Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2

Volume Two

New York McClure, Phillips & Co. Mcmii

Copyright, 1902, by McClure, Phillips & Co.

Published May, 1902. N.

CONTENTS

XXVIII Service in Congress XXIX Incidents in the Civil War XXX The Amendments to the Constitution XXXI Investigations Following the Civil War XXXII Impeachment of Andrew Johnson XXXIII The Treasury Department in 1869 XXXIV The Mint Bill and the "Crime of 1873" XXXV Black Friday--September 24, 1869 XXXVI An Historic Sale of United States Bonds in England XXXVII General Grant's Administration XXXVIII General Grant as a Statesman XXXIX Reminiscences of Public Men XL Blaine and Conkling and the Republican Convention of 1880 XLI From 1875 to 1895 XLII The Last of the Ocean Slave Traders XLIII Mr. Lincoln as an Historical Personage XLIV Speech on Columbus XLV Imperialism as a Public Policy INDEX

REMINISCENCES OF SIXTY YEARS IN PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Volume Ii

XXVIII SERVICE IN CONGRESS

My election to Congress in 1862 was contested by Judge Benjamin F. Thomas, who was then a Republican member from the Norfolk district. The re-districting of the State brought Thomas and Train into the same district. I was nominated by the Republican Convention, and Thomas then became the candidate of the "People's Party," and at the election he was supported by the Democrats. His course in the Thirty-seventh Congress on the various projects for compromise had alienated many Republicans, and it had brought to him the support of many Democrats. My active radicalism had alienated the conservative Republicans. As a consequence, my majority reached only about 1,400 while in the subsequent elections, 1864-'66-'68 the majorities ranged from five to seven thousand.

Among the new members who were elected to the Thirty-eighth Congress and who attained distinction subsequently, were Garfield, Blaine and Allison. Wilson, of Iowa, had been in the Thirty-seventh Congress and Henry Winter Davis had been a member at an earlier period. Mr. Conkling was a member of the Thirty-seventh Congress, but he was defeated by his townsman Francis Kernan under the influence of the reactionary wave which moved over the North in 1862. At that time Mr. Lincoln had lost ground with the people. The war had not been prosecuted successfully, the expenses were enormous, taxes were heavy, multitudes of families were in grief, and the prospects of peace through victory were very dim. The Democrats in the House became confident and aggressive.

Alexander Long, of Ohio, made a speech so tainted with sympathy for the rebels that Speaker Colfax came down from the chair and moved a resolution of censure. Harris, of Maryland, in the debate upon the resolution, made a speech much more offensive than that of Long. As a consequence, the censure was applied to both gentlemen and as a further consequence, the friends of the South became more guarded in expressions of sympathy. It is true also, that there were many Democrats who did not sympathize with Harris, Long, and Pendleton. Voorhees of Indiana was also an active sympathizer with the South. I recollect that in the Thirty-eighth or Thirty-ninth Congress he made a violent attack upon Mr. Lincoln, and the Republican Party. The House was in committee, and I was in the chair. Consequently I listened attentively to the speech. It was carefully prepared and modeled apparently upon Junius and Burke--a model which time has destroyed.

Of the members of the House during the war period, Henry Winter Davis was the most accomplished speaker. Mr. Davis' head was a study. In front it was not only intellectual, it was classical--a model for an artist. The back of his head was that of a prize fighter, and he combined the scholar and gentleman with the pugilist. His courage was constitutional and he was ready to make good his position whether by argument or by blows. His speeches in the delivery were very attractive. His best speech, as I recall his efforts, was a speech in defense of Admiral Dupont. That speech involved an attack upon the Navy Department. Alexander H. Rice, of Massachusetts, was the chairman of the Naval Committee. He appeared for the Navy Department in an able defence. Mr. Rice's abilities were not of the highest order, but his style was polished, and he was thoroughly equipped for the defence. He had the Navy Department behind him, and a department usually has a plausible reason or excuse for anything that it does.

An estimate of Mr. Davis' style as a writer and his quality as an orator may be gained from a speech entitled:--"Reasons for Refusing to Part Company with the South," which he delivered in February, 1861, and in which he set forth the condition of the country as it then appeared to him. These extracts give some support to the opinion entertained by many that Mr. Davis was the leading political orator of the Civil War period:

"We are at the end of the insane revel of partisan license, which, for thirty years, has, in the United States, worn the mask of government. We are about to close the masquerade by the dance of death. The nations of the world look anxiously to see if the people, ere they tread that measure, will come to themselves.

