Autobiography of Seventy Years Part 43

2. The maintenance by that authority of the political and personal rights of all citizens, of all races and cla.s.ses.

As I have said, he interpreted the Const.i.tution in a manner which he thought would best promote these objects. He had little respect for subtilties or refinements or scruples that stood in the way.

He was for going straight to his object. When the Hayes and Tilden contest was up, he was for having the President of the United States put Hayes and Wheeler in power by using all the National forces, military and other, that might be needful. He was a member of the Committee that framed the bill for the Electoral Commission, but refused to give it his support.

I made a very pleasant acquaintance with him during the sessions of that Committee. I suppose it was due to his kindly influence that I was put upon the Committee of Privileges and Elections, of which he was Chairman, when I entered the Senate. But he died in the following summer, so I never had an opportunity to know him better. He was a great party leader. He had in this respect no superior in his time, save Lincoln alone.

It was never my good fortune to be intimate with Zachariah Chandler. But I had a good opportunity for observing him and knowing him well. I met him in 1854, at the Convention held in Buffalo to concert measures for protecting and promoting Free State immigration to Kansas. He was the leading spirit of that Convention, full of wisdom, energy and courage. He was then widely known throughout the country as an enterprising and successful man of business. When I went into the House of Representatives, in 1869, Mr. Chandler was already a veteran in public life. He had organized and led the political forces which overthrew Lewis Ca.s.s and the old Democratic Party, not only in Michigan but in the Northwest. He had been in the Senate twelve years. Those twelve years had been crowded with history. The close of the Administration of Buchanan, the disruption of the Democratic Party at Charleston, the election and inauguration of Lincoln, the putting down of the Rebellion, the organizing, directing and disbanding of great armies, the great amendments to the Const.i.tution, and the contest with Andrew Johnson, had been accomplished. The reconstruction of the rebellious States, the payment of the public debt, keeping the national faith under great temptation, reconciliation and the processes of legislation and administration under the restraints which belonged to peace, were well under way. In all these Chandler bore a large part, and a part wise, honest, powerful and on the righteous side. I knew him afterward in the Department of the Interior. He was, in my judgment, the ablest administrative officer without an exception who has been in any executive department during my public life. His st.u.r.dy honesty, his sound, rapid, almost instinctive judgment, his tact, his business sense, his love of justice were felt in every fibre and branch of the great Interior Department, then including eight great bureaus each almost important enough to be a Department by itself.

The humblest clerk who complained of injustice was sure to be listened to by the head of that great Department, who, with his quick sympathy and sound judgment, would make it certain that right would be done.

Chandler has little respect for the refinements of speech or for literary polish. He could not endure Mr. Sumner's piling precedent upon precedent and quotation upon quotation, and disliked his lofty and somewhat pompous rhetoric. He used sometimes to leave his seat and make known his disgust in the cloak room, or in the rear of the desks, to visitors who happened to be in the Senate Chamber. But he was strong as a rock, true as steel, fearless and brave, honest and incorruptible.

He had a vigorous good sense. He saw through all the foolish sophistries with which the defenders of fiat money, or debased currency, sought to defend their schemes. He had no mercy for treason or rebellion or secession. He was a native of New Hamps.h.i.+re. He had the opinions of New England, combined with the directness and sincerity and energy of the West.

He had a very large influence in making the State of Michigan another New England.

He was a sincere, open-hearted, large-hearted and affectionate man. He was the last man in the world of whom it would be proper to speak as a member of an intrigue or cabal. His strategy was a straightforward, downright blow. His stroke was an Abdiel stroke,

This greeting on thy impious crest receive.

His eloquence was simple, rugged, direct, strong. He had but a scanty vocabulary. It contained no word for treason but "treason." He described a lie by a word of three letters.

The character of his speech was that which Plutarch ascribes to Demosthenes. He was strongly stirred by simple and great emotions--love of country, love of freedom, love of justice, love of honesty. He hated cant and affectation.

I believe he was fond of some good literature, but he was very impatient of Mr. Sumner's load of ornament and quotation.

He had little respect for fine phrases or for fine sentiment or the delicacies of a refined literature. He was rough and plain-spoken. I do not think he would ever have learned to care much for Tennyson or Browning. But the Psalms of David would have moved him.

