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BIOGRAPHY

JAMES G. BLAINE

GAIL HAMILTON

NORWICH, CONN.
THE HENRY BILL PUBLISHING COMPANY

1895

THE HENRY BILL PUBLISHING COMPANY

PRESS OF

ROCKWELL AND CHURCHILL
BOSTON

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Galbraith ........ 1

IL Blaine . 13

III. Colonel Blaine's Peaceful Years ... 34

IV. James Blaine 49

V. Early Education . . . . . . 63

VI. Finding the Road ...... 84

VII. Maine 98

VIII. In Congress . . . . . . . . 136

IX. The Conkling— Fry Incident .... 157

X. Vacation in Europe and Work at Home . 182

XI. The Speaker 222

XII. Credit Mobilier 268

IV CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

XIII. From the Speakership to the Senate . . 310

XIV. The Work of the Republican Convention . 394
XV. In the Senate 432

XVI. Secretary of State ...... 479

XVII. Years from 1882 to 1888 .... 569

XVIII. Again Secretary of State, 1889 . . . . 651

At Last ..... 720

NOTE. — The reader is indebted to Mrs. Harriet Preseott Spofford,

who, at the request of Mrs. Blaine, and with the approval of Gail

Hamilton , completed Chapter XVlll., and wrote the concluding

pages of this Biography.

THE PUBLISHERS.

TO DISCOVER AN UNKNOWN LAW OF HUMAN

LIFE.

Intellectual energy, like every other of which we have knowledge,
is the product of antecedents. A great genius never comes by
chance. It always bursts upon the world, as the new star in
Auriga burst upon us, unexpectedly, but only because we have not
explored the depths out of which it has come. Every man at birth
is an epitome of his progenitors. He starts out with the elements
of his character draivnfrom the widest sources, but so mixed in him
that he differs necessarily from every other individual of his race.
Here is the problem of life. Not the dome of St. Peter's, but
how the hand that rounded it acquired its skill; not the play of
" Hamlet,'" but how the mind that gave it its wondrous birth was
developed, — these are our chief concern. — Edwin Reed.

GALBRAITH.

^HH ROUGH the mists of that yesterday which we call
-*- antiquity loom up the stalwart forms of the Galbraiths
moving resolutely, if to us vaguely, around the foot of Ben
Lomond and along the shores of the storied lake. A fragment
of Gaelic verse epitomizes their honorable history :

" Galbraiths from the Red Tower,
Noblest of Scotch surnames."

Loyally adhering to Lord James Stuart, they had brought their
noble surname to Baldernoch — whence it was but a step to the
Clyde — whence their continued share in the world's movement
took them to the Isle of Gigha. Here they held with the later
McNeills an otherwise undivided sway till the nearness of
Ireland tempted them over the easy stretch of blue water
to become the Galbraiths of Donegal.

The world movement in which they were involved was a
wider one than the Galbraiths knew. So long ago as Julius
Caesar was winning fame in Great Britain, the Scotch, under
the name of Picts, and the Irish, Scots, were surging back and
forth into each others' lands till on the crest of the human
wave Ireland rode triumphant as Scotia Major, and Scotland
followed meekly content to be Scotia Minor.

By intellectual prowess Ireland justified her right to the
lordly name. Converted to Christianity by St. Patrick and
St. Columba, she battled for religion as warmly as she had
battled for booty in her good old pirate-pagan days, and won.
Religion brought in schools, learning, literature, and sent out
missionaries to all the world — the world of England, France,

2 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Switzerland, Italy, Germany. Even Iceland warmed herself in
that new sun. When Europe awakened from her long sleep
and began to crave colleges, Scotia Major was ready to man
them with her professors.

But another wave of barbarism churned down from the North
and swept all before it — colleges, houses, churches. Then
William with his Normans stormed up from the South and
ground the people between the upper and nether millstones —
to a finer standard, but to diminished sway ; for Scotia Minor
ceased to be minor and became Scotland the only, and Scotia
Major was fain to fall back upon her pet name and become
green Erin.

But this was not all the movement. Crowding also from the
East came the Saxons, Jutes, and Angles, pushing Britons to
the wall ; who, in their turn, with the eagerness of self-preser-
vation, were as sedulously pressing westward and crowding out
as they could the Scots from Wales and Cornwall, and crowding
up with Saxon Lowlanders against the Celtic Highlanders, and
then with the Northmen crowding even into north Ireland till
the human caldron boiled like a pot, out of which seething
came presently the sturdiest race on earth — the Scotch-Irish.

Whereabouts on their journeyings the wand of Elizabeth
touched the Galbraiths, history does not say, but more generous
tradition supplies them with knighthood and a coat of arms
from her royal hand in 1560 — three wolf heads and a dagger to
Archibald Galbraith for having killed more wolves than any
man in his shire and thus become to the afflicted farmers a
public benefactor.

By her protracted wars Elizabeth had been harder than the
wolves upon the north of Ireland, which was reduced to abject
misery. On account of the great rebellion of O'Neill and
O'Donnell, their estates had been confiscated and reverted to
the Crown. James, upon his accession, found the land a " devas-
tated waste." He determined to reclaim it by filling it with a
peaceful, thrifty, industrious population. He knew his Scots.
By offering " allotments " under certain conditions of improve-
ment, he induced thousands of the better classes, many be-
longing to the nobility and gentry, to emigrate to Ulster,
carrying with them their Presbyterianism of John Knox and the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 3

Westminster Catechism, for the free enjoyment thereof. Then
Charles I. succeeded to the throne, and would by all sorts of
silly persecution, oaths, fines, imprisonments, confiscations,
break down their prosperity, which his father had fostered, for
the sake of breaking down their Presbyterianism, which was
not his ism. Recourse was even had to butchery. Pastors
were forbidden to preach and to baptize. Churches were
closed. Rents on lands leased from the Crown were raised so
that multitudes were reduced to poverty ; raised still further
under Charles II., under James II. The Scotch-Irish did not
like it. They would not submit like Irish Catholics. They
were not enough to resist successfully. They were only one-
tenth of the entire population. Had they been the nine-tenths
there would have been no Home Rule Question to vex the
Parliament of Man to-day. But, being only one-tenth, they
sought and found a more excellent way. Ireland was not the
home of their ancestors. America beckoned and they came —
first, a few bold experimenters, then a great army in many suc-
cessive regiments. In 1729 it is estimated that 6,000 of the
Scotch-Irish had come over. Before 1750 nearly 12,000 had
arrived annually for several years. Some went one way and some
another, but the greater number made their home in Pennsyl-
vania. They took to the frontiers by natural attraction.
Their fighting qualities made them a desirable buffer between
the peaceable Quakers and Germans and the wilderness Indians.
They were splendid men to settle a new country ; fighting men
who feared no foe : splendid men to found a new State ; Bible
men to whom God was a living King, and themselves his
responsible subjects.

Among these malcontents were the Galbraiths. Upon the
death of John Galbraith in Ireland, his two sons James and
John closed connection with the old and threw in their lot witli
the new. John tarried in Philadelphia, and his descendants
went their way and out of our way westward, while James
lifted up his eyes and beheld all the plains and hills of Cones-
toga that they were well watered and fertile everywhere, and
chose him all that land to dwell in. Fires had destroyed the
timber, but the scrub oak prophesied the great forests which
afterwards justified his faith. He was a man in the full

4 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

maturity of vigorous life, and he came as an emigrant should,
with his wife, Rebecca Chambers, his sons and daughters and
grandchildren, and all his household goods. Himself fifty-two
years of age, his eldest son, John, twenty-eight, brought his
Scotch lassie of twenty-five, Janet, .and their three-year-old
Robert. There was Andrew, twenty-six, and his wife and their
year-old baby John. There was James of fifteen, and Eleanor,
and Isabel, and Rebecca named for her mother, names still re-
tained among their proud descendants. The family in this vast,
rich, strange land clung together. The father had no sooner
settled his sons around him than he bestirred himself at once
to found a church in the wilderness. Within a year after his
arrival the church was organized. In less than two years his
religious home stood firm fixed upon the sweetest spot in Penn-
sylvania, a pleasant wooded hill with a perennial spring bub-
bling up its cool waters for man and beast and forming the
beautiful " run " which follows its own sweet will through
fertile meadows, winding a thousand turns till it joins the Chic-
quesalunga, — compressed by modern haste and waste into the
feeble " Chickies " !

The meeting-house of their faith and hope and aspiration was
built of logs and loose stones gathered from the surrounding
woods, and there for ten years they worshipped God and re-
joiced in their new freedom. So strong was their influence,
so sweet their memory of green Erin in spite of all they had
suffered there, and so vigorous and well-assured their hope,
that Conestoga was fain to yield up her name to their wooing
and permit them to become in the New World what they had
been in the Old, the Galbraiths of Donegal.

This little Donegal church became the famous nursery of
Presbyterianism in middle and western Pennsylvania, Vir-
ginia, and North Carolina. Andrew Galbraith was elected its
first ruling elder. As early as 1721 we find him making
application to Newcastle, Del., for " supplies " for his church.
This young ruling elder, as was meet, his father located
next to the church he was to serve and rule, and honors
and responsibilities canie swift upon him. Along the beau-
tiful Donegal run, next to the glebe land, under patent
from the Penns, his farm grew green on hill and meadow,

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BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 5

and Andrew prospered with it and attested his right to the
"noble surname." Upon the organization of Lancaster county
he was appointed first coroner, and afterwards became a jus-
tice of the Court of Common Pleas, remaining such as long as
he lived in Lancaster. In 1732 he was elected to the General
Assembly.

In the early history of the province the Quakers held the
political power. Pennsylvania was ruled by governors ap-
pointed by Penn and approved by the king, and it was a
pleasant little family arrangement which had worked smoothly
hitherto ; but these new colonists threatened to displace
the old order. Invited they had come, but in such numbers
that their Quaker hosts feared lest themselves should be sup-
planted and the strangers turn proprietors. They swarmed all
along the beautiful Susquehanna, and when challenged for their
title said " it was against the laws of God and nature that so
much land should lie idle while so many Christians wanted it
to labor on," and that they had as good a right to enter and
occupy as the Penns !

As early as 1729, James Logan, in a letter to the Proprietaries,
wrote : " The Indians themselves are alarmed at the swarms of
strangers (Scotch-Irish), and we are afraid of a breach with
them. The Irish are very rough to them." In 1730, he
complained of the Scotch-Irish, " in a disorderly manner pos-
sessing themselves, about that time, of the whole of Conestoga
manor, of 15,000 acres."

The argument is not without logic. Logic or no logic, it
seems that with the Quakers on one side fighting them at the
ballot-box, and the Indians on the other with powder and
shot, it was a substantial victory for the Scotch-Irish that
they " rested chiefly in Donegal, as a frontier people at an
exemption from rent."

This struggle was still on when AndreAV Galbraith sat
down by the gentle welling of Donegal spring. The township
being settled entirely by Scotch-Irish, — Presbyterians, — they
naturally challenged the supremacy of the Quakers in the
organization of the new Lancaster county. Andrew Galbraith
was brought out by the Donegalians for the Legislature on the
eve of the election. The Quakers became very active to defeat

6 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

him. The election was held at the courthouse at the county
seat, the only voting-place. Believing that the office should
seek the man and not the man the office, Mr. Galbraith made
but little effort in his own behalf. His wife seems to have
been of a different mind. Her motto was, She serves her
country best who serves her husband best, and she mounted
her fleet and favorite mare, Nelly, and galloped through the
settlement, persuading her neighbors to go down to Lancaster
and vote for her Andrew. Thus it came that she rode gal-
lantly at the head of an enthusiastic procession of mounted
men down to Lancaster courthouse, where she halted, drew
up her men in line and harangued them manfully, and of
course they brought her candidate in, elected by three votes over
one of the most popular Quakers in the county, throwing out,
it must be admitted, some Quaker votes for a slight informality.
But certainly the Quakers were awed or persuaded into har-
mony thenceforth, and reelected Mr. Galbraith many times
without contest. When the roving spirit took him from
Donegal, we hear of him at Pennsborough on a perambulating
committee, pacing between the Pennsborough meeting-house
and the Great Spring to establish just boundaries, and wher-
ever and whenever he appears, he is always the discreet and
public-spirited citizen.

The third son, James, stood by his father and brothers in
noble character, patriotic service, and public record. He was
twice elected sheriff of the county, he was a justice of com-
mon pleas of the county, he was an officer in the Indian wars.
Up in Swatara they followed hard upon the feet of Donegal,
organized a congregation, and were " supplied " by the friendly
Donegalians with the stated preaching of the gospel according
to John Knox.

Presently came over the sea a most unhappy father and
mother, seeking a lost son. During one of the many polit-
ical excitements in the British Isles the boy had disappeared,
and his parents, under the impression that he had gone to
America, came to search for him about 1730. The father could
not find his son, but he- was too valuable a colonist to be let go.
A clergyman of the Presbytery of Bangor in Ireland, educated in
Edinburgh, he was hospitably and unanimously received by the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 7

Donegal Presbytery, and was installed at the meeting-house in
Swatara, which then took the name of Deny. Little Derry bore
herself handsomely to him, and appointed representatives who,
on his settlement, executed to him the right and title to the
" Indian town tract," on the north side of the Swatara, of three
hundred and fifty acres.

Young James Galbraith, who had been deeply interested
in the Deny church, became still more interested in the new
clergyman's pretty daughter, who to her beauty added rare
accomplishments, great excellence, and it may not be invidious
to say the hope of a fortune through her mother, Elizabeth
Gillespie, who was heiress to a handsome estate in Edinburgh.
This daughter, Elizabeth Bertram, presently became his wife,
and for her he bought the farm on Spring creek, next to
her father's, close to the church and including the inevitable
grist-mill, and moved thence, taking his own father with him,
who had then reached the goodly age of seventy -seven.

But the peaceful glebe-life had warlike interruptions. He
and his brother John were elected captains in companies of
" associators." Then he rose to be lieutenant-colonel, and fought
a good fight in the French and Indian wars of eight stormy and
terrible years. A letter to Governor Hamilton gives in a few
bold lines a vivid picture of life in that early time. The post-
script tells the spirit in which it was met :

Derry, the 10th August, 1756.
Honored Sir, There is nothing heare allmost evry day but murder com-
mitted by the Indians in som part or oather, about five miles above me, at
Monaday Gape, there was two of the provance solders kild, one wounded;
there wase but three Indians, and they came in amongst ten of our men
and committed the murder, and went off' safe, the name or sight of an
Indian maks allmost all mankind in these parts to trimble, there Barbarity
is so Cruel where they are masters, for by all appearance the Devall
commitans, God j:>ermits, and the French pays, and by this the Back parts
by all appearance, will be Laid waste by flight with what is gon and
agoing, more espesaly Cumberland County, Pardon my freedom in this
where I have don amiss.

Sir, your most Humble Servant to Command,

Jas. Galbreath.
P.S. — Sir I am in want of the Pistols.

8 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

The next year he was appointed one of the commissioners to
build a fort at Wyoming ; and when he had stayed long enough
at Spring run, over he also went to Pennsborough, and was
appointed commissioner for Cumberland county by Governor
Penn, and in course of time became owner of land enough to
constitute a German principality. April 10, 1777, he was
appointed " Lieutenant of Militia in room of Col. Ephraim
Blaine, who declined ; " but owing to his great age, which
prevented him from performing active duty, the Council ap-
pointed John Wilkins and James Blaine his assistants. And
having given all his sons to officer the war of the Revolution,
he died at the good old age of eighty-three, directing his bones
to be carried over to the old Deny churchyard, where for
forty years the dust of his father had lain.

John, the eldest brother, more closely though not more really
to our purpose, seems to have been as quiet and as shrewd as
Andrew. He bestowed himself promptly along the Donegal
meeting-house run, next neighbor to Andrew, and at a point
where the present turnpike, following the lead of Peter Bizal-
lion's Indian trail, crosses the run. That old Indian trader
had located a path for his pack-horses, and the Irish emigrants
had followed this trail, which at about the time of the Gal-
braiths' advent rose to the dignity of a public road, leading to
the settlement at Chicquesalunga. The Indian trail, become a
public road, did what railroads have done since — opened up
the country to settlers.

Being by trade a miller, John Galbraith built himself straight-
way a grist and saw mill, and having also cannily settled along
the " great road," handy to the Scotch-Irish settlement, and to
the Conoy Indian town, and connecting with the Paxtang and
Conestoga road (now nearly covered by the Lancaster and
Harrisburg turnpike), he also bethought himself to set up an
" ordinary ; " wherefore :

To the Honourable bench the humble petition of John Galbreath of
Donnegall in the County of Chester

Humbly Sheweth

That your humble petitioner dwelling on a great road and many travel-
lers passing thereby has great encouragement for their reliefe and accom-
odation to take up ordinary to which your petitioner is likewise requested

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 9

by the neighborhood for their publick and common advantage in as much
as great quantity of barly is raised and malted which by reason of the
great distance from a market without publick houses here will turn to no
account to their great loss for which valuable considerations your petitioner
humbly craves that this hon. bench may be pleased to grant him license to
brew and Sell beer and ale

And your humble petitioner as in duty bound Shall ever pray
We whose names are Subscribed inhabitants of Donnegall and Connos-
togoe do hereby certitie and confirm the truth of the above petition and also
most humbly with Submission to the hon. bench recommend the above
petitioner John Galbreath as a fitt person to keep ordinary dated at Don-
negall this vi day of Aug 1726.

Among the names of those who thus became surety for his
good conduct of the ordinary were his father's, — spelled as it
is pronounced, James Galbreth, — his brother Andrew, who sup-
plied an a after the e in the "noblest of Scotch surnames," James
Alison, and Richard, whose land, six hundred and thirty-six
acres, ran along the old road and up to Andrew Galbraith's land
near the Donegal meeting-house, till in the second generation
the family sold it all and went West, to be represented in our
day by Senator Allison ; Robert Buchanan and William, who
may have stayed in Pennsylvania to give her a president of the
United States ; James Brownlow, who stirred the spirit of '76
in Parson Brownlow; Moffats and McFarlands, Hays and
Howards and Cochrans, were all on hand thus early to stand
sponsors for the quality and quantity of the beer and ale which
their thirsty souls longed for. This ordinary still stands, — a
stone house with straight lines erect and firm, — though the
present turnpike has risen five feet higher along its front than
was the old roadbed, and has thus turned the front of the
ordinary into a one-story house, while the rear remains as of
yore, in two stories. The doorway facing the road has been
built in, and the old mill has disappeared ; but Donegal run,
narrow and deep and blue and clear, winds between its clean
green banks and sparkles to the bending boughs above it, as
blithe as in John Galbraith's day, singing its eternal song.

And here John Galbraith bore himself steadfastly for law
and order. He was a member of the first jury drawn in Lancas-
ter county, and was twice elected sheriff. In " Cressap's war,"
between the Marylanders and Pennsylvanians, he demeaned

10 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

himself like a true member of iie Church Militant, and
when Captain Cressap ordered a glass of rum and drank
damnation to himself and his men if they ever surrendered,
John Galbraith was one of the men who forced him to the
alternative.

The Galbraith farm, and the Galbraith tavern, and the Gal-
braith mill show how untiring was his personal and peaceful
activity ; and if the " great roads " did not bring men enough
to his " ordinary," what should hinder the making of branch
roads so that Vinegae's ferry and Anderson's ferry and Ran-
kin's ferry and Conewago falls and all the ends of the earth
— their earth — should have easy right of way to Galbraith's
mill and Galbraith's well-brewed beer and ale ?

But to all his prosperity came a blight. His first-born
son, the Robert who had sailed from Ireland with his
father and mother, died in his early prime. By will he left
his little son John a sacred charge to his father, and afterwards
the young widow, by her own will became, with her little
daughter, Rebecca, a sacred charge to her prosperous young
neighbor, Capt. John Byers, — which scarcely brought separa-
tion, for his smiling acres lay close by, and all the orchards
and meadows were broad and pleasant — a delectable land for
the two grandchildren, John and Rebecca. The stone house,
thrown open to them, was ample and comfortable, and in the
wide dooryard the flowers still bloom and the shade of lofty
trees invites to quiet and hospitality. But the restless
spirit returned upon these Scotch-Irish rovers and bore them
away from all these fertile valleys to the even then ever-
receding West, and little John and Rebecca were seen no more
under the bending boughs of Donegal run.

Upon the grandfather fell the bitterness and the sweetness
of death while yet he was hardly more than sixty years of age.
To his Scotch lass Janet and his brother James he left the
settlement of all his earthly affairs, since they alone remained
in the neighborhood of dear Donegal.

Then all the fair lands went this way and that — a farm and
mill to John Bayley, the farm on the east of Donegal run to
Hiestands, andr of all the Galbraith and Byers estates no rem-
nant owns to the name, or blood, or race.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 11

But little Rebecca fared well at the hands of her stepfather
in her new home, until on a June evening she gave her noble
Scotch surname, the vigor of her Galbraith blood, and the
courage of her eighteen years to Ephraim Blaine.

Not only do our character and talents lie upon the anvil and
receive their temper during generations, but the very plot of our
lifers story unfolds itself on a scale of centuries, and the biography
of the man is only an episode in the epic of the family.

Robert Louis Stevenson.

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BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 13

II.

BLAINE.

AS dimly as the noble Galbraiths, through the wavering,
lifting, lowering mists of nigh three hundred years
may be discerned another heroic figure : a brave soldier, a
sturdy Protestant, from whose strength of mind and body
alone gleams the spark that lights him down the generations
to recognition and the faint remembrance of a name. Out
from Scotland, also, he went to Ireland, and his children,
having had emigration in their blood, thought another the
easier, and found it but a natural remedy for the evils that
still surrounded them in Ireland — high taxes, manufactures
prohibited, trade lessened, industry vexed with repeated insur-
rections ; and ever voices coming to them from friends and
neighbors, across the great tides calling, who had found a rich,
free, generous land, where they could enter into their own and
govern themselves.

Thus it was that at about the middle of the eighteenth
century, near 1745, James Blaine and Isabella his wife took
their little son, Ephraim, scarce out of babyhood, and jour-
neyed from Londonderry into the Western World.

Donegal claims him, and to Donegal he must have come first,
for in the year 1767 Temple Thompson, of Donegal, died, leav-
ing two hundred acres of land and other property to three minor
children, of whom he appointed James Blaine guardian ; indi-
cating that he had tarried in Donegal and was probably a
relative of the family. He at any rate took charge of the
children and educated them, fulfilling the trust of the dying
father; but he made his abiding-place in Toboyne township,
extending his interests in many directions ; for he lived long
and prospered. Tradition locates one of his homes in Phila-
delphia, though he may have shared it with his eldest son.

14 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

An old-fashioned two-story brick house on the north side of
Arch, in the neighborhood of Fourth or Fifth street, was many
years ago pointed out as the Blaine house. He was in Carlisle
long enough to make warm friendships, to mature the slow-
growing plant, confidence, and to lend his Scotch-Presbyterian
sympathy and assistance in building the old stone church which,
with improvements and enlargements, still stands on the pub-
lic square in Carlisle.

In Toboyne township, then on the frontiers, he took up a
large tract of land on the south side of the blue Juniata,
and immediately assumed a leading part in the affairs of the
province so long as it continued a province, an active interest
in the state when it became a state, in the nation when a
nation was born.

While Pennsylvania was still English, and the French were
putting the Indians on their track of blood and fire and torture
that themselves might gain control of the New World, James
Blaine, for all his Scotch-Irish blood, was sturdily on the Eng-
lish side, though in the stubborn and brutal Braddock he saw
repeated in the wilderness the same British policy which had
driven him from Donegal to the wilderness. Just as sturdily,
when Pennsylvania would throw off her leading-strings and
become American, James Blaine gave all the wisdom and sym-
pathy of his declining years, as well as the sons of his strength,
to the struggle for independence, nor laid down the torch of
life till he had seen that struggle end in victory.

As his family grew to maturity each took up a tract of land
around him on the sunny side of the same Juniata. As late as
March 24, 1777, a deed from James Blaine and Isabella Blaine
his wife, residents of Toboyne township, Cumberland county,
conveys to William Blaine, " one of their sons," four hundred
acres in Toboyne. .

So they took root and extended themselves in the new
country, carrying with them wherever they went, and upbuild-
ing wherever they stopped, the church and the school-house ; at
peace with all the world, so long as the world would ordain
the things that make for peace, but desiring only peace under
liberty.

Successful in all his business activities, happy in all his

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 15

domestic relations, the father of nine children who survived him,
the first recorded grief of James Blaine was the death of his
wife Isabella — a loss in some degree repaired by his subsequent
marriage with Elizabeth Carskaden, daughter of George Cars-
kaden, of Toboyne, his friend and neighbor. That she was a
practical rather than a pretentious woman appears in the suc-
cessful compression she put or permitted upon her own rather
impressive name when bestowing it upon her son James
" Scadden." But the second marriage did not apparently
disturb the family harmony, for by will his executors were
" my beloved son Ephraim and my beloved wife Elizabeth,"
who long survived him. Their honorable exactitude appears
in an inventory which shows accounts of debt and credit,
carefully estimated and duly balanced, to the smallest detail.

Of the nine children, Ephraim, the little Irishman, was the
eldest. He received a classical education at the school of
Rev. Dr. Alison, a school famous in its time. No better proof
is needed of the principle that it is the teacher, and not boards,
buildings, or machinery, that accomplishes education than the
number of distinguished men of that day whose biography
records their education by Rev. Dr. Alison. There was a com-
manding reason why the north of Ireland young gentleman
should be sent to Dr. Alison's school, inasmuch as he had come
himself from the Irish Donegal, and had settled in Toboyne
township, neighboring the Blaine home. He was moreover
pronounced the greatest classical scholar in America, especially
in Greek, and " a great literary character; " and he not only wore
in their season all the honors thereunto appertaining in his own
State, but had the distinction of being the first of his pres-
bytery who received the honorary degree of D.D. from the
University of Glasgow.

On the recommendation of Franklin he had been early
made a tutor to the son of John Dickinson, author of the
famous "Letters of a Pennsylvania Farmer," which did no small
work in arousing the people to recognize and resist the tyranny
of the British ministry. Having permission to take a few other
pupils, he at length opened an academy to which it was con-
sidered a great advantage and privilege to be admitted. He
had a taste of the field, and as chaplain saw varied and active

16 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

service. He was a statesman, and opposed the throwing off
of the proprietary government, a compliment which Richard
Penn returned with a tract of one thousand acres of well-
watered, fertile Susquehanna land. And even in that early
day, his humane and just mind developed the emancipation
of his slaves by will, as logically as it wrought the evolution
of subjects into citizens.

It is little that " his failing was a proneness to anger," since
he was "placable and affable;" and a quick and generous anger
may be but an intellectual stimulus to the bright, but discur-
sive minds with which the school-master deals.

When young Ephraim left the patriotic and stimulating train-
ing of this school he went armed with a recommendation from Dr.
Alison for an ensigncy in the provincial service, and indorsed
as " a young gentleman of good family." Nearly all his short
life had been passed within sound of the rifle-shot, and it is not
strange that he should have turned to military service. Dr.
Aliso'n's recommendation was honored, and young Blaine was
appointed commissary sergeant. There and then began the
apprenticeship which subsequently availed himself and his
country so greatly in the acquisition of Independence. The
wars between the provincials and the Indians were flagrant,
and with many varying fortunes were steadily tending towards
Indian subjugation and provincial supremacy. But the strug-
gle was bitter and long. Dr. McGill has said, " The rich and
beautiful Cumberland valley became the bloodiest battle-ground
we have ever had since the beginning of our American civil-
ization. There the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians had been suf-
fered to pour their stream of immigration, in order that the}^
might stand guardsmen for the nation through nearly the whole
of a century."

Colonel Burd, of Carlisle, was sent to open a road from Brad-
dock's road on Laurel hill to the Monongahela, and thence to
Fort Pitt, now Pittsburg. Opening a road in that time meant
the construction of forts at various points for defence. On a
hill overlooking the Monongahela, on the site of the present
town of Brownsville, Colonel Burd built a fort, and on Sunday,
the 4th of November, 1759, his chaplain, the Rev. Dr. Alison,
preached a sermon in the fort, and on the same day left for

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 17

Philadelphia, having no objection, it would appear, to travelling
on Sunday. It is pleasant to think that his late pupil, the
young ensign of good family, then just eighteen, may have
joined his teacher and preacher after the sermon was over,
and strolled along the heights, gathering into his youthful
vision all the majestic sweep of river, the smiling intervale
beyond, and the wall of hills rising abruptly behind it, brilliant,
glowing, quivering in the autumn sunshine, — sheltering hills,
kindly river, happy valley, to which a most dear life of his life
was one day to be intrusted.

In 1763 Ephraim Blaine was connected with the Second
Provincial Regiment, was in the Bouquet expedition, and shared
in the dangers and triumphs of the savage "Pontiac war."
In the performance of his duties he traversed the State, largely
then a wilderness, from Carlisle to Pittsburg, and gained a
familiarity with its topography, its wealth of resources, its
picturesqueness, and its promise, which in the subsequent Rev-
olutionary struggle was of the greatest service to the nascent
nation and to his own fortunes.

Attracted no doubt by his Carlisle comrades and by the
vicinage of Rebecca Galbraith, he seems early to have chosen
Carlisle for his permanent home. One month after he had com-
pleted his twenty-third year, the prudent young officer purchased
from James Fleming and wife, for one hundred and fifty pounds
Pennsylvania currency, a house-lot in Carlisle — judging accu-
rately that peaceful tides were flowing in.

The young soldier's valet, by the way, had but an unwilling
mind for the tame duties of peace, and his master was forced
to offer in Franklin's " Gazette " :

THREE POUNDS REWARD.

Run away from the Subscriber in Carlisle an Irish Servant Man named
Michael Futrill, aged about twenty-six Years, about 5 feet 8 inches high,
dark Complexion, short black curled Hair, pitted with the Small Pox ; had
on when he went away a blanket Coat, Buckskin Breeches, white Shirt,
Thread Stockings and Pumps; he served his time with Col. James
Gillespie in Lancaster County ; he has been in the Army and it is sup-
posed he will go towards New York. Whoever takes up and secures said
Servant so that his Master may get him again shall have the above Reward
from the subscriber

Emit aim Blaine.

18 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Even Dr. Alison's slaves were only to be free when the
doctor had no further use for them !

Whether the thread stockings and pumps ever found their
way back to their master, history does not inform us ; but on
May 8, 1765, the treaty of peace was signed ; on the fifth of
June Governor Penn's proclamation opened Indian trade, and
on the twenty-sixth, just one month after he had completed
his twenty-fourth year, Ephraim Blaine celebrated the new
peace by taking to himself as wife Rebecca Galbraith.

Before the honey-moon was over he appeared in court in answer
to a summons as a grand juror, was sworn, and served as a good
citizen. On October twenty-second he was summoned again, but
evidently thought this was more than his share of public duty
and failed to appear. At various times thereafter he was sum-
moned, and served until, on the 22d October, 1771, he made his
first return as sheriff of the grand jurors he had summoned.

He had, however, been doing something beside serving on
the grand jury ; for at this time, though only about thirty,
he owned, besides the corner lot in Carlisle which he had bought
before his marriage, four hundred acres of land on the beautiful
Conodoguinet creek, and all the indications are that he must
have been in easy circumstances.

In the bond given by him when he was made sheriff his
father was one of the sureties ; aud as five good men and true,
composing the Executive Council, attested to the recorder for
the county of Cumberland that they did approve of Robert
Calleuder and James Blaine as sufficient sureties for Ephraim
Blaine, his due execution for the office of sheriff of the county
of Cumberland, it follows that both were known for men of
substance. Robert Calleuder was a very rich man. He was an
old Indian trader, and had had much trouble from friend and
foe in the Indian fightings. In a single en counter when he was
convoying a train of eighty-one pack-horse loads of goods, sixty-
three were destroyed, valued at three thousand pounds. In
vain lie protested that they were not destined for the hostile
Indians, but were fo-r the Illinois, and to be stored at Fort Pitt.
He was charged with intending " to steal up the goods " before
the trade was legally opened, which was, no doubt, the aspect
that his superior shrewdness and sagacity assumed to the more

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 19

laggard traders. Certainly he stood on a good footing both with
young Ephraim and his father, since the three combined to be
" held and firmly bound unto our Sovereign Lord George the
Third by the Grace of God of Great Britain, France and
Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith &c. in the sum of two
thousand pounds lawful money of Pennsylvania; to be paid to
our Sovereign Lord the King his heirs and successors to which
payment well and truly to be made we bind ourselves our heirs
executors and administrators and every of them jointly and
severally firmly by these presents sealed witli our seals and
dated the fourteenth day of October in the eleventh year of
his Majesty's reign," before John Agnew, Esq., one of His
Majesty's justices of the peace for the county of Cumberland
aforesaid.

Unquestionably both father and son had profited by Robert
Callender's experience, for Ephraim was in his turn a skilful
and successful Indian trader and established headquarters at
Carlisle. Whether he had himself threaded on horseback the
wilderness with which he had first become familiar as a soldier,
armed with a rifle as bright, and appurtenances as various, and
followed by a retinue almost as large, of horses with packs and
men with the luggage, or whether he confined himself to pre-
siding over the collection and distribution of his stores at
Carlisle, we are not told. On his appointment as sheriff of
Cumberland county he seems to have given up Indian trade.

He never made trade subservient to patriotism, never
encroached on what might be due to the country, being con-
stitutionally on the side of law and order, even against some
of his own friends; for through the piping times of peace, the
bugle blast of war was ever sounding. Turbulence was the
natural after-swell and roar of past storms. The Scotch-Irish
Presbyterians were fain to enjoy the liberty which they valued
so highly and had bought so dearly, and sometimes they verily
thought they did God service by resisting the powers that be.

During the prevalence of Indian war an act of assembly
prohibited the selling of guns, powder, and other warlike
stores to Indians, but a company of traders, tempted of the
devil, risked the safety of the community by selling their wares,
irrespective of law, to the Indians. The ruling Quakers,

20 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

supposed to be friendly to the Indians and hostile to the Pres-
byterians, did not interpose. Wherefore the law-and-orderly
Cumberland men took the enforcement of law into their
own hands by seizing the goods, blankets, lead, tomahawks,
scalping-knives, gunpowder. Two Germans, who had murdered
ten peaceable Indians, were arrested and lodged in Carlisle
jail, but a warrant was issued for their removal to Philadelphia
for trial. The Carlisle folk counted this an encroachment on
the right of a citizen to be tried by a jury of his countrymen
in the county where the crime was committed. Some seventy
men well armed appeared at!?,the door of Carlisle jail early
one morning, surprised the keeper, effected entrance, and bore
away the murderers. Colonel Armstrong the sheriff, William
Lyon, the Presbyterian clergyman-soldier John Steel, then a
youngster of twenty-three and all the more likely for that to
be on hand, Col. Ephraim Blaine, and others, gathered to the
assistance of Sheriff Armstrong in pursuing the rioters ; but
they escaped to Virginia. One is fain to believe that the
chase for such law-breakers was not over-hot.

Colonel Blaine's peaceful pursuits were remarkably successful.
He became one of the wealthiest men of interior Pennsylvania
at that day. In his purchases of land he had an eye for the
picturesque and beautiful as well as for the fertile and pro-
ductive. In 1772 he built the mill on his Cave farm, so
called from a cave in the rock that has never been thoroughly
explored unless by a dog that is said to have gone in at the
farm and come out in Carlisle ! We can still drive along the
peaceful country road that Colonel Blaine built for the farmers
to come to his mill ; and a mill then was an immediate vital in-
dustry. The mill is not there, but the Conodoguinet goes down,
as of old, past the place where the mill-wheel went turning
round and round, and curves into a broad, tranquil stream,
spreading smoothly under the willow ; and beyond water and
willow we see the pleasant country house to which its owner
came for summer rest, and whither his friends drove out from
the city for many a gala feast.

Across the water, half hidden by trees and vines, can still be
discerned the black mouth of the mysterious cave which gives
its name to the place. On a high wooded knoll behind the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 21

house, but easily accessible by a safe road, is a far fair view of
the goodly land into which he entered and took possession,
amply wooded and watered, framed in with purple hills, fruit-
ful under a caressing sun.

Joining his father, or perhaps joined by his father, in erecting
and supporting the First Presbyterian Church in Carlisle, his
pew in the church was steadily occupied, and his "stipend" was
as regularly found on the treasurer's list — among the highest
contributors, along with the familiar Byers and Galbraiths. His
children were reared in the habit of attending church, and of
paying their share of money and of moral influence in sustain-
ing the institutions of the gospel. His voice was wanting in no
good word, his hand in no good work.

But another war-cloud was rising in which the red-coats
were to be vanquished as the red-skins had already been.
Into this war Ephraim Blaine, still a young officer, entered
with the energy of youth, with the enthusiasm of conviction,
with the advantage of experience. He joined at once in raising
and officering a battalion of associators, of which he was com-
missioned lieutenant. On July 12, 1774, a meeting of the cit-
izens of Cumberland county was held to take action upon the
act of Parliament closing the port of Boston. At that meeting
Colonel Blaine, together with his old teacher and friend Francis
Alison, John Armstrong, Robert Callender, Jonathan Hoge, and
others, was appointed a member of the committee " to corre-
spond with the committee of this province or of the other prov-
inces upon the great objects of the public attention, and to
cooperate in every measure conducing to the general welfare
of British America."

One week after, he made his last return as sheriff of grand
jurors, and gave himself wholly to the greater work. In De-
cember, 1775, the Committee of Correspondence for Cumber-
land County reported to the Committee of Safety that they had
expectation of raising an entire battalion in the county in addi-
tion to the twelve companies already sent to the front, and
among the officers therefor recommended Ephraim Blaine as
lieutenant-colonel. The next month Col. Ephraim Blaine, of
the First Battalion of Cumberland County Militia, was directed
to hold an election for held officers of the battalion. But his

22 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

remarkable executive ability had brought him to the notice of
the Supreme Executive Council, and on April first, by a resolu-
tion of Congress, Ephraim Blaine was appointed commissary of
provisions. He thereupon resigned his commission and entered
the Commissary Department.

For this department he was specially fitted by his superior
business qualifications, his large personal credit, his intimate
knowledge of the resources of the Middle States, attested by
his success in managing his own private affairs.

August sixth, of the same year, he was elected deputy com-
missary general of purchases, " in the room of Mr. Buchanan."
On the transfer of Gen. Nathaniel Greene to field service, at
the personal request and recommendation of General Wash-
ington he was made commissary general of purchases of the
Northern Department, a difficult position, demanding not only
integrity, but infinite patience, prudence, and worldly wisdom.
To this position lie continued to be elected and reelected by
Congress.

Colonel Blaine's life thenceforth, till independence was at-
tained, lay in furnishing the soldiers with food, sometimes to
the point of keeping the army from starving. His highest
promotion came during the memorable and critical winter
of Valley Forge. With a bankrupt and listless Congress,
with an army perishing of hunger and cold, and saved only by
the gayety of the British officers and the blandishments of the
Tory ladies of Philadelphia, who served their country by keep-
ing the Howes, and Andres, and Burgoynes writing verses and
dancing Meschianzas instead of going out in the snow and sleet
to destroy Washington and his remnant at Valley Forge, — the
terrible winter was softened and made tolerable by Colonel
Blaine's strenuous exertions in the service of his country and
of his revered chief and friend, General Washington.

Every school-child remembers Valley Forge, for the sufferings
of the soldiers and the footsteps tracked in blood ; but every
child does not know that all the while "hogsheads of shoes,
stockings, and clothing were lying at different places on the
roads and in the woods, perishing for want of teams, or of
money to pay the teamsters ; " that when ordered to be ready
to march against the British, the army answered that fighting

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 23

would be preferable to starving. Three days, reported a
commander, we " have been destitute of bread. Two days
we have been entirely without meat." Washington reported,
an "alarming deficiency, or rather total failure, of supplies."
On the 23d December, 1777, he reported : " Since the month
of July, we have had no assistance from the quartermaster-
general ; and to want of assistance from this department, the
commissary-general charges great part of his deficiency."
" We have, by a field return this day made, no less than two
thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight men now in camp unfit
for duty, because they are barefoot, and otherwise naked."

And — alas ! that we must say it — in this bitter time
critics arose to carp and sting, to attribute to Washington the
misery of the soldiers and the low estate of the war. Many
men in the region round about preferred to send their grain
to the British dancing in Philadelphia rather than to the
patriots dying at Valley Forge. What wonder that Wash-
ington cherished forever a tender friendship for the man who
stood at his side faithful among many faithless ; eager, active,
loyal, helpful, untiring, self-suppressing, through that season of
stress and test? Back and forth from Carlisle to Valley Forge,
from Valley Forge to Carlisle, went Colonel Blaine, consult-
ing friends and neighbors, urging the laggard traders and
farmers. Then it was seen why he had been foreordained a
miller, a farmer, a tradesman. Night and day, every mill that
he owned, every mill that he could control or influence, was
kept running to feed the soldiers. He ordered, pleaded, urged,
remonstrated, impelled. I have heard that insistent and irre-
sistible voice bearing down all opposition. The sore need of
money may be inferred from such simple facts as that with
an estimate of $8,000,000 voted for a year, the whole sum
actually raised by the States during the first five months was
$20,000. Out of his own means, and by his influence over his
neighbors, and by all his business reputation with men of
means and affairs, Colonel Blaine advanced a saving fund,
for the distressed and apparently abandoned army.

At one time (January, 1780) the Supreme Executive Council
of Pennsylvania drew a single warrant in his favor for one
million of dollars, to reimburse him for advances which his own

24 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

means and exertions had provided ; and at another time a war-
rant for seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars was credited
to him by the same authority, in payment of similar obligations.
And while he was gathering in provisions and pouring out
money he was also hammering away at Congress, whose jour-
nals are fretted with his name. April 5, 1777, the day before
his promotion to the generalship, Congress " Ordered that
there should be advanced to Ephraim Blaine Esqr. in part
payment of the balance due to him for provisions furnished the
troops, and in advance towards his furnishing provisions in
consequence of his late appointment $15,000." Another time
it is resolved that a copy of the letter from Ephraim Blaine
and its enclosures be transmitted without delay to the several
States, who are hereby requested to take into their serious con-
sideration the present want and distress of the army, and that
they furnish and forward, by means the most efficacious, the
supplies requested from them. Even as early as 1775 the
Committee reported that there is due to Ephraim Blaine for
expenses incurred by the treaty with the western Indians, and
paid by him, the sum of " 533 odd " dollars. There is a "Mem
of money paid sundry persons in 1776 when out with the
Militia." By 1780 at least, Congress opened its heart to
Colonel Blaine, and " Resolved him a salary at the rate of
#40,000 by the year until the further order of Congress, also
six rations a day, and forage for four horses," — not too high
a salary if we look at some of his accounts :

Feb. 14 1779 Col. Blaine bo1t at vendue
1 chafing dish
1 roasting jack

1 mahy [mahogany] china table
1 chest of drawers
1 mahy tea table
1 china bowl
6 cups & saucers

at the extraordinary, if one may not say extravagant, price of
X365 5s. 3d.1 The " 1 mahy tea table," at least, is still in good
preservation, and i«s held in affectionate reverence by his kin.

JThe pound in Pennsylvania currency was of the value of $2.66 2-3. The value of pounds,
shillings, pence, Pennsylvania currency, was expressed in dollars and ninetieth parts of a dollar.
The penny was 1-90, the shilling 12-90, and the pound 240-90 of a dollar. The latter was
therefore $2 60-90, or $2.66 2-3.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 25

Mrs. Irwin's bill for sugar and coffee is :
274 lbs. of sugar and 112 lbs. of coffee £702-5-0, at $2.66| per £.

1779, John Cox's bill for a night's lodging and boarding of
Colonel Blaine, his servant and two horses, is X64.

Decemb 17. 1779. Colo Blain Dr

To a Mug of Toddy ...... £8 0 0

Rum To Sert 0 15 0

Dinner & Club 400

Quarts of Corn 1 10 0

Supper 3 0 0

Club 976

2 Bottles of Clarrett 22 10 0

Lodging 0 7 6

Rum To Serv* 1 10 0

Breakfast 3 0 0

Ditto for Serfc 250

Hay ■ . 5 0 0

55 5 0

One account is not so surprising as the receipt:

Ephraim Blaine Esq. bought

1 Cag old spirits 10 gallons . . . . £5 10 0
Cag 3 6

£5 13 6

Reed at same time the contents in full for Michael Gratz

Alexk. Abrahams.

Recd. 18th Oct— 1779 from Ephra. Blaine fifty seven thousand Dollars
which 1 promise to replace in two Day

57,000 Dolls Robert Alison

The first item of an account with Mr. Nichols, but well after
the war, is for " Mhcle [merchandise] delivered Gen. Wash-
ington," <£78.

X31 14s. 2d. Pennsylvania currency he paid to Alexander
Blaine and John Holmes, Esq., for keeping General Morris's gray
horse Ajax through the winter, by order of Col. George Morgan,
who sent him down from Pittsburg.

An account made out for him in March, 1780, by George
Morton, who was an assistant in Colonel Blaine's office, is

26 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

supplemented with a note in Colonel Blaine's own handwriting,
whose severity scorches still through the century :

Sir : Annexed you have a statement of your acct. nearly as it will be
settled in the Creditors1 office for which there will be a considerable bal-
ance against you, for which I am accountable — if there appears any error
you can have it altered. Mr. Morton knows more of the amt. than I do.
I knew nothing of Mrs. Blaine's being indebted to you untill the other Day
and I am astonished to see the note you have written her upon that subject.
Mr. Morton will regulate the charges between us if any error and Mr.
Russell will fix the Exchange agreeable to rule. If money due to you, it
shall be paid and if the balance is against you, I shall expect it. I am Sir

Your hble Servt.

Eph. Blaine.

Colonel Blaine could not only say sharp words on occasion,
but take decisive and incisive action, as the records show, even
against Alexander Hamilton ! But he was equally prompt to
suppress all underhand scheming. Parts of an interesting little
correspondence between Blaine and Harrison attest his vigi-
lance and his loyalty.

TO COLONEL HARRISON.

Camp 1st Jan. 1778.
Sir: What I mentioned to you yesterday, thought it my duty. The
person who gave me my information is John Jones, Inn Keeper, near the
Windsor Forge ; he told me a Captain Reese belonging to one of the
Penna. Regiments, his brother and another man were present ; he seemed
a little guarded in mentioning the matter to me and said he was astonished
to hear the gentleman express himself so publicly ; part of his conversation
was to the effect, that the General was not the man people imagined, nor
yet the General ; and that he was unpardonable for missing the many
opportunities he had over the Enemy ; — the whole conversation can be had
from that gentleman. ... A very little time will discover some of
those ill-natured malicious men ; he assured there are but very few and are
preparing weapons to break their own heads.

Note by R. B. N. Harrison.

Colonel Blaine in a conversation the day preceding the date of this letter
told me General Conway had said G. W. — he is the gentleman alluded to.

General Conway's little unpleasantness at that time made it
imperative to know who was on the Lord's side, and what they
were doing who were on the other side ! In his intentness Col.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 27

Blaine is sometimes brusque ; and both he and his correspondents
are often too eager to be elegant. While orthography and punc-
tuation are little to the purpose, I have supplied both when
necessary to the sense. Homely their details and plain their
words, but the place whereon they wrought is holy ground :

Philadelphia, March 16, 1779.
Busy collecting food — will go as far as Winchester in Virginia. My
doubt about being able to procure a plentiful supply of Flour for our
coming is very great — there are near seven months before we can have
any relief from the Crops now in the Ground, and indeed sorry I am to
inform you that the scarcity of grain is not so real as artificial. Extortion
seems generally to prevail with mankind — some from a desire of obtaining
large prices hold back from sale — others from disaffection and dislike to
our currency.

TO ROBERT L. HOOPER, JUN., ESQ.,

A.C. of Purchases at Easton.

12th. I am afraid of Our Salted Provisions Spoiling. See that yours
is in proper Order and the pickle Sound. — One Weeks Neglect may occa-
sion considerable loss in that Article —

16th. " Am exceeding sorry to find that there is the least Appearance of
any of your Beef spoiling, it will be a great loss, and give the malicious
Room to charge us with Neglect. Let every Measure be adopted to pre-
serve it — believe Severe smoking will be the best but first have it clear
drained from the Old pickle — and make a Strong fresh Pickle, which let
it lay in, twelve Hours before you liang it

24th — The Acco* I have received of Your Salt Provisions being Spoiled
distresses me exceedingly. It will oblige us to buy fresh Beef before it is
fit to Use ; and at a most extravagant Price, and exclusive of the great Loss
the publick will Sustain it will occasion great Clamour with many people —

July 1st — I have had Letters from the Commissary Gen1 of Purchases
and Issues, and from General Sullivan — who has also wrote the Board of
War — that all the Salt Provisions are Spoiled — beg to hear from you by
very first Express —

Prince Toun 29th Jan'., 1780 —
Sir: I have done all in my Power to Obtain Money from the Treasury
board for the use of my Department but have been disappointed — The
Treasury being exhausted of the Monies limited and the taxes coining in
very slow — have Obliged Congress to delay payment of Large sums
wantd, for the Commissary and Quarter Master's Department — I have not
been able to Obtain a sum Necessary for the present Demands of my
assistants in the vicinity of Camp for the daily supplies of onr Army at
Head Quarters — You must therefore wait till Congress have it in their

28 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

power to Obtain money by tax and dispose of bill of Exchange which they
are now about selling, — without the Immediate wants of the Garrison at
Fort Pitt, call your attention. In that case you will make Immediate
application to the Treasury Board for a sum of money sufficient to make
the Necessary Purchases in your District, for the above purpose, and I
make no doubt they will furnish you with it. I am now on my way to
New England ; when I return shall give you every Assistance in my
Power, and am with much regard Sir

Your most Obd\
and most

Hble Serv\

Eph Blaine C.G.P

Petarabah Is*. of May 1780
Sir

I received yours of the 16th. of April and have noted the contents —

about that time I will be with you and have been as ready some time past

as I now am. — Wou'd request you to use your influence to send Mr. Darah

down to Elk as it will require a few days yet, to compleat my Accts —

Some accts. I believe I never shall get settled as people are not disposed to

receive such money as I have to pay them, and we have no tender law for

any species but hard Stuff — Do tell Monsieur the French Agent if he

wants any Supplies of the Victual kind fo his fleets or Armies, I am his

man, provided he will furnish plenty of Gold — God knows I have made

a pretty hard time past, the whole of my Commission not worth one

Damn. ■ —

I am with Esteem Sr

Your Obed\ Serv*.

Patrick Ewing— -
Col0. Ephraim Blaine —

Philadelphia, 25th May, 1780, records :

Executive and Legislative objection to his plans for supplies. He
insists, they give in.

Philadelphia, 27th May, 1780, he reports that he will send
one thousand barrels of flour soon :

Be assured of my utmost exertions in adopting ways and means to
procure supplies tho1 1 am loaded with debt and have not had a shilling
this two months.

TO COL. BLAINE.

Spring Field 10 August 1780
Sir

I receved yours of 9 today. I should long er now have Settled but
having a Suit out ditermoned that T brought against a Miller for what you

o
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LJJ

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o

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o

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o

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 29

are pleased to call froud I could not Settle my accounts before it was done
I purpose to be with you in a few days

Answer.
Sir

Admitting the causes above stated, it was your indispensable duty to
have acquainted me with the circumstance of the Miller, which you urge
as an apology for your neglect, and by such information you would have
saved me the trouble of writing upon such a disagreeable subject as that
of embezzlement, —

The performance of Colonel Blaine's duties carried him
throughout Pennsylvania, and from New England to the Caro-
linas, and it is pleasant sometimes to find him at old Donegal
with his intimate stanch friend Colonel Lowrey, whose
home, "Locust Grove," stood on the sunniest slope of the
Susquehanna, a half mile from its bank. He had come from
the north of Ireland when about six years old. He had been
Colonel Blame's companion on the Bouquet expedition, he had
marched with General Forbes to Duquesne, and had escaped
with his life from the massacre of Bloody run; more happy
than his brother John, who had been killed by the Indians at
the " Forks of the Ohio," in 1750. Both land-lovers and land-
owners, both Indian traders of many years' standing, with Indian
trading-stores in Carlisle, Colonel Lowrey and Colonel Blaine
were not only sentimental friends in Donegal, with fresh
Scotch-Irish reminiscences, but hard-headed business friends in
the world of money-making, co-patriots in the great cause of
independence, and intimate and sympathetic in all. Colonel
Lowrey, too, had become an officer in the Revolutionary war,
and distinguished himself by his bravery, his fidelity, and his
sagacity. His home on the river nearly opposite Anderson's
ferry was on the great line of travel, and during the war shel-
tered many officers despatched on important business to and
from headquarters. When Congress was in session at York,
many distinguished people who had dealings there stopped
over at Colonel Lowrey's. Sometimes when the ice prevented
the boats from passing, the travellers were detained for days,
and the hospitable owner drew liberally upon his large flocks
of turkeys for the sustenance and good cheer of his friends.
ft is pleasant to think of neighborly festivities relieving the

30 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

stern tension of war, and the ample rooms of the hospitable
Lowrey house echoing between the roar and rush of battle the
inextinguishable laughter of the gods.

They had need to hearten each other in Donegal, for
the Pennsylvania Quakers, if patriotic, were non-combatant.
While Howe and Cornwallis could get no forage in the country
around New York, because it was so closely watched by that
arch-rebel George Washington 'and his handful of starveling
soldiers, the hills and valleys of Pennsylvania mocked them with
rich granaries. Bertram Galbraith, son of James, therefore
cousin to Rebecca Galbraith Blaine, brought the battalions
of Donegal and the country to arms; but the non-combatants
resisted arms, and kept Colonel Galbraith and Colonel Lowrey
in the saddle day and night, arresting the rebellious, encourag-
ing the loyal, throwing the ring-leaders into jail by way of in-
timidation, bailing them out again by way of conciliation, and
giving their own personal obligation to the farmers for payment
of forage and cattle taken for the use of the army.

On a Sunday morning, Colonel Galbraith sent an express to
Donegal to Colonel Lowrey to call out his Donegalians against
the advancing British. The express arrived at the meeting-
house during service. The congregation immediately adjourned
to the grove, and the men joined hands in a circle around one
of the big trees, since called " The Witness Tree," and pledged
themselves anew to the sacred cause of freedom.

Their beloved Scotch minister, Colin McFarquhar, had not
been in the country quite long enough to establish a clear
record, so they sweetly forced him inside the circle and made
him take off his hat and hurrah for the Continental cause,
which he did with as good grace as possible, whatever may
have been his predilections, and lived among them in love for
many years thereafter ; while Colonel Lowrey inarched on with
his men to the front, and when they could find no red-coats
for a target, amused themselves by firing at tavern-signs which
bore any relation to the tyrant George, till they reached the
Brandywine, where the joking ceased.

Washington lost at Brandywine, and Gates won at Saratoga.
And when, forgetting Schuyler, he came down from Saratoga
to persuade Congress that he alone had won the battle from

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 31

Burgoyne, and deserved to be put over the head of Washington,
Colonel Lowrey met him on the river-banks, as a loyal brother-
officer needs must, and having, manlike, bidden him to his
house, hurried up apace to inquire too late of Mistress Lowrey,
" My dear, can you entertain company to-day ? " " No, my
dear," emphatically protested the good housewife, "there is
nothing — " " 'Sh ! don't say a word ! " interrupted the colonel,
in no stage whisper. " They are right at my heels ! " Mrs. Gates
was among them, and the little girl who nestled shyly in a
corner and absorbed everything with eager eyes, to transmit it to
this generation, remembered even the ribbons the lady wore ;
but, alas ! she transmitted them to a male child, and, for all he
can tell of their color or texture or fashioning, they might as
well have been torn to tatters in Burgoyne's defeat !

Gates had good cheer at the Lowrey house, but Washington
remained at the head of the army.

Ah ! what eager ambitions, what high hopes, what bitter
rivalries, what splendid determination and heroism, have trav-
elled up and down that beautiful slope to the Susquehanna, in
the old days when the slope was unvexed with houses, and
nothing lay between the home and the majestic river but the
green turf or the unbroken snow !

The lady of the manor was as heroic as there was any call
for ; witness the courtesy with which she perforce opened her
house to her Gates guests and made them welcome ; but she
also loved ornamentation and beauty, and Colonel Lowrey
being away when she was ordering the trappings of her new
carriage, she innocently enough bespoke a coat-of-arms to be
thereon emblazoned, meaning no treason, only decoration ; but
when the colonel came home and saw the accursed thing, thun-
der gathered on his brows. " Bring me a hatchet," he com-
manded a waiting servant. The hatchet was brought, and the
pretty bauble was hacked off the carriage and buried by his
own hands, and no man knoweth of its sepulchre to this day.

Colonel Blaine's children were too young to serve him ex-
cept through their bright spirits, their fresh interest, and the
inspiration of their free future beckoning. He was but thirty-
four. To his little boys of seven and nine the war was but
a wide playground ; but his brothers Alexander and William

32 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

were his loyal and able assistants, both active officers, the
former in his own department, Assistant Commissary of Issues.
Alexander is represented through his daughters in our genera-
tion by his descendant, Judge Shiras, of the Supreme Court, by
the Hon. Robert J. Walker, and until within a few years by
his daughter, Mrs. Anderson, who, nearing her one hundredth
birthday, carried into our time her tall figure, her striking
presence, and traces of the great reputed beauty which had
made her young days brilliant.

An account of provisions issued to the Seventh Pennsylvania
Regiment, detachments, artificers, wagoners, etc., at Carlisle,
from January to September, 1777, by Alexander Blaine, Assist-
ant Commissary of Issues, beautifully ruled and written by his
own hand, has escaped destruction, to show that our patriot
army disposed of 109,403J lbs. of bread to 116,552 « Jills " of
" Rum or Whiskey."

Alexander Blaine had also been fitted for the work by an
excellent education, and by long experience in business affairs.
So early as 1768, when he could have been hardly more than
twenty-five years old, he received from the Hon. John Penn,
Esq., his certificate of character and license to trade with the
Indian nations and tribes.

To the wonderful triumphant end of the war, Ephraim
Blaine held his even course, strong, sustained, effective,
untouched by envy, unmoved by calumny, unswerving under
opposition, loyal to his chief, loyal to his cause, marshalling
his inglorious flour and whiskey for the preservation of life
as strenuously as if he had been intrusted with the glory of
battle. And presently even the dates of his severe business
letters and the dry terms of his orders and despatches are
musical with the notes, fragrant with the blossoms, of approach-
ing peace.

Public Service.
York Town 30th. May 1781,
Colonel James Wood

Commanding the Convention troops, Lancaster.
Dear Sir

I am ordered by the board of War to make Provisions for the Convention
troops and their guards amounting to near three thousand men, and have
it laid in at convenient places upon the route in which the are Ordered to

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 33

march — I have already given the necessary Orders and the places of de-
posit between Frederick Town and North river is this place, Reading
Easton, Sussex Court House, and Fishkill Landing — Flour and Whiskey
will be procured but have reason to doubt a difficulty in Obtaining meat —
I shall Employ some person, who will meet you at this places, and give
attention to the supply of those troops until! they reach Rutland in Massa-
chusetts Bay — I am now upon my way to Carlisle where I shall remain a
few days. If you cou'd inform me the time you expect to reach this place
will do my self the honor of waiting upon you —

Col. Wood.

