more ambitious than most of the men
of his time gave him credit for. I am convinced
that he dreamed of the Presidency long before
destiny and the people's choice had turned his
face in the direction of the White House. He
was conscious of power within himself very
early in his political career. But he was wise
and shrewd — shrewd almost to the point of cun
ning. Nobody better than he knew how to veil
his purposes while he yet held these in abeyance.
If he " fooled " his advisers and petitioners while
he put off and again put off his action, it was
that he might be absolutely sure of the step before
he took it. Once taken, there never was a back
ward movement. Never for a moment relax
ing his intention to do, he waited with a patience
that was immovable the ripeness of the time and
the readiness of the people to go with him to the
end of the thing to be done. Although he ap
peared to be led, he constantly and artfully and
subtly led.
To the last his manners were simple, unaf
fected, and free from even the appearance of
self-conscious greatness. When touched in his
manly dignity, he showed his resentment; and
at times, when he had been too long subjected to
the worry and strain of the duties of his place,
he was humanly irritable and even captious.
Once, when a visitor had exhausted his patience
with his profanity, he rose and, with awful dig-

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

221

nity, motioned the offender through the opened
door. And at another time, when one of his
dearest friends had been maligned in a memorial
laid before him, he asked if the paper were his to
treat as he pleased, and answered affirmatively,
he calmly laid the document on the burning
coals in the grate and bade the delegates good-
morning. The folk-lore, the multitudinous stories ab-

Death-mask of Lincoln.

sorbed in the years of his roving frontier life,
were of inestimable value to Lincoln ; and these
are popularly associated in any view of his life
and character. But he seldom told a story for
the mere sake of telling it. Invariably, the anec
dote, the incident, the humorsome jest had pith
and point. Taken from the setting that Lincoln
gave it, it was merely funny ; as he gave it, it
was the barbed arrow that sent the argument or
saying home. This has been excellently de-

222 STATESMEN
scribed by Emerson, who, in his funeral address
at Concord, said : " He is the author of a multi
tude of good sayings, so disguised as pleasant
ries that it is certain that they had no reputation
at first but as jests; and only later, by the very
acceptance and adoption they find in the mouths
of millions, turn out to be the wisdom of the
hour. I am sure if this man had ruled in a
period of less facility of printing, he would have
become mythological in a very few years, like
.^sop or Pilpay, or one of the Seven Wise Mas
ters, by his fables and proverbs."
Whatever were his limitations, and these were
apparent to those who knew him, Lincoln was
fully equal to the time in which he lived and to
the vast burden that he lifted and carried with
giant ease and strength. The tragicalness, the
needlessness, so to speak, of his taking-off will
always remain to mortal eyes inexplicable. Why
he should not have been permitted to live and
enjoy the well-earned fruits of four years of
strenuous labor, why he should have been al
lowed only to look over into the Promised Land
of Peace from the Pisgah summit of those last sad
days, we may not know. Somewhere in God's
eternal plan that noble, self-denying soul lives
and rejoices in its strength. And even we, dis
consolately lamenting his unrewarded years of
toil, may find some consolation in the thought
that in the vast movements of humanity in which
nations and individuals are insignificant factors,
the life of Lincoln was long enough to serve its
majestic mission.

The Statue of Sumner, by Thomas Ball, in the Public Garden, Boston.

VIII.
CHARLES SUMNER.
In October, 1850, Charles Sumner delivered a
wonderful speech in Faneuil Hall, Boston. This
was at the important turning-point in the history
of American politics when old parties were dis
solving, and from their elements were rising the
two great parties (for there were really only
two) that were to stand arrayed against each
other until the civil war should destroy slavery
and open another epoch in the history of civil
ization. It was my good fortune to sit within a
few feet of the rostrum, at a reporters' table,
looking up at the young Apollo, who towered
like a demigod at an immense height over us. I
remember one reporter, who, fascinated by the
sight, looked up and breathlessly said : " Great
God ! that man seems twenty feet high ! "
His personal appearance was not only one of
extreme elegance — for he was always dressed
with scrupulous care — but of magnificent and
manly proportions. He was six feet and two
inches high, well formed, with a magnificent head
of hair, dark, lustrous eyes, perfect teeth, and
features that might be called Romanesque. His
gestures were large and sweeping, his voice res
onant and musical, but without any such great

224 STATESMEN
compass as that of Wendell Phillips or Henry
Clay, both of whom he somewhat resembled in
his general style of oratory. One of his biog
raphers has given this account of his appearance
at the age of twenty-two : " He was tall and
gaunt, weighing only one hundred and twenty
pounds ; his hair was dark brown, his eyes hazel
and inflamed by excessive use ; his face sharp-
featured ; his teeth gleaming with whiteness ; his
complexion dark and not clear ; his visage and
person not attractive to the eye, and far unlike
his presence in later life, when, with full propor
tions and classic features, he arrested attention
in the Senate and on the street. . . . His
voice was strong, clear, and sonorous ; his coun
tenance was lighted up with expression, and his
genial smile won friends upon an introduction.
His spirits were buoyant in company, and his
laugh was loud and hearty." I have said that he
was careful in his attire. This habit stuck to him
through life, and even when he was an under
graduate of Harvard he refused to conform to
the rules of dress prescribed by the faculty, and
persisted in wearing a buff-colored waistcoat, for
which he received an "admonition for illegal
dress." As to his height, an amusing incident
is related by B. P. Poore, who says: "On Lin
coln's arrival in Washington, shortly before his
inauguration, in 1861, he met Sumner for the first
time. Lincoln said : ' Sumner declined to stand
up with me back to back to see which was the
taller man, and made a fine speech about this
being the time for uniting our fronts against the

CHARLES SUMNER 225
enemy and not our backs ; but I guess he was
afraid to measure them. He is a good piece of a
man. I had never had much to do with bishops
where I lived, but do you know Sumner is my
idea of a bishop.' " As a matter of fact, it may be
said here that Sumner and Lincoln were very
nearly the same height ; Lincoln was six feet
four inches.
The first impression that most people gained
of Sumner, even in his earlier years in Boston,
long before he had acquired great fame as an
orator and a statesman, was not altogether favor
able. He impressed one with his egotism and
profound self-admiration. He always delighted
to talk of the celebrated people he met, and of
the attentions lavished upon him, and to air his
erudition and his learning, of which he certainly
possessed a great store. His accomplished biog
rapher and literary executor, Edward L. Pierce,
has this to say of him : " It pleased him to know
the effect of his orations, and to let others know
it also. This habit, which developed when he
took the platform in Boston, remained with him
to the end. There was always in it, as well in
middle life as in youth, something spontaneous,
artless, childlike, the natural expression of a frank
nature, with no purpose to exalt himself or de
preciate others. Tact would have imposed
greater reserve, for the habit repelled many, par
ticularly those who had the ambition without
the power to do what he could do. People who
are clever, without breadth or strength, are dis
posed to harp upon such a limitation, overlook-

226 STATESMEN
ing altogether the talents and service which may
accompany it. . . . This quality or habit of
Sumner, whatever he had of it, was harmless.
It led him to no distorted view of men and things ;
to no underestimate of other men's powers ; to
no disparagement of their work, and no disregard
of their opinions and counsels. Jealousy and
envy were no part of his nature. He praised
generously, even lavishly, not only those younger
than himself or inferior in position, but those also
who were his peers in office or his rivals for
fame." Whittier doubtless had this defect in
mind when, after his death, he wrote of Sumner
thus: " Safely his dearest friends may own
The slight defects he never hid,
The surface blemish in the stone
Of the tall, stately pyramid.
" What if he felt the natural pride
Of power in noble use too true.
With thin humilities to hide
The work he did, the lore he knew ? "
The charge that he was a tuft-hunter or seeker
after titled folk was often made unjustly against
him, but it so happens that in this country of ours
a titled foreigner is likely to be a person of dis
tinction whose acquaintance would be desirable
to any person. Being at the White House one
day during Lincoln's administration, the Presi
dent asked me if, on arriving at the Capitol,
whither I was going, I would say to Senator
Sumner that he (the President) would be glad if

CHARLES SUMNER 227
the Senator would call to see him later in the
day, if entirely conveuient. I sought out Mr.
Sumner and delivered the message, whereupon,
in his most magnificent manner, he said : " Let
me see. I have an engagement to take luncheon
with the Marquis de Chambrun, and later to
dine with the British Minister. Yes, yes, I think
I will go ; I think I will go. Pray tell the Presi
dent so." There was no need for Senator Sum
ner to tell an unimportant person like myself
what his engagements with great people were ;
and he knew very well that I should not see the
President again that day.
Before Sumner was elected to the Senate he
passed several years abroad. He was _then at
an impressionable age — twenty-seven years —
and his long residence abroad (some two years
and three or four months) gave him a certain
air of foreign distinction which to sensitive
critics was exceedingly offensive. While abroad
he met many desirable acquaintances, and he
said in a letter to a friend at home : " I now
hardly call to mind a person in England that
I cared to see whom I have not met under
circumstances the most agreeable and flatter
ing to myself." His rare intelligence on topics
interesting to Englishmen, their politics, his
tory, law, literature, authorship, and public
men commended him to the best people in
England. It is possible that his brilliant social
successes abroad and his thoroughly enjoy
able residence there made him somewhat disaf
fected toward the comparatively raw culture of

228

STATESMEN

his own land. On his return from abroad he
went into the practice of law, the details of
which were to him exceedingly irksome, and he
could not refrain from confessing to his intimate
friends that he had little heart for the drudgery

The Bust of Sumner in the Museum of Art, Boston, by his friend, Thomas
Crawford.
of a law office. " Sometimes," says Mr. Pierce, " at
this period he recurred unwisely to his foreign
life or letters in conversation with clients or
lawyers who knew or cared little about such
things, a habit likely to repel those who were
intent only on the business in hand, and to make
them feel that his mind was not enough on what

CHARLES SUMNER 229
most concerned them. Indeed, prudence dic
tated a greater reserve in this regard with all
except intimate friends than he maintained." W.
W. Story, then a student in the office of George
S. Hillard and Charles Sumner, says : "After the
flush of those exciting days abroad, his office
and daily occupation seemed dull and gray, and
I cannot but think that that changed the whole
after course of his life and thought. He did in
deed set himself with determination to his work,
but it had lost the charm it formerly had and the
dreams of tho^e delightful days, and the echoes
of those far-away voices haunted his memory.
America seemed flat to him after Europe. This,
however, slowly passed away, though never to
his dying day completely." People often re
ferred to Sumner's " English manner."
An amusing example of his sensitiveness to
the American rawness above referred to appears
in a letter written by Sumner during the Whig
campaign of 1840 to a friend in London. The
letter was written on one of the campaign note-
papers of the tirne, and bore as its heading
wood-cuts of General William Henry Harri
son and a log cabin and cider-barrels. He re
ferred in his letter to " this poor sheet and its
pictures," and said : " Our politics are shabby
enough. The Whigs, constituting the opposi
tion, have nominated for the Presidency the
person whose head adorns a corner of this sheet.
He has in his favor his good conduct during the
War of 18 12 and an alleged victory at Tippe
canoe ; and the vulgar appeal is made, grounded

230 STATESMEN
on military success. This has made him a more
acceptable candidate than Clay or Webster, who
have been serving the state well for years.
Harrison lives in the State of Ohio, cultivating
his farm with his own hands, and as what is
called ' help ' in that part of the country is not
easy to be procured, his wife and daughter cook
and serve the dinner for seven or eight people
who daily challenge his hospitality. An admin
istration paper alluded to him as living in a log
cabin and drinking hard cider. The Whigs at
once adopted these words and placed them on
their favors. They proclaim Harrison the candi
date of the log-cabin, and hard-cider class, and
this vulgar appeal is made by the party profess
ing a monopoly of the intelligence and educa
tion in the country ! " This critical note on
American political vulgarity might have been
by an English visitor to a friend at home.
It is due to Sumner to say that when Harrison
died, but one short month after his inauguration,
he wrote to Lord Morpeth : " I think you will
be struck by the short and simple annunciation
of the death of President Harrison by his Cabinet.
This was written by Mr. Webster, who is the
soul of our government. Harrison died after
holding power thirty days, ere the shoes were
old in which he had taken the oath of his high
office. He was loved much, and the country ex
pected much from him."
But more delightfully familiar foreign corre
spondence was never sent from Europe by any
American than Sumner's letters to his friends at

CHARLES SUMNER 231
home. His powers of observation were acute,
and he had rare and unusual facilities for accu
mulating entertaining anecdotes about people
now well known in history. For example, he said
the Duke of Wellington said of Lord Brougham,
" Damned odd fellow — half mad ; " while Brough
am, who was vexed with the Duke for interfer
ing in British politics, said, " Westminster Abbey
is yawning for him." Of Carlyle he wrote : " I
heard Carlyle lecture the other day. He seemed
like an inspired boy. Truth and thoughts that
made one move on the benches came from his
apparently unconscious mind couched in the
most grotesque style and condensed to a degree
of intensity, if I may so write. He is the Zerah
Colburn of thought." He met Sir Walter Scott,
who did not impress him very pleasantly, and
who, as he learned from one of his intimate
friends, never saw " fair Melrose aright," be
cause he never did " visit it by the pale moon
light." The truth was, according to Sir David
Brewster, that Scott would not go there by
night " for fear of bogles."
Sumner's first business on arriving in Europe
was to acquaint himself with the French lan
guage, and his acquisitive powers were demon
strated by the ease with which he mastered " the
lingo." He deferred visits to all places of in
terest and held himself aloof from societ}' until
he had overcome the difficulty of speech which
he so much deplored. When he arrived in Paris
he could hardly understand a single sentence
when spoken to him. In less than a month he

232 STATESMEN
could follow a lecturer, and in six weeks he could
take his part in conversation, and at the end of
three months he served as an interpreter before
a local magistrate on the examination of a fellow-
countryman. Sumner's mind was active to rest
lessness, and in his earlier years he threw him
self into study with ardor so great as to impair
his health and get for him the reputation of being
monkish in his habits. He read with a devour
ing eagerness, but with great discrimination and
care. He early mastered the classics, and it is
possible that the pedantry of which he was in
later years accused, was due to the fact that he
absorbed the works of Latin authors with a cer
tain avidity and enthusiasm most unusual. His
father was sheriff of Suffolk County, a stern man,
and ruling his household with an iron hand.
Although the Sumners were of good family and
in comfortable circumstances, it is noticeable
that when Sumner's father recommended him
to a preparatory school where he should be
equipped to enter Harvard College, he laid stress
upon the necessity that the lad should early earn
his own living. After he had been graduated
from Harvard he unsuccessfully sought for a
subordinate post in the Boston Latin School.
Then he taught for three weeks at Brookline, but
soon gave up school-teaching, for which he had
neither taste nor inclination. At the age of nine
teen he composed an essay on Commerce, the
subject of a prize competed for by minors, which
had been offered by a Boston society, of which
Daniel Webster was president. Sumner won

CHARLES SUMNER 233
the prize, and Webster, requesting him to come
forward, took him by the hand, called him his
" young friend," and in kindly words congratu
lated him on his possible future. The great and
godlike Daniel little thought that he was greet
ing one who should succeed him in the Senate
and win enduring fame.
When Sumner was twenty-three years old he
had his first sight of the capital of the republic,
where his future renown was to be won. His
letters to his friends and family from Washing
ton are entertaining, and they bespeak the close
observer. This was in 1834, when Webster,
Clay, Calhoun, and Benton were in the Senate.
Sumner from the gallery looked on, and writing
to his father, said : " Mr. Calhoun has spoken to
day on Mr. Webster's Bank bill. He is no ora
tor ; very rugged in his language and studied in
style, marching directly to the main points of his
subject without stopping for parley or introduc
tion. His speech made a very strong impression
upon a very numerous audience." Later on,
when the Oregon question was still under dis
cussion, and while Sumner was yet a geat way
off from the Senate, he wrote to Lord Morpeth
thus : " Calhoun has won what Adams has lost,
and I have been not a little pained to be obliged
to withdraw my sympathies from the revered
champion of freedom and give them to the un
hesitating advocate of slavery. Calhoun's course
has been wise and able."
Returning to Boston from Washington after
his little outing, Sumner tried to take up again