I suppose he was not much of a civil service reformer. He expected to rule Michigan, and while he would have never bought or bribed an antagonist by giving him an office, he would have expected to fill the public offices, so far as he had his way, by men who were of his way of thinking. He was much shocked and disgusted when Judge h.o.a.r wanted to inquire further concerning a man whom he had recommended for the office of Judge of the Circuit Court. The Judge said something about asking Reuben Rice, a friend he highly respected who had lived long in Michigan. Chandler spoke of it afterward and said: "When Jake Howard and I recommended a man, the Attorney- General wanted to ask a little railroad fellow what he thought of him."

He joined with Conkling and Carpenter and Edmunds in their opposition to the confirmation of Judge h.o.a.r. He came to know the Judge better afterward and declared that he himself had made a mistake.

He was a strong pillar of public faith, public liberty, and of the Union. He had great faults. But without the aid of the men whom he could influence and who honored him, and to whom his great faults were as great virtues, the Union never would have been saved, or slavery abolished, or the faith kept. I hold it one of the chief proofs of the kindness of divine Providence to the American people in a time of very great peril that their leaders were so different in character.

They are all dead now--Sumner and Fessenden and Seward and Wilson and Chase and Stanton and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan and Chandler,--a circle in which Lincoln s.h.i.+nes as a diamond in its setting. Not one of them could have been spared.

It is proper that I should add that I have known very well a good many of the most eminent citizens of Michigan. This list includes Governor and Senator Henry P. Baldwin, and Judge Christiancy, who displaced Chandler in the Senate. I have frequently heard them speak of Mr. Chandler. Without an exception I believe they held him in profound esteem and honor. They were proud of him as the most eminent citizen of their State which has been prolific of strong men, speaking of him as we do of Sumner or Webster.

Mr. Chandler was a remarkable example of what I have often noticed, how thoroughly the people come to know the true character of a public man, even when the press of the whole country unite to decry him. I suppose there was not a paper in New England, Republican or Democratic, that spoke kindly of Zach.

Chandler for many years. He was disliked by the Democratic press for his unyielding Republicanism. He was disliked by the Republican press that supported Charles Sumner, for his opposition to him. He was represented as a coa.r.s.e, ignorant and unscrupulous man. In the campaign of 1880 I sent him a telegram, asking him to visit me in Ma.s.sachusetts and make a few speeches in our campaign. I added: "You will be received with unbounded respect and honor." The telegram was an astonishment and revelation to the old man. He had no idea that the people of New England had that opinion of him. Governor Baldwin told me that he happened to be pa.s.sing Chandler's house just as he received my message. Chandler knocked on the window for the Governor to come in. He had the telegram in his hand when the Governor entered, and exclaimed: "Look at that; read that; and I did not graduate at Harvard College either." His colleague, Senator Ferry, alludes to his gratification at the receipt of this message, in his obituary delivered in the Senate.

He spoke in Worcester and Boston and Lowell, and in one or two other places. His pa.s.sage through the State was a triumphal march. He was received as I had predicted. In Worcester we had no hall large enough to hold the crowds that thronged to see him, and were compelled to have the meeting in the skating-rink. Chandler went back to Michigan full of satisfaction with his reception. I think he would have been among the most formidable candidates for the Presidency at the next election, but for his sudden death. If he had been nominated, he would undoubtedly have been elected. But, a short time after, he was one morning found dead in his bed at Chicago.

In his death a great and salutary force was subtracted from the public life of the country, and especially from the public life of the great State to whose history he had contributed so large and n.o.ble a part.

I have found among some old notes a few sentences with which I presented him to a mighty audience in my own city:

"Worcester is here in person to-night to give a welcome from the heart of Ma.s.sachusetts to the Senator of Michigan. If our guest had nothing of his own to recommend him, it would be enough to stir the blood of Ma.s.sachusetts that he represents that honored State, another New England in her interests and in her opinions. With her vast forests, her people share with Maine, our own great frontier State, those vast lumber interests, for which it has been our own policy to demand protection. Daughter of three mighty lakes, she takes a large share in our vast inland commerce. Her people are brave, prosperous and free. They have iron in their soil, and iron in their blood. Great as is her wealth and her material interest, she shares with Ma.s.sachusetts the honor of being among the foremost of American States in educational conditions. Ma.s.sachusetts is proud to--

Claim kindred there, and have the claim allowed.