Commanding the Convention Prisoners :

Reading 17,h June 1781,

Dear Sir

I expected to have had the pleasure of seeing you at this place but am
disappointed. Captain Alexander, the person whom I have appointed to
attend the Convention Troops upon their March to the Eastward and use
every endeavour in his power to procure supplies at the sundry ports upon
the route, and attend to your Orders and Instructions, upon meeting the
Hessians troops in Marsh Creek, and thinking you would be up Immedi-
ately did not proceed but return'd with them to this place, where he will
remain untill he hears from you. He is a Gentleman on whom you may
rely, and will closely attend to your Instructions and put every part of
them into execution

That his even course was sustained only by loyaltyr to his
chief and his cause is occasionally seen. " Please your Excel-
lency," he wrote from Philadelphia the year before, " it has not
been in my power to obtain a single shilling of money from the
Treasury Board : My people are so much indebted that their
credit is quite exhausted with the Country. . . . The treasury
being exhausted, my Agents greatly involved, the delay of our
public finances and the general change in the system of the
Quartermaster and Commissary-General departments has made
my office one of the most disagreeable man ever experienced.
Indeed nothing would induce me to continue under present
appearances but the duty I owe my country and regard to your
Excellency, which ever shall be motives to command my best
services and surmount every other difficulty."

34 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

III.

COLONEL BLAINE'S PEACEFUL YEARS.

/COLONEL BLAINE came out of the war still a young man,
^-^ his eye not dim, nor his natural force abated. Instantly he
took up again with undiminished ardor, promptitude, and effect-
iveness all the old business of life ■ — trade, lands, exchange ; all
the old pleasures of life, social and domestic. The establishment
of Congress in Philadelphia, with his revered friend General
Washington, at the head of the government, made that city
the social centre of the new nation, and Colonel Blaine
availed himself of its advantages as far as possible by making
Philadelphia his winter home, and taking his full share in
its duties and festivities. His fortune had been impaired, or
at least diminished, by his generous contributions to the
patriot cause, but it was still ample for a gentle and wide
hospitality, for the best rearing of his children, and for the
demands, small or great, of an extensive business.

From Colonel Blaine, Fort Pitt 25th. Novr. 1783
To Mr. William Bell, Merchant, Philadelphia :
Dear Sir
I have this moment returned from being up the Monongahala River in
pursuit of One of the Deputy Surveyors — and fortunately met with Col0.
Marshall who has Fayette County which Extends from the Mouth of Sandy
River to Kaintuck, and back to the Mountains. I have Obtaind a depu-
tation for Mr Lyon who goes with me as a Surveyor — Mr Marshall has
given me bad Encouragement Respecting Vacant lands — however I shall
proceed on Friday Morning and adopt every possible measure to accom-
plish my business. I shall have excessive fituage and do not Expect it
will be in my Power to return before the last of February — After I reach
the Mouth of sandy River and Explore that Country and locate my lands
I will have to ride One hundred & fifty Miles to Mr Marshalls Office to
Enter them. This will take considerable time, then after the surveys are
made I must return them and have the drafts signed and Certified. Mr
Elliot has been gone some days. When he has his business a little settled

BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 35

at the falls he will proceed to Green River and endeavour to lay the
warrants I have sent with him. You will be so kind as to hury up the
goods which I wrote for by Mr Tate and Rather add to the list as many of
the articles are much wanted. Speak to Mr Ludhom Mr A & Co and
tell them to keep my note untill I return at which time they shall be punctu-
ally paid with Interest — You will much Oblige me in paying Mr. Gren
the Waggoner who Brought up part of my goods the sum of fifty pounds,
and I forgot to settle with Mr. Galaugher in record that for some delph
ware which I bought from him. Pray will you pay him. Pray endeavour
to have our Indian cargo early in the Summer there will be a great demand.
I shall have a very Considerable Remmittanee to carry down with me upon
my Return in money' and piltry —

You will please to pay attention to my family, and should my son
Return from France before I come home, I shall take it a very particular
favour if you will make it your business to See him often and give him
your friendly advice. He is an unweildy boy and will stand in much need
of it, please to present my Compliments to Mrs. Bell and believe me with
much Reguard Dear Sir
MR Bell.

And being at Fort Pitt he improved the occasion to turn an
honest penny, for we find a conveyance to him of three lots in
the city of Pittsburg, by John Penn, Esq., and John Penn, Jr.,
— grandson and great-grandson of William Penn, late proprie-
taries of Pennsylvania.

Philada. 26th Ap1. 1785
Gentlemen

we find by information you have not been able to dispose of the goods
you had from us neither have you paid us the money agreable to Contract.
We have therefore sent M\ Alexander Blaine to act for us with full power
to receive from you the debt due to us — We think from the best Informa-
tion you cannot proceed to Canada without the greatest danger of losing
your property, and therefore deprive you of your good intentions (paying
what you owe) by losing verry Considerably on your adventure and put-
ing it out of your power to pay at a future day. Mr. Blaine has full power
and authority to dispose off John Lauman One third of the Cargo for cash
or piltry upon such terms as he may think prudent; shoud he fail in this,
he has special instructions to Bring the goods back to this City, we there-
fore advise you to put the property into his hands to sell what he can at
Skenactady for Cash or peltry, and what he can not sell to bring back to
this City where they ma}T be sold with Little or no loss and the neat pro-
ceeds thereof go to your Credit. We again Repeat to you the danger in
attempting to proceed from where you now are, as we have undoubted
information of the Risque and the property is too Valuable to be triffled
with, and we must also expect punctuality of payment in a very short time

36 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

— We also think your Own prudence will Immediately Acquiese with the
plan we have proposed, therefore have not a Doubt of your Complying in
Opinion and doing every thing for your own advantage, as also for Gen-
tleman

your Obd'. Hble Serv\
P Post
To Genl. Irvine.

Philad\ Sept. 1787
Dear Sir

You will be much surprised to find I have been in Philadelphia ever
since you left it. My friend Stewart & self have differed and have been
in equal distress for want of money, indeed he has been very diffident. I
could say a great deal but shall Omit it respecting him. I would have
wrote you long ere this but the perplexity I have been under owing to this
Virginia affair has given me much trouble and distress — Mr. Pollock has
agreed with Mr. Hamilton for Bird's place and goes up in a day or two.
He has taken it at the Stiff Price. I had a good deal of trouble before I got
them to a Compromise — the Convention are still siting and perhaps will
not break up this month yet, various are the Conjectures Respecting their
deliberations. Some people take upon them to say that the Legislative
branches of the Respective States will not be trusted with the final deter-
mination, but that a Convention of the people at large will take place and
that their delegates will have the finishing; of the business — and I am of
Opinion it will answer best, as the prejudices of party will not prevail so
powerfully as in the different assemblys —

Pray how does your new Government come on, and are your Officers of
Gover* yet appointed ? The sale you have made is a Large One. I know
all the Boundaries Except the town North of Siota, within those Lines the
Eastern Gentry have secured a very Valuable tract of Country, as I sup-
pose they will have all the Valuable Lands upon Muskingum, Hackhack-
ing, and the North side of Siota — I hope they have given a Dollar per lot.
I wish I had One Township which I could Locate at that price (within their
claim) indeed I might say fifty. Pray favour me with a Line upon that
Subject & who are supposed to be the Officers. I have been inform'd the
Candidates who are in Nomination for Governor, are Gen S*. Clair, Gen1
Parsons, and your self. I should suppose the appointment of Gen. Parsons
would be impolotick as he is one of the Principle Proprietors concearned
in the purchase, and it would be giving him an undue influence which
might be attended with evil Consequences. This is an idea which has
struck me in thinking on the matter, therefore suppose Congress will have
the same Opinion and that the appointment will rest between you and the
President.

I find you are disposed to sell some ranges of Lots in the Course of this
month. Pray can you lay your hands upon a few thousand Acres, if they
are sold in tracts of 640 lots, for Instance the Mingo Bottom. There is a
Valuable tract of Land upon the Ohio River about fourteen Miles beldw
Wheeling, at the Mouth of a Creek Called Captina I wish you could

ELEANOR BLAINE,

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 87

purchase five or Six Lots at this place to include the Mouth of said Creek
and Extend an Equal distance up & down the river. The Land is Valua-
ble and would command a price in a short time. I will Join you in the
purchase, I shall leave the City in a day or two, and you will not see me
untill I return from Kentuckey

My Son has been home above two weeks ; he knew nothing of your
being in New York altho he was two days in that place, and called at Mr.
Elsworths to get Lodging. He promises to be a Cleaver Likely fellow,
and I hope will do well. Tf you have any thing to do in that New Coun-
try, I wou'd wish to get him an Apointment, such as his Capacity might be
equal to, say Secretary, or what Else you please,

His children were indeed growing into maturity, companion-
ship, and support. His two sons had received a liberal educa-
tion, and had become handsome and accomplished gentlemen,
known in life and to be remembered long after they had left it
for their distinguished bearing and social graces. Both followed
their father into mercantile pursuits, including also traffic in
lands. James, the eldest, named for his father's father, had been
sent abroad for special professional training to Bordeaux, and
for further travel and wider acquaintance with the world. Sou-
venirs of his tour yet remain to his great-great-grandchildren.
There is a tradition that the young gentleman developed abroad
a greater fondness for society than for business, which is not
improbable considering his age, for he was not seventeen when
he returned from his first trip, and a very young man when he
returned from his second. John Bannister Gibson, the illus-
trious Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania,
wrote that "James Blaine, at the time of his return from Europe,
was considered to be among the most accomplished and finest-
looking gentlemen in Philadelphia, then the centre of fashion,
elegance, and learning on this continent. His reputation as a
model gentleman was honorably sustained throughout life." He
and his brother Robert entered upon business together in Car-
lisle, and gradually came into the management of their father's
affairs as well as their own. John Adams, President of the
United States, willing to do Colonel Blaine a service, nomi-
nated his son James as captain in the United States Infantry.
Domestic joys came to crown their success. Both married
young and married happily in their own sphere of life. The

38 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES a. BLAINE.

wife of the eldest was Jane Hoge, daughter of David Hoge, Esq.,
a public-spirited citizen, whose name is closely identified with
the upbuilding of civilization in both eastern and western
Pennsylvania. He had relinquished the sheriff's office to
Colonel Blaine the year after his daughter's birth, and threw
in his interests, though not his residence, to the formation of
Washington.

December 22, 1791, Robert married Susanna, daughter of
Paul Metzer, of McAllister's town, now Hanover. Their happy
home in Carlisle, and on the Cave farm, is still represented not
only in tradition, but in living charm and force.

It was no doubt in view of these marriages that Colonel
Blaine bought the Middlesex estate which became so dear to
him.

It had happened, in the order of events, that his old friend
Robert Callender, who had been his surety when he assumed
the office of sheriff, died in 1776, leaving by will his Middlesex
estate to his son Robert Callender, then a minor. Fifteen years
afterwards the property was sold from this son at sheriff's sale,
Robert Buchanan being the sheriff, and Ephraim Blaine was
minded to buy it. In the deed which conveyed it to him,
Oct. 12, 1791, it is described as containing " 563 as 139 prs."
called " Middlesex,'' with fifty acres adjoining. At an earlier
date it had belonged to the Chambers family, and as James
Galbraith's wife, Mrs. Ephraim Blaine's great^grandmother, was
a Chambers, it is not improbable that in reverting to her the
estate had come to its own again.

In 1792 the father, James Blaine, passed away from earth,
well stricken in years. He had lived through the storm
and stress of Indian and civil war, supporting his sons with
his patriotism, and rejoicing with them in the triumph of
the cause which all upheld with all their strength, the one
giving to it the blessing and approval of his patriarchal years,
the others their prime and power. He had lived to see that
his experiment of. a change of home had not been a mistake.
For the petty restrictions of the British government and the
consequent exasperations and hardships, he had come into a
land where freedom was limited only by the laws which he
and his wise compeers had made in their wisdom, and where

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 39

possessions were limited only by the ability of brain and hand
and honor. He had been able to rear his children in com-
fort to intelligence and self-respect, and he saw them, all but
the one who had gone before him, clothed in the sovereign
power of self-governing citizens, held in esteem by the republic
which they had served. Surely he could wrap the drapery of
his couch about him and lie down, not to pleasant dreams, for
dreams were no part of the faith of Scotch Presbyterians. Their
creed was no such stuff as dreams are made of. They died
under contract with God, in full expectation that he would, and
moral demand that he should, grant them immortal life in Jesus
Christ our Lord.

James Blaine's will made no bequest to his eldest son, to whom
he had already given great gifts, but commended his family and
his estate to the care of that beloved and trusted son.

A deeper sorrow came to the family the next year — deeper,
because not in line with nature's intent. A large business at
that time was carried on between Carlisle and New Orleans
and other points south. A common mode was to load flat-
boats with provisions, float down to New Orleans, and remain
until the cargo was sold at what profit the times permitted,
sometimes only after a three months' waiting in the use of
means.

From one of these long absences James Blaine returned to
find only a grave instead of his young wife and the child
whom he had never seen.

A letter from Carlisle, April 18, 1793, says with quaint
pathos :

" We lost a very worthy female inhabitant of Carlisle a few
days ago (the wife of Mr. James Blaine) who died & was
buried in the absence of her husband. He arrived the day
after the Funeral ; & upon hearing of the sad disaster, ran to
the graveyard, almost distracted, & there remained a good
while fixed in the deepest sorrow."

In the deepest sorrow he looked again upon her face and ob-
tained some locks of her hair, from which ten rings were made
for remembrance — - five with her hair and his own entwined,
five with such mourning emblems as love could command from
the art of that period.

40 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Two, at least, of these rings remain to-day in the ownership
of a granddaughter of the young wife's sister.

In the old graveyard at Carlisle her brief story is told :
" In Memory of Jane Blane, Wife of James Blaine, who died
the 15th of April, 1T93, in the 24th year of her age.

" Reader behold and drop a tear
Beauty's remains lie bury'd here ;
But Heav'n which lent the transient boon
Hath bid her sun go down at noon.
Ye fair since hers may be your case
Forget the beauties of the face. -
Go first in virtues paths and tread,
Then safely mingle with the dead,
And you'll with Sister Seraphs join
Where Heaven's refulgent glories shine."

In June, of the same year, Colonel Blame's life was touched
by another tragedy, as far as possible from the dignity of his
father's composed farewell, or the pathos of his daughter's early
death. John Duncan, a brother of Judge Duncan, had some
political dispute with James Lamberton, the grandfather of the
late Hon. Robert A. Lamberton, LL.D., President of Lehigh
University of Pennsylvania, — a dispute which presently be-
came an altercation, so violent and personal as seemed in the
judgment of those days to demand blood. A challenge was
sent and accepted, and Col. Ephraim Blaine was chosen second.
The duel was fought, and Duncan was killed at the only ex-
change of shots between them ; departing " this life June 22nd
1793 aged thirty-one years."

But for all grief, disappointment, or death, the world
goes on. In May, of the next year, the bereft husband was in
New Orleans again on his three months' business trip, and in
October he was back in Carlisle helping his father to entertain
the President of the United States.

The whiskey insurrection was testing the new government.
Like most insurrections, it had a reasonable side. The
Scotch-Irish had emigrated for liberty, which for them in-
cluded freedom from restrictions in trade. They had hardly
fought through their last fight with the old home tyrant,
when here was their own chosen government putting an enor-
mous tax on whiskey. But in the extreme West, whiskey was

ROBERT BLAINE.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 41

the chief currency ! Rye was the chief product. As rye it
could not be taken to market. A horse could carry only four
bushels. Of rye changed into whiskey, he could carry twenty-
four bushels. Freight in wagons to Philadelphia was from $5
to $10 a hundred pounds, and such freight ate up both profits
and rye. There was no trade down the Ohio, and lower
Mississippi was held by Spaniards. Whiskey was the only
high road to salt, which was $5 a bushel ; to iron and steel,
which were $15 and $20 the hundred weight. Consequently
distilleries were everywhere, but few of them paid cash for
grain. The men of the interior saw the men on the coast
drinking their imported wines which transportation by land
would make too costly ; and they said among themselves, If we
cannot import, why shall we not make ? Why should we be
called upon to pay duty for drinking our grain, any more than
for eating it ? And it is hard to see that the question was ever
more logically answered than with Light Horse Harry's fifteen
thousand troops. But that logic carried the day. President
Washington, Colonel Blaine, and the others drank their
" cags " of wine, and decided that law, whether good or bad,
must be enforced. The nation was not seated firmly enough
in the saddle to permit the horse to take the bits in his mouth
for a moment.

" September 30, 1794," says Jacob Holtzheimer, " that great
and good man General Washington, President of the United
States, set out from his house on Market street, with Secretary
Hamilton on his left and his private secretary on his right, to
head the Militia to quell the Western Insurrection." His
arrival in Carlisle gave a great week to the stirring little town.
The President's body-guard was composed of New Jersey
cavalry, handsomely uniformed, and himself had no superior
for personal dignity and imposing presence. But public sen-
timent in Pennsylvania was republicanism flavored with
whiskey, and the soldiers and the citizens were often at odds
— once at so great odds that Governor Mifflin found it neces-
sary to soothe the excited crowd from the balcony of the
hotel on South Hanover street. Mr. Paul Metzger, father of
Mrs. Robert Blaine, and his twelve-year-old son, George, were
then on a visit to Carlisle, dividing their time between Mrs.

42 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Robert's house and that of Dr. McCoskrey, father of the late
Bishop McCoskrey. General Washington had visited at Mr.
Metzger's home in Hanover, and of course little went on which
the lively lad did not see. When his host gave a dinner-party
to the President, Governor Mifflin, Colonel Blaine, and other
distinguished men, George, being his guest, was, though but a
lad, invited, or be it said permitted, to appear at the table.
This honor he was too shy to accept, but in the prospect of a
street fight the small boy's shyness vanished, and through the
whole commotion he stood at the Governor's elbow, and so was
able to tell us all about it.

The President's headquarters were on the opposite side of
the street, where both Colonel Blaine's houses were devoted
to his accommodation and entertainment. In the one which
Colonel Blaine himself occupied on the corner just south of
the public square, the President and staff were guests at his
table. In the one adjoining they were lodged. Mrs. Blaine
was at this time an invalid, attended and cheered by her young
niece, Margaret Lyon, who had been almost reared in her
uncle's house ; and the young daughter-in-law mounted her
horse every day, and, leaving her little brood at home, rode
in through the green fields, from the Cave Farm, and as-
sumed supervision of the President's entertainment and chap-
eronage of the young maiden. The sons, Captain James and
Robert, took charge of the outdoor arrangements, seeing that
"the President's horses" and accoutrements were properly
cared for, and all expenses promptly met ; as witness many
a bill, order, and account :

Sir, Deliver four bushels of Oats for the President's Horses.

Jas Blaine
7th. Octr. 1794
Mr. Robt. Blaine.

Receiv'd of John Logan, one Load of Hay for the President's Horses —

Jas. Blaine.
fth. October 1794
Pay him three pounds
E. Blaine.

Thus the father had only to devote his time to his distin-
guished guest, who, in turn, made himself thoroughly agreeable,

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 43

especially delighting young Margaret, by praising her "flannel
cakes," and begging her to give him her receipt for them that
he might carry it home to his Patty! Yes, " My Patty." Cum-
berland county and Washington county join hands on that !

History says that while the President was at Carlisle he
heard that the insurrection had been quelled. A private theory,
firmly held, is that he enjoyed his visit there so much that he
was willing to believe the insurrection had never arisen ! This
theory all must adopt who know what that Blaine home-circle
was — the host dignified, courteous, hospitable, brilliant, the
centre of all life and love and gayety ; the children young,
bright, strong, devoted, — an harmonious family circle ; the
guests pleased, stimulated, happy, and giving happiness ; every
comfort, convenience, and entertainment that money and gen-
erosity and native elegance could supply — all, hosts and
guests, at their best in mind, body, and estate.

And the next January James and Margaret were married ;
but when he bought the engagement ring, Mistress Peggy
used to tell her grandchildren, the French jeweller, Pierre
Lorette, asked him what initials were to be engraved on it.
" Oh, your own," replied the light-hearted lover. "And I was
so vexed ! " laughed the grandmother. For "Peggy " was just
entering one of its periodical obscurations as a fashionable
appellative, and its owner aspired to the dignity of " Mar-
garet," — but she wore the ring on her faithful hand to her
life's end.

Margaret Lyon brought to the family not only her win-
ning personality and her Blaine inheritance, but the strength
of another stock. When Ephraim Blaine went his way from his
father's house to wealth, credit, and renown, his sister Eleanor
went her way and found them all in Samuel Lyon, who had
also come over from that fruitful north of Ireland, with his
father John Lyon and his mother Margaret Armstrong. Now
the father, John, was a strong, true man, and having chosen for
himself two hundred seventy-three acres and sixty-three perches
of fine, fertile, romantic country, besides the proprietary grant
to John Lyon et ah, of twenty acres of land for the use of the
Presbyterian church of Tuscarora, he worshipped God, and
there he lies buried. But Margaret Armstrong, whom he

44 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

took to wife in Ireland, lias come down to us through the
one hundred and fifty years all a-sparkle with brilliant in-
tellect, with wise and wide intelligence; fit to adorn any
society, but better employed in the upbuilding of a State; —
sister of that Homeric hero who never found his Homer,
John Armstrong, the fearless warrior who, with two hundred
and eighty farmer-soldiers, marched two hundred miles up the
west branch of the Susquehanna, across an ambushed moun-
tain wilderness, to the great encampment of the Indians at
the Great island, quietly surrounded them in their midnight
revelry in that stronghold of Kittanning, at daybreak fell upon
them, — and Pennsylvania had rest from slaughter for a while.

In 1758 Colonel Armstrong and Colonel Washington, march-
ing ahead with the Provincials under Colonel Bouquet, in
General Forbes's expedition against Fort Duquesne, formed an
acquaintance which ripened into a warm personal friendship.
When the French, taking alarm, fired their fort and fled, it was
Colonel Armstrong's own hand which raised the British flag
over the ruins of Fort Duquesne, and it became Pittsburg.

In the Revolutionary war, as brigadier and major-general,
he took as active a part, and fought the battle of the
Brandy wine as earnestly as that of Kittanning. When, in
1779, Col. Stephen Bayard wished to name the fort he had built
at Kittanning for Colonel Brodhead — or himself, that sturdy
soldier disdained the compliment, and disdained to return it to
Colonel Bayard. He replied frankly, not to saj^ bluntly, " I
think it a compliment due to General Armstrong to call that
fort after him ; therefore, it is my pleasure from this time for-
ward it be called Fort Armstrong, and I doubt not we shall
soon be in the neighborhood of a place where greater regard is
paid to saints than at Kittanning, where your sainthood may
not be forgotten." And this answer not being considered final,
he wrote again nine days after : " I have said that I thought it
a compliment due to General Armstrong to name the fort now
erecting at Kittanning after him ; and I should be very sorry to
have the first fort erected by my direction in the department
named after me. Besides, I should consider it will be more
proper to have our names at a greater distance from our
metropolis. I never denied the sainthood of Stephen or John

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 45

but some regard to priority must be necessary even among
saints." The fort has sunk into the past, but grateful Penn-
sylvania erected a monument more durable than brass to the
hero of Kittanning ; for she not only presented him with a
piece of plate and a silver medal, but gave the name of
Armstrong to the county which included the battlefield.

A year after this more than Homeric hero had led his host
to Kittanning he was writing, " To-morrow we begin to haul
stones for the building of a meeting-house on the north side of
the square." When the Indians had been subdued and the
stone church reared, the next project of these lofty State-
builders was a college, and Dickinson College arose ; the
witness on the spot is that " nothing of that kind could have
gone forward at this period without the ardent sympathy and
cooperation, if not the controlling influence, of Gen. John
Armstrong." His education, his wealth, his political and
social position made him the first man to be consulted, and gave
his opinions the highest influence in all questions of general
interest in Church or State.

It was natural that such a man should work out the Pauline
faith, and think him worse than an infidel who provideth not.
for his own house. With the aid of his nephews, Margaret
Armstrong's sons, and by order of the Proprietaries, he had
laid out the town of Carlisle, and marked the corner lots
that Ephraim Blaine afterwards bought. As fast as his
nephews became available he availed himself of them and
swept them into places of honor and profit and hard labor — •
surveyors, justices of the peace, assessors, holders of all the
honorable offices through which a free people governs itself.
And when he could command no more offices he created new
ones, all tending to the grace and glory of the blossoming
wilderness. Like himself, mighty men of war these boys
became, fighting the foe wherever he appeared, Indian or
Quaker or British, or even their own too liberty-loving Scotch-
Irish, if it came to revolt against the established order ; for
though, they loved liberty, it was liberty under law.

Samuel Lyon, father of Margaret Lyon, son of Margaret Arm-
strong, settled on land adjoining his father's, and presently
inherited one-half his father's farm. In addition to his state

46 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

and town offices he was, in 1780, made commissary general
of purchases for the Revolutionary army, doubtless through
the representations of his brother-in-law ; for nepotism in that
serious time seems to have been the guide-post to appoint-
ment and promotion, men taking for vitally important work
the men they knew best. Establishing himself in Carlisle, he
was brought into close official relations with his brother-in-
law, until in due time the family tie was further established
by the union of Margaret Lyon with James Blaine.

In less than one month after his son's second marriage, Feb.
5, 1795, Colonel Blaine lost the wife of his youth — Rebecca,
daughter of the Galbraiths. A second month, and the bride's
great-uncle, John Armstrong, " eminently distinguished for
patriotism, valor, and piety," joined her in the unseen world ;
the stern and strenuous life, the sweet and cherishing life,
going out alike in the odor of sanctity. The last years of
the mother had. been spent in comparative seclusion, on account
of illness and increasing infirmities which banished her from
the activities of society, and from all but the ministrations of
the family. The household niece, Margaret, could no longer
make her uncle her first thought, because her cousin had appro-
priated it. It is not then strange that the beautiful young
widow, with whom Colonel Blaine had been thrown into pecul-
iarly close and pathetic relations four years before, should
come into his mind and into his heart. He was fifty-six years
old and she was thirty-eight — no forbidding disparity where
the man was courtly and commanding, rich and distinguished,
handsome and cultivated, in the prime of a successful life,
enlarged and softened by experience, in charity with all the
world, a man of quick as well as wide views, of prompt
decision, unflinching resolution, successful execution, eminent
unselfishness, sought by the humblest, valued by the highest.

Some years before, Colonel Blaine, among other transactions,
had bought a lot of land on the west side of North Hanover
street, on the public square at Carlisle, not far from his own
houses, which Were on the east side of South Hanover street,
just south of the public square. On this lot he built two
houses, whose every line speaks the lavishment of love and the
love of beauty. In his sheriffs receipt-book is a receipt for

BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. 11LAINE. 47

brick, whose date indicates that its destination was to these
houses. Their fine and stately architecture is still a pleasure
to the eye and a repose to the soul. No modern. Eastlake sen-
timent can draw more heavily on " sincerity " than these doors,
with their massive colonial bulk, their hinges reaching nearly
across the door, and showing to the most careless their easy
ability to sustain the swing. The arched windows, the ornate
yet elegant mantels, the ample and cheerful rooms, are given
over to business, but speak yet of the home courtesies and com-
forts of the past. These houses, complete in every detail, the
loving father — wise man — - conveyed to his proud and devoted
sons, Sept. 18, 1797; to James Blaine the one on the south-
erly part of the lot, together with three hundred acres of land ;
to Robert Blaine the one on the northerly lot, together with the
Cave mill and farm of two hundred and fifty acres, and four
hundred acres of mountain land.

Two days afterwards, September 20, he married Sarah Eliza-
beth Postlethwaite Duncan, the granddaughter of Joseph Rose,
a distinguished Irish barrister from Dublin who had died in
Pennsylvania, and widow of him who had fallen in the fatuous
duel; and thus he gained for the solitude of a saddened hearth
seven years' companionship with a woman whose Irish wit and
beauty, whose elegance and social accomplishments brought
down to the middle of the ' present century, living witness of
the charm which had been confessed by three generations.

One son was born to them, whom they named for his
father Ephraim, and to whom the happy father gave the Mid-
dlesex home which he seems to have loved best of all, from
which he could never stay long away, and in which he spent the
greater part of his closing years. But his beloved wife, Sarah
Elizabeth, besides personal devises, was to enjoy the whole
estate at Middlesex during her life, " if she continues unmarried "
(with ample provision, however, even if she should not continue
unmarried), paying out of the same "all that may be necessary
for the proper support and education of my son Ephraim Blaine
until he shall arrive at the age of twenty-one years." When
Ephraim was twenty-one lie was to enter into possession of
the estate, but was to pay one-half the profits to his mother
during her life and widowhood ; " and if my said son Ephraim

48 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES <l. BLAINE,

should die before he would arrive at the age of twenty-one
years and without having lawful issue to inherit the same
estate, then I give and devise to my grandson Ephraim Blaine
son to my son James Blaine, all the mills and water powers
erected on my said estate at Middlesex with two hundred and
fifty acres of land adjoining to the said mills to be laid off at the
discretion of such of my Executors as shall be void of all in-
terest in the said division and the remainder of my said lands at
Middlesex I give to my Grandson Ephraim Blaine son of my
Son Robert Blaine ; " and after various other and ample devises
to wife and son Ephraim, "all the residue of my estate real and
personal I do give and devise to be equally divided between my
two sons James and Robert, and I do hereby appoint my two
sons James Blaine and Robert Blaine and my Friend David
Watts Executors of this my last will and Testament." The
will of a just man mindful of his obligations and acquainted
with human nature.

The three young Ephraims were not far apart in years —
the nephews a little older than the uncle ; but he was not
destined to enter into his inheritance. Of the many children
who played around the water-brooks of Cave farm and the
Letort mill-race, it was the infant heir of those broad lands, the
beautiful, curled darling of his father's old age, whose little feet
stumbled on the brink. Margaret Lyon, Mrs. James Blaine,
was spending the day at Middlesex. The little boy, dressed in
his pretty white suit, with his long, fair curls freshly brushed,
was brought in to be duly admired and petted by the guest, his
cousin and sister-in-law, then dismissed to run about at his
liking. Shortly afterwards, not hearing him at play, they
called and sought him — in vain. He had wandered down to
death in the swift-rushing mill-race.

The father did not long survive him, but died in his bereaved
home on Feb. 16, 1804, in the sixty-third year of his age.

His beloved wife, Sarah Elizabeth, was loath to remain in the
house of her repeated sorrow, and withdrew to Philadelphia,
where she " continued unmarried," leading such a life of dignity
and distinction as beseemed her blood and name, till, in 1850,
she passed away at the ripe old age of ninety.

JAMES BLAINE.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 49

IV.

JAMES BLAINE.

TZTIS father gone, the old Scotch-Irish rover reappeared in the
J — *- son with renewed vigor. The large business in new,
rich lands, which to the hereditary Blaine vision that saw clearly
into the future, were big with promise, had a tendency to keep
the land-hunger ever alive. With all his graces and amenities,
James Blaine had a watchful outlook for business, and could
be short, sharp, and decisive upon occasion. The records of
the court at April sessions in 1798 present a true bill of
indictment against James Blaine for assault and battery, and
defendant being charged submits to the court with protestations
of innocence, whereupon the judgment of the court is that the
defendant pay a fine of four dollars towards the support of the
government, pay the costs of prosecution, and stand committed
until this judgment be complied with. But though the court
pronounced this stern decree, it is to be noted in a marginal
"aside " that clerk and attorney forgave their fees ; whence we
may infer that the weight even of the court opinion was on
the side of the defendant, whose most accomplished kinsman,
worthily wearing and transmitting the family honor, affirms
that whipping the other fellow is often worth more than four
dollars, and only hopes he was well whipped !

To James Potter, Esq., lie writes :

Carlisle 12th April 1802

By your agreement with my Father you engage to Patent the Land you
exchanged with him in Woods's district, when you were called upon for
that purpose; I now request you will perform your part of said agreement
as soon as you conveniently can, as I have an opportunity of selling to
advantage

Please to answer this Letter by some one of your Gentlemen & oblige

Sir

Yours &c

Blaine

for
Eph. Blaine.

50 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

As an executor of his father's estate he writes from Carlisle
in 1804 :

Sir

I am much surprised that I have not heard from you respect8, the
Patent for the tract in Armstrong County. You certainly ought to have
procured it for us before this. My Father left my Brother & me Executors,
I now write as such and must urge you to take out the Deed and transmit
it to us between first of May next as by that time we mean to proceed to
that Country & make sale of some of our Lands.

At the first and second session of the Ninth Congress (1805)
James and Robert Blaine, executors of their father's estate,
presented a petition for compensation for Revolutionary services
in the Commissary Department ; but I find no record and no
tradition that such petition was ever granted.

From time to time they kept alive before an unheeding
Congress the indebtedness of the country to their father, for
services rendered and money advanced.

So late as 1818 the journal of Congress calmly records that
" Mr. Baldwin also presented a petition of James and Robert
Blaine, executors of the last will and testament of their father,
Ephraim Blaine, deceased, a deputy commissary general and
commissary general of purchases in the Revolutionary army,
praying compensation for the services of their said father, and
for a reimbursement of the moneys advanced by him for the
purchase of various supplies for the said army ; " but I find no
record that Mr. Baldwin got any reply to his petition.

Boys and girls grew up around them, and the two homes
were filled with young life. It is pleasant to remember that
when a little daughter was laid in Margaret's arms, the divinity
in her remembered that other young mother lying out in the
churchyard with her dead child on her heart, whom the young
father had never seen, and she gave to her own warm living
baby the dead mother's name, Jane Hoge. " How did you like
to call her that?" used her grandchildren to ask, with infantile
mercilessness. "J did not care, my dear," was the reply of
gentleness from which experience had banished all pain.

An infant child who lived barely long enough to receive the
seal of baptism on his forehead bore to the grave the name of
George Washington. "Why did you give him that name?"

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 51

prattled another grandchild. " Oh ! my dear, we knew he would
not live ! '* In the hour of sudden grief and danger and pain,
his was the first name they thought of, whose renown was
not then a cold and remote splendor but a living household
fame.

Ephraim, named for his grandfather, with his mother's Lyon
name incorporated, bright, handsome, debonair, was early sent
to school and college — which was then probably hardly more
than a school, but in its moderate and modest bills was a full-
fledged college.

15th. August 1807
Recd : from James Blaine eiHit dollars beino; the tuition due to Wash-
ington College up to the first day of this month for Ephraim Blaine —
D : 8 :00

Parker Campbell

Treas*-. W. C.

At one time there were four Ephraim Blaines in Washington
College. Their distinguishing sobriquets were " big Eph,"
"little Eph," "red Eph," "devil Eph," and "gentleman
Eph," scattered somewhat promiscuously among the group.
The big and devil Eph seem mostly to have been confined to
the son of James, and little Eph and gentleman Eph to the
son of Robert. That these sobriquets were not distributed
from mere caprice may be inferred from many anecdotes still
current, perhaps the earliest being that when devil Eph's mamma
called attention one day to the swift ruin attending his trousers'
knees the very young gentleman retorted, " That is because Dr.
Brown [the President] keeps us at prayers so much."

Leaving college, Ephraim Lyon studied law in the office of
Mr. Watts, son of David Watts, an intimate friend of his
father, and father of H. M. Watts, late District Attorney of the
United States, and Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Pleni-
potentiary to Austria in 1868, who presently became an intimate
friend of Ephraim's son. Ephraim also, like his father, was sent
to travel in Europe, as a matter of mental and social finishing.
But there is no tradition that he or his father ever visited the
land from which they came — that north of Ireland, that Lon-
donderry and Donegal, which had done so much more for them
than all the splendors of the grand tour. Mr. Watts had the

52 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

pleasure of seeing his pupil admitted to the bar before he
removed from Carlisle ; and the younger Watts, who as a boy
knew him well in Carlisle, renewed the acquaintance after his
removal to Pittsburg to practise law.

All the going back and forth, the inspection, survey, ex-
change of lands, and the other traffic, only increased the rest-
lessness of these land-lovers; and presently they left — never
to return — the heritage of Middlesex, their beautiful finished
Carlisle home, and all the fair hill-country round about, the
waterbrooks of the Conodoguinet and the Letort, just as their
forebears had left Donegal run and the Chicquesalunga, — and
pitched their tents on Muddy creek in Greene county, in what
was then the far West ; but Margaret found it too far and
lonely, and even James missed his good Carlisle society. So
back they fared to Brownsville, where he owned lands in and
about the town, thence to Sewickley, an outpost of Pittsburg,
on the Ohio river.

In his various wanderings he tarried long enough to acquire
local interest and influence, and everywhere he carried on his
mercantile business in connection with his investments and other
transactions in land. In Brownsville he was commissioned as
justice of the peace, and entered into the social and business
life of the place with zeal and sympathy. Indeed, all the
Blaines seem to have considered all Pennsylvania as their
natural home and heritage, and wherever James Blaine went
he could feel that the feet of his father had trodden the path
before him, and all the landed property had been his father's
choice, prevision, and judgment as well. Gordon, one of the
earliest travellers, braved the contempt of the Old World by
testifying that " This country may, from a proper knowledge,
be affirmed to be the most healthy, the most pleasant, the
most commodious, and the most fertile spot of earth known
to European people/'

At Sewickley, not ill chosen for beauty or for business,
James Blaine established himself in a comfortable and even
imposing house, with the river that seemed necessary to
Blaine contentment, and the plateau commanding a lovely
view and allied with a historic past. In the centre of an
orchard of twenty-five acres is a large mound where tradition

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 53

fought a fierce battle between French and Indians, and after
the fight buried braves and valuables. This mound has never
been disturbed, and the ghosts of the fallen wander at will,
harming nobody.

Here lived and prospered James Blaine, and here his son
Ephraim Lyon brought his bride. A letter of 1820, from one
of their friends, says playfully, if somewhat incoherently,
" The Duke of Sewickley, late Middlesex, it is said, will take
a wife from the backwoods, and has selected Maria Gillespie
as the object."

Maria Gillespie, thus summoned from the " backwoods " to
the suburbs of lofty Pittsburg, was from the same radiating
north of Ireland, but of another clan and religion. Neal Gil-
lespie, senior, according to family tradition, came from Scotland
to Donegal county, barony of Inisowen, Ireland, famous for its
whiskey-smuggling. There he made a runaway match with
Eleanor Dougherty, was married by some wandering priest,
and came immediately to this country. Under the penal laws,
unless it were by a registered priest the marriage was counted
invalid. To ensure the legality of the tie, and prevent question
of the legitimacy of their children, a subsequent marriage cere-
mony was performed by a Protestant Episcopal rector in this
country, in lieu of a priest willing to assume the risk of such
a service. Neal Gillespie was a man distinguished for force
of character, for penetration and executive power. He saw
the possibilities of the West, and, leaving wife and children
behind him, went out and selected a location full of promise
and richer in fulfilment.

During the middle of the last century a friendly Indian,
named William Peters, yet more generally known as " Indian
Peter," lived on lands in the Youghiogheny valley, adjoining a
German, with whom he could not agree. Thereupon Indian
Peter wrote the Proprietaries' agent, saying that he could not

get along with, the " d d Dutchman," and wished to give up

his land for another tract. His request was promptly complied
with. On the 5th day of April, 1769, but two days after the
land-office was opened, a warrant was granted him for a tract
containing three hundred and thirty-nine acres situated on the
west side of the Monongahela river. This land was surveyed

54 BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Oct. 7, 1769, by James Hendricks, Deputy Surveyor-general,
who gave it the name of " Indian Hill."

Indian Peter at once left his " d d Dutchman " and

took up his abode on Indian hill. On the 22d day of February,
1775, the Virginia court licensed Michael Cresap " to keep a
ferry over the Monongahela from his house at Redstone Old
Fort to the land of Indian Peter."

On this ferry Neal Gillespie, pushing westward, fixed his
eyes, and oh Indian Peter's hill he laid his hand. Washington
county was rapidly filling up, and Redstone Old Fort was
becoming a business centre, by land and water. The first
flatboat that ever descended the Mississippi went from Red-
stone Old Fort in 1782. The tide of emigration from East to
West broke at Brownsville. After long and toilsome journeys
over mountain roads and by Indian trails the emigrant could
embark peacefully on Kentucky or New Orleans boats, and
float pleasantly towards the desired haven ; or if his destina-
tion was nearer at hand, he crossed the ferry and made his
way to the delectable mountains of Washington and Greene.

Indian Peter was gone, but Marey Petters and William
Petters remained, and they did " bargain and seal to said Neal
Gillespie the Tract of land which we now poses and all the
tenements and boundries of said Land at forty five Shillings pr.
Acker the tearm of Peaments the 15th of next October fower
hundred Pouuds to be Paid in money or moneys worth for this
Peament two ton of Iron at teen pence Pr pound and one
Negro at Preasment of two men, one hundred pound more to
be pead at the same time of this Preasment or Else to Draw
In Trust for one Year, the Remainder of the Purches money to
be Pead in two Peaments ■ — First in the [year] 1786, the Next
the year 1788, Each of these Peaments to be mead in October
15th the above Bound marey Petters and william Petters asserts
to meak the said Neal Gillespee a proper Right for said land for
which we have seat our hands and Seals."

Signed with the mark of Marey Petters and William Petters,
and in consideration of the sum of £56 15s. 9d. was granted by
the Commonwealth unto Neal Gillespie " a certain tract of land
called ' Indian Hill,' excepting and reserving only the fifth part
of all Gold and Silver ore for the use of this Commonwealth,

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 55

to be delivered at the Pit's mouth clear of all charges, whereof
the Hon. Charles Biddle, Vice-President of Supreme Executive
Council, hath hereto set his hand in the year of our Lord
Jan. 31, 1787, and of the Commonwealth the eleventh."

Thus Neal Gillespie obtained full title and control of Indian
hill and of the ferry on the great thoroughfare from Cumber-
land to Wheeling, — a route as important in that day as the
great Pennsylvania system of railroads in the present ; and
there he built up a fortune with strong hand, and there he
brought his family and lived " in his palace " on Indian hill ;
and when his wife Eleanor died he buried her beside his
" palace," and married Anna Brown, the sister of Thomas and
Basil Brown, the founders of Brownsville. His son Neal
succeeded to the business and the estate ; and, possessing the
energy and the force of his father, added to both business and
wealth through the rapid growth of the country.

The other son, John, was equally vigorous and brilliant.
Both had the true rollicking Irish temperament, and were
impetuous, impatient, outspoken. This temperament, in John
especially, sometimes burst forth in a way that astonished even
the strong, racy individualities that surrounded him ; as when
once, conducting a lawsuit in court, across the river at
Brownsville, it suddenly dawned upon him that he was on the
wrong side of the case. The evidence was not turning out
satisfactory. He instantly rose in his wrath, kicked over the
table, spilling ink and scattering books and papers in all direc-
tions, picked up his hat, strode from the courtroom, and never
touched the case again.

Susan, a daughter, married Philemon Beecher, an able
and distinguished lawyer, long a member of Congress from
Lancaster, Ohio, and became a strong Scriptural Presbyterian.
Another sister, Eleanor, married Hugh Boyle, also of Lancaster,
Ohio.

Young Neal Gillespie led a busy life, always taking heed to
mingle pleasure with business. Every year he loaded his
flatboats with all the corn and wheat and other produce he
could raise or buy in the region round about, and sent it down
to New Orleans, while lie and his brother went by land, — by
stage or horseback, — at least part of the way, through all the

56 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

cousinable and otherwise social part of the route. Coming back
with his pocket full of money and his mind free from care, he
would, as a certain descendant said of him, make the wilder-
ness blossom. The home of his intellectual and religious sister
Susan lay in the way of his journeying, and he never failed to
pay her a visit of duty and affection. The sister would wel-
come her brother, but, having a reputation to sustain as a
member of the Presbyterian church and of the best society in
Ohio, would take the sisterly liberty of locking herself into her
own room, not having the heart to lock her brother out of the
house, while the young lawyers and other rising young men of
Lancaster held high festival with the brothers in her house,
or, if too jovially inclined, adjourned to the Swan tavern to drain
the last drop of festivity. Thus they celebrated the memory of
Inisowen.

The home of Mr. Purcell in Virginia was another rendezvous
of young Neal Gillespie. " Sit just there," said a descendant
of Mr. Purcell not long since, to a descendant of Neal Gillespie,
whom he had invited to dinner ; and directing the old lion-
footed table to be moved a little further forward, " There, now
you are at the very table and in the very place where your
grandfather, Neal Gillespie, used to sit. He would come here
bringing eighteen or twenty of the very best horses from Ken-
tucky. There were a lot of pretty girls around, and when he
came we would have a party, and oh ! how he would dance ! r

But the prettiest girl of all to him was a daughter of the
house, Tamar Elizabeth Purcell, who became his wife and suc-
ceeded the Irish Eleanor and the Indian "Marey" as mistress
of Indian hill.

Of their children, John, the eldest, known for his fine Greek
and Latin scholarship, died before his father, at the age of thirty-
eight, leaving a daughter, to become Mother Angela, the first
superior of the Sisters of The Holy Cross in America. William
Louis was educated for a priest, but fell in love with a girl and
resumed the world with its natural cares, joys, and responsi-
bilities. Maria Louise, said by her admirers to have been the
most beautiful woman in Pennsylvania, and who was indeed
fair to look upon, even in her old age, and as gentle and loving
as she was beautiful, was the young woman of whom Ephraim

MR. BLAINE'S FATHER

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 57

Lyon bethought himself on the heights of Sewickley, and her
he went into the " backwoods " to bring. From the Roman
Catholic church at Pittsburg, the Rev. Father Maguire came
clown to marry them, at the old Indian-hill farm ; and Ephraim
Blaine bore her home on a characteristic wedding-journey,
handling his horses himself, loving with an ardent if not equal
love both bride and steed. I do not know whether it was on
this or a later or an earlier journey that he began to indoctrinate
her into horsemanship with his daring feats. " Maria, do you
see those two trees yonder ?" " Oh ! my dear, don't — don't try
to go between them ! " cried her prophetic soul. " Oh, no
danger! '" And away they would whirl and never hit a tree!
" 1 don't know how many years,'* gasped the poor lady, with
smiling, pathetic pride, " I was in terror of my life when
your father asked me to drive." '

But they reached Sewickley in safet}* and shared also the
social and business life of Pittsburg.

There children were born to them, and there, alas ! they died.
The first little boy bore the name of his grandfather and his
great-great-grandfather scarce one swift year, and then was
laid in the old Roman Catholic burying-ground at Pittsburg.
Twenty-one, twenty-three, twenty-five, twenty-seven, through
the decade of 1820, came little Blaines in regular succession,
and the declining health of the Brownsville father drew the
mother to her old home on the Monongahela. The Sewickley
father also was falling into decline. The same year that
brought him a daughter-in-law had taken away from him a
daughter — Eleanor, by her marriage with John Hoge Ewing.

When David Hoge delivered up his sheriff's staff to Ephraim
Blaine, in Cumberland county in 1771, he went straightway
West and bought up a large portion of the Chartiers valley,
and upon it he laid out the town of Washington to be the
capital of the new Washington county. In the log house of
David Hoge the first court of the county was held, Oct. 2, 1781.
Having thus secured the capital, he followed up his advantage
by giving four lots for a courthouse and prison, two lots to His
Excellency George Washington, who dearly loved land, and who
especially had an abiding faith in corner lots, and who accepted
them without a qualm of bribery. Seventy or eighty acres

58 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

wise David Hoge laid aside for a common, and then speedily
sold the whole enterprise to his sons John and William, who
took up residence there, while he preserved for himself his
own homestead in Cumberland county.

The son William married Isabella Lyon, Margaret's sister,
which may have made it easier for her to call her own little
daughter for Jane Hoge, who had been William's sister. It
had also established a special personal interest and family
centre for the Blaines in Washington. William Hoge was
elected and reelected member of Congress, and was afterwards
made associate judge. After his death, his wife married Alex-
ander Reed, from Donegal, son of Robert Reed, who was called
to Ireland from Scotland to preach against the Arian heresy, and
preached it so successfully that his church at one time had
one thousand communicants, and his children and great-grand-
children became sole occupants of its pulpit for one hundred
and fifty years. His first wife had been daughter of that Colin
McFarquhar who preached in Donegal church for thirty years,
and who had been fain to attest to his loving, but doubting,
parishioners his hyyalty, by going inside the circle around The
Witness Tree and swinging his hat with a hurrah for the
Continental cause !

Mr. Reed was a public-spirited citizen whom all the world
delighted to honor, and Isabella's house had thus been a pleas-
ant and wholesome home to her kinsfolk, and there her young
niece, Eleanor, had met an extremely clever and promising
young man, by the name of Ewing. His father, coming down
from that inexhaustible Scotch-Irish hive through York, had
received his education under the direction of his kinsman, Dr.
John Ewing, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Phila-
delphia, and provost of the University of Pennsylvania, who
had served his country on weighty public and political commis-
sions, and braver still, had breasted Dr. Johnson with the soft
answer that not only turned away his wrath, but turned it
into complacency for the ignorant Americans who " never read
anything." " We have all read ' The Rambler,' sir," returned —
it is so bland one cannot say retorted — the suave Ewing. An
intimate friend of John Hoge, Mr. Ewing had given the name
to his son, and when the boy came to Washington to attend

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 59

the college, John Hoge took him into his own family. After
his graduation the young man remained in Washington study-
ing and practising law, practising the gospel also by every
good word and work. It was this young man whom Eleanor
Blaine had met on her visits to her aunt Isabella in Washing-
ton. On the footing of a cousin, though in fact no relation,
a classmate of her brother Ephraim and born the same year,
it befell that one week after Ephraim Blaine married Maria
Gillespie, Eleanor Blaine married John Hoge Ewing — in her
Aunt Isabella's house, — because, if married in Sewickley, the
way thence was so rough, and the steamers so uncertain, that
they ran the risk of having to take their wedding journey in a
flatboat, with all and sundry of its inconveniences and dis-
comforts.

Another daughter of James Blaine had also married in Wash-
ington,— ■ the little Jane Hoge, —whose husband was the founder
of the first newspaper established in Washington. Thus when
age was drawing on and Sewickley grew too remote from
kindred for the repose of the evening of life, the elder Blaines
could but be attracted to the place where so many of their
family had gathered. Moreover, a house awaited them, not
too far for neighborhood or too near for independence, to which
John Hoge Ewing and his wife Eleanor besought and brought
her parents. Here James Blaine — a tall and handsome man
still, with figure scarcely bowed and only a becoming portli-
ness, with head whitened by years and bright eyes undimmed
— came with Margaret Lyon to the society and vicinity of
their own people, and there on the green hillside that might
well suggest the Cave farm of his youthful years, he passed
the serene evening of his life among his children and his
grandchildren.

v The Sewickley homestead went to strangers — a sect or com-
munity called the Economites, who gladly bought the Blaine
lands and added thereto. The old Blaine dwelling-house
still stands, but was moved to 'a different site and used for
a school-house, though still some personal belongings remain
to speak of the refined and cultured family that once occu-
pied it. The earth yields her increase as of old, and the
breezes sing as freshly, but the factories of the Economites

60 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

are as deserted as the drawing-rooms of James Blaine, and
the life of the place is garnered in the wine-cellars where the
fifty-year-old wine . and the year-old cider, drunk instead of
water, mock the Prohibitionists * with their witness that the
Economites know no drunkenness or peevishness, but are rich,
charitable, musical, and happy !

It has often been said that if James Blaine and Ephraim his
son had kept this farm instead of selling it, the heirs would
have been worth millions. Yes ; and if Lord Donegal's prede-
cessors had retained their property and managed prudently,
his income would, have been $1,250,000, whereas his whole
Irish property is $205,000. And as James Blaine's grandson
was wont to quote, — what we may adopt, as Virgil did his
Homer, with variations, — if Columbus had sold the feather
in his cap and put the money out at compound interest, the
Duke of Veragua would have been richer than all the United
States of America, to which he is holding out his hat ; but
nobody desired to pay interest on Columbus's feather, and
Columbus needed the feather to wear; and James Blaine and
his son wanted the 825,000 more than they wanted to live in
Sewickley and compound interest for their descendants — not
to suggest that it was better for the descendants to compound
their own interest. So there is no discredit to be visited either
upon heart or head ; for how could James Blaine or Ephraim
his son see that the Pittsburg, Fort Wayne & Chicago Railroad
and all the Panhandle lines were coming around by Sewickley,
and that the angel of the bottomless pit would turn the key at
the forks of the Ohio, and its smoke and fire should be belched
through a thousand chimneys as the smoke of a great furnace,
and the sun and the air be darkened by reason of the smoke of
the pit ?

So Ephraim and Maria went to Brownsville — first in the
grand old house which their father built, the first stone house
erected west of the Monongahela; afterwards colonizing in a
house of their own building close at hand. And there on Sun-
day, the 31st of January, A.D. 1830, from all the sturdy
strength, the unconquerable will, the joyous vigor, the civic
virtues, the patriotic passion, the home sanctities of all the
Galbraiths and Blaines and Armstrongs and Lyons and Gilles-

. #§i

WkM

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. ■ ■ . .■■ ■ ■ . ...■ ; ■ .

liliitr'" ""

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MR. BLAINE'S MOTHER.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G, BLAINE, 61

pies, a boy was born, whom for his grandfathers on the one side
they named James, and for his grandfathers on the other side
they named Gillespie, to whom it was given to serve his
country on the heights, and to uplift in her name the stand-
ard of peace on earth, goodwill to men — James Gillespie
Blaine.

Here, but for the one little unknown quantity, this biography
would be finished. But for the one fact of differentiation, the man
is accounted for. The mental soil from which he sprang turns up
rich in all the qualities that nurture statesmen ; yet proof need
not be furnished that, without the mysterious germ of genius, all
the fruitful soil is no more fruitful than the arid sand-bank.
Therefore the quest goes on. Man, by searching, cannot find out
God, but the search is the noblest effort and occupation of human-
ity. We may not solve the mystery of the Divine germ, but having
studied its habitat ive may further seek its actual environment
— ivhat sun fed it, what dews refreshed it, of what rains it drank
vigor, what rocking winds nerved its tender roots and shoots to
sinewy strength and steadfastness, till it brought forth boughs
and bore fruit and became a goodly cedar.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 63

EARLY EDUCATION.

n^HUS the new little life placed itself ; in the open, hills climb-
-*- ing to the sky, the broad eternal river, and along and
across its eternal current the eternal ebb and flow of human
life and human interests ; parental tenderness and parental
culture to cherish growth ; a large and varied family circle
to represent the great human family outside.

It was a happy life, and the memory of it never faded —
unless memory itself fades in the grave. Development was
healthy, natural, simple. There was no precocity. The man's
own theory of his boyhood was that he was uncommonly slow
and dull, so that some of his elders believed him deficient. He
did not learn to read till he was seven years old. He lived out-
doors with his magnificent playthings, the river, the woods, the
hills, the farms ; with his , sympathetic and agile play-fellows,
the birds and squirrels and horses, the farmers and the gardeners.
All the seed sown, all the harvests gathered, all the bloom of
spring, all the ripening autumn, was his interest and his sport.
If he learned no books, he had the culture of obedience to
parental law, and of intimacy with his father and mother.

He had also the liberal education of the National Road on
which the Blaine and Gillespie homes were located, and which
brought Brownsville to the forefront of the world, while Pitts-
burg was considered and called by Brownsville " the back door."

Washington had made it his first duty after his retirement
from the command of the army to arrange for easy communica-
tion between East and West, either by land or water, and thus
make a community of interests and prevent the new nation
from falling to pieces. The country had had glory enough.
What it now needed was stability. Just as Rome built her
Appian Way, just as Egypt bordered the Nile with her

04 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

National Roads to all points whithersoever the tide of travel
could flow, so Washington projected for the young nation its
channels of life. As a surveyor and a soldier he had marched
through the wilderness, and he knew where to go. It is
said that he first made the acquaintance of Albert Gallatin sit-
ting on a log on the Monongahela, surrounded by frontiersmen
talking about the best route for a new road. To one of them
with a foreign look who had volunteered an opinion, George
Washington vouchsafed a surprised glance and no reply till he
had completed his examination, when he announced, " Young
man, you are right. Your route is the true one." The young
foreigner came to be his secretary of the treasury and right-
hand man, Albert Gallatin.

During his administrations and the succeeding ones to
1811 the road was before Congress, and in the summer of 1820
it was open for travel from Cumberland in Maryland, to Wheel-
ing in Virginia, contiguous on the East to Braddock's line of
march from Cumberland to Fort Duquesne. It had cost the
government nearly $1, 700,000, and of it at the beginning of the
century, just as truly as of the Central and Pacific roads in its
later years, might Edward Pierrepont say, " It matters little
what the government advanced to build them. This great
highway is of priceless value to the nation. Had it cost the
Federal treasury ten times more than it did, it were money
well invested."

All the expectations which had been cherished of the travel
and trade that would pour through it fell far short of the
reality. The stories of its glories are innumerable. Twenty-
five stage-coaches, with every seat occupied, would pull out at
the same time from Wheeling on the west, from Cumberland on
the east. Thirty stages, fully loaded, stopped at one hotel in a
single day; sixteen coaches, crammed with passengers, in close
procession crossed the bridge at West Brownsville. If one is
to believe the reports, an unbroken line of presidents, presidents-
elect and ex-presidents, senators and representatives and secre-
taries, were passing through Brownsville on their way to and
from Washington the great. Little Washington, as the county
seat of Washington is affectionately called, was for a while left
aside, but by vigorous urging of her claims she had induced

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 65

the great road to come her way. Over this road the world
rolled past the Blaine house, and the little ones became a
part of it. There were long lines of wagons going east with
produce of the fields, going west with the produce of the mines
and manufactories. There were men on horseback and in pri-
vate carriages, and foot passengers and four-foot passengers innu-
merable. This made an army of men to feed and lodge, which
caused public houses to spring up, one for every two miles along
the road. Drovers with their teams stopped anywhere upon
the route ; but passengers were lodged chiefly at the large
towns, like Brownsville and Washington ; stations precisely as
far apart as were the stations on Egypt's national roads — with
the difference only that the Coptic drivers rested their camels
by day and the Pennsylvania drivers rested their horses by
night. Forty great Conestoga six-horse teams, carrying from
five to six tons each, would be picketed around the yard and
on the commons of a single tavern, and a continuous procession
of these huge caravansaries passed daily over the great road.