234 STATESMEN
the practice of law, which he did in a certain
perfunctory and not enthusiastic manner. It is
difficult to think of Sumner as an attorney,
arguing about water rights, conveyances, and
similar matters, but he was willing to accept
the place of a reporter of judicial decisions and
to edit law books, which not only shows that he
had not enough clients to take up his time, but
that he found jurisprudence a more congenial
study than books of practice. Regarding Sum
ner's position in life and literature at this period,
one can see that he was, for a little while at least,
out of place. He may well have been puzzled
to know where lay his true vocation. He was a
scholar, an art critic, a student of literature and
of history, but to him even politics, in which he
afterward found some occupation, were to the
last degree distasteful. Pierce says of him : " He
was aspiring, his nature sensitive and refined ;
his imagination had fed upon historic ideals and
he had shared the intimacy of the best exem
plars among living men. . . . He remem
bered the promises of youth, and we may believe
felt keenly that as yet the performance of mature
life had fallen far below them, and he did not see
opening before him any path of great usefulness
and honor."
There are those who have believed that Sum
ner's choice of a career, which involved that
bitter crusade against slavery which he subse
quently waged, was determined rather deliber
ately than spontaneously. Many people have
thought, and perhaps not unjustly, that Sumner

CHARLES SUMNER 235
was an anti-slavery man from sentiment and not
from principle. His first high anti-slavery note
is in a letter written January 9, 1836, to Dr.
Lieber, in Columbia, S. C, in which he says:
" You are in the midst of slavery, seated among
its whirling eddies, blown around as they are by
the blasts of Governor McDuffie fiercer than
any from the old wind-bags of .^olus. What
think you of it ? Should it longer exist ? Is not
emancipation practicable? We are becoming
abolitionists at the North fast. The riots, the
attempts to abridge the freedom of discussion.
Governor McDuffie's message, and the conduct
of the South generally have caused many to
think favorably of immediate emancipation who
never before inclined to it."
Questions of international law growing out of
slavery in the United States supplied topics for
discussion in which Sumner engaged with great
heartiness. The right of search exercised by
the British Government in the suppression of
slavery, the validity of a claim to a slave on
the high seas or in the ports of foreign pow
ers, and other matters of this sort attracted his
attention and engaged his pen. He was not
an abolitionist like William Lloyd Garrison and
Wendell Phillips, but believed from the first in
the ultimate triumph of freedom under the Con
stitution and by the power of the Union, where
as the abolitionists stigmatized the Constitution
of the United States as " a covenant with death
and an agreement with hell." Other concerns
than those immediately related to the anti-slav-

236 _ STATESMEN
ery movement enlisted his great and growing
powers. The education of the blind and the
idiotic, and care for prison discipline, were
among the interests that received his active cOr
operation. He reached a turning-point in his career when
he delivered his Fourth of July oration in Bos
ton, in 1845, choosing for his topic "The True
Grandeur of Nations." It was an old-fashioned
celebration of Independence Day, the festivities
and exercises being under the charge of the city
government. Sumner's address, therefore, had a
certain official character which gave it impor
tance. The oration was delivered in Faneuil Hall,
and was a remarkable occasion. The audience
was large, expectation was high, and everybody
appeared to apprehend that something was about
to happen. Peleg W. Chandler writes of this
picture presented in Faneuil Hall : " Sumner's
presence as he came forward drew undivided at
tention. The prominent citizens in the audience
had met him in society or in the routine of his
profession, and others had noted him on the
street, but probably the greater number of his
hearers now saw him for the first time. He was
then the impersonation of manly beauty and
power, of commanding stature, his figure no
longer slender, as in student days, but well de
veloped ; his features finely cut, his dark hair
hanging in masses over his well-formed brow,
his face lighting with the smile which always
won him friends at first sight. He wore a dress-
coat with gilt buttons, a fancy of lawyers at that

Charles Sumner.

238 STATESMEN
period, and white waistcoat and trousers. His
gestures were unstudied and followed no rules ;
the most frequent one was the swinging of the
arm above the head. His voice was clear and
strong, resounding through the hall, but at times
falling in cadences hollow and pathetic. Seldom
has there been seen on the platform a more at
tractive presence than his as now, at the age of
thirty-four, he stood for the first time before the
people assembled to hear him."
On this occasion the officers, sailors, and ma
rines from a United States man-of-war lying in
the harbor, and portions of the State militia in all
their glory, were present. Sumner's speech was
a plea for peace, and these questions were ut
tered in the course of his oration : " What is the
use of the standing army ? What is the use of
the navy ? What is the use of the fortifications ?
What is the use of a militia of the United States ? "
He also employed such phrases as "Farcical
discipline ; " " Shouldering arms and carrying
arms ; " " Men closely dressed in padded and
well-buttoned coats of blue, besmeared with gold,
surmounted by a huge mountain cap of shaggy
bearskin." These expressions, naturally enough,
angered the authorities and set the tongues of
Boston gossips, male and female, wildly wagging.
It was an epoch in Sumner's career. The bold
ness of his utterances, the caustic satire in which
he assailed many cherished institutions excited
the surprise and sometimes the wrath of conserv
ative, old-fogy Boston. The whole State took
up the discussion, and it may safely be said that

CHARLES SUMNER 239
the Fourth of July oration of the young orator
gave him then more prominence than any pre
vious ^ct of his life.
The Whig party was about dropping into
pieces, and Sumner now became one of the lead
ers of the faction known as " The Young Whigs."
He was a member of a State committee appoint
ed in the fall of 1845 ^-^d charged with the duty
of organizing public opinion against the admis
sion of Texas, then one of the burning topics of
the time. The question of annexation, and of
the Mexican War, which immediately followed,
rent the North into factions. Robert C. Win
throp, a leading Massachusetts Whig, for some
time Speaker of the House of Representatives,
lent his voice and vote to the prosecution of the
war. The Whigs were then contending that
they, rather than the Democrats, were disposed
to hinder the further extension of slavery. Win-
throp's action roused the Young Whigs and
Sumner wrote a series of articles, which were
published in the Boston newspapers, reprobating
Winthrop's vote and criticising him in the bitter
est terms. This attack upon Winthrop was furi
ously resented by Boston "society," in which
Mr. Winthrop, as a descendant of one of the
early Governors, was a conspicuous figure and
was regarded as one of the bluest of the blue-
blooded. Society held up its hands in horror at
the bare suggestion that a young man like Sum
ner should dare to criticise the course of conduct
of the admirable and admired Winthrop. Doors
of many great houses in the modern Athens were

240 STATESMEN
from thenceforth closed against Sumner, and
people of Boston's " highest society " said of
him : " He is outside of the pale." Sumner
doubtless felt keenly this social exclusion, for he
had a relish for the tastes, luxury, and refined
talk which at that time distinguished the homes
in which he had once been welcome, but from
which he was now shut out.
The Whigs died hard. The " Silver Grays,"
as the Conservatives were called, worshipped
Webster, and while the disturbances of social
and political lines were going on, the godlike
Daniel, speaking in Faneuil Hall, said : " Others
rely on their foundations and their hopes for the
welfare of the country, but for my part, in the
dark and troubled night that is upon us, I see no
star above the horizon promising light to guide
us but the intelligent, patriotic, united Whig
party of the United States." Slowly arosp from
the ruins of the dismembered Whig party the
Free Soil organization of 1848. Among these in
Boston were Richard H. Dana, Jr., Charles Sum
ner, Charles Francis Adams, Henry Wilson, An
son Burlingame, E. R. Hoar, John A. Andrew,
and others whose names subsequently became
famous in the history of the country. It is inter
esting to note that among the Whigs who spoke
in Massachusetts during that time was Abraham
Lincoln, then the only Whig member of Congress
from Illinois, who had been brought by his party
into the State and who spoke at Worcester on
the evening before the Whig State Convention,
when his arguments were chiefly directed against

CHARLES SUMNER 241
the Free Soilers, to whom he objected as being
a party of one idea, which was good enough in
itself, but not broad enough to build a party on.
Webster took the same view, when he said about
this time : " No drum-head in the longest day's
march was ever more incessantly beaten and
smitten than the public sentiment in the North
has been every month and day and hour by the
din and roll and rub-a-dub of abolition writers
and abolition lecturers."
Fire was added to the flames of the anti-slavery
excitement by the arrest, in Boston, in April,
185 1, of Thomas Sims, a negro, claimed as a
fugitive slave from . Georgia. The case was
taken before a United States commissioner sit
ting in the Boston Court-House. The building
was surrounded with chains to keep off the mob,
and amidst great excitement the negro was
awarded to his claimant and, surrounded by
three hundred armed policemen, was taken to
the water-front and put on board a brig bound for
Savannah. This incident created the wildest ex
citement not only throughout New England, but
through the North.
Sumner's speech in Faneuil Hall, to which
reference was made in the opening paragraph of
this chapter, was sometimes called his " Marc
Antony speech." It was a bold and vigorous
arraignment of the Fugitive Slave law, a denial
of its binding force under the Constitution, and
was admirably designed to create a public senti
ment which would render enforcement of the
law impossible. The speech was exceedingly
16

242 STATESMEN
bitter in its denunciation of the men engaged in
the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave law and of
those who were in any way instrumental in its
enactment. He pleaded for a public opinion
that should keep perpetual guard over the liber
ties of all within the boundaries of Massachusetts.
" Nay, more," he said; "like the flaming sword
of the cherubim at the gates of Paradise, turning
on every side, it shall prevent any slave-hunter
from ever setting foot in this commonwealth.
Elsewhere he may pursue his human prey, em
ploy his congenial bloodhounds, and exult in his
successful game, but into Massachusetts he must
not corhe." Referring to the often-repeated
statement that the slavery question was settled,
he said : " Yes, settled, settled, that is the word.
Nothing, sir, can be settled which is not right ;
nothing can be settled which is against free
dom ; nothing can be settled which is against
divine law. God, nature, and all the holy senti
ments of the heart repudiate any such false, seem
ing settlement."
An election for United States Senator from
the State of Massachusetts was now impending,
and this speech placed Sumner foremost among
the Free Soilers as a candidate. The Legislature
met early in January, 185 1, with Henry Wilson,
Free Soiler, President of the Senate, and Nathan
iel P- Banks, Jr., Democrat, Speaker of the
House. The Free Soilers and the Democrats
formed a coalition, under the terms of which the
Democrats were to secure the greater part of the
State offices, the Governorship being about to be

The Boston Home of Mr. Sumner, at 20 Hancock Street.

244 STATESMEN
filled by the Legislature, and the Free Soilers to
be awarded the United States Senator. This
agreement naturally roused great wrath among
the Whigs, who saw that Webster's place in the
United States Senate was to pass out of their
control. There was some delay, however, in
carrying out the provisions of the covenant,
and it was not until after a contest which lasted
more than two months that Sumner was finally
elected. Robert Rantoul, Jr., was the candidate of some
of the Democrats who held themselves aloof
from the coalition. Robert C. Winthrop, who
had been appointed by the Governor to fill the
temporary vacancy caused by Webster's resign
ing his seat in the Senate to take a place in the
Cabinet of President Fillmore, was the choice
of the Whigs. During the long balloting for
Senator, there was one day found among the
ballots in the box one bearing this eccentric in
scription : " Not a truck-and-dicker coon,
Not a man in the moon ;
Get Sumner if you can,
But Rantoul is my man.''
If this ballot could have been counted for
either Rantoul or Sumner — and both parties
claimed it — the election would have been con
cluded then and there. Its ambiguity made an
other ballot necessary after a long debate over
the possible intention of the voter.
Sumner was sworn in as United States Sena-

CHARLES SUMNER 245
tor, December i, 1851. His first speech was
made on the tenth day of that session on a reso
lution of welcome to Louis Kossuth, the Hun
garian patriot, who had come to this country
with a national invitation and was accorded a
national reception. Sumner took conservative
ground against any action which would seem to
be a recognition of the belligerent rights of
Hungary. He spoke with discretion, and his
position was very generally applauded. His
first anti-slavery speech was delivered eight
months later, and was a vigorous blast against
the Fugitive Slave law, the immediate repeal of
which he demanded. Many efforts had been
made to prevent him from speaking, but he
finally found an opportunity where his address
could be made under due provision of parliamen
tary law ; whereupon he delivered a speech of
tremendous power which created consternation
among the pro-slavery Senators in the Senate
and made a profound impression throughout the
country. He did not usually join in general de
bate in the Senate, apparently confining himself
for a long time to watching the drift of events,
and seldom speaking except on the great sub
ject nearest his heart. Seward, writing to him
at this time, said that he hoped that Sumner
would seize some practical question and show
that he was competent to deal with the general
affairs of the government. And Chase, then
Governor of Ohio, wrote, advising him " to take
off his coat and go into the every-day fight."
Sumner's hesitation in this regard, however, did

246 STATESMEN
not pass away until his own party was fully es
tablished in power in the United States Con
gress in 1 86 1. He was systematically excluded
from the Standing Committee of the Senate, and
was generally regarded as a Catiline, whose
presence in the Senate chamber was a menace to
the perpetuity of the Union.
His speeches on the Kansas-Nebraska bill, in
the early part of 1854, were even more vigorous,
powerful, and caustic than those which he de
livered against the Fugitive Slave law. The
proposition to repeal the Missouri Compromise
and leave the friends of freedom and the sup
porters of slavery to fight it out between them
selves in the new Territories aroused his wrath,
and he poured out his righteous indignation in a
torrent of logic, invective, and historic illustration
that amazed and dismayed the pro-slavery men.
At last they were faced by an adversary even
more bold and aggressive than themselves.
These speeches caused a prodigious excitement
everywhere, and some of the more feather-
headed Southern politicians in Washington act
ually proposed Sumner's expulsion from the
Senate ; but this scheme, if it was ever seriously
entertained, lacked the support of votes to carry
it through and was abandoned. In the course
of one of these speeches he said : " In passing
such a bill as is now threatened you scatter
from this dark, midnight hour no seeds of har
mony and good-will, but broadcast through the
land dragons' teeth, which happily may not
spring up in direful crops of armed men, yet, I

CHARLES SUMNER 247
am assured, sir, will fructify in civil strife and
feud." By a curious coincidence, almost while
this was being delivered in the Senate, Boston
was greatly excited by the arrest and rendition
of another fugitive slave, one Anthony Burns,
claimed by a Virginian planter, and remanded un
der the orders of the United States commissioner
to the custody of the United States marshal.
During the excitement a deputy marshal was ac
cidentally killed by a pistol-shot, and there were
those who were ready to claim that Sumner's
language in the Senate had led to the act which
resulted in bloodshed. As a matter of fact, the
speech could not have reached Boston until sev
eral hours after the fugitive slave had been sent
back to slavery.
The rage of the Southerners was great, and
was still further inflamed by later speeches on
the same subject during the debate over the
proposition to throw Kansas and Nebraska open
to a contest between slavery and-freedom. Out
of this great excitement came the assault of
Preston S. Brooks upon Senator Sumner. In
one of his speeches Sumner had referred to Sen
ator Butler, of South Carolina, with his usual
causticity and sarcasm ; but during the address
he was not called to order for any part of it,
either by the President or by any Senator, al
though he was closely watched to see if any per
sonality could justify a point of order to be raised
against him. He sustained himself with great
force and emphasis, and with a vigor and rich
ness of diction and felicity of expression that ex-

The Rendition of Anthony Buns.