"But our guest brings to us more than a representative t.i.tle to our regard. The memory of some of us goes back to the time when, all over the great free Northwest, the people seemed to have forgotten to what they owed their own prosperity.

The Northwest had been the gift of Freedom to the Republic on her birthday. In each of her million homes dwells Liberty, a perpetual guest. But yet that people in Illinois and Michigan and Indiana and Ohio seemed for a time to have forgotten their own history, and to be unworthy of their fair and mighty heritage.

They had been the trusted and st.u.r.dy allies of the slave power in the great contest for the possession of the vast territory between the Mississippi and the Pacific. The old leaders, Douglas in Illinois and Ca.s.s in Michigan, who ruled those States with an almost despotic power, sought to win the favor of the South for their aspirations for the Presidency by espousing the doctrine of squatter sovereignty, under which the invaders from the slave States hard by, without even becoming residents in good faith, might fix forever the character of that fair domain. At that time a young knight, a figure of manly courage and manly strength, came forward to challenge General Ca.s.s to a struggle for the supremacy in Michigan. It was our guest of this evening. As you all know, the young champion vanquished the veteran warrior in a trial by battle for the freedom of the Continent. I met him at Buffalo in 1854, in the height of the conflict, at a gathering of a few gentlemen to concert measures for sustaining, aiding and arming the Free State immigrants in Kansas. He was the leader and the life of the company. Many of those immigrants had gone from Worcester County, where the Emigrants' Aid Society was first devised by Edward Hale and organized by Eli Thayer. I met him again when I went to Was.h.i.+ngton in 1869. I found him among the foremost of the leaders of the Senate. He had gone through the great period of the Civil War, and the period before the Civil War. He had stood by Lincoln in that time of trouble.

He had stood firm as a rock for the financial integrity of the country. Afterward it was my good fortune to know a good deal of his administration of the great Department of the Interior. I have never known, or known of, a better administration of any Department from the beginning of the Government, than his of that great office, with its eight important bureaus.

"He brings to you to-night the news from Maine and the news from Ohio. He can tell you what the Republicans are thinking of and are doing all over the country, as they prepare themselves for the great contest beginning this year, to end, as we hope and believe, with a great Republican victory in 1880."

John James Ingalls was in many respects one of the brightest intellects I ever knew. He was graduated at Williams in 1855.

One of the few things, I don't know but I might say the only thing, for which he seemed to have any reverence was the character of Mark Hopkins. He was a very conspicuous figure in the debates in the Senate. He had an excellent English style, always impressive, often on fit occasions rising to great stateliness and beauty. He was for a good while President pro tempore of the Senate, and was the best presiding officer I have ever known there for conducting ordinary business.

He maintained in the chair always his stately dignity of bearing and speech. The formal phrases with which he declared the action of the Senate, or stated questions for its decision, seemed to be a fitting part of some stately ceremonial. He did not care much about the principles of parliamentary law, and had never been a very thorough student of the rules. So his decisions did not have the same authority as those of Mr. Wheeler or Mr. Edmunds or Mr. Hamlin.

I said to him one day, "I think you are the best presiding officer I ever knew. But I do not think you know much about parliamentary law." To which he replied: "I think the sting is bigger than the bee."

He never lost an opportunity to indulge his gift of caustic wit, no matter at whose expense. When the morning hour was devoted to acting upon the reports of committees in cases of private claims, or pensions, he used to look over, the night before, the reports which were likely to be on the next day's calendar. When a bill was reached he would get up and make a pretty sharp attack on the measure, full of wit and satire. He generally knew very little about it. When he got through his speech he would disappear into the cloak room and leave the Senator who had reported the bill, and had expected to get it through without any difficulty--the case being very often absolutely clear and just--to spend his time in an elaborate and indignant explanation.