In all this stirring world the accomplished father, still in his
early prime, took an active and leading part, and the eager
sympathetic mind of the boy was in full touch with affairs, and
quickened by the contact. The Monkey-box mail and the
Oyster express had as many charms for a boy as had the states-
men and merchants, the Monroes and Jacksons, the Polks and
Bells and Clays, who stopped to rest. The National Koad was
turned over to the State, but without loss of importance. Of
the times and seasons of the stage lines, the National, the
Good Intent, the June Bug, and the Pioneer, the boy knew the
arrivals and departures and prowess, as well as the drivers.
He knew which drivers could harness four horses in four
minutes and change teams before the stage ceased rocking, and
he shared their ambitions and their successes. The drivers'
orders were to make time on the ten or twelve mile relays even
if they killed horses, — ten miles at full run if they were a little
behind ; and if a poor horse fell disabled he was unharnessed
and dragged aside. Even so late as President Polk's day such
trouble came, and the President-elect, on his way to his inau-
guration, alighted and lent his helping hand to the poor oil'
wheel-horse that had failed. Henry Clay, arriving from the

66 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

South at Cincinnati, and finding the Ohio river frozen, came
by stage to Lancaster ; thence the roads were impassable till a
young German was induced to drive him to Wheeling, won by
the fifty dollars offered, which fifty dollars became the basis of
the largest farm in the county. In 1841, driver Noble was driv-
ing Henry Clay down the hill at Brownsville to the bridge, when
the wheels encountered a rut and Clay was thrown through the
window and left standing upon his. head in the mud, and the
historian would bate not one jot or tittle of that perpendic-
ular, out of regard to the proprieties or even necessities of
the story. The Monkey-box mail and other mails brought to
the Blaine doors the earliest and widest news of the world's
doings. One of the lad's first literary recollections was of the
arrival of the English illustrated newspapers, and his father
reading them aloud and exhibiting their pictures to such as
gathered to listen, of family and neighbors. Thus he grew
familiar with much that was interesting the people long be-
fore he could read it himself, and as his retentive memory
served him for a somewhat intelligent judgment he became
actively concerned for the girl-queen of England, and a violent
Whig partisan at the early age of seven. Perhaps his first
lesson in French History was given him by his father's French
gardener, who was setting out strawberry plants, and said to
the little lad who was watching him : " That is the way the
king's strawberries are set." "What king?" asked the boy.
" Louis Philippe." And thus the story became a personal
association.

His happy, careless, busy life at Indian hill continued till he
was nearly ten years of age — - varied by occasional attendance at
neighboring schools. His first sally into the great world was in
the winter of 1839 — when, nothing loth, he visited a houseful of
Gillespie-Ewing cousins in Lancaster, Ohio. Hugh Ewing, who
was three years his senior, and Thomas, who was about his age,
grandsons of Eleanor Gillespie, who had married Hugh Boyle,
were his most intimate friends and companions. They attended
a private school on Wheeling street at the top of the hill, kept
by William Lyons, an Englishman, a younger brother of Lord
Alfred Edward Lyons, who won fame in the Crimean war,
and an uncle of Lord Lyons, who was British minister at

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 67

Washington soon after our war of the Rebellion. Mr. Lyon
numbered among his accomplishments portrait-painting, and,
after the fashion of England, offered a prize to the most merito-
rious scholar, which in this case was the portrait of the winner
painted by Mr. Lyon. Thomas was so inconsiderate of his
guest as to win the prize from him, and even rejoice over the
success. His cousin James, however, came in as a handsome
second. We may afford, perhaps, to turn aside long enough to
drop a tear over the ignoble fate of the prize. The portrait was
hung in the proud father's office. When the elder Mr. Ewing
went to Washington to enter President Harrison's cabinet, the
office was rented to two dress-makers, and they, heedless of its
high emprise, used the canvas for a pin-cushion, to its utter ruin
as a work of art.

When school was over and summer came on, the boys made
many visits about the beautiful country surrounding Lancaster
— - going forty miles south to the home of Mrs. E wing's sister,
Mrs. Samuel Denraan, a hrst cousin of Mrs. Blaine. Mr.
Denman was a salt manufacturer on Sunday creek, two miles
above its mouth. Here the boys1 club was increased by the ad-
dition of the two Denman boys, " Hamp " and Matthias, of about
the same age, and the five had " royal fun " for several weeks
that summer, blackberrying, swimming in the Hocking river and
Sunday creek, building salt furnaces and boiling salt, collecting
from the coal mines impressions of sigillaria and lepidodendra,
club mosses and tree ferns, in which the roofs of the coal mine
abounded.

As the visit in Lancaster drew toward a close in the early fall
of 1840, it was crowned with a trip to Columbus, thirty miles
from Lancaster. The father, willing to do the boys a pleasure
and give them a taste of independence, provided them with his
carriage and horses and a proper supply of money for a holiday
excursion. Hugh, being the older and more masterful, was
given the purse and the reins, with implied general command.
It was a fresh, cool September morning ; the country was lovely
and bountiful with ripening harvests, and they set out in higli
glee.

At Greencastle, a village eight miles from Lancaster, they
drove by a street-corner where the Democrats — the Loco

08 BIOGliAPlir OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Focos, as they were then called — had just erected a pole with
the Van Buren and Johnson flag floating from it, its top sur-
mounted by a hickory bush, or brush, signifying that the
Democrats of the Old Hickory type would prove to the Whigs
the besom of destruction and sweep them all away. This
aroused in the small West Brownsville politician a resentment
which his high spirits and independent position at that moment
would not allow him to suppress. Several " loafers " were
standing by. As Hugh drove past, young Blaine stood up, put
his ringer to his nose, and shook his hand in derision. At
this Hugh was greatly offended. He told Blaine that every-
body knew that this was his father's carriage, and that they
were of his family, and would regard this conduct as person-
ally insulting. The youngster was in too high spirits to be
snubbed, and felt that Hugh was taking on airs of superiority
over a free and independent State. He stoutly maintained his
right to make the unseemly gesture. Hugh said he must not
do it again, or he would get into trouble. " I will do it again.
I will do it when we come back." " If you do, I will put you
out of the buggy," declared the commander resolutely; and
they rode on full of fight, but as the danger-point vanished in
the lengthening distance, full of fun.

They had a letter of introduction to Col. John Noble, father
of Hon. John W. Noble, recently Mr. Ewing's successor as
Secretary of the Interior. Colonel Noble owned the principal
hotel in Columbus, and he and Mr. Ewing Were .warm friends.
They were cordially welcomed by Colonel Noble, and informed
as to all that a party of boys would wish to see and do at
the capital. They ate the fat and drank the sweets. The}''
fished in Alum creek, they swam in ,the Scioto and under-
went a distressing experience in having their clothing stolen
and hidden in the bushes while they were in swimming, by a
couple of young ruffians who made great sport of their trouble,
but who relented at last and told them where to find the
clothes. They visited the penitentiary and the asylum, and
as a special favor were admitted to the yard inclosing the
State capitol, then being built by convicts.

They had been in Columbus a week or more, but had not
exhausted the novelty when their money began to run low

C^l^L

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 69

and after calculating as well as they could what their hotel
bill would be, found it very plain that they would have no
more to spend for ice cream, ginger beer, and other luxuries
so necessary to an outing. Wherefore, they believed that the
hand of prudence on the clock of time pointed to the hour for
departure. Hence, after breakfast one morning, Hugh stepped
up to Colonel Noble, who sat in the shade in front of his
hotel, and asked to have the carriage and horses brought. The
Colonel rang the stable bell and ordered the carriage. Hugh
then — a little shyly, but proudly, as becomes a man — asked
for the bill. " Oh, boys," was the unexpected answer, " I won't
charge you anything, not a cent." This sudden change in
the situation nearly wrought a panic. A council of war was
hurriedly summoned in the corner of the piazza, and a unani-
mous agreement was reached that it would be the height of
folly and flying in the face of Providence to go home with all
that money in their pockets, and they accordingly went back
to Colonel Noble, thanked him, and said they would stay a
while longer ! This was too much for the polite Colonel's
gravity, and lie sank back in his chair with unaccountable
laughter. u Here, John, take back those horses — the young
gentlemen don't want them ! " And another week of independ-
ence flew by, till the money was satisfactorily disposed of and
there was no question of further stay. They therefore bade
their genial and generous host good-by, and set out for home.
They were merry, jocose, and noisy till they drove up a hill
and saw Greencastle and the hickory pole floating the Van
Buren flag. Then old memories returned. An ominous silence
fell simultaneously upon the trio. Not a word was said till
they came to the pole. The hickory brush still swept the sky.
There was no escape. Three hearts beat high with suspense,
two with resolution. The horse's head was on line with the
pole, when a small scapegrace in a flash was on his feet and the
offensive gesture was in full swing. But in an instant he was
off his feet, for the equally resolute driver reined in his horse
so quickly that the offender was nearly thrown over the dash-
board. He did not wait to be ordered out, but sprang lightly
and defiantly from the carriage, jumped over a fence into a
field, and struck out towards Lancaster without a Avord, with-

70 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

out even so much as looking back. Little Tom, who lived to
be the historian of the occasion, like most historians was not
in the fight, held indeed a divided sympathy, but well knew
that wherever his sympathies might be, his big brother would
make short work of him if he attempted to put in a word,
and so wrapped his valor in discretion and silence. They
watched the withdrawing rebel a moment, till Hugh felt
assured from the direction taken that he was making for the
farm of a near relative, Aunt Gillespie, widow of the brilliant
Uncle John, whose house, though not on the direct road,
was two miles nearer across lots than Mr. Ewing's. Fearing
that he might poison Aunt Gillespie's mind arriving thus
alone and footsore, Hugh, like the wise general he was, deter-
mined to leave the Lancaster road, and get there first. So
the small villain was left to his lonely way, poor lamb, with
his load of guilt, for he must have known he was wholly
wrong ; and, doubtless, Hugh was not altogether light-hearted,
though knowing he was wholly right in defending his father's
dignity, — for the courage of our convictions sometimes fails
us.

Of course Hugh made the desired connection. They paid
their respects to Aunt Gillespie, who bade them be of good
cheer, while a bountiful luncheon was prepared for boy and
beast. They had eaten and were full, when, peering about the
grounds, they soon discerned, to their great joy, a little figure
striding sturdily across the fields ; whereupon the happy pair
went out to meet the prodigal, and instantly and amicably
joined forces, attended him through his belated luncheon,
visited the cows and pigs and ducks and chickens, the young
mules and jackasses and calves and colts, in unbroken harmony,
bade their aunt good-by with the innocence of infancy and
clear conscience, and made safe port at home in the most
cordial good-fellowship, without any awkward reference to the
past, either in conversation with Aunt Gillespie, with the home-
stayers or each other !

The next year Master Thomas returned the visit with his
father, who was going over the National Road to Washington to
be Secretary of the Treasury under Harrison. Another happy
season of study followed, though under a teacher of far less

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 71

education and culture than Mr. Lyon. The cousins organized
a debating society among the pupils and other young men of
the village, and got a good deal of useful practice in debate.
Two of Mr. Blaine's horses were devoted to their use out of
school hours, — "dappled-gray and splendid," — -on which they
scoured the country far and wide. Their longest ride was to
Washington springs in Virginia. " Uncle Will " was often
with them, and to their memory no man was ever so adapted
to going about with boys — escort, comrade, teacher — -as the
gentle, home and child loving, yet somewhat sad-hearted man,
while the loving mother, beautiful and kind, found time in the
midst of all her social, domestic, and religious duties to minister
to the pleasure of the boys and leave a memory scarcely less
dear and bright in the heart of her guest than of her son.

In 1842 the father was elected prothonotary of Washington
county, an office for which, perhaps, his legal education better
fitted him than for the business in which he was often tempted
to engage. Of this office Timothy Pickering, of Washington's
and Adams's cabinets, when contemplating it in his own inter-
ests, said: "The Register's and Prothonotary's offices, more
especially in Pennsylvania, require much law-knowledge and
the more the incumbent possesses with the more propriety and
facility he will execute them: More than ever law-knowledge
in the Prothonotary, will now be useful and important, on
account of the increased importance of the Court under the
new constitution."

When Ephraim Blaine had come down from Sewickley,
Brownsville was, in modern language, " booming," and he
lent a quick hand to the boom. In 1830 he became one of
the corporators for the building of a bridge over the Monon-
gahela. For twenty years there had been talk of such a bridge,
but it had proved only talk. Now the amount of traffic and
travel over the National Road justified the expenditure, and the
bridge was built, and proved a most profitable investment to
the stockholders, especially until railroads knocked away the
profits, if not the props, of both bridge and road.

The next year, in furtherance of the boom and its profits,
Mr. Blaine laid out the Indian-hill farm into lots sixty feet wide
and of varying depth, owing to the abrupt hill-side, from ninety-

72 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

three to two hundred and seventy feet, — the plot of the town
of West Brownsville. He also, with the hereditary tendency,
adventured a partnership in a steam saw-mill, under the title
of " Crumrine and Blaine,'1 who were to be equally interested
owners of the property, which Blaine chiefly furnished and
Crumrine was to superintend.

But the boom was slow of development in West Brownsville,
and had to be patiently nursed, awaited indeed a new " plant "
of boat-building, while a growing family to be reared and edu-
cated made it hard to wait. A generous disposition, abounding
hospitality, expensive tastes without the frugality which natu-
rally attends the slow accumulation of fortune, had drawn the
Middlesex estate and the Sewickley estate, and other outlying
estates, to very tenuous proportions. Handsome, fascinating,
popular, " always beautifully dressed," says one, " ah ! Mr.
Blaine was a man of ability. I remember yet his courtly air
as he came up the street, his bow so elegant and noticeable,
yet nothing Chesterfieldian about it — but he made the money
fly ! " There is a report in Washington that when he drove
over to assume his office, his horses' fore feet were shod
with silver, which shows the same picturesque imagination in
interior Pennsylvania as that which flourished in Nero's stables
and furnished Poppsea's horses with shoes of gold. An in-
choate museum in Washington still holds the ruins of the
famous T-cart which the silver-shod steeds, driven tandem, swept
around her street corners amid much gazing from quiet win-
dows. Fine stables Mr. Blaine certainly kept, and two of his
magnificent chestnut sorrels dwell in the memory of men yet
living — Bolivar and Beaver ; the first named in admiration of
Simon Bolivar, the South American dictator, the second in
honor of General Beaver, an old family friend of the Blaines.
The deeds of derring doe performed with that team still make
timid blood run cold.

The grandfather, Neal Gillespie, had his own loves and tastes
in the matter, of horses, which in the mental lapse of his later
years took somewhat grotesque forms, — like galloping with
three horses abreast, or insisting upon sleigh-riding in the sum-
mer,— yet left a certain set of mental faculties in all their
pristine keenness. His eccentricities at length so increased that

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 73

his sons and his son-in-law agreed that a proceeding de lunatico
inquirendo should be instituted to save the estate from waste.
His ferries were losing money, and his business in general was
suffering. The old Anak drew his Irish wits together, defended
himself in person with great force of argument, humor, and good-
natured sarcasm. He described his business career and accu-
mulation of fortune, and admitted that there was plausible
ground for the inquiry of lunacy because he was permitting his
large and well-earned fortune to go to the support of those fine-
gentleman loafers, his sons, and his tandem son-in-law ! The
court broke up in roars of laughter, in which none joined more
heartily than father and sons. But the wavering faculties were
steadied only for the time.

One of his " chums " was Father Murphy, the Catholic priest,
who lived over the river, on the top of the high hill in Browns-
ville adjoining the Catholic church. In those later days his
feet wandered thither so often as sometimes to interfere with
priestly duties. On one evening as he climbed the hill, he saw
the priest's head above the low curtain of the lighted win-
dow ; but when he reached the house the servant said
Father Murphy had gone out. " Ah, gone out, has he ? " said
Mr. Gillespie blandly. " Give my compliments to Father
Murphy, and tell him the next time he goes out to take his
d d old bald head with him."

But Neal Gillespie was lying beside his father and his mother,
at rest on Indian hill, with his son John at his side, and knew
nothing of waning means or growing needs.

When Ephraim Blaine became Whig candidate for prothon-
otary, the charge was trumped up against him that he was a
Catholic, to which his marriage into a Catholic family gave
currency. Straightforward and straightway he went to the
family priest for a certificate of non-membership. The priest,
with a gleeful twinkle, wrote him the certificate on the spot :

" This is to certify that Ephraim L. Blaine is not now and
never was a member of the Catholic church; and furthermore,
in my opinion, he is not fit to be a member of any church."

Mr. Blaine knew his people. He caught up the certificate,
flung it to the breeze, and rode into office on the crest of the
laugh, and with the goodwill of both parties.

74 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

So the household gods were borne to Washington over the
National Road, only another stage of the old westward journey
from Donegal. Leaving the Monongahela on the left to find
or fashion its own way to the Ohio, skirting the lovely
woods, climbing the green hills, we only see rich, rolling
green hill-farms to the horizon. With the limitless substratum
of limestone, the ridges seem fertile as the hollows, and all the
hollows are ripening to unknown harvests, and all the hills
dotted with countless sheep ; for when the whiskey rebellion
foamed and broke against these hills, and the farmers found
themselves forbidden to profit by their crops of whiskey, they
wisely turned their attention to wool, and made their country
famous for its quality and quantity. Up all the way to
Hillsborough, eighteen feet above sea-level, with a glimpse
of Laurel Hill, thirty miles distant. On and on, descending
now to the Gals' house, founded before women had thought
much about their rights, but when three women, without
other points in law than possession, took them and their share in
the National Road's bounty by keeping tavern, and an excellent
tavern, whose yards were crowded with teams by night, and
whose tables were crowded with guests by day. Past Eggnogg
hill, a very mildly suggestive name for this whiskey insurrection
locality; past coal mines still producing, that were opened
ninety years ago ; and one sight we see which the boy did
not — the scaffolding of countless oil-wells bubbling and
bursting with a wealth undreamed of in his day, although the
hint was given long before his day; for George Washington
reported that he saw gas escaping in the Great Kanawha and
ceded his land for a public curiosity. Unluckily some in-
formality in the deed of conveyance had balked his pleasant
purpose, and caused the reversion of the gift to his heirs, but
nothing balks our increasing conviction that there were few
things which escaped the eyes of George Washington. Past
Sam Hughes's station, which so pleased Andrew Jackson that
he used to stop there over night in preference to the town
hostelries, till one unlucky day, in a fit of enthusiasm, he
sent " Sam " to manage the Hermitage, to which he speedily
showed himself less adapted than to " keeping tavern," and was
quickly recalled, to the satisfaction of both ; past Pancake,

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 75

derived by the archaeologist from the tavern's pancakes, whose
flavor was such that the mouths of the stage-coach passengers
began to water for them as soon as they left Cumberland, and
not from the commonplace suggestion that one George Pan-
cake kept the tavern, — we come to the bright and pleasant
town which had been Cat Fish, but upon which a great man
smiled and it became Washington. Here also, as at Browns-
ville, and even perhaps more, young Blaine had the education
of the outer world, of a short, but stirring and heroic past
pictured all around him, and the same vivid and eager contact
with a thrilling and active present. County and town, the
first that had been called by that great name, had been Wash-
ington's own hunting-ground. A part of the very land on
which Washington College stood had been Washington's
property, presented to him by Jane Hoge's father, gracefully
returned by Washington in the shape of a gift to the college
that bore his name. The very house which was to be for a time
the boy's college-home had belonged to a James Blaine, of his
blood. This house, still standing quaint and comely, had also
been the house of David Bradford, the leader and soul of the
whiskey insurrection, Deputy Attorney-General of the State.
Here had been planned that first revolt against the infant
nation which Washington had come as far as Ephraim Blaine's
house to put down — the assault and burning of Revenue
Officer Neville's house, the robbery of the mails, the march on
Pittsburg. Here, too, it was that the tramp of Light Horse
Harry's fifteen thousand was heard, and from one of these
back windows the agile leader leaped to fight another day,
rushed down the Ohio, down the Mississippi, nor ever stopped
till he had reached the Spanish settlements and Tom the
Tinker's house.

Here, too, the young scholar had opportunity to learn that
there is another side to all things human. Although the name
of Washington was a household word to the people, repre-
senting an actuality, yet thereabout still live men who have a
personal grievance against Washington. All this region he had
explored with discerning, prophetic, possessing eyes. By Vir-
ginia patent for services rendered the colonists, a great tract of
country had been given to him. This land had been located by

76 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

his warm personal friend, Captain Crawford, of Fayette county,
who knew what he was about, and took care that George
Washington's twenty-eight hundred acres should be worth
having. But Colonel Croghan, of Fort Pitt, had bought from
Indians and sold to settlers parts of the same tract of country,
and some of them had squatted on Washington's lands, along
Miller's run and Raccoon creek, a few miles away, and when
he could take breath between battles he came hither to adjust
a settlement. His diary says naively: "Lodged at a Col.
Canon's, on Shurtees Creek, a kind, hospitable man, and
sensible. Sept. 19 Being Sunday, and the people on my lands
being Cececlers and very religious, it was thought best to
postpone going among them till to-morrow." Of course, so
watchful and politic a man was not to be caught in a
common settler's trap. The law was, as the courts and nature
had settled it, that the right belonged to the first comers.
Thus the squatters had to pay him for a quitclaim, and they
hate him yet!

Besides its historic interest, Little Washington was swaying
in the full current of passing political life. Statesmen and
merchants from the East and West had tarried there on their
journeys. Jackson and Harrison had gone through on their
way to their inaugurations ; Polk and Taylor were yet to go
— probably the last, for the old order changed, giving place
to new. Stories of them, and of Monroe and John Quincy
Adams and Lafayette, of Calhoun, Crittenden, Clay and
Bell, filled the air. At many a dinner-table, in after years,
the gay old Washington College boys laughed over their
Tangle wood Tales, and rehearsed how General Taylor, Presi-
dent-elect, had been driven by Jack Bayless, a Democratic
coachman, to McDaniels', the Democratic resort, and stayed
an hour in that sequestered place before his Whig friends dis-
covered him and rescued him to the banquet of the Mansion
House, where he felt " only one thing missing, flitch and
eggs " — how Henry Clay, returning to the stage-coach after din-
ner, with his wife on his arm, between double lines of waiting
admirers, to whom he was politely bowing right and left, was
touched on the shoulder just as he had reached the carriage
door, by a belated editor, who in a shrill excited voice intro-

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 77

duced himself as A. B. C, of the " Commonwealth.' ' "I know
your ' Commonwealth,' " shouted back the irate statesman, in

the same high pitch, "but I'll be d d if I know who you

are," — for which he deserved defeat at the polls ; how the
same statesman, once obliged to stay overnight at the Mansion
House, fell, like Taylor, a prey to the mischievous Democrats.
The Whigs, learning of the godsend, gathered in the dining-
room, which was also a meeting-place of the local Democratic
club, and invited Clay to address them in the evening, to which
he gave willing assent. The meeting was held, but after wait-
ing in vain for the great Kentuckian, they were obliged to
fall back on commonplace oratory, and the meeting came to an
untimely and inglorious end. Investigation proved that the
wicked Democrats, fearing his eloquence, had nocked to his
room, bolted the door, and engaged him in such friendly
and nattering debate that he had forgotten all about his
Whig meeting ; how, one unlucky Sunday when old Father
McCurdy was to preach in Dr. Jenkins's pulpit, word came
that General Jackson was coming through and would attend
church. "What will you do?" asked some of the anxious
parishioners, who thought no gospel grand enough for grand
hearers unless it came from Dr. Jenkins's lips. Then
quietly answered Father McCurdy, " I shall preach to General
Jackson just as I would to any other sinner," and preached so
well that the sinner in question went up and shook hands
with him and thanked him for the discourse.

So good use did the boy make of his mind that his father
was able to put him into college when he was little past
thirteen — younger than any other member. But his mental
action was quick, and he never lost ground, or suffered from
imperfect preparation or too great effort to keep in step. Indeed,
he seemed never to make effort. Work was the natural, easy
action of his mind and did not fatigue him.

His college course was apparently one of unalloyed pleasure
and unbroken success. Three years after its close he wrote:

" Old Washington is endeared to me by a thousand ties, and
though I can now look back upon many acts of my College life,
as strongly marked with folly, they are not on this account re-
membered with less affectionate regard — not a single one of

78 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

them would I wish to be blotted out — friendships, enmities,
follies, disappointments, mortifications and all — a glorious four
years — such as I shall never see again."

His college mates unite in representing his scholarship and
his character in college as unexceptionable. He was not over-
fond of athletic sports, or of " street fun," or even of the games
of the campus ; but he took his full share in riding, walking,
driving, dancing, and is remembered as the best euchre-player
in college or town. He was joyous, friendly, attractive,
answering still to General Sherman's picture of " Jim Blaine
and Tom Ewing," in Lancaster seven years before, u two boys,
cousins, as bright and handsome as ever were two thoroughbred
colts in a blue-grass pasture of Kentucky."

One of his young friends of that early time writes :

You know, and perhaps he knew, what my feeling toward him was,
always has been, with no weakening or shadow of turning. He buckled
one's heart to him "with hooks of steel.11 I so well remember when and
where I saw him first. It was when he was in college, in Washington,
at a gay little picnic. He was the life and the light of the fete, so
joyous were his spirits, so incessant the play of his wit.

It seems to me I can see his frank young face, hear his merry laugh,
at this moment.

And of about the same time I remember that old Esquire M. admitted
with some amusement : " Why, that young Blaine pushed me harder in the
argument than any man I know three times his age ! "

The young student had the great advantage during nearly
all his college course of being at home, and in the midst of a
large circle of his kinsfolk. Hence there was no room for
homesickness. The grandfather had only lived to hear the
inarticulate prattle of his namesake and grandson, and then
the long procession bore him to the house appointed for all
living, to the succinct record of the grave: "In memory of
James Blaine Esqr. who departed this life September 6th. in
the 66th. year of his age A.D. 1832." Two years afterwards
his daughter Ellen died in the arms of her brother Ephraim,
and then Margaret Lyon went to the house of her son-in-
law, to fill her daughter's place in caring for the motherless
children. There, sweetest of women, she grandmothered her
oreat brood. On all the youthful tumult her mild eyes looked

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 79

calmly down, and being " sweet and nice " herself, everything
around her soothed itself presently to sweetness and peace. As
no antagonisms ever sprang from her, she was the centre of com-
fort and cheer, the meeting-place of all interests and dependen-
cies. There her grandson had the advantage of constant easy
access to his Uncle Ewing's large family of young people, a
throng of boys and girls near his own age ; but rushing in to
his gay young cousins he seldom failed to pass through his
grandmother's room first, on the way to theirs, to give a cordial
greeting that gladdened her heart more than he knew. The
society of his uncle, who served in Congress with Clay,
Webster, and Calhoun, and served at home, as a lawyer, to
keep his neighbors away from lawsuits, beneficent, gentle, highly
educated, and of a most liberal, powerful, and original mind,
was in itself education.

His uncle William, who had attended him on his wild-wood
jaunts, and ministered to the fun he shared, retained his deep
interest in his nephew, and whenever the youngster and the
elder met in visits to Indian hill, the uncle would bid him bring-
out his books and would examine him in his Greek and Latin..
"I am rusty," his uncle would admit, "but I should think
you were doing very well." Many a delightful hour they
passed together — the dreamy and perhaps somewhat dis-
appointed uncle, who had not fulfilled the career which his
friends wished, but who at least knew the happiness of
following his own heart's leading, and the fresh eager student ;
and when apart the elder depended much on the younger
for tidings from the passing world.

From Greene county, Aug. 29, 1846, he writes to

Dear James :

I expected a letter from you, thinking- that among my numerous
acquaintances you might spin out a long letter which would be interesting
to me — whilst I in the wilds of Greene could not pen anything to you that
you would care about, except, perhaps the health of my family ; beginning
in this wise: "we are all well thanks be to God hoping these few lines
may find you in the same state of health." . . . Now do you not
see how much easier it would have been for you to indite a letter than
for me. Still T must not forget yr. many kindnesses in sending me
papers, which have served to enliven many a dull hour. You are almost
the only one that has remembered me at all in that way. Your Pap has

80 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

occasionally sent me one, but owing I suppose to his want of health, he
has not thought of me as often as formerly. I have no news worth
mentioning except the fun I have with the long-faced Democrats
about the tariff; they have all been obliged to sell their wool at prices
that did not suit them and I comfort them by telling them that it is good
for them. Were it not for the fun I have with them I should get the blues
myself ; but as I am a believer in Ike Mayhorn's philosophy, which teaches
never to take more trouble on one foot than we can kick off with t'other,
I bear the evil like a true philosopher. .

Now don't forget to write and give me all the news particularly about
your own folks. Give me also all the Washington news — Deaths mar-
riages all, all — tell me particularly if I. R. be married yet — if not why
the deuce he is not — Tell me how many graduates you have — how Mr.
A. M. is — tell me all and T am sure you will have no lack of materials for
making out a long letter.

What are your views now on the Trinity — are they as wild and infidel
like as they were when we conversed upon the subject. With this I will
send you a paper with the views of three candidates for ordination in the
Methodist Church on that subject — after you have read it I would like to
know which of the three you agree with. — When you answer me tell me
who is your Pastor now, or rather who is Presbyterian Pastor. I suppose
though whoever he is he occasionally gets astride the old Pope and ham-
mers away at his seven heads and ten horns (wonder they dont among
them break some off.) . . . And now dear James I must conclude

with assurances of my affection.

Yk. Uncle Will

He left the college campus thoroughly furnished not only
with character but with certificates of character from the fac-
ulty, collectively and separately. From first to last it was a
trait of his nature to trust nothing to chance or to the inspi-
ration of the hour, but to go well armored and well armed.
The groundwork of his inspiration was preparation.

Mr. James G. Blaine having gone through a regular & full course in
Washington College Penna. was graduated Sept1, 29th, 1847. During the
whole period of his connexion with College he maintained the character of
a very punctual, orderry, diligent, & successful student. His demeanor
was always respectful, & becoming a gentleman. When graduated, to him
with two others was awarded the first Honor of a large, & respectable
class of thirty-three. He is of one of the most respectable families of
Washington County; & by propriety of conduct, polite & pleasing man-
ners will entitle himself to a place in the best society. If he should be-
come an Instructor in a High School, Academy, or College, his talents,

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 81

literary acquirements, dignity, decision, fidelity, & prudence will not fail
to merit the confidence, & approbation of those who may obtain his
services.

October l8t. 1847.

David M. Conaughy President of

Washington College Penm.
W. P. Aldrich, Prof. Math, et

Chem. etc.
Richard H. Lee Profr, BLP
Nichs. Murray Prof, of Lang
Robt. Milligan Prof , Eng Lit

It is noticeable that each of the professors specialized the
proficiency of his pupil in his own department. The professor
of languages considered it " due to you as matter of private
friendship that I should add my individual testimony to that
which I have united with my colleagues in bearing to your
worth as a man, your diligence as a student, and your attain-
ments as a scholar. Permit me to say, sir, that during your
long connection with the college your conduct has been such as
greatly to endear you to those of us who have known you best.
You indeed are one of the few who have passed through their
collegiate course without a fault or a stain.

" Of your qualifications for teaching, so far as these depend
upon character and scholarship, I may speak with the highest
confidence. Your knowledge of the languages especially, being
critical beyond what is often attained at college, fits you in a
special manner for the office of instructor in this department.

" In a word, sir, I feel assured that those who may be so fort-
unate as to secure your services in this capacity will, when you
become known to them as you are known to us, be satisfied that
no recommendation of ours has been in the least exaggerated."

The professor of mathematics thought it " but justice to him
to say that in my department Mr. Blaine specially excels.
From the commencement of his course in mathematical studies
lie manifested a peculiar fondness for them ; his recitations
gave evidence of thorough investigation, and his demonstrations
were characterized by clearness, accuracy, and precision. The
same is true of the kindred branches, as natural philosophy,
astronomy, etc., yet his taste for the exact sciences seems to

82 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

indicate that in that department he would secure enjoyment
with success."

The professor of English literature praised his " Latin and
Greek classics, and the various branches of mathematics, but
particularly his sound and thorough English education," while
he specially commended Mr. Blaine to his personal friends as
" a young man of superior talents, of good moral and indus-
trious habits, of many personal virtues, of a liberal, generous,
and amiable disposition, and of one of the most respectable
families of Western Pennsylvania," and assured them that he
" should be much disappointed if he does not prove himself
entirely worthy of their confidence."

His attachment to the college and community of Washington
was deep and lasting. He ever counted the circumstances of
his college days as among the fortunate events of his life.
Nearly a quarter of a century after he had left them, he noted
his peculiar gratification at words of remembrance and regard
"from those who knew me in my youth, and to whom I am
allied for more than one generation by ties of blood, affinity,
and friendship. I have the warmest attachment to Washington
and all its surroundings. To the good old college I owe a debt
of gratitude which I can never repay."

After the death of his uncle, John Hoge Ewing, at the age
of ninety years, Mr. Blaine wrote from Hamburg, Germany, to
Mr. Ewing's daughter :

Sept. 6, 87.

Notwithstanding his weight of years, and the gradual failure which
betokened the end, the death of Uncle was a great grief, I might well say
a great shock to me. For nearly fifty years, ever since I measured human
character and felt the warmth of human affection, ever since as a boy he
noticed me so kindly, he has been an example to me of lofty character.
No better or nobler man ever lived. I can even now feel the thrill of
pleasure I felt when at the closing examinations of my first year in college
he spoke to me so approvingly and so encouragingly of the examination
I passed and of my conduct for the year. From that hour, though often
separated for years, we were even more than relatives, we ivere friends
in the highest, broadest, best sense.

To all the loving circle in which he was the centre and the light and
the life, my most affectionate sympathy goes out in full measure ; indeed,
I hope I may count myself, in a peculiar sense, a member of that circle.
Aside from my own immediate family, my deepest love goes out to my

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 88

Ewing cousins. Even if this were not so from nay own impulse, and from
my own heart, it would flow out naturally from the great love my dear
Mother bore to all of you, and the love you bore to her.

Those early days when we were all young together (in a circle of
kinship that was inspired by the most unselfish love), come back to me
freshly and vividly in this foreign land and blind my eyes with tears as I
write. God bless you all and sustain you all. The wife who is widowed,
the children who have lost the best of fathers, are all in my mind and in
my heart, and I can only say again to all, God have you in his keeping.
Affectionately and devotedly,

Your cousin,

JAMES G. BLAINE.

$4 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

VI.

FINDING THE ROAD.

r I \HE seven years after leaving college were as truly a time
-*- of preparation as the preceding years had been. Mr.
Blaine's experience in the Military Institute of Kentucky and
in the school for the blind at Philadelphia, riveting and in-
creasing his knowledge of books and compelling close study of
human nature in its most pathetic as well as its most stirring
phases ; his reading of law with the view of adopting it as a
profession ; his personal investigation of business methods, re-
quirements, and successes in the South, with the same practical
purpose ; his marriage, which led him to New England and
ultimately to his permanent establishment there ; the premature
death of his father and brother, intensifying his sense of respon-
sibility as an elder son and brother, — all had their specific and
important part in fitting him for and impelling him towards the
work of his life.

He had earnestly desired to take a two years' supplementary
course at Yale College, but finding it impracticable he struck
out into the world at once by way of Kentucky. His first ex-
perience was the unheroic one of deathly homesickness. Forty
years afterwards he wrote of this time to Mrs. Jane W. McKee,
Allegheny Arsenal, Pittsburg : - .

Paris, Oct. 11, /87.
My dear Mrs. McKee :

On the 28th of this month it will be forty years since on one half-rainy
Sunday morning in Lexington I entered your house for the first time.
The welcome you gave me, the cordiality with which you received me,
made an indelible and most grateful impression on my mind. Every in-
cident connected with that day comes to me afresh as I sit down to write.
How you sent William to Child's Hotel for my trunk, and how my home-
sickness which had made me so miserable for ten days was changed to
the joy of the fireside and the delightful sensation of being with people

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 85

who, if not akin, were connected in sympathy through common ties with
the Reed family, all whose members were elaborately discussed on that
blessed Sunday. I fell to thinking of all those things to-day, and I could
not help writing to repeat my gratitude to you and to renew the expression
of an affection which has followed you with tender recollection through
this long period. The very small things which now and then I have been
able to do for you seem so inadequate a return for all you did for me.
Miss M. was on that Sunday morning of October, 1847, a connecting link,
for I had met her more than once at Aunt Reed's, but I had not learned to
have the affection which I soon acquired for her as your sister. I cannot
realize I was then four months short of being eighteen years of age, and
that through all these forty }rears of " storm and sunshine," little as I have
seen of you, my memory of you has been so vivid. . . . Give my sincerest
regards to your good son and my good friend.

To his college friend " Countee," Mr. James Murray Clark,
he frankly owned:

A thousand times have I regretted that I left Pennsylvania, but since I
have left resolved to rely for a year or two upon my own exertions, I feel
a pride within me too strong to allow me to return home.

In 1869 he wrote to a friend :

"The day is dark and gloomy, unsettled and uncertain like the chang-
ing destinies of human and of national life." Now who said that ? With
all your learning and reading you cannot tell, so let me instruct you !

Many years ago, — to wit, on the 13th day of November, A.D. 1847, —
Henry Clay spoke in the great public market-house in Lexington, Ky., on
the subject of the Mexican war, which was " flagrant," if not "fragrant,"
and the words I have quoted were the very first utterances of his majestic
lips. Among the crowd, close up to the great commoner, "might have
been seen" a stray and eager youth with note-book and pencil in hand,
ready to report the words of the Whig oracle, and they were taken down
by .this youth of seventeen green summers and carefully preserved ever
since. From Lexington he went to Louisville, thence to Maysville, thence
to Cincinnati, and the morning he left the last-named place, December 4,
he heard that Robert C. Winthrop was just elected speaker of the United
States House of Representatives. He immediately notified his friends that
he was a candidate for the succession, and in the incredibly brief space of
twenty-two years he attained the place — a remarkable instance of faith,
patience, and despatch harmoniously combined. But I do not mean to
imply that there is any immediate, or palpable, or recognizable connec-
tion between the rainy Sunday of Lexington in November, 1847, and my
election to the speakership in 18G'J.

86 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

To Mr. J. M. Clark, Dec. 2, 1847 :

I have procured a situation as assistant teacher of languages in the
Western Military Institute located at Georgetown, Scott county, about
twelve miles from Lexington. It is an institution of some celebrity in
this State ; has about one hundred and fifty students and a faculty of seven
professors ; is pretty much on the same plan as West Point, or probably
more like the Virginia Military Institute. They attend to the military
training of the students some hours every day. Their course in college
studies is a good deal like Washington, except that they have a far more
extensive course of mathematics, embracing the whole course at West
Point. The students wear a beautiful uniform, and go through a regular
drill every day in the college grounds. Georgetown is the county seat of
Scott county (one of the richest in the State, joins Fayette and Bourbon)
and contains fifteen hundred or eighteen hundred inhabitants — about as
large as Washington. My situation will be a very pleasant one, I expect,
though I cannot say for certain until I try it ; I will not commence my
duties until the 8th of January. The session will end the 4th of July,
and then will there be a vacation of six or eight weeks, so that I shall
not be in Pennsylvania before that time, and very probably not even then
if I like the situation and they like me. I shall stay there for some time,
at least until I think of entering upon the study of a profession, which
will not be for two or three years yet anyhow. The way in which I
happened to get the situation was accidental. I heard of it when I was
up in Lexington — just got into a buggy and drove down one morning,
and they told me they would give me an answer in a day or two, and the
very next day I received a letter stating that I could have the situation
if I chose. I immediately accepted it, and am now only waiting until
the next session opens. I will have to teach the preparatory course in
Latin and Greek, and have a class in Davis's Elementary Algebra, so
you see my situation will be a very pleasant one as regards the branches
I have to teach ; what it will be in other respects I cannot of course say
until I try it awhile. It is at least something to be a teacher in a corpo-
rate college. ... I will send you a copy of the regulations after I get
there. I shall go up in two or three yweeks. I will give you due notice
of my removal before I start. I may not be in Pennsylvania again for
some time, and although I would greatly prefer being there, yet, when I
see it so obviously to my interest to remain in Kentucky, I endeavor to
reconcile myself to it. I shall stay for a year or two, at least, as I said.
Three of the professors in this institute are graduates of West Point, and
one of them is a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute. It is intended
to be the military school of- Kentucky. There is a female seminary in the
same town pretty near as large as Miss Foster's — quite a literary place,
you will perceive. Old Dick Johnson lives within a few miles of the
place ; he has a brother living in the town, and the superintendent of
the institute is a cousin of his : his name is T. F. Johnson —rather a John-

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 87

sonian settlement. There are more great men live in that vicinity than
anywhere else in the United States embracing the same space ; for instance
at Lexington, only twelve miles distant, there is H. Clay, Bob Wickliffe,
General Coombs, and a host of others. Then at Frankfort, but twenty
miles distant, there is Jno. J. Crittenden, Governor Letcher, and numerous
others too tedious to mention, and as I said before old Dick within a few
miles of the place ; so I will be perfectly surrounded by great men.
When I commenced writing I thought I could say all I had to in two
sheets, but find myself here on the third and not more than half through.

I mentioned in a former page that I would give you an account of my
pecuniary circumstances. Whatever are my father's are of course mine.
The state of his affairs is simply this — a few years ago he became very
much involved in consequence of having foolishly endorsed for men who
deceived him. ... He has now worked pretty well through his diffi-
culties. . . . The family have a sufficiency. It is pap's great desire to
see all his children established in some kind of business before his death,
and it is his wish that I should study a profession, either law or medi-
cine. It was altogether my own doings that I came away from home,
and I believe it was for my good that I have done it. Whenever I choose
however to return, father is ready and willing to render me all the aid in
his power. He says that he has now done as much as he is able for the
older ones, and they must henceforth depend on themselves. " They
have a better start than many a young man, and if they are only indus-
trious and economical they will succeed." Well, by the time I study a
profession, if I conclude to do so, I shall have pretty near my share of the
property, and the rest should be appropriated to educating the younger
children. You will at once see,, then, that although not actually poverty-
stricken, I am far from being in good circumstances, for after I study a
profession I will not have much more than will buy me a library. . .
Oh, how I would like to be back at Mrs. Acheson's.

You must be sure to give my respects to H., for as you say I do like
him. I cannot tell the reason, but I formed a very strong attachment for
him when I was at the American with him last summer. I considered him
one of the best-hearted fellows I ever knew, and shall always cherish a
high regard for him. Remember me very particularly to Esquire M., for
a better fellow never lived. He is as honest and true as steel ; a clever,
whole-souled fellow. I had not heard of the death of M. Poor fellow, I
pity him, as well as all those who have shed their blood and lost their lives
to so poor a purpose and in such a poor cause. You may think these
reflections ill-timed and ill-placed, but they are nevertheless true. We can
but shed a tear over the fate of those who have so fallen.

I saw a "Reporter" containing those resolutions relative to the death of
Robinson, and although your name is in the Corner, I will do you the
justice to suppose you had no hand in writing them. I think they might
as Avell have a stereotyped edition struck off with blanks left for the
name of the decedent — it would save them a great deal of trouble, they
would not have to tax their memories so severely to remember the last

88 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

form. I well remember the little incident relative to the album of Miss M.
— the words you did not have exactly ; they were :

"Reminiscitor me cum absum longe — Remember me when far away.
In medio erro inconsiderati mundi — Amid a thoughtless world I stray."

You left out the word " erro,11 a typographical " error," I presume.
That summer of the " Ball Alley," etc., is full of pleasing little occur-
rences over which I love to sit and think by the hour. It was one of my
most pleasant sessions at college, and I remember every little thing from
the willow tree to the great Whig meeting the 5th September. That
was the day I believe on which we first wore the striped velvet vests with
the red buttons — do you remember them ? and do you remember Patter-
son on the Catholic question? how he used to talk about Anthony Rentz,
etc. ? — it is needless to enumerate — there are a thousand incidents of that
summer which time can never efface. . . . This State is just crammed
full of teachers, and there are a good many from Washington and Jefferson.

A. M. is out here looking for a situation. I have not seen him though.
I saw his advertisement in one of the Lexington papers a few days since —
he is there still, I believe, staying with Bascom, the great Methodist
preacher. I think he will find it somewhat more difficult to get a situation
than he anticipates ; a great many are sorely disappointed in these expecta-
tions — itfs very easy talking about these " big situations in Kentucky," but
when you come to look for them you will find yourself mistaken. When
I leave my present situation I don^ think I shall ever look for another, but
I shall return to old Pennsylvania. The longer I am away the more I feel
attached to her — her very name possesses a charm. As strong a Pennsyl-
vanian as you already are, you are not as much attached to her as you
would be if you were to leave her for a few months — depriving you of a
pleasure teaches you better how to appreciate it. I can never nor shall I'
ever be anything else in feeling than a Pennsylvanian, though probably
circumstances may render it manifestly more advantageous for me to set-
tle elsewhere ; yet I still cherish the fond hope that I shall ultimately land
there. . . .

My room-mate, Forbes, who is professor of mathematics in the institute,
was formerly (I believe up to last July) in the same station at the Virginia
Military Institute. . . . R. is better at acting the " Czar of Russia" and
having you for chief " courtier," and drinking Jim Dennison^ hot whiskey
punch. Do you mind that awful cold night that we went to Caldwell ; Mayor

Johnson was in his shirt-sleeves and I lost my old cap that was so h ugly ?

Many a time will those old scenes recur to my mind. I can sit and think of
them by the hour — ''tis then that I long to be in old Pennsylvania. In your
predictions as to the candidates for the presidency, I think you are wrong —
at least as to the Whig candidate. Maz. is rather below par — that " secret
circular" injured him considerably. Taylor stock has been rising very
rapidly in the market since the old general returned to the United States.
For a few weeks previous to that it had been going down, " but it is suffi-
ciently evident to the most superficial observer " that a strong reaction has

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 89

taken place and he now stands forth preeminently conspicuous as "'the
man of the times.'1 I have no doubt now but that he will be the Whig can-
didate ; even if he is not he can run as an Independent, and such is the
wild enthusiasm of the American people for a military hero that he will
run ahead of anything that either party can bring out. As to the Demo-
cratic candidate, I hardly know what to think, though I can scarcely believe
that Buchanan will be the man. Your party will have great difficulty I
apprehend in settling on a man. You have so many men that have strong
claims that it will be no easy matter to make a nomination, and if Taylor
is nominated by the Whig party it will be very little odds who you nomi-
nate, for he will run ahead of the devil himself. For my part I would
rather see James Buchanan president than General Taylor, if he had not
had so large a fist in the affairs of the present administration. That will
ruin him — he can't run now (remember, this is my humble opinion just
to you). Calhoun's late speech will go very hard with President Polk &
Co. He uses them up completely about that "vigorous prosecution of the
war " that the President has always talked so much about and especially in
his late message. I think he establishes beyond the shadow of a doubt
that taking a defensive line is the true polic}T for our government to pur-
sue. You have of course read the speech and formed your opinion of its
merits and demerits. My opinion is that it is one of the most argumenta-
tive speeches I ever read, which every man ought carefully to peruse
before saying a word against a " defensive line ; " if you have not read it,
do so immediately. But enough of politics. I would not have written so
much about this subject only that you and I always took a great interest in
such matters, and I thought a small touch would, not be amiss. In conclu-
sion, I would just say that I would, like to see both candidates selected from
among the citizens. I don't like these military presidents that " go in" on
account of their " gunpowder popularity." I reckon I must not pursue
this point further, or I will get you raised about " Old Hickory." Peace to
his ashes — he was a great man, but entirely too rash. " Sed de mortuis
nil nisi bonum." I heard Doctor Breckenridge preach this morning — he
came down from Lexington to assist the preacher here in the communion
service — he preached a most splendid sermon. I could not help thinking
all the time that I was listening to a Pennsylvanian. I thought of the
night that he recommended you and Nilsy to wash your faces — that same
night that you stole one of the pillows off of Briceland's sofa and hung it
upon Creigh's awning-post — do you remember that memorable night?
My room-mate is a Loco-foco, we have it hot and heavy every day or
two — he's too many for me occasionally — he would suit you exactly —
he's a real Jos. K. Polk man. I may probably see Albert Graham some of
these days in Lexington, as that is the great central point for this part of
the world.

To his college-mate, Mr. Thomas B. Searight, historian <>l
the National Roarl :

90 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

W.M.I. , Jan. 14, 1848.
My dear Tom :

Your d d mean; trifling, low-lived, half-written, one-paged affair

(which might by some be called a letter, though improperly) reached me'
a few evenings since. It made me mad for a few minutes, I assure you.
Why couldn't you have written me a decent letter while you were at it,
even if I were one in your debt ! . . . I see that J. has been elected
to the United States Senate, a poor selection in my opinion. Why, don't
you remember his long, dry, uninteresting address delivered to the alumni

two years since ? and which by the way (your favorite) pronounced

the best he had ever heard, and for no other reason, I presume, than that

he did not understand a word of it. Edgar Cowan beat him all to h 1

the very next day in his address to the societies. I think the Whigs would
have showed more sense in selecting McKennan, Walter Foruard, Jos. R.
Chandler, or indeed fifty other men in preference, but the Whigs are a
fated party in Pennsylvania, and I think old Geo. Dawson's remark a very
good one, and I heard Watson of Washington make a very sensible re-
mark also, that the ''Whigs never could retain power in that State, and
they would always run themselves out in three years." And they have
let the Democrats elect the speaker. The natives do not always work with
Whigs, it appears. Is not that speaker the same man that your father
told Billy Roberts was too much of a Packer man ? Thus, then, by mis-
management we will lose our power in the old Keystone, and the next
governor will be a Democrat.

As I have to go out of town to-day to visit a country friend I will not
finish my letter until to-morrow.

I have just returned from the country (and just by way of parenthesis I
will tell you that I have had a most delightful visit and that Kentucky is
the place to have such) .

We resumed school last Monday, January 8 (an anniversary which you
venerate on account of the immortal Jackson). We had a vacation of
three weeks, which I spent at Lexington and Frankfort. It is very lively
at Frankfort just now, as the Legislature is in session.

They elect a United States Senator on the 1st February, and there is a
good deal of excitement about who it shall be. It will, I think, be either
Ex-Governor Letcher or Judge Robertson of Lexington. It lies between
them at present ; however, one may withdraw before election day. They
are brothers-in-law and it will not look very well to run against each other
— politics divide many a family, though.

They have a convention next summer to amend the constitution of this
State. The all-absorbing question is that of slavery — whether it shall be
continued or abolished. The papers have all taken sides, and some of
them seem to be rabid Abolitionists — others again are ultra-slavery in
their views — a third class and I think far the largest and most respectable
are for a system of gradual emancipation, and this I think will be the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 91

course pursued. Kentucky has been ruined by slavery — her soil and cli-
mate won't admit of it — she is too far north.

The convention will be composed of men of both parties of the first
order of talent, and the affair will be fully and freely discussed. I wish I
had you out here awhile with me. I know you would like the country and
the people so much. Scott county would just suit you, for it is a strong
Democratic region, although it gave a small majority for Taylor — this
was the first time it ever gave a Whig majority. Polk beat Clay in it.

Are not the Ohio Legislature playing well ? That is a burning shame on
the Democratic party. It is the most ultra State in the Union on all ques-
tions. It is always in one extreme or another. I wish they would turn
right into it and have a civil war. I presume you were much pleased with
Mr. Polk's message. I think it a very able document, but tinctured entirely
too strongly with party politics instead of national affairs. It is a labored
defence of his administration and his different cabinet officers.

Walker's report of the Treasury is a masterly paper, and so is Johnson's
post-oflice report. I read them both with great interest.

What do you do to amuse yourself away out in the country — jon have
no companions, and I don't see how you get along. Do you ever have a
game of poker nowadays ? We play draw poker here altogether and I
don't like it half as well as the regular old game we used to play at Wash-
ington. M. and R. L. could have their ravenous appetites satisfied if they
would come out here.

Poor W. — he fought without knowing what the dispute between the two
countries was about. It didn't matter much to him whether the Rio Grande
or the Xeuces was the boundary. . . .

Accept my thanks for the "Examiner" containing an account of the
funeral ceremonies of Lieut. Irons. It must have been an imposing affair.
Dr. King's oration I consider neat and apt. He did not say enough about
Phillips — that is the only objection I could possibly find to it. Saml. A.
Gilmore, Esq., of Butler, is to be Judge Ewing's successor. I suppose he is
an able jurist from what I have seen in the " Examiner." I think it is decid-
edly better that the judge should be from some other district. He is then
free from any personal feelings pro or con, and is entirely untrammelled,
and that is what a man can rarely ever be in his own neighborhood. I sup-
pose if the appointment had been made in the district, some of the Union -
town lawyers would have got it since the death of Cleavenger, or would
your brother-in-law have stood a chance ? No doubt you would have used
all your influence to further his interests. By the way, that reminds me of
what you were telling me about you and the Count studying law with him.
Do you intend to stick to it, or is it just one of the freaks of your imagi-
nation, which you will discard as soon as the novelty wears off? I advise
you to hold fast, and study with him until you are admitted. It is all you
are fit for. Suppose you and the Count remain in W. after you graduate,
and T will come there too, and we will all three go into it together, and be
admitted at the same time. I tell you the legal profession would be benefited

92 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

no little by the addition of three such promising young men as Messrs.
Searight, Clark, and Blaine. Now I do not intend this all as a joke. I
am in good earnest about studying law, and I know no place that I would
rather do it in than Washington. The only difficulty I have is in making
up my mind as to the time I shall commence. I could study here if I
chose, as there is a law school connected with the institute, and my duties
Avill allow me time to study. Accompanying this letter you will receive a
copy of our catalogue and regulations, from which you will get a better
idea of the W.M.I, than I could give you by writing for a month. You
will see that they say I graduated No. 1 in a class of thirty-three. This
was inserted without my knowledge ; if I had known it was going to be
put in, I would have objected to it, for in fact it is not strictly true. I no
more graduated No. 1 than did Tom Porter, or John Hervey, nor did they
any more than I, so that in that sense I might be said to have graduated
No. 1, for nobody was above me. But this is not to the point: I was
speaking about how it came there. Mr. McKennan gave me some letters
of introduction to gentlemen in this part of the country, in which he said
as a recommendation that I had graduated No. 1. Johnson saw some of
these letters, and that accounts for its being in the catalogue. I was ab-
sent at Frankfort and Lexington the week it was made out and sent to Cin-
cinnati for publication, and never saw it until the catalogues were printed
and circulated. I have been thus tedious in my explanation of this matter,
because I did not wish you to think that I was fool enough to have such a
thing printed concerning myself. My class-mates who may happen to see
it will think that I am taking a great stiff out here in Kentucky, just
because I happened to get a share of the first honor. When you hear any
remarks of this kind made I wish you to give the explanation which I
have given to you. The Count mentions that he received a catalogue from
me. I have not the slightest recollection of ever having sent him one ; if
I ever did it was when I was asleep, for I determined long ago not to send
one to Washington without preceding it with this explanation.

We have some of the prettiest girls about here that ever lived in the
world. They beat the Washington girls all hollow, one always excepted.
I am in love with about a half dozen, and the only difficulty I have is to decide
between them, and it is no easy matter, I assure you. Since I wrote to you last
I have entered upon my duties, and like teaching very well indeed. I am
at present hearing a class in algebra, one in geometry, one in Virgil, one
in Caesar, and one in the Greek reader, so that I have them from qui, quae,
quod up to triangles, circles, and squares. It keeps me right busy review-
ing, for I always look at the lesson before going into the section room, —
that is the military term for recitation room, — and each class is divided
into sections, varying in number according to the size of the class. This
afternoon (Friday) I have nothing at all to do. The sections are under
the professor of composition and declamation. To-morrow I am going to
Lexington, and will mail this letter there, as you will get it a day sooner
in that way.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 93

W.M.I., Georgetown, Ky,, Oct. 25, /48.
Dear Tom :

And you have graduated and left old Washington, no longer a student,
but out fully in the world as a man. Well, Tom, it is not the thing it is
cracked up to be. Give me a student's careless life — nothing to think
about except to-morrow morning's lesson, and if he can only get through
that feels perfectly happy. Oh, how you will think over these things
before you are a year older. At present you do not, for I know you are
all excitement in regard to the coming election, and cannot take time to
think of anything else. But if I were you I would not rack my system
about it. You are bound to be defeated, and that, too, most shamefully.
Are you not perfectly aghast at the late result ? Pennsylvania elect a
Whig governor ! The most astonishing thing I ever heard of. I do not
think the most sanguine Whig ever dreamed of such a thing. It must be
confessed we have not done so well in Ohio as we wished, but then you
must remember that there existed a good many elements of discord among
the Whigs, which can all be smoothed over before the 7th of November.
Besides, Weller got the Free-soil vote, which will all be cast for Van
Buren, thereby securing Taylor a plurality. But to tell the truth, I am
very much afraid we will lose Ohio, but then Pennsylvania will more than
make up. I have bet about sixty dollars on the election ; about half of it
on Taylor's carrying Pennsylvania. Do you think 111 win ? Your

" Pard11 is elected by one vote, I see. He'll go to h this winter certain,

and drink himself to death. I should like well to see you just about this,
time to plague you about Pennsylvania. ... I had a delightful trip
down the river with the Misses B. I went on to Cincinnati with them and
stayed a day there. I received a letter from them a few days since con-
taining very handsome presents in the way of bookmarks — rewards for
my gallantry ! They are in Memphis. A. is a splendid woman. I had a
blue day when I left Wheeling, going away from home and parting from
you, but towards evening I felt better. The girls were so lively and the
weather so pleasant that I could not help regaining my spirits.

I am surprised to hear that Henry Clay's speech does not take in Penn-
sylvania; it was made just for the purpose of conciliating the furor of

the North, but I am afraid it is going to play the d 1 in the South ; it is

tinctured too much with "Abolitionism " to go down well there. Henry
has made another mistake which will be apt to defeat him again. You
have no idea how his friends here are manoeuveringfor his renomination.
This State will be very nearly balanced between him and Taylor when
they hold their convention at Frankfort in February. Some of the Demo-
cratic papers of this State have Gen. Wm. O. Butler up for the presidency.
If he should happen to be nominated by your party it would be with groat
difficulty that the Whigs could carry the State, even with Clay as I he
nominee, and I have heard intelligent and leading Whigs say that they
would vote for him, and that they believed ho could outrun any man of
either party, f hope they won't nominate him, for if they do the NVrhigs

94 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

will be a used-up community again. You remember what a hard chase he
gave Ousley for governor in 1844. If you nominate Cass, Buchanan, Van
Buren, or any of those men, I think the Whigs stand a very good chance.

I have read President Polk's message very attentively and consider it
upon the whole a very clever document. Upon the important measures
and suggestions contained in it I will not pretend to decide, be they poli-
tic or impolitic ; let wiser and more experienced heads than mine do that ;
I forbear expressing my individual opinion, as it would only raise a dis-
pute between us. I will say this much, however, in compliment to Mr.
Polk — he is and has been manly, honorable, and consistent in his course
in regard to the " war.11 But whether he is right in that course is another
and a different question.

We had " the message " here the day after it was delivered, telegraphed
to Cincinnati.

The great "Tom Marshall" made one of his very finest speeches in
this place about a week ago. He is warm for Cass and Butler. It was
about the finest political speech I ever listened to. He did give the Whigs

h I assure you. I felt cheap myself in some parts of his speech, but it

is all to no purpose ; can't beat old Zack — we can elect him if Ave can't
Clay. The longer I live in Kentucky the better I like it. I wish you
were here awhile with me. I know, with all your attachment to the
old Keystone (which I so much admire in you), that you would §&y old
Kentuck is hard to beat.