CHARLES SUMNER 249
torted the praise of many who could not sym
pathize with his views. Preston S. Brooks was a
representative from South Carolina, a son of
Senator Butler's cousin — a relationship hardly
near enough perhaps to call for his volunteer
ing to defend the South Carolina Senator who,
among others, had been attacked. A day or two
passed after the delivery of the speech in which
Butler was so vigorously criticised by Sumner,
when Brooks, watching his opportunity, stole in
to the Senate chamber where Sumner was busily
writing at his desk, the Senate not being then in
session, and, raising a heavy cane, beat the Sen
ator with great force and rapidity over the head.
Sumner fell to the floor senseless and bleeding,
unable to extricate himself from the desk where
he was sitting, closely engaged..
This assault, from the effects of which Sumner
never fully recovered, kindled the North with
flames of indignation and caused an intense ex
citement throughout the country. South and
North. Brooks was hailed as a champion of the
South, but was denounced by many fair-minded
slave-holders, Benton, among others, saying :
" This is not an assault, sir, it is a conspiracy ;
yes, sir, a conspiracy. These men hunt in coup
les ; it is a conspiracy, and the North should
know it." A resolution to expel Preston S.
Brooks from the House failed of the necessary
two-thirds vote, whereupon he resigned his seat,
went home, and was re-elected. A few months
later he died, and a cenotaph was erected to
his memory in the Congressional cemetery at

250 STATESMEN
Washington. Sumner remained on his sick-bed
for many weary weeks, and after a magnificent
reception in the city of Boston, he went to Eu
rope for health and remained there eight months.
He returned for a short visit and again went
abroad, remaining this time a year and a half.
The election of Lincoln and the flight of the
Southern Senators and Representatives from
Washington left the party of Sumner in full
possession of both branches of Congress. Sum
ner was one of the more far-sighted statesmen
who saw that war was not only imminent, but
likely to be prolonged. He early urged upon
the President the policy of emancipating the
slaves, and he embraced every occasion to press
this upon the President and all others in author
ity. During the long and tedious struggle that
succeeded, he was actively engaged in other mat
ters than those which related directly to the
prosecution of the war. In the case of the Trent,
from which the Confederate envoys Mason and
Slidell had been taken by Captain Wilkes, of the
United States man-of-war San Jacinto, Sumner
argued that international law required the sur
render of the captives ; but as the question did
not directly require the intervention of the Sen
ate, he contented himself with such private
conversation as would be influential in prepar
ing the minds of Congressmen to receive with
patience the bitter pill which Secretary Seward's
statesmanship subsequently showed to be neces
sary. The men were given up. From this time
forward Sumner was easily the leader of the

CHARLES SUMNER 251
Senate in all matters requiring the genius, learn
ing, and wide information of a statesmen. In
foreign affairs he was specially useful, and when
the action of France in Mexico, in overturning
the republican government of Juarez, and other
dangerous complications, engaged the attention
of the administration, Sumner's voice and influ
ence were powerful in settling some of the most
troublesome questions. In the reconstruction
measures that followed the martial subjugation
of the rebel States, he did not always agree with
the majority of Republican Senators and Rep
resentatives. On June i, 1865, he was invited by the city of
Boston to deliver a eulogy on Lincoln. His
address on this important and impressive occa
sion was somewhat disappointing to his friends.
His kindly biographer, Mr. Pierce, says : " The
oration was wanting in artistic unity, in parts
a sense of due proportion was disregarded,
and at the end there was a digression which
seriously marred the effect." It was evident
that Sumner's attention was rather directed
to the policies which he hoped to see carried
out by the administration, and not so much
to the life and services of the illustrious subject
of his eulogy. On the proposition to amend
the Constitution of the United States so that
it might conform to the changed condition of
things brought on by the War of the Rebellion,
he also disagreed with some of his associates,
and the draft of an amendment which he sub
mitted was rejected by the Senate.

252 STATESMEN
During the controversy of the Senate with
President Johnson, Sumner warmly took the
part of Secretary Stanton, whom Johnson en
deavored to eject from the War Department in
violation of law ; and the Senator's famous note
to the Secretary containing the single word
" Stick," when Stanton's removal was threatened,
has become almost classic.
During the two terms of President Grant,
Sumner was frequently at odds with the admin
istration. He opposed the scheme to acquire ad
ditional territory in San Domingo. So frequent
were the misunderstandings between the Senator
and the President that many people were dis
posed to regard the removal of Senator Sumner
from the Chairmanship of the Foreign Affairs
Committee of the Senate, and the recall of his
personal friend, Mr. Motley, Minister to England,
as the Senator's punishment for having dared to
oppose the wishes of the President. It is most
likely that this view of a very painful episode in
American politics is the correct one. Toward
the last of his career Senator Sumner lost some
prestige in his own State and throughout the
North, in consequence of a resolution which he
introduced forbidding that the names of battles
of the civil war should be continued in the
army register or placed on the regimental colors
of the United States. This so-called " battle-flag
resolution " was severely condemned in Sumner's
own home, and the Massachusetts Legislature
passed resolutions of disapproval. These reso
lutions were subsequently rescinded.

CHARLES SUMNER 253
Senator Sumner died in Washington, March,
1874, after a long and painful illness. Although
the country had been prepared for the event, his
final exit from the stage of life created a pro
found impression throughout the country, and
we may say throughout the civilized world. Ora
tions, eulogies, public resolutions and addresses
testified the appreciation of his services and the
high estimate in which he was held by the
people of the republic. At the time of his death
he was past sixty-three years of age, having been

Sumner's Tomb in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, near Boston.
born in January, 181 1. He had been Senator
continuously for twenty-three years.
In this sketch I have presented such traits of
Sumner's character as will enable the reader to
form a tolerably intelligent and clear estimate of
the man, his worth, his services, and his place
in American history. His faults, of which suf
ficient mention has already been made, were not
serious ; they were personal and were due to
Sumner's strongly marked individuality. In
considering his 'commanding talents, his eminent
public services, these defects will sink out of
sight and be speedily • forgotten. But a man

254 STATESMEN
possessing such immense vital power and so
many individual peculiarities cannot be fitly
described without some mention of the minor
flaws of character that were apparent to those
who knew him well. Whether he entered the
fight for freedom from the highest motives or
not, none will gainsay that the war for the de
fence of the Union was more vigorously prose
cuted and the cause of human liberty more
completely successful because of his ardent, con
sistent, eloquent, and effective championship.

Samuel J. Tilden,
(After a pastel by Sarony in the House at Gramercy Park.)

IX.
SAMUEL J. TILDEN.
A YOUNG man who at the age of eighteen
should compose a political address directed to
the people of the great State of New York, and
by this means should break or weaken a power
ful party coalition, would be regarded as a mod
el of precociousness ; and philosophers, shaking
their wise heads over such an example of early
manifested genius, would be very likely to pre
dict a barren future for the boy who should be
gin life with so much apparent maturity of men
tal power. But this is the way that Samuel J.
Tilden started out in a career which certainl}^ was
not unfruitful of important results — important to
him and to the age and time in which he lived.
This is how it happened : In 1832 there was a
hot political contest raging in the State of New
York. There were three parties in the field.
The anti-Masons, who had been very nearly suc
cessful in the contests of previous years, had
nominated William Wirt for President; the
Democrats had nominated Andrew Jackson and
had put up Martin Van Buren as their candidate
for Vice-President ; and the anti-Jackson men,
who were really the Whigs of that day (al
though not so named, but were called the Nation-

256 STA TESMEN
al Republicans), had nominated Henry Clay.
New York was the debatable ground in that na
tional campaign. If either two of these three
parties should combine and work together, the
coalition would carry that State. Such a com
bination was proposed by the anti-Jackson and
the anti- Mason men. The anti-Mason party
nominated Francis Granger for Governor and a
full ticket of Presidential electors. The anti-
Jackson men in their convention adopted and en
dorsed all these nominations. It was understood
that both of these parties would support Granger
for Governor, and that the Presidential electors,
if chosen, would be divided between Wirt and
Clay. The situation was alarming to the Jack
son men and was eagerly and anxiously discussed
in their households. Martin Van Buren was one
of the leading citizens of Columbia County, New
York, and a frequent visitor at the home of the
Tildens, where the perils of the coalition were
considered and debated in the hearing of " Sam,"
a sharp, bright lad, then scarcely eighteen years
old. He was a tall, slender young fellow, with a
pale face, mild blue eyes, firm lips, and bright
chestnut-colored hair. He lived in an atmos
phere of political excitement. Andrew Jackson's
fierce and tempestuous public career, his bitter
partisan administration, and his unrelenting pur
suit of his enemies had filled the land with con
fusion, and debate ran high. At the country
store, around the village forge, by the fireside
and on the farm, an intelligent and quick-witted
people discussed all sides of the pending politi-

SAMUEL J. TILDEN 257
cal questions. Matters that now rest quietly
enough in the dusty bins of ancient political
history were then full of vital importance to
voters who in their turn have passed from the
stage of human activity and are no more.
The boy " Sam " Tilden listened attentively to
the talk of his elders, and full of the all-impor
tant problem — how to break up the coalition of
the anti-Masons and the anti-Jackson men, he
went into seclusion ; asking counsel of nobody, he
wrote an elaborate " Address to the People." In
this document he appealed by turns to the selfish
political instincts of both parties to the coalition,
and put the case in a clear, logical, and convinc
ing light, the incongruity of the alliance and the
risk incurred in dividing the electoral ticket
being especially dwelt upon. Having finished
the address, which was pretty long, Samuel sub
mitted it to his father's critical examination. The
father listened to the reading with surprise and
attention, and although he was secretly pleased
with the precocity of the lad, he did not venture
to tell him what he really thought of his work.
But as Martin Van Buren was then visiting in
the town, the elder Tilden resolved to show it
to him. Van Buren, to the father's great de
light, was so struck with the force and clearness
of the address that he advised that it be printed
without delay and without making any material
change in its text. It was accordingly put forth
officially through the columns of an Albany news-
paper,where it occupied a half-page. It produced
a great effect upon the campaign, and the vanity
17

258 STATESMEN
of the lad, as we may well suppose, was flattered
by the fact that many people were so convinced
that Van Buren was the author of the address
that that astute politician was obliged publicly
to deny that he had written it. The coalition
was broken ; the Democrats carried the State by
nearly ten thousand majority, and anti-Masonry
disappeared from the politics of New York.
The young politician was already fitted for col
lege, and in the following year, 1833, he entered
Yale, where he was long remembered as a stu
dious young undergraduate — good-natured, but
diffident and shy. His close application to study
impaired his health, and at the end of the year he
was obliged to return home. On his recovery it
was decided for him that his academic course
should be continued and finished at the University
of the City of New York, whither he went, and
where just before he graduated he won a second
success as a writer on public affairs. This work
was a review of the political situation of the
time, with special reference to the question of
the independent treasury then agitating the peo
ple of the United States. Van Buren was now
President, and the consequences of the financial
policy pursued by Jackson during his second
term were a widespread depression in business
and general suspension of the banks. The gov
ernment deposits had been removed from the
United States Bank and placed in the State
banks, many of which were in the city of New
York. This money had be6n freely used for
discount and speculative purposes, and after a

SAMUEL J. TILDEN 259
series of financial disorders, the money panic of
1837 swept so swiftly through the land that busi
ness was paralyzed and a general stagnation of
commerce ensued. President Van Buren called
Congress together in special session and set be
fore that body the financial condition of the
government. His principal recommendation
was that the treasury of the people should be
kept by the officers of the government and
should be entirely separated from the business
and concerns of the banks. The President's
recommendations were very hotly discussed in
New York and elsewhere, and Tilden, now
twenty-three years old, plunged into the discus
sion in a series of papers which were written in
admirable style and evinced a thorough knowl
edge of governmental affairs, political economy,
law, and finance. These papers, which created a
profound impression at the time they first ap
peared, were sufficiently mature in their judg
ment and literary style to be included in the col
lection of the writings and speeches of Tilden
which has been made since his death.
He also appeared in politics, more conspicu
ously, perhaps, when, in 1838, there was organ
ized in the Democratic party, to which the Tilden
family adhered, a diversion in favor of William
H. Seward, who had just been nominated by the
Whigs as their candidate for Governor against
Marcy, who was the nominee of the Democrats.
United States Senator Tallmadge, of New York,
was at the head of this movement, and being in
Columbia County, speaking in behalf of the

260

STATESMEN

"bolters," he was greatly surprised by the ap
pearance of young Tilden, who, in default of any
other speaker, mounted the platform at a public
meeting, and with such skill and familiarity with
public questions combated the views which had
been proposed by Senator Tallmadge. This
somewhat dramatic appearance of the young
man in active politics gave him great vogue at

¦i^i^iia.^^

The Tilden Homestead, where Mr. Tilden was Born, at New Lebanon, N. Y.

the time and was long afterward remembered as
one of the most striking incidents of the cam
paign, which resulted in the election of William
H. Seward.
When Tilden had completed his academic
course and had passed through the Law School
of the New York University he became more
than ever engrossed in politics, and in 1840 he
prepared an elaborate speech, which he deliv
ered in his native town. New Lebanon, N. Y.,

SAMUEL J. TILDEN 261
in October of that year. The subject of this
speech, which was " Currency, Prices, and
Wages," affords a very good clew to the character
of Tilden's subsequent career. He was always a
close student of political economy, and as soon
as he had begun to read anything above the
ordinary range of boys' books, he tackled with
remarkable courage the writings of the great
publicists of this and other countries. He not
only mastered the details of the financial systems
of the United States, but grappled successfully
with the general principles of finance as applied
to the governments of the world. His speech at
New Lebanon contained, among other things, a
history of the United States Bank, which is of
sufficient historical value to make it acceptable,
even to this day, as a lucid and accurate state
ment of the bearings of that great question in the
politics of the middle of this century.
Tilden was admitted to the Bar in 1841, and
opened an office for the practice of his profes
sion in the city of New York. His clients were
not very numerous, and he turned his attention
to the management of a political newspaper
enterprise which was now proposed by some of
the leading men of the Democratic party. He
became editor of the Morning News, a success
ful political newspaper, which supported the
nomination of James K. Polk in 1844, and was
active in the canvass of that year. He particu
larly devoted himself to the cause of the work-
ingmen, and threw himself with great animation
into an attempt to defeat the scheme of the

262 STATESMEN
Whigs, who had expected to divide the vote of
the State, so that Clay would carry it by a plu
rality and thus secure his election. Polk carried
New York by a plurality of a little over five
thousand, and Silas Wright was elected Govern
or over Millard Fillmore, the Whig candidate.
After the election, Tilden closed his career as an
editor and returned to the practice of law. In
the following year he was elected a member of
the Assembly, where he devoted himself to the
discussion of questions relating to finance, the re
duction of taxes, and the enlargement of per
sonal liberty.
When the war between the United States and
Mexico was declared, in 1846, he favored the
joint resolution supporting the war policy of the
Polk administration and voted for an appropria
tion to enroll a New York military contingent.
In the Constitutional Convention of 1846, of
which he was a member, he played a distin
guished part, his activities being specially di
rected to such constitutional provisions as
should guard with greater safety the public
treasury and maintain the credit of the State.
The amendments which he proposed on these
subjects were of Spartan severity, and if they
had all been adopted, they would have undoubt
edly made the financial system of the State of
New York much more nearly perfect than it is.
One of the early triumphs of Mr. Tilden was
achieved in what is known as the Flagg case,
and in this and in two or three subsequent causes
in which he distinguished himself, the character

SAMUEL J. TILDEN 263
of the man's mind evinced itself. The Flagg
case grew out of an election contest between
Azariah C. Flagg and his competitor, Mr. Giles,
for the office of Comptroller of New York City.
The majority of Mr. Flagg was one hundred and
seventy-nine, and a contest arose over the count
ing of the returns. A portion of the tallies in the
poll were not forthcoming when the case came
to trial in the courts, but Tilden, by a curious
process of reconstructing and analyzing the
tallies already in possession of the court, suc
ceeded in establishing as nearly as possible the
identity of the missing tallies ; and by this pro
cess of reconstruction he convinced the court
that all of the combinations which he laid before
it made a methodical demonstration in favor of
Flagg. In effect he placed in the hands of the
court and jury printed copies of his recon
structed tallies and of all the regular tickets, and
going over them step by step he was enabled to
demonstrate to the complete satisfaction of all
impartial observers that his case was impreg
nable. The jury returned a verdict in favor of
Tilden's client. Another case somewhat similar
which evinced great legal skill in its manage
ment was the famous Cunningham-Burdell case.
This was a cause growing out of the murder of
Dr. Harvey Burdell, and a suit brought by his
alleged wife, a Mrs. Cunningham, to recover a
greater portion of the estate of the deceased
man. The case was one in which great interest
was felt all over the country on account of the
mystery which surrounded the death of Burdell;

264 STATESMEN
and the astute lawyer who managed the case
against the Cunningham claimant gained great
renown not only on account of the notoriety of
the case itself, but by the happy combination of
qualities which he exhibited in his management
of the case. A somewhat similar cause in which
he figured with great credit was that of the
Delaware & Hudson Canal Company against
the Pennsylvania Coal Company. This required
the exercise of the same variety of talent as
that employed in unravelling the mysteries and
intricacies of the before-mentioned suits. The
point at issue in this case was, whether the
enlargement of the canal had rendered trans
portation cheaper than it had been before its en
largement. By a series of computations and
conclusions, drawn from the books of the canal
company, Tilden with methodical precision, es
tablished a complete defence for the coal com
pany. The system which he pursued was a
combination of skilfulness and ingenuity, and the
case, which was a novelty in its time, is referred
to as one in which novel principles and entirely
original methods of procedure were adopted.
His tables, which were marvels of methodical
elaborateness, became a species of technical
standard in matters of this kind. Commenting
on this case long afterward, Tilden said : " I re
member an anecdote which ex-President Van
Buren once told me of John Randolph. Some
body was speaking to him in a complimentary
vein in reference to a debate in the House of
Representatives, and told him that a speech of

Mr. Tilden's New li'oik House, at No. 15 Gramercy Park.