Mr. Ingalls disliked very much the scrupulous administrations of Hayes and Harrison. He yielded to the craze for free silver which swept over parts of the West, and in so doing lost the confidence of the people to whose momentary impulse he had given way. If he had stood stanchly on the New England doctrines and principles in which he was educated, and which I think he believed in his heart, he would have kept his State on the right side. Shortly before the campaign in which he was defeated for Senator, he said in the cloak room, in my hearing, that he did not propose to be a martyr. He was the author or a beautiful poem, ent.i.tled "Opportunity," which I think should accompany this imperfect sketch.

OPPORTUNITY

Master of human destinies am I!

Fame, love and fortune on my footsteps wait, Cities and fields I walk; I penetrate Deserts and seas remote, and pa.s.sing by Hovel and mart and palace--soon or late I knock unbidden once at every gate!

If sleeping, wake--if feasting, rise before I turn away. It is the hour of fate, And they who follow me reach every state Mortals desire, and conquer every foe Save death; but those who doubt or hesitate, Condemned to failure, penury and woe, Seek me in vain and uselessly implore.

I answer not, and I return no more!

Ingalls was a native of Haverhill, Ma.s.sachusetts. Somewhere about 1880, being in Boston, he gave an interview to one of the papers in which he commented very severely on the want of able leaders.h.i.+p in the Republican Party in Ma.s.sachusetts.

I suppose the criticism was directed at me, although he did not mention my name. In 1880 Ma.s.sachusetts gave a Republican majority of 48,697, and Kansas a Republican majority of 41,897.

Mr. Ingalls's leaders.h.i.+p in Kansas had been manifested very largely in the control of official patronage. He said in the Senate that he and his colleague sought to get rid of all Democrats in office in Kansas as with a fine-toothed comb.

So far as I had been concerned, and so far as the Republican leaders in Ma.s.sachusetts had been concerned, with the exception of General Butler, a different policy had been adopted. We had never attempted to make a political instrument of official patronage. There had never been anything like a "boss" or a machine. Our State politics had been conducted, and our candidates for office nominated, after the old fas.h.i.+on of a New England town meeting. When an election approached, or when a great measure or political question was to be decided, men who were influential consulted together informally, ascertained the public sentiment, deferred to it, if it seemed to be right, and did what they could to persuade it and guide it by speech and discussion in the press, if it needed guidance, and trusted, hardly ever in vain, to the intelligence of the people for the result. I do not know but the diminution of the comparative importance of the towns, and the change of the Commonwealth and cl.u.s.ter of cities and manufacturing villages, and the influx of other elements than that of the old New England stock may not bring about, or if indeed it is not already bringing about, a different conduct of affairs. But I have never adopted any other method, and I have never desired that my public life or influence should survive the introduction of any other method in Ma.s.sachusetts. Mr. Ingalls's methods and mine have been tested by their results. The people of Kansas are largely of Ma.s.sachusetts origin. I believe if her leading men had pursued Ma.s.sachusetts methods she would to a great extent have repeated Ma.s.sachusetts history. Our method of political management and control has been vindicated by the fact that the Commonwealth has been kept true to its ancient faith, except in a very few years when accidental causes have caused the election of a Democratic Governor.

Those elections were protests against an attempt to depart from the old-fas.h.i.+oned method of ascertaining the will of the people in selecting Republican candidates. Ma.s.sachusetts has kept the succession of United States Senators unbroken, and has had a Republican delegation in the House ever since the party came into power, with two exceptions. She has in general maintained her great Republican majority. On the other hand Kansas has been represented in turn by Democrats and Populists and Socialists and the advocates of fiat money and free silver.

Senator c.o.c.krell of Missouri entered the Senate two years before I did, and has been there ever since. He is a man of great sincerity and integrity, of great influence with his own party, and highly esteemed by his Republican a.s.sociates.