We had a great time in our school on the 5th of this month ! — the anni-
versary of the battle of the Thames. We had a review of the cadets by
old Dick Johnson, assisted by Colonel Thompson, Fourth Regiment Ken-
tucky Volunteers, General Pratt, and Games and Harmon (two Buena
Vista heroes) as aids. It was an imposing sight I assure you, and at the
same time rather ludicrous. Old Dick is one of the plainest-looking old
chaps you ever saw. He would suit Plumpsock admirably ; he is the most
radical Democrat in the Union ; he did not look the least military. All the
rest were in full dress and looked splendidly. I wish you could have been
here. Just come to Lexington and you'll see the prettiest piece of God's
handiwork.

I send you a little piece of Horace Greeley's wit in the political line.
You must acknowledge it is pretty good, although it does hit you Loco-
focos hard. Write soon after the presidential election and you will have
the pleasure of recording a glorious Whig victory.

From J. N. McKee, Lexington:

I was in such great consternation the day you passed through that I
entirely forgot a commission I wanted you to execute for me in Pennsyl-
vania. You are doubtless aware that our wheat crop has failed. Conse-
quently flour will be inferior, scarce, and dear. Colin Wilson would tell
you if you were talking to him that we never had any fit to eat, but you

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 95

know to the contrary, that you have eaten good bread made out of Kentucky
wheat. As good flour as I ever saw has been made out of wheat grown
in Ganara. . . . Now for the commission itself. Invest the amount
enclosed in flour. I dare say your father will be a first-rate judge of the
article, and Brownsville will be a convenient point to ship from — more so
than Washington — as the river is exceedingly low. I presume freight
will be high. By the time you are ready to leave, the water will perhaps
be up.

I hope you may be able to get a good situation on the road next spring.

To Mr. T. B. Searight:

April 8, 1849.

God only knows when I'll get away from here. . . . Directly after
the organization of the new Cabinet, I thought of applying for a clerkship
in the Home Department, as Ewing (who presides over that branch of the
Cabinet) is a relative of mine. Subsequent events have determined me to
withdraw my application and now I am not in the ring at all.1

I do not think this is to be at all regretted, as very probably a resi-
dence of four years at Washington would prove anything else than ad-
vantageous to me. I would not expect to make any money, and I might
contract habits ruinous to my future prospects. Nevertheless I must con-
fess that it would be quite charming to be in Washington and see how the
wheels of government revolve and how the wires are pulled. . . .
Although there have been few removals made, you Democrats need not
flatter yourselves that this administration is going to play the " betwixt and
between'1'' — pursue a temporizing policy. You will find that about June
and July and along there the heads will begin to come off pretty rapidly.
I am looking for and hoping for a General Decapitation. I have had some
advices from headquarters, and this opinion is formed from them.

This State is at present all agitation on the subject of the convention
which assembles next winter to remodel the constitution. Slavery is the
great question. You have no doubt seen Mr. Clay's letter. He is strong
for emancipation and colonization, but he has many bitter and able oppo-
nents to encounter, and the day has long since gone by when Henry Clay's
will was law in Kentucky. This county (Scott) will be apt to send one of
the most able men in the State as her delegate — Jas. I. Robinson — you
have never heard of him, though by many he is accounted the ablest lawyer
in the State. He is opposed to emancipation in every shape and form
and I have no doubt a large majority (say two-thirds) of the delegates
returned will be his supporters. So the Abolitionists in the North may
console themselves with the reflection that their ultra course has created
this reaction in the public pulse of Kentucky.

I am glad to see that the bill for the new county is again lost. I want
old Washington to remain in her integrity. 1 expect they will finally

1 Chief of "the subsequent events" was that Mr. Ewing kindly dissuaded him from even
applying for a clerkship.

96 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

succeed in getting the bill passed ; they come nearer and nearer every
time ; it was lost this time by a tie vote I believe. Do you know whether
we at West Brownsville would be in the new or old ?

No two States in the Union fraternize better than the old Keystone and
Kentucky, though one be Whig and the other Democrat.

I intend to commence the study of law regularly this summer. My pre-
ceptor will be Judge Robertson of Lexington, one of the first lawyers of
the State.

From J. N. McKee :

Lexington, Dec. 4, 1851.
You are wise in leaving that institution : it required all the energy of
such a man as Colonel Johnson to sustain it. That once withdrawn, with
the formidable opposition it will have to contend with, it will be more
than the present faculty can uphold, and I think you are right not to be
buried in its ruins. I am perfectly disgusted with trade, but you are
young enough to lose and make a fortune. May you be as successful as
your most sanguine expectations.

From his mother

My beloved Son •

Elizabeth, Christmas Evening, 1852.

Yours of the 22d I this day received with the very acceptable Christ-
mas gift, for which I give you many thanks. Have you no vacation at
this time in the institution ? I heard from M. that you expected one and
intended going to Augusta and having your wife return with you. I fear
you are kept too busy. ... I am indeed sorry to hear that you do not

enjoy yourself at . How or why have you so poor an opinion of

his young and handsome wife ? I would have you to be at all times kind
and polite to them both. . . . Have you made many acquaintances in Phil-
adelphia ? How do you spend your spare time if you have any ? And you
have never yet told me how you spend your Sundays. ISTot, I fear, as I
wish, in attending church ; but this, Jimi, I fear is an unpleasant subject
and one that you think I have no right to speak of ; but you will forgive me
as you will know my anxious desire to see you a practical Christian. . . .

Your uncle Willie has made up his mind to go West. ... I would
much rather it were otherwise. I cannot bear the thought of parting from
my only brother in our old days. Never, never will either of us in this
world spend as hapj^y days as we once did. Poor uncle Frank seems very
near to me. I will ever love him for the unbounded love he had for your
aunt E. Her death was about my first great trouble, but what was it com-
pared to my sorrow and sadness in the last two years ? . . .

Little M. and A. were dressed this day for the first time in their new
frocks that you sent them. A. says her uncle Jim dress is the prettiest

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES O. BLAINE. 97

one she has and wishes very much you could see how beautiful she looks
in it. She knows you would think her almost as pretty as Stannie. . . .

Mage is the very soul of honor and correctness, although she has some
little faults to contend with. You ought to be very partial to her, for I
think she loves you as dearly as it is possible for one person to love an-
other. She told me the other day that if you were to die, all happiness in
this world to her would be gone forever. . . .

Do you have no idea of visiting us before July ? Oh, it seems so long,
long to wait till then. ... I hope, my dearest child, this has been to you
a happy Christmas. And may you have many, many, my own dearest
son.

To Mr. T. B. Searight :

Elizabeth, July 7, 1853.

Your letter did not reach me until many weeks after it was written, and
then I chanced to see my name among list of advertised. . . .

I am here without wife or child, they having gone on to New England
to spend the summer. I will be in this region during this month and a part
of next, and it is my most anxious desire to meet you and the Count. . . .
I cannot make any appointment of a meeting because I know nothing of
your engagements nor of the Count's. I lay myself, however, subject to
your commands, and will most gladty meet you at any place you may des-
ignate ; but meet you and the Count I must, or else T shall return to Phila-
delphia, bitterly disappointed in one of the greatest pleasures anticipated
in my visit.

Where is " Tariff? " T am very anxious to see him. If in Uniontown
I shall certainly see him if I have to come all the way on purpose.

Elizabeth, Friday, Aug. o, 1853.

After more than a week's delay I redeem my promise of sending you the
Count's letter. You will observe it has the regular country-squire fold to
it. No one but a Cross Creek or Robinson Township "Justice" would
give a sheet of foolscap the shape this has.

I leave to-morrow or next day for Philadelphia, and thence to New Eng-
land, returning to Philadelphia by September 1. I am sincerely sorry that
the trio can't have a reunion, but since the Count sj^eaks so mournfully
about the probability of its being the last meeting, T feel inclined to put it
off for some time — don't you ?

Have you paid another visit to Miss ? If you are really struck, all

I have to say is " pusxevcere" and if you should not make the landing,
there is nothing lost in honor or purse. Write me in regard to your success
if you make the effort. My own marriage only makes me sympathize the
more warmly in all affairs of this kind.

My address after first September will be Pennsylvania Institute for the
Blind, Philadelphia.

98 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAIJSE.

VII.

MAINE.

MR. BLAINE'S post-office address, after the first of Sep-
tember, was, as he had declared it would be, the Phila-
delphia Institute for the Blind, but only for a few weeks. All
unwittingly he had found the road — and it was The National
Road.

He had adopted teaching not as an ultimate profession, only
as the next step ; but he had none the less taught with ardor,
devotion, success, and happiness. His experience was at the
two extremes of confident strength and pathetic helplessness, —
with the young cadets of the military institute, vigorous, fiery,
impulsive, eager to try and not loath to show their mettle, and
with the young pupils of the blind asylum, groping their way
through the darkness of an unseen Avorld, — and to both his
profound sympathy brought full and eager service. In per-
forming his duties he never consulted the contract, but
wrought out of the abundance of his own nature, and over-
filled his position with unstinted generosity, with joyous cor-
diality. Instinctively he identified his own interests with those
of his associates. As young as some of his cadets, he not only
taught and trained their minds to accuracy and breadth, but he
could sympathize even when they were wrong, and discern the
time when it was wise not to see. Through the corridors of
the blind asylum his step was as elastic, his mind as alert
as in the Military School. He still kept an outlook on the law
and on the land, but he lavished himself on his daily duties,
looked after the interests of the institution, took part in the
improvement of its organization, with as much fidelity and
sympathy as if he had chosen it for his permanent work, and
left his individuality so vividly impressed upon his partners
that to them his later life was but the fulfilment of expectation.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 99

Twenty-two years afterwards, an associate teacher in the in-
stitute, who had but rarely seen him through the intervening
years, wrote :

I trust that out of this seeming defeat you will win a richer victory —
that the world will be permitted to see a man who finds a defeat only an
incentive to battle more strongly and vigorously for the right — a man
who is able to forget himself, and by his nobleness and devotion to his
country bring to it untold blessings.

Loving you for all that you were to me, and ail that I knew you to be
in yourself, in the years long ago, and proud of you for all that you have
been since, and sure that the Lord knows what he is about when he does
not let us throw up our hats for you in the coming election, under all
circumstances, I am your friend.

It was in the railroad train on the way from Augusta back
to Philadelphia that he was joined by Mr. Dorr, who had been
one of the owners and conductors of the Kennebec Journal,
and was still interested in its fortunes.

At that time, Mr. Blaine was known to the people of Augusta
only as they had seen him in his short vacation visits, but Mr.
Dorr had reached the conclusion that he was the man to take
charge of the chief journal of the State ; and he represented
the matter to Mr. Blaine so attractively that he immediately
took it into consideration and consultation.

Luther Severance, Simon Cameron, and Russell Eaton, three
young men, were working together in the office of the Na-
tional Intelligencer, at Washington, when the Whigs of Maine
conceived that the time had come for the establishment of a
Whig newspaper in their State. Mr. Severance and Mr. Eaton
were selected as men whose mental ability and practical expe-
rience fitted them for the undertaking. They were invited to
Maine, and in 1825 the first number of the paper, the Ken-
nebec Journal, was issued. It continued under their control
till 1833, when Mr. Eaton withdrew and Mr. Severance con-
ducted it alone until 1839, and in conjunction with Mr. Dorr
until 1850.

The proposition of Mr. Dorr appealed strongly to Mr.
Blaine's political tastes. The probability that the State
printing would be awarded to the Journal by the winter
Legislature was presented as an additional pecuniar} induce-

100 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

ment. He did not hesitate, but arranged with the Phila-
delphia institution that his resignation should be accepted as
soon as a person should be found to take his place, and on
November 16, 1854, the Kennebec Journal announced that
the establishment had been " sold to Messrs. Joseph Baker
and J. G. Blaine, who would thereafter conduct its editorial
and business affairs."

The Journal was obliged to admit that Mr. Blaine had
" come among us a comparative stranger," but pleaded in rebut-
tal that he was a gentleman of decided talent and of wide travel,
— a stronger adjective perhaps than would at this day be
allowed to his modest meanderings.

Mr. Blaine was a comparative stranger in the State, but he
was not unprepared for his work. It had been the amusement
of his vacations to go up to the State House and bury himself
in Niles's Register and in local records, by which he speedily
absorbed and assimilated the history of the State, and was
thus able to lend a strong, eager, and shaping hand to its
future course.

The time was one of such mental and emotional upheaval as
marks at intervals the upward path of humanity. The great
landmark of past understandings, always misunderstandings,
of compromises patriotically conceived and conscientiously
undertaken for union between North and South, had just been
swept away in the repeal of the Missouri compromise, and the
North was glowing towards the white-heat of the great civil
war. To the immediate actors and spectators, the repeal was
a brazen betrayal of faith. Following the passage and enforce-
ment of the last fugitive slave law, it seemed a wanton and
wicked rending of a national compact solemnly made and
sacredly kept for thirty-two years. In the procession of time,
it was a constituent part of what Mr. Seward discerned as an
irrepressible conflict, which no pledge, however solemn or
sacred, could prevent or compose, a compromise which the
most determined resolution could not perpetuate. It was the
ever-rising tide of conscience, reaching in these latter days
the high -water mark of a distinct consciousness of the value
of the individual human being, which in the eternal order
made, marred, and avenged the Missouri compromise.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 101

The conflict had not become more real, only more manifest.
The political ferment was radical. The old party lines were
broken up, and new combinations were inevitable.

In Maine, the nascent Republican party won its first victory
in September, and the immediate question was what to do with
it. When the Legislature assembled in January, interest was
keen in the popular mind as to how its organization should
be completed, and what should be its policy and measures.
The Whig organization had been maintained, and the Free Soil
and " Morrill Democratic " party had been maintained, but the
Whig party had dwindled from 46,000 in 1840 to 14,000 in
1854, while the vote for Anson P. Morrill ran up to 45,000. At
least one-half of the 14,000 were estimated to be in perfect
sympathy with the Republican or Morrill party, and were only
retained in the old Whig organization by the force of a regular
nomination. This was unequivocal testimony against the slave
democracy and the Administration.

The choice of Mr. Blaine as editor was speedily justified.
His thorough acquaintance with the political history of the
country, his ready comprehension of the issues pending, his
familiarity with the characteristics and personal history of
prominent persons, surprised even his friends. His reviews of
measures and his judgments of men were correspondingly just
and incisive. He fought not as one that beateth the air.

Joseph Baker, Esq., father of Orville Baker, the brilliant
ex- Attorney-General of Maine, was a leading lawyer of the
State, and the exactions of his profession made it impracticable
for him to retain active part in the newspaper. Mr. Blaine had
seen and copied into his paper, with strong commendation, an
unsigned article on the political situation, written by Rev. John
L. Stevens, and Mr. Stevens had noted with what signal clear-
ness and cogency, with what superior insight and intellectual
force, the young Pennsylvanian was handling the prevailing-
topics of public discussion. Without the knowledge of either,
a meeting was arranged by influential friends between Mr.
Stevens and Mr. Blaine, and in twenty-four hours from that first
meeting they had become associate owners and editors of the
Kennebec Journal. This was the beginning of a friendship
which extended without break for thirty-eight years. " As

102 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

freshly as of yesterday," says Mr. Stevens, "I remember his
appearance as I first saw him at twenty-five. His handsome
person, his striking features, his large, lustrous eyes, and his
whole expression of face spoke the man of genius and intel-
lectual power."

To the two young men — for Mr. Stevens was scarcely ten
years the senior of Mr. Blaine — there was nothing forbidding or
formidable, on the contrary, there was somewhat attractive and
stimulating, in the formation and appearance of a new party.
They at once and eagerly determined to follow their principles
into the Republican party rather than to " lie down and fold
our arms and do nothing in this great final struggle between
slavery and freedom. We will help bear the glorious banner
of Republican liberty on to victory till our government is com-
pletely and forever divorced from slavery, and wielded to secure
the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity ! "

The new party stood to them for freedom, temperance,
river and harbor improvement within constitutional limits,
homesteads for freemen, a just administration of the public
lands of the State and nation, and for education as the surest
safeguard of republican institutions. A department was to be
devoted each week to religious intelligence. And they modestly
continued : " With what ability or what success we may labor,
we shall leave others to judge — we can only pledge honest
impulses and faithful endeavors." They declared the great
Republican party to be fairly inaugurated into power in Maine,
" with a popular good-will, a prestige of success, and the elements
of permanency such as no party has had since the birth of our
State. . . . Let it be not merely the inauguration of a new
party, but the exaltation of principle above party."

Clear eyes at the South foresaw dissolution of the Union or
extinction of slavery as the outcome of the Republican party.
The Charleston Mercury foretold "no passing effervescence,
but a great movement ; progress a law of its being, victory
the law of its agitation." The Maine editors, on the con-
trary, saw in it not the dissolution of the Union, but its sal-
vation. Both were right. It was the extinction of slavery
and the dissolution of the old Union founded on the shifting
sands of compromise between the dying past and the eternal

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 103

future. It was the establishment of a new Union founded on
the rock of ages, the right of the human being. Certainly no
party ever had a more immaculate conception or a holier
nativity than the Republican party.

A bill, very important to the private success of the two young
men, passed both branches of the Legislature, making the Ken-
nebec Journal the State paper, in which should be published
all laws and resolves of a public nature, and all advertisements,
notices, and orders required to be published. Their work was
so well done that even their rivals complimented them on the
highly creditable style in which their reports were issued, in
response to which the Journal rather saucily congratulated
its " Hunker contemporaries " that, " however awry their politi-
cal principles, they know what good printing is ! "

To one recalling incidents of this time, Mr. Blaine wrote in
1868:

I love these, reminiscences that give us a life glimpse of what we really
were a dozen or fifteen years ago. I know myself that I must have been
green enough in those days — but I never imagined it at the time. Was 1
not then editing the leading Republican paper of Maine ? Was I not then
State printer, making $4,000 a year and spending $600, a ratio between
outlay and income which I have never since been able to establish and
maintain? Bless me, how rich I, should grow if I should only now come
into the annual receipt of seven times my outlay — and yet that was just
my charming condition in those delightful days.

But no personal compliments or private profits kept the
Kennebec Journal from girding itself for battle. It went
not simply where the fight was hottest, but it made the hottest
of the light — confronting the determination of the slave power
to extend and perpetuate slavery with an equal determination
to limit and destroy it — confronting the arrogant demand for
concession of superiority with as lordly an assertion and a
wiser maintenance of equal condition and rights. " The Ne-
braska swindle" was an objective point, a living contention.
On the final passage of the Nebraska bill Northern Statesman-
ship solemnly pronounced that all compromises Avith slavery
were henceforth at an end. Every issue of the Journal
was a series of blows boyish sometimes in their directness,
but manfully aimed and delivered, manfully muscular, swift,

104 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

untiring, effective. Every blow consolidated the party and
confounded the opposition. The confidence and strength of
the young editors infused confidence and increased strength,
and made many adherents to the new cause.

Mr. Stevens was then both chairman and secretary of the
Republican State Committee, and was too deeply absorbed in
efforts at Republican organization to devote much time to edi-
torial work, so that most of the ably written articles and caustic
paragraphs published in the Kennebec Journal in the cam-
paign of 1856, and copied extensively in and out of the State,
were written by Mr. Blaine.

The madness of slavery about to be destroyed gave innumer-
able points on which the alert foe never ceased to ring the
changes. The fugitive slave law, which opened the whole North
as a hunting-ground to the slave-catcher, and brought slavery
in its most odious and least defensible form to the very doors,
before the very eyes, of hereditary freemen; the overthrow of
barriers against slavery in the new territories, openly threaten-
ing freedom with the permanent political supremacy of slavery,
— were all that was necessary to rouse suspicious and smoul-
dering wrath to flame, and the strong young manhood of free
institutions had thenceforth but one passion — wherever slavery
showed head or hand or foot, to smite it.

Thus it came that the Nebraska bill, instead of confirming
the compromise of 1850 and strengthening harmony, brought
resentment and discord. Instead of two slave States, it gave to
the Union two free States ; instead of bounding Free Soil, it
made Free Soil of the whole nation.

Abroad the world was not becalmed. Mr. Perley, of New
Brunswick, was in Washington interviewing the President and
Secretary Marcy and Mr. Cushing and Mr. Crampton on the
Reciprocity Treaty with Canada. France, England, and Sar-
dinia were leagued in the great Crimean war to limit Russia
in the Black sea, and to bar from the East her gigantic and
terrible steps. In the very first issue of the paper after Mr.
Blaine assumed the editorial chair, the annexation of Hawaii was
presented as an immediate and American question. Mr. Sever-
ance, his predecessor, had been a man of marked ability,
courtesy, and character. While continuing as editor he had

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 105

served in both branches of the Maine Legislature, and had twice
been sent to the lower house of Congress. He had been ap-
pointed by President Taylor commissioner to the Hawaiian
Islands, and sailed from Boston August 22, 1851, reaching Hono-
lulu January 12, 1852. In this station he bore himself so admi-
rably that the king desired him to remain as Secretary of foreign
affairs. He did not accept the offer, but he ever cherished a
lively concern in the fortunes of this peculiarly interesting little
kingdom. It was during his stay there that the question of
annexation became prominently agitated for the first time, and
he prepared a paper upon it whose pertinence and value have
lost nothing from subsequent events. At the time of Mr.
Blaine's advent, Mr. Severance was regarded somewhat as editor
emeritus, and not only by his successor on the Journal, but
by Maine citizens generally, was held in warm and high respect.
Mr. Blaine's acquaintance with him was brief, Mr. Severance
dying that winter, but his appreciation of the man induced
him to write for the Journal a memorial sketch of the life of
Luther Severance, which was afterwards published in pamphlet
form.

Mr. Stevens, born and schooled in Kennebec, avowed on as-
suming editorship that his earliest political knowledge was drawn
from the pages of Luther Severance, " whose light still lingers
on us like the rays of the sun on the mountains, ere it goes
down," and spoke " with reverence and joy through a medium
made almost classic by his labors."

Hon. Elisha Allen, of Maine, was then Speaker of the Hawaiian
House of Representatives, a position which was said to be as
onerous as it was honorable, from the ignorance of the Hawaiians
regarding parliamentary forms. Of the twenty-seven native
members only six, including the Speaker, were whites or under-
stood English, and half the native Hawaiians had never even
seen a legislative assembly before. With Judge Allen Mr.
Blaine sustained cordial connections in private and public life till
the New Year's day when, full of years and honors, the Dean of
the Diplomatic Corps fell dead in the White House.

Through his relations with such men Mr. Blaine acquired an
intimate knowledge of the resources, history, character, and
aspirations of the island kingdom, and shared with them an

106 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

interest, personal as well as political and patriotic, in its con-
dition and destiny.

Annexation seemed coming on apace. Mr. Severance was
writing from his vantage ground of familiarity with both
nations, and strangely enough the questions which were con-
vulsing America were affecting also the policy of the gentle
island. The compromise intended to open way for slavery in
Utah and New Mexico, the repeal of compromise to open
Kansas and Nebraska to slavery, and the cry of squatter sover-
eignty frightened the Hawaiians. Slavery was prohibited by
the Hawaiian constitution, but if Hawaii were annexed, they
feared they would be made slaves under the Nebraska bill, or
even become the prey of marauding filibusters from San Fran-
cisco. In August, 1853, the British Consul had offered the king
formal remonstrance against annexation. Through the columns
of the Journal, from the pens of Maine Hawaiians, the ques-
tion of annexation was .ably presented, sometimes as the only
ultimate resource against anarchy. Negotiations were be-
lieved to be far advanced, and " probably," wrote a corre-
spondent from Hawaii, " ere this time next year, we shall
again be under the stars and stripes." Of 2,000 whites and
70,000 natives, nearly all Americans were in favor of annex-
ation ; the Germans stood three to one. The Scotch were
somewhat indifferent. The mercantile and commercial motive
was strong ; the sugar-planters wanted annexation to avoid
a thirty per cent, duty and get a thirty per cent, protection.
English land-holders were not opposed to it, since it would
raise the price of their lands. The chiefs, who owned large
tracts of land which yielded little income after compulsory labor
was abolished, saw that they would profit by it. Of the mis-
sionary work, the Journal spoke without sentiment, but its
facts were significant. Until the arrival of the missionaries in
1820 the natives had no written language, no recorded laws or
titles to lands, or to anything else. " The authority of the king
was paramount," and it was as constitutional for him, Kameha-
meha I., when he conquered the islands to assume ownership of
the conquered lands as it was for William of Normandy. The
missionaries therefore not only brought Christianity, but civiliza-
tion, to Hawaii. One of the judges of the Supreme Court was

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 107

John Ii, who remembered seeing his father, a native priest,
officiate at a human sacrifice. An annual labor-school for the
children of missionaries was under the chief care of Rev. Daniel
Dole, a " Kennebeeker," father of President Dole, of the Provis-
ional Government established in 1893. The English school for
half-castes was taught by G. B. C. Ingraham, a native of Hallo-
well. In Maui there was a school for native children under Rev.
Mr. Alexander, father of Professor Alexander now of Honolulu.
If the islands should be admitted as a State, these Maine men
avowed that they could send "better representatives than the
average." In 1843 England and France agreed not to take pos-
session of the islands either as a protectorate or otherwise, and in-
vited the United States to enter into the compact. The United
States declined, but all agreed to protect the islands against
filibusters. In President Buchanan's subsequent message it
was adversely noted that the two subjects upon which most
interest was felt by the public, the acquisition of Cuba and the
annexation of Hawaii, were wholly ignored.

In addition to editorship Mr. Blaine assumed the work
of reporter of the Senate, and his reports, though written
from memory only, without notes, became at once authori-
tative from their fulness and accuracy. His custom was
never to watch the speakers, on a theory that the exercise of
two senses is less effective than reliance on one. It was his
invariable habit, when a debate commenced, to draw up a
chair to the open fireplace and watch the burning logs while
he listened. He would afterwards, without a single note, fur-
nish his paper with a synopsis of the speeches delivered
throughout the debate. While still listening, he would men-
tally and instinctively frame speeches meeting the arguments
brought forward. After hearing the roll-call, he could give at
will every member's vote. He formulated no method of mem-
ory, was aware of no effort. When asked, " How can you re-
member so ? " his only explanation was, " How can you help
it?" What came to him remained — was on call. It was a
touch of the divine memory — no memory at all, but an
eternal now. Yet the eternal now was perhaps a part of his
secret, was certainly his impetuous and imperative rule, even
in that early day. A word or ;i fact that he wanted must be

108 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

sought at once, never relegated to a more convenient moment.
This association helped to fix in his mind the definition or the
statement required.

His attendance upon the Senate gave him excellent oppor-
tunity to become acquainted with the leading political men
of the State, of both parties. His own intelligent interest,
his enthusiasm, his knowledge of what most concerned legis-
lators and public men, his readiness to draw upon it for the
pleasure and the profit of his interlocutors, his eagerness to
draw upon their stores for his own profit and pleasure, the
very unwontedness of his Pennsylvania birth, breeding, and
associations, quickly drew the attention and regard of the
members, while it was equally observed that he never pushed
himself forward. Always and by nature energetic and force-
ful in manner when called upon to speak or to act, he had the
reserve which belongs to trained intellect, good breeding, and
good sense, no less conscious of responsibility than sensitive to
the rights of others.

From men then living in Augusta and its neighborhood Mr.
Blaine received great advantage, by the fulness of their in-
formation, and their ability and readiness to put him in pos-
session of the personal history of men, measures, and parties as
no reading could do. Several had done eminent service to the
community and were in the evening of honored life.

When Mr. Pinkham1 drove President Polk in his coach to
the house of Reuel Williams, a lad who was looking on with
swelling heart affirms that he could not tell which seemed to
him the greater man of the three ! Reuel Williams was a nat-
ural magnate such as New England loved to honor. He had
been United States Senator. He was a famous lawyer. He
had charge of the Plymouth Company's lands, and perhaps his
last public service was in the Peace Congress at Washington,
in February, 1861.

Nathan Weston, grandfather of the present Chief Justice of
the Supreme Court of the United States, had been Chief Justice
of the Supreme Court of Maine. He and Reuel Williams had
married sisters, two of the four daughters of Judge Daniel Cony,

1 Mr. Pinkham afterwards became Mr. Blaine's colleague in the Maine House of Representa-
tive. He was an intense Democrat, but a no less intense admirer of Mr. Blaine.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 109

who was one of the early settlers, and had given a house and
one thousand dollars for the establishment of a school for the
education of girls. Of the other two daughters one became the
wife of Rev. Mr. Ingraham and the other of General Cony.
Samuel Cony, from 1864 to 1867, Governor of Maine, was her
grandson.

Ethan Shepley had been in the national Senate from 1833 to
1836, but had resigned his position to become Judge of the Su-
preme Court of Maine, whence he was appointed Chief Justice.
He retired from the bench in 1855 and made his home in Port-
land. He was the father of George F. Shepley, who distin-
guished himself in the war, and became afterwards a judge in the
United States Circuit Court.

Hon. George Evans, of Gardiner, had represented the Kenne-
bec District in Congress for six terms, and had then entered the
Senate, where he had shared a national renown with Webster and
Clay and Calhoun, and was now Attorney-General of Maine.

Hon. Williams Emmons, of Hallowell, was in the decline
of his long and venerable life, though he did not attain unto
the days of the years of the pilgrimage of his father, the
famous Franklin divine, Rev. Nathaniel Emmons. His first
wife was Miss Wild, a sister of the wife of Caleb Cushing;
his second was the daughter of Benjamin Vaughan, the friend
and disciple who had accompanied Priestley in his escape to
this country. Mr. Emmons had been State Senator and judge,
and was held in great and deserved reverence in the com-
munity, not only for his eminent descent and connections, but
for his personal probity and dignity. Mr. Blaine's father-in-
law had cherished for him a special regard and affection which
Mr. Blaine shared so largely that he gave the name Williams
Emmons to his third son, and the family friendship continued
throughout life.

It will easily be seen that a keen appreciation which could
open the storehouse of such memories, would furnish incalcu-
lable treasure.

" How does Blaine know so much about Maine ? " was often
asked. Only by ways open to all, if trodden by few.

" He was born in the rotunda at Washington," said one,
whimsically accounting for an acquaintance with national details

110 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

which had come to him by natural assimilation from these
natural sources.

Of those still at the front, and of those coming to the front,
Edward Kent, Judge of the Supreme Court and Governor of the
State, is still remembered not only for his public spirit and ser-
vice but for the resonance of the campaign rhyme :

" He has gone hell-bent,
For Governor Kent."

Senator Fessenden was in the height of his great reputation
and influence, powerful by the purity of his character and his
eminent ability. Senator Hamlin was among the first to leave
the Democratic and join in forming the new party on the direct
slavery issue. Senator Morrill, the brother of Anson P.
Morrill, over the bridge of temperance, took the same road.
Israel Washburn, Jr., one of five famous brothers, was in
Congress from the Penobscot district, while the present Senator
was encouragingly referred to in the Kennebec Journal as a
young man of great promise, Assistant Clerk in the House of
Representatives.

March 23, 1855, the Journal records that Mr. Melville W.
Fuller, who had reported the legislative doings for the Age
while Mr. Blaine had been reporting them for the Journal,
delivered the seventeenth lecture before the Augusta Lyceum,
on Oliver Cromwell, in which his " researches as a historian and
his ability as a writer fully sustain the creditable reputation he
has already acquired." Afterwards he recited a poem which
was also generously praised.

Sidney Perham, Speaker of the Maine House in 1855, once
said, " At that time two young men were reporters in the
House. I never saw them together again till I saw them in
Washington, when one was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
and the other was Secretary of State."

On July 13, the Republican editor welcomed B. A. G.
Fuller and his nephew, Melville W. Fuller, to the editorship of
the Democratic Age, particularly esteeming the Fullers as
"talented and accomplished gentlemen whose abilities might
possibly lend respectability to the bad cause they advocated ; "
but by August 3 the sword was agleam, in spite of the " talents

BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. Ill

and accomplishments " of the foe. " Truly, Sir Cottrill, this is
an Age of trickery. It cloth seem to grow yet c Fuller and
Fuller ' of cunning machinations," quoted the Journal editor,
and hung up in his office a secret circular of the Age,
signed by " Fuller and Fuller" asking their friends to " coun-
teract the influence of such pernicious prints as the Kennebec
Journal, etc., which secret associations are using every means
to open up channels through which a deluge of copies may be
poured forth to flood the land with their dangerous doctrines ; "
and " it is the obvious duty of our friends to counteract, by those
vehicles of truth whose object it is to rebuke error, and hold up
to the light the machinations of its devotees. We have no
secret clubs, we have no hireling officials, to aid in their cir-
culation;" and then the " hireling official," the State printer and
future Speaker, held up his prospectus, inserted openly in the
paper for six consecutive weeks, to shame the future Chief
Justice !

The Coalition carried the next elections against the Repub-
licans, and the u hireling official "-ism was transferred to the
Age. Naturally, the alert Republican editor allowed no em-
barrassment of the opposition to escape him. A coalition is apt
to be awkward and unpopular. It did not seem less so under
the manipulation of the Kennebec Journal. The nomenclat-
ure was uncertain and entrapping. The victors could not call
themselves Democrats, because that would offend the Whig
membership. If they stammered on the " Democrat and
Whig," it was but specializing the odium attaching to " Coa-
lition." But when the bewildered Chairman, reduced to despair,
shouted at the top of his lungs, " The Anti-Republican members
will meet in caucus," peals of laughter reverberated loud and
long through the Journal.

The editor pointed out, with a. rather suspicious reverence,
that he had not reported the prayers of the Legislature, but,
finding the Coalition chaplain's prayer published by the
" government organ," the Age, the Journal reproduced it
with no other comment than underlining certain portions :
" To thee, Almighty God, in the presence of men and angels,
we humbly pray for thy favors to be upon the administration of
our State government during the year which has now opened.

112 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Thy servant offers this supplication, not that his voice has been
bought to party interests, not that he would part with his love for
Christ, and his allegiance to Him, for any worldly inducement, but
because he loves his country, the whole and undivided country."

Heartily devoted to the hopes and plans of Maine, the pages are
yet sprinkled with Pennsylvania and Kentucky lore. Serious
political argument is enlivened with stories of Joe Doake and
the National Road. When John C. Breckenridge was appointed
Minister to Spain by President Pierce, the Journal Editor
affirmed from neighborhood knowledge that no abler or worthier
man was to be selected. Before the Dred Scott decision fell
like a pall upon the venerable Roger B. Taney, the Journal
had noted his unswerving integrity and impartiality, the " rich
record of an honest and faithful discharge of the weightiest and
most momentous duties." When the Maine opposition pleaded
that President Buchanan had not appointed a Southern man
governor of Kansas, but a Pennsylvanian, son of a judge of the
Supreme Court of the United States, and a man who had prac-
tised law in Pennsylvania, the retort came like a blow that his
father never was judge of the Supreme Court of the United
States, but of the District Court of the Western District of
Pennsylvania ; that he had not practised law in Pennsylvania
for many years, but went to Mississippi as soon as he had fin-
ished his legal studies, at the age of twenty-four years, and was,
to all intents and purposes, a Southern man.

Hon. Thomas Ewing, of Ohio, was triumphantly and author-
itatively reported to have joined the " Buchaniers." " We
contradicted the rumor when it was first circulated, knowing it
to be false. Mr. Ewing has recently declared for Fremont, and
his son, Thomas Ewing, Jr., has taken the stump in Ohio in
behalf of the Republican nominees."

" Henry Winter Davis, a young and talented Fillmore mem-
ber of Congress for Maryland (would be for Fremont, prob-
ably, if he dared), made a speech in the House lately that took
some of the South by surprise. He spoke of the Buchanan
party as a Southern sectional party, and intimated that so long-
as Southern men supported it, they could not blame Northern
men for supporting Fremont. He passed a high eulogy on
Speaker Banks, who, he said, had graced the chair as it had not

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 11

been graced for thirty years. Mr. Davis is the most eloquent
and promising member of his party in the House, although this
is his first year of congressional service."

Thus it fell that at the age of twenty-six, upon a two years'
residence in the State, Mr. Blaine had sufficiently won the
confidence of the people to be chosen delegate to the first Re-
publican national convention for the nomination of a candi-
date for the presidency.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. I. Washburn, Jr. :

Washington, Feb. 14, 1856.

My Dear Sir : I am obliged to you for your favor of the 12th and its
enclosure to you. Fremont has strong points undoubtedly, and very many
elements of popular strength. It will not be strange if he shall be con-
sidered upon the whole as our best man for the presidential nomination.
But I doubt not that there will be strong opposition to him from quarters
entitled to the greatest respect. A man who says " I am not opposed to
the system of slavery if properly regulated," will be apt to say things,
and do things, which will not tend to strengthen him in the North, to say
the least. You are probably right in thinking that Seward nor Chase can
be run, I am sorry it is so. Wilmot, Pollok, P. King, Judge McLean, and
Speaker Banks have been named. It is thought by some that the latter
gentleman occupies the best position for success of any man in the country,
that he can better unite the American and Republican strength than any
other man. This idea is not without force and plausibility. But in my
judgment it is altogether too early to make commitments. We cannot say
who ought to be nominated — hardly guess — at least I cannot. A few
months may work great changes as to the positions and chances of men.
I would let things drift for the present. There will be attempts to reunite
the American party North and South, and, these failing, to organize a dis-
tinctive American party North, and to which it will be held that Republi-
canism must be subordinated. Movements and combinations to this end
are undoubtedly on foot, and I shall not be surprised if our recent elections
in the House enure considerably to their benefit- Every elected officer is a
Know Nothing, and it is now whispered that all save Banks are of the 12th
section, about all the subordinates are of the order, and majority, I believe,
of the southern wing.

Among the Republicans, pure and simple, especially from the West,
there is considerable squirming ; they say that they are mere adjuncts to
the party that has won; that they can procure no appoints., and indeed
that Republicanism is an offence ; who declare that the upshot of tin;
nine weeks1 struggle; is the, strengthening of the direct and indirect opposi-
tion to the Republican party, and that Americanism, as the paramount

114 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

thing, is more healthy and hopeful than it has been, etc. These things
though said, are more thought of than talked about.

You will perceive that what I have written should be private, or " rather
so.1' Excuse a hurried letter at this time, and please write me often.

February 26, '56.

Your letters are received. ... I presume that no one expects that
Seward will be our nominee. The trepidation of our friends has made
him Aveak, when six months ago he was strong and ought to be now. The
quest for as small a modicum of Republicanism as will answer, and as
large an infusion of Know Nothingism as will be safe, has put all first rate
men out of the ring, and left the nomination possible to onty second or
third rates. Fremont may be the best man that we can take. I do not
feel sure that he is not, but I must feel that we can tie to him on the
slavery question. I have no specific and positive desire to be cheated
again.

There is a living feeling in the country, without which we are nowhere,
which means opposition to the extension of slavery ; any attempt to ignore
which, or waive, or trifle with, will not succeed, and ought not to succeed.
Men are in earnest, and the earnest men rather than the traders and trim-
mers, the mere politicians, are to be felt in this campaign . I hope Fremont
may, be all right; if so, he can make a fine run. I agree with you in
reference to Mr. Banks.

Do you think that straight Whigs in Maine, who puffed Seward all last
summer, would oppose him while they would support a Democratic
"Republican"? The nomination of Fillmore yesterday will spoil many
nice schemes in embryo. I am rather glad it has been made now, as I am
sure it was bound to be made at some time. It will bring many anti
Know Nothings, who have been waiting and temporizing, into line. It will
crush out many aspirations and combinations. We can now see clearly the
path of duty and of hope. Men who are with us in reality will say so, and
those who at heart are against us but would have maintained a quasi con-
nection for their own purposes, though certain to leave us in the end, will
leave us now. Will the straight Whigs of Maine, who have opposed the dark
lanterns so furiously, fall into the Fillmore ranks ? Is Americanism, when
associated with opposition to slavery in Kansas, objectionable, and attrac-
tive only when its leading idea and purpose is to establish it there ?
. . . Weston says Maine is good for 20,000 majority for the Republican
ticket, and I do not see how that ticket, if a fair one, can be beat. There
is, we hear, considerable talk about Hamlin for governor. We think well
of it here, if agreeable to Mr. H.

At this convention Mr. Blaine inclined to the nomination of
Judge McLean, of the Supreme Court, rather than Fremont.
" My preference for Judge McLean," he explained to his

BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 115

constituents on his return, " was in large degree based upon
admiration of his high character, but partly upon an inherited
friendship for him, partly from a kinship of feeling with his
conservatism, and partly, I suppose, because the Whig instincts
which I share with the great majority of this district turned me
towards one who has so long been among the trusted statesmen
and soundest advisers of that party." Though impulsive in man-
ner and bold in action, Mr. Blaine was the farthest from rashness
— was, on the contrary, thoroughly cautious and even conserv-
ative. The rapidity of his conclusions often gave the appear-
ance of recklessness to what was really a sound, though swift,
logic. Ever the lasting force if not the strongest shock of his
charge lay in the strength of the position from which it was made.
The young and ardent Republicans at the convention gener-
ally preferred Fremont, and he was selected as standard-bearer.
None the less Mr. Blaine entered the contest with all his heart.
For the great majority with which the Republicans carried
Maine, no member of the rising party won more laurels than
their adopted citizen, and no exigency could have been better
adapted to show his genius for leadership. The moral eleva-
tion of the struggle was such as to enlist every power and the
whole allegiance of a noble nature.

His first public speeches are numerous. Soon after coming
to Augusta he went with a large party to Farmington, where
William Pitt Fessenden was to speak. It was one of the earli-
est Franklin-county mass meetings of Republicans. Fessenden
was not there, and the committee came to the Augusta delega-
tion and asked if they had any speaker. Some one said there
was a young man named Blaine there who had just come to
town and spoke well at caucuses. He was called on and modestly
stated that Fessenden was away, and that he had accepted the
invitation so that they might hear Republican doctrines instead
of no speech. He then likened his situation to that of the
farmer in New Hampshire who had a fast horse which he
thought worth $500. A jockey tried him, and offered $75.
The owner thought it over for a few minutes, then said, " It's

a d 1 of a drop, but I'll take it." The aptness of the story

and the manner of the speaker captivated the audience, and his
speech was pronounced the best of the year. From that day

116 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

on, it is the proud boast of Franklin county that no person ever
shared with him its political love.

Another first public speech his editorial partner vouches for
and describes. Mr. Blaine had then been in the State one year
and a half, had already become well known as a brilliant and able
writer, and had secured a large circle of warm friends. Yet
it was not known that he possessed rare powers for debate and
public speaking. It is doubtful if he knew that himself. In-
deed, there are signs that he then distrusted his powers in this
regard. There was to be a large political assemblage of farmers
of more than average intelligence, in Litchfield, a Kennebec
town a few miles from the Maine capital. The two Kenne-
bec Journal editors rode together to and from this meeting,
in the beautiful afternoon of a spring day, it being understood
that both were to speak on pending issues. It was arranged
that Mr. Blaine should begin and his associate close the
meeting. A little nervous, yet holding complete self-command,
he stepped on the platform ; he had not spoken five min-
utes before there were plain indications that his audience
was quickly coming to the opinion that the young editor could
talk as ably as he could write. The various and vital issues,
all converging in one focus, were reviewed plainly, incisively,
and with compact and lucid array of facts. His success in an
address of perhaps forty minutes was complete. The listeners
were delighted, and his editorial associate, who was to speak
after him, was quite as much surprised as the rural assembly,
and too modestly avows that he felt his own speech was spoiled.

In point of time Mr. Blaine's first political speech was in
Haliowell in the open air. He stood on the top of a high flight
of steps belonging to a boarding-house, and he probably never
passed the house afterwards without thinking of it; seldom,
with members of his family, without speaking of it.

His public hatred of slavery was accentuated by its personal
attack upon his brother-in-law, Mr. Stan wood, of Boston. That
gentleman was, as the Boston papers of the time noted, " what
is popularly known as a Webster Whig, of the conservative
stamp, well and favorably known in mercantile circles ; and
this foul attack upon a person of his high character and social
position has, of course, excited much attention here."

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 117

Upon returning to his hotel near midnight, Mr. Stanwood
had been introduced by a friend to Mr. Bushrod W. Vicks, of
North Carolina ; but seeing that the gentleman was somewhat
excited on the subject of politics he soon withdrew, with some
six or eight other gentlemen, leaving only one man, an acquaint-
ance, with Mr. Vicks. Reaching the staircase and hearing very
loud and harsh talk from Mr. Vicks, he went back, with the
laudable intention of calming and separating the parties, and
again left, supposing that he had succeeded.

" I might have got some two or three paces from him," his tes-
timony is, " he directly in my rear, when he commenced beating
me, with a large and heavy cane, over the back of my head, my
shoulders, and the back of my arms. I immediately faced him,
and grappled him by the throat, and threw him on a settee,
sprawling. But the severe blows I had received across my
arms, head, and back had well-nigh exhausted me in the com-
mencement, and he again got the advantage of me and kept it
till he was taken off by help."

The physician summoned testified significantly that " he bears
the marks of very severe blows upon the back of his head, the
back of the right shoulder and right forearm, and the back of
the left arm and forearm. The blows must have been struck
with a heavy weapon, by some person behind him."

With all the editor's brotherly sympathy and outraged sense
of justice, there is discernible a grim scientific satisfaction over
the proof of a political theorem !

"This outrage seems the more aggravated when it is remem-
bered that there was not even the excuse (if excuse it be) of
political difference and animosity. Mr. Stanwood, we regret to
say, belongs to the most hunker class of Boston Courier Whigs,
a set of gentlemen who have about as much sympathy with
4 Republicanism' as they have for the c Jellyby ' missions in
Borrioboola-Gha, and whose affinities with the Buchanan Demo-
crats are so close that the nicest optics can discern no line of
demarcation. In. attacking Mr. Stanwood, therefore, the ruffian
Vicks was assaulting one of that very class of Northern men
who most persistently maintain that the South is the wronged
party, and that Southern men, if treated well themselves, are
not disposed to molest others. If all the Courier Whigs in

118 BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Massachusetts, and in Maine too (for we have a few of them
among us), could have the recent experiences of Mr. Stanwood,
we might begin to hope that they would see matters in a differ-
ent light, and be disposed to admit that the Black Republicans
are doing battle against a tyranny as inexorable as ever cursed
the earth — a tyranny that not only lays claim to supreme
dominion in all the territories of the nation, but invades sover-
eign States, and waylays and half murders Senators and private
citizens at pleasure.

" Until this spirit of insolence and arrogance is effectually re-
buked, we of the North can expect but a repetition of similar
outrages. So long as we have a party among us that excuses
and palliates, and, in some instances, even justifies, these brutali-
ties, we may be sure that Southern ruffians will repeat them.
When Massachusetts editors give dinner parties to Knights of
the Bludgeon, what else can be expected than that Massachu-
setts Senators shall be assaulted for daring to speak the lan-
guage of freedom, and Massachusetts merchants stealthily
struck down for presuming to claim friendship with a supporter
of Fremont?

" At the South, we too well know how even these villanies are
upheld, justified, and applauded. Preston S. Brooks has re-
ceived thirteen canes and two services of plate, to say nothing
of the bouquets, the compliments, and the kisses, for his chival-
rous assault on Mr. Sumner. We expect nothing else than that
Mr. Bushrod W. Vicks will be sent to Congress by a grateful
constituency for his manly and courageous attack on Mr. Stan-
wood. If he fails in securing that honor, he will doubtless be
rewarded, in the possible event of Buchanan's election, with a
handsome executive appointment."

The possible event happened. Fremont was not elected,
but through the very announcement of defeat rang the psean of
exultation. " No defeat ! " resounded from the hills of Maine.
44 Such a result from an organization four months old is the
assurance of victory to come."

But politics did not absorb all Mr. Blaine's thought. His
nature was so full, so exuberant, that he was interested in every-
thing he touched. All the interests of Augusta became his
care and concern, both before the Legislature and in private

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 119

citizenship. The institutions of the city, the agricultural possi-
bilities of the outlying communities, the industrial developments,
the charities and churches, all felt the glow of his sympathy, the
impetus of his ready action.

When Mr. Blaine came to Augusta, the Rev. Edwin B. Webb
was pastor of the First Church. He was a very handsome and
promising young man, but a few years older than Mr. Blaine, and
he further allied himself to Augusta by marrying the daughter
of his predecessor, the venerable Dr. Tappan, whose wife was a
sister of Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, of Boston. Mr. Webb and
his young parishioner at once became close friends. Many and
many a night they walked up and down State street arm in
arm, or sat upon the stone steps of the Capitol, though their
homes were so near each other that, as Dr. Webb once said, he
could throw a biscuit from his window to Mr. Blaine's, — and
spoke no doubt from successful experiment. The relation be-
tween them was one of peculiar warmth and tenderness. Dr.
Webb had great confidence in Mr. Blaine's business ability,
followed him through all his political career with keen, admir-
ing, often pained and painful sympathy, and cherished the pas- .
toral relation in his heart long after it had ceased on the records
by his own removal from the State. Under his influence, Mr.
Blaine was speedily brought into the church, nothing loath, it
must be added ; for his easy way to the love of God, whom he
saw not, was through love of man, whom he had seen. The
Hon. Mr. Bradbury, then an Ex-Senator, and living now in the
evening glow of his two and ninety years, remembers that
Mr. Blaine was a member of his Sunday-school class for a few
months till many cares thickened around him ; but Mr. Bradbury,
who lived nearly opposite Mr. Blaine, insisted on exercising
spiritual supervision to the extent of sending over a silver bowl
which had been in his family a hundred and fifty years, for the
baptism of each of the Blaine children.

A large class of men he taught in a Mission Sunday-school
with so much acceptance that a churchman declared fervently,
" If he had entered the pulpit instead of the political arena,
there would not have been his equal in the profession in the
country." And a member of that Sunday-school class exclaimed
many years afterwards, " Not a day passes but T bless the name
of Blaine ! "

120 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

At the annual parish meetings, which Mr. Blaine considered
as important to a Congregational church as the annual election
to politics, he was a regular attendant and an active participant.
For liberal measures, especially for liberal appropriations for
the minister, the music, and all the service of the church, he
could be relied on.

But in one respect Mr. Webb was disappointed. In the
" prayer-meeting " Mr. Blaine's voice was not heard. The lamp
of his faith glowed with a steady, cheerful, and far-reaching
light, but that particular burner he never used. Anything like
" exhortation," still more anything like personal revelation or
exhibition of religious feeling, was impossible to him.

None the less he walked in all the ordinances of the Lord
blameless, and with ever-growing influence. They tell yet, in
Augusta, of the good woman who, when the meeting-house was
struck by lightning, rushed around amid the crowd, sorrowful,
wringing her hands, and moaning, " Where is Mr. Blaine, oh,
where is Mr. Blaine ? " evidently believing, by neighborhood
interpretation, that if Mr. Blaine had been there the lightning
would have been balked. " Where is Mr. Blaine ? " cried a
second woman, coming up. " At home, drawing up a subscrip-
tion paper for a new meeting-house.''

When a large East Boston church bade Mr. Webb to their
pulpit, Mr. Blaine was appointed on a committee to draft reso-
lutions expressive of the sentiments of the society. The com-
mittee's resolutions were prompt and pointed, to the effect'
"that this is not an invitation which the great Head of the
Church requires their respected and beloved pastor to accept " !
They recapitulated the success of his work for the seven years,
suggested that it was " the only society at the capital where were
necessarily brought together large numbers of intelligent stran-
gers from every section of the State, thus presenting a field of
great general usefulness and influence beyond our own locality,
and responsibility and accompanying duty surpassed only by a
few positions in this part of the Union, where his labors have
been so signally blessed ; " and that it was especially necessary
that this society should be united, strong, energetic, and en-
gaged; and Mr. Webb remained in Augusta — till a better
attested call won him to Boston itself.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 121

Mr. Webb's young parishioner, the Journal editor, also re-
ceived a call which he decided that the great Head of the
Church required him to accept. His Augusta editorship had
been successful. The paper was established in a new building
with modern improvements, but the editor carried with him his
pet desk, made upon his first induction into the office, from his
own directions, under his own eye. By the limited light of
that day, it was his ideal of the true editor's desk. It has ever
since attended the fortunes of the Journal, and with all its
shortcomings is at this moment the article of furniture most
prized in the Journal office. Mr. Blaine was in truth a very
skilful and artistic, though undeveloped, mechanic. There is
reason for supposing that even the jack-knife was a lost art to
him, but he delighted in mechanical inventions and arrange-
ments ; loved to plan houses, rooms, furniture ; loved to symbol-
ize sentiments and ideas in decorations, and watch their slow
materialization ; loved to group pictures — always with a man
and a step-ladder to try the suggested effects ! He was inval-
uable in helping out interiors when he could be captured from
the exterior. Not only his own houses, but his friends' houses,
he viewed upon occasion with the eye of the artificer. If a
change were desired by a woman on whom he might be calling,
it was the work of a moment for him to pace the floor, to
knock down a partition here, to knock open a door there, to
throw out a portico, to place a tank, run a pipe, draw a diagram,
and all with such definiteness of vigor and heartiness of reason-
ing and demonstration, that the work seemed already accom-
plished before a nail was driven, and it only remained to the
proprietor to pay the bill.

August 9, 1857, he wrote to his mother : " In case Walker gets
through his sickness comfortably and H. and the baby remain
in good condition, it is not improbable that I shall go to Port-
land in a few weeks to edit a daily paper. I have an excellent
offer, and have about concluded to accept in case my family af-
fairs will permit. I should not remove my family from Augusta
at present, and would be at home every Saturday and Sunday.
Portland is but three hours distant."

In October, the same year, the Journal made announce-
menl that Mr. Blaine had become connected with the "Portland

122 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Advertiser " a few weeks before, and a week later that he had
disposed of his entire interest in the Journal, and " his con-
nection with the paper ceases." He tendered many thanks for
the confidence and regard shown him during three years' service,
commended his successor, and spoke warmly of his partner, J.
L. Stevens, " with whom I have been most agreeably associated,
and to whose zeal, fidelity, and ability in the advocacy of Re-
publican principles I bear most cheerful testimony." He did
not announce what was nevertheless true that the success of the
paper was attested by the greatly increased value of the prop-
erty under his management, as shown by the prices at which he
had bought and sold it.

Familiar with the coal-fields of Pennsylvania, he early invested
his surplus capital in coal properties in Western Pennsylvania,
and it was not very long before he was contracting for the de-
livery of coal ; by the spring of 1863, " the party of the second
part agreeing to pay unto the said James G. Blaine the price of
sixty cents for each and every one hundred bushels of coal
taken out, not less, however, than three hundred thousand
bushels in each year."

Hon. John M. Wood, M.C., had come into chief ownership of
the Portland Advertiser, and Mr. Wood fastened upon the
young Augusta editor for editor-in-chief of his new venture,
offering him $2,000 a year, a larger salary than had ever been
paid a Maine editor.

" Agreement " between John M. Wood, of Portland, of the
first part, and James G. Blaine, of Augusta, of the second part, in
Mr. Blaine's handwriting, " witnesseth " what importance he
attached to a clear understanding of detail :

. . . . That his salary was to be two thousand dollars ($,2000) per
annum, payable monthly, one hundred and sixty-six dollars sixty-seven one-
hundredths per month ($166.67).

2. That if at any time prior to October 1, 1861, the said Wood desires
to dispense with the services of said Blaine as editor of the " Advertiser,"
he (the said Wood) shall pay to him (the said Blaine) the sum of six
hundred dollars ($600) in addition to the salary that may be due to him at
the time his labor on the paper shall cease; and if, on the other hand,
the said Blaine wishes to be released from this agreement prior to October
1, 1861, he shall pay the said Wood six hundred dollars bonus for releasing
him.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G, BLAINE. 123

3. It is further agreed that said Blaine, during his connection with the
paper as editor, shall reside either in Portland or Augusta; if in Augusta,
then to remain in Portland five days of each week except when the Legis-
lature is in session, during which time said Blaine is to remain in Augusta
as correspondent and reporter for the "Advertiser," as much of the time
as maybe deemed expedient for the best interests of the paper, at the same
time furnishing the leading editorials for the paper. . . .

7. It is further agreed that the supervision of the editorial columns of
the paper shall be exercised by said Blaine, and no editorial article shall
be allowed to appear in said paper without the inspection and assent of
said Blaine, except articles whose insertion is directed by said Wood.
And all editorial articles which may be inserted by said Wood's direction
the said Blaine shall have the right to dissent from in the columns of the
" Advertiser,1' in case he desires to present different views, or explain his
own position.

8. For the considerations herein named and upon the conditions cited,
the said Blaine binds himself to use all honorable efforts for the prosperity
and advancement of the "Advertiser,11 and to this end will devote all the
time requisite to the proper and faithful discharge of his editorial duties,
and will not aid by contribution or otherwise in the editing of any other
paper or periodical, and will not engage in any other business that will
conflict with the proper discharge of his editorial duties.

In 1859 agreement was continued between Waldron, Little &
Co. and James G. Blaine, in presence of E. B. Webb, with the
addition that " in case said Blaine shall serve as a member of
the Legislature, he shall devote his compensation as such to the
payment of a substitute in his place, besides himself furnishing
not less than three leading editorials or letters for the paper
each week."

February 11, 1860, under a new contract, " if said Blaine be
a member of the Legislature he shall receive but twelve dollars
per week for his editorial services, and be required to furnish
no more than three leaders and one letter each week during the
legislative session. This agreement shall continue in full force
and effect for one year after the services of said Blaine shall
commence, and may then be discontinued by either party
thereto."

The Portland Advertiser was a daily. The Kennebec
Journal had been a weekly, and during the sessions of the
Legislature a tri-weekly. The work was naturally more exact-
ing, and in a letter to his mother Mr. Blaine speaks <»l

124 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

. . . my very numerous cares and my constant, unremitting1 daily
labor. . . .

I spend about one-half the week in Portland, and the remainder at home.
A large part of my editorial labor is performed here, and as Portland is
distant but three hours1 travel by rail, I can get along just as well as though
I were constantly there. I have thought a good deal about moving there,
but hardly think I shall do so. Rents are enormously high and expenses
of living higher in every way than here. The city is a very beautiful one,
of thirty thousand inhabitants, situated directly on the ocean, and possesses
many attractive points as a place of residence. I think, however, that
upon the whole 1 prefer the quiet and retirement of Augusta.

Our babies grow finely. Walker is a great boy of now nearly three
years, and has grown prodigiously since his sickness of the past summer.
I shall before long try to send you his daguerreotype. Emmons (now
eight months old) is of course very handsome in my eyes. He is large,
playful, and so far exceedingly healthy.

Dec. 19, 1857.

. . . Walker and Emmons are two as beautiful children as, in the
fondness of my heart, I could possibly desire. I hope before very long I
may be able to bring them to see you, or, better still, have you come and
see them — or would you venture into this Puritan land ?

Tell Mr. M. to lie low in political matters and watch the Democratic
party rush on to self-destruction. . . . The Republican President will
beyond all doubt be inaugurated on the 4th of March, 1861. I should like
to see him and talk politics, but I cannot write them, as I have too much of
that to do for a daily paper.

The event foreshadowed in the contract with Mr. Wood came
to pass, and in September, 1858, Mr. Blaine was elected Repre-
sentative from Augusta in the State Legislature. His slight
business connection with Portland had not been long enough or
strong enough to weaken his home attachment to Augusta, or
to invalidate the vigor with which, whenever an attempt was
made to take away the Capitol from Augusta and give it to
Portland, he opposed it tooth and nail. Nor, after his con-
nection with the Advertiser ceased, was he ever again tempted
away from Augusta to Portland.