"Yet in the early youth of our national life we are already exhausted by premature excesses. The corruption of our political maxims has relaxed the tone of public morals and degraded the public authorities from terror to the accomplices of evil-doers. Platforms for fools-- plunder for thieves--offices for service--power for ambition--unity in these essentials--diversity in the immaterial matters of policy and legislation--charity for every frailty--the voice of the people is the voice of God--these maxims have sunk into the public mind; have presided at the administration of public affairs, have almost effaced the very idea of public duty. The Government under their disastrous influence has gradually ceased to fertilize the fields of domestic and useful legislation, and pours itself, like an impetuous torrent, along the barren ravine of party and sectional strife. It has been shorn of every prerogative that wore the austere aspect of authority and power.

"The consequence of this demoralization is that States, without regard to the Federal Government, assume to stand face to face and wage their own quarrels, to adjust their own difficulties, to impute to each other every wrong, to insist that individual States shall remedy every grievance, and they denounce failure to do so as cause of civil war between States; and as if the Constitution were silent and dead and the power of the Union utterly inadequate to keep the peace between them, unconstitutional commissioners flit from State to State, or assemble at the national capital to counsel peace or instigate war. Sir, these are the causes which lie at the bottom of the present dangers. These causes which have rendered them possible and made them serious, must be removed before they can ever be permanently cured. They shake the fabric of our National Government. It is to this fearful demoralization of the Government and the people that we must ascribe the disastrous defections which now perplex us with the fear of change in all that constituted our greatness. The operation of the Government has been withdrawn from the great public interests, in order that competing parties might not be embarrassed in the struggle for power by diversities of opinion upon questions of policy; and the public mind, in that struggle, has been exclusively turned on the slavery question, which no interest required to be touched by any department of this Government. On that subject there are widely marked diversities of opinion and interest in the different portions of the Confederacy, with few mediating influences to soften the collision. In the struggle for party power, the two great regions of the country have been brought face to face upon the most dangerous of all subjects of agitation. The authority of the Government was relaxed just when its power was about to be assailed; and the people, emancipated from every control and their passions inflamed by the fierce struggle for the Presidency, were the easy prey of revolutionary audacity.

"Within two months after a formal, peaceful, regular election of the chief magistrate of the United States, in which the whole body of the people of every State competed with zeal for the prize, without any new event intervening, without any new grievances alleged, without any new measures having been made, we have seen, in the short course of one month, a small proportion of the population of six States transcend the bounds at a single leap at once of the State and the national constitutions; usurp the extraordinary prerogative of repealing the supreme law of the land; exclude the great mass of their fellow- citizens from the protection of the Constitution; declare themselves emancipated from the obligations which the Constitution pronounces to be supreme over them and over their laws; arrogate to themselves all the prerogatives of independent power; rescind the acts of cession of the public property; occupy the public offices; seize the fortresses of the United States confided to the faith of the people among whom they were placed; embezzle the public arms concentrated there for the defence of the United States; array thousands of men in arms against the United States; and actually wage war on the Union by besieging two of their fortresses and firing on a vessel bearing, under the flag of the United States, reinforcements and provisions for one of them. The very boundaries of right and wrong seem obliterated when we see a Cabinet minister engaged for months in deliberately changing the distribution of public arms to places in the hands of those about to resist our public authority, so as to place within their grasp means of waging war against the United States greater than they ever used against a foreign foe; and another Cabinet minister, still holding his commission under the authority of the United States, still a confidential adviser of the President, and bound by his oath to support the Constitution of the United States, himself a commissioner from his own State to another of the United States for the purpose of organizing and extending another part of the same great scheme of rebellion; and the doom of the Republic seems sealed when the President, surrounded by such ministers, permits, without rebuke, the Government to be betrayed, neglects the solemn warning of the first solider of the age, till almost every fort is a prey to domestic treason, and accepts assurances of peace in his time at the expense of leaving the national honor unguarded. His message gives aid and comfort to the enemies of the Union, by avowing his inability to maintain its integrity; and, paralyzed and stupefied, he stands amid the crash of the falling Republic, still muttering, 'Not in my time, not in my time; after me the deluge!'"

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