He can generally be depended upon for a fair vote, certainly always for an honest and incorruptible vote, and to do full justice to a political opponent. He used for many years to prepare one speech, in each session, in which he went over the political issues of the two parties in a violent and extreme fas.h.i.+on. He would give us the whole history of the year and point out the imperfections and weakness and atrocity of the party in power in a most unsparing fas.h.i.+on. This speech he would frank home to Missouri. He seemed to think his duty as a Democratic politician was done, and he would betake himself to statesmans.h.i.+p the rest of the year. I think he has of late discontinued that practice. I do not want what I have said to be taken too seriously. There is scarcely a member of either side in either House who would be more missed from the public service, if anything were to happen to him, than Mr. c.o.c.krell, nor for whom all men have a kindlier and more affectionate regard. Like Mr. Allison, he knows the mechanism of administration and legislation through and through. He would be entirely competent to fill a chair of public administration in any college, if, as I hope may be done, such chairs shall be established.

When Justin Morrill died, not only a great figure left the Senate Chamber--the image of the ancient virtue of New England-- but an era in our national history came to an end. He knew in his youth the veterans of the Revolution and the generation who declared independence and framed the Const.i.tution, as the young men who are coming to manhood to-day know the veterans who won our victories and the statesmen who conducted our policy in the Civil War. He knew the whole history of his country from the time of her independence, partly from the lips of those who had shaped it, partly because of the large share he had in it himself. When he was born Was.h.i.+ngton had been dead but ten years. He was sixteen years old when Jefferson and Adams died. He was twenty-two years old when Charles Carroll died. He was born at the beginning of the second year of Madison's Presidency, and was a man of twenty-six when Madison died. In his youth and early manhood the manners of Ethan Allen's time still prevailed in Vermont, and Allen's companions and comrades could be found in every village.

He was old enough to feel in his boyish soul something of the thrill of our great naval victories, and of the victory at New Orleans in our last war with England, and, perhaps, to understand something of the significance of the treaty of peace of 1815. He knew many of the fathers of the country as we knew him. In his lifetime the country grew from seventeen hundred thousand to thirty-six hundred thousand square miles, from seventeen States to forty-five States, from four million people to seventy-five million. To the America into which he was born seventeen new Americas had been added before he died.

A great and healthful and beneficent power departed from our country's life. If he had not lived, the history of the country would have been different in some very important particulars; and it is not unlikely that his death changed the result in some matters of great pith and moment, which are to affect profoundly the history of the country in the future. The longer I live, the more carefully I study the former times or observe my own time, the more I am impressed with the sensitiveness of every people, however great or however free, to an individual touch, to the influence of a personal force. There is no such thing as a blind fate; no such thing as an overwhelming and pitiless destiny. The Providence that governs this world leaves nations as He leaves men, to work out their own destiny, their own fate, in freedom, as they obey or disobey His will.

Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man Commands all life, all influence, all fate; Nothing to him falls early or too late.

Our acts our angels are, or good or ill; Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.

It is wonderful what things this man accomplished alone, what things he helped others to accomplish, what things were accomplished by the political organization of which he was a leader, which he bore a very large part in accomplis.h.i.+ng.

Mr. Morrill's public life was coincident with the advent of the Republican Party to National power. His first important vote in the House of Representatives helped to elect Mr. Banks to the office of Speaker, the first National victory of a party organized to prevent the extension of slavery. From that moment, for nearly half a century, Vermont spoke through him in our National Council, until, one after another, almost every great question affecting the public welfare has been decided in accordance with her opinion.

It would be impossible, even by a most careful study of the history of the country for the last forty years, to determine with exactness what was due to Mr. Morrill's personal influence.

Many of the great policies to which we owe the successful result of the Civil War--the abolition of slavery, the restoration of peace, the new and enlarged definition of citizens.h.i.+p, the restoration of order, the establishment of public credit, the homestead system, the foundation and admission of new States, the exaction of apology and reparation from Great Britain, the establishment of the doctrine of expatriation, the achievement of our manufacturing independence, the taking by the United States of its place as the foremost nation in the world in manufacture and in wealth, as it was already foremost in agriculture, the creation of our vast domestic commerce, the extension of our railroad system from one ocean to the other--were carried into effect by narrow majorities, and would have failed but for the wisest counsel. When all these matters were before Congress there may have been men more brilliant or more powerful in debate. But I can not think of any wiser in counsel than Mr. Morrill. Many of them must have been lost but for his powerful support. Many owed to him the shape they finally took.