To Mr. Blaine from Senator Fessenden :

August 15, 1860.
. . . The publishers and owners of the Advertiser have made up their
minds, at last, that they must adopt a new system. It is too late for
them to do much before the September election, but we shall see what can

lisiiia,

■-.■--•-•:

;«

;«%?!

AT TWENTY-EIGHT.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 125

be done after that is over. . . . But nothing can be done unless an able
editor can be had ; and there is but one voice as to who should be the
man. I am convinced that the concern is profitable, and can be made
more so, if a jDroper character can be given to it. Now, can you, and will
you, become identified with Portland ? I have heretofore given you my
views as to the proper place for you. My opinion remains unchanged.
This is the point of strength for you in every aspect, political and pecuni-
ary. Let me know what you think about it soon, as our action will be
influenced by your decision.

But editorship was incompatible with his new duties. As an
editor he had not only shaped the policy and written the edito-
rials for his paper but he had supervised its details. His writing
was largely done in his own house. At the Journal office he
looked over the newspapers, exchanged cheery words with the
compositors at the case, and with the political friends who found
him there, and not only gave general directions regarding the
course of the paper, but stood by the foreman and dictated the
position of every article, from the leader down to the most
trivial three-line items. For particulars he had an inexhaustible
capacity, and though he never expended himself on them they
were the basis of all his generalization and his ready and most
formidable weapon whenever those generalizations were chal-
lenged.

In the Legislature he quickly took high ground. His views
were radical, definite, uttered with frankness and fearlessness.
He was impetuous, aggressive, and persistent. His words were
weapons. Maine had become used to his writing, but his suc-
cess as an editor had not prepared her for his greater success in
the House. After two years' service on the floor he was made
speaker. In the new position he showed a knowledge of parlia-
mentary rules and a quickness and reasonableness in applying
them that come only from a comprehension of the principles
underlying rules, and imply mental grasp rather than mechan-
ical memory.

In 1859, succeeding Mr. Stevens, he was appointed Chairman
of the Republican Executive Committee, of Maine, an honor less
noticeable, perhaps an office less conspicuous than those of the
speakership, but carrying the responsibility of shaping the policy
and organizing the forces of the Republican party in the State.

126 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

To this office he continued to be reappointed until he was made
Secretary of State by Garfield in 1881. Indeed, from the day
of his election to the Legislature his district never let go her
hold upon him, except to relinquish him to the State, and the
State relinquished him only to the nation. As Chairman of
the State Committee, his organization was so thorough that the
party marched to nearly uninterrupted victory, and the other
party called him dictator. A dictator he was, but a dictator
who believed that the reason and conscience of the people was the
true basis of government, and the only basis of popular govern-
ment, and who, therefore, so arranged his forces as to meet the
reason, and enlist the conscience, and command the assent, and
know the purpose of every man in the community. His broad
view, his swift glance were accompanied by such a patience of
detail as counted nothing done for victory while anything re-
mained to be done. This it was which invested his counsels with
an unsurpassed vigor and vitality. When in other States ex-
pected victories turned themselves into defeats at the polls, his
surprised question was, " Why did they not know f v Thorough
organization was the great secret of his political dictatorship.

Of this* period of his life, Ex-Governor Robie some years
afterwards writes :

It was my good fortune to have been associated in the Legislature of
Maine with Mr. Blaine during three of the most important years in the^
history of our State, commencing in the year 1859. . . . He came
into public life at a time when the management of the finances of our
State required a searching investigation, and he was made chairman of a
responsible committee, of which I was a member. ... I recall the
masterly manner in which he handled the delicate trust committed to him,
his searching and uncompromising efforts to save the credit of the State.
The able report prepared by him which laid open and explained an unfor-
tunate misdirection of public confidence, was at once adopted ; the credit
of the State was saved by his labor and by the action of the committee. I
call to mind his efforts to develop the great railroad interests of the State,
then in their infancy, but since developed in consequence of methods which
he advocated. I recall his recommendation for State Prison reform, which
created a new departure in our State and resulted in an improved method
of prison-work and discipline. I cannot for want of space recapitulate
the numerous and well-executed plans for the prosperity of our State
and Nation which he advocated with the fervor of his youthful eloquence ;
but he thus early laid in our State the foundation of that respect and

BTOGEAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 127

regard to which his untiring services for education, temperance, law,
and order, and the development of the natural resources of the State,
entitle him. . .

These are some of the many causes which have contributed to create
and increase the warm feeling of attachment and State pride which has
grown into a profound veneration among the Republican masses.

Yet, in truth, his popularity was something other than this.
The personal affection lavished upon him by the people of
Maine was apart from political affiliation.

The attractiveness which never failed to win at his first ap-
pearance deepened as familiarity grew. His sympathy was
seen to be not only quick, but wide, deep, lasting, and fruitful.
It embraced the man himself, not simply the citizen. It was
seen that his heart, his conviction, his conscience, were in his
work, and that he was more eager to secure the end than the
credit of it. Naturally he enlisted the best in every man, and
gathered by divine right all love and loyalty to himself. The
personal enthusiasm which centred in him stretched far beyond
the point of personal contact. Governor Kent testified, " Almost
from the day of his assuming editorial charge of the Kennebec
Journal, Mr. Blaine sprang into a position of great influence
in the politics and policy of Maine. At twenty-five he was a
leading power in the councils of the party. Before he was
twenty-nine he was chosen chairman of the Executive Commit-
tee of the Republican organization in Maine, a position from
which he has shaped and directed political campaigns in the
State, leading his party to brilliant victory. 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 foundation of all, pure character and a masterly
ability equal to all demands made upon him ; "but just as deeply
and more definitely right was the old neighbor in Augusta who
wrote him, on his fortieth birthday, in Washington :

January 31, 1870.

My DEAR Mr. Blaink : Permit me to congratulate you on safely reach-
ing your fortieth natal day. From my heart, I thank God for your life,
and fott your public and private virtues. How prosperous have been your

128 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

years ! From the day you took up your abode in Augusta, your advance-
ment has been sure and steady, and the confidence and anticipations of
your friends have never been disappointed. My opportunities for personal
observation, and for knowing what others think, have been as good, I
believe, as those of any other person ; and I have never heard you accused
of any deceptions, trickeries, double-dealings, or any of those little mean-
nesses that taint and mar the life of so many public men. That there have
been envyings, there can be no doubt — alas, who is free from them? That
you have been, and are, ambitious, is true, I suppose ; but your plans and
measures have been wise and sagacious, not dishonorable, low, and mean.
Your friendship for me — how constant and faithful has it been ! There has
not been a year of our acquaintance that has not witnessed your good daily
towards me and mine, and all that is now pleasant and comfortable in my
surroundings I owe to you. Your deportment towards me in this city is
as cordial and considerate as ever, though 1 have appeared to you many
times moody, croaking, and cynical.

May God have you and yours in his continued holy keeping, and grant
you all the desires of your heart ; for sure I am that your advancement is
also the advancement of the public welfare.

When the Republican convention met in Chicago in 1860,
Mr. Stevens and Mr. Blaine attended it, the one as Republican
delegate, the other as a volunteer from vivid personal interest.
Mr. Stevens was for Mr. Seward's nomination, and, as usual, all
his soul was in his conviction. Mr. Blaine had been appointed
Prison Commissioner for the State in 1859, and with great care
had investigated prisons in many States and his report is still
quoted as authority. On one such visit he had found him-
self in the vicinity of the Lincoln-Douglas debate, and had
availed himself of the opportunity to hear Mr. Lincoln twice.
He had followed the senatorial contest with interest, and ever
after was an enthusiastic adherent of Mr. Lincoln, and was
now his earnest advocate. Indeed he believed his paper, the
Kennebec Journal, to be the first one which ever mentioned
Lincoln's name for the presidency.

He could not win Mr. Stevens away from Seward, but of the
sixteen Maine delegates not pledged, but supposed to be for
Seward, six voted for Lincoln. This division of an Eastern
delegation for the Western man had an appreciable effect. Mr.
Stevens drew from Mr. Blaine full admission and admiration
of Mr. Evarts's eloquence, to which he then listened for the first

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 129

time, but it did not alter his opinion that Mr. Lincoln was the
better candidate.

Chenery House, Springfield, III.,

Sunday, May 20, 1860.

I came here yesterday from Chicago, in company with the committee
appointed by the National Convention to notify Mr. Lincoln of his nomina-
tion. We reached here before sunset, and were received by a tremendous
crowd at the depot, conducted to the hotel, treated to a handsome supper,
and then taken to Mr. Lincoln's residence, where Mr. Ashmun, of Massa-
chusetts, chairman of the committee, formally notified him of his nomina-
tion, and Mr. Lincoln accepted it in a most admirable, pertinent, and brief
speech. We were all then formally presented to him and also. to his wife,
who is a very lady-like and quite good-looking person. Lincoln himself
is a far better-looking man than you would expect from the miserable car-
icature I sent you. It is like him to be sure, but a most grotesque and
exaggerated painting of his phiz and features. . . . While a very
awkward-looking man, you realize at once that it is the awkwardness of
genius rather than any proof of the lack of it.

I think the nomination the very best that could have been made in every
way, and I have no more doubt of the election of the ticket than I have
that Maine will be carried by the Republicans. Governor Morrill and my-
self worked hard for Lincoln from the time we reached Chicago, and you
may depend we feel no little gratification at the result. All the way out in
the cars I tried to persuade Lot that Lincoln was the man, but he would not
believe it until after he reached Chicago. His convictions were then
speedily strengthened and confirmed. The renomination of Hamlin [for the
Senate] proves what there is in being a lucky man. He always turns up
on the winning side, and the very fact that he is on the ticket is a good
augury of success. People generally accept it as assurance, and that
impression will be as good as the reality. . . .

It is now a little after nine o'clock, and the various gentlemen, strangers
like myself, are inquiring where the best preaching may be found.

Among those in our company is Governor Morgan.

On the way home Mr. Stevens stopped at Mr. Seward's for
consolation, but the intercourse only deepened the disappoint-
ment which he shared with many Eastern men. For two days
after reaching Augusta lie did not go near Mr. Blaine, and when
he did it was only to revert for a moment to theology :

"Here, you have got your man. Now, take your d d old

paper and run it ! "

And the stout-hearted loyalist was as good as his word, turned
his back upon his paper for three months — much, it must be
admitted, to Mr. Blaine's satisfaction, since it left him free to

130 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

resume and use the Journal as a battering-ram through the
Lincoln campaign.

The war of ideas earnestly waged, came to its unexpected
and terrible issue in blood. The North shuddered incredulous,
but the forces of freedom and peace rallied in a new and untried
defence. For one moment it was mere playing at war, but the
grief of Baltimore, the surprised horror of Bull Run, passed
into the unrelenting grip of a four years' war, fought by mil-
lions of men.

Concerning Mr. Blaine, there was never any question of his
battle-field. The soldiers themselves drafted him into the sup-
port and sustenance of the army, and his great-grandsire's grave
did utter forth a voice.

He was in constant communication with generals and privates.
He was the servant of the soldier, whether it were to champion
a general against unjust attack in the newspapers, or to sub-
mit cheerfully to the demolition of his own purse or the
devastation of his own larder, for the soldiers' sudden emer-
gency. In gathering the regiments, in their care and comfort at
home, in forwarding and furnishing them, in keeping commu-
nication open between them and their families, in help for the
wounded and ministry for the dead, he was unwearied, not only
in service, but in sympathy. He shared, if he did not sound,
Maine's proud boast of being the banner State in raising her
quota for the Holy War. In defeat and darkness he maintained
with cheerful confidence the ability of the country to suppress
the rebellion, the ability of the Union to maintain itself. He
was at the right hand of the State authorities, ever at call, and
in frequent and close communication, for the State, with the
general government at Washington.

One letter shows as well as many the necessary but unbla-
zoned civilian side of army work. It is from Mr. Washburn,
who was then governor of Maine, to Mr. Blaine, who was in
Washington :

Augusta, Oct, 30, 1861.
My dear Sir : I returned from Boston last evening, where I had been
for three or four days arranging for some absolute needs. I there secured
the appointment of Major Gilbreth, and another to be designated by him,
to inspect the thing, etc.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES Q. BLAINE. 131

Your letter of the 21th forbids the State doing anything more than fur-
nish men, tents, and clothing for the artillery companies, but yours of the
28th intimates that the State may furnish guns, carriages, etc., for all but
Tillson's company.

As it will take so much time to get up all these things, and will cause
so many inconveniences, will it not, on the whole, be best for govern-
ment to furnish eveiwthing save these — men, horses, clothing, and tents'?
Will not General Barry furnish all the rest ? Let him do as he chooses
about horses, though I would like to buy them in Maine, but make no
special point if government has the horses on hand ; but if it has not,
why not let them be purchased here? Upon consultation with General
Barry, advise me what to do. I think we shall hardly raise more than
three companies artillery in addition to Shepley's and Dow's (Tillson's) .
There will be no difficulty in raising these.

As to camp stoves, Colonel Harding has got up a pattern that will answer
splendidly — he makes the pipe serve the double purpose of stove-pipe
and tent-pole. The pipe is stiff, strong, steady, and lets the smoke escape
from the apex of the tent. It is lighter than the common wooden pole.
The entire expense of tent and pipe will not exceed $4.00, and by it you
dispense with the pole, saving thereby some fifty cents in cost of the tent,
and it warms the tent well, and is a saving of Avood and thus of expense.
One of them has been in use here for several days and works admirably — -
nothing else can be so good — there is no smoke in the tent. If we don't
get a pattern in season, will it be safe to contract for some of these ? Stoves
are now much needed, as cold weather is coming on. Telegraph me —
remember the net expense will not exceed, hardly come up to, $3.50, in-
cluding stove and pipe.

Advise me of the proper steps^to draw money for payment of the horses
and clothing.

You know Colonel Marshall and the Seventh have been constructing a fort
at Baltimore, in which they took great interest. It would be exceedingly
gratifying to the people of this State, and particularly to Mrs. Marshall,
if the fort can be named after the brave and noble man who built it. Will
you speak to the Secretary about it ? It would be a most fit and graceful
act.

I have appointed Lieutenant-Colonel Varney colonel of the Seventh. I
am rejoiced at your success in getting the laws. Laus Deo, and some
laus J. G. B.

I think we ought to have at least one army artillery sergeant for each
battery. I will write Mr. Belger.

Messrs. Sammat and Tayler came yesterday. Bowen has not arrived.
The rubber blanket is such protection to the health of the soldier that I
think the government will see that there is economy in adopting it.

Recruiting is going on satisfactorily. Colonel Caldwell will leave next
week — the Twelfth and Thirteenth are well along — the Sharpshooters is
full, and a good beginning is made with Fourteenth and Fifteenth. Cav-
airy regiment is full, though about one hundred men have not yH come

132 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE

into camp. I can move in two weeks if it only has arms. Can you get
them ? I don't want it to leave without. They want to march to Washing-
ton, or at any rate through New England — it will be fine drill for men and
horses. Can you get consent? You can't exaggerate this regiment.

I do want to give Colonel Caldwell's regiment their arms before they
start. Please see what can be done for them — where will it <ro ?

Maine has not vet received arms from United States averasfino- with
those of other States. Government has furnished not one Maine regiment
with rifles.

Will you see how Colonel Berry is satisfied with the arms of his regi-
ment ? Ask him what I shall do — some eight or ten hundred Enfield rifles
will arrive soon in New York for us, in season probably for one of our
regiments as it passes through that city. Ask him whether these guns
shall be sent to him by express, while another, McKey, must go to Wash-
ington armless, and there get guns much poorer than he now has ? I
wish to gratify him, though I think it would be rather shiftless considering
the guns he now has, that they are better than are often delivered now ;
but if he is very particular, I suppose I can give him six to seven hundred,
which, with the rifles he now has, will give this kind arms to all his men.
But if he is content with things as they are, these guns will furnish flank
companies of some four or five regiments with rifles.

I would like to have you visit all our Maine camps and report condition,
etc.

Mr. Blaine's political creed till the war closed was the Union
through Abraham Lincoln. He left the chair and took the floor
in the House to iterate his faith and emphasize his position.
Mr. Gould, of Thomaston, a veteran Democrat and a prominent
lawyer, opposed resolutions supporting Mr. Lincoln, and hardly
yet have the reverberations died away of the ringing and
stinging words with which Mr. Blaine carried all before him —
words so energized that they seemed like a physical attack.
His friend, Hon. William P. Frye, of Lewiston, now and for
many years United States Senator, occupied the chair at the
time, and has hardly persuaded himself that in vigor, force,
effectiveness, Mr. Blaine ever surpassed that early grapple with
slavery and rebellion. The loyal masses of the nation have
made truisms of the truths which were then only divined, but
Avhose utterance was determining, decisive.

" I am for the administration through and through, being an
early and unflinching believer in the ability, the honesty, and
patriotism of Abraham Lincoln. . . . Lest the gentleman
should infer that I shrink from the logical consequences of some

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 133

propositions which I have laid down as ultimate steps, I tell
him boldly that if the life of the nation seemed to demand the
violation of the Constitution, I would violate it ; and in taking
this ground I am but repeating the expression of President Lin-
coln in his message, when he declared that c it were better to
violate one provision than that all should perish.' The gen-
tleman sticks to forms : I go for substance. He sacrifices the
end to the means : I stand ready to use the means essential to
the end. I am sure that I speak no less the sentiments of patri-
otic Republicans than of those truly loyal Democrats who intend
to stand by the administration to the end of this fight with
rebellion and treason."

But no storm of the outside world ever made the fire on his
hearth-stone burn low. With all the stress of war and politics
and business and travel, he never forgot to say the loving word
to the present, to write a loving word to the absent. It might
be only a word, but it certified sympathy, memory, affection.

His letters to his mother and sister are continuous — almost
always accompanied by some little " gift " or " remembrance "
or proposal of pleasure which he begs them to accept. In his
occasional journeys he remembers not only the Great Hearts
but the Little Hearts to be gladdened by news from him ; and
printed letters to the children are scattered all along the way.

May 15, 1859.
To his sister :

You and ma could not do me a greater favor than to send me all
your family letters from Lancaster, Washington, Pa., and wherever else
you may think worth while. I am so far out of the circle of my own " kith
and kin " that T hear no more of them directly than though I was in Siberia.

. . I hope to be able to make a visit to Philadelphia within the year,
but at what time I cannot now say.

. . . Emmons is now nearly two years old ; a perfect rogue. Walker
sedate and sober. . . .

P.S. — The passport was received. . . . He may tell General Cass that
1 will sell it back to him for half price, as I have concluded, most probably,
to postpone my trip until 1 can have my passport signed by a Republican
Secretary of State, which will be from and after March 4, 18C1.

Washington City, D.C., March 25, L86L
My dear Walker: I received your nice little note this morning. I
shall long keep it as the first letter written to me by ray darling little son.

134 BTOCtBAPHY OF JAMES (1. BLAINE.

The weather here is very warm. There is no snow here. The dust is
very thick and blows in my eyes whenever I go on the street.

I saw Abe Lincoln at the White House, and I heard that his children are
sick with the measles.

Kiss dear little Alice for Papa.

( To be read by Walker.}

Washington City, March 29, 1861.

My dear Emmons : Papa was very glad to receive a letter from his
dear little son. . .

When I come home we will get the express wagon out of the barn, and
have it nicely fitted up for you and Walker to ride in next summer.

Kiss Alice for me.

West Point, June 11, 1861.

My dear Walker : This place is very beautiful indeed. It is on a
high hill, with mountains all around, and the great Hudson river at the
base. There are very many ships and steamboats sail past here, and some
very large ones : one steamboat, called the " Isaac Newton," is four hun-
dred and four feet long, as far nearly as from Mr. Potter's to the Mansion
House. They sail very fast, some of them going twenty miles in an hour.

In the river just opposite where I sit is an island called "Constitution
Island." It is not very large, and one lady owns the whole of it. She is a
very smart lady and writes books. She wrote one called Queechy, which I
know you will read when you are old enough. ... I wish you would
write to me soon.

{To be read by Walker.)

West Point, New York, June 13, 1861.

My dear Emmons : There are a great many boys and young men here
learning to be soldiers ; when they drill they have a splendid band of
music and thirty musicians. A man walks at the head of the baud with a
large gilt staff in his hand, with which he directs them how to play. He
wears a very big hat with four very large feathers in it. They call him
the drum major.

I hope you go to school every day and behave yourself well.

I don't think you ought to whistle at the table, but you can do so in the
front yard.

New York.

My dear Walker r Before the war began Ex-President Pierce wrote a
letter to Jeff Davis, telling him that Northern people would help him fight
against Republicans. When our troops under General Grant captured
Jackson, Mississippi, they found the letter in Jeff Davis\s house. I send
you an exact copy of it. Keep it carefully. Love to Emmons and the
Palace. Your affectionate father.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 135

My dear Ma : I have thought it just as well to slip this translation of
Emmons's letter into the envelope, as I doubt if you could read his scrawl.
It is entirely his own in every respect.

Augusta, Oct. 28, 1865.
Dear Grandmother : I am very sorry that I did not write before. I

want to tell you about the baby. Alice calls her " Pleasant M ." She

is the pleasantest child you ever saw. . . .

A few weeks ago a large part of the business portion of the city was de-
stroyed by fire. Property amounting to half a million of dollars was lost.
Nine engines were playing, among which was a new steam fire-engine, I
cannot think of anything more, so good-by for a week.

From your affectionate grandson,

Williams E. Blaine.
P.S. — Uncle R. has been here and returned.

136 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

VIII.

IN CONGRESS.

~V JTR. BLAINE'S marked success in the State Legislature
.-»-"- made his election to the National Congress pure foreordi-
nation. His ability was so conspicuous that movements for his
promotion began long before his own judgment could further
them. He was a strong party man, seeing that measures could
only be effected through organized action. He refused therefore
to consider any personal proposition that threatened party har-
mony. He had moreover the happy faculty of enjoying the
estate wherein he was placed. He liked well to discover and
achieve its possibilities, and he especially liked not at all to
violate the just claims, or even disappoint the expectations, of
others. The following slight correspondence, but one of many
similar records, is thoroughly characteristic.

Augusta, June 26, 1860.
My dear Sir : The opportunity to set matters right in Monmouth
occurred early and naturally. The day after I saw you I received the en-
closed, and answered it, as you will see, on third page of this sheet. I also
saw Mr. T. L. Stanton, of North Monmouth, last night, and set him right.
Do you know anything specific about Leeds ? I advise you to look after
that locality with some care. You may if you please return this note, as I
may wish to keep Andrews's letter.

In haste, your friend truly,

J. G. Blaine.
Gov. A. P. Morrill.

(Enclosure.) Confidential.

Monmouth, June 23, 1860.
J. G. Blaine, Esq. :

Dear Sir : Is your name to be used at the Congressional Convention of
this district, for representative to Congress ? If so, I pledge you my hearty
support and the delegation from this town, and, in the event of your nomi-
nation, every Republican vote of this town next September.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 187

Tn this I speak what I know. Should you feel disposed, I would be happy
to hear from you at an early day.

Very truly yours,

Geo. II. Andrews.

Augusta, June 25, 1860.
Geo. H. Andrews, Esq. :

My dear Sir : Your kind and friendly favor of the 23d is before me.
The tender of your support for the honorable post of representative in
Congress is exceedingly gratifying and flattering to me, and proves that I
have not reckoned amiss in counting you among my most earnest friends.
It is proper, however, to advise you that I am not a candidate for that
position. It may possibly be known to you that Ex-Governor Morrill de-
sires the nomination, and I should consider it both ungenerous and unjust
for me to allow my name to be used against him. He has done much and
sacrificed much for the Republican party in the day of its trial and its need,
and the opportunity seems now to be presented for suitably and cordially
recognizing his worth and his services. You can readily see how unbe-
coming it would be in a man of my years to contest the nomination with
him, even if I personally desired to do so. Its effect could only be to
divide the hitherto harmonious ranks of the Republicans of Kennebec.

I shall therefore most cheerfully support Governor Morrill for the nom-
ination, and shall urge all my friends to do the same.

Yours most truly,

J. G. Blaine.

When the propitious time came, his nomination to Congress
was spontaneous, unanimous, enthusiastic, and in this spirit
every succeeding step was prompted. The only question was
as to what office he should fill, never as to whether he should
fill office. His majority at the election approved the wisdom
and justified the enthusiasm of the nomination ; and thenceforth
to the day of his death his State held him in love and pride that
knew no waning or wavering; that counted all his honors
won; and all that he failed to wear, a personal sorrow and a
national loss.

In accepting the nomination, July 8, 1862, he not only referred
with respect and gratitude to his immediate predecessor, Hon.
Anson P. Morrill, and to the earlier men who had given the Ken-
nebec District a front rank in Congress by their ability, culture,
and skill in debate, but dwelt with peculiar affection on " the
able editor, the sincere friend, the judicious adviser, the upright
man, Luther Severance, who, after promoting the elections of Mr.

138 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Sprague and Mr. Evans with unsurpassed activity and zeal, was
rewarded with succession to the seat to which they had given
eminent distinction. If you will pardon the personal reference,
I regarded it as the chief honor of my life, before you crowned
me with your favor to-day, that I followed Luther Severance,
longo intervallo, in the editorship of the Kennebec Journal,
which he had founded and nurtured, and to which he had given
character and prominence throughout the State. There have
perhaps been more brilliant men in Maine than Luther Sever-
ance, but not one who ever enjoyed the public confidence in a
higher degree, or repaid that confidence more amply by an
honorable and stainless life."

In this accepting speech he announced as his platform — ■ Abra-
ham Lincoln. He made no pledge of principles to be adopted
or measures to be carried out. His one pledge was, ' If I am
called to a seat in Congress, I shall go there with a determina-
tion to stand heartily and unreservedly by the administration
of Abraham Lincoln. In the success of that administration,
under the good providence of God, rests, I solemnly believe,
the fate of the American Union. If we cannot subdue the
rebellion through the agency of the administration, there is no
other power given under heaven among men to which we can
appeal. Hence I repeat that I shall conceive it to be my duty,
as your representative, to be the unswerving adherent of the
policy and measures which the President in his wisdom may
adopt. The case is one, in the present exigency, where men
loyal to the Union cannot divide. The President is commander-
in-chief of our land and naval forces, and while he may be
counselled he must not be opposed."

On the great question which had already become not slavery,
but emancipation, he spoke with veiled, but not vague voice :
" The great object with us all is to subdue the rebellion
speedily, effectually, finally. In our march to that end we must
crush all intervening obstacles. If slavery, or any other " in-
stitution," stands in the way, it must be removed. Perish all
things else, the national life must be saved. My individual con-
victions of what may be needful are perhaps in advance of those
entertained by some, and less radical than those conscien-
tiously held by others. Whether they are the one or the other,

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 139

however, I do not wish to see an attempt made to carry them
out until it can be done by an administration sustained by the re-
sistless energy of the loyal masses. I think, myself, those masses
are rapidly adopting the idea that to smite the rebellion its
malignant cause must be smitten."

In early September the metropolitan newspapers began to
announce from their Maine correspondents, among the congres-
sional nominations of the country, that of Mr. James G. Blaine,
who had been " for the last two years speaker of the House of
Representatives in Augusta, who is an able debater, and who
will at once take high rank among the debaters in the national
House of Representatives."

When the vote was announced which upheld the President
and the Union, the patriotic State proudly boasted that,
though her young voters had carried the battle from the polls
to the field, — ninety Republican to ten Democratic soldiers, —
she had citizens enough left to man the ballot-boxes.

At the time of Mr. Blaine's entrance into Congress, President
Lincoln was the centre of a storm of hostile criticism. The
shafts aimed at him were not only pointed, but envenomed.
The suggestions of his message were pronounced vague and
impracticable, wildly unjust, worse than tyranny, a betrayal of
the principles of our fathers'. It was the " despot's edict, a
ukase from the chambers of an autocrat." The President was
hotly charged with political duplicity, with mean and treach-
erous trickery, and was consigned by many a now forgotten
foe to eternal infamy.

Enemies abroad repeated the obloquy of the foe at home,
and in Mr. Lincoln's message they saw, to the republic whose
safety is the first care of monarchs, every menace, from the
sanction of State suicide to a " bid " for renomination.

Even in the house of his friends the great President was
wounded. Distinguished and patriotic men were coldly criti-
cal, if not actively hostile, towards the leader whom they did
not comprehend, but whom they could pain and hinder — hin-
derance perhaps the greatest pain of all.

Naturally the Maine victory won in his name was doubly wel-
come to Mr. Lincoln; the men whom it sent to Washington
found his confidence already bespoken, and thus perhaps Mr.

140 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Blaine had freer access to him than would otherwise have been
awarded ; and all his intercourse inspired him with deeper faith
in the President's wisdom, and confirmed his acceptance of the
President's leadership as the only safety.

Another President, Mr. Lincoln's predecessor, Mr. Buchanan,
was watching the new member, and in a letter of comment and
inquiry from Wheatland, showing his continued deep interest
in public matters, he wrote :

Mr. Blaine leads in the House of Representatives ; he will rise to be
one of the leaders in reconstruction. I know that he comes from a noble
stock of people in the counties of Washington and Cumberland, Penn.

The problems before Congress at the time of Mr. Blaine's
entrance were such as enlisted his warmest and highest interest
— the support of the patriotic army on the field, and the official
and complete abolition of slavery, made possible through the
army and proclaimed by Abraham Lincoln. When this stern
army of more than a million men melted away under the sun-
shine of peace, and became again an elemental where it had
been an objective force of productiveness and prosperity ; when
slavery had been eliminated from the young nation whose life
it had endangered, — the question became at once a questi'on of
healing, of restoring national unity, of rebuilding waste places
on new and lasting foundations. A great State rent by four
years of fierce war was to be reconstructed on the old lines
of republicanism, and on the new lines of universal indi-
vidual liberty. President Lincoln proclaimed the emancipa-
tion of slaves. Congress destroyed forever the institution of
slavery.

Into this work Mr. Blaine entered with his whole soul. The
grandeur of this new nation was ever before his eyes. What
the country could be, founded on the good-will of every citi-
zen, where every citizen was free to work out his best and to
enjoy his rest, — that it should be. No quest of the holy grail
was ever more devotedly followed than his " extraordinary
generous seeking " for the ideal republic. Her fortunes, her
glory abroad, her happiness at home, definitely to be measured
by the degree in which each man should through industry and

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 141

thrift have freedom to cultivate his mind, create his home, and
enjoy his family, — that became the private vocation and the
public profession of the young Congressman. To his thought,
national success began only where the struggle for life ceased
and human beings entered into the sphere of aspiration.

But for this ideal republic he wasted his strength in no vain
dreams or vapid rhetoric, but used it in the widest fields and in
the smallest details. His quick, pervasive, generalizing, and in-
terpreting mind enveloped, penetrated, classified things small
as well as great, and they ceased to be merely small, but, taking
their place in the eternal sequences, became parts of the world-
drama.

Thus along the general principles which shaped themselves
in the great seething mass of facts, he trod a clear path to
logical positions which often seemed to the desultory mind seg-
regated and sometimes inconsistent. From his fund of knowl-
edge he readily marshalled precedents, and to his quick insight
facts grouped themselves with their belongings and were there-
fore orderly and pertinent. He noted that the central direct-
ing power of the world does not scorn to use economic as well
as moral forces to accomplish moral ends, and he put himself
heartily in accord with that law. He rejected the idea that a
community should or could be punished. While the rebellion
was rampant, he had but one purpose — to suppress it ; the
rebellion once suppressed, his purpose became to heal by cordial
cooperation, by wise and fostering care, by a benign justice, by
an inexhaustible patience, by returning prosperity, and thus win
to voluntary and enthusiastic union the element which had been
forced back from secession. He counted an enemy destroyed
only when turned into a friend.

He never forgot that the American government is a popular
government, that legislation to be effective must carry the
popular good-will. Yet he would secure good-will only by
appeal to reason, to which he never appealed in vain. He was
not afraid of being in a minority, if that was the way to better
things. He advanced measures on applied principles without
hope of a majority, or even a vote, but believing the path he
was blazing was in the right direction, and would eventually
become the beaten path; and did not hesitate In say that the

142 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

man who shoots at the sun will come nearer to it than the man
who does not draw a bow.

A sound currency he deemed as vital to the body politic as
the circulation of blood to the human system, and early and
late, against the world or with the world, he held up the neces-
sity of the two metals with one standard, " to the end that busi-
ness should be conducted on a safe and secure basis, that labor
should meet with its full reward, that every man should know
what he is dealing in and how much he is worth, and the entire
country rejoice in an abundant circulation of both gold and
paper, in which paper will be as good as gold and gold no better
than paper." Yet he recognized on this point, as on others, that
legislation was but the working of causes far more powerful
than itself, and could be lasting only as it was in harmony with
eternal laws. He recognized that the country is continental,
and should therefore be self-sustaining; that we are in the family
of nations, but that the nation is a family ; that privileges bring
duties, and requirements involve responsibilities. The princi-
ple of protection was to him inwrought with the very idea of a
nation, but it was a principle sinuous and flexible to the move-
ment of events, to be applied with watchful wisdom, to be
modified in detail by the demands of the occasion, with scrupu-
lous regard to the rights and interests of the individual, and
to be complemented by the principle of reciprocity between
nations, equally to be modified by the current of events and
correspondingly regardful of national rights.

The Grand Army had been the saviour of the nation, and he
felt that the war debt to each soldier was a debt of honor. Yet
his share in the debates of Congress was eminently practical
and business-like. He spoke in Congress exactly as he spoke
out of it, with the earnestness of conviction, with the persua-
sion of facts and figures, directly, simply, without oratorical
attempt, though statistics in his hands not infrequently touched
the imagination, and even arabic numbers became poetry. He
had no self-consciousness. His purpose became himself. He
had no sense of dignity to be defended or assumed. His dignity
was the dignity of a pure, upright, and lofty manhood, instinc-
tive, inalienable. Because he was a young man, assimilative and
sympathetic, his words were often free, even careless, and no

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 148

doubt occasionally startled the House, accustomed to some-
what more formal style. But his words were never used to
shock the House, only to express opinion most directly and forc-
ibly. The little hells, and damns, and deuces, which sparsely
sprinkled his boyish letters, had long since disappeared, as
meadow midges from one reaching the sunny uplands ; but the
street words that fell upon his all-hearing ears fell sometimes
from his all-remembering tongue, and occasionally the torrent
of his speech tossed out combinations that, if not created
on the toss, must have had their origin in the mountain
fastnesses of Pennsylvania. He was persistent, but not opin-
ionated. He readily relinquished his own suggestions where
others' seemed more desirable, or even when they seemed not
materially less desirable, if thus he could avoid controversy
and accomplish his purpose. " If I cannot have a better
amendment than the one of the gentleman from Pennsylvania,
I shall vote for that." Addressed lightly he answered lightly,
returning the ball with unfailing gayety of heart. Often his
disapproval of a measure was expressed with too infantile a
simplicity for this aged and circumlocuitous world, and he was
genuinely surprised, grieved, and repentant to find that he had
given offence. If he grasped the other man's idea before it
was half out, it was very hard for him to sit still and hear it
out. If a boat was likely to lose the race through bad rowing,
it was very hard for him not to put in his oar and pull ahead,
even when it was not his boat. A member is asked if such and
such will not be the effect of his amendment :

"I really am unable to say,"- says the gentleman, rather
helplessly.

" Not by a very great deal," would Mr. Blaine interpose
with an unasked but lucid explanation.

If an onset was made upon him, he repelled it sometimes
perhaps with a greater impetus than was necessary, but that
was the end of it. He carried anger as the flint bears fire —
bore no malice — did not so much forgive as forget.

He was in no haste to rush to the front in Congress, but
neither was he backward. It was matter of course that his
first work should be in committee where he was soon found
to be an authority. He had not the self-consciousness that

144 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

prearranges pose and place, but wherever his thought, purpose,
impulse led, thither he followed. His command of parliament-
ary law often enabled him by a motion to shorten, or even to
close debate. Indeed, his very first speech was a citation from
the report of the Secretary of the Treasury, of perhaps a dozen
lines, but so pertinent to the debate that it practically settled the
question at issue, and secured for him the compliment of per-
sonal thanks from the venerable and formidable Thaddeus
Stevens, who had the bill in charge, and whose powerful, if
somewhat grim, not to say ferocious, leadership in the House
made his commendation as valued as it was rare. During life
the saturnine old Pennsylvanian and his sunny-hearted young-
compatriot remained mutual admirers and personal friends.

Many measures which Mr. Blaine introduced or advocated
related, of course, to business matters, but the business questions
of that day were suffused with the sentiment of patriotism and
holy self-sacrifice out of which they sprang, and close alongside
the driest or the most trivial details the wells of human sympathy
were ever ready to burst forth. One day he was asking for the
assumption of war debts by the general government, taking for
granted the success of the Union, though in the midst of the
war, and maintaining that such success was " of no more impor-
tance to the loyal than to the revolted States and to the forty
new States that are yet to be added to the Union!"' His argu-
ment was that by this assumption the burden would not be
increased, but equalized. " The contest is not local, but general ;
not for ourselves, but for mankind ; not merely for to-day, but
for all time. The burden falls with increased severity on the
farmers and other holders of real estate, from the fact that so
vast a proportion of the personal property in many of the com-
munities has sought investment in government securities which
are specially exempt from State and municipal taxation. I
should certainly be among the last to countenance a breach of
the national faith in the slightest degree. We must standby the
terms nominated in the bond, no matter how onerous and op-
pressive they may be. No hardship can arise to any of us from
observing good faith on the part of the government, at all com-
parable with the hardship that would ensue to all of us by
violating that faith, even by the remotest hint. But while we

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 145

all agree, I trust, on this point, I submit that as the policy of
the government has made the war debt of the States bear une-
qually on different classes of the community, and most oppres-
sively on the most meritorious class, it is the imperative duty of
the government to equalize the burden by assuming an equitable
share of the debt."

Another day he was speaking a kind word for the West Point
cadets, whose Academy he had closely investigated when he was
on the Board of Inspectors in 1861, — that too grave a construc-
tion might not be put on "found deficient," and thus lose to the
nation some of her best officers because their curtains were not
"drawn back at 6.45 A.M.," or their floors were "out of order
near the washstand," or even — which shows much generosity in
a man who never smoked — because there was " the odor of
tobacco-smoke in their rooms ; " but praying that power to
pardon might be restored to the President and the Secretary of
War ; and he cited the case of a boy for whom he had come
to Washington and successfully interceded with the Secretary
of War — a boy who had afterwards gloriously justified his in-
tercession, on Sheridan's staff in the valley of the Shenandoah.
General Schenck came to his support handsomely, declaring —
rather unhandsomely — that' if he wanted to secure a principal
of a female academy he would take the men whose floors around
the washstand were clean, but when he wished to secure efficient
officers he would turn the graduating class the other end fore-
most ! As a result of conference, the desired power of restoring
cadets was relegated to the Secretary of War.

He took it for granted that wherever a usage has grown up
in the army, whether with reference to titles or to more sub-
stantial points a civilian would find, when he went to the bottom
of the matter, that there is some good reason for this usage and
that it is not safe to abolish it without full inquiry.

In a debate regarding the presence of cabinet officers on the
floor of the House, he took little part, and was indeed subse-
quently opposed to it, but he maintained there and then that
if they should refuse to appear when required, they could be
impeached, just as any other officer could be impeached. Later
events have made his advocacy of a concurrent power for the

146 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Executive in the foreign affairs of the government seem almost
too successful, though he was even then fully appreciative of
the distinct spheres and divine rights of the coordinate depart-
ments of the government.

When he disapproved of a measure he instantly opposed it,
without so much as thinking whether his opposition would be
well or ill received. In December of 1864, Mr. Stevens
had brought in a bill to prevent gold and silver coin and
bullion from being sold or exchanged for a greater value than
their real currency value. Even to receive notes of corpora-
tions or individuals in payment for gold, silver, or bullion, at
less than par value was to be a punishable offence. It is not
easy to exaggerate the surprise with which the old autocrat
beheld " the gentleman from Maine " rise and inform the House
quite simply and with great earnestness that only the respect
he felt for the distinguished gentleman prevented him from
saying that the provisions of the bill were absurd and mon-
strous — that a gold dollar cannot be made worth less or more
by legislation — that the bill had been productive of great
mischief in the brief twenty-four hours it had been allowed to
float before the public mind as a measure seriously entertained
by this House — that if a dollar note issued by the govern-
ment should be declared equal to a gold dollar the whole
Pacific coast was liable to indictment for criminal offence,
because they would persist in believing that in the present
condition of the currency a gold dollar was worth more than a
paper dollar ! It was not till after the House had laid his bill
on the table that Mr. Stevens recovered breath and sarcasm
to note the " intuitive way " "in which his excellent friend " got
at a great national question : " How the gentleman from Maine
by his intuitive knowledge of these things comes to understand
at once what the ablest statesman of England took months to
mature, I can't very well understand. It is a happy inspira-
tion ; " and returning to the field again spoke of his bill, which
threw "my excellent friend into convulsions or the House into
epileptic fits." " My excellent friend from Maine, in an alarmed
and excited manner, said that the bill was fraught with innu-
merable mischief, that it would destroy the interests of the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 147

country, — I do not speak exactly as he spoke. The House, par-
taking of the magnetic manner of my friend from Maine, — he
seemed to be distracted on the subject, — and wishing to escape
the evils of this gunpowder plot, immediately laid it on the
table." That something unusual had happened, that some
unwonted force had been displayed, is evident, for he repeated:
" The House, being magnetized by the excited manner of the
gentleman from Maine, became alarmed and immediately laid the
bill on the table without its being presented, and without a single
member having had an opportunity to read a word of it. I
remember what was said by the able editors, sciolists, who prate
deeply in reference to things of which the}^ know nothing. I
know that they repeated what my excellent friend had taught
them."

This, so far as I know, is the first time the word magnetic
was applied to Mr. Blaine — that word which simply spans the
unknown and perhaps the unknowable, and which came after-
wards to be, it may almost be said, appropriated to Mr. Blaine.1

How light-heartedly he received the criticisms of the old
Pennsylvanian whom he loved, and whose God of freedom and
patriotism he worshipped with equal ardor, is seen in his banter-
ing declaration shortly after,, when seeking the floor. " I ob-
serve my friend from Pennsylvania is very anxious to hear me."
"The gentleman is mistaken," growled his friend from Pennsyl-
vania. " I am not in the least anxious to hear a speech on any
subject."

In a debate on naval affairs, Mr. Blaine called attention to
the fact that of the four and one-half hours allowed for
debate the committee occupied more than four ; four gentle-
men on the same side of the question had spoken in succession,
and he had only three and a half minutes ; that the gentle-
men of the Naval Committee found it easier to oppose a Board
of Admiralty with objections borrowed from English example
than to answer the charges of shortcoming and blundering in
the Navy Department, and thus dexterously spent their time in

1 His own wordH of Mr. Burlingame are not inapt. " What precisely is meant by magnetism
it might be diflicult to define, but it is undoubtedly true that Mr. Burlingame possessed ;i great
reserve of that subtile, forceful, overwhelming power which the word magnetism is used to
piirnify."

148 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

exposing the inefficiency of the proposed remedy rather than
in meeting the great essential points made against the navy.
To reject the amendment was to declare that the officers of
the department may again spend $10,000,000 in the construction
of twenty iron-clad vessels that will not stay on top of the water.

The assertion was flatly disputed, but he reaffirmed that
twenty of these iron vessels built under the supervision of the
Navy Department will not float — - at least those that have been
tried won't, and the model is the same for the whole number.

Mr. Pike reiterated that it was a mistake.

Mr. Blaine. — They are not sea-going.

Mr. Pike. — They were never intended to be sea-going.

Mr. Blaine. — They will not float.

Mr. Stevens. — An engineer told me the other day that not
one of them would float until 1120,000 more had been expended
upon each of them.

Mr. Pike. — The first of them, launched in Boston harbor,
floated three inches out of water on a level, though she was in-
tended to float twelve. Others floated high enough and when
altered make useful vessels.

Mr. Blaine. — Then the first lost nine inches.

Mr. Pike. — She did.

Mr, Blaine. — That is, she lost seventy-five per cent, of that
portion of her which was designed to be above water, and this I pre-
sume is the best of the whole twenty. Well, sir, that is conceding
the whole case. Only three inches above water. Why, the
chances are that she could not be towed a mile in smooth water
without sinking to the bottom. As to speed, out of ninety
British steamers caught within a given period in attempting to
run the blockade, only twelve were caught by vessels built by
the present Admiralty of the Navy Department, while seventy-
eight were caught either by purchased vessels or vessels in-
herited by the old navy. Members of the Naval Committee
quoted from one of those remarkable reports of Admiral Porter,
written from Fort Fisher, in which the admiral indulged in
some very high blowing about the merits of a certain monitor,
and states in conclusion that she could cross the ocean, storm
all the fortresses of England and France, and, after laying their
cities under contribution and playing havoc generally on a very

BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 149

large scale, could recross the ocean in perfect safety provided
she could get coal. A very important proviso, truly, — if she
could only get coal in some mysterious way entirely unknown
to the authorities that ordered her construction.

Mr. Pike. — The criticism on Admiral Porter is unfair. He
meant she could carry coal enough to cross the ocean, but not
enough to return.

Mr. Blaine. — Oh ! I presume that after laying London
under contribution, some of the obliging coal-heavers at Green-
wich would supply her as a matter of international courtes}^.

Presenting a bill for the repeal of the tax on gross receipts
and the substitution of a tax on net receipts of boats, Mr.
Blaine " occupied his brief time " with facts personally known
to himself: UA ship-owner in my district — a highly respon-
sible and intelligent gentleman — chartered to government a
vessel of four hundred and fifty tons, with cargo of coal from
Philadelphia to New Orleans, for gross $6,000. For painting,
calking, repairs of sails, men and provisions, and port charges,
the captain drew on owners for $3,075.35 ; for distribution in
New Orleans, $1,410.70. Procuring no business in New Or-
leans, she was compelled to proceed to Boston in ballast, where,
to pay off her crew and meet other expenses, there was a further
distribution of $1,176. At Boston the vessel chartered to go to
Philadelphia in ballast for cargo, and at Philadelphia, before a
dollar of the new charter was available, or even earned, the
captain again drew for $576 — a total distribution of $6,238.05,
At this point the government paid the $6,000 in certificates of
indebtedness then selling at ninety-four, the owners thus receiv-
ing but $5,640 in cash for the period during which the actual
distribution in cash was $6,238.05, showing a net cash loss for
the time of about $600, or, to be precisely accurate, $598.05, be-
sides the interest on advance — nearly two hundred more. And
now see — after this melancholy experience the tax collector
came forward and demanded of the owner of the vessel 21 per
cent, on the $6,000 which the government paid as above, and
on top of all losses already incurred actually compelled him to
pay $150 under that section of the internal-revenue law which
we are now seeking to amend."

150 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

An amendment that no vessel which had been licensed to sail
under a foreign flag or the protection of a foreign government
during the rebellion should be registered as an American vessel,
or have the rights and privileges of an American vessel except
under an act of Congress authorizing it, Mr. Blaine advocated
with statistics : " At the beginning of the war we had
2,500,000 tons of shipping engaged in foreign trade. As war
grew hot and dangers multiplied on the ocean, 800,000 tons of
this shipping took refuge under a foreign flag. The flag of our
nation was hauled down, and protection was sought under the
flag of our neutral enemy, Great Britain. I do not question the
right of the owners — many who did so are honorable and pa-
triotic men. All I contend is, that having made their election
they shall abide by it. They escaped all the hazards, they
gained all the profits, of their alien connection, and for one I am
not now willing to put them on the same ground with those
ship-owners who took all the risks of standing by the American
flag in good report and in evil report, in our dark days as well
as in our bright days. The ship-owners who took British
registers escaped the heavy war-risks, and now to place them on
the same footing with those who hazarded everything rather
than sail under a foreign flag would be flagrantly unjust. I
think, sir, it would be cruelly unjust for the American Con-
gress to permit this policy, and thus turn their backs on
those ship-owners who, under all the seductions of profit and
against all the perils of war, refused for a single hour to take
refuge under any other flag than that which was floating over
the armies of the Union, and which protects us in this Capitol
to-day.

" Moreover, while many were high-minded and patriotic men,
some were unpatriotic and even criminal, and while securely
concealed behind their British registers, they were sharing in
the enormous profits derived from running our blockade and
engaging, to the detriment of the Union cause, in all the illicit
commerce which the' British flag covered during the four years
of bloody war from which we have just emerged."

He ever leaned to the moderate and gentler side when the
success of the cause did not imperiously demand the sternest

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 151

recourse. He upheld the necessary conscription, but he would
not make it unnecessarily hard, sharp, inexorable.

He opposed earnestly an amendment which summarily cut off
the power of the President to appoint any lad, however promis-
ing, however loyal, to West Point, if he were so unfortunate as
to have been born and lived in the South : " I am opposed to
the amendment, root and branch. I regard it as proscriptive,
illiberal, narrow-minded. Its logic can be justified only on the
ground taken by my distinguished friend from Pennsylvania,
who holds that the entire population of eleven Southern States
are alien enemies. Not believing, myself, in this extreme
dogma, I shall vote against the amendment, even if I stand
alone in my opposition."

Of course Mr. Schenck, who moved the amendment, and Mr,
Stevens, who advocated it, could but notice the " extraordinary
remarks of the gentleman from Maine, who characterized the
amendment in the worst kind of terms ; " and certainly they
were not complimentary, though both members were among his
most valued friends.

Mr. Colliding could not round a sharp corner so easily as
these men. " I will accept that in lieu of my amendment,
though I think it is merely surplusage," said Mr. Blaine lightly.
Mr. Conkling took three days to think it over, and hoped " the
House will not vote in here anything as harmless surplusage.
. . . I am quite sure that it is not harmless surplusage."

" I should like to make further observations upon the ques-
tionable expediency of any permanently established invalid
corps. ... I believe the practical effect will be virtually
to prefer en masse a large portion of the officers of the present
corps to other wounded and disabled officers and soldiers."

Mr. Schenck. — There is no such thing in the bill, and the
gentleman either cannot read or will not understand.

Mr. Conkling. — I hope the gentleman from Ohio will not
get too energetic. ... I do not wish to wrench myself
by attempting to execute that celebrated pelvic gesture by
which the gentleman makes himself forcible, but I hope the
House will consider that I have executed it as far as it is
necessary. . . .

Mr. Blaine presently desired to suggest to the gentleman

152 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

from New York that it would be more satisfactory if he would
point out the section of the bill which conveys the alleged
meaning, instead of indulging in loose and vague assertions.
Mr. Conkling retorts that possibly by listening the gentleman
from Maine will have his attention directed to some provisions
of the bill which he may not understand any better than the
rest of us ; which does not prevent Mr. Blaine from rising
presently to correct " a gross misapprehension — I will not
call it a misrepresentation — of the gentleman from New York.
When he speaks of his own knowledge of a subject, he is a
gentleman of accuracy to whom I shall always listen with great
pleasure. He is not so accurate when he speaks upon the
suggestions of others who are interested adversely to this bill/'
Unhappily, Mr. Conkling had also a private grievance. At a
dinner party given by Hon. Henry C. Deming, of Hartford,
the conversation glanced from the Utica of Mr. Conkling's home
to a newspaper which had been published for a little while by
Mr. Deming and his friend Park Benjamin, and which bore
for its motto the lines :

" No pent-up Utica contracts our powers,
But the whole boundless continent is ours."

A question arose as to their authorship, and the whole com-
pany gayly contributed answers. An impression prevailed that
it was Barlow. Mr. Conkling offered to bet a basket of cham-
pagne that it was from Addison's "Cato." Mr. Blaine warned
him not to make the bet because he kneiv the authorship, and
that the lines were not from Addison's " Cato." Mr. Conkling
was so sure that he persisted in the bet. The lines are by
Jonathan M. Sewall, in an " Epilogue to Cato," written for
the Bow-street Theatre in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Mr. Conkling sent the basket of champagne, but took his dis-
comfiture so much to heart as to insinuate that Mr. Blaine had
been reading up for it ; and when Mr. Blaine made a feast
and invited all the company to drink the champagne, Mr.
Conkling did not attend.

The proposed substitute for the reciprocity treaty with Can-
ada seemed to Mr. Blaine so radically wrong in its details that

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 153

he despaired of seeing it amended into any acceptable form.
" It seems to me to sacrifice and subordinate American interests
to provincial interests."

In a matter of separating" hemlock and spruce timber, and
making the duty specific instead of ad valorem : " The bill not
only ingrafts ad valorem, but tells these cunning provincials
just where to strike, and therefore I denounce this proposition
of Congress as a fraud upon the revenue as well as a fraud
upon the lumber interests ; " but he remembered to have the
grace to say, "I do not think they so intended it ; " and having
thus antagonized the committee in general, he proceeded to
pay his respects to the gentlemen in detail — to the gentleman
from Michigan who had been advocating the admission of
lumber in order to enable the people of the South to rebuild
the houses destroyed by war. Did he expect many houses
would be built in the eleven Southern States, of lumber from
Canada, when they had lumber of their own as good as could
be obtained anywhere ? And a word to the gentleman from
Ohio, to tell him his very figures were unreliable, and it was a
vicious cheating inducement to fraud.

Yet he was but stating the simplest fact when he declared :
" Mr. Chairman, I was very much surprised and somewhat
mortified a few days ago, on finding, when I had made a motion
to get rid of this bill at an early stage of the debate upon it,
that a great many gentlemen who sympathize with my purpose
considered it a discourteous and rude motion. I certainly
intended nothing of the kind to the Committee of Ways and
Means. The chairman of that committee assuredly knows that
it would be utterly impossible for me to make a motion in this
House, intended to convey disrespect or discourtesy to him. I
thought that the House was against the bill, and I do not believe
you can find forty gentlemen who can say that they intend to
vote for the bill as it has gone through the amendatory process.
Now, as our time is valuable, is it not best to express the sense
of the House on a direct motion ? And having said that
I did not intend any disrespect before, it is unnecessary to
repeat that I do not now intend disrespect when I renew the

154 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

motion for the purpose of bringing this question to a head
at once."

" Yesterday the honorable chairman of the Military Com-
mittee intimated that I had procured the amendment be-
cause it would promote some of my friends. The friends of
mine that would thus be promoted are the friends of every
member of Congress who has had business at the War Depart-
ment, and in no other sense. I have no kinsman, or constitu-
ent, or old acquaintance to be helped or hindered by the
amendment. I count many of the officers of the Adjutant-
General's department my friends, and I am proud to do so, but
I was actuated solely by a desire to promote the interests of the
public service in procuring advanced rank for that depart-
ment ; " and then he added somewhat haughtily, " I desire to
say nothing more on the subject."

" The gentleman from New Jersey is as graciously heard as
almost any man on this floor ; we always listen to him with
delight, but it is rather going too strong for him to take up one
entire morning hour." This when his Sunday rest had sent
him fresh and strong to Monday's work.

The gentleman from New Jersey wanted only a few minutes,
but did not perceive the flight of time till the morning hour
was gone, and with it all opportunity for the weekly work ; and
with that went all the gracious patience and delighted listening
of the gentleman from Maine ; and the gentleman from New
Jersey " has gone on and talked during the whole morning
hour, and prevented us from attending to any morning business
at all. Now after he has abused and outraged the patience of
the House to this extent, I want to guard against any similar
outrage next Monday. . .

" Propositions like the one now pending interjected in this
way will, of course, only give rise to this sloshy-washy debate."

To be sure, General Schenck was almost as bad. When
the gentleman from" New Jersey moved to amend, Mr. Schenck
declared the amendment not in order. The gentleman from
New Jersey appealed to Mr. Schenck to wait until he found out
his object. " Oh ! I know your object," replied the bluff old

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 155

general. " It is to make that same old speech that we have
heard on every occasion."

Yet it was only to Mr. Blaine that the much-belabored gen-
tleman turned for relief from the " malicious assaults which the
honorable gentleman has made it his business to make upon me
every time I have got up to say anything in this House. I con-
fine myself strictly to the subject under debate. [A remark
which the House garnished with irreverent " laughter." I
make no general speeches, but I think I ought to be treated
with common respect, at least, by the gentleman from Maine.
God made us so that our natures are different and we arrive
at different conclusions, and I think it is most contemptible
and indiscreet work on the part of the gentleman, when I
undertake to discuss any subject, to attempt to browbeat and
insult me. I have no ill-feeling towards the gentleman at all.
I hold him in high respect. I believe him to be a gentleman,
and shall always treat him with courtesy. All I ask of him
is, that he shall treat me in the same way. When he speaks
on any question he never finds me slurring him for what he
says. I speak the honest dictates of an honest heart."

The offender apologized promptly : " The gentleman says
whenever he has spoken, I have taken occasion to say something
ridiculous or unbecoming. Yet he cites only two occasions on
which I have offered any remarks about him. If he will re-
member how frequently he has addressed the House, and can
only remember those two occasions, he must see that there must
have been a good many times when I have not referred to him
at all. Two or three weeks ago on a Monday morning, by
means of a mere accident in parliamentary rule which happens
perhaps once in twenty-five years, the gentleman had an op-
portunity to exhaust the whole morning hour in a debate in
which neither himself nor any other person was interested, and
I appealed to the gentleman personally to yield the floor, inas-
much as there were many gentlemen on this side of the House
who had resolutions to offer — not of a political character, but
of a business nature, which could only be introduced under the
call of States on alternate Mondays. The gentleman agreed
that he would not take more than twenty minutes, but then he
continued for the entire hour, and in the heat of the moment

156 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

I made some remarks that were hasty and unbecoming. If I
have thereby wounded the gentleman in any way, I am very
sorry for it, and I will say in addition that I have none but the
kindest feelings for him personally. He has always treated me
with respect, and I desire to treat him in the same way."

The gentleman from New Jersey was pleased to accept the
apology as " sufficient."

This was not the old formal, " dignified " oratorical style of
debate. It was animated conversation. But it was very ef-
fective in the hands, on the lips, of a man whose object was
to make his points and secure his ends, whose sympathies
were both national and individual, who assimilated knowledge
as the blood assimilates air, whose memory was a necessity of
his being, and therefore assured the accuracy of his knowledge
and its production on call, whose mental processes were so
rapid as to elude observation, outstrip communication, and
seem intuitional.

o
I—
o
z

X
CO

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 157

IX.

THE CONKLING-FRY INCIDENT.

THE House on the twenty-fourth of April, 1866, resumed the
consideration of the bill entitled " An Act to reorganize
and establish the Army of the United States." The twentieth
section was then read — That the Provost Marshal's bureau
hereafter consist of a provost marshal-general, with the rank,
pay, and emoluments of a brigadier-general ; and one assistant
provost marshal-general, with the rank, pay, and emoluments of
a colonel of cavalry ; and all matters relating to the recruitment
of the army and the arrest of deserters shall be placed under
the direction and control of this bureau, under such regulations
as the Secretary of War may' prescribe.