266 STATESMEN
his had not been answered. ' Answered, sir,'
said he ; 'it was not made to be answered.' And
so, sir, these tables were not made to be confuted.
They are made according to the best process of
scientific analysis, proved step by step from the
records of the plaintiffs themselves, and are in
troduced here in strict conformity of the rules
of evidence." Tilden showed that the coal
company, instead ol reaping an advantage from
the enlargement of the canal, had suffered loss.
The verdict accordingly was rendered in favor of
his clients.
From this time Tilden's career as a lawyer was
largely devoted to rescuing corporations from
unprofitable and embarrassing litigation, in reor
ganizing their administration, in re-establishing
their credit, and in rendering their resources
available. One of his biographers has said :
" Since the year 1855, it is safe to say that more
than half the great railway corporations North
of the Ohio and between the Hudson and Mis
souri Rivers were at some time his clients.
. . . It was here that his legal attainments,
his unsurpassed skill as a financier, his unlimited
capacity for concentrated labor, and his con
stantly increasing weight of character and per
sonal influence found full activity." In other
words, Mr. Tilden now became what is com
monly known as " a railroad lawyer," and he
laid not only the foundation for notable profes
sional success, but also of a large fortune which
he accumulated during the years ensuing.
The legal work by which Tilden will longest

SAMUEL J. TILDEN 267
be remembered undoubtedly was his service in
tracing out and exposing the frauds of the so-
called " Tammany Ring " that ruled in New
York during the years from 1869 to 1871. By
a series of political manoeuvres this combination
of political adventurers had secured a position
in the government of the city of New York
that seemed to be utterly unassailable. The so-
called Tweed charter of the city gave these
men, at the head of whom was William M.
Tweed, full power over the finances — receipts
and expenditures — of the great metropolis. At.
a single meeting of the Board of Special Audit,
for example, three men made the order for the
payment of $6,312,500, of which scarcely ten per
cent, in value was realized by the city of New
York. As time advanced, the percentages of
theft mixed in these bills, which were audited
and paid under the direction of the members
of the Tweed ring, grew in amount. In 1870 the
theft was sixty-six per cent., and a little later it
was eighty-five per cent. The aggregate of
fraudulent bills after April 5, 1870, and dur
ing the rest of that year, was $12,250,000; in
1874 it was $3,400,000. Nearly $15,750,000 of
fraudulent bills were comprised in the booty
grasped on a single day. So complete was
the power of this corrupt combination un
der the laws of the State, that Mr. Tilden,
in one of his famous papers on the Tweed
ring, said that the act of the Legislature might
have run in this way : " We, the people of the
State of New York, represented in Senate

268 STATESMEN
and Assembly, do by our supreme legislative
authority hereby grant William M. Tweed the
office of Commissioner of Public Works, and
annex thereto, in addition to the powers hereto
fore held by the Street Commissioner, all the
powers heretofore held by the various officers
of the Croton Department, to have and to hold
the same for four years, with the privilege of
extending the term by surrendering any rem
nant thereof and receiving a reappointment for
a further new term of four years, which office
shall be free and discharged of the power of
the Governor to remove for cause on charges,
as in the case of sheriffs, and every power of
removal by the city government; and absolutely
of all accountability whatsoever, unless Mayor
Hall or some successor shall choose to prefer
articles of impeachment to the Court of Com
mon Pleas, and unless all six judges shall attend
to try such articles." This was exactly the
operation of the act conferring on the city of
New York the famous so-called Tweed charter.
The secret accounts of the ring were published
in one of the newspapers of the day at the in
stance of one of the political associates of Tweed
and his fellow conspirators. This exposure,
which created great excitement throughout
New York, and indeed throughout the whole
country, was followed up by a combination
of good citizens, at whose instance the work
of further unravelling the frauds and bringing
the offenders to justice was vigorously prose
cuted. Mr. Tilden's chief contribution to the

SAMUEL J. TILDEN 269
good work was an investigation of the methods
by which the conspirators divided among them
selves the proceeds of their thefts. By obtain
ing from one of the banks, under due process of
law, the checks which had passed through that
institution, and comparing them with the ac
counts in the Comptroller's office, Tilden man
aged to expose with convincing lucidity of proof
the details of the conspiracy. All of these de
tails were laid bare with consummate ingenuity
and with a clearness of statement which left no
doubt of their accuracy and genuineness. By
the information which he obtained from the
banking institution before referred to, he estab
lished the fact that but one-third of the nominal
amount of the bills audited by the city govern
ment had ever reached the persons who pre
tended to be entitled to the payments, and that
two-thirds of this great amount had been divided
among public officers and their accomplices, and
he traced the dividends into the actual possession
of some of the accused parties. He thus con
verted a strong suspicion into mathematical
certainty and furnished judicial proof against
the guilty parties. In process of time the ring
was broken, its power was utterly destroyed, arid
the chief conspirator, after having been brought
back a fugitive from a foreign land, was sen
tenced to jail, where he died miserably.
During the entire period of the wicked ascen
dency of the Tweed ring Tilden had been con
tinued as Chairman of the State Democratic
Committee, but he did not share in its corrupt

SAMUEL J. TILDEN 271
councils, and he was kept ignorant of its auda
cious schemes. There was no bond of sympa
thy between him and the vulgar creatures who
had taken possession of the government of the
city of New York, and when he had succeeded
in the work of capturing the stronghold of the
Tweed ring, he entered the Assembly of the
State as a member and engaged in the work of
repealing the laws that gave to this conspiracy
its power, and in purging the statute books of all
legislation that had been framed to enable the
adventurers to carry on their nefarious schemes.
It is fair to presume that it was at this time
that Tilden conceived the ambition of becoming
President of the United States. His popularity
and repute as a reformer and as an exterminator
of gross political abuses were now very thor
oughly established. His name was in the mouths
of all men, and he had contrived without appar
ent injustice to others to secure for himself great
credit of the entire work of overthrowing one of
the most powerful and apparently impregnable
political combinations ever made in this country.
This was his opportunity. The Governorship to
which he was elected in 1874 became a stepping-
stone to secure the nomination of his party in
1876. His name was identified with adminis
trative reform, and his political methods were
those of a complete and wellnigh perfect organ
ization. His inaugural address as Governor was
devoted to questions of political economy, and
one of the earliest acts of his administration was
to attack the " Canal Ring." This was another

272 STATESMEN
combination by which the grossest abuses in the
management of the Erie and Champlain Canals
had long been maintained. By a system of false
accounts and prodigal expenditures the managers
of the ring had robbed the State and oppressed
its internal commerce. Tilden's vigorous efforts
in the overthrow of this corrupt combination re
claimed a great sum of money from the con
spirators and readjusted the whole scheme and
policy of canal management. His public admin
istration, therefore, had been signalized by the
overthrow of the Tweed ring and the Canal
ring, and a decrease of the tax budget of the
State of New York by nearly one-half. His
position in 1876 was most fortunate. He was
virtually master of the Democratic party, then
ascendant in his State, and had gained a national
reputation for honesty and administrative ability
which was certainly not surpassed by any states
man of his time. Although there was a vigor
ous opposition organized against his nomination
by the national convention of his party, he
succeeded in carrying off the honors, and was
the accepted and accredited candidate of his
party that year, being opposed by Rutherford
B. Hayes, the Republican nominee.
It was generally supposed that the votes of
the States recently in rebellion could be safely
counted on to vote for Tilden, but when the
returns were made up it was found that South
Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida were included
in the Kst of States claimed by the Republicans.
The colored people in those three States were

SAMUEL J. TILDEN 273
naturally regarded as secure for the Republican
candidate. The white population of South Caro
lina was only two hundred and eighty-nine thou
sand, while the colored population was four hun
dred and fifteen thousand, and the disparity
of the white and colored races in the three
States above named, it was claimed, justified
the belief that the returns as made out by the
election officers were trustworthy. Both parties
persisted in claiming a victory in the three
States, and the confidence of the leaders in
flamed the excitement of the masses of voters.
A long contest ensued in each of these States,
and representatives of the two parties pro
ceeded in hot haste to the respective capitals
of the States in order to see that " a fair count "
was had. So great was the excitement through
out the country that General Grant, who was
then President, felt constrained to send to Gen
eral Sherman, who commanded the army of the
United States, this memorable despatch : "In
struct General Augur, in Louisiana, and General
Ruger, in Florida, to be vigilant with the force
at their command, to preserve peace and good
order, and to see that the proper and legal
boards of canvassers are unmolested in the per
formance of their duties. Should there be any
grounds of suspicion of a fraudulent count on
either side it should be reported and denounced
at once. No man worthy of the office of Presi
dent should be willing to hold it if counted in or
placed there by fraud. Either party can afford
to be disappointed in the result; the country
18

274 STATESMEN
cannot afford to have the result tainted by the
suspicion of illegal or false returns."
The final result of the contests in the three
States, as determined by the canvassing boards,
gave the electoral votes in each one of them to
Hayes, and later in November, 1876, when the
electors met in the several States, the count
from all the States of the Union showed one
hundred and eighty-five electors for Hayes
and one hundred and eighty-four for Tilden.
The Democrats had hoped up to the last that at
least some one of the States, or possibly one of
the electors in one of the three States, would be
returned for Tilden, and when they found that
every vote of the three States was counted for
Hayes, their anger was intense. Threats were
made that General Hayes should never be in
augurated as President of the United States, and
a fierce excitement swept over the country. As
the time drew near when the electoral votes
should be counted by Congress in joint session
of both Houses, this excitement became deeper
and more strained. Under the existing law it
was directed that " No electoral vote objected to
shall be counted, except by the concurrent votes
of the two Houses." At this time the House of
Representatives had a Democratic majority and
the Senate had a Republican majority. It was
obvious that either of the two Houses could pre
vent the counting of an electoral vote. Accord
ingly, after a long and heated discussion, a bill
was passed by both Houses providing for the
creation of an Electoral Commission, to which

276 STATESMEN
body all the questions in dispute should be re
ferred. This commission was to be composed
of five members of the Senate, five members of
the House, and five Justices of the Supreme
Court of the United States. This Electoral Com
mission was finally organized on the thirty-first
day of January, 1877, ^^^ was composed as fol
lows: Nathan Clifford, Samuel F. Miller, Ste
phen J. Field, William Strong, Joseph P. Brad
ley, Justices of the Supreme Court ; George F.
Edmunds, Oliver P. Morton, Frederick T. Fre
linghuysen, Thomas F. Bayard, Allen G. Thur-
man. United States Senators ; Henry B. Payne,
Eppa Hunton, Josiah G. Abbott, James A. Gar
field, and George F. Hoar, Representatives in
Congress — eight Republicans and seven Demo
crats. It had been generally supposed that the
fifth justice selected for this commission would
be David Davis, of Illinois, then a Justice of the
Supreme Court of the United States. Judge
Davis was classed as an Independent, although
there was an impression abroad that he would
cast his vote in favor of Tilden. By a singular
combination of circumstances he was not able to
serve on the commission, having at that juncture
been elected United States Senator from the
State of Illinois. His place was taken by Jus
tice Bradley, of New Jersey, who served on the
commission. The result of a long, laborious,
and absorbingly interesting contest before the
commission was a decision in favor of General
Hayes by a vote of eight to seven, and the find
ing of the commission was finally confirmed.

SAMUEL J. TILDEN 277
Other complications arose in this contest in con
sequence of the failure of the Presidential elec
tors from the State of Oregon to present a
unanimous report. This point was also decided
in favor of General Hayes by the Electoral Com
mission, before which body it came.
An unpleasant sequel to this most unfortunate
dispute was the production of a series of cipher
despatches which had passed between the friends
of Mr. Tilden during the exciting period of the
count in the winter of 1876-7. These despatches
had been brought into the custody of a committee
of the United States Senate by subpoenas and
were finally unravelled by an expert, and the con
troversy, which had been reopened by Tilden's
friends, became even more acrimonious than
before. The investigation which followed
showed that the friends of Tilden had been
engaged in an effort, which proved abortive, to
use money corruptly to influence the action of
returning boards or to secure the votes of Presi
dential electors in some of the States where
contests were made. Tilden appeared before
the committee of investigation and swore that
he knew nothing of any of these telegrams, and
that when he was informed of certain negotia
tions in South Carolina he had stopped them.
He emphatically declared that he scorned to de
fend his title by such means as were employed
to secure a felonious possession.
Probably the actual merits of this most un
happy controversy will not be satisfactorily
adjusted during the lifetime of the present gen-

278 STATESMEN
eration of men. Commenting on the final out
come of this deplorable business, Blaine in his
" Twenty Years in Congress " says : " The inter
est throughout the investigation centred upon
Mr. Tilden, and concerning him and his course
there followed general discussion, angry accu
sation, and warm defence. There is nothing in
the testimony to contradict the oath taken by
Mr. Tilden, and there has been no desire to fasten
a guilty responsibility upon him. But the simple
fact remains, that a Presidential canvass which
began with a ponderous manifesto in favor of
reform in every department of the government,
and which accused, those who had been in
trusted with power for sixteen years of every
form of dishonesty and corruption, ended with
a persistent and shameless effort to bribe the
electors of three States." But no biographical
sketch of Tilden would be complete unless it in
sisted, as Blaine has insisted, that there has been
no serious attempt to fasten upon his character
any accusation of complicity in the corrupt ef
forts made to put him into the Presidency.
Mr. Tilden died at his country place, August
4, 1886.
The model for Tilden's political career was
Martin Van Buren, whom he admired for his
many talents and respected for his private worth.
As a lad Tilden became well acquainted with
Van Buren and his family, and as he advanced
to mature years he was admitted to the inti
macy and confidence of the " Sage of Kinder-
hook," as Van Buren was familiarly called by

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— 3 *i i

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Biyant Park, Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, New York, and the Suggested Tilden Library,

280 STATESMEN
his admiring neighbors. Van Buren was a mas
ter of political strategy, and in the history of
American politics he stands without a rival as a
manager of men. Tilden was adroit, ingenious,
and cautious. He was skilful in planning and
strong in execution, and he inspired his party
with a courage and energy which up to the time
of his becoming its natural leader it had failed
to evince. Although Tilden was during the
greater part of his life immersed in active poli
tics, his tastes were scholarly and refined. He
was a high authority in bibliography and was a
zealous and untiring collector of books and manu
scripts relating to American history. His house,
which in later years became an abode of ele
gant leisure, was stored with rich treasures of
art and literature. In everything that pertained
to American history and to the advancement of
American interests Tilden was an enthusiastic
and devoted patriot. His manner in social inter
course was variable. At times he was mysteri
ous and secretive and at other times cordial and
frank to the last degree. Probably very few per
sons were admitted to his closest intimacy, and he
died as he lived, without acquiring any permanent
hold on the affections of the whole people. By
the terms of his will the bulk of a fortune of sev
eral millions was bequeathed to the city of New
York for the building and maintenance of a great
public library. By an unfortunate judicial con
struction of the terms of this will the greater part
of his princely benefaction was diverted to the
uses of collateral heirs of the Tilden estate.

James G, Blaine.