Mr. Conkling at once moved to strike out this section, and
gave as his first reason, " that it creates an unnecessary office
for an undeserving public servant."

Discussing public reasons against it, he continued his personal
reasons. " I have never heard any very serious attempt to
justify by argument the permanent continuance of an officer
whose administration during the war has had in it so little to
commend and so much to condemn. But I have heard, an
effort made to prove the propriety of this section by charging
it to the Lieutenant-General of the army, and by saying that
he had found a necessity for continuing in time of peace the
bureau of the Provost Marshal-General. In order that the
House may see how true this allegation is, I send to the Clerk's
desk and ask to have read copies of letters which have been
furnished to me, the first a letter addressed to the Lieutenant-
General by a Senator of the United States."

The Clerk read as follows :

158 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

United States Senate Chamber,

Washington, March 17, 1866.
General : The House bill for the organization of the army contains
a provision creating a permanent provost marshal's bureau, with a brig-
adier-general at its head ; also placing the recruiting service in its charge.
It has been unofficially reported to me that this was done in consequence
of a recommendation of yours to that effect.

I should be pleased to know if such is the case, as I had labored under
the impression, from conversation with officers of the army, that such a
step was not a judicious one, and tended only to increase the number of
bureaus and officers of the army, with an increase of expenditure without
any corresponding efficiency or benefit.

If my impressions are erroneous I would like to have them corrected.
I am, very respectfully,

Your obedient servant,

J. W. Nesmith.

The answer of the Lieutenant- General was then read, which
stated that —

Some months since, a paper was referred to me showing the great
number of desertions from the army, and asking for suggestions to put
a stop to them. To that paper I suggested a number of changes in orders
governing the recruiting service, and I recommended that the whole
matter be put in charge of the Provost Marshal-General, who could devote
more attention to it than the Adjutant-General, with all his other duties,
could. I am opposed, however, to multiplying bureaus, and I think there
is no necessity for a provost marshal-general. In fact, if we had to
organize the army anew, I would not have as many bureaus as we now
have. In my opinion, the country would be just as well, and much more
economically, served if the coast surveying duties were added to the
engineer bureau, and the quartermaster, subsistence, and pay depart-
ments were merged into one. I would not recommend a change now,
however, but would not make any increase of bureaus.

Very truly yours,

U. S. Grant,

Lieutenant- General.

After further giving the public reasons, Mr. Conkliilg re-
turned to the personal reasons :

" There is one thing — I know of but one — for this bureau
to do before leaving the public presence, and that is to close its
accounts, so as to allow the War Department and the country

BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 159

to know precisely what has become of the twenty-five million
and odd dollars which, under the act of March 13, 1862, went
to its credit.

" My constituents remember, and other constituencies re-
member, wrongs done them too great for forgetfulness, and
almost for belief, by the creatures of this bureau, and by its head.

" There came, at the same time, other creatures of the head
of the bureau at Washington. The western division swarmed
with these chosen favorites.

" They turned the business of recruiting and drafting into a
paradise of coxcombs and thieves.

" There never has been, in human history, a greater mockery
and a greater burlesque than the conduct of this bureau."

It may here be mentioned that the officer who was so obnox-
ious to Mr. Conkling had been assigned to Western New
York by General Fry, at the request of William H. Seward,
of New York, Secretar}^ of State ; that Mr. Spaulding, of Ohio,
who also opposed the continuance of this military bureau as
necessary only in war and unnecessary in peace, thought it his
duty to protest in the House that a great deal of the odium
which had been attached " to the administration of the duties
of that office pertained rather to the nature of the office than
to the individual who discharged the duties of the office. I
question whether any man, whether he came from the East or
the West, from the North or the South, could have gone into
the administration of the Provost Marshal-General's depart-
ment and discharged its duties with any more satisfaction to
the general public than General James B. Fry," — and added,
with amiable desire to allay strife, " I think, perhaps, the gen-
tleman from New York has sufficient cause for what he has
said ; but such a case as he has mentioned has not been brought
home to me, in all my official intercourse with the Provost
Marshal-General during the last three years, and it has been
constant and frequent. I have been treated by him with a
degree of kindness and courtesy which requires from me an
expression of thanks rather than of censure. I am happy,
therefore, to have it in my power to say that I am under obli-
gations to this man ; and it is a pleasure to me to acquit myself
of the duty of doing so " :

1G0 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

That General Schenck, of Ohio, protested against the intro-
duction of General Fry's character, as having no relation to the
question, declaring that " It is defended by the history of the
war. It is defended by his services through good report and
evil report. According to the best of his ability, that officer
has so discharged his duty that those in his own immediate
department, who know best how that duty has been discharged,
have no such epithets to bestow upon him as that he is an un-
deserving officer ; the Military Committee, in all their labor of
consideration, discussion, inquiry, and other work tending to
the framing of a proper bill for the establishment of an army
system, have endeavored to act without reference to persons,
having in view only the best schemes for the attainment of
objects which might result in the public good " :

That Mr. Farquhar, who had served under General Fry, rose
in the House to declare : " I never did hear any charge made
against the efficiency, against the promptness, against the
success of the officer in charge of that department, but, on the
contrary, — - and I say it with pleasure, ■ — the duties of that office
were performed with evidence of the highest ability and the
greatest satisfaction. During the time I had an opportunity of
serving under that officer, a large number of recruits were
raised, both to fill up old regiments and to create new regi-
ments, with a success which did not attend the service when
another officer was in charge of that department. I take
pleasure, without entering into the controversy, if I may so
call it, in regard to the duties and services of that high officer,
to say to-day that I bear testimony to the highest ability of that
officer in the full discharge of these duties " :

That General Fry was a graduate of West Point from Illi-
nois, and had been in the army from the age of twenty ; that
when the war broke out, his father, though a Democrat and
over sixty years of age, raised a regiment, went into the field,
and fought in some of the severest battles of the war; that
General Fry was attested by his own Congressmen to have been
one of the most gallant men we ever had in the army, whose
character had been without reproach, whose integrity had never
been impeached until that moment ; that after righting the bat-
ties of the country. with glory and with joy, the bloodless

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 161

battles of the provost marshalship with deserters and drafts
and bounty-jumpers, were so distasteful to him that he once fell
from his high estate of unquestioning obedience into complain-
ing to President Lincoln of the obloquy attaching to the mere
administration of the law of his office ; but the great-souled
President, who had himself drank to the full the cup of obloquy,
instead of rebuking, comforted him with the assurance, " That is
necessarily the case for the present, but it will be all right in the
end." Suffer it to be so now for thus it become th us to fulfil all
righteousness. Such a soldier, so attacked on a field where he
could make no defence, Mr. Blaine was not likely to pass by on
the other side. When Mr. Conkling began to speak, Mr. Blaine
was talking to a friend in the diplomatic gallery of the House ;
but his quick ear caught the tenor of the remarks, and hurry-
ing to his seat he took the floor the instant Mr. Conkling re-
leased it. He was on the Military Committee which had the
bill in charge, and he had a special right to speak. He began
calmly enough, replying to Mr. Conkling's implication of
falsehood in attributing the report to the Lieutenant-General :
" I wish to state why the committee reported this section of
the bill in regard to which the gentleman from New York
shows so much feeling. I believe that among the earliest acts
of the gentleman from New York at this session of Congress
was the introduction of a resolution which was adopted by this
House, directing the War Department to report upon the ex-
pediency of abolishing the office of provost marshal-general.
In the routine of business the answer of the Secretary of War
came to the Military Committee, and among the papers was a
letter from Lieu tenant-General Grant The gentleman from
New York has read a letter from the Lieutenant-General, which
practically recalls the recommendations of the letter on which
the committee acted ; but I desire the Clerk to read the letter
of Lieutenant-General Grant, which was the authorization, in
the judgment of the committee, for inserting the section." The
Clerk read as follows :

Headquarters Army op the United States,

Washington, December 14, 18G.0.
Sir: In reply to your letter of the 13th instant, in reference to deser-
tions, I would make the following remarks: J do not think the present

162 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

method of recruiting, as carried out, sufficient to fill up the regular army
to the force required, or keep it full when once filled.

The duty is an important one, and demands, I think, the exclusive atten-
tion of an officer of the War Department, aided by a well -organized system
extending over the country. I think the officer best fitted for that position,
by his experience during the present war, is General Fry, and would rec-
ommend that the whole subject of recruiting be put in his hands and all offi-
cers on recruiting duty be directed to report to him. He should also have
charge of the apprehension of deserters, should be authorized to offer such
rewards as will secure their apprehension. When caught they should be
tried, and the sentence rigidly carried into effect ; this would soon stop the
present enormous amount of desertion.

I would recommend that the duties heretofore performed by provost

marshals be hereafter performed by officers detailed for recruiting duty.

Very respectfully,

U. S. Grant,

Lieutenant- General.
Hon. E. M. Stanton, Secretary of War.

Mr. Blaine. — The House will observe that the Committee
on Military Affairs acted precisely in accordance with the rec-
ommendations of the Lieutenant-General as contained in the
letter which has just been read. When the gentleman from
New York quotes the letter of the Lieutenant-General in con-
demnation of the report made by the Committee on Military
Affairs, I merely wish the privilege of showing that that report
was made in express conformity, verbatim et literatim, with the
recommendations of that officer's letter, which came officially
before the committee, and which was not smuggled in in the
manner in which the letter read by the gentleman from New
York comes before us. That is not an official letter ; it is an
unofficial note. The letter just read by the Clerk is an official
note, communicated to this House by the Secretary of War on
a regular call, and referred by the House to the Committee on
Military Affairs.

Mr. Speaker, I do not suppose that the House of Representa-
tives care anything more than the Committee on Military
Affairs about the great recruiting frauds in New York, or the
quarrels of the gentleman from New York with General Fry, in
which quarrels it is generally understood the gentleman came
out second best at the War Department. I do not think that
such questions ought to be obtruded here.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 163

Though the gentleman from New York has had some differ-
ence with General Fry, yet I take pleasure in saying that, as I
believe, there is not in the American Army a more honorable
and high-toned officer than General Fry. That officer, I doubt
not, is ready to meet the gentleman from New York or any-
body else in the proper forum. I must say that I do not think
it is any very creditable proceeding for the gentleman from
New York here in this place to traduce General Fry as a mili-
tary officer when he has no opportunity to be heard. I do not
consider such a proceeding the highest specimen of chivalry
that could be exhibited.

The gentleman from New York has had his issues with Gen-
eral Fry at the War Department. They have been adjudicated
upon by the Secretary of War, and I leave it for the gentleman
to say whether he came out first best. I do not know the par-
ticulars ; the gentleman can inform the House. All I have to
say is — and in this I believe I speak the sentiment of a majority
of the members of this House — that James B. Fry is a most
efficient officer, whose character is without spot or blemish; a
gentleman who stands second to no other officer in the Ameri-
can army ; and he is ready to meet the gentleman from New
York and all other accusers anywhere and everywhere. And,
sir, when I hear the gentleman from New York rehearse in
this House, as an impeachment of General Fry, all the details
of the recruiting frauds in New York, which General Fry used
his best energies to repress with iron hand, a sense of indigna-
tion carries me beyond my personal strength and impels me to
denounce such a course of proceeding.

To this Mr. Conkling replied in words which, as reported in
the " Congressional Globe," were :

" Mr. Speaker, if General Fry is reduced to depending for
vindication upon the gentleman from Maine, he is to be com-
miserated certainly. If I have fallen to the necessity of taking-
lessons from that gentleman in the rules of propriety, or of right
or wrong, God help me. I say to him further that I mean to
take no advantage such as he attributes of the privileges of this
place or of the absence of General Fry. On the contrary, I am
ready to avow what I have here declared anywhere. T have

164 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

stated facts for which I am willing to be held responsible at all
times and places."

What the newspapers reported Mr. Conkling to have said
was, " I am entirely responsible, not only here, but elsewhere,
for what I have said." " To the particular individual to whom it
may give offence I will answer not here, but elsewhere — any-
where it may be agreeable to have the answer."

" I say, further, that the statement made by the gentleman
from Maine with regard to myself personally, and my quarrels
with General Fry and their results, is false."

Mr. Blaine. — What does the gentleman mean to say was
false ?

Mr. Conkling. — I mean to say that the statement made by
the gentleman from Maine is false.

Mr. Blaine. — ■ What statement ?

Mr. Conkling. — Does not the gentleman understand what
I mean ?

Declining to answer Mr. Blaine's question directly, Mr.
Conkling at length came around in his own way to the point
of his objection, which was the statement that he had " had
personal quarrels " with General Fry and had been worsted
in them, and that too before the Secretary of War and by the
Secretary of War.

Mr. Blaine replied that what he had understood was " from
very high authority," but " I left it to him to say whether it
was so, but added I could not consent to go into this cheap sort
of stuff about answering 'here and elsewhere,' and about 'per-
sonal responsibility,' and all that kind of thing.

" Sir, I do not know how to characterize it. When we had
gentlemen here from the eleven seceded States, they used to
talk about answering ' here and elsewhere ; ' and it was under-
stood that they meant a duel. I suppose the gentleman from
New York means nothing of that kind ; I do not know whether
lie does or not ; but that is the only meaning that can be at-
tached to the phrase. When a man says that he is ready to
answer ' here or elsewhere ' he means that he is willing to
receive a note outside of the District of Columbia. Well, now,
that is very cheap, and certainly beneath my notice. I do not
believe the gentleman from New York wants to fight a duel;

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES O. BLAINE. 1G5

and I am sure he needs no assurance from me that I do not
intend it. When I have to resort to the use of the epithet of
' false ' upon this floor, and this cheap swagger about being
responsible ' here or elsewhere,' I shall have very little faith in
the cause which I stand up to maintain."

On the second day of the debate Mr. Blaine read the Globe
report, and threw down the gauntlet himself, informing the House
that in personal controversies between gentlemen it is a point of
honor that as the reporter puts what takes place it shall be printed,
and that if alterations are made they shall be made by mutual
understanding and knowledge. On reading the report at the
Globe office he found essential alterations, and was told the
alterations were made by the member from New York, and are
in his handwriting. " I now hold the report of his remarks in
my hand, and there is scarcely a page but what has been
altered. But I merely want to call the attention of the House
to one point where the gentleman sought by an alteration to
take away the entire point of my reply to him. I characterized
some of his bravado as cheap swagger when he talked about
meeting me ' here or elsewhere.' The gentleman eliminates
that important part of his speech, and inserts these words : ' I
have stated facts for which I am willing to be held responsible
at all times and places.' Now the phrase ' here and elsewhere '
is a phrase well known in Congress — ■ it is the phrase of bully-
ism. It was a phrase upon which I commented, and which I
denounced, and justly denounced, and which the gentleman
had no right to alter at the Globe office. I want members to
understand the precise point of my complaint. Though I am
reported, and correctly reported, as referring to the phraseology
'here and elsewhere,' and commenting upon the bravado of
his manner, yet a person reading the debate might be led to
ask what I was replying to when I quoted a phrase of that
kind, the very mild phrase c at all times and places ' having
been cunningly substituted. Mr. Speaker, I never expected
to make a personal explanation in this House in my life. As
to courage, I am like the Methodist deacon about his piety, I
have none to speak of."

Mr. Conkling asked and was permitted to look at the sheets,
protested that he had made no improper alterations, that he

166 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

was " as incapable as the gentleman from Maine pretends to
be of doing anything in violation of the rights or the position
of any other member," reviewed the debate in question, de-
fended his course and rights therein, declared that he never saw
the notes of the gentleman from Maine, did not know they con-
tained any statement about " here or elsewhere," did not think
there was the slightest significance in those words more than in
any other for this purpose, characterized Mr. Blaine's remarks
as " frivolously impertinent and also incorrect," and that the im-
putation of duelism was " a cheap way of clawing off," and, after
expressing with great fervor his indifference to, not to say con-
tempt for, the opinion of the gentleman from Maine, proceeded
to read the original phrases and the alterations, and "throwback
to the gentleman any imputation which he seeks to cast upon
me," — - which reading showed him to have done exactly what
Mr. Blaine said that he had done !

So the second day came and went, and on the morning of the
third Mr. Blaine reappeared with a fresh fusillade, comprising
the proof of his statement, — which was much more in his way
than shooting Mr. Conkling, or being shot by him, with an
entirely illogical and therefore impertinent bullet..

" I hold in my hand a letter from Provost Marshal-General
Fry, which I ask to have read at the Clerk's desk, for the double
purpose of vindicating myself from the charge of having stated
in debate last week what was false, and also for the purpose,
which I am sure will commend itself to the House, of allowing
fair play to an honorable man in the same forum in which he
has been assailed."

The Speaker. — It requires unanimous consent to have it
read. Is there objection ?

Mr. Conkling. — I infer that this has some reference to
me. I shall make no objection, provided I may have an
opportunity to reply to whatever the letter may call for here-
after.

Mr. Blaine. — I wish further to say that if, on investigation, I
had found I was in error in the statement 1 had made touching
the member from the Utica district of New York [Mr. Conk-
ling] and Provost Marshal-General Fry, I would, mortif}dng as
it would have been, have apologized to the House. Whether

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 167

I was in error or not, I leave to those who hear the letter of the
Provost Marshal-General.

A letter from General Fry was then read in which he said :
"Your assertions touching Mr. Conkling's difficulties with this
bureau are amply and completely justified by the facts which
this letter will disclose. . .

" My official intercourse with Representatives in Congress dur-
ing the past three years has been constant and in many cases
intimate, and, with the solitary exception of Mr. Conkling, it
has been marked, so far as I remember, by mutual honor and
fair dealing." After giving in detail the three main issues be-
tween himself and Mr. Conkling, (which were, first, that General
Fry removed the first Provost Marshal of Mr. Conkling's dis-
trict, that Mr. Conkling complained of this action both to the
President and to the War Department, but failed to procure
any modification of General Fry's conrse. Second, that General
Fry had removed the second Provost Marshal of the district,
and that Mr. Conkling had failed to restore him. Third, that
Mr. Conkling had attempted to secure counsel from the gov-
ernment to defend the second Provost Marshal in his litiga-
tions and had failed) General Fry added, " Notwithstanding
Mr. Conkling's denial in the House, his own letters as well as
the foregoing statements show that there were differences, and
that he was 'worsted.' On the 25th of October, 1865, he
wrote the Secretary of War, saying : 'It is now many
months since I have been able to obtain any response from the
department touching the interests of the government in this
district. Still I venture one more trial, etc' Every request,
complaint, or accusation of any importance made by Mr.
Conkling affecting General Fry's bureau had been laid before
the Secretary of War, and passed upon by him. The result in
nearly every instance had been, unfavorable to Mr. Conkling,
and assuming that these were the differences or quarrels
which were referred to in the debate as those in which Mr.
Conkling came out second best, he asserted what was not true
when he denied them."

This was sufficiently conclusive of the existence of the
quarrels referred to ; but General Fry, having been so very
definitely and sorely attacked, did not stay his hand. To the

168 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

, insinuation that lie " should allow the War Department and the
country to know precisely what has become of the twenty-five
million and odd dollars which, under the act of March 3, 1863,
went to its credit," General Fry replied triumphantly, " My
official report, now partly in the hands of the public printer,
shows in detail the disposition of every dollar of this money,
and shows, moreover, a completeness and accuracy in accounts
that is not surpassed, if it is equalled, by any bureau under the
government ; and I hold a certificate from the Second Comp-
troller of the Treasury that all my accounts relating to this
fund have been examined and found correct." And in turn he
added a suggestion whether Mr. Conkling's action in exercis-
ing the functions of judge advocate, and receiving pay therefor
from the United States to the amount of $3,000 while receiving
his compensation as a member of Congress, was a violation of
the letter or spirit, or both, of article one, section two, of the
Constitution :

" He was as zealous in preventing prosecutions at Utica as he
was in making them at Elmira, and the main ground of difficulty
between Mr. Conkling and myself lias been that I wanted ex-
posure at both places, while he wanted concealment at one. I
have been at all times amenable to the severest form of law, —
the military code, — liable at any moment to summary arrest,
court-martial, and extreme punishment in case of any derelic-
tion of official dut}r. No one knew or knows this fact better
than Mr. Conkling, and if, while acting as judge advocate, he
came into the possession of any fact impugning or impeaching
my integrity as a public officer, he was guilty of grave public
wrong and unfaithfulness if he did not instantly file formal
charges against me with the Secretary of War. He can, there-
fore, only escape the charge of deliberate and malignant false-
hood as a member of Congress by confessing an unpardonable
breach of duty as judge advocate. He held both offices and
took pay for both at the same time ; he has certainly been false
to honor in one, and perhaps, as the sequel may show, in both.

" Copies of official documents substantiating statements herein
made are subjoined."

Mr. Blaine did not ask that these documents should be read
but that they and the letter should be printed. Mr. Ross, of

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 169

Illinois, moved that ten thousand extra copies be printed. Mr.
Conkling desired them to be read, rather childishly declaring
that he enjoyed it very much, and proceeded to justify in de-
tail his acceptance of the $3,000 fee till Mr. Ross interrupted
him again, " If it will not discompose the gentleman too much,
I would ask him to state whether that was during the time he
was drawing pay as a member of Congress."

Mr. Conkling. — I do not quite understand the pertinence
of the question of the gentleman from Illinois. But I will
endeavor to enlighten him. He probably knows, for I presume
that information has extended to him, that the term of members
of Congress commences on the fourth of March. And as the
retainer which I have spoken of was in April, which, I will in-
form the gentleman, is a month that comes after March in the
calendar, he will very likely be able, by the rule of three, or by
some other rule with which he is familiar, to cipher out whether
I was a member of Congress at the time or not.

I should be sorry to suppose that the member from Illinois,
or any other member of this House, — indeed, I should be sorry
as an American to suppose that the standard of intelligence
anywhere in the country is so low that any human being, un-
less it be that distinguished mathematician and warrior, Provost
Marshal-General Fry, believes there is the slightest impropriety
in a man who is a member of Congress practising his profession
as counsel in courts, or accepting from the government of the
United States, or from any other client, a retainer for such pro-
fessional services.

But after he was again in the full tide of explanation, Mr.
Ross again interposed, " Will the gentleman from New York
yield to me a moment?"

Mr. Conkling. — For what purpose ?

Mr. Ross. — I desire to ask the gentleman whether he was draw-
ing pay as judge advocate at the same time when he was receiving
$3,000 a year from the government as a member of Congress.

Mr. Conkling. — I will answer the gentleman's question,
Mr. Speaker ; because nothing interests me in connection with
this matter more than the laudable curiosity of the gentleman
from Illinois.

170 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

I beg, Mr. Speaker, to assure the gentleman " confidentially,"
as the gentleman from Pennsylvania would say, and I hope
he will regard it as a confidential communication, that I never
did receive salary as judge advocate during the period he
refers to, or during any other period ; not one penny. Indeed,
Mr. Speaker, I found myself very unexpectedly elevated when
I saw the announcement in some paper that this retainer which
the government had given me made me acting judge advocate
for the purpose of trying a case. It was merely an employ-
ment as counsel; and the counsel fee which was paid is, I
beg to assure the gentleman, the only compensation that I
ever received for my services. I never received any pay as
judge advocate during any period whatever. ... I beg
leave, Mr. Speaker, to remind gentlemen of the precise state-
ment which on that occasion I pronounced untrue. The mem-
ber from Maine said — I read from the Globe : " I do not
suppose that the House of Representatives care anything more
than the Committee on Military Affairs about the great recruit-
ing frauds of New York, or the quarrels of the gentleman from
New York with General Fry, in which quarrels, it is generally
understood, the gentleman came out second best at the War
Department." I will not stop to read further (although I
propose to have all I have marked inserted in my remarks) the
various forms in which the statement was made that I had had
personal quarrels with Provost Marshal-General Fry.

Mr. Blaine. — -I hope the gentleman will read the whole. If
he will show me the word " personal " in the speech to which
he is replying, I will reward him. He cannot do it. He is put-
ting his own interpretation upon it. Let the gentleman read
all that he is going to print.

Mr. Conkling^ — Mr. Speaker, I hope the active member
from Maine will preserve himself as free from agitation as
possible.

Mr. Blaine. — I demand that whatever the gentleman puts
in the Globe he shall read.

The Speaker ruled that the demand was parliamentary, and
Mr Conkling perforce yielded : " Mr. Speaker, this is a little
episode, I suppose, for the amusement and diversion of the
House. It is quite unnecessary. The member had better be

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. Ill

quiet ; I am entirely disposed to have the whole passage read,
and I will ask to have it read." The whole passage was read,
and then Mr. Blaine scored his point by declaring, " The word
personal does not occur there," to which Mr. Conkling made
the astonishing confession and avoidance, " The House will
observe I did not say the word ' personal ' did occur. But
that is not here nor there," and continued his argument to
prove that he had " no personal quarrel with General Fry,"
and concluded by hoping that the House would " pardon some-
thing to the extraordinary incident which has been witnessed,
of the head of a bureau, a clerk in the War Department, sending
here to be read such a pile of rubbish as that, a personal assault
upon a member of this House, under the pretence of vindicating
himself in some way or other."

Mr. Blaine responded in his most off-hand manner : " I do
not know that I have anything to say, and I shall not take very
long to say it. I do not happen to possess the volubility
of the gentleman from the Utica district. It took him thirty
minutes the other day to explain that an alteration in the
reporter's notes for the Globe was no alteration at all ; and
I do not think he convinced the House, after all. And it
has taken him an hour to-day to explain that while he and
General Fry have been at swords' points for a year, there has
been no difficulty at all between them. He has said that General
Fry is of no consequence, that he is a mere clerk in the War
Department. Yet he is a very sensitive clerk, and when he
has been accused of all sorts of fraud, he should have a little
chance to be heard. Now, one single word. The gentleman
from New York has attempted to pass off his appearance in
this case as simply the appearance of counsel. I want to read
again, for the information of the House, the appointment under
which the gentleman from New York appeared as the prosecutor
on the part of the government. It is as follows :

War Department,

Washington City, April 3, 1865.
Sir: I am instructed by the Secretary of War to authorize you to inves-
tigate all cases of fraud in the Provost Marshal's department of the
western division of New York, and all misdemeanors connected with
recruiting. You will from time to time make report to this department of

172 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

the progress of your labors, and will apply for any special authority for
which you may have occasion. The Judge Advocate-General will be in-
structed to issue to you an appointment as special judge advocate, for the
prosecution of any cases that may be brought to trial before a military
tribunal. You will also appear in behalf of this department in any cases
that it may be deemed more expedient to bring before the civil tribunals.
Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

C. A. Dana,

Assistant Secretary of War.
Mr. Roscoe Conkling.

u Now, sir, I find in Brightly's Digest, Section 46, page 821,
that : ' No person who holds or shall hold any office under the
government of the United States whose salary or annual com-
pensation shall amount to the sum of #2,500 shall receive
compensation for discharging the duties of any other office.'

" I leave it for the House to decide whether the gentleman
can get off under the technical plea that he was not a judge ad-
vocate. He cannot deny that he discharged the duties of judge
advocate under the special commission which I have read, and
he was paid for the discharge of those duties. The case falls
under the same law as that of the gentleman from Ohio [Mr.
Schenck], who, being a Representative in Congress while yet a
major-general, declined to receive any pay as a member until he
had resigned his office in the army, and had taken his seat in
this House. I have no suggestions to make about this, except
that I consider the point well taken, and that in my view this
committee, if appointed, ought to investigate the matter. I do
not believe that the gentleman received the money rightfully,
though I will say this much of him, if he will permit me, that I
have no doubt he will restore it if convinced he has taken it
improperly.

" Mr. Speaker, all I have to say further in connection with this
matter is, that what I stated the other day has, as I conceive, been
fully, entirely, and emphatically vindicated by the record. I
believe I have shown the members of this House that I am in-
capable of stating anything here for which I am not responsible
— not exactly 'here or elsewhere,' but responsible as a gentle-
man and as a Representative."

If the debate had stopped even there, the situation, though

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 173

dilapidated, might not have been irreparable ; but Mr. Conkling
added, " Mr. Speaker, I sought the floor again to say this,
which possibly I omitted to state before : that no commission
was ever issued to me by the Judge Advocate-General. For
fear that I omitted to state it, I beg leave to say that no com-
mission, paper, or authority whatever was ever issued to me
except the letter of retainer which has been read, employing me
to act, according to its language, before military courts and
before other tribunals."

Mr. Blaine, who had already said his final word, was instantly
up again, but Mr. Conkling's patience was exhausted to the
point of direct and simple ire.

The Speaker. — Does the gentleman from New York yield
to the gentleman from Maine ?

Mr. Conkling. — No, sir. I do not wish to have anything
to do with the member from Maine, not even so much as to
yield him the floor. [But he quickly recovered his rhetoric and
attested the fervor of his indifference.] Mr. Speaker, if the
member from Maine had the least idea how profoundly indif-
ferent I am to his opinion upon the subject which he has been
discussing, or upon any other subject personal to me, I think
he would hardly take the trouble to rise here and express his
opinion. And as it is a matter of entire indifference to me
what that opinion may be, I certainly will not detain the
House by discussing the question whether it is well or ill-
founded, or by noticing what he says. I submit the whole
matter to the members of the House, making as I do an
apology for the length of time which I have occupied in con-
sequence of being drawn into explanations originally by an
interruption which I pronounced the other day ungentlemanly
and impertinent, and having nothing whatever to do with the
question.

Mr. Blaine, taking the floor, began :

" It is hardly worth while to pursue this controversy further ;
but still the gentleman from New York cannot get off on the
technicality which he has suggested. He says that a com-
mission never was issued to him. I understand him to admit
that if a commission had been issued to him he could not have
taken pay for both offices. Now every one knows that those

174 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

preliminary authorizations are the things on which half the
business arising out of the war has been done. Men have
fought at the head of battalions and divisions and army corps
without having received their formal commissions. The gentle-
man was just as much bound to respect the law under that
appointment as though it had been a formal commission with
the signature of the Secretary of War." Turning then
directly to Mr. Conkling, who was accentuating his profound
indifference to what the gentleman from Maine might be say-
ing by writing busily, there came one swift downpour of scorn
for scorn. "As to the gentleman's cruel sarcasm, I hope he
will not be too severe. The contempt of that large-minded
gentleman is so wilting, his haughty disdain., his grandiloquent
swell, his majestic, supereminent, overpowering, turkey-gobbler
strut, has been so crushing to myself and all the members of this
House, that I know it was an act of the greatest temerity for me
to venture upon a controversy with him." Referring then to a
chance newspaper comparison of Mr. Conkling to Henry Winter
Davis (which he interpreted satirically), he continued, " The
gentleman took it seriously,, and it has given his strut additional
pomposity. The resemblance is great, it is striking. Hyperion
to a Satyr, Thersites to Hercules, mud to marble, dunghill to
diamond, a singed cat to a Bengal tiger, a whining puppy to a
roaring lion. Shade of the mighty Davis, forgive the almost
profanation of that jocose satire ! "

The House of Representatives proved to be but children
of a larger growth. It listened to every word, shouted
its inextinguishable laughter, then pulled itself together to
comfort the gentleman from New York, and to discipline the
gentleman from Maine. The Chair recovered presence of mind
first, and laid the blame on the House. " If any member had
called to order, the Chair would at once have strictly enforced
the rule ; " but it is noticeable that the Chair took care not to
make this suggestion prematurely. The House, having first
gratified its curiosity by listening to the whole letter, appointed
a committee " to investigate the statements and charges made
by Hon. Roscoe Conkling, in his place, against Provost Marshal-
General Fry and his bureau, whether any frauds have been per-
petrated in his office in connection with the recruiting service ;

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 175

also to examine into the statements made by General Fry
in his communication to Hon. Mr. Blaine read in the House."
The committee met, gave one look at the mass of docu-
ments which were to be examined, and determined, "in
view of the magnitude of the task assigned to it," to under-
take only half of it ; that is, to dispose of the charges of
General Fry against Mr. Conkling, and to leave General Fry to
fight his way out of Mr. Conkling's charges as best he could.
This task it accomplished to its own satisfaction. The com-
mittee asserted, and the House assented, that Mr. Fry's
charges against Mr. Conkling were wholly without foundation
in truth, that the conduct of Mr. Conkling had been in all
respects above reproach, and, too late horror-stricken at the
spectacle of a mere clerk of a department attacking a member
of Congress in Congress simply to defend his own unimpor-
tant character, and forgetting that the House was advised of
the contents of the letter before it was read, that it agreed to
the reading without an objection, when a single objection could
have kept it back, and that it must therefore be particeps crimi-
nis, it nevertheless condemned General Fry for breach of the
privileges of the House. Indeed, General Fry fared so ill at
the hands of the committee that the question was openly asked
on the floor of the House, why some steps had not been taken
to send him to the penitentiary ; which it appeared, in answer,
the House might have done, but that the sin of General Fry in
writing the letter was so closely connected with the sin of Mr.
Blaine in offering the letter that the same prison-door which
opened on the one must needs close on the other, by which the
dignity of the House would be still further violated. Thus it
will be seen that while they laid exculpating hands on Mr.
Conkling, and kept inculpating hands off Mr. Blaine, they all
turned upon poor General Fry, and, forgetting that he had any
grievance at all, gave him a very bad time of it. The com-
mittee reported, and the House adopted the report, condemning
General Fry for attempting to resent and disprove, in the
House of Representatives, the charge made in the House that
he had prostituted "the whole machinery of the government
to miscreants and robbers."

Still there was a world outside. The Mouse adopted the report

176 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

on the 14th of July. On the 17th of the same month, General
Fry was appointed '" major-general by brevet, for faithful, meri-
torious, and distinguished services in the Provost Marshal-Gen-
eral's department." And the Senate confirmed the appointment.
June 10, 1.868, he was appointed " brigadier-general by brevet,
for gallant and meritorious services in the battles of Shiloh,
Tennessee, and Perryville, Kentucky." And the Senate con-
firmed the appointment. He was appointed " colonel by brevet,
for gallant and meritorious services in the battle of Bull Run
(first), Virginia." And the Senate confirmed the appointment.
March 12, 1875, he was appointed colonel in Adjutant-General's
department. And the Senate confirmed the appointment. So
the House of Representatives and the War Department each
drew its own child from the fierce flame, to its own fond eyes
unscarred, while the other child was all scathed and blackened
by the lightning stroke.

This controversy has been given with more detail than its
intrinsic importance would justify, because of the innumerable
variations which time and tradition have lent to the tale, and
because of the factitious importance with which the subsequent
prominence of the two chief contestants invested it. National
policies and presidencies have been hung on its issues, and the
poison of an imaginary bitterness has been diffused through
an entirely constructive " life-long feud." But to a feud there
must be two parties. On Mr. Blaine's side certainly, there
was no feud whatever. He spoke to the occasion, and smote no
more. He had fought in his own field the soldier's battle, who
had fought on the bloody field the citizen's battle, and that was
the end. Thereafter was no moment when he was not ready for
peace, — at least for such peace as was possible with Mr. Conk-
ling. At intervals along the way were ever springing up
friends who wished to heal the breach, and Mr. Blaine always
lent himself cheerfully, without their urging, to their desire and
design. He did not think it worth while to go over the story in
detail, or to make an apology, or any scene whatever ; he was quite
willing that the dead past should bury its dead, but he would
assist at no funeral ceremony. Hearing that the obstacle to rec-
onciliation in Mr. Conkling's mind was a supposed reflection
on his integrity by Mr. Blaine, the latter denied promptly any

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. Ill

such reflection, and half humorously maintained that any un-
prejudiced reader of the debate would testify that in this aspect
he had more to complain of than Mr. Conkling. But he not
only admitted, he was quick to avow his admission, that in the
excitement of the moment both had spoken some words which
in cooler moments both regretted and would have been glad to
recall. So much he volunteered without regard to Mr. Conk-
ling's attitude. To peace-lovers and well-wishers of both,
and to loyal adherents of the Republican party, who thought its
interests involved in the relations of its prominent leaders, he
from the first averred his willingness, even his desire, at any
moment to resume relations with Mr. Conkling, and to disavow
at the same time, and at all times, any intention whatever to
reflect on his honor as a gentleman. On one of the many
occasions when he was approached by friends of Mr. Conkling in
the cause of reconciliation, he closed with the proposition, " If
you will assure me of Mr. Conkling's acceptance, I will without
any other preliminary invite him and Mrs. Conkling to the
best dinner I can proffer to the best company I can gather in
Washington." This was after he had been made Speaker and
had established his home with its usual hospitalities in Wash-
ington. The gentlemen withdrew, but the desired assurance
was never given and the proffered table was never spread. On
another and similar occasion he replied that he would " far
rather be Mr. Conkling's friend than his foe, and I can say
with entire candor that I never felt towards him any of the
rancor of an enemy/' During the presidential campaign of
1884, renewed efforts were made by loyal Republicans towards
friendly intercourse in the interests of political cooperation.
Again Mr. Blaine responded, as always, with assurances of
good-will. He reiterated his readiness to resume friendly
relations and to disavow any intention of imputing dishonor to
Mr. Conkling, but added, " To do so now would subject me to
the imputation of improper motives, but when the election is
over, whichever way it may end, I would be glad as a step to
reconciliation to make that disavowal in any way that would
be agreeable to Mr. Conkling, assuming of course that he feels
ready to make similar disavowal respecting myself." The
reconciliation went no further.

178 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Yet it probably was not wholly due to Mr. Conkling's un-
willingness to be reconciled, but partly perhaps to his practical
inability to overcome what seemed to him the awkwardness of
the step.

It must also be admitted that Mr. Blaine did not set a high
private value on Mr. Conkling's friendship. To the core of the
heart they were different men. They worshipped different
gods with different rites. They cherished different ideals and
followed them on different lines. Mr. Blaine was not gladly on
ill terms with any one, but he was not pressed to a reconcilia-
tion with Mr. Conkling by any inward urgency.

The controversy^ did not affect Mr. Blaine's political course,
and not perceptibly, I think, his political fortunes. The situa-
tion was not indeed without its humorous side — as at a
dinner where important matters were discussed with Secretary
Fish, and Mr. Blaine would refer Mr. Fish to the Senator from
New York as the proper authority, and Mr. Conkling, address-
ing also Mr. Fish, would presently refer another question to
the decision of the Speaker of the House. On another day it
chanced that a group of friends, including both Mr. Blaine and
Mr. Conkling, were travelling from New York to Washington,
and enjoying the liveliest nonsense of leisurely talk. One of
them, Mr. (since Senator) Chandler, amused himself with contriv-
ing, as opportunity offered, a cut de sac in which to entrap Mr.
Blaine and Mr. Conkling, for the sake of forcing their skill at
keeping out. In a careless moment Mr. Conkling produced some
confection or other and began to pass it around, apparently
without thinking of the great gulf fixed between himself and his
constructive foe. When it should have come to Mr. Blaine,
there was a visible rudimentary movement of Mr. Conkling's
proffering hand towards Mr. Blaine ; but alas ! the habit of a
lifetime prevailed, his good angel of gayety forsook him and
fled, more to Mr. Conkling's chagrin, possibly, than to any other
person's. " Would you have taken it if he had offered it?"
asked a friend of Mr., Blaine afterwards. " Certainly, if it had
choked me ! " was the careless reply.

It was inevitable that they should be often in opposition, but
they never clashed on the old battle-field. They never contended
where, but for that battle-field, they- would have combined.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 179

On the contrary, that early conflict was rather, doubtless one
of the things that made for peace. Mr. Conkling's manner
was intolerable, and Mr. Blaine disembarrassed himself of it
once for all, and thus the world remained unvexed of many
a storm. Mr. Blaine never made the mistake of under-estimat-
ing Mr. Conkling while fully recognizing his limitations, and
Mr. Conkling, I think, never again made the mistake of even
pretending to leave Mr. Blaine out of the account. " Mr. Conk-
ling and I have usually cooperated in political struggles, and I
have never withheld my frank expression of admiration for his
great abilities, " wrote Mr. Blaine to one of the great army of
peace-makers. " You can talk with Conkling and I can't," said
Senator Blaine to a brother Senator when a pet measure of Conk-
ling's was at stake. " I have seen L., and I think he is on
the borders. . . . Go and tell Conkling if he will talk with
L., I believe he can bring him in." And it was observed
that Mr. Conkling speeded to Mr. L. like an arrow from a bow.
On the other hand, in some of Mi\ Blaine's many minorities,
Mr. Conkling did not shrink from ranging himself alongside. " If
any gentleman on this floor has made himself singular," was
the euphuism by which Mr. Conkling indicated that it was Mr.
Blaine's forlorn hope which he was following. In presidential
nomination campaigns, as often in other causes, Mr. Conkling
opposed Mr. Blaine, but there is no reason to attribute Mr.
Blaine's defeats to Mr. Conkling, any more than to Mr. Sher-
man or to Mr. Windom, or to others with whom Mr. Blaine
never had a personal conflict, but who were working each for
his own man with as undoubted honesty and zeal as if that man
had not been himself. Mr. Blaine never nursed the old dis-
pute, never seemed to hold it in mind, never used it as a base
of operations, never gathered or disseminated from it any poi-
sonous fruitage, never looked upon it as other than an incident
of the past, right in its origin and motive, improvable perhaps
in its manner, to be left for what, on the spur of the moment,
it was worth.

The metropolitan press seems, like the House of Represent-
atives, to have joined in the laugh, but to have espoused the
cause of the member from New York. A leading and powerful
newspaper, the New York Tribune, marvelled that a bureau

180 BIOGRAPHY <)F JAMES G. BLAINE.

clerk should impudently cause such a letter to be read to the
House. It declared each and all the charges against Mr. Conk-
ling to be proved false and frivolous and foolish, while only the
novelty of the attack redeemed General Fry and its lamented
supporter from Maine from general contempt. It was the
Provost Marshal-General's bureau that was about to be put on
trial, and the prediction was that Roscoe Conkling would con-
vict it of the grossest crimes or compel it to prove innocence
by confessing to the most finished, incalculable, and complete
stupidity.

When " The Historic Congress " was delineated in that jour-
nal, Mr. Conkling appeared in minute and accurate detail,
" brimful of blood and action, forceful and commanding, with
the height of Mars, crowned with the forehead and locks of
Hyperion, eyes large and black," — though in the search-light
of the newspapers they often flashed blue, — " auburn hair, and
beard peaked as his nose, set above shoulders that become a
great captain ! " but near the end of four and one-half columns,
the member from Maine comes perfunctorily in only as "an
editor from Maine, and the ally of Mr. Fry in the pending in-
vestigation. "

One journal did not consider him of sufficient importance to
be named, and brought him forward indiscriminately as Mr.
Blane and Mr. Blain.

Five years flew by and another day had dawned. On the same
pages " Conkling rose with his slow undulations like nothing
so much as a yellow viper coupled with the accompanying
venom," and by that time the "crimes," and the " stupidity '"
were alike merged in " the annoyance which we all suffered
under General Fry's legal tyranny," but that " he did his duty
faithfully, industriously, and honestly is too well vouched for
by his superiors, among them the lamented Stanton," to be
doubted ; while Mr. Conkling's " overbearing manner has made
him the most unpopular man in the Senate, and he carries it in
debate to an extreme almost beyond belief. Though his rasp-
ing tones are disagreeable at all times, they are specially and
incomparably odious when employed (as they are every day)
to convey an insult to one of his associates. ... In answer-
ing a political opponent, it is his custom to give the lie as

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 181

nearly as he can without being called to order. . . . Not
being called to order, he went on to make that unfortunate
observation about c courage ' and 4 strutting ' which brought
upon him the severest rap he has received in six years. When
Mr. Schurz begged pardon if he had done anything like strut-
ting, c because he did not want to interfere with the exclusive
privilege of his friend from New York,' the application was so
perfect that the galleries roared with laughter, and some of the
Senators were convulsed with delight. For the strut of Mr.
Conkling is one of the sights of the Capitol.

" Six years ago, Roscoe Conkling and James G. Blaine had a
famous tilt in the House of Representatives. The debate was
then upon ... a piece of sharp practice which Mr. Conk-
ling justified, if I am not mistaken, upon the plea that, though
he took the appointment and the pay, he did not receive a
formally engrossed commission. In the course of the discus-
sion Mr. Conkling was guilty of an airy exhibition towards
Mr. Blaine, and the member from Maine retaliated with a piece
of denunciation so cruelly descriptive that it will long hold a
place in our political literature."

Only the Creator, never the created, is the same yesterday,
to-day, and forever.

182 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

VACATION IN EUROPE AND WORK AT HOME.

IN May, 1867, Mr. Blaine took a short vacation voyage to
Europe, and often boasted that he had outstripped Napoleon,
having in three months conquered three languages and overrun
five kingdoms ! Mr. Morrill, of Vermont, was his travelling
companion, and though twenty years his senior, they sailed into
New York harbor on their return, agreeing that if the journey
were to be taken again, each could choose no better companion-
ship.

" He was a delightful traveller," says Mr. Morrill, " mar-
vellous. We fell in with, many English gentlemen, and he
seemed to know more about their country than they did them-
selves. He was thoroughly familiar with the history and the
associations of every battle-ground we visited, of every spot
connected with great events. His observation was remarkably
quick and wide, and we swept a great deal of interest and value
into a short time."

He landed at Queenstown on the last day of May, and never
dreamed of anything in vegetation so splendid as the green of
Ireland, but noted Spike Island, on the outer side of the harbor,
a penal institution strongly walled in and " just now filled with
condemned Fenians, waiting for transportation to Botany Bay."
He rode on the engine to Cork, for a better view of the mag-
nificent country. " The only fault, the double fault rather, is
the absence of trees and the absence of houses. The inhabi-
tants are all rooted out by the large proprietors. I had no idea
of the beauty of Ireland, nor of the fearful effects of absenteeism,
and the general disaster to the native race caused by the Eng-
lish policy." On the way to Dublin he made friends with the
" guard " and rode on his car, an elevated one with forward and
rear lookout, and got all the views and information attainable.

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BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 188

One Sunday in Dublin the travellers decided " to go to 'church
on a large scale ; so we took a carriage, and between 10.30
and 1.30 we attended four Catholic and three Episcopal
churches. . . . We heard a very good sermon at the last
one, where we wound up our ecclesiastical perambulations. At
St. Patrick's, the great Episcopal cathedral, the highest of High.
Churchdom, there were by actual count more persons engaged
at the altar and in the choir than were to be found in the pews.
The audience did not number over fifty, including Morrill and
myself, and such an array of rectors and vicars and deans and
canons and prebendaries and deacons and sub-deacons you
never saw and never will in America. The cathedral would
probably seat at least three thousand, and it only lacked two
thousand nine hundred and fifty of being full ; and the church
is maintained by tithes on the property of all denominations.
What a cruel farce ! The music in all, both Catholic and Epis-
copal, is very fine." At the great cemetery he noted O'Con-
nell's monument and the memorial stone of an Irish soldier who
fell in the battle of the Wilderness, " in defence of the ' Great
Republic,' as the inscription said." From Kingston they em-
barked for Holyhead on the Isle of Anglesey opposite, and
made the trip in three and three-quarters hours. "I never
saw anything so long and sharp as the steamers are. We shot
out into the English channel like an arrow, passed a lightship
seven miles out from the pier in precisely twenty minutes by
Mr. Morrill's watch. Fare on steamer very high, 12 shillings,
$ 3 gold, for sixty-six miles."

In Menai Bridge he was disappointed and gave it only the
honors of a pioneer. But with the beauty of the scenery he
was greatly impressed. At Chester he measured the Roman
wall in his usual way by pacing it. At Eton his comment on
the park, architecture, and greenhouses, which alone covered
fifty-two acres, was enthusiastic, but of a distinctly Maine
flavor. From Wolverhampton fourteen miles to Birmingham,
through the Black Country, — " one continuous Pittsburg.
Mr. Morrill, who is so familiar with statistics of trade and
manufactures, confessed himself utterly amazed at the magni-
tude and extent of the display we witnessed." Giving two
hours to Birmingham, they went to Warwick, thence a drive

184 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

four miles out to Kenilworth, then another drive with fresh
horses to Stratford-on-Avon, and at 4.30, train to Oxford, after
lunch driving out to Blenheim. They slept at Oxford, visited
all the colleges, gave over an hour to the Bodleian Library,
and reached London at 2.20 P.M. " It is only five days since
we landed at Queenstown. . . . An attentive study of the
trains and the notable localities that are accessible on the route
has enabled us to do more in these five days than tourists often
accomplish in two or three weeks. We find a great number of
those who came over on the " China " with us here at the
Langham, and all they have done is simply to travel from
Liverpool, stopping nowhere and seeing nothing. We have
seen rural England, ridden on its fine roads, talked with its
people, seen its splendid country seats.

" Take the finest finished and ornamented lawn in Brookline,
Roxbury, or any of those beautiful towns around Boston, and
you see there only what you see in all directions in England,
only what I have seen for every mile of the four hundred miles
that I have travelled by rail or carriage on English soil. It is
just as Ralph Waldo Emerson says of it in his English notes,
4 England is finished with a pencil, America with a plough.'

" Travelling here is expensive. . . . My English experi-
ence thus far has cost me twenty-one dollars a day in our money-
I had previously written Mr. Morse, our consul, from Oxford,
that he would procure us admission to the House of Parliament
and have the necessary papers at the Langham. We found his
note containing a card of introduction to Mr. W. E. Foster,
and down we went about 5 P.M., when we found to our dismay
that he was not in his seat. ... I was not, however, to be
so easily put off, and remembering the almighty power of the
shilling in England, I made up to one of the guards, door-
keepers, explained our dilemma, slipped a half-crown into his
hand, and away he flew and reappeared in a few minutes with
Lord Henry Cavendish's order for our admission ; and

for several hours we enjoyed the sight of the British House of
Commons. I was intensely interested in everything that was
said and done.

" Next morning Mr. Morse called, and we all called on Mr.
Adams and were very cordially received. He said he would send

BTOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 185

his Secretary of Legation to our hotel at 3.30 to escort us to
Parliament House and procure our admission to the floor. So
at the hour Mr. Moran very promptly appeared, and off we
drove. . . . Mr. Foster was in his seat, and, hearing about
us from Mr. Morse, he did not wait to be introduced, but came
right over, and soon after brought John Stuart Mill, and then
Lord Amberley and many other of the Liberal members.

" After about half an hour Mr. Foster, having left us for a few
minutes, returned with the compliments of the Right Honorable
John Evelyn Dennison, Speaker of the House, inviting us to
take seats on the Peers' Bench, — a most eligible location, — -
and sending us word that during our stay in London he would
be happy to have us occupy that seat whenever it might suit
our pleasure. Mr. Morrill and myself felt quite overwhelmed
with the attention, but a member of the American Congress is
a bigger animal in England than he ever was before. Our war
has infused a tremendous respect for us into the minds of
Englishmen.

"After staying for several hours we repaired to the House of
Lords, and here again we had seats on the floor, at 4the foot of
the throne.' We had an admirable chance of seeing all the
notables in both Houses, Derby, Disraeli, Russell, Stanley, etc. ;
we did not see Bright or Gladstone, as they are both out of
town. I never cared [for] a sight so much as the British Par-
liament, and I have now seen it under the most favorable cir-
cumstances. ... But withal it is a body of notable men
worth a trip across the Atlantic to see. . . . Mr. Morrill is
a capital travelling companion in every sense — even-tempered
and with wide-awake interest and attention."

From London to Brussels, through Antwerp, Malines, Aix-la-
Chapelle, to Cologne ; but he could not call Belgium prosper-
ous, because while some were accumulating enormous wealth the
laboring classes seemed deprived of their fair share of the profit.
The " stolid, stupefied, resigned, and saddened look so un-
affectedly assumed would touch the heart of stone — far worse
than any I saw in England or Ireland," and he could "imagine
no country better adapted for the marshalling and manoeuvring
of troops than Brussels."

Kverywhere the works of art and of architecture receive his

186 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

word of criticism, of enthusiasm or of indifference, sometimes of
disappointment. Of the most beautiful face he ever saw : " I could
have choked the valet when he told me that the Antwerp tra-
dition was that Rubens painted it from the face of his mistress."
From his window he hears " in the soft moonlight the ceaseless
gabble and gibberish of the German crowds in the street. Prus-
sian soldiers are plenty, the fellows who fought at Sadowa.
They look small and mean, and before an army of Americans
would, I think, be a small obstacle ; " but " Prussian power and
prestige are everywhere visible after you leave Cologne. It is
really a nation of tremendous energy and enlightenment." With
carriage, horses, driver, and guide they made a thorough inspec-
tion of the field of Waterloo.

From Cologne they took steamer to Mayence — - so charmed
with the scenery that he could not leave the deck, having lunch
brought up to him instead of going down to the saloon. Dis-
appointed at not finding Elihu Washburn at Homburg, they
went on to Ragatz, Switzerland, where he was taking the fa-
mous hot baths of mineral water, but stopped all along the way :
two hours at Frankfurt, and a drive to Hanau in Hesse Cassel,
then a night and a morning at Heidelburg, an afternoon at
Baden Baden, presenting themselves dutifully at Strasbourg
Cathedral at 12 M. to see the apostles come out, a night and a
morning at Zurich, and meeting at the Hof Ragatz not only Mr.
Washburn, but a dozen unexpected American friends. Thence
they took carriages through the wild Alpine scenery to the Swiss
village Tusis in the canton of Grison, where they ate mountain
trout and played " c Old Hundred ' and c John Brown ' on a fine
piano in the Hotel Via Mala " till eleven o'clock at night, and
at half-past seven the next morning began the ascent of the real
Alps by the Splugen Pass. When they had passed the last bridge
of the Via Mala they called a halt and celebrated a feast of the
meeting and parting " with as cordial a feeling of fellowship as
ever animated the hearts of seven Americans. . . . We
parted with songs. and cheers, waving of hats and handker-
chiefs, the cordial grasp of hands, and with more than one pair
of eyes moistened by the grateful pleasure of the romantic meet-
ing and the inexpressible sadness of the parting — they back to
Ragatz, Mr. Morrill and myself on to Italy ; . . . zigzagging

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 187

up the precipitous sides of the mountain just after the fashion of
the pictures of the Tower of Babel in the old Bibles. . . . We
have a splendid carriage all to ourselves, three horses, and pay
for it one hundred and forty francs from yesterday P.M. to
bo-morrow at eleven, when we reach the head of Lake Como."
They sailed across the lake to the city of Como, thence to
Milan one night, with a glimpse of city and cathedral, then on
to Florence, and found in the wonderful railroad engineering
proof of " a new birth for Italy, hope of a great future and even
increased glory for the Latin race.'"'

At Florence, he had " considered the crossing of the Alleghe-
nies Central as a wonderful triumph of human skill and enter-
prise, but it is absolutely lame and inconsiderable compared with
what has been achieved in the Apennines."

Two days to Florence and its fascinations. "As we drove
home we passed the elegant palace in which Bigelow Lawrence
resides — not the finest by any means in Florence ; but it is
very elegant, and the grounds are by far the grandest in the
city, except those of the king. They are in the city, sixteen
acres in extent, and these, with the splendid house> he has on a
lease of six thousand francs (twelve hundred dollars) a year.

Then eleven hours in a gondola at Venice, to Milan through
the famous quadrilateral of the Italian war of 1859, over the
Simplon Pass, " doing Geneva very thoroughly."

By July 5 he was " living in clover " at the Hotel de Hol-
lande on the Rue de la Paix — just as it turns out of the Place
Vendome ; Elihu Washburn was there and Governor Curtin,
and he was constantly accosted by Augusta people and Maine
people and Americans, for4 it was the Exposition year. As he
stood just where the garden of the Tuileries opens into the
Place de la Concorde he had a good look at the Emperor Louis
Napoleon and the Sultan of Turkey, which was all he wanted.
The travellers' only trouble was in regard to Congress. " It
seems to be the very general impression that if we should start
to-day we should not reach Washington before the adjournment.
All our advices are to that effect, and yet I dislike very much
not to start and try to reach there. . . .

" At the Theatre L'Imperatrice last night I saw John Breck-
enridge and his wife. They sat but a very few boxes from us.

188 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

and were very intently gazing on our party the whole evening.
They look sad, downcast, and dispirited. He is in Paris without
money. What situation could be more deplorable !

" I had a very fine day in the Corps Legislatif. Heard Berier
speak, also Rouher, the great minister. Saw Jules Favre, Thiers,
and all the magnates. The Assembly is very impressive, and I
think contains far more talent than the British House of
Commons. The speakers displayed marvellous readiness and
eloquence. They were discussing the Mexican question, which
is now exciting France profoundly. The death of Maximilian
is a terrible blow to Napoleon. It shows his infallibility too
palpably. The sensation created is immense and intense. One
can see the excitement about it on all hands. . . . The
dismay at the Tuileries is said to be great. . . . Neverthe-
less, I fully believe the power of the Emperor to be firmly fixed
for his lifetime. His improvements in Paris, which are truly
vast, and visible on every hand, give him this city, and with that
and the army he can hold France. I saw him again yesterday.
He bears himself stoically and splendidly."

The Representative conscience continued to flatter them that
Congress would adjourn in a very few days. " I am very glad that
I did not attempt to get home for the session. Had I been in
London when John Sherman sailed I would doubtless have
gone with him, but, luckily or unluckily, I was that very day on
the top of the Alps, and by the utmost exertion it would have
been impossible for me to reach Washington before this time,
or say July 20, and that, I apprehend, would have been just in
season to see Congress adjourn. At least, such were the rea-
sonings of Mr. Morrill and myself, and I am satisfied that we
acted wisely. We have, at all events, done the best we could
with the light before us, and that is all that human nature is
expected to do."

From Paris Mr. Blaine and Mr. Washburn went again to
Homburg for a fortnight, while Mr. Morrill went on to Eng-
land. With all the distractions of Homburg he remembered
his desire to secure " George Field, if we can, for the Augusta
church. I never saw the day when I did not prefer him to any
other."

On August 8 he rejoined Mr. Morrill in London, met the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 189

Garfields next day, and went down to see Mr. Washburn on
the way from Bremen to America.

Two years afterwards Mr. Washburn returned to Europe as
American Minister to France, an appointment that elicited much
ridicule from a class of reformers, for its unfitness. Mr. Wash-
burn very soon distinguished himself throughout Europe by his
eminent fitness, staying at his post when all other ministers fled,
and shielding under our flag, from the perils of the Franco-Prus-
sian war and the greater perils of the commune, not only the
property and the lives of his own countrymen, but of the still
more endangered Germans. In the House of Representatives,
April 17, 1894, Mr. Hitt, of Illinois, than whom no one is better
entitled to speak of American diplomacy, said of Mr. Wash-
burn, " When the first peal of that awful cannonade burst
upon Paris, all the other diplomats, every one of the lords, and
counts, and marquises hurried away : Washburn stayed — stayed
through it all. The stars and garters all disappeared, but the
stars and stripes stood fast. His house was pierced with shot.
The bomb-shells fell all about the Legation, but he never
failed one day nor one hour from his post. He had the respect
and the confidence of both the French and German governments
when they trusted no one else. For weeks he was the only
means of communication between the contending forces, a pure
politician turned diplomat, a dignified, courageous, discreet
American minister."