X.
JAMES G. BLAINE.
We have seen how the precocious promise of
the youth of one statesman, Samuel J. Tilden,
was amply fulfilled in his maturer years. But
the historian will say that this was an exception
to a general rule. Brilliant men have riot usually
evinced much of their brightness in their boy
hood. There is great hope for the dull boy, after
all. James G. Blaine, if not a boy of very com
monplace traits of mental character, certainly was
not a lad of remarkable promise. When he was
a student at Washington College, in Western
Pennsylvania, one who knew him well said of
him that " he was a plain, quiet, good-tempered,
studious boy," remarkable for nothing but his
love of reading, and giving no hint of the great
ness of his future career as a statesman. One of
his college mates has said of him : " I knew
Blaine at Washington College, he being in the
next class below me. Blaine's parents lived at
Washington during their son's college course,
and on that account the students saw less of
' Jim ' Blaine, as he was familiarly called, than if
he had boarded at the college instead of at home.
Young Blaine was a sturdy, heavy-set, matter-of-
fact looking young fellow, not at all prepossess-

282 STATESMEN
ing in appearance, and exceedingly awkward at
times, and giving no hint of the elegant gentle
man he has grown to be. He was never seen on
the street or play-ground, and rarely mingled in
the customary sports of the boys. I remember
we had a very fine foot-ball ground, but I never
remember to have seen young Blaine on it. In
fact, I cannot say for certain that I ever saw him
engaged in any kind of sport during the entire
time I was at college. It is my impression that
he passed all his leisure at home or in one of the
college halls or with a book. He was a great
reader, almost a book-worm, and would become
absorbed to a wonderful degree in his books."
The bent of his mind, so far as it was mani
fested at all, was in the direction of newspaper
writing. In his graduation address, delivered in
September, 1847, when he was in the eighteenth
year of his age, he devoted him.self to " The Duty
of an Educated American." Texas had just been
annexed to the United States, and gold had just
been discovered in California. The budding
young statesman said : " The sphere of labor for
the educated American is continually enlarging.
But recently we added the vast dominion of the
Lone Star Republic to our glorious Union. The
war to which that act gave rise is now in victo
rious progress, and will not end without another
great accession to our territory, possibly carry
ing our flag beyond the Great American Desert
to the shores of the Pacific sea. Where our
armies march, population follows; and the full
duty for the scholar is to be continental in ex-

JAMES G. BLAINE 283
tent and as varied as the domains of a progres
sive civilization." It will be observed that the
youthful orator took no part in the discussion
that then raged among his elders as to the right
eousness or injustice of the annexation of Texas
and the war which it provoked.
After grr.duation, Blaine found employment as
a professor of mathematics in a military school
at Blue Lick Springs, Ky., where about two
hundred young students, sons of the planters
of the South, were pupils. These lads were of a
class hard to govern, and early in his connection
with the school there was a rebellion against the
faculty. Some of the students attacked the pro
fessors with pistols and knives, but Blaine, who
was conspicuous in this fight at the head of the
faculty, used only his fists and arms, and his par
ty finally triumphed in the fight, and Blaine
won from the young Southerners more respect
on account of his having been the hero of the
struggle than if he had been only the accom
plished professor that he was.
In the third year of his professorship at Blue
Lick, having married Miss Harriet Stanwood, of
Maine, he went to her native State, where he
tarried for a time ; then returned to Pennsyl
vania and taught in the Philadelphia Blind Asy
lum. But from 1854 onward he was wholly
identified with Maine, having taken up his resi
dence at Augusta, the capital of that State. He
became part owner and editor-in-chief of the Ken
nebec Journal, and entered upon a career of active
politics and journalism. It is interesting to note

284 STATESMEN
here that early in his editorial work Blaine
evinced his high admiration for Henry Clay,
who, as everybody now knows, was the pattern
and exemplar of the life and career of the future
" Man from Maine." Blaine -viras always pleased
when a parallel in his and Clay's public life was
found, and he never disguised the ardent ad
miration which Clay's character and services
inspired in him. In his newspaper, very soon
after he took charge of it, Blaine said: "As a
speaker, Mr. Clay is very earnest and persuasive ;
not polished either in manner or diction, but still
irresistibly pleasing. He speaks from the soul,
and the moment you hear him you are assured
that he gives utterance only to what he knows
and feels to be the truth and the cause of human
freedom." Blaine's first public address was made with
much diffidence, because he had not been suc
cessful as a debater in the literary society of his
college, had had no experience, and was nervous
and easily embarrassed, and his speech was hin
dered by a slight impediment. He had attended
the first national convention of the Republican
party, which was held at Philadelphia in 1856,
and on his return he was asked to address a
meeting of his fellow Republicans in Augusta, to
tell them the story of the convention's doings.
When he became accustomed to the sound of
his voice, and the friendly audience before him
encouraged him by their sympathetic applause,
he was emboldened to make what was said to
be a very creditable speech. A more important

JAMES a. BLAINE

285

address, however, was delivered at a Republican
meeting in Litchfield, Me., during the following
month. This speech was carefully prepared and
committed to memory and was notable for its
conservatism and for the moderation of state
ment which characterized it.
He was actively engaged in the political cam
paign of 1856, when Fremont was the Republican
candidate for the Presidency ; and in 1858 he was

The Birthplace of Mr. Blaine at West Brownsville, Pa.
elected for the first time in his life to a political
office, being a member of the Assembly of the
Maine Legislature. He now devoted himself to
a careful and exhaustive study of the rules of
parliamentary usage and the manual of debate.
He was an assiduous student of all public ques
tions and was master of the methods of pro
cedure in legislative bodies, not, as many have
supposed, by reason of his powers of intuition,
but by a diligent study of rules, precedents.

286 STATESMEN
and historical examples. These acquisitions of
knowledge formed the basis of his election as
Speaker of the House of Representatives of the
Maine Legislature two years later. He served
two terms, and his training in the Legislature as
member and presiding officer fitted him for the
honor which was still later conferred upon him
by the national House of Representatives.
His studies continued to be ardent, and he
spent his nights in storing his mind with useful
political knowledge and in almost committing to
memory the political history not only of his
adopted State, but of all the other States of the
-Union. One of his first speeches of general
and national interest was on a proposition in
Congress favoring the purchase of Cuba by
the United States. In a speech before the Leg
islature, where the question was incidentally
brought up, he said : " The proposition to place
thirty millions of dollars at the disposal of the
President, and to run the nation in debt for the
purpose of raising the money ; to surrender
to him the power to make treaties, annex Ter
ritories and States ; to create him absolute.
dictator, with the purse of the nation in one
hand and the sword in the other ; to have peace
or war, prosperity or misfortune follow at his
will or to be decided by his errors — such a
proposition, I say, is too monstrous to be en
tertained for one moment by anyone who values
the preservation of constitutional rights and the
perpetuity of a republican union."
Although Blaine was not born in the State

JAMES a. BLAINE 287
with which his name is so indissolubly con
nected, the people of that region have never
apparently regarded him other than as one of
themselves. His glory is their glory, and his
fame is their own. Writing of him in later years,
Governor Edward Kent said : " Before he was
twenty-nine he was chosen chairman of the exec
utive committee of the Republican organization
in Maine, a position from which he shaped and
directed political matters in the State, leading
his party to brilliant victory. Had Mr. Blaine
been New England born he would probably not
have received such rapid advancement at so
early an age, even with the same ability that he
possessed ; but there was a sort of Western dash
about him that took with us Down-Easters — an
expression of frankness, candor, and confidence
that gave him from the start a very strong and
permanent hold on our people, and as the foun
dation of all, pure character and a masterly abil
ity equal to all demands made upon him."
The most notable speech made by Blaine dur
ing his term of service in the Legislature was
on the war power of Congress as involved in
the question of confiscation of rebel property.
He took the Lincoln view of the power of the
nation and approved unqualifiedly President
Lincoln's propositions regarding the question of
confiscation. In his devotion to the Republican
cause, Blaine went to the Chicago convention as
a delegate in i860. He had pledged himself to
the Lincoln interest and refused to be won over
to the Seward column, although a number of the

288

STATESMEN

Maine delegates supported the cause of Seward.
Earlier than this, when Lincoln and Douglas
were having their memorable oratorical contest
for the Senatorship in 1858, Blaine was on the
scene with his pen describing the wonderful de
bate for his little newspaper in Augusta, Me.

Blaine at Thirty Years of Age.

In one of his letters he ventured the prediction
that Lincoln would be defeated for Senator by
Douglas, but would beat Douglas for President
in i860. This letter was copied from the Kenne
bec Journal into several Illinois papers friendly
to Lincoln, and Lincoln himself cut it out and
carried it in his pocket-book until long after he

JAMES a. BLAINE 289
was inaugurated President. When Lincoln and
Blaine met in Washington, after the election of
the Maine man to the House of Representatives,
their friendship became at once strong, and it
lasted with the life of the great President.
Blaine was elected to the Thirty-eighth Con
gress in 1862, succeeding Anson P. Morrill.
Among the prominent men in the House at that
time were Henry Winter Davis, of Maryland ;
John A. Bingham and Samuel Shellaberger, of
Ohio ; General Schenck, of Ohio ; Thaddeus
Stevens, of Pennsylvania, and James A. Garfield,
of Ohio. When Blaine was sworn in by the
Speaker of the House, Garfield, who was to be
come his most intimate friend in Congress, stood
upon his right and William B. Allison, of Ohio,
on his left. This was the beginning of one of
the most notable terms of Congressional service
which has been enjoyed by any American. He
was seven times elected to Congress, making
fourteen years in all, and was elected by the
House three times Speaker, making his service
in the chair six years.
His first speech in Congress was during the
spring succeeding the beginning of his term in
the House, when he made an elaborate address
on the subject, " Can the Country Sustain the Ex
penses of the War and Pay the Debt which it
will involve ? " It is needless to say that Blaine
boldly advocated the assumption by the National
Government of all the debts incurred by the
States in the prosecution of the war. His
speech was a business-like statement of the finan-
19

290 STATESMEN
cial condition of the government, its resources,
and its pecuniary liabilities and possibilities. It
was a model of clearness and strength and was
admirably calculated to restore public confidence
and strengthen the faith of the people in the
ability of the National Government to prosecute
the war to its end and to adjust satisfactorily
the burdens of taxation which the great debts in
curred would make necessary. At that time
there were many timid souls who apparently
dreaded bankruptcy more than they feared the
dissolution of the Union. Blaine was one of the
more courageous statesmen who, while he be
lieved in the righteousness of the cause of the
country, never for one moment doubted its abil
ity to carry on the war, sustained as it would be
by the patriotism of the people. He showed
that even this great national debt, which he
estimated at three thousand millions of dollars,
could be easily borne by the country, and was
not greater in proportion than the debt assumed
by our government at the time it was founded in
1779. His historical parallel was a striking one,
and by quoting from Jefferson's estimates of the
financial carrying capacity of the people in 1779,
he argued that the republic of this later time
was even more competent to bear its burden
than it was at the close of the War of the Revo
lution. This speech, which was circulated by hun
dreds of thousands of copies throughout the
United States, concluded with these memorable
sentences : " These are the great elements of

JAMBS G. BLAINE

291

material progress, and they comprehend the
entire circle of human enterprise, agriculture,
commerce, manufacture, mining. They assure
to us an increase in property and population
that will surpass the most sanguine deductions
of our census tables, framed as those tables are
upon the ratios and relations of our workers
in the past; they give into our hands, under

^tfaifei't 

Where Mr. Blaine went to School at West Brownsville, Pa.
the blessing of Almighty God, the power to
command our fate as a nation; they hold out
to us the grandest future reserved for any peo
ple, and with this promise they teach us the
lesson of patience and render confidence and
fortitude a duty. With such amplitude and
affluence of resources, and with such a vast
stake at issue, we should be unworthy of our
lineage and inheritance if we for one moment
mistrusted our ability to maintain ourselves a

292 STATESMEN
united people with one country, one constitu
tion, one destiny."
Blaine contented himself, however, during his
first term in Congress with speaking briefly on a
variety of important measures, including those
for the adjustment of the revenue, tariff for pro
tection of American industries, a law in refer
ence to fugitive slaves, and other similar subjects.
But his remarks on these questions, while they
were short, were always pungent, crisp, and full
of information. It may be truly said of him
that he never spoke without an absolute and
full comprehension of his subject, whatever it
might be.
He was a " hard-money " man, and during a
debate on an act of Congress proposed to pre
vent the depreciation of greenbacks and the ap
preciation of gold, he said : " This whole bill
aims at what is simply impossible. You cannot
by Congressional enactment make a coined dol
lar worth less than it is, nor a paper dollar worth
more than it is. I think we had experience
enough in that direction with the famous gold
bill at the last session. . . . The bill under
consideration has already had a most pernicious
effect, and should it become a law no man can
measure the degree of its hurtful influence."
Although the bill had the powerful support of
Thaddeus Stevens, who was the chairman of the
House Committee of Ways and Means, it was
soon after withdrawn, as the arguments against
it were too powerful for its friends to overcome.
Reconstruction measures naturally engaged

JAMES G. BLAINE 293
much attention in Congress at this time, and
Blaine's attitude on some of the great questions
which came up from time to time was consist
ent, manly, and patriotic. He insisted that the
basis of- representation should be so arranged
that the newly enfranchised negroes of the South
ern States should not be deprived of their rights,
and that the representation of those States should
be diminished just so far as the right of suffrage
was curtailed by law or by usage.
During the long session of the Thirty-ninth
Congress, in 1866, occurred the celebrated
Blaine-Conkling episode which resulted in the
life-long estrangement of these two eminent
men. Conkling was an educated lawyer, im
perious in his manner and impatient of opposi
tion. General James B. Fry, who had been a
provost -marshal -general in the State of New
York during the war, was violently assailed by
Representative Conkling in the course of debate
in the House. Blaine came to the rescue of
General Fry, and the two Representatives be
came involved in a bitter personal controversy.
The outcome of the long and acrimonious debate
was a polished shaft from Blaine's quiver directed
at Conkling's well-known personal vanity. The
weapon struck its mark, and Conkling never
forgave Blaine for this conspicuous and rankling
wound. From that day until he died he never
exchanged a word with Blaine and apparently
never saw him, although the two men were as
sociated together as members of the same party
in the House and in the Senate for more than

294 STATESMEN
fifteen years, and it may here be said that wher
ever Conkling's influence could harass the am
bition or hinder the upward steps of his adver
sary, harassment and hinderance were in the
way. Before Blaine was elected Speaker, he occa
sionally was called to the chair by the presiding
officer, and he became one of the most conspic
uous figures among the younger members of the
majority of the House. His personal qualities
were speedily made the subject of comment by
observers, and visitors to the House of Rep
resentatives usually asked first to be shown
Blaine. A newspaper correspondent writing at
this time says : " Blaine is metallic ; you cannot
conceive how a shot would pierce him, for
there seems to be no joint in his harness. He is
a man who knows what the weather was yester
day morning in Dakota ; what the Emperor's pol
icy will be touching Mexico ; on what day of the
week the i6th of December, proximo, will fall;
who is chairman of the schoob committee in
Kennebunk ; what is the best way of managing
the national debt ; together with all the other
interests of to-day, which anybody else would
stagger under. How he does it nobody knows.
He is always in his place. He must absorb de
tails by assimilation at his finger-ends. As I
said, he is clear metal ; his features are cast in a
mould ; his attitudes are those of a bronze figure ;
his voice clinks, and he has ideas as fixed as
brass." Blaine's first election as Speaker was on

JAMES G. BLAINE 295
the 4th of March, 1869, when he succeeded
Schuyler Colfax, who had just been inaugu
rated as Vice-President of the United States.
As Speaker he was alert, thoroughly well versed
in parliamentary usage and in the rules, regula
tions, and precedents of his high office. He was
impartial, quick, self-poised, and in all respects
probably the best equipped parliamentarian who
ever occupied the chair, except only (possibly)
his great exemplar, Henry Clay, who still holds
the reputation of being the best Speaker who
ever presided over the House of Representa
tives. He spent more hours in the chair than
any of his predecessors had been in the habit of
doing, and was almost never absent from his
place. His strength appeared to be indomitable,
and through some of the longest sessions of the
House he remained at his post without apparent
fatigue. He was always courteous and fair, and
never lost his head; when the most exciting
scenes of parliamentary confusion raged around
him, he alone remained immovable, composed,
and intently observant of every detail of the tu
multuous sea that was enclosed within the walls
of the House. In a farewell address delivered
when he finally laid down the emblem of his
office for the last time, he admirably set forth
the conditions under which the presiding officer
must administer his duties in these words :
"The Speakership of the American House of
Representatives is a post of honor, of dignity,
of power, of responsibility. Its duties are at
once complex and continuous ; they are both

296 STATESMEN
onerous and deUcate; they are performed in
the bright light of day under the eye of the
whole people, subject at all times to the clos
est observation and always attended with the
sharpest criticism. I think 'no other official
is held to such instant and such rigid account
ability. Parliamentary rulings in their very
nature are peremptory, almost absolute in au
thority and instantaneous in effect. They can
not always be enforced in such a way as to win
applause or secure popularity, but I am sure
that no man of any party who is worthy to fill
this chair will ever see a dividing line between
duty and policy."
During the latter part of Blaine's career in the
House of Representatives he delivered one of
his most remarkable speeches, which was on a
proposition to extend amnesty to Jefferson Davis.
The speech was made with all the vigor and en
ergy of his character, and its unexpectedness,
coming as it did like a fierce gale sweeping
down from the North, so staggered and dis
mayed the advocates of this variety of " magna
nimity " that they hated the speaker, while they
were forced to admire the audacity of his attack
and the spirit with which it was made. The ad
dress is generally known as the " Andersonville
Speech," because Blaine did not so much object
to Davis's political rehabilitation on the ground
that he was the rebel chieftain as because in his
capacity as President of the Confederacy he had
sanctioned, authorized, and approved the atroci
ties practised on Union prisoners confined in the

JAMES G. BLAINE 297
Andersonville prison. Blaine's picture of the
horrors of Andersonville, materials for which
were drawn from rebel archives, as well as
from the history of the time, was one of fright
ful vividness and realism. He quoted from doc
uments written by Union and by secession offi
cials, and from the testimony of persons who may
be regarded as impartial, to prove the truth of
the allegations which he brought not only against
the management of the prison pen, but against
the rebel chieftain himself. The argumentative
portion of his speech is included in these words :
" It is often said that we shall lift Mr. Davis
again into great consequence by refusing him
amnesty. That is not for me to consider. I
only see before me, when his name is presented,
a man who by a wave of his hand, by a nod of his
head, could have put an end to the atrocious
cruelties at Andersonville. Some of us had kins
men there, many of us had friends there, all of
us had countrymen there. I here protest, and
shall with my vote protest, against calling back
and crowning with the honors of full American
citizenship the man who stands responsible for
that organized murder." The bill did not pass.
The episode of the so-called Mulligan letters
might be passed over in silence, but it is well
enough to recall the facts. A certain package
of missing letters was the focal point around
which raged a bitter controversy. These were
in Blaine's possession ; and that was a dramatic
scene in the House when, having reached the
close of a preliminary statement of the case

298

STATESMEN

against him, he seized the package of letters ly
ing on his desk and brandished them in the face
of the House. It had been said that the letters
were destroyed and that he would never dare
to have them printed. He now proceeded to
have them read, one by one, and they were duly

^KUr a^^^^a^ -«.

iiiiiiitiifiiiiiji!''''!'™'''''^"

Mr. Blaine's Home at Augusta, Me.
spread upon the records of the day's doings.
Not to go more minutely into this unhappy busi
ness, it may be said that the investigating com
mittee finally dropped the whole inquiry and
failed to write out any opinion upon the testi
mony taken or to make an official report upon
a matter which for a time aroused the atten-

JAMES G. BLAINE 299
tion not only of Congress but of the whole
country. Exactly when the Presidential ambition began
to take shape in the mind of Blaine it is impossi
ble to say, but he first appeared as a pronounced
candidate in the Republican convention of 1876.
On the first ballot he led with two hundred and
eighty-five votes, L. P. Morton followed with one
hundred and twenty-five, Benjamin H. Bristow
one hundred and thirteen, Roscoe Conkling
ninety-nine, Rutherford B. Hayes sixty-one, and
three other candidates had seventy-two votes all
told. After seven ballots Rutherford B. Hayes
was nominated, having five votes more than was
necessary for a choice. It was at this convention
that a phrase which subsequently became cele
brated was first applied to Blaine. Robert G.
Ingersoll, in the course of his speech nominating
Blaine, said : " Like an armed warrior, like a
plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched down
the halls of the American Congress and threw
his shining lance full and fair against the brazen
foreheads of the defamers of his country and the
maligners of his honor. For the Republican
party to desert this gallant leader now -is as
though an army should desert their general up
on the field of battle." While this convention
was in session Blaine remained in Washington.
The weather was excessively hot, and on the Sun
day previous to the assembling of the conven
tion, Blaine, walking to church, was prostrated
by a sun-stroke. He did not fully recover until
the work of the convention was well under way.