But before the stress of war came on, while Mr. Washburn
had hardly yet occupied his new position, he recalled the old
visit of two years before with a touch of homesickness :

" The good old lady, three hundred avoirdupois, the well-
beloved daughter, the polite 'cabtain,' and, last, little c Bet-
chen.' . . . The walk and the waters in the early morning,
the same simple breakfast brought to the room, and the dinner
at the Kursaal. I often sat at the same table where we took so
many meals, and never without thinking of you. Homburg was
for all the world the same. The same sort of a crowd, the
same eternal jingle of the money, the same imperturbable
' croupiers,' and many of the self-same persons that we saw
every day were there. Though the irrevocable edict has gone
forth that the gambling must cease in 1872, the effort to make

190 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

everything attractive as possible has not abated. There is the
music, the theatre, the ball, the illuminations, and the demi-
monde, the latter more gorgeous than ever. A still larger crowd
of Americans were there than two years ago, but I missed the
pleasant people we had there, the Whitmans, the Fields, the
Kings, the Van Bergers, the Holmeses, and others. . . .
The regret at the removal of Murphy is very great, among the
Americans and Germans equally. Never were people more
beloved than both he and his wife, and particularly by the
Frankfort people, who, in view of their departure, have pre-
sented them touching souvenirs. Webster, his successor, Ben
Butler's brother-in-law, has been a long time at Homburg
waiting for his commission to come, and now Kreisman writes
me that Bancroft tells him that it is detained with two or three
others, purposely, at the State Department. This leads me to
say that there have been many curious changes made in the
consuls abroad. . . . Further about Homburg people. The
good madam was jolly as ever, with the bright, charming little
girls. In Paris, for seven weeks, I was still unwell. The
weather was the most wretched I ever knew, and on the whole
I was not jolly. My reception was very cordial and all that I
could desire. My intercourse with the officials was very pleas-
ant. Rouher was the acting Minister of Foreign Affairs when
I arrived, and he was particularly cordial. He is a great man,
but now the worst-hated man in France. His ability and elo-
quence are conceded, but he is considered as utterly without
principle. De Valette, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, whom
I saw often, was a most agreeable and charming gentleman, and
I am sorry the new deal has thrown him out. Burlingame
writes me that the new Minister is a good fellow. I liked
Marshal Neil (now very ill) and Duruy, Minister of Public
Instruction, very much. There are 4 high old times ' now in
political circles in Paris, and the coming winter bids fair to be
a very interesting one. ... I think I shall like my position
very well. The official duties will not worry me. The social
duties are the most burdensome. ... I shall not be lone-
some as I was at Ragatz when I saw you and Justin Morrill
streaking it up to the 4 Hof Ragatz.' "

In the House of Lords Mr. Blaine heard "a splendid speech

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 191

from Lord Derby, one of the most elegant, graceful, and eloquent
men I ever listened to. I heard also moderate speeches from
Lord John Russell and from Earl Stanhope."

The travellers took a week in Scotland exploring the Tros-
sachs, one at least with the memory of his well-beloved Walter
Scott for a guide.

" Yesterday before starting for Ayr, I thought I would look
up Mrs. B. ; but alas ! the directory spoke of more than thirty
John B.'s, and at least a dozen of the same business that I
knew John B. pursued. But I looked them all over carefully
and found one whose residence was at 5 Royal crescent. I said,
fc That is highly genteel, and that must be the one.' So at 9
o'clock I took a cab«and posted away off a mile and a half, and
stopped in front of an elegant house in the most aristocratic
section of the city. A tidy Scotch serving-maid answered the
bell. ; Does Mr. Black live here ? ' ' Yeas, but he bes gone
down to his business.' ' Well, is Mrs. Black in ? ' rejoined I,
adding that I was not sure I was at the right house. 4 1 trow
you are,' said she, 4 for Mrs. Black is an American !'

August 24 they sailed for America in the " Persia," and
Mr. Blaine reached Maine in season to vote at the September
election.

On the day of his departure from home he had written to his
mother :

" I sail for Europe to-day on the Cunard steamer ' China,' a
fine boat, and you must not feel uneasy about me."

He had hardly returned before he was asking her, " What
are your desires as to the winter? I mean for yourself and
Maggie, ft is my wish that you select just the place you may
desire to pass the winter. It is not for me to suggest where you
had better go — you and Maggie can judge far better in regard to
that point than I can ; and as it more immediately and directly
concerns you, 1 desire you to settle it for yourself."

Mr. Blaine derived health and pleasure from his foreign jour-
ney, but it can hardly be said that he needed it. Amusement
he always found in his work. Intellectual occupation was his
panacea. A definite purpose gave him bounding health. " Cam-
paigning " was to him a recreation, not an exhaustion. His
neighbors say that he did more service on the stump than any

192 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

other man in Maine. With a horse and buggy, sometimes with
two horses, and generally accompanied by some member of his
family, he drove over the hills, through the woods, along the
shores, of the picturesque State.

To stop in some pleasant village, or by some pleasant pond, and
talk under the trees for an hour or two on a theme with which
he was entirely conversant, and in which he was deeply inter-
ested, to a great company of friends and neighbors, who had
come from far and near to hear him, who listened intently and
responded quickly, — what was it all but a festivity, an exhila-
ration, no labor; and the hearty greetings, the sympathetic and
often humorous advice and comment, the quick mother-wit, were
a stimulus both to heart and mind. He had great respect for
his audiences, and never found it necessary to talk down to an
assumed lower level, but paid them the compliment of addressing
them on his own level. Speaking in the open air he considered
as good as gymnastics, especially for the chest exercise, and it
gave him no sense of fatigue. Generally he avoided hotels, and
was greatly humored in such avoidance by the hospitality which
opened all houses to him, not only as an honored but as an
entertaining guest. His bearing was so simple and gentle, his
interest in others so sincere, his talk so earnest and informing,
that men and women, alike the cultured and the unlearned,
were eager to welcome him, and by these excursions he made
and kept himself acquainted with the people, diffused his own
spirit around him, and felt himself the ebb and flow of the pop-
ular currents.

As his family had grown in numbers and stature the old home
had grown straitened, and he had bought a house adjoining the
State House, so that the State House grounds simply enlarged
his own. In a far corner, near the river which flowed by out
of sight beyond its high north bank, was "the governor's
grave," where lay buried the young Governor Lincoln who
died in office ; to this grave led a path bordered by elms ; all
through these grounds and through the State House woods and
Mulliken's farm, and up the Betsy Howard hill, and by Canada
brook he rambled and roved with his children and neighbors
and friends, in ever fresh and keen enjoyment of the common
lot of life. As the children went from under his roof to school

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 193

and brought young friends home with them, and the outside
world came in upon him faster and thicker, this second house
had to be enlarged, and every summer the home was radiant
and not infrequently rampant with life. The croquet mallet
and the tennis racket and the billiard cue kept the balls in
steady leap, and no carriage was too fine and no go-cart too
shabby for climbing the far-off hills or winding along the river ;
and if there was a lull in politics there was always theology
to fall back upon, in which the youngest child showed interest
as soon as he could articulate ; and the old questions of litera-
ture are new to every generation. Fresh visitors have been
startled in the early morning b}^ hearing mysterious voices of
disputation ; and inspection has revealed a boy's unkempt head
stretched far out of window arguing with other unkempt heads
stretched out of other windows, at various angles, all bear-
ing down hard on some insoluble problem which they had fallen
asleep over the night before. Frequent also were excursions
along the coast, taking on all the traits of a pleasure party,
though generally with some political or business aim to give it
purpose and reason to be, and usually some outside friends to
impart to it the grateful touch of hospitality. It was a breezy,
healthful, stirring, satisfying life, in which work was the under-
lying earth and pleasure the overspringing bloom.

In work, in bringing knowledge and power to bear on some
beneficent end, Mr. Blaine was always happy ; and the larger
and loftier the aim, the more buoyantly, almost boyishly, wTas
he happy. Work seemed never to exhaust him. He wore out
every one else, but himself remained bright and elastic. He
had the inestimable gift of sleep, at convenience, in continu-
ance. For him indeed there was no such thing as work ; it was
merely expression.

In the course of the summer lie would strike off from all
business to drink the waters of Saratoga, or he would run up
for a few days with as many of his family as were foot-free to
Poland Springs. In the cooler weather he would go down from
Washington for a week to the White Sulphur Springs of Vir-
ginia, and once he even adventured the Hot Springs of Arkan-
sas. Mis journeys to his Pennsylvania properties, or on political
missions, always seemed like celebrations, so welcome was he to

194 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

his old neigborhood and to his old State. It is pleasant to
think that the two communities of his birth and of his adoption
held him in equal confidence, honor, and love, as one alto-
gether unique and worshipful, and that he lost nothing even
of the satisfactions of the heart by his northward migration,
and perhaps added by the transplantation — in accordance with
the law of growing things — to his mental equipment and his
moral force.

But always he went back to Congress with fresh energy, and
especially was he earnest and untiring in working for the weak
against the strong, in helping the South to recover from the
war, in extending all the benefits of the Union, while seeing
that the principles of the Constitution received no detriment.

One of the most important steps in the great work of recon-
struction was the amendment of the Constitution regarding the
basis of suffrage. Mr. Blaine, in the Thirty-ninth Congress,
made the first argument against the plan of basing representa-
tion on voters, and presented and urged the plan of basing it
upon population. Fully sharing the sense of justice which had
inspired the first plan, he aimed to secure its benefits without
incurring its evils. Its object was to deprive the lately rebel-
lious States of the unfair advantage of a large representation
in Congress based on the colored population, while that popula-
tion was denied political rights. But women, children, and other
non-voters he maintained may have as vital an interest in the
legislation of the country as have voters, and if persons be
excluded from the basis of representation, they should be ex-
cluded also from the basis of taxation. The ratio of voters to
population varies from nineteen to fifty-eight per cent., and
hence would come gross inequalities of representation. To make
voters the basis of representation " would cheapen suffrage ;
would cause an unseemly scramble to increase voters, and the
ballot, which cannot be too sacredly guarded, would be de-
moralized and disgraced everywhere."

His proposition was that representation and direct taxes
should be apportioned according to the population, and that the
population should be determined after excepting all to whom
civil or political rights or privileges should be denied or abridged
on account of race or color.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES 0. BLAINE. 195

" . . . No statistics show any loss to Maine, and on sev-
eral theories we gain one member. My opposition, therefore,
is not grounded on local selfishness, but upon the belief that
the principle is a dangerous one ; that it is an abandonment of
one of the oldest and safest landmarks of the Constitution, and
that it is a most perilous leap in the dark. It introduces a new
principle in our government, whose evil tendency and results
no man can measure to-day."

Apportionment on the basis of voters was abandoned, and Mr.
Blaine's proposition was substantially embodied in the Four-
teenth Amendment to the Constitution.

He was equally strenuous against any measure that should
place the South under military government without, at the same
time, prescribing the methods by which the people could by their
own action, reestablish civil government. To this end he offered
" the Blaine amendment," making impartial suffrage the way of
escape from " military police" — which also was subsequently
embodied in the reconstruction laws.

In March, 1865, defending an amendment of the Constitu-
tion, which should strike out the clause that forbids the taxing
of exports, in a speech, which caused an extraordinary agitation
throughout the country, he had declared that in the future of
our country " the great task and test of statesmanship will be
in the administration of our finances, and the wise distribution
of the burdens of taxation. . . . An immense amount of
money will be required to meet the interest of our National
debt, to maintain our arnfy and navy — -even on a peace founda-
tion, and to defray the ordinary expenses of civil government.
The revenue for these objects may be raised so injudiciously as
to cripple and embarrass the commercial and industrial interests
of the whole country ; or on the other hand, the requisite tax
may be so equitably distributed and so skilfully assessed that
the burden will be inappreciable to the public. Whoever, as
Secretary of the Treasury, shall accomplish the latter and
avoid the former result, must be armed with a plenitude of power
in the premises. He must have open to him the three great
avenues of taxation — the tariff, the excise system, and the
duties on exports ; and must be empowered to use each in its

196 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

appropriate place by Congressional legislation. At present only
two of these modes of taxation are available, and the absence
of the third takes from the general government half the regu-
lation of trade. It is for Congress to say whether the people
shall have an opportunity to change the organic law in this im-
portant respect, or whether with a blind disregard of the future
we shall rush forward, reckless of the financial disasters that
may result from a failure to do our duty here.

" I do not know whether there is the slightest hope that this
amendment will be adopted, but I believe, with the old Cove-
nanters of Scotland, that it is sometimes valuable to bear testi-
mony against a wrong which we are unable to resist. I think
the tax on raw cotton is altogether the most extraordinary that
was ever laid by an intelligent government. Six years ago,
when the war began, we had a monopoly of this article in the
markets of the world. The course and events of the war
robbed us of that monopoly. The system of labor on which
the cotton culture, rested was utterly destroyed — destroyed as
a necessity of war and for the permanent welfare of the nation,
as well as to vindicate the right of every man to personal
freedom. Nor was this all. The war in its ravages consumed
the horses, the mules, and the farming implements of the
South, laying waste the plantations and using up the accu-
mulated wealth and the reserved capital of the South. Brazil,
Central America, the West Indies, Egypt, Australia, and the
East Indies were greatly stimulated and encouraged to engage
in the cultivation of cotton, and hence during the five years in
which the business was practically suspended in the United
States, every other country in the world, where the climate and
soil are suitable, engaged in the effort with great zeal and
enterprise.

u We now desire to regain our ascendency, and the first step
which Congress takes is to impose a heavy tax of $15 on each
and every bale of cotton before it can be removed from the
plantation where it is raised. It seems to me that absurdity
cannot go further ; that if we had specially designed to lay a
great obstacle in the way of our ever reviving the cotton busi-
ness in this country, we could not have invented a more certain
and efficient mode. The fate of the negro and the cotton plant in

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 197

this country seems to be indissolubly connected, and just in the
degree that we retard the cotton culture Ave retard the progress
and the profit of negro labor. In urging the repeal of the cot-
ton tax, therefore, I feel that I am most effectively pleading the
cause of the emancipated negroes of the Southern States.

" The idea that we are punishing the South by this tax (which
some gentlemen advance) is utterly delusive, if it were not
indeed unworthy. The cotton tax is not an injury to the
South merely, but to the whole country, and quite as great an
injury to the manufacturing and commercial interest as it is to
the agricultural. Resentment is always an unsafe basis for
legislation. Let us remember that a heavy export of cotton
with cheap cotton at home is among the most desirable objects
for the whole country that can possibly be obtained ; that the
tax of $15 per bale is not merely an oppression and a hindrance
to cotton-growing in the United States, but that it is a bounty
and a stimulus to cotton-growing in Egypt, in India, and
everywhere else that the plant can be successfully cultivated.

" We may, I know, get several millions per annum from the
tax, but every dollar derived from this source is a loss of $5 in its
adverse effects on other business interests of the country. It
is a tax, in short, Mr. Chairman, which we cannot afford to
collect."

Refusing to take a questionable advantage even for the Re-
publican party, Mr. Blaine directed attention to the fact that
"we have had an able committee of this House diligently at
work on the question of loyalty or disloyalty of Mr. B., and
after seven or eight months' investigation the committee re-
ported that his record was disloyal. It took nine astute men,
with all the powers of investigation that this House could
clothe them with, to find out that fact, and then the com-
mittee could not agree.

" 1 desire to know, if this doctrine be laid down, how any
constituency, in the disturbed condition of the Southern States,
could ever be sure that they were to have a foothold in this
House by giving this man or that man a certificate of election.
The power of the House is ample ; it has been exercised, and
exercised with tremendous power, in refusing to let Mr. B.

198 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

take the oath and assume a seat in this House, and I — one
among the majority — voted to refuse him the right to sit here ;
but I am not going to turn round thereafter, and with this
House elect a man to represent that district. Let them have
another chance. If they send a loyal man here with a majority
vote, he shall take the oath. If they send a disloyal man here,
we will send him back. We can stand that just as long as the
second district in Kentucky can stand it.

" If there were anything decided by the election in this dis-
trict of Kentucky, it was that they did not want Mr. S. to rep-
resent them. Now it appears to me to be stretching technical
constitution to the last point, where it cracks and where it
breaks, if you are going to hold up nine, ten, or twenty thou-
sand men to an accurate knowledge of the precise political
record of the various candidates asking their suffrage. We
have a peculiar case pending now, I believe, before the Com-
mittee of Election. One of the gentlemen from Tennessee,
who is in sympathy with this side of the House, was arrested
at the Speaker's desk on the first day of the session, and was
not allowed to take the oath because he had once taken an
oath to support the confederate constitution. If the Com-
mittee of Election shall report that he is ineligible on that
account, why of course then this copperhead competitor by this
construction comes immediately in."

Eldridge. — I rise to a question of order. I insist that the
term copperhead is not parliamentary.

Mr. Blaine. — I recall the word. I never used it before in
a debate here. I will say his Democratic competitor.

The Speaker overruled the point of order on the ground that
he was not speaking of any gentleman in the House, but Mr.
Blaine refused to be thus upheld : " I did not withdraw the
word as a question of order. I should have told the gentleman
that he had made no point of order. As a question of taste
I confess that I have transgressed, and as a question of taste I
change the word. ' It was in bad taste, as it always is, to use
offensive political epithets in debate. To resume the line of
my argument : I am unwilling to lay down a precedent affect-
ing the other side of the House, that I would not be willing to
follow for this side of the House. . . . And it does seem to

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 199

me that it is a most extraordinary proposition — and I say it
with all due respect to the admirable arguments that have been
made on that side — the most extraordinary proposition that I
ever knew advanced here in an election case, that the House
should deliberately declare that a man who has a pitiful minor-
ity of the votes in the discussion shall be declared here en-
titled to the seat.''

The same scruplous respect for the will of the people as the
foundation of government is everywhere seen. On the bill
concerning land-grants to Southern railroads: "We expect
within the next few weeks, or at most the next few months,
these States which are to be immediately affected by this
legislation will be represented on this floor, that those States
will have on this floor Representatives in the interest of the
very class in whose behalf he advocates the passage of this bill.
Now, Mr. Speaker, is it not at least fair that before passing a
bill of this kind we should wait until these Representatives
shall come upon this floor and be heard in their own behalf?
They. should be heard on this subject as the Representatives
and Senators from Iowa and Wisconsin have been heard.
Why, just as the reconstruction system is approaching its con-
summation, should we rush through a bill of this kind ? I
greatly distrust the wisdom of denying to these Southern States
the means of finishing their lines of transportation. If these
lands were ever necessary to those States, I believe them to be
much more necessary to-day than they were at the time when
they were originally granted. I do not say that I shall vote in
favor of a renewal of those grants. I have not voted for other
land-grants this session. But we lose nothing by waiting. To
the accusation that they were rebels and lost by war, if the
Southern country is ever to be built up again, then upon those
lines of railroad depends the future of the South, just as if rebels
never had anything to do with them. We do not propose to
have the rebels here. Reconstruction is to bring loyal men
here, and the best loyal men. Why, then, cannot the gentle-
men wait until they get here ? "

In the same spirit of justice lie opposed anything like the

200 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

exclusion of the South from West Point. "I differ entirely
with the committee. I do not believe in punishing children
in the rebel States. When this war began the persons eligible
to be appointed to West Point were nine, ten, or eleven years
of age, and I do not propose to punish them for the faults of
their fathers."

Being answered that it punished no children, but merely
provides that no rebel should be admitted to West Point, he
answered : " I am opposed to keeping up this imaginary line."
" I should think the gentleman from Pennsylvania would see —
if I had not a great respect for him, I would say — the absurdity
of such a notion."

At the time when all were angry with President Johnson,
when he was called on the floor " His Royal Highness," and had
made inquiry of the Attorney-General if he could turn Con-
gress out of the House, Mr. Blaine insisted that it was " perfectly
absurd, to use a strong phrase, when the business of all the other
departments has increased three, four, five, and six fold, and ab-
solutely requires a proportionate addition of clerical force, to
suppose that the Executive Department, which is the head of
the whole, should need no more clerical assistance than in the days
of Madison. . . . Every one knows that the business of the
Executive Department has increased enormously of late, . . .
and I ask any gentleman if it be at all possible for the execu-
tive head of all the departments to get along with precisely
the same number of secretaries and clerks that he had five years
ago. I think the amendment of the gentleman is wrong."

Offering communication from Judge Advocate-General Holt :
" The report is clear and explicit, and nothing I can say will
add to it. If gentlemen will not listen to what the Judge
Advocate writes, I am sure they will not listen to what I may
say. I move the previous question."

" I give notice of a vote soon, so that gentlemen may not
consider the question as sprung upon them when I call it up."

" I understand perfectly well that gentlemen on the other
side desire this bill shall not by any possibility go to the Presi-
dent till morning, but they must see very plainly that it is now
impossible it should go to him before to-morrow. I appreciate

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 201

their motives. They have the power, and I am willing they
should exercise it. But it is a mere capricious demand on
their part that this bill shall again he postponed a whole day."

" Unanimous consent, in nine cases out of ten, is only
another name for negligence on the part of the House. It
was gross negligence in this case."

" I move to strike out, and insert 4 by the President of the
United States, by and with the advice and consent of the
Senate.' The appointing power is vested by the Constitution
in the President of the United States. The secretaries are but
his servants, and we do not intend to invest the Secretary of
the Treasury with a power distinct from the President of the
United States."

As a specimen of Mr. Blaine's parliamentary manner we may
refer to his conduct of the Army Appropriation Bill shortly
before he was elected Speaker :

Mr. Blaine. — Before the Clerk proceeds to read the bill
for amendment, I desire to make a statement in reference
to the aggregate amount of the appropriations comprised in
the bill.

It will be observed that the total amount appropriated by the
bill is $43,199,500. ... I desire for myself to say now,
as I said then, that it is my conviction that the army ought to
be reduced. I had the honor to introduce last year a provision
in the Army Appropriation Bill for the reduction of the army,
which did not meet with the concurrence or approval of the
House. . . . Therefore, the Committee on Appropriations
have not this year made any recommendation touching that
question. But in order to preserve my own consistency, which
is important to me if not to other people, I hold now that in-
stead of sixty regiments, this Congress, or, if not, the very next,
ought to provide for the reduction of the army to thirty regi-
ments, or just one-half what it now is.

General Grant, as General-in-Chief of the Army during the
past year, has done everything within the existing law, and
under the power that the law confers upon him, to reduce the
army. All that it contains now, with its sixty regiments of

202 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

enlisted men and non-commissioned officers, is about forty-nine
thousand. That is nearly the minimum of the army, and yet we
have the same number of officers. There are between twenty-
eight and twenty-nine hundred officers on the pay-roll, which, in
my judgment, is a larger number than it ought to be, and more
than Congress ought to allow. But as the army is now cir-
cumstanced, with the exigencies which seem to be upon it with
reference to army operations, the Committee on Appropriations
have not felt at liberty to readjust its proportions by this bill
to what they believe the size of the army ought to be, but have
felt it their duty to report the appropriations for it under ex-
isting law, leaving to the appropriate committees of the House
itself to give directions as to whether the army shall be
reduced. With this explanation I ask that the bill be read for
amendment.

Mr. Brooks. — I would ask the gentleman if under the
rules, orders, and proceedings of this House it is practicable
during this session to pass an act reducing the army from sixty
to thirty regiments save in this bill ?

Mr. Blaine. — • I am very glad to answer the gentleman. If
by unanimous consent the Chairman of the Committee of Ways
and Means, or the gentleman from Illinois, who opposed my
proposition last year, could to-day move to put a proviso in
this bill for the reduction of the army, I would be glad to have
it done. Or if any one else will move it, it will gratify me. I
decline to do it myself, because, having been voted down last
year, I do not choose to run the hazard of a second rebuff. No
one would support such a proposition more cheerfully than
myself. It need not be moved now : it can be done at any
stage of the bill.

Mr. Brooks. — To what committee does this business appro-
priately belong ?

Mr. Blaine. — To the Committee on Military Affairs, of
course.

Mr. Brooks. — Will that committee or the Committee on
the Militia have any opportunity to report before the fourth of
March ?

Mr. Blaine. — I think not. ... I have a suggestion
which I think is practicable. This is Friday ; the bill will be

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 203

considered about one hour to-day, and I think it will be possi-
ble to get through it to-morrow, when it will be reported to the
House. I will not call the previous question till Monday,
which is suspension day. In the meantime, if any gentleman
can devise a plan for the reduction of the army which will
meet the concurrence of two-thirds of the House, it will bring
it within the power of two-thirds under the rule to act upon the
proposition.

Mr. Wood. — - 1 have not wished to interrupt this interesting
discussion by gentlemen on the other side of the House. Per-
haps it would be as well to leave it to them, as the responsi-
bility rests with them. But I wish to remind the House and
the country that we have repeated discussions of this character
by the gentlemen who have recently participated in this discus-
sion, proposing a reduction of the army and of the great expend-
itures which grow out of the army. It is about time that we
should have a practical reduction of the army, which has been
so often promised. Although the war has been closed for now
nearly four years, and although it is contrary to the genius
of the country to keep up a standing army in a time of pro-
found peace, yet this bill proposes to tax the people of the
country over $43,000,000 to maintain an army at this
time — ■ one-sixth of the whole amount required to be raised for
the support of the entire government of the country. This is
proposed for the support of an army when no necessity exists
for an army of over six or eight thousand men. I think the
country, like myself, is tired of hearing of a reduction of the
army when there is no practical proposition to reduce the army,
and when the majority in Congress persist in maintaining
the present large army, for the support of which this bill
appropriates money. Our avenues and streets are filled with
generals and major-generals and captains and colonels draw-
ing full pay, while the poor tax-payer is overburdened with
unnecessary taxation, wrung from him for the purpose of
supporting these idle vagabonds, who are so well paid and do
nothing.

I ask, therefore, that we shall have some practical proposition
presented to us on this subject. I ask the gentlemen on the

204 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

other side to show that they are acting in good faith by com-
mencing an actual reduction of the army. I want to see these
143,000,000 cut down to what it was before the war.

Mr. Blaine. — It was $22,000,000 before the war.

Mr. Wood. — I wish the gentleman to tell the country Avhy,
although the war has closed for almost four years, we are called
upon at this day to appropriate these immense sums of money
for the support of the army.

Mr. Blaine. — During Buchanan's administration of four
years the annual expenditures for the support of the army, as
the gentleman will find by reference to the documents, were
$22,000,000 in gold for nineteen regiments. While I will go as
far as the farthest in favor of a just reduction of the expenditures
of the government, I wisli the House to understand that the
rate of expenditure for the army under the administration of
James Buchanan was greater than at any time during the last
eight years. This bill only proposes about $700,000 in paper
for each regiment, when during the administration of James
Buchanan before the war the cost of supporting a regiment was
a little in excess of $1,000,000 in gold.

Mr. Wood. — I know that the gentleman from Maine is ex-
ceedingly ingenious in making the worse appear the better
reason. I will remind him that under Buchanan's administra-
tion we had to suppress a rebellion in the Western country.

Mr. Blaine. — There were only nineteen regiments employed,
and not a single extra regiment was called into service.

Mr. Farnsworth. — I hope the gentleman from Ohio will
submit his amendment, so that we may have it printed and
before us for our consideration.

Mr. Blaine. — That consent having been given, the proper
place for the amendment will be at the end of the bill.

Mr. Farnswokth. — Of course.

Mr. Blaine. — I hope it will be printed for use to-morrow,
as I hope to be able to get through with this bill to-morrow.
Unanimous consent having been given, it will not be necessary
to carry this bill over to suspension day.

Mr. Lawrence, of Ohio. — Will the gentleman yield to me
for a moment ?

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G, BLAINE. 205

Mr. Blaine. — Yes, sir.

Mr. Lawrence, of Ohio. — I ask unanimous consent of the
committee that other amendments may be offered to this bill
providing for the consolidation of the regiments of the army
and the mustering out of the necessary officers.

Mr. Blaine. — The permission given to the Committee on
Military Affairs covers the whole ground.

Before the committee is compelled to rise I desire that
some little progress may be made in the consideration of
this bill. I wish only to say this for the benefit of gentle-
men on my right and my left : this matter is now exactly in
the position where it should be. The Committee on Appro-
priations tried their hands last winter at the work of reducing
the army, and met with such discouraging results from the
action of the House that they are not very eager to try their
hands at it again. It belongs properly to the Committee on
Military Affairs, and I think the responsibility has now been
very properly shifted to their shoulders. Unanimous consent
having been given for the introduction of a measure looking to
the reduction of the army, the whole question will be opened,
and all amendments pertinent to the subject will be in order.

Mr. Windom. — I would like to know whether that will
enable the Committee on Military Affairs to introduce an
amendment contemplating a reform with reference to commu-
tation of quarters, subsistence, etc., in connection wTith which
there has been so much swindling of the government ?

Mr. Garfield. — And I will inquire whether we shall be
permitted to submit a proposition for the transfer of the Indian
Bureau to the War Department? (Laughter.)

Mr. Blaine. — I decline to yield further. I ask that the bill
be now read for amendment.

The Clerk proceeded to read the bill by paragraphs for
amendment, and read the following :

" For expenses of recruiting and transportation of recruits,
1300,000."

Mr. Ross. — I move to amend the item just read by striking
out " three " and inserting "one," so as to make the amount of
the appropriation $ 100,000.

206 BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Mr. Blaine. — I desire to make a single remark. If the
army is to be kept at the present minimum standard, this
appropriation of $300,000 is absolutely necessary; but if the
army is to be reduced, then I think there might be a reduction
in this item ; but the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Ross] pro-
poses too small a sum. If he will modify his amendment so as
to make the amount $150,000, it will obviate the necessity for
offering an amendment to his amendment.

Mr. Ross. — I decline to modify my amendment.

Mr. Blaine. — Then I move to amend the amendment so as
to make the amount of the appropriation $150,000.

Mr. Maynard. — I see that the appropriation for this pur-
pose for the present fiscal year was only $100,000.

Mr. Blaine. — Yes ; but we recruited for only four months
in the year. We were reducing the army down to the min-
imum. But to keep the number of men at the present minimum
a larger amount will be necessary. One hundred thousand
dollars were appropriated last year because it was intended to
cover only about one-third of the year.

Mr. Maynard. — ■ Then the gentleman is of opinion that
$150,000 will be needed for this purpose ?

Mr. Blaine. — Absolutely.

Mr. Burleigh. — I move to amend by adding : Provided,
that no officer or soldier of the army of the United States under
the age of sixty-five years, unless he be a married man and
takes his wife with him, shall be assigned.

Mr. Blaine. — It is unnecessary to read that amendment
further. I raise the point of order that it proposes independent
legislation, and cannot be entertained as an amendment to this
bill.

The Chairman. — The Chair sustains the point of order.

Mr. Loughridge. — I move to amend the pending para-
graph by striking out " fifteen " and inserting " ten," so as to
make the amount of the appropriation for the pay of the army
$10,000,000.

Mr. Blaine. — I think the gentleman from Iowa will not
urge that amendment when he understands fully the cir-
cumstances of the case. If the House should, to-morrow or

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G, BLAINE. 207

Monday, take the action which seems to be contemplated for
the reduction of the army, the amount named in the bill will
be absolutely needed. The reduction of the army will lead to
mustering out, whereby additional expense will be incurred ;
and if the mustering out process is to go on, it is probable this
item will have to be increased.

Mr. Lotjghkldge. — I would like to ask the gentleman from
Maine how or where we are to reduce these appropriations.
It is understood that the army is to be reduced : where are we
to reduce the expenditures?

Mr. Blaine. — In the quartermaster's department.

Mr. Blaine. — I move that the rules be suspended, and that
the House resolve itself into Committee of the Whole on the
state of the Union, to proceed to the consideration of the
Army Appropriation Bill; and pending that motion, I move that
all general debate upon it shall cease in one minute until we
reach the point where the amendment which was allowed to
be presented yesterday for the reduction of the army shall be
introduced.

The motions were agreed to.

Mr. Blaine. — In view of the very general agreement that
seemed to pervade the House yesterday, that an amendment
should be presented for the reduction of the army, I have
consulted several members of the Committee on Appropria-
tions, all that I could meet, and all excepting one gentleman,
and they agreed that I should move such amendments to
the appropriations as would cut down the aggregate to the
amount appropriated last year. That will reduce the amount
110,000,000. T think, from the examination I have given the
bill, that I know better than those who have not examined it
at all, just where these amendments ought to be put, and where
they can most profitably and easily be made. For that pur-
pose, I propose, if the gentleman from Iowa will withdraw
his amendment, to move to reduce the pay of the army from
115,000,000 to 111,000,000. That will be a reduction of
-14,000,000.

208 BTOGTtAPUY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Mr. Loughridge. — That is entirely satisfactory to me, and
I withdraw my amendment.

The Clerk read as follows :

" For commutation of officers' subsistence, $2,000,000."

Mr. Blaine. — I move to reduce that appropriation to
11,500,000.

Mr. Windom. — I move to amend the amendment by reduc-
ing the amount to $1,000,000.

Mr. Blaine. — I think the reduction that I propose is a
very considerable one, and it is on a scale that will cut down
the bill just $10,000,000. I think every dollar that is left
after that reduction is made will be absolutely needed.

Mr. Windom. — My reason for moving to cut this appropria-
tion down to a greater extent than the gentleman from Maine
proposes to reduce the bill generally is, that I think upon this
point we shall have an amendment offered by the gentleman
from Massachusetts [Mr. Butler] that will prevent the cor-
ruptions growing out of this system. Now, sir, it has been my
fortune during the last years to board in a good many boarding-
houses in this city ; and I think I never, with one exception,
was in a boarding-house where there was a military officer that
a part of his board bill was not paid by allowing the boarding-
house keeper to get beef cheaper than it could otherwise be
bought. I know of one honorable exception, and only one.
Now, I am opposed to this sort of swindling of the government,
and to this whole system of commutation of subsistence. I
do not believe there should be such a thing. I believe the
provision of the gentleman from Massachusetts should be
carried out, and that this kind of fraudulent dealing with the
government should be prevented.

Mr. Blaine. — - 1 do not understand that the gentleman from
Minnesota proposes to cure the evil at all. If you do not
change the law you must appropriate what the law allows. If
we do not need $1,500,000 we do not need anything.

Mr. Windom. — I' move to amend the amendment by strik-
ing out the whole clause.

Mr. Blaine. — I think that would be a very injudicious
amendment, and T hope the committee will not concur in it.

Mr. Windom. — When Ave come to act on the amendment of

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLATNE. 209

the gentleman from Massachusetts we can prevent this kind of
corruption.

Mr. Blaine. — I do not think it fair to call it " corruption.'
This is an appropriation for pay under the existing law. The
law may be unwise, but I think the gentleman uses too severe a
term when he calls it " corruption." There is not a gentleman
upon this floor who has served in the army — and there are a
great many who have served with great distinction — who has
not drawn a part of his pay in this form. It is a part of the pay
of officers of the army under the law, and so long as the law re-
mains as it is, it is idle to talk about its being corruption to draw
pay in that form.

Mr. Scofield. — I ask unanimous consent of the committee
to pass over this and the two succeeding clauses providing for
commutation of officers' subsistence, forage for officers' horses,
and clothing for officers' servants, so as to consider them
in connection with the amendment offered by the gentleman
from Massachusetts and which has been ordered to be printed.

Mr. Blaine. — I think that is a good suggestion. I am will-
ing that these three clauses shall be passed over until we see
what fate will betide the amendment of the gentleman from
Massachusetts.

Mr. Wood. — I desire to' ask the gentleman from Maine
whether in this appropriation of 160,000 for contingencies of
the army there is included 125,000 to be paid to a horse doctor
hj the name of Dunbar ?

Mr. Blaine. — The Committee on Appropriations have no
knowledge of a horse doctor named Dunbar, or any other horse
doctor, being interested in this appropriation. Nothing of the
kind came to the knowledge of the committee, and I never heard
of it before. Tt is an appropriation $ 40, 000 less than up to last
year has usually been made for that item.

Mr. Wood. — The Secretary of War has made a contract with
a horse doctor for which he proposes to pay him $25,000 a year
for curing horses' feet. I meant to ask in what part of this bill
the appropriation is made which would include that expenditure ?

Mr. Blaine. — I think it is in the item of appropriation for
cavalry and artillery horses, which I propose to materially
reduce when we reach it.

210 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE,

Mr. Eldridge. — I desire to inquire of the gentleman from
Maine if there is in this bill any appropriation for the purchase
of the museum called the Army Museum, I believe ? And
then I would like to have him inform the House, if he will, by
what authority that museum was purchased — how it became
the property of the War Department, or of the United States.

Mr. Blaine. — We have already passed the item for the Army
Medical Museum ; but, of course, I will not take advantage of
that point of order. It was by authority of an appropriation
made by this House, for which I suppose the gentleman voted
in common with the rest of us.

Mr. Eldridge. — I beg pardon of the gentleman; I think I
did not vote for it.

Mr. Blaine. — -I suppose there is no record to sustain the
gentleman in his assertion.

Mr. Eldridge. — Perhaps not ; but I generally vote against
such things, and think I did this. I hope the gentleman will
inform the house by what authority this museum was purchased.

Mr. Blaine, — This Army Medical Museum has nothing
whatever to do with the Ford's Theatre museum, to which I
suppose the gentleman refers. The Army Medical Museum is
under the management of the Medical Department, and is
regarded as of great use. The appropriation given for it has
been considered a very wise expenditure ; it is not very large
in amount.

As to the Ford's Theatre Museum, that is a matter of three
or four years ago. And if there was anything done in that
matter that was not right, the gentleman from Wisconsin
should tell the House, if he knows it. I do not know it.

Mr. Eldridge. — I will tell what I know about it. I have
understood, and I believe, that the Secretary of War took pos-
session of that building without authority of law, without any
right whatever to do so, without any authorization from Con-
gress or from any other source, and made it the property of the
United States by force — he only consenting. I believe that to
have been done ; and that is the reason why I make the inquiry
of the gentleman.

Mr. Blaine. — Does the gentleman object to that having
been done ?

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 211

Mr. Eldridge. — Yes, sir; since the gentleman asks me the
question, I object most emphatically to any man or any officer
of the government doing anything without authority of
law. I would never consent that any officer of the government
make any purchase of property or do any other act not author-
ized by law. I oppose all such things now and at all times.

Mr. Blaine. — I desire to say to the gentleman from Wis-
consin, who, I think, rather ungraciously brings up this subject
and obtrudes it upon us at this time, that the Secretary of War,
in the case alluded to, acted in a way which the Congress of the
United States clearly approved, in rescuing that building, which
was the scene of the greatest sacrifice that has been made in
modern times.

Mr. Van Trump. — I rise to a point of order.

The Chairman. — The gentleman will state his point of
order.

Mr. Van Trump. — Unless there is something here in the
way of instalments for the purchase of Ford's Theatre, I object
to this debate.

Mr. Blaine. — It was to prevent that desecration [the use
of it as a place of common amusement], that the Secretary of
War took possession of the building ; and the Congress of the
United States afterward gave him the money necessary to vest
the title to it in the United States.

Mr. Shanks. — I wish to say that the murder of President
Lincoln was an act of war, and that it was the duty of the
Secretary of War to take such steps as became a nation in a
state of war.

Mr. Blaine. — . . . If at this late day the gentleman
from Wisconsin, or any other gentleman, on that side of the
House, desires to criticise acts of Secretary Stanton which he
believes to have been outside the Constitution or outside the
laws, he makes a very unfortunate selection when he singles
out this particular transaction ; for among the many deeds
which will for all time commend the name of Edwin M.
Stanton to the patriotic people of this country, that will not
be among the least.

212 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

I desire to say a very few words in reply to what
was said this morning by the gentleman from Massachusetts
touching the amendment for reducing the army. I hope the
House will not vote to sustain the amendment of the gentle-
man from Massachusetts. I hope the House will not vote to
deprive General Sherman of the right to be promoted to the
rank of general. I hope the House will not vote that Gen.
George H. Thomas or Gen. Phil. Sheridan shall never be pro-
moted to the rank of lieutenant-general. I hope the House
will not say that Meade or Hancock must and shall be mustered
out as major-generals of the army ; and yet that is what they
would say if they voted for the proposition of the gentleman
from Massachusetts. There is a great deal in his proposition
which is meritorious, and which I would vote for if it was by
itself. But there are features in it which I do not believe this
House will ever be willing to approve.

The amendment which I have moved as a substitute for his
proposition has this extent and no more : it ties up the army
so that there can be no more new appointments or promotions
until Congress can take hold of the question. And in that
way all increase of the army will be prevented, and under the
administration of General Grant the army may be very rapidly
decreased.

The criticism of the gentleman from Massachusetts that the
Secretary of War and not General Grant will have the control
of this matter, is very superficial. The Secretary of War under
General Grant will be very apt to carry out the ideas and
wishes of General Grant in this matter. I do not think there
is any great danger that General Grant and the Secretary of
War will differ very much about this matter.

Mr. Butler, of Massachusetts. — Why did the gentleman
leave it entirely to the Secretary of War last year?

Mr. Blaine. — Because Andrew Johnson was President.
Was not that a good reason ?

Mr. Butler, of Massachusetts. — Yes, it was a good reason
for the time.

Mr. Blaine. — When the question was up last year there
was a very serious trouble between President Johnson and
Secretary of War Stanton, and my sympathies were with the

BTOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 213

Secretary of War, and the provision was made accordingly;
and when I moved the amendment last night, I did not think
it worth while to change it from what it was last year, because
I do not suppose that there is any doubt that the Secretary of
War under General Grant will carry out the wishes and views
of General Grant on the subject.

Upon the election of General Grant, Mr. Blaine congratulated
the American Congress and the American people, making one of
his rare pauses in an unwearying march to look back along the
path already followed. The victory of 1860 he recounted as
having dealt the fatal blow to slavery-propagandism — the Am-
erican people deciding that at all hazards the further spread of
human servitude into free territory should cease.

" The election of 1864 turned upon the point of continuing or
discontinuing the bloody contest, which up to that time had
raged with unabated fury and with enormous sacrifice of life and
property. The vote of the people demanded the prosecution of
the war until the rebellion should be suppressed, the national
unity secured, and slavery utterly abolished throughout the
length and breadth of the land. But the unexpected and unpre-
cedented course of the Executive, the revived malignity of the
southern rebellion, and the manifold attacks on our national
character and credit by the Democratic party, rendered the vic-
tory of 1868 as absolutely essential to conserve and preserve the
fruits of our great triumph, as was the victory of 1864 to insure
the prosecution of the war to a successful conclusion. And now
that the victory, complete and unsullied, lias been won, the
points that have been solemnly adjudicated and permanently
settled by the American people in the election of General Grant
to the presidency, are :

"First. The union of the States has been maintained, and its
perpetuity guaranteed, by this election, in a sense and with a
force that were never before enunciated when the question was
involved.

" Second. The reconstruction laws of Congress have been
vindicated and sustained by General Grant's election.

"Third. The election of Genera] Grant had settled the finan-
cial question. The American people have deliberately, solemnly,

214 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

and emphatically recorded their decision in favor of an honest
discharge of their public obligations, and against all the forms
of evasion and delusion so temptingly set forth in Democratic
platforms. They have declared against the policy of wildly in-
flating, depreciating, and ruining their currency in order to prema-
turely pay off any portion of the government bonds ; and they
have declared with equal emphasis in favor of lightening the
public burdens by reducing the interest on the national debt as
promptly and as rapidly as may be done with honor. They have
decided against all forms of repudiation " open or covert,
threatened or suspected," and in favor of upholding the public
faith and maintaining the public honor spotless and stainless.
Nay, they have gone one step further ; the question of paying
the public debt " in the utmost good faith, according to the letter
and spirit of the contract " is no longer to be made the subject
of controversy or of doubt in the American Congress.

" Fourth. With the election of General Grant comes a higher
standard of American citizenship — with more dignity and char-
acter to the name abroad and more assured liberty and security
attaching to it at home. Our diplomacy will be rescued from
the subservient tone by which we have so often been humiliated
in our own eyes and in the eyes of Europe, and the true position
of the first nation of the earth in rank and prestige will be as-
serted ; not in the spirit of bravado or with the mere arrogance
of strength, but with the conscious dignity which belongs to
power, and with the moderation which is the true ornament of
justice. And with this vindication of the rights and the rank
of our citizenship abroad will come also its protection and its
panoply at home.

" Whatever, therefore, may lie before us in the untrodden and
often beclouded path of the future, — - whether it be financial
embarrassment, or domestic trouble of another and more serious
type, or misunderstandings with foreign nations, or the exten-
sion of our flag and our sovereignty over insular or continental
possessions north or south, that fate or fortune may peacefully
offer to our ambition, — let us believe with all confidence that
General Grant's administration will meet every exigency with
the courage, the ability, and the conscience which American
nationality and Christian civilization demand."

BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G, BLAINE. 215

With all Mr. Blaine's foresight and forecast which often left
him alone on the mount of vision, with all his undisguised
directness and intellectual vehemence, the rectitude of his
judgment, the depth and delicacy of his sympathy, his sense
of justice, his enthusiasm for humanity, and his over-brimming
good-will to men, were always in evidence. His parliament-
ary skill and power had been attested by repeated temporary
service in the chair, and during the winter of 1869, the gossip
of Washington in the newspapers began, as early as January,
to invest him with the speakership, and his "great popu-
larity with his fellow members " began to be "inferred from
his prospective promotion." The Republicans made good
the gossip by his unanimous nomination on March 2, and his
harmonious election on March 4. The oath was administered
by his long-time friend and comrade, Mr. Elihu Washburn.

The approval of his promotion to the speakership was
general, but not extravagant. He was described with the not
immoderate praise of being a hard-working member who never
made long speeches, but was ready and quick in debate. His
frequent service as speaker pro tern, was declared to have certi-
fied his fitness for the permanent position, and though he had
" assumed the chair at a critical moment, he has proved himself
equal to the emergency." He was congratulated that there
was so much excitement attending President Grant's Cabinet
appointments as to leave him at peace in the appointment of
his committees.

But when the fifteenth of March had come and he had not
announced those committees, even the warmly Republican news-
papers began gentle gibes, and fables, and philosophies, warning
him of the folly and the futility of trying to please every one
on committees, which were " said to be the reasons " of the delay.

On March 16 the committees were announced, and the press
made a handsome retreat, avowing that the attributed reasons
were all erroneous, and that the delay was on account of the
New Hampshire members who had not been sworn in, and
could therefore not be on committees, which would leave New
Hampshire unrepresented. The appointments, in spite of
prophecy and fable, were declared to have elicited general sat-
isfaction. Important committees were pronounced especially

216 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE,

strong, and every section of the country was represented. Two
years later, at the beginning of his second term in the chair,
to which he was re-elected practically without opposition, Mr.
Blaine pointed out the care and preparation required in making
appointments, especially in the case of new members, and,
referring to these eleven days of committee-making, suggested
that the announcement even then was in many respects pre-
mature !

From Hon. Elihu Washburn :

Galena, Illinois, September 15, 1868.

Deak Blaine : Well, you have gone and done it in good earnest.
What a campaign, what a tight, and what a victory ! I tell everybody you
deserve immense credit for the magnificent conduct of the campaign.
Complete success in November is now assured if we only half do our
duty. . . . There is a terrific fight going on in Indiana, and our
friends have been alarmed. Your election will help them out.

. . . I think Grant will remain here till after October elections. I
wish you would write him about your election and tell him to remain quiet
at home till the October elections are over.

From Mr. Blaine :

16 January, 1869.

The book to Senator Fessenden was "favored by Mr. Blaine" with
prompt delivery. I did not content myself with sending it by a servant,
but carried it myself. He opened it very deliberately — when out dropped
a note. He put on his glasses, read the note with some apparent interest,
then read it again — and then " the wretch" (a term Beau Brummel ap-
plied to his wife, and thus sanctioned its use in jwlite circles) with great
care ^returned it to its envelope, laid it on his table, and proceeded to read
the marked pages. To be sure, I had no earthly right to see that note,
but then I said to myself he might just as well have shown it to me, for
he knows I would have enjoyed reading it. . .

You write very sensibly about the speakership. Do not imagine that
I am unduly excited about it, or that I desire it with an intensity which
leaves me unprepared for failure and its consequent disappointment and
chagrin. I have measured the whole matter calmly, logically, and phil-
osophically. I mean to win if I can fairly and honorably. If I cannot,
there's the end. But if successful, I shall not have the self-reproach of
having done one unworthy act to secure the place ; and if unsuccessful, the
same consciousness will be my compensating and consoling fact.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 217

February 11, 1869.
Your search in the papers for the sayings and doings of Mr. Blaine, of
Maine, will have meagre reward this winter — for, by a wise care or caution
or cunning or cowardice, Mr. Dawes, of Massachusetts, and Mr. Blaine, of
Maine, are taking just as little part as possible in the current business of
legislation; not exactly dodging, for that would be too mean, but avoid-
ing very carefully the trampling on other people's corns — a good deal of
which I have done in this hall during the last half-dozen years.

What a very sad death that of Mrs. . And what a sad sort of life to

look back on. A married life that has so much that is necessarily painful in
it as hers must have had, is to me the blankest and hardest form of human
woe. For it is so ordained that all those relations best calculated to confer
happiness have in them the largest capacity for suffering. Weighed down
almost continuously with the "primal sorrow of her sex," burdened with
the care of a family, constantly outgrowing her powers and resources, her
sympathy drawn upon if not exhausted by an invalid husband ; her fate,
to my observation and appreciation, was the very acme and essence of
domestic misery. But all these sufferings have their compensation. I am
a firm believer in the doctrine that suffering here is to be carried to our
account on the credit side in balancing the Ledger of Eternity. Dickens1
sermon on the death of the Chancery prisoner was always to me one of the
most touching passages in his writings. . . .

In June, 1867, I stood on the spot where this scene is laid, and it came
upon me with the rush of reality, far more than when viewing the local-
ities of actual tragic occurrences Of life, such as the Tower of London or
the Field of Waterloo. I realized at that moment the creative power of
Dickens as never before, — and I say this not liking him, — indeed, having
a sort of distaste for the man as separated from the author. But there is
one thing in regard to which I have always done him injustice, and I hasten
to offer my apology through you. It appears after all, that the Chicago
woman, who lately destroyed herself, was not his brother's wife, but
merely his jmrtner in crime ; that the actual lawful wife or widow has
always been in England, and tenderly cared for by Dickens. This ought
to have been told before, and Dickens may have been restrained from the
explanation by a desire not to uncover the skeletons of his household, and
still more by a chivalrous reluctance to expose and farther degrade an
erring and lost woman. Having accejjted the version of the stoiy as given
by the Chicago papers, I had laid up a heavy charge against him, which I
now deliberately retract. If, in your judgment, it would be wise and proper
to acquaint Mr. Dickens with my " change of heart" on this subject, you
can give the pertinent hint to your friend, Mr. F. Through this channel it
would doubtless reach Mr. Dickens by the earliest trans- Atlantic mail, if not
by cable despatch. Probably, however, the apology would create a more
profound sensation in England if I should wait till I am elected Speaker
of the House. But then if I should not be elected Speaker! Why, what
then? Dickens might have to <li<; without the sublime satisfaction of
reading my retraxit.

218 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

From Mr. Blaine to a friend who had characterized one of
his letters as "just a scrawl, with an umbrella handle, on an
acre of white paper " :

House of Representatives,

Washington, D.C., March, 1869.
You complain in an audacious and umbrageous manner that I sprawl my
writing out to such a degree that you are cheated by the appearance of a
letter on the outside, that really contains nothing within ; now, to punish
you for this slur and contempt of my precious epistles, I have a great mind
to send you sixteen sheets written just as close as this, so as to weary
your brain and destroy your eyesight, as a proper punishment for the dis-
respect and contumely that you have so gratuitously heaped upon me.
Indeed, I would surely do it were it not that in the process I should be pun-
ished as severely as you would be ; for of all the combined mental and
physical processes to produce an ecstasy of agony, commend me to this
" cribbed, cabined, and confined " style of penmanship. It not only cramps
my hand and benumbs my fingers, but it freezes my blood and paralyzes
my brain and reduces me to a condition bordering on spiritual despair. I
am sure that one of the occupations of lost souls doomed to eternal punish-
ment must be the copying of Jonathan Edwards1 sermons forever and for-
ever in just such handwriting as I am now joyfully inflicting on you. What
a delightful torture it must be to the hopelessly lost to continually tran-
scribe in this choice chirography the special causes, the general grounds,
and the absolute justice of their damnation ; and what sublime equity
there would be in giving you a temporary purgatorial experience of this
fate, in compelling you to read the transcriptions. I am administering a
slight taste of it to you, and I shall sicken you, I am sure, of this type of
writing, and make you cry aloud in agony for another display of my
sprawling proclivities. Please remember that in letter-writing I am noth-
ing if not " sprawling.'1 My education in that respect was once good, but
by bad association and evil practice it has come to naught, and by the bless-
ing of God, or its absence, " I am what I am.11

From an Andover Professor to Mr. Blaine :

March 28, 1869.
. . . Mrs. M. has for some time declined taking boarders, though
much pressed, and did so in the present instance ; but my assurance
respecting your son, founded in jmrt on the pleasant impression he made
on me when I saw him at your home in Augusta and again last spring,
induced her to change her mind.

From Mr. Blaine, enclosing the former :

I have no doubt Mr. S. has selected wisely. I am very anxious that
Walker should be continually under good influences, and I think he must

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 219

have secured a very safe and excellent place in this regard. He has
certainly taken great pains and put himself to much trouble to accom-
modate me.

It is noticeable and notable that his letter is written on Sunday, Ando-
ver is liberal.

From Mr. Blaine :

In that same file of the " Kennebec Journal " in which I hunted up the
Manchester romance of the Swedish girl, I found the accompanying para-
graph, which conclusively establishes the date. You must have come up to
Augusta on Thursday, August 23. Next day, Friday, you returned to Bath
by steamer, and went thence home by rail on Saturday, August 25. An-
other trifling fact corroborates Thursday as the date — i.e., I was late at
tea on account of its being publication day, and thus by my industry in
my business I was cheated out of more than half your call. Who knows
but that if I had enjoyed the other half, we should not have been compelled
to wait thirteen years, two months, six days, twenty-one hours, and thirty-
six minutes for a new introduction and a second meeting ! You may rely
on this interval being stated with absolute accuracy, it having been cal-
culated with laborious care after the most diligent comparison of almanacs
and the closest astronomical observations, the "reckoning being verified
by geometry and the higher mathematics.'''

July 22, 1869.

How sad and heavy our hearts were eight years ago to-day. We were
just having our eyes opened to the, magnitude of the war under the keen
anguish of our first defeat. The first shock of that defeat was the moment
of deepest grief I ever felt in my life. The reaction, of course, came
promptly, but not until my very soul was harrowed with agony unspeak-
able. I do not think I have ever been the same man since; perhaps I am
a better man than I was before, but no stroke so stunning could ever be
entirely recovered from. I felt as one whose treasure and honor and life
were at stake. . . .

From the courage I gained on the reaction, I never once afterwards de-
spaired or grew faint. The awful magnitude of later battles, the terrible
carnage, the costly sacrifices never had in them the fearful omens of that
trifling: fisrht and g-io;antic defeat at Bull Run.

Elizabeth, Penn., 30th July, 1869.

I write you from a house of mourning, though my dear mother, with a
fortitude which I could not have anticipated, bears the burden of her
great sorrow with pious resignation. Indeed, the very magnitude of the
affliction seems to have given her the nerve and Christian courage to
endure it.

My dear sister died at three o'clock on Monday morning. She was taken
very suddenly and alarmingly ill on Saturday night, and all day Sunday
she was sinking — \vm,s in a state of great debility, though not suffering any

220 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

acute pain. She was in entire possession of her faculties, but spoke little,
paying attention, however, to all that was going on around her. She was
perfectly conscious that her time on earth was to be measured by hours
only, and early in the afternoon she expressed a desire to receive the last
sacrament of her church — the extreme unction which the Catholics base on
that verse in St. James, " Is any sick among you ? Let him call for the
elders of the Church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil
in the name of the Lord.1' After the ceremony was concluded she seemed
to revive for an hour or two, but at nightfall she grew painfully worse.
At midnight she said that her hour was nigh, and desired that the " Liturgy
of the Church for the Dying " might be read while she was yet able to fol-
low it. It was at once done, and the two physicians in attendance — both
Protestants — begged that they might be allowed to remain and join in the
responses. Many parts of this liturgy are very impressive :

" Receive thy servant, O Lord, into that place where she may hope for
salvation from thy mercy.

" Deliver, O Lord, the soul of thy servant as thou didst deliver Enoch
and Elias from the common death of this world.

" Deliver, O Lord, the soul of thy servant as thou didst deliver Isaac from
being sacrificed by his father.

" Through thy nativity, deliver her, O Lord !

" Through thy cross and passion, deliver her, O Lord !

" Through thy death and burial, deliver her, O Lord !

" Through thy glorious resurrection, deliver her, O Lord !

" Through thy adorable ascension, deliver her, O Lord !

' ' Through the grace of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, deliver her, 0
Lord ! "

I might copy much more, but this little, selected at random, will show
you the impressive solemnity both of the thought and the diction. Really
all that is beautiful in the Episcopal service is borrowed bodily from the
Catholic ritual.

Parts of the liturgy were repeated at intervals for two hours or more,
and a few minutes before three o'clock she dropped off into a sweet and
infant-like slumber, and in a short time ceased to breathe, — without a
struggle or a single exhibition of pain, — peacefully passing to her reward.

If ever a sinless life was lived, she lived it. If ever a soul went before
its Maker pure and white and spotless, that soul was hers !

She left most affectionate and affecting messages to all her near relatives,
and she wished it to be told to me that she " had always loved me more
devotedly than any one else in the world except ma ; " and she added,
among the last things. she ever said, " Tell him from me to be very mindful
of his soul's salvation " — speaking in the somewhat quaint, strong phrase
that was natural to her tongue. Her funeral was on the afternoon of Tues-
day. It was attended literally by a vast multitude. The services were
conducted by her own beloved pastor, and among those present were
seven Protestant ministers. Indeed, the entire country side seemed anxious
to testify their respect for her life of faith and good works — an exhibition

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 221

which in life would have been most distasteful to her modesty and hu-
mility, but over the grave and in the presence of death there was nothing
to restrain it or forbid it.

Between the good and the pure there is a link of interest and identity
which binds them together on both sides of the grave. She was lovely to
all who loved purity and piety. No fear of death darkened her last hour
— her mind was unclouded, her heart undaunted, her hope sure, her faith
steadfast. She fills a place in the first rank of those who are redeemed
from the earth, who stand without fault before the throne of God, who
share the last mighty victories of the Lamb, who are called and chosen
and faithful.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

THE SPEAKER.

TTPON his election to the speakership, Mr. Blaine bought a
*^ house and established a home in Washington.

It was a glorious era of intellectual and national life, the
beginning of a happier time. The country had not yet wholly
lost the first rapture of slavery abolished, of peace renewed and
assured, of advanced and advancing reconstruction. The irri-
tations and exasperations of Mr. Johnson's presidency had no
place under the administration of the great general. The
leaders of the war were the leaders in peace. Congress, army,
and navy abounded in them, and one saw on every dinner-card
names still aglow with the heroism, the patriotism, the self-
possession and self-surrender which have lit up the long, sad
story of humanity, which have vitalized history, constituted
poetry, created civilization.