300 STATESMEN
and in the meantime reports of his death were
circulated far and wide. It was believed by his
devoted followers that this untoward casualty
deprived him of the nomination, which otherwise
was easily within his reach.
Blaine's first term of service in the United
States Senate was by virtue of an appointment
by the Governor to fill a vacancy. He was sub
sequently elected by the Legislature upon its
assembling, notwithstanding an ardent effort on
the part of his enemies to defeat his promotion
to the Senate. When the Legislature assembled
it was found that copies of the attacks made
upon him during the Mulligan controversy had
been mailed to all of the members, and the State
House was deluged with printed matter calcu
lated to prejudice the minds of the members
against their stalwart leader. This attempt,
however, was defeated, and, curiously enough,
Democrats and Republicans united in their choice
of Blaine, who was elected to the Senate by the
unanimous vote of the Legislature, something
unprecedented in political history. In the Senate
his appearance was dreaded by some of the more
conservative members, who were afraid that his
brilliancy and picturesque method of conducting
debate would interfere with the more solemn tra
ditions of their conclave. They were, however,
speedily reassured, and the newly elected Sena
tor from Maine took his seat with becoming
modesty and did not for some time participate
largely in the debates. His first carefully pre
pared speech as Senator was made in opposition

JAMES G. BLAINE 301
to the silver craze, which was then at its height,
and he opposed the inflation theories of the far
West with a temperate and deprecatory argu
ment addressed to the better judgment of the
people. He argued that Congress had no more
power to demonetize silver than to demonetize
gold, and he advocated a policy of co-operating
with foreign nations to secure a uniform standard
of silver with gold. His speech went to the root
of the matter, and it is to this day regarded as an
admirable exposition of a sound financial policy
to be pursued in regard to maintaining the parity
of gold and silver.
Another topic which Blaine took up with much
zest, and in the discussion of which he showed
the results of profound thought and careful
study, was South American trade with the
United States. In this speech he outlined to
some extent the policy which he pursued later
on when he became Secretary of State. He ad
vocated the payment of subsidies to American
lines of steamships between the ports of the
United States and Central America and South
America. He showed how the great trade of
the countries to the South of us went to Europe
instead of coming to the United States, and
he sketched a policy by which a diversion of
this profitable trade could be made to our own
country. Blaine was again a candidate for the Presi
dential nomination in 1880, when Garfield was
named by a decided majority. He took the
stump for Garfield, and on the election of that

302 STATESMEN
statesman was offered the post of Secretary of
State, which he accepted. It is likely that
Blaine's occupation of this high office had some
influence upon the mind of Senator Conkling,
who very soon developed a hostility toward
the Garfield administration, which culminated
finally in the resignation of the two New York
Senators, Conkling and Piatt. Out of this most
unfortunate episode grew a long and angry con
troversy which divided the Republican party
into two factions. The bitterness of this dispute
was intensified by the failure of the New York
Legislature to re-elect Messrs. Conkling and
Piatt, for they had apparently expected to be re
turned to the Senate. In the midst of this bitter
contention President Garfield was assassinated,
while on his way to a brief vacation, three
months after his inauguration. But during his
brief service in the Cabinet, Secretary Blaine
had defined the foreign policy to be pursued by
the Garfield administration, which was as fol
lows : " First, to bring about peace and prevent
future wars in North and South America ; and,
secondly, to cultivate such friendly commercial
relations with all American countries as would
lead to a large increase in the export trade of
the United States. It was for the purpose of
promoting peace on the Western Hemisphere
that it was determined to invite all the independ
ent governments of North and South America
to meet in a peace conference at Washington on
March 15, 1882. The project met with cordial
approval in South America, and had it been car-

o .mu.jTjo ix. S3i^.a.±j.y jii

ried out would have raised the standard of civ
ilization, and possibly by opening South Ameri
can markets to our manufactures would have
wiped out $12,000,000 balance of trade which
Spanish America brings against us every year."
The death of Garfield apparently rendered
necessary the reconstruction of the Cabinet,
which resulted in Blaine's being succeeded by
Mr. Frederick T. Frelinghuysen, of New Jersey,
and only Robert T. Lincoln, Secretary of War,
remained in the official family of President
Arthur, who succeeded Garfield. But even the
few months which Blaine spent in the Cabinet
at this time were filled with useful activities.
The Clayton-Bulwer treaty, relating to Ameri
can interests on the Isthmus of Darien, was one
of the important topics considered by Secretary
Blaine, and a number of elaborate despatches
were written by him concerning our relations
with Mexico, British oppression in Ireland, and
the union of the Central American States under
one confederacy. Retiring from public life at
the conclusion of his brief term of service in the
Cabinet, Blaine removed to his home in Maine
and addressed himself to the preparation of his
historical work, " Twenty Years in Congress,"
the first volume of which appeared in April,
1884. This work, which in some respects was
modelled upon Benton's " Thirty Years in the
United States Senate," covers a most important
part of our history, extending from Lincoln to
Garfield, with a cursory review of the events
which led up to the American Rebellion. It is

304 STATESMEN
in fact a biography of the American people and
a picture of their progress through the twenty
years immediately after the death of Lincoln.
Blaine was again a candidate for the Presiden
tial nomination before the Republican conven
tion which assembled in Chicago in 1884, and
was nominated on the fourth ballot, having five
hundred and forty-one votes, four hundred and
seven being necessary for a choice. The anti-
Blaine elements had centred upon President
Arthur as their candidate, and it was apparent
that the friends of Conkling, and others who had
all along opposed Blaine's ambition, would not
heartily support Blaine in the contest which was
to follow. The result of the canvass was the elec
tion of Grover Cleveland, who had been nomi
nated by the Democrats. Various causes con
spired to weaken the cause of Blaine, one of
them being the extraordinary episode known as
the " Burchard business." In an address to
Blaine at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York, the
Rev. Dr. Burchard spoke of the Democratic
party as the party of " Rum, Romanism, and
Rebellion," and Blaine's failure then and there
to make some response signifying his disapproval
of this statement undoubtedly influenced many
votes against him in the canvass. It was said
that Blaine had been called on unexpectedly, and
while his mind was concentrated in an effort to
frame something pertinent to say in reply to the
address, he failed to notice the singular phrase
employed by Dr. Burchard. The vote of the
State of New York determined the issue by a

O-ainnjo it. j:tijj\xi^ jjj

small plurality. Of the popular vote, Blaine re
ceived four million eight hundred and fifty-one
thousand nine hundred and eighty-one, and
Cleveland had four million eight hundred and
seventy-four thousand nine hundred and eighty-
six votes. The result was undoubtedly sorely
disappointing to Blaine, who had in vain endured
the weariness and fatigue of a long and exhaust
ing campaign. But he speedily rallied from his
depression, and in an address which he made to
his fellow-citizens at Augusta he treated the issues
of the campaign with fresh vigor and without
betraying the least annoyance at his defeat.
Absence in Europe during a part of the next
succeeding years prevented him from becoming
positively identified with the efforts which were
put forth to nominate him again in 1888. There
were many contradictory reports received from
him, and although when he was formally ap
proached and interviewed on the subject of his
nomination he expressed himself as being out of
the field, his tenacious followers insisted that he
should be regarded as a candidate for the nomi
nation. However this may be, the outcome of
the national convention that year was the nomi
nation of General Benjamin Harrison. Blaine
returned to the United States and took an active
part in the canvass, speaking in various portions
of the country and lending his powerful support
to the Republican nominations.
On the accession of General Harrison to the
Presidency, Blaine was again appointed Secre
tary of State, and he proceeded to carry out his
30

306 STATESMEN
South American-Central American policy with
much vigor and doubtless with infinite satisfac
tion. As if he realized the shortness of the time
now left to him, he undertook at once with amaz
ing vigor the execution of the plans which had
been frustrated by the death of Garfield and his
retiring from public life. Instead of a peace con
ference to meet at Washington, Blaine now pro
posed a Pan-American Congress, which really
had the same object in view, although the scope
of the policy to be considered was made much
wider. The objects of the Pan-American Con
gress, as officially declared, were to adopt meas
ures that should tend to preserve and promote the
prosperity of the several American States, the
formation of a customs and trade union, the estab
lishment of regular and frequent communication
between the ports of the several States in the
compact, the establishment of a uniform system
of customs dues, weights and measures, trade
marks, silver currency, and an agreement look
ing toward the arbitration of all questions and
disputes by an international court. The princi
pal result of this congress was the adoption of
a system of trade reciprocity with the South
American and Central American States, which
it is claimed has inured greatly to the benefit
of the republic of the United States.
It is likely that the calamities that now over
took Blaine not only depressed his spirits, which
had always been elastic and animated, but hast
ened that gradual decay of his physical powers
which eventually resulted in making his retire-

Mr. Blaine's Washington Home, at 17 Madison Place, where he Died— Formerly
the Seward Mansion,

.IAMBS G. BLAINE 309
ment from public life absolutely necessary. On
January 15, 1890, his oldest son. Walker Blaine,
who had been his main-stay and support in the
cares of State, died suddenly. Within a month
later his oldest daughter, Alice, also died ; and
another son, Emmons Blaine, died in 1892. A
few weeks after the death of his daughter,
Blaine had an attack of paralysis and was taken
to his home, and during the summer of 1891 was
unable to attend to the affairs of the State De
partment. During his absence many questions
of great importance arose and were disposed of
by President Harrison, who was obliged to as
sume the duties of Secretary of State to a great
degree during the prostration of the Secretary.
As if pursued by adversity relentlessly, and in
spite of all efforts to escape, his name was pre
sented at the Republican convention of 1892 by
ill-advised friends. It is likely that the long suc
cessful statesmen, now enfeebled by disease and
made irritable and somewhat vacillating by the
misfortunes which had so persistently followed
him, was not sufficiently able to control his ar
dent admirers in the national convention. At any
rate, although he had repeatedly expressed his
determination not to permit his name again to be
used as a Presidential candidate, his adherents
insisted in pressing it, and to their inexpressible
chagrin and the mortification of all sincere
admirers of Secretary Blaine, he was defeated.
Harrison was nominated by a very handsome
majority. During the hurly-burly which was
caused by the attempt to force Blaine into the

310 STATESMEN
convention, apparently against his will, he per
emptorily resigned his post as Secretary of State
and left Washington for his summer home in
Maine. This step, while it could not be thor
oughly understood by politicians and public men,
was generally regarded by the people at large as
a sign of disagreement between the President
and the Secretary of State. But whatever were
the interior facts of this curious complication, it
is certain that, later on, the reconciliation of
these two men was complete. Blaine returned
to Washington after the election of Grover
Cleveland in 1892, but was in feeble condition,
unable to see any of the devoted friends who
besieged his house, imploring information as to
his real condition. Contradictory reports of his
health were circulated, but he grew weaker day
by day, and died quietly, January 27, 1893.
The personality of James G. Blaine was the
most conspicuous and remarkable of any in
American public life during the period immedi
ately succeeding the close of the Rebellion and
ending with his own career. His alluring quali
ties were many. In person he was command
ing ; his figure was strikingly handsome and was
sure to attract attention anywhere. His manner
was winning and affable, and he impressed those
with whom he came in contact as possessing a
kindly individual interest and sympathy. His
wonderful memory for faces and remote personal
incidents aided him materially in maintaining
this pleasing character. He doubtless studied to
commend himself to those whose esteem he de-

JAMES G. BLAINE 311
sired to win. Illness and grief impaired these
qualities at the last ; but he will always be re
membered by the hosts who admired him as
" the magnetic man from Maine."
In debate he was aggressive, dashing, and au
dacious. He was quick to discern the weak
points in the harness of an adversary, and by
his incessant and sharp attacks he sometimes
worried an antagonist to the verge of despera
tion. Preserving his own good temper and
coolness, he would contrive to goad' an adver
sary with repeated flights of barbed arrows of
rhetoric which were exasperating to the last de
gree. Yet withal he was a generous gladiator
and he never took a mean advantage of an oppo
nent, but readily conceded every point that was
fairly made against himself. His studied ora
tions, of which there are several on record, were
calm, lofty in tone, and worthy of a high place
in American literature. His memorial address,
pronounced in the national Capitol by invita
tion of Congress, on the death of Garfield, while
it is not free from small defects, may be regarded
as a fair example of Blaine's more elaborate form
of oratory.
In conversation he was brilliant and versatile,
his range of reading and observation being very
wide, and his mind concerning itself with an
almost infinite variety of topics. His habit of
thought was rapid and his conclusions usually
intuitive and generally correct. In public speak
ing his voice was ringing, and it had a certain
penetrative quality that has been called "me-

312 STATESMEN
tallic." His oratory was argumentative and illus
trative, rather than eloquent and sentimental;
and his propositions were always put forth with
a lucidity and homeliness of application that
gave to Lincoln's speeches their chief charm.
He was a tremendous worker, and although
he found it necessary, especially in his later
years, to employ a secretary and amanuensis, he
never dictated any part of his voluminous work
except that which was purely narrative. It was
this close application to study and writing
which, added to the severe mental strain of an
arduous and often stormy life, shortened the
number of his days and hastened the collapse
that finally overtook him while he was yet only
in the sixty-third year of his age, thus closing
the career of the most brilliant statesman of his
generation.

James A. Garfield.

XI.
JAMES A. GARFIELD.
In his memorial oration on Garfield, Blaine
quoted the words in which Webster described
the place where the elder members of the Web
ster family were born — " a log cabin raised
amid the snow-drifts of New Hampshire." The
orator then said : " With requisite change of
scene, the same words would aptly portray the
early days of Garfield. The poverty of the
frontier, where all are engaged in a common
struggle, and where a common sympathy and
hearty co-operation lighten the burdens of each,
is a very different poverty — different in kind,
different in influence and effect — from that con
scious and humiliating indigence which is every
day forced to contrast itself with neighboring
wealth on which it feels a sense of grinding de
pendence. The poverty of the frontier is indeed
no poverty ; it is but the beginning of wealth,
and has the boundless possibilities of the future
always opening before it."
When Garfield was elected United States
Senator from Ohio, in January, 1880, President
Hinsdale, of Hiram College, Ohio, made an ad
dress to the students of the institution appro
priate to the occasion when so much honor had

314 STATESMEN
been conferred upon one who, as he said, " had
been bell-ringer and president" of that college.
In the course of his remarks President Hins
dale said : " General Garfield once rang the
school-bell when a student here. That did not
make him the man he is. Convince me that it
did and I will hang up a bell in every tree in the
campus and set you all to ringing. Thomas
Corwin when a boy drove a wagon, and became
the head of the Treasury ; Thomas Ewing boiled
salt, and became a Senator ; Henry Clay rode a
horse to the mill from the Slashes, and he be
came the Great Commoner of the West. But it
was not the wagon, nor the salt, nor the horse that
made these men great. These are interesting
facts in the lives of these illustrious men. They
show that in our country it has been and still is
possible for young men of ability, energy, and
determined purpose to rise above lowly condi
tions and win places of usefulness' and honor.
Poverty may be a good school ; straitened cir
cumstances may develop power and character ;
but the principal conditions for success are in
the man and not in his surroundings."
The simple fact is that American history, even
in recent years, is full of examples of personal
vicissitudes that are dramatic in their sharp con
trasts, and Garfield's career was so compact with
these that after he had passed through the ear
lier days of his training he rapidly ascended
through several important successive stages.
Within six months he was successively president
of a college. State Senator of Ohio, a major-gen-

JAMES A. GARFIELD 315
eral of the Army of the United States, and Rep
resentative to the national Congress. As his eulo
gist has said, " a combination of honors so varied,
so elevated, within a period so brief, and to a
man so young, is without precedent or parallel
in the history of the country." Garfield's mother
was left a widow while he was yet an infant.
She was a woman of unusual energy, faith, and
courage. She declared that her children should
not be separated, and she kept them at home
together until they were able to take care of them
selves. As President Hinsdale, in the address
above quoted, says of young Garfield, his life did
not materially differ from the lives of his neigh
bors' boys. " He chopped wood, and so did
they ; he hoed, and so did they ; he carried but
ter to the store in a little pail, and so did they.
Other families that had not lost their heads nat
urally shot ahead of the Garfields in property,
but such differences counted for far less then
than they do now." While yet a lad, the desire
of the youngster to earn a little money led him
to become a boatman on the Ohio Canal, which
passed within a short distance of the Garfield
farm. He discharged the humble duties of his
place with so much fidelity and diligence that he
attracted the attention of his superiors and was
promoted to the loftier position of steersman of
a barge. After about eighteen months of this sort of
labor, laying by as much as he could of his small
earnings, he took a step forward and shipped as
sailor on one of the schooners plying on Lake

316

STATESMEN

Erie. Illness compelled him to relinquish this
mode of life, and he returned home and confided
to his mother his ambitious plans for the future.
He had already acquired an elementary knowl
edge of common branches of education, and now
resolved to build a loftier structure for him
self. With the small savings that were within
his reach, and by his mother's assistance, he be
gan a course of study at an obscure institution in
a small country village not far from Orange, O.

Garfield s Boynood Home.
Young Garfield and his room-mate, too poor to
pay their board in the village, rented a room in an
old frame building not far from the academy and
there did their own cooking and house-keeping
in the most primitive way while they imbibed
elements of knowledge at the Pierian spring
which gushed forth in the Geauga Academy.
But the future President had a stout heart and a
determined will, and he applied himself with
honest and faithful toil to the task which he had
set before him. He found work among the car-

JAMES A. GARFIELD 317
penters of the village, and spent his mornings,
evenings, and Saturdays in the shops, where will
ing hands were held out to give the boy a lift
along his rugged road. During the winter he
taught a district school, and thus added a little to
his income. And so for several years, teaching
in the winter, working at the carpenter's bench at
odd times, and attending the academy during the
fall and spring terms, he was able to secure the
training necessary for a higher collegiate course.
He was a tall, muscular, fair-haired country lad,
browned by wind and exposure, sound in every
fibre of his body, a strong athlete, a good student,
and a great favorite with his associates.
In the fall of 1854 Garfield was admitted to the
junior class of Williams College, Williamstowji,
Mass., his previous studies having been sufficient
ly thorough to enable him to skip the fresh
man and sophomore courses. It is a matter of
record that the polished young students among
whom he was now thrown were disposed to look
somewhat contemptuously on the rough Ohio
carpenter and farmer's boy who had ventured
into their company. Rude remarks and ruder
treatment he bore with patience, high-spirited
though he was ; and without regarding the
slights and taunts that were occasionally tossed
at him, he devoted himself with energy to his
studies, and very speedily acquired a reputation
for scholarship far above that of any of his fellow-
students. When he graduated, in 1856, he car
ried off the honors of his class in metaphysics, a
distinction of great merit. Three years later (in

318 STATESMEN
1859) Garfield was nominated for State Senator
by the Anti-Slavery party of Portage and Summit
Counties, O., and was elected by a handsome
majority. He had previously taken part in the
political campaigns of the region and was already
pretty well known as a stump-speaker. He had
meanwhile been chosen president of the Hiram
Eclectic Institute, in Portage County, and had
won additional fame for the little institution of
which the people of Northern Ohio were already
very proud.
When the slave-holding States of the South
began to secede from the Union during the win
ter of 1 860- 1, Garfield's patriotism was fired to
fervent heat, and he took every occasion to speak
eloquently and vigorously in favor of a prompt
exercise of the right of the General Government
to coerce the so-called seceded States. The
Union, he argued, was meant to be perpetual,
and secession was to be firmly and finally blocked
by the power of the Federal Government.
Garfield was early in the field when the war
began, and at the head of a regiment of brave
Ohio soldiers he was assigned to duty as an in
dependent force in Eastern Kentucky. His first
task was to check the advance of General Hum
phrey Marshall, who was marching down the Big
Sandy River with the intention of co-operating
with other rebel forces in Kentucky and precipi
tating the State into secession. The young col
lege president was entirely unversed in the art
of war, but, as he afterward expressed himself,
knew just enough of military science to measure

JAMES A. GARFIELD

319

the extent of his ignorance. With a handful of
men he was obliged to march in the rough
winter weather of 1861 into a strange country,
among a hostile population, to confront a largely
superior force under the command of a gradu
ate of West Point who had already seen ser
vice. Like many another patriotic civilian un-

The Garfield Monument at Washington.

acquainted with military strategy and tactics,
Garfield plunged into the fight and imparted to
his raw and undisciplined troops a good measure
of his own personal courage. He rallied his
little column, and to the consternation and as
tonishment of the rebel force opposed to him,
he checked their advance, routed their column,
and swept from an important territory the rising

320 STATESMEN
tide of the rebellion. With less than two thou
sand men, and without cannon, he had met an
army of five thousand and had driven Marshall's
forces from point to point and finally had turned
the stream of military invasion. His subsequent
career in the army, which was not a long one,
was brilliant, effective, and worthy of the high
praise which he received from his superiors.
In 1863 he was assigned to the responsible post
of chief of staff to General Rosecrans, at the
head of the Army of the Cumberland. He very
speedily manifested his hostility to slavery, and
incurred the ill-will of some of his associates
who were yet disposed to regard American
slavery as a sacred thing. On one occasion a
fugitive slave took refuge in the Union ranks,
and the division commander wrote a mandatory
order to General Garfield to hunt out the fugi
tive and deliver him to the custody of his owner.
Garfield endorsed on the order, with great de
liberation, the following extraordinary sentence :
" I respectfully but positively decline to allow
my command to search for or deliver up any fu
gitive slaves. I conceive that they are here for
quite another purpose. The command is open
and no obstacles will be placed in the way of
search." That fugitive slave was not returned.
While Garfield was fighting in the field, new
and unexpected honors fell to his lot. The en
ergy and tact with which he had allayed the
political dissensions that had arisen in the Army
of the Cumberland, his military prowess, and
his skill in discipline were rewarded successively

JAMES A. GARFIELD 321
by commissions as brigadier-general and major-
general, his last promotion being given him for
gallant and meritorious conduct in the battle of
Chickamauga. When the Army of the Cumber
land was reorganized under the command of
General Thomas, Garfield was offered one of its
divisions; but meanwhile he had been chosen a
Representative in Congress from his own dis
trict in Ohio, and after seeking the advice of
President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton, he de
cided to accept the post of Congressman, and
resigned his commission of major-general De
cember 5, 1863, and took his seat in the House
of Representatives two days later. He had just
completed the thirty-second year of his age.
In the trying career of a member of the
House of Representatives Garfield showed him
self a good parliamentary orator and an admi
rable debater. He differed from most parliamen
tary leaders in that a certain bonhomie natural
to this vigorous young Westerner was mingled
with scholarly refinement and polish not usual in
the lower House of Congress. He spoke so
readily that he was frequently importuned by
his fellow-members to aid them in measures
which they brought before the House, and per
haps spoke too often for his own fame. One
writer says : " His superior knowledge used to
offend some of his less learned colleagues. At
first they thought him bookish and pedantic,
until they found how useful was his store of
knowledge, and how pertinent to the business in
hand were the drafts he made upon it." It must
31

322 STATESMEN
be admitted that Garfield's classic and literary
allusions seemed somewhat out of place to those
who listened to the debates from the gallery of
the House and heard him quote ancients and
moderns, to the infinite weariness of many of his
associates, who never heard of Juvenal, and to
whom Wordsworth and Coleridge were stran
gers. Blaine, in his eulogy, says of Garfield :
" 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
the patient industry of investigation, to which
John Quincy Adams owed his prominence and
the Presidency ; he had some of those ponderous
elements of mind which distinguished Mr. Web
ster, and which indeed in all our public life have
left the great Massachusetts Senator without an
intellectual peer."
On the various complicated and knotty ques
tions that grew out of the process of reconstruc
tion at the end of the civil war, Garfield always
took an advanced and radical position. He was
one of the devoted band that stood by Senator
Wade, of Ohio, in his somewhat brutal course as
member of the Committee on the Conduct of
the War. Garfield was a moderate protectionist,
and while he supported measures for the pro
tection of American industries, habitually coun
selled measures less severe than some of the more
ultra protectionists in the House of Representa
tives advocated with much strenuousness. On
the tariff bill of 1870 he said: "After studying
the whole subject as carefully as I am able, I am

Jit jv:^=»^«p^
t ^ I [S^ri

MUl-j

m

I

0
I

324 STATESMEN
firmly of the opinion that the wisest thing that
the protectionists in this House can do is to
unite in a moderate reduction of duties on im
ported articles. He is not a faithful Representa
tive who merely votes for the highest rate pro
posed, in order to show on the record that he

General Garfield in 1863,
voted for the highest figure and therefore is a
sound protectionist. He is the wisest man who
sees the tides and currents of public opinion and
uses his best efforts to protect the industry of
the people against sudden collapses and sudden
changes. . . . The great want of industry is
a stable policy, and it is a significant comment
on the character of our legislation that Con-

JAMES A. GARFIELD 325
gress has become a terror to the business men
of the country."
In July, 1864, Senator Wade, of Ohio, and
Representative Henry Winter Davis, of Mary
land, united in the publication of a document,
afterward famous as the Wade-Davis manifesto.
It was directed against the reconstruction policy
of President Lincoln, as outlined in his procla
mation of that month and year. A reconstruc
tion bill, which had been supported by Wade
and Davis and their allies, had passed through
both Houses of Congress, but it failed to receive
the signature of the President in the closing
hours of Congress, which adjourned July 4, 1864.
It was reported that the Wade -Davis mani
festo against President Lincoln had been writ
ten by Garfield. The publication created the
most intense excitement throughout the West,
and was vehemently denounced by the people
of the Western Reserve, where Garfield had his
home. It was regarded as an unkind and unjust
attack upon the beloved Lincoln, and was re
sented by sturdy Republicans throughout the
country. Just at this time the convention to
nominate a candidate for Congress in Garfield's
district assembled. Garfield was summoned by
a committee of the convention to appear before
that body and explain his standing in regard to
the Wade-Davis manifesto. He had already
denied that he was the author of the letter, but
he appeared before the convention and made a
speech which he naturally supposed would end
his political career then and there. He denied

326 STATESMEN
that he had written the Wade-Davis letter, but
he approved the document, defended the motives
of its authors, and asserted his own right to in
dependence of thought and action, and told the
delegates in the convention that if they did not
want a free agent as their Representative, they
might better look elsewhere, for he could serve
them no longer. So saying, he strode out of the
convention hall ; but before he could leave the
building a burst of applause, which he imagined
was the signal of his defeat, broke upon his ears.
It was the signal of his nomination by acclama
tion. Garfield, as we have said, was elected to the
Senate in January, 1880, succeeding Allen G.
Thurman, whose term of office expired March 3,
1 88 1. But before he could qualify he was nom
inated for President of the United States in the
summer of 1880 by the Republicans in their con
vention at Chicago. The nomination of Garfield
was bitterly opposed by the men who were asso
ciated with Roscoe Conkling in the support of
General Grant, whose name was pressed upon
the convention as a candidate for a third term.
After a long and somewhat heated contest, Gar
field was nominated on the thirty-sixth ballot.
The Conkling element had been defeated by this
choice, and in order to conciliate the associates
of the Senator from New York, Chester A.
Arthur was named as candidate for Vice-Presi
dent. This selection, however, was made with
out any reference to the personal wishes of Sen
ator Conkling, and it was asserted that he took

JAMES A. GARFIELD 327
no part in the convention after the nomination of
Garfield. The Presidential election of that year resulted
in the choice of Garfield by a majority of fifty-
nine electoral votes. In the popular vote Gar
field had 4.437,345 ; General Hancock, Democrat,
had 4,435,015 ; and Weaver, Greenback, 305,931.
His inaugural address was a straightforward,
business-like, and eminently practical oration. It
was read slowly and effectively and made an ex
cellent impression throughout the country. His
Cabinet was as follows: Secretary of State,
James G. Blaine ; Secretary of the Treasury,
William Windom ; Secretary of War, Robert T.
Lincoln ; Secretary of the Navy, William H.
Hunt ; Secretary of the Interior, S. J. Kirkwood ;
Attorney General, Wayne McVeagh ; Postmas
ter General, Thomas L. James.
As soon as the purposes of General Garfield
could be unfolded, they were shown to be fair,
just, and statesman-like. He gave promises of
being a safe, conservative, and patriotic Presi
dent, and his talents as an administrative officer
and a legislator were likely to acquire for him
an honorable record and enduring fame. But he
was very soon called upon to face a serious par
tisan contest which appeared in the Republican
party. A quarrel arose over the appointments
to Federal office in the State of New York. This
unhappy disagreement finally culminated in the
resignation of Senators Conkling and Piatt, of
that State, and their appeal to the Legislature
to approve their acts by re-electing them. Presi-

328

STATESMEN

The Garfield Monunnent at Cleveland O.
dent Garfield, however, apparently having the
support of the great mass of the people, pursued
the course which he had marked out for himself
without reference to the angry protests of the

JAMES A. OAHFIELl) 329
two Senators. He believed that the true pre
rogatives of the executive office were involved
in the issue which had been raised against him,
and that he would be unfaithful to his obliga
tions if he failed to maintain with all their vigor
the constitutional rights and dignities of his
great office. In the eulogy so often quoted,
Blaine said : " More than this need not be said ;
less than this could not be said. Justice to the
dead, the highest obligation that devolves upon
the living, demands the declaration that in all
the bearings of the subject, actual or possible,
the President was content in his mind, justi
fied in his conscience, immovable in his con
clusions." The sum and substance of this mis
erable business was that the two New York
Senators claimed the right to defeat any nom
ination to office in their State made by the
President and unacceptable to themselves. Out
of this bitter contention grew a schism in the
party which was long and deep. Washington
was confused with rumors of even more serious
difficulties between the President and political
enemies in his own party. In the midst of this
clamor, July 2, 1881, as President Garfield, ac
companied by Secretary Blaine, was leaving
Washington for a brief holiday, he was mur
derously fired upon by one Guiteau, a person
of then unknown antecedents, who had haunted
the corridors of the White House and other
public places for weeks past. The motive of
his crime has never been fully understood, but
when arrested he exclaimed, " I did it, and want

330 STATESMEN
to be arrested. I am a Stalwart, and Arthur is
President now."
The excitement throughout the country, and
we may say throughout the civilized world,
which followed this dreadful deed can be likened
only to the same state of feeling which prevailed
when Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. For a
time it seemed as if the shock to the public sen
sibilities had arrested every other thought save
that which centred in Washington, where the
President was believed to be slowly dying. But
weeks of suspense passed, and the iron constitu
tion of the chief magistrate fought bravely for
his survival. That summer will long be remem
bered by the American people as one of deep
gloom, sorrow, and anxiety. The weather was
dry, hot, and oppressive, and on September 6th
the dying President was carried to the sea-shore
at Elberon, N. J., where, after a few more days of
failing strength and intense suffering, he passed
away. He died on the 19th of September, and
was immediately succeeded by Vice-President
Chester A. Arthur. A great wave of grief
swept over the land, and amid the lamentations
of the people the body of Garfield was carried
by a funeral train back to his native Ohio, where
it was laid to rest in a magnificent mausoleum,
built in the suburbs of Cleveland.
Garfield's person was impressive and manly ;
his stature was six feet ; he was broad-shouldered,
compactly built, and was the personification of
physical strength and health. He had an un
usually large head, a dome-like forehead, light

JAMES A. GARFIELD 331
brown hair and full beard, large light-blue eyes,
prominent nose, and ruddy complexion. He
was plain in his dress, usually wore a dark slouch
hat, and presented the appearance of a comfort
able and well-to-do Western farmer or merchant,
rather than the scholar and statesman that he was.
As we have indicated, his training was thor
ough, and to his indomitable industry rather
than to any remarkable genius we must attrib
ute his achievements in public life — civil and
military. By nature he was of an affectionate
disposition, tenaciously devoted to his friends
and almost feminine in his attachments to those
who won his confidence and affection. With cer
tain limitations, he was qualified to hold and ad
minister the highest office in the gift of the
American people, and had he lived, doubtless
would have achieved for himself still greater
fame than that which his untimely taking-off has
possibly attached to a career so tragically ended.
The last scene of all, his slow passage from
this life to the life beyond, by the borders of the
ocean at Elberon, has never been more elo
quently touched upon than in the closing words
of Blaine's memorial oration : " 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 oppres
sive, 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

332 STATESMEN
should will, within sight of its heaving billows,
within sound of its manifold voices. With wan,
fevered face tenderly lifted to the cooling breeze,
he looked out wistfully upon the ocean's chang
ing waters ; on its fair sails whitening in the
morning light ; on its restless waves rolling shore
ward 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 think that his dying eyes read
a mystic meaning which only the rapt and part
ing soul may know. Let us believe that in the
silence of the receding world he heard the great
waves breaking on a further shore and felt al
ready upon his wasted brow the breath of the
eternal morning."

President Grover Cleveland

XII.
GROVER CLEVELAND.
We have now taken a brief survey of a goodly
company of American statesmen with a view to
determine, so far as possible, their assignment to
positions in the history of their country, and to dis
cover lessons in their careers for the incitement of
others to persevere to attempts at achievement.
These all have passed over to "the silent major
ity," and the places which they will each occupy
will be fixed as time rolls on. As inflexible as the
laws of life, as unsparing as death, is the verdict
of posterity which will assign to each his ulti
mate station in the temple of fame. The process
of determination began as soon as each man
passed over into the pale realms of shade. The
procession is still moving onward.
Grover Cleveland is nearest to us of these
worthies because he, the twelfth on the list, is
still in the land of the living. When the men of
this time are removed beyond the confusion of
immediate events, other generations will see the
lost leaders with a clearer vision. Their charac
ters will have taken their places in a true perspec
tive. We can only guess at a venture what will
be the dictum of that far-away jury. Cleveland,
born in an obscure New Jersey village, chris-

334 STATESMEN
tened Stephen Grover Cleveland, the son of a
rural clergyman, gave no more promise of fut
ure greatness than any of his predecessors in
the long line of public men whose characteristics
we have been considering. Like others of that
company, young Cleveland appeared to take to
the village store as affording one of the means
of gaining a living that was readiest to his hand.
Like them, too, he drifted about at first somewhat
aimlessly, and it was not until 1855, when he was
past eighteen years of age, that he really made
a beginning in the career that was to land him
finally in the White House. He studied law in
Buffalo, N. Y., after taking a turn in the work of
assisting in compiling " a short-horn herd-book."
Vigorous in health, ambitious, manly, and full of
courage, he showed himself in the Buffalo law
office to be a youth of intelligence and decision
of character. He was admitted to the Bar in
1859, but he remained four more years with the
law firm where he imbibed the elements of his
profession, and thus had eight good years of
legal training. As office boy, student, and em
bryo barrister, he was thoroughly rooted and
grounded in the theory and practice of law.
As a young practitioner at the bar he made
himself so favorably known to the people of Erie
County that his appointment as District Attorney
in 1863 was taken as a fit and proper assignment
to duty. So able did he fill the position to which
he had been appointed that he was nominated by
his party, the Democrats, for District Attorney
in 1865, but was defeated by Mr. L. K. Bass,

GROVER CLEVELAND 335
with whom, later on, he was associated in a firm
of lawyers. At the age of thirty-three, in 1870,
he was elected Sheriff of Erie County, an office
which he discharged with fairness and ability.
Another step in advance was taken in 1881 when
he was elected Mayor of the city of Buffalo by
a majority of thirty-five hundred. Buffalo was
then a Republican city, but local affairs had got
into such a condition that the election of a mayor
on a non-partisan ticket had become a necessity,
and Cleveland, by his honest devotion to duty,
his strict integrity and public spirit, had so com
mended himself to the people that he was chosen
their candidate without regard to party lines.
The local government of Buffalo had drifted
into a condition of slovenliness and carelessness
which needed a strong hand to bring order out
of chaos and to restore public affairs to a basis of
economy and frugality. The lax way of doing
things which had for years characterized the
administration of public affairs had not only
aroused the indignation and dissatisfaction of
the people, but had attracted the attention of
men who, like Cleveland, were determined that
a better government was necessary to rescue
the municipality from extravagance and corrup
tion. He became at once so famous for his veto
messages sent to the Common Council that he
was generally known as the "Veto Mayor."
These messages are interesting as a study of
municipal government. They touch problems
of daily occurrence and evince on the part of
their author a determination to do good service

336 STATESMEN
in the cause of honest government. One can
imagine the dismay of the happy-go-lucky pol
iticians and time-servers who were confronted
occasionally by a breezy message which would
contain some such sentence as this : " I cannot
rid myself of the idea that this city government
in its relation to the tax-payers is a business
establishment, and that it is put in our hands to
be conducted on business principles." Or this :
" The extreme tenderness and consideration for
those who desire to contract with the city, and
the touching and paternal solicitude lest they
should be improvidently led into a bad bargain,
is, I am sure, an exception to general business
rules, and seems to have no place in this selfish,
sordid world, except as found in the administra
tion of municipal affairs."
The administration of Mayor Cleveland, so to
tally different from that of any officer who had
preceded him, and so unlike that of some other
municipal officers throughout the country, at
tracted the attention of the people of New York
to his courage and his fidelity to public trusts.
Accordingly in 1882 he was nominated by the
Democratic party their candidate for Governor
in opposition to Charles J. Folger, then Secretary
of the United States Treasury, who had been
nominated for the same office by the Republicans
of the State. Mr. Folger had been nominated at
the instance, it was alleged, of the national ad
ministration, and although he was an honest, able,
and patriotic gentleman, the voters of the State
resented this alleged interference with their in-

GROVER CLEVELAND 337
dependence. It was claimed, and not without
reason, that the Federal administration had
forced Folger upon the party, with a serene in
difference to all other considerations than those
of expediency and in the tranquil expectation
that his nomination would be followed by an
election. During this canvass the so-called In
dependents played a conspicuous part, and while
they were active in their advocacy of the merits
of Cleveland, the rank and file and many of the
leaders of the Republican party sulked in their
tents and stayed away from the polls. The re
sult was the election of Cleveland by an over
whelming majority. Cleveland received a plu
rality of 192,854 over Folger, and a majority over
all candidates of 151,742.
He went into office on January i, 1883, and his
inaugural address was apparently modelled on
the business-like and unpretentious message of
one of his predecessors in office, Governor Til
den. He paid marked attention to the economi
cal questions which concerned the affairs of the
State, and rrianifested a determination to root out
ancient abuses and correct extravagance and
recklessness of expenditure wherever these could
be found. His administration was characterized
by just such reforms as might have been expected
after such a message. He vetoed bills that were
designed, as he thought, to block the progress of
economic reforms, and the State administration
was really an expansion of the principles that had
controlled his official action while he was Mayor
of the city of Buffalo.
22

GROVER CLEVELAND 339
The portentous majority with which he had
been elected Governor, and the record which he
made in that office by his courage and severe
Simplicity of administration, gave him great
vogue throughout the country, and his nomina
tion by the Democratic National Convention in
July, 1884, seemed to follow as a matter of
course. Out of eight hundred and twenty votes
he received on the first ballot six hundred and
eighty-three, a two-thirds vote being necessary
for a nomination. In the letter he wrote accept
ing the nomination for the Presidency he re
peated and expanded the views he had so often
enforced while in the office of Mayor and Gov
ernor. James G. Blaine was the nominee of the
Republican National Convention, and the result
of the election in November of that year gave
Cleveland a majority of thirty-seven electoral
votes. In a total popular vote of 10,067,610,
Cleveland had 4,874,986, and Blaine had 4,85 1,981.
New York was the pivotal State and was carried
for Cleveland by a small plurality. Its thirty-six
electoral votes, however, decided the contest in
his favor.
His Cabinet officers were as follows : Secre
tary of State, Thomas F. Bayard ; Secretary of
the Treasury, Daniel Manning; Secretary of
War, William C. Endicott ; Secretary of the
Navy, William C. Whitney ; Postmaster-General,
William F. Vilas ; Attorney-General, Augustus
H. Garland ; Secretary of the Interior, L. Q. C.
Lamar. Generally speaking, it may be said that Cleve-

340 STATESMEN
land's administration of the National Govern
ment was modelled on the same general princi
ples which had distinguished his course in the
minor executive offices which he had filled. His
immediate following was largely made up of
Independents who were pledged to civil-service
reform, and Cleveland entered the White House
with renewed expressions of loyalty to this
movement. It has been forcibly claimed on the
part of his friends who are also advocates of
civil-service reform that any deflections from the
path which they had marked out for him are to
be charged to the tremendous pressure exerted
upon him in his high office by the politicians, with
out whose aid he possibly could not have reached
the Presidential chair. The sincerity of his pro
fessions and the honesty of his intention to carry
out the principles of civil-service reform have
been conceded even by those who are not polit
ical friends and who possibly have not expected
that the party which elected him can ever be in
duced to surrender the ancient doctrine, " To
the victors belong the spoils."
During his first administration he came in
conflict with many influential members of his
party who insisted that the Republican office
holders should be removed indiscriminately and
their places filled with Democrats of undoubted
party loyalty. Among other important events
which marked his administration was the naval
expedition for the protection of American inter
ests in Aspinwall when that city was burned by
the revolutionists in 1885. The encroachment

GROVER CLEVELAND 341
of cattle companies and ranchmen upon certain
partly vacated lands belonging to the Indian
Territory formed another vexatious and compli
cated problem which was solved by the deter
mined action of the President, who resisted the
pleadings of the squatters and ordered their im
mediate vacation of the lands which they were
holding without lawful title. During the same
term a discussion arose between himself and the
Senate in regard to the confirmation of per
sons nominated to places of emolument and trust.
The Senate demanded the production of papers
on which suspensions and removals had been
ordered. The President took the ground that
these were not public but private documents,
and should not be placed on the files of the Sen
ate. After a somewhat acrimonious discussion,
the Senate virtually receded from its position and
most of the persons nominated were confirmed
without more ado. An attack upon the Chi
nese at Rock Springs, Wyo., was another of the
unfortunate complications which attended Presi
dent Cleveland's administration, and the Presi
dent, somewhat at variance with the precon
ceived notions of his party, took the view that the
United States, while not bound by international
law to pay for loss of life or property by China
men in the United States, should pay an indem
nity to the sufferers and their families. This
was voted by Congress. When further anti-
Chinese disturbances occurred in Oregon and
other far Western States, he ordered out the
military and expressed his determination to pro-

342

STATESMEN

tect the Chinese at all hazards, so far as the
power of the government should permit.
" The Veto Mayor " of Buffalo in the Presidency
exercised his power to check abuses and extrav
agant expenditures with the same decision that
had previously characterized his administration.
During the first session of the Congress which
met next after his inauguration he vetoed one

r ¦>?

Gray Gables, Mr. Cleveland's Summer Home at Buzzard's Bay.
hundred and fifteen of the nine hundred and
eighty-seven bills that had passed both Houses
and were laid before him. Of these one hundred
and two were private pension bills, and others
were for the erection of public buildings and
for other purposes requiring an outlay of pub
lic money. A river and harbor improvement
bill, appropriating a vast sum of money, was se
verely criticised by the President, but in conse
quence of its voluminousness and the necessity

GROVER CLEVELAND 343
of some of the appropriations included therein
was not vetoed.
In 1888 he was for a second time nominated
by his party a candidate for the Presidency
against General Harrison, the Republican nom
inee. There we^'e several candidates in the
field, Fisk being the nominee of the Prohibition
ists and Streetor of the Union .Labor organiza
tion. In a total electoral vote of 401, Harrison
had 233, and was elected, Cleveland having 168.
After his defeat as a candidate for re-election
Cleveland took up his residence in the city of
New York, where he became engaged in the
practice of his profession and continued his
successes as a counsellor and attorney. He
took very little part in politics during the four
intervening years, and by his strict attention
to his private business so commended himself
to the mass of the Democratic party that in
1892 his nomination seemed to be inevitable.
There was, however, a strong and influential ele
ment opposed to his nomination, and for a time
it seemed as though the convention which as
sembled in Chicago that year would be rent
into irreconcilable factions. But the necessity
of Cleveland's nomination gradually appeared
to sink into the minds of even his bitterest op
ponents, and he was chosen standard-bearer for
a third time without serious opposition. The
Republicans that year nominated General Har
rison, and the scenes of 1888, when these two
eminent men had been pitted against each other,
were repeated. In 1892, as in 1888, the principal

344 STATESMEN
issue was framed upon economic questions, and
while the Republicans adhered to a strict pro
tective tariff as the fundamental principle of their
political faith, the Democrats put forward the
somewhat novel proposition that a tariff for pro
tection is unconstitutional and wrong. On this
main issue the contest was fought out to its con
clusion. Various subsidiary questions were in
troduced into the debate, but Cleveland's popu
larity solidified the rank and file, and all manner
of dissensions being composed, the united party
went to the polls that year and re-elected him by
a larger majority than that which he had secured
in 1884. He received 277 electoral votes ; Har
rison had 145, and Weaver, the candidate of the
new party, the Populists, had 22 votes. Of the
popular vote, Cleveland had 5,553,808 ; Harrison,
5,180,911 ; Weaver, 1,035,572, and Wing, the nom
inee of the Socialists, 21,145.
It cannot be claimed for Cleveland that he
possesses brilliant or conspicuous statesman-like
qualities. His popularity is chiefly due to the
belief of the people in his stern integrity and in
their admiration for the so-called Jacksonian
qualities of firmness and devotion to what he
conceives to be the best interests of the whole
country. All his public services have been
characterized by a certain Spartan simplicity
and absence of rhetorical parade which have
evoked the admiration of the people.
As an orator he is sensible, matter-of-fact, and
direct, rather than eloquent. His voice is harsh,
and at times somewhat shrill. His manner is

GROVER CLEVELAND

345

angular and not altogether graceful; but it is
the matter of his speeches and public addresses,
rather than their style, that commends him to the
people and gives him the reputation of a busi
ness-like and sensible statesman. In person he
is large, florid, and impressive. His personal
friendships are not many, but they are warm and

" The Weeds," the Clevelands's Home at Holland Patent, N. Y.
devoted, and his immediate personal following
is knit to him by the strongest bonds ; through
these he has always maintained a firm hold on
the affections and esteem of the American people.
The most conspicuous event of his second ad
ministration has been his convocation of Con
gress in special session in August, 1893, to
consider the financial condition of the country,
which at the time of the meeting of Congress

346 STATESMEN
was one of great confusion and depression,
almost amounting to panic. The message in
which he directed the attention of Congress to
existing difficulties was brief, pointed, and busi
ness-like, and commanded at once the approval
of all patriotic citizens without regard to party
affiliations. During his public life Cleveland has given cur
rency to many notable sayings that will always
be identified with his name and services in the
cause of good government. As a matter of
record some of these are herewith appended :
" Public officers are the servants and agents of
the people to execute laws which the people
have made, and within the limits of a constitu
tion which they have established."
" Your every voter, as surely as your chief
magistrate, under the same high sanction, though
in a different sphere, exercises a public trust."
" A true American sentiment recognizes the
dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in
honest toil."
" They have proved themselves offensive par
tisans and unscrupulous manipulators of local
party management."
" After an existence of nearly twenty years
of almost innocuous desuetude these laws are
brought forth."
" It is a condition which confronts us, not a
theory." " Party honesty is party expediency."
" Communism is a hateful thing and a menace
to peace and organized government. But the

GROVER CLEVELAND 347
communism of combined wealth and capital, the
outgrowth of overweening cupidity and selfish
ness which assiduously undermines the justice
and integrity of free institutions, is not less
dangerous than the communism of oppressed
poverty and toil which, exasperated by injustice
and discontent, attacks with wild disorder the
citadel of misrule."

YALE UNIVERSITY

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