To the new Washington, the centre of the new nation, every-
thing came. The new life was represented in every phase of its
beauty and brilliancy, its intellectual impulse, and its moral
activity.

The Speaker's house would naturally be a house of much
resort. With his family about him, Mr. Blaine was always
happy, and that happiness left him free to seek and to give
pleasure. His modest means were ample for a generous and
refined, but never ostentatious hospitality, which indeed his
taste, if not his purse, would have forbidden. He had never
wealth for the demands of extravagance. The luxury which
is a necessity he had never lacked. The nursery was at the
top of the house, and was the one place in it which the children
disdained even to visit. His library was between the dining-
room and the drawing-room, his writing-room was at every one's
writing-desk, where he was a great disturbance and a still

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BIOOBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 223

greater delight. No child's frolic, no talk of friends, annoyed
him. His power of abstraction was illimitable, and he could
always be interrupted with impunity. The world of his thought
builded its own walls and closed its own gates and did not fear
incursion. There was but one imperative and external law of
his life — to be in the Speaker's chair at 12 M. As often as
possible he walked thither — a mile or more — from his house
on Fifteenth street, accompanied by as many members of his
family as chose to go, or chanced to be at leisure. He declared
that any proposal of his for walk, or drive, or concert, or theatre,
or any other outing was always a signal for town-meeting. If
the Congressional debates were interesting, his companions
stayed to listen, and an informal luncheon in the Speaker's parlor,
with a friend or two from the House, or from the gallery, was
a separate attraction and an agreeable realization.

On the one side of Mr. Blaine lived Governor Buckingham,
then Senator from Connecticut, a churchman without pretence,
a total-abstinence man who shunned all notoriety from it, a
knight without fear and without reproach, a serious man with
full appreciation of humor, and abounding in unobtrusive good
works. On the other side was Governor Swann, handsome,
hospitable, and luxurious, a Democratic member of Congress
from Maryland, but knowing no North or South in social
amenities. Beyond Governor Swann, in the corner house, Hon.
Fernando Wood, of NeAv York, also a Democrat, was an equally
courteous, friendly, and irreproachable neighbor. Opposite lived
Secretar3r Fish, ruling his diplomatic world with iron hand and
velvet glove, — himself ruled in all things lovely and of good
report by the serene and stately lady, his wife, greatly, but
never too greatly, praised for the dignity, the elegance, the un-
tiring assiduity with which she discharged the duties of her
position.

The friends of Mr. Blaine's childhood helped to make the
atmosphere home-like. The Hugh and Tom Ewing of his boy-
ish comradeship had gone from the army to become, in time, one
minister to Belgium, one a lawyer in Washington, afterwards
member of Congress. Their sister Ellen, wife of General
Sherman, was living in the house on I street, that had been
given first to General Grant and then to General Sherman;

224 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

and the father, Hon. Thomas Ewing, passed the tranquil even-
ing of his years and honors sometimes with one child, sometimes
with another. Younger members of all these houses were
naturally gathered in Washington, and Mr. Blaine had the hap-
piness in his new home of finding himself in the midst of closest
friends and kin of his old homes.

Walker and Emmons were at school at Andover. Mr.
Blaine's letters to his absent children were not long or over-
frequent. A word of family news, a word of public affairs,
always a word of abounding love, often a word of tender and
sometimes of urgent advice, occasionally a delicate word of
religious suggestion ; but details were left to a pen that never
failed them. The boys were generally in such a hurry to get
home that whichever was dismissed first on vacation shot
home like an arrow from the bow, without waiting for the
other. Once it was Emmons whose excellent report had
preceded him, and whose way, therefore, was unclouded. But
Walker's report had accompanied his brother's, and Walker's
standing was nothing to speak of. Dr. Taylor, the head of the
school, averred that Walker could take any rank he chose, but
that he had not studied at all. Emmons tried continuously
to soften matters for Walker before his arrival, but an irate
father was not to be appeased till the miserable but happy
boy, barely inside the threshold, had promised to do his best the
next term ; and the storm having burst in one minute, in two
minutes the sun was shining clear. Stout, tall Emmons was
sitting in his father's lap with his long legs hanging to the floor,
while bigger and taller Walker was sitting close to his father,
resting his two elbows on his two knees, bending forward in his
eagerness to lose no word of his father's talk with a group of men
who had called on some business errand, perfectly content simply
to be at home, taking the liveliest share in the conversation with-
out uttering a word, and drinking in knowledge at every pore in
spite of his disgraceful report. Mr. Blaine was never brilliant in
baby-lore, although the children's story-teller found no more
interested listener ; but whenever his children asked him an intel-
ligent question he gave them a full, exhaustive answer, as soon
as he could be dragged up out of his well of thought far enough
to be aware that a question had been asked. He never saved

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 225

himself for anything. He was an inexhaustible source of infor-
mation and inspiration. His best talk was as free at his own
breakfast-table as to a listening constituency. His best thought
was at the service of his own family, and he was never more
direct, more rich in illustration, more earnest, eloquent, and
luminous than when he was expounding a policy, or shaping
a measure, or explaining a point, or quoting a precedent, or
verifying a statement to this select audience of the fireside,
which he believed, and pronounced, and made, the happiest fire-
side in the world.

When Emmons' turn for admonition came, it was a more
serious one. His father, visiting Andover when Walker gradu-
ated, had thought the mock programme performance rather silly,
and wondered that the teachers did not forbid it. The next
year it was forbidden, and Emmons was suspended for being
connected with his class in the distribution of the prohibited
programmes. Emmons', however, was no case of suspended
animation, and before presenting himself to his father in the
character of a discarded student, he had secured board in Newton
in a good deacon's family, and the tutorship there of Mr. Water-
house, who had been the remarkably successful high school
master of Augusta, and was most favorably known to his
father and mother. It may be mentioned, however, that Emmons
entered Harvard after two years at Newton, much better pre-
pared than Walker, who had gone through the whole prepara-
tory course at Andover.

In all parliamentary and administrative questions, Mr.
Blaine's skill and power were quickly recognized. The busi-
ness of Congress, in his view, was to promote the interests of the
country by furthering wise legislation, and preventing unwise
legislation ; the Speaker, from his central position, was especially
empowered to secure such a result by an impartial and inflexible
administration of parliamentary law — the highest embodiment
of wisdom from the experience of generations. His decisions
were instantaneous and authoritative. Sometimes they made
against the object of the hour and of the party. Though
always founded on principle, and often fortified by precedent,
he seldom argued the one or quoted the other, but carried con-
viction by the clearness of his statement, the promptness of his

22b' BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

ruling, and the unwavering definiteness of his own conviction.
He ruled, but it was a rule well-tempered and flexible to the law
of right, never varying in principle, ever varying in application.
As he presided not over a House of subjects, but in a House of
Peers, and peers who were often intensely concerned in the
theme under debate, things did not always run smoothly.
In the heat of contest sharp words were sometimes spoken, and
men who were ruled to their seats when they were eager to be
on the floor resented the authority against which they did not-
rebel. But the resenting mood was followed by the consenting
mood of calmer moments, and exasperation yielded to reason
or dissolved in a jest, — all the more easily because the Speaker
did not arrogate absolute power.

" While the Chair does not possibly see how there can be any
difference of opinion, the Chair does not desire to extend abso-
lute decision without the right of appeal."

" It would put the Chair in an embarrassing position to say
that his judgment shall absolutely be taken without appeal,
although it is not possible for him to see in tins case any ground
for difference of opinion."

" As gentlemen have expressed some dissatisfaction with
the ruling of the Chair, he will only say that if the motion for a
suspension of the rules could be made by the gentleman from
Arkansas, in order to permit him to speak on this question, a
suspension of the rules would be in order to allow the same privi-
lege to every other member of the House."

" Mr. Butler. — Why not, if the House desires it ?

" The Speaker. — Simply because the House does not wish to
commit an absurdity after having seconded the previous question
and ordered the main question. It would put it in the power of
one man to detain the House here until noon, on Thursday
next [the end of the session], by moving to suspend the rules
that each member of the House should have the right to speak.
It would, of course,, be the greatest absurdity."

Naturally it would require some courage to take an appeal in
face of this calm confidence.

A member having quoted the Speaker's past decision against
his present one upon conditions which seemed precisely alike
was assured that u the Chair is really quite pleased to see how

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 227

accurately he made the distinction in that decision. It is pre-
cisely what he would reaffirm at this moment. . . . The
two bills were entirely different in scope and purpose.
This bill may involve an expenditure, but does not require it.
The distinction is very wide."

" I withdraw my motion."

" So the Chair understands."

Wearied with all-night sessions, a member plaintively asked
that absentees might be sent for. Mr. Blaine, whose physical
endurance seemed insurmountable, and who presided after an
all-night session with as much dexterity and decision as at its
morning commencement, replied that the House would not have
a particle more power than it had at that moment, since a
quorum was already present. The poor gentleman insisted that
a call could be made. Mr. Blaine gently insinuated that there
should be some reason for the call.

To the suffering member it appeared reason enough that
" when it is now a question of endurance, and those who are
here are suffering all the inconvenience of attending this long
session of the House, is it not right that those who have gone
home to bed should be brought here under the call ? "

"That would not make the endurance of those who are here
a particle less."

"The House has the right to send for absentees."

" If the gentleman got the House of Representatives to en-
force that, it would never do anything else."

Although acting as Speaker of the House, Mr. Blaine never
forgot, and never allowed the House to forget, that he was a
member of Congress from the Third District in Maine, and that
he retained all his rights and especially the right to discharge all
his duties as a Representative. When General Butler, of Massa-
chusetts, endeavored to make a point that in shaping a resolution
and securing its adoption at a Republican caucus, the Speaker
had committed an impropriety, Mr. Blaine left the Speaker's
chair and came down upon. the floor to dissipate the assumption
with a series of rapid, verbal, and logical onsets which that very
clever and belligerent man of genius was more accustomed to
assay than to receive.

When a Congressional District sent a prize-fighter to Congress

228 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

it was a scandal to many, not only that a prize-fighter should be
sent to Congress, but that the Speaker should treat him like a
Congressman. But the Speaker answered that Congress was a
representative body, and the right of representation was a
sacred right, and not only a sacred, but a safe right ; that it was
not his duty, but would be a flagrant violation of duty in the
Speaker to interpose his personality between a member and his
constituents. More than this, he sent for the pugilist to the
Speaker's parlor, acquainted himself with the man's views,
with his wishes, with his ways of thinking, his modes of action,
with his fists and his muscles, acquired his confidence, and
helped him in many ways. It may be added that he found the
ex-warrior very modest in his legislative ambitions, desiring only
as quiet and inconspicuous positions as possible, and aiming
to perform his duties with decency and fidelity.

When a member had fallen under popular disfavor by reason
of charges against his character, the Speaker was Avidely re-
proached because on the reassembling of Congress the offen-
sive member was reappointed to the Chairmanship of an im-
portant committee. But the Speaker responded that it was no
part of his duty to visit popular odium upon a member of Con-
gress. The gentleman in question had not been censured
by Congress, he had been elected by his constituents, and the
Speaker should strictly regard parliamentary law and official
duty.

On the important Committee of Ways and Means there was
a serious " split." The Chairman, Mr. Dawes, was a moderate
Protectionist ; so also was another member, Mr. Roberts. Two
Republicans were high-tariff men ; three Democratic free-traders
and two low-tariff Republicans constituted a majority and
brought in a very low tariff bill, which the Chairman could
not support, and refused to report to the House. No one of
the majority who had forced it knew enough of tariff details
to undertake its management in the House. The Speaker
was justly held responsible for the composition of the com-
mittee, and was criticised as having formed an unwieldy
organization. But he was unmoved. By the withdrawal of the
previous Chairman, General Schenck, the head of the Committee
of Appropriations, Mr. Dawes, was justly entitled to the pro-

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 229

motion which he received. The opinion of the House was
fairly represented and was entitled to fair representation in
the committee. The result justified the Speaker's judgment.
A compromise was effected. The Chairman agreed to report
the bill, reserving right to state to the House his disagreement
with certain provisions and to offer amendments. After the
subject had been well knocked about in the House for several
weeks, Judge Kelly offered a very high tariff bill as a substitute
for the committee's bill, and Mr. Dawes offered by way of
amendment a moderate bill as a substitute for Judge Kelly's.
The low-tariff men joined the moderates and voted for the
Dawes bill, then the high-tariff men turned about and joined
them, and thus the two moderates had their way at last. Their
bill became the Tariff law of 1872, and " parliamentary luck "
turned in the exact direction that the Speaker wished and
designed.

During his first winter in the Speaker's chair, the sale of
cadetships was proven against some members of the House, and
a resolution for their expulsion being expected, the House was
surprised by the resignation of the offending member whose
case was first reached. Two prominent legislators, one an
ex-Speaker, objected that the House alone had the right to
decide when one of its members ceased to be a Representative ;
but the Speaker ruled against them. Leading Republican
newspapers, friendly to Mr. Blaine, criticised his action frankly,
and paying full tribute to his high personal character, and his
devotion to the public interest, and to the dignity of his office,
yet maintained that by allowing a member to resign and thus
escape expulsion, he had made a false ruling, contradictory to
all English parliamentary law and to the law of common-sense,
and establishing ;i dangerous precedent.

But the Speaker maintained his ground both by precedent
and principle. The member had sent his resignation to the
Governor, the Governor had formally accepted it, and a notifi-
cation to this effect had been sent to the Speaker the day before.
By the unbroken precedent of tin; House, the man eeased to be
a member. The Speaker could not suppress or withhold the
resignation. But that the House might have opportunity to
give its judgment, the Speaker privately requested a Republican

230 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

member to appeal from the Speaker's decision. He did so,
though publicly stating at the same time that he agreed with
the Chair. A Democratic member moved to lay the appeal on
the table, which was done almost unanimously, and thus the deci-
sion of the Speaker became the decision of the House. Mr.
Blaine maintained that any other decision would not only be
unparliamentary, but would entail great embarrassment and
might be productive of great injustice. Resignation being un-
known directly to the British Parliament, and only to be practi-
cally secured by indirection, that body could furnish no analogy,
and he pronounced it absurd to attempt to institute a parallel or
even to deduce an inference applicable to the American Congress.

He steadily maintained and upheld the rights of the minority.
When the transformation of the minority into a majority was
manifestly and rapidly approaching, he refused to advocate a
legislative change which would bind the majority by new and
repressive rules. To the argument that the Democrats would
work mischief without it in the next Congress, he maintained
that a majority has the right to legislate, and the responsibility
for legislation by reason of its numerical existence, irrespec-
tive of its political complexion, and that no legislation can be
so destructive in its effects as the forcible assumption or the
forcible prevention of legislation.

His manner in the Chair was entirely without self-conscious-
ness, yet utterly self-confident. He had thorough control of the
situation. He was never perplexed or uncertain. If in some
temporary absence or in Committee of the Whole, the House
fell into confusion and he was summoned from the dinner-table
to straighten the snarl, he appeared upon the scene radiant,
intent, erect, masterful, and order evolved itself from chaos.

No better stage can be imagined for the display of his person-
ality. The vast hall, the strong men, the great questions, the
intense interest, the varying purposes, clashing, combining in
stormy debate, — among it all and above it all he stood, an em-
bodied intellect, a regnant spirit, — vibrant, electric, compelling.
One could not say with the poet, " his body thought," but his
body was transfused with thought, became the perfect medium
of his will. Eye and voice and figure were instinct with com-
mand. Great as was the position, he illustrated it by the un-

BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 231

conscious dignity of his bearing, by the force, the scope, the
completeness of his control. Recognizing — and assuming where
he did not recognize — that all men were, like himself, loyal to
the reign of law and seeking always the way of righteousness,
which is rightness, he disentangled the law and developed the
right, and penetrated the consciousness of men. Mr. Holman is
reported as saying that Mr. Blaine, by that personal quality
which gained for him the name of the " magnetic " man, con-
vinced his opponents of the correctness of his decisions against
their own judgment. It is a contradiction in terms, yet holds a
germ of truth. " His winning manner," " his irresistible fasci-
nation," was the proffered and pleased disguise under which
many a man confessed to spiritual illumination.

Yet no man was less averse to pleasantry upon occasion.
Sometimes when the House was too noisy or had failed to re-
spect his gavel, he would fling himself into the chair with a
fierceness of patience, with a desperation of resolution to wait
for quietness that was both effective and amusing. Monday
being private Bill day the proceedings had a tendency to become
turbulent. A sudden declaration by the Speaker that no busi-
ness would be transacted until order was restored, and that the
condition of the House oh two preceding Mondays was a
scandal to legislation, had the effect of producing better order
for at least one day. As nothing could exceed the earnest-
ness of members to get their Bills through, so nothing could
be a greater inducement to order than a suspension of all
business during disorder.

While General Garfield and General Butler were acting as
tellers in a long and fatiguing session, the irrepressible boy
in the two men enlivened the monotony by interjecting a quasi-
dialogue into the proceedings :

General Butler. — 1 want gentlemen to vote to save nearly
a million dollars to the treasury.

General Garfield. — I object to the gentleman from Massa-
chusetts discussing the question while acting as a teller.

General Butler. — Read the rule that forbids it.

The Speakeb, — The rule of common propriety forbids
it.

232 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

After a pause :

General Butler. — Mr. Speaker, may I be dismissed as a
teller ?

The Speaker. — Does the gentleman demand a further
count ?

General Butler. — I don't want this question to be decided
without a quorum.

The Speaker. — That is what the Chair is trying to get.

General Butler. — I do not like to see a great wrong of this
sort done at this time of the morning.

General Garfield. — I object to a teller making remarks
on the question which is being voted upon.

General Butler. — - 1 object to being interrupted by my
fellow-teller.

General Garfield. — I rise to a perpetual point of order :
that the gentleman should behave with seemly decency in this
matter.

General Butler. — Pardon me ; it is a very indecent neigh-
bor I have got here who keeps all the time talking.

Mr. Speer. — I object to debate.

The Speaker. — The Chair thinks it fair to let the tellers
fight it out

" Mr. Speaker, put me down for five minutes ! " called Mr. S.
S. Cox when a dozen were clustering around the Speaker
arranging for the order of the day.

" I wish I could keep you down for one minute," was the very
audible sotto voce of the Speaker.

It is hardly too much to say that his authority in Congress
became almost absolute. His imperiousness was seen and felt
to be founded on understanding, pervaded with good-will,
lightened with good-humor, and justified by the strength and
skill with which he guided the important business of the country
through the legislative labyrinth, and by the firmness with
Avhich he established himself in the confidence and regard of
the House. Not his own party alone, but the opposition placed
so much reliance on his knowledge of the law and on the
impartiality with which he administered it that an appeal was
seldom taken except by his own devising, for his own satisfac-

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 233

tion, and no appeal against his decision was ever sustained by the
House. When the minority subsequently became the majority,
knotty questions were often referred to him privately, and
Democrats who on the floor had been the most recalcitrant to
Mr. Blaine's rulings, sometimes took the precaution of fortifying
themselves for imminent battle by having on hand a parlia-
mentary programme, solicited for the occasion and adapted to
its probable course by the Republican ex-Speaker. Both parties
agreed with equal unanimity in congratulations upon his taking
the chair, in regrets at his leaving it, and in thanks for the
manner of his incumbency.

Mr. Blaine was hardly settled in the speakership before the
question of the Senatorship was again presented. It had been
agitated two years before, but while he had looked at it with a
certain favor and had carefully observed the situation, the time
had not seemed to him propitious, and he had decided not to
encourage the movement. In the spring of 1870 another decision
was required. His friends in Washington, and even in the
public press of the country, warmly opposed, in the public inter-
ests, the Contemplated change. " The House of Representa-
tives," protested the latter, " needs the best possible of Speakers
to keep it in anything like order, and Mr. Blaine has shown
himself on several occasions well fitted to hold the reins." He
fully enjoyed his position, and as fully discerned its great influ-
ence and responsibility. He feared also that the step might dis-
appoint friends to Avhom he wished to give only pleasure, and,
being unnecessary, might seem to them inconsiderate. He there-
fore decided against it, and replied, "Fearing my candidacy
would tend to produce discord among those who have hitherto
been friends and might possibly mar the harmony of the Re-
publican party in Maine, I deem it my duty to say thus early
that my name will not be presented to the next Legislature as
a candidate for the United States Senate." It was recog-
nized that this withdrawal secured the election of Mr. Morrill,
who held Mr. Blaine's confidence and received his cordial sup-
port.

Public questions of home and foreign relations were of mani-
fest vital interest from the very opening of General Grant's
administration. By the spring <>f 1870 all the States were back

234 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

in the Union, and, in Mr. Lincoln's quaint phrase, " finding
themselves once more at home it seemed immaterial to inquire
whether they had ever been abroad." Reconstruction was
formally completed during this first year, and the Fourteenth
and Fifteenth Amendments became a part of the Constitution
with public proclamation and unutterable thanksgiving; but
Congress continued to be urgent in enacting laws to protect
the newly guaranteed rights. Ku-Klux Klans were still odious
to the North, and carpet-baggers to the South, but it remained
that four years of war had abolished slavery, and four years
of reconstruction had restored the Union, and not a drop of
blood had been shed or a single home confiscated by way of
legal penalty. The annexation of San Domingo was earnestly
desired by the President, but he could not bring Congress or
the country to his way of thinking; while Senator Sumner
opposed it with unnecessary heat. The British Government, in
its own defence, had picked up and proffered the arbitration which
it had contemptuously thrown down when offered by the United
States, and which President Grant had quietly permitted to lie
where it fell. A Joint High Commission was se,nt over by
England, — the gossip of Washington said in such a, hurry that
they could not stop for their papers, or their trunks, but made
sure of getting here themselves, and certified their right to come,
afterwards. Their arrival and residence in Washington in the
winter of 1871, together with the presence of the American
commission appointed to meet them, made a pleasant social
feature of the season with its veiled note of American exulta-
tion, through which ran also its jar of discord caused by the
deposition of Mr. Sumner from his chairmanship of the Com-
mittee on Foreign Relations. Mr. Sumner had been among the
first to condemn the attitude of England, and it seemed only
fitting that he should assist at its change. The country with
regret saw him set aside in the hour of victory, a regret scarcely
modified by the feeling that his own methods and manners had
contributed somewhat to the bitter result.

In the spring of 1871 Mr. Blaine's mother died. From her
earliest days when she was at school at Emmetsburg, and when
even her girlish letters to her young friends closed with gentle
wishes for their happiness here and blessedness hereafter, her life

BIOGKAPHY OF JAMES G, BLAINE, 235

and love had been in two worlds. She was a Catholic both in the
ecclesiastical and the etymological sense of the word. Not only
her close alliance to Protestants, but all the instincts of her
heart made her liberal. The Protestant Herrons, of Pittsburgh,
were akin through Alexander Blaine, and the Catholic Tiernans,
of Pittsburgh, were akin through a marriage with her only sister,
and when her eldest boy died in Pittsburgh, while she was on
her way to the old home in Brownsville, Dr. Francis Herron,
Presbyterian minister, and old Father McGuire, an Irish Cath-
olic priest, walked together at the head of the procession at
the child's funeral.

" Ah," said one of her nieces to her, " if all Catholics were
only like you ! "

" My dear," was the gentle reply, " that is the poorest compli-
ment you can pay me."

" But, dear aunt, you are so charitable, so kind."

" That is my religion ; that is the way I wish to recommend
my religion."

But though suffused with the religious spirit, she was not
careless in observing the forms of her own faith. Washington
held no Catholic church at the time of her removal thereto, and
she at once secured the services of the Brownsville priest and held
such public worship as was practicable in her own house. Her
husband was a Protestant, but he had been well trained to
public spirit, and by hereditary habit shared his privileges with
his neighbors. When his father came to Brownsville he found
no sufficient facilities for the education of his children, and
therefore sent for a teacher from Philadelphia to his own house
at his own expense ; but to this private school-room the children
of his neighbors were warmly welcomed, and shared its advan-
tages with his own children.

Years after her death Mr. Blaine wrote to a friend: "It seems
to me here and now that I would give worlds could I have had
a single parting word. The last message my mother left in her
conscious moments was to me, the last word she ever uttered
audibly was my name, after her intellect was clouded with
the shadow of the dark valley. She was the most loving,
devoted, and affectionate of mothers, and my love for her was
very great."

236 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

In the summer of 1871 Walker was sent to Paris for a year's
study. His father's P.P.C. is characteristic. It was a little
manuscript book known only to those two, and found among
Walker's papers after his death.

Walker Blaine, P.P.C.

Aug. 7, 1871.
Read pages a and b near end of book once a day during your voyage.

It contained among other things minute directions for the
trip, written from memory of his own, mostly in pencil and in
the irregular chirography of the railroad train.

If you find an agreeable travelling companion on the "Tripoli" who
wishes to land at Queenstown and proceed overland to London, the fol-
lowing is a good route : Delay at Cork only long enough to go out to
Blarney Castle, five miles out the valley of the Lea. Go in an Irish
jaunting-car. Go one road and come back the other. Then take rail for
Dublin. If you stop at all on the way, let it be for a single day at the
Lakes of Killarney. One day in Dublin will enable jou. to see the public
buildings and churches, the Phoenix park, the monument to Daniel
O'Connell, etc. From Dublin to Kingstown, mouth of Liffey, nine miles ;
thence by steamer to Holyhead on the Island of Anglesea. At Holyhead
buy a ticket in early morning train for Menai station, thirty-two miles,
near famous bridge over Menai straits ; after seeing the bridge, drive to
Bangor three miles farther on ; see old cathedral, and take the next train
to Chester, fifty-two miles. In Chester see the old Roman wall, the old
cathedral, and drive out to Eaton Hall, the famous seat of the Marquis
of Westminster. Procure ticket of admission in the town. You may get
back in season to go to Birmingham, forty-eight miles, the same evening,
via Wolvesampton and the "Black country"; if not, go next morning,
At Birmingham there is nothing to see except a vast succession of factories.
From Birmingham go to Warwick, twenty-six miles. Engage a carriage
at Warwick station to take you to Ken il worth, and then back through to
Stratford-upon-Avon. Get a carriage if you can belonging to the keeper
of the little hotel in Warwick. I think the Warwick Arms landlord will
probably drive you. From Warwick go to Stratford one way and back
the other ; see Squire Lucy's, where Shakespeare shot the deer. You will
get back to Warwick in season to take evening train for Oxford, forty-five
miles. Stay in Oxford a day or two studying it well ; while there drive
down to Blenheim Castle, the famous seat of the Duke of Marlborough ;
see fair Rosamond's well, etc. From Oxford to London, fifty miles. In
London you will have friends to advise you what to see, and how to see it.
If Parliament is in session you will, of course, attend there several times

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 237

Visit British Museum. Go to Richmond via the park, and take a row up
the Thames. See Madam Tousseau's wax- works. Attend divine service in
Westminster Abbey ; see Poets1 corner ; see Bank of England ; Zoological
Garden. Try to get Director's ticket and visit Sunday afternoon St. Paul's
Cathedral, the Tower of London, Crystal Palace on Saturday. During
your stay in London you can run down one day and see the University of
Cambridge ; one day will do it. A very fine excursion of a single day
may be had thus : Leave London early in the morning for Southampton,
there take a steamer for Cowes, and along Isle of Wight by Osborne.
Ride, etc., to Portsmouth, the great naval station ; thence to London by
evening train. In going to Edinburgh, go up on east side of England
through " Old York.'" If you provide yourself a lunch before leaving
London you need not dine in York, but can employ the time that other
passengers are eating in seeing the famous York minster. In Edinburgh
see the " Castle," Holyrood Palace, the famous old Cannongate, the house of
Regent Murray, house of Jno. Knox, Heart of Mid-Lothian, Scott's monu-
ment, Arthur's seat, etc. In leaving Edinburgh go to Glasgow by way of
the Trossacs, first to Calendar by rail ; thence in open wagon over Ben
Lomond, and by boat over Loch Lomond ; thence in wagon again to Loch
Katrine, etc., and finally by rail into Glasgow. In Glasgow spend one
day, Cathedral crypt of same ; also spend one day in going to Burns' birth-
place, Ayr ; go down by rail via Paisley, distance forty miles. Returning
go by steamer up the Fryth of Clyde, a splendid sail. See Castle of
Dumbarton as you go up the river Clyde. From Glasgow go to Sheffield
or lake country ; thence to London. Reach London Saturday night.
. . . Sunday go to hear Spurgepn preach in the morning. Monday
go to British Museum. Always have sun in room in Rome and Naples.
Victoria Hotel, Naples.

To temper the rigor of a superiority attested by this foreign
journey, Emmons was allowed to make alone a tour of explor-
ation and discovery to Chicago the day after Walker set sail.
All went well until he should have telegraphed his arrival in
Chicago. Not hearing from him there according to appoint-
ment, his father was in great apprehension and telegraphed in
all directions. Twenty-four hours after " schedule time "
Emmons telegraphed cheerfully that, seeing in the papers that
there was to be " a race in Buffalo with a favorite trotting mare,"
he had stopped over. And having delivered his letters of intro-
duction in Chicago and investigated the city to his heart's con-
tent, the " positively delightful boy " — as a friend wrote to
his parents — came leisurely and safely home, without mistake
or mishap.

238 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

To Walker :

Augusta, April 27, 1869.

. . . Yesterday Emmons commenced his school again — likewise M.5
the magnificent, hers. Mons came home at noon fearfully disgusted with
his arrangements. He had been put into Caesar, although he is perfectly
unposted as to rules — into geometry, though he has never been in algebra,
and in arithmetic only to square root. His other study, natural history,
he made no objection to. Then he has that bete noir, declamation, threat-
ening him. Altogether I think if it were not for the fear of boarding-
school hanging over him, he would sit down in the ashes and wait for his
fairy godmother, rather than try to help himself; but with this dread
harrowing his soul, he knows that he must do or die, so last night he
shut himself into the parlor until he had mastered his geometry, and this
morning at breakfast, while I cut steak and poured coffee, he ate and read
out his " Gallia omnis divisa est in tres partes,'''1 and I will say for him
that he translated his nine lines very deftly and neatly. All your old books
come in play so well that he has not had to buy a new one. As soon as
breakfast is over, I take in the little Blaine girls and the one big brother
and off we drive. First we drop M. at Winthrop street, — she goes off
bowing her head and saying, " Now, Alice Blaine," — then Emmons throws
out the reins and gives a spring as we come in sight of that dirty,
hiibbubly High School, and lastly I drive over the old bridge and deposit
my saintly Alice among the saints [Saint Catherine's School] . She likes
there much, and this is now the fourth week, so I feel some confidence
in the permanency of her regard. When I come home, father meets me
with the salutation, " Well, old lady, the separation is over. We have
nothing to do now but enjoy each other." This on Friday, but on Wednes-
day I find myself at the door saying good-by, with the best grace I may. I
give him now until Saturday to get home in. If he comes not then, I have
a fit of the blues all ready to put on. I was delighted to hear from him
so satisfactory an account of you. That your tongue ran, that you ate the
oranges, that the home-sickness had disappeared, that you addressed Aunt
C. as Sir, — each and every item gave satisfaction.

To Mr. Blaine from Hon. Eliliu Washburn :

Paris.

About home matters, I read up pretty well, but I take it I don't get quite
all there is going. I would give " a pretty" for an old-fashioned talk of
three or four hours with you touching the present political situation. I
may be deceived, but I confess I don't like the look at this distance.
If A. Johnson gets to the Senate, it must be regarded as the joak of the
century. I want you to take a morning for it and give me a bird's-eye
view of the field. How stands the administration, and does the President-
hold all his popularity ? . Tell me all about your movements.
1 am delighted not to have seen your name among the junketers on the
Pacific Railroad. Keep clear of all entangling alliances.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 289

From Mr. Blaine :

Portland, Sept. 3, 1869.

I write you with a sad heart. It is not improbable that the same mail
which delivers you this note will bring you the newspaper announcement
of Senator Fessenden's death. I have just returned from his house. He is
critically low — exhausted in body and wandering in mind. His attending
physicians give no hope. He was taken suddenly, a day or two since, and
the peculiar feature of the disease seems to be that it is a consummation of
the National Hotel poison — of which he with so many others was a victim
in 1857.

I feel profound sorrow for the impending blow. Notwithstanding I may
desire his place, I do not wish to get it in that way ; nor indeed do I know
that his removal from the field would improve my chances. It may raise
up other Richmonds. But in the shadow of death, I do not think of the
future, only of the past ; and in the past, I recall a man of strong mind,
of many high points of character, and with few weaknesses, who has been
my friend for fifteen years, and with whom I have passed through many
trying scenes, and had many pleasant days, and I grieve that, at sixty -three,
he is to be removed from earth.

From Mr. Blaine to Hon. I. Washburn, Jr. :

Augusta, Sept. 13, 1869.

Dear Governor: Yours received. I thank you for your frankness.
But in telling me that you are a candidate for United State Senator you do
not specify which term you will run for.

Am I to understand that you are a candidate for the short term, or for
the long term, or for both?

I am not myself a candidate for the short term — so in the one pressing
exigency of the hour you may regard me as out of everybody's way.

Colonel Smith must have quite misunderstood what I said to him or what
I intended to say, if you have correctly reported him. But nothing is
more common than for conversations to be misunderstood, and such
misunderstanding implies no reflection on any one.

From Mr. Blaine :

The depth and richness of Y.'s composition remind me all the time of the
infinitely varying and always freshly developing grandeur of Henry
Winter Davis' character. [ was only yesterday glancing over one of his
speeches and I came across this, which I well remember when it fell from
his lips :

"For untimely agitators and premature reformers I have little sym-
pathy. They are cocks that crow at midnight, heralding no dawn, and only
disturbing peaceful and needed rest by unseemly and unseasonable
clamor."

240 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

I do not quote this as any striking exhibition of eloquence or excellence
of speech, but only of that wonderful readiness and facility of expression
and illustration which came to his lips as with inspired force. I re-
member the startling significance of this particular phrase as it fell on
the ear. It arrested the attention of the entire House, and you have very
probably heard me quote it before. Davis was essentially a many-sided
man. His culture seemed to embrace the whole domain of knowledge.
He was a profoundly learned lawyer. He was a most clear-headed
and admirable statesman. He was a man of letters. He was a match-
less orator. He was a true and genial Christian, and yet a man of the
world.

From Mr. Blaine :

Oct. 3, 1869.

As to that Sorrento expedition, it strikes me as in some respects just
what you would not want. Going that horrid Quebec route in the
autumn is enough to chill one with apprehension at the very outset.
Seven steamers of that line lost in four years, and the navigation the
most hazardous and least interesting of all the Atlantic waters ! And
still further, after you shall have reached Liverpool, seasick, exhausted,
despondent, hating the sea and all connected therewith, the proposition
is to coast round through Gibralter on one of those miserable mail
steamers that touch here and there on the barren coast-line, but give you
no more glimpse of Europe, than a trip by steamer from Boston to the
Kennebec would give you of New England. Your sight of France would
be that of the sailors whose experience is embraced in that charming dis-
play of ballad-rhyming:

•' There we lay
All the day
In the Bay

Of Biscay, O ! "

. . . Wait and go with the Blaines, and we will take a Cunard
steamer to Queenstown and we'll "do" Ireland at the start, and then
we'll do England and Scotland, and then cross over to Belgium and
Holland, and thence to the Rhine valley and the German States, following
the Rhine through Switzerland, and crossing the Alps via the Simplon,
and come back via the Splugen, after doing Milan, Turin, the Lakes
Maggiore and Como, and then when on the North shore again, doing
Munich and Vienna and Pesth, and then to the head of the Adriatic, over
to Venice, Padua, Modena, Bologna, Florence, Rome, Naples, Sorrento
(one day), and thence back along the Italian coast, Leghorn, Genoa, via
the Cornici road to Nice, Marseilles, Lyons, Paris, Home. This would be
a trip worth taking. We'll do it in 71, so don't go and spoil your ap-
petite by imprudent nibbling in advance of the real feast. As we go
along, I shall gather, up sufficient data to demolish Julius Ca3sar, and

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 241

you can see about Joan D'Arc, and any other worthy whose real immor-
tality hangs upon the end of your pen.

From Mr. Blaine :

Boston, Oct. 10, 1869.

We have just returned from hearing Mr. Murray, and I must tell you
that, in spite of the prejudice his Adirondack book gave me, — deepened
and intensified as it was by your settled adverse judgment, — I liked him
very much indeed. He preached a lucid, logical, fervent, impressive
sermon, well conceived and admirably delivered. His text was very
brief, " On earth peace and good- will to men." The subject, " Christian
unity.11 My wife was even more taken with him than I was, and she is a
capital judge of a good sermon. . . . Doubtless in future if I hear Mr.
Murray he may not preach so well, surely not if I go to hear him with
you and have the aroused sensitiveness which your presence would inspire ;
but I always will maintain against all comers that " the discourse"
delivered by the aforesaid on the tenth day of October, 1869, in the
presence of the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United
States and his wife, was a scriptural, Christian, eloquent, and faithful ex-
position of the Word as it was delivered to the saints and handed down by
the elders — a very saving power to them that believe, and ineffectual only
on such incredulous and uncharitable mortals as can see no good in a man
who had the bad taste once to tell an indelicate story ; as if the very
prince of English statesmen in the eighteenth century had not been in the
habit of entertaining his guests at parliamentary dinners with coarse stories,
on the avowed ground that, it being difficult to find congenial topics for
such mixed companies, he fell back on that " which everybody enjoyed."
Now, I am not defending Murray's coarseness, nor am I assailing Sir Robert
Walpole. I am only showing you that genius and vulgarity are not by any
means incompatible ; nay, that they are not infrequently associated !

I found myself nearly laughing aloud as the preacher hastened in such
a hand gallop through the preliminary exercises, apparantly anxious to
get at the sermon. Just at that moment the d— 1 put it into my head to
remember Byron's tart letter to his publisher, when he was so impatient
for additional cantos of "Don Juan," commencing',

" My dear Mr. Murray,
You're in a d — d hurry."

But Jacob Stanwood's carriage is at the door, punctual at the 1 P.M.
which 1 appointed, and so I take leave of Mr. Murray in a — hurry.

At three I went to Andover and had three good hours with my beloved
boys, and at seven we met their beloved mother. At your cousin's we had
a very pleasant time and a dinner altogether too sumptuous to have been
cooked on the Sabbath day, in the household of one descended of the Puri-
tans, but perhaps he had his notions of the strict observance of that day
somewhat loosened by reading a certain review and criticism of (iillillan's

242 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Sabbath. At all events, as I had the advantage of the dinner, and greatly
enjoyed it, I am not going to question too closely the theological basis on
which it rested.

From Mr. Blaine:

Washington, Jan. 14, 1870.

The way in which you analyzed the parliamentary question involved in
the point at issue on Monday last is worthy of an old legislative head.
By the way, did you see that the paper editorially sustained me, and their
correspondent has since materially modified his despatch in which he
attempted to place me in the wrong ?

I write this while the roll is calling on Bingham's amendment to Virginia
Bill, and maybe another tie is in reserve for me with its trials and tests.
I close this letter without knowing, save that the vote is very close.

From Mr. Blaine :

Washington, Jan. 16, 1870.

You observed how close a vote followed the closing of my last letter,
98 to 95, for the unconditional admission of Virginia. It came very near
precipitating another tie. They were counting noses during roll-call, and
thought it would be 96 to 96. I would reallv have been glad had it been
so, for I would like to vote on the admission of all the States still out.

You have so well analyzed and so well understand all the points of my
parliamentary disagreement that you have left me nothing to explain.
The editorial was very good, just, and true. No Speaker has voted to
produce a tie since Robert C. Winthrop, and he was very severely
censured therefor. To produce a tie and defeat a motion is to give the
Speaker's vote the force of two votes, and would prove highly odious
and offensive. The Speaker has the undoubted right to vote on every
question ; but if he refrains from exercising that right from motives of
courtesy and conciliation, he ought not to claim it at a time when its asser-
tion must prove exceedingly offensive. I take great pleasure and no little
pride in telling you that the decisive weight of opinion is now in my favor.
Indeed, my course is approved by all who have any right to give an opinion
on the premises or any knowledge to base it on.

Jan. 20.
I noticed that your dear and daily Monitor gave the Speaker a slight
dig for his decision on Monday ; nevertheless, the Speaker was entirely right,
and the oldest and best parliamentarians declare that he was. But as he
knew from the outset that he was right, he can afford to endure the crit-
icisms of all the " Respectable Dailies " that can be crowded into or issued
from the city of Boston, because "Respectable Dailies" in Boston or
elsewhere, have very slender knowledge of the Lex Parliamentaria, that
bundle of wisdom into which the unregenerate have never even looked.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 243

January 26.

I dined with the prince [Arthur] last eve. He impressed me as a young
man of fair sense who had been accustomed to good society. It seem to me
but yesterday when I saw in the " London Illustrated News " the picture of
the Duke of Wellington holding him in his arms for baptism. It was in

1850.

From V. :

Washington, April 22, 1870.

All the Shermans were out, but across the way Mr. Blaine happened to
see General Sherman in his garden and drove back to speak to him. He
came up with the greatest cordiality, insisted on our going into the
garden, showed us all around the place, which you may remember is the
one formerly given to General Grant and afterwards transferred to
Sherman. I wanted to see his horses, and we went into the stables, saw
the carriages, etc. ; then he would have us go into the house, showed
me the maps which he used in his campaigns, some of them mere pencil
sketches drawn to illustrate a plan, one which General McPherson drew
and brought a few minutes before his death. I asked him if in that march
to the sea he was following a designed plan or making it simply as a
necessity. He said it was wholly a plan. Did he have faith in it?
Entirely, never faltered a moment. It was just as the lightning opens
the landscape to you suddenly and shows everything. It was one mental
effort and the thing was done. From Chattanooga to beyond Atlanta, for
a four-months' march with one hundred thousand men, there was not an
hour in which the cannon was not roaring somewhere along the line, so
that when at last it did stop, it seemed strange and noticeable. We spoke
of the attempt now making to reduce the General's salary. I said I did
not care so much about the inconvenience to him, but that it seemed
mean for the country, whose fate had so hung upon the strength and
steadfastness of a few men ; now having availed itself of all their
services and being in the full enjoyment of the fruit of their labors, it turns
about and proposes to reduce their salaries. Then we professed unbounded
gratitude ; now we talk of paying them too much, as if we did not owe
to them the having anything to pay for, or to pay with. He said he did
not care so much about himself, he could live anyway, but he did care
about his family, whose mode of life must be changed by this proposed
reduction. He is also opposed to having the office of General cut off with
his life, thinking there were many others who had served with great dis-
tinction in the war, and who ought to have the title when he was done with
it. The call was all the more interesting for our being thrown entirely
upon the General. He is so simple, so hearty, and earnest, and intense,
with his small, sharp, wrinkled face, anything but good-looking in the
common sense of the term, with the ttcm of genius from head to foot, in
every tone and turn. . . .

244 BIOGRAPHY OP JAMES G. BLAINE.

Washington, April 25.
. . . Later came Senator and Mrs. Williams. She is handsome,
vivacious, has an agreeable voice and manner of speech, a good deal
of intelligence and fluency. She talked on woman's rights, — against
it, — and advanced such arguments that I withdrew from the field "in
sullen silence," Mr. Blaine said afterwards. Mrs. Williams talked in
earnest, and Mr. Blaine told her, on leaving, that he had talked on three
sides, and if she had stayed only a little longer, he should have got on to
the fourth !

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. Anson P. Morrill :

Readfield, May 8, 1870.
Your highly esteemed favor of 29th ult. was duly received. I have been
from home nearly all the time since on railroad matters, and hence my
delay in answering. Permit me to say that nothing could give me greater
satisfaction than to be assured that in no event would you and Lot be made
opponents and competitors for political place. If such a contest presented
itself, the ties of consanguinity which would urge me to support a brother
would be hardly stronger than the personal friendship I have felt for you
for many years. I have, amidst all the rumors, constantly asserted that
such an evil day would be averted. No word of an unfriendly character
has escaped me, and for the future, as in the past, T shall rejoice and feel
proud of your prosperity and success. ... I defer very much to your
judgment, and should be glad, very, to act in harmony with your views as
I ever have done. ... I shall see our true friend, Stevens, to-morrow
and will try to consult for the general good.

From Mr. Blaine :

Augusta.

. . Q.'s baptism was very impressive. Mr. McKenzie is marvellously
felicitous in all such exercises. Give him a marriage or a funeral or a
christening, and he is the very soul of all that is pious and eloquent and
touching. M. insisted that the baby ought to be baptized after " mother's
cousin," the title by which she always designates you.

From Mr. Blaine :

Augusta, August 15, 1870.

Our darling little Q. has been very ill since I wrote you. Yesterday
morning we were really quite alarmed about him. He is better this morn-
ing, and we hope and trust permanently so. The weather is cool, delight-
ful, and charming, and that is very favorable to him.

No news of any kind, and if there was, my anxiety about Q. has been
such that I could write nothing. . . .

I think your tile drain need not be laid over three and one-half feet deep.
I will see how deep mine is. N., I know, is colder than Augusta, but by a
little differential calculus, aided by a last year's almanac and the meteoro-

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 245

logical tables of the nineteenth century, you may calculate how many inches
deeper you would require a drain on the bleak coast of Massachusetts than
in the mild valleys of Maine, to be secure from frost.

I take another half foot from the drain. I find that mine is but three
feet under ground, and we have never heard of a freeze. You see, the less
you sink the drain, the better. If you do not, I will come to N. and illus-
trate by diagrams and drawings on the ground, fixing my corner points by
shavings carefully deported !

To Mr. Blaine, from General Schenck, of Ohio :

Burlington, Ohio, Aug. 29, 1870.

I have been constrained to be a candidate for reelection in spite of me.
I have just sent down my acceptance of the nomination, after four weeks
of delay and consideration. Now for the canvass. I am going home to
open the campaign next week. It is going to be a tough and doubtful fight.
. . . Two years ago, in a vote of 35,000 I had 474 majority ; 335 of that
was from the inmates of the National Soldiers' Asylum, now ruled out by
the count. I shall gain about 200 by colored votes, and lose perhaps as
many from prejudiced Republicans who " won't vote with niggers." Alto-
gether it's close work ; but I think I'll win.

Now, do you remember your promise to come and help in my district if
I should run ? What time can you give me between the 15th September
and 10th of October ? . . . Mind, it isn't to come to Ohio, but / am
after you for my district.

From Mr. Blaine :

Town of

Pittsfield

Somerset County
State of Maine

United States of America
Western Hemisphere
Terrestrial Globe

Latitude 44 £ North

Longitude 77j| West
from Greenwich
8| East from
Washington
8.25 A.M.
Tuesday
Sept. 6th

A.I). I.S70

Can you tell where and when by the above? Lefl home yesterday :i

little after twelve, and drove here with my pair and my wife. I drove the

246 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

pair, my wife rode ; she is not generally driven, but in family arrange-
ments she more commonly drives. Distance from Augusta, forty miles,
directly up the Kennebec to Winslow, nineteen miles ; thence N.E. up the
valley of the Sebasticook twenty-one miles. Now, 1 presume you never
heard of the Sebasticook, which is only another proof of the deep igno-
rance that prevails in the country towns of Massachusetts. What a State you
live in, — all the culture and intelligence crowded into a little circle of three
miles diameter measured from the Boston State House, the remainder of
the Commonwealth left to black and blue ignorance. In Maine, culture is
generally diffused, reaching this country town in such profuse abundance
that the largest church in the village, last evening, was filled with its in-
habitants, able to follow and comprehend an abstruse and profound political
discourse, delivered by a friend of yours. The same discourse, an hour
and a half in length, would have been preached in vain in a Massachusetts
audience, outside the favored circle I have mentioned.

Wednesday, September 7, tea-time.
Town of

Bingham

on the Kennebec river

70 miles north of Augusta

Directly on the route that
Benedict Arnold

took to reach Quebec.
Inspired by this patriotic reminiscence, I addressed a large audience
this afternoon, and here I am two hundred and twenty-one miles nearer
the north pole than you are.

My wife and I have just returned from a ramble up the side of a moun-
tain here, where we enjoyed a view of unsurpassed grandeur.

I wrote you from Pittsfield yesterday morning, that afternoon I spoke in
Hartland, and the same evening in Athens, both very beautiful villages.
This morning we drove hither, twenty-five miles. We are staying at a
delightful country hotel and enjoying everything except you. We leave
to-morrow morning for North Anson, twenty miles nearer home, where I
shall mail this letter. The tea-bell rings, and after tea we shall have
country friends calling.

To Mr. Blaine, from General Schenck :

Dayton, Ohio, Sept. 29, 1870.

. . . My strength and voice are nearly gone. But I think I shall beat
Free Trade, Repudiation, Whiskey, Ireland, Democracy, Falsehood, and
the Devil generally, and get, maybe, five hundred majority. The combina-
tion, though, has become ferocious !

I am sadly disappointed at the prospect of your not coming at all. You
could have given me just the help I wanted and need.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 247

From Mr. Blaine to his mother :

November 14, 1870.

. . . I had three days to spare — two of which I spent in Washington
[Pennsylvania] , and one in Brownsville — saw all the friends in both places
— none more delighted to see me in Washington than Mrs. Adams. She
flew at me with wide arms, and kissed me. " You're not Mr. Blaine nor
Speaker Blaine. You're just Jim Blaine to me," she said. She sent
showers of love to you. The same with Mrs. Huston. I saw her in the
identical old kitchen in which I pulled the chair from under grandpa.

From Mr. Blaine :

Washington, December 17, 1870.

Mr. Fisher, of Boston, is with us, and last evening we had a round-table
dinner — the guests, besides Mr. Fisher, wereSchenck, Banks, Allison, Cox,
Potter, Beck, Garfield, Schofield, Hale, Peters, Kelly, Hooper, Ingersoll,
and General Butler ; good company and a good dinner.

I had quite a chat with Governor Coburn yesterday noon about advanc-
ing the $140,000. I think I shall induce him to do it.

From Walker :

Andover, December 27.

I have so many things which I wish to thank you and father about, and
I have so many occurrences which I wish to tell you, that I hardly know
how to make a beginning.

Saturday noon, Emmons, Guy [son of General Howard], and myself
went to Boston. We met father at the Parker House at two o'clock, and
he engaged the rooms for us which we occupied during our whole stay.
We all three went to the Globe Theatre to see Fechter in " Ruy Bias."
The best piece of acting I ever saw. In the evening, father and Emmons
went to the Globe, while Guy and I went to the Boston Theatre, and saw
the opera of the " Bohemian Girl." The opera was very good, though I
believe you are not very much interested in operas or theatres. Sunday
morning we all went to hear Mr. Murray preach. At two o'clock we all,
except Guy, who dined with some relatives, dined with Mr. Fisher. On the
way to that place, father said that he wasn't sure whether he was invited
for Sunday or Monday. However, we stumbled on, and found that there was
no mistake. Had a very nice dinner at two, after which father went out into
the country with Mr. Fisher to see his father, and Mons to Cambridge to see
N. I stayed at Mr. Fisher's, where I spent a most pleasant afternoon. . . .
Father returning, we all went to tea, and afterwards Dr. Gay came in.
Father retired with him for a private consultation on the subject of his
broken-dovm health. Mrs. Fisher and I went in to see Dr. Lewis' library.
Dr. Lewis is the father of the first Mrs. Fisher. A magnificent library.
Two rooms completely walled in with books, while the doctor himself is a
real old antiquarian. Tie says that he has over six thousand medals and
coins. On returning to the house, we found a carriage waiting, which

248 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

drove us to the hotel. This ended Sunday — as pleasant a Sunday as I ever
spent, and spent in the way which I like. I don't think very much of
the doctrine of making you expiate all the sins of the past week every
Sunday by corporal punishment on hard benches, and by mental punish-
ment under ! Monday morning we took breakfast at a very reasonable

hour, nine o'clock, and then Guy and I went out to see the picture of
"Sheridan's Ride,11 by T. B. Read, the author of the poem. Jenks and
all the boys from Andover came up Monday, and in the afternoon we
went to see Stuart Robson at the Boston Theatre, in "Paul Pry.11 At six
o'clock of the same evening, nine of us took dinner together, and in the
evening we went to see Fechter and Miss LeClercque in " Black and
White,11 by Wilkie Collins, as you would soon discover if you saw the
play. I found, on returning from the matinee Saturday afternoon, that
father had gone out to Mr. Caldwell's (Josiah) to a Christmas-tree, and
that he enjoyed it so much that Mr. Caldwell had sent a carriage for
Emmons and myself to go out there. Of course, as I was not at home
Emmons went alone, and had a very pleasant time, I believe. After re-
turning from the evening performance we all went to bed, and came to
Andover at seven o'clock this morning. This closed the Boston trip. I
have been to the theatre thrice, opera once. Have seen six plays and one
opera. Have been out to dinner, and have, on the whole, had one of the
best times I ever had in my life. And now I come to giving thanks
both to you and to father. To father for all three, for the splendid time we
had.

From Mr. Blaine

Washington, Jan. 4, 1871.

I have been round to the White House since dinner to call on the Presi-
dent. He sent for me, and we had a frank chat on San Domingo. I will
support the resolution of inquiry, but am against the final acquisition.

From a guest :

Washington.

Thursday morning I walked to the Capitol with Mr. Blaine, and then
back again alone. In the evening we went to General Sherman's, and had
a very bright and agreeable evening. Old Mr. Ewing is spending the
winter there, and his son, General Hugh, late Minister to the Hague, was
also there. The former is past eighty, tall, handsome, silver-haired, a real
gentleman of the old school, and he promised to come here some evening
if possible. We had Mr. Stephens, the new Minister to Uraguay, at
dinner. Mr. Blaine is guiltless of Sumner's deposition. He told the
President frankly that the whole power of his administration could not
do it. If he was not right, he came pretty near it, for it is still a ques-
tion whether the administration will not break down under it. Yet the
President keeps on perfectly good terms with Mr. Blaine, though the
latter is very outspoken and frank.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 249

Washington, March 4, 1871.

Mr. Blaine has been exceedingly busy these last few days, was up at
Congress all last night, and did not get home till near six this morning,
then at it again at ten.

We have been to the House, heard a resolution of thanks to the Speaker
passed with an eulogistic speech from S. S. Cox. The caucus was held
last night, and nominated Mr. Blaine by acclamation. There was practi-
cally no opposition. The dissolution and recreation were extremely inter-
esting. At precisely 12 M. Mr. Blaine brought down the gavel and made
a little farewell speech ; a few minutes of pause, and then the clerk,
McPherson, came in, called the roll, and then elected the Speaker by the
roll. Mr. Blaine had one hundred and twenty-six votes, one hundred and
ten necessary to election. There were no scattering votes. Then Mr.
Morgan, the Democratic candidate, and Mr. Dawes, the oldest consecutive
member, led him to the chair. He made a short inaugural speech, and Mr.
Dawes stood in front of the desk and administered the oath. Then Mr.
Blaine swore in the members. It was very impressive. Mr. Blaine's
speeches were everything one could desire — short, touching, concise,
sufficient, not a bit of spread eagle. The House was as still as emptiness.
I heard every word with perfect distinctness.

Washington, March 17, 1871.
I suppose you have seen the Butler-Blaine fight in all the papers. The
boys came from Andover Thursday morning. Mr. Blaine said it would
probably be lively at the House and we went up. Judge Kelly was
speaking when we went in. Presently I was startled by Walker's saying :
" I declare, he is going for him," and I then saw that Mr. Blaine was
leaving his Speaker's chair and taking a place on the floor. He did come
down like a sledge-hammer. Butler was really cowed. You know how
impetuous Mr. Blaine is, and it was lightning and thunder all together.
Mr. Peters, who sat in front of Butler, told Mr. Hale that Butler shook so
that he (P.) could feel it where he sat. Butler has brow-beaten wit-
nesses till all the world exceedingly feared and quaked, so that he has,
in a certain sense, had free course ; but this time he was faced down and
pounded and battered, and very much — surprised. I was surprised too
to see how little he had to say in reply. He left nearly every point un-
touched, throwing out a few wild shots. But yesterday he went up to the
desk and chatted with Mr. Blaine just as if nothing had happened, and
the whole gallery of reporters rushed down to the front seat and looked
over below to see it — frightfully disgusted, no doubt, that it was all talk
and no tussle.

Washington, March 23, 1871.

Tt is very warm to-day, and Miss Ripley took us driving this morning,

and then to lunch with her, and then II. went to Nettie Chase's wedding.

The boys are all to dine at General Sherman's, and Mr. Blaine ami I are

going to the Thomas concert. II. won't go because she is sure she shall

250 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

go to sleep. There is and has been a report around for several days that
General Butler was to attack Mr. Blaine again to-day, and old Mr. Ewing
sent his son, General Charles, down this morning to see if it was so, be-
cause he wanted to go in if it was, and wanted Mr. Blaine to be loaded! I
meant to go up and see for myself, but just as I was dressing for Miss
Ripley's, the note came from Mr. Blaine which I enclose with this.

First page.
General Butler opened his fresh attack on me to-day as soon as the
journal was read, and before a privileged question, which Farnsworth was
trying to offer, could be got fairly before the House for consideration

Second page.
by inviting you and Miss D. and myself to accompany the managers of
the National Asylum to Fortress Monroe and Norfolk on an excursion
to-morrow, by boat, to be back on Monday morning. Will you go ?

Gu}7 Howard and a school friend of his here at dinner ; also General
Sherman's son and nephew, Tom Sherman and Tom Ewing, — all fine boys.
Tom Sherman has a pony and rides over to Georgetown to school every
morning at eight and back at five. Did I tell you that Mr. Fish had given
the boys a fine billiard-table ? In the evening Mr. Hooper came up,
having seen in the evening paper an account of some previous transac-
tions alleged to have taken place between Butler and Blaine, bringing Mr.
Hooper in. He came to say that so far as he was concerned, there was no
truth whatever in it. The San Domingeese are expected next week, and
there is no prospect of an immediate adjournment. There was a confer-
ence Wednesday night, Butler being on, and when they were considering
where they should meet, Mr. Blaine invited them here, and they came,
Butler and all. He came in and shook hands as heartily as you please.
Mr. P. went on that Fortress Monroe expedition, and says General Butler
seemed to be really disappointed that Mr. and Mrs. Blaine did not go,
and had the steamer wait for them.

Mr. Sumner's speech went too far against the President. The President
was at Governor Buckingham's in the evening, and was much excited —
for him.

Mr. has a picture of Mr. Blaine that makes him look like a brigand,

and a biographical sketch of him makes him out not much better. Mr.
Blaine says he always knew they would have their revenge on him, and
here it is. General Garfield was here at breakfast. The Shermans called
last evening, and are coming here to-day to dinner, and General Tom
Ewing, who is visiting in town.

From Mr. Blaine to Walker :

House of Representatives, April 15, 1871.
I will not give you very many rules in interest, but aim merely to im-
press one useful point on you, and so to explain it that you may be able
readily to tell qua ratione. Knowledge sine ratione is not enduring.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 251

In business affairs your most frequent use of interest is to calculate it
for short periods, months and days. For even number of years your path
is easy and direct. The months and days are the bother.

The most comprehensive rule for calculating interest at six per cent, for
any number of days is to multiply the amount by the number of days,
and divide by sixty. For example, what is the interest on $371.23 for
eighty-three days, six per cent? Process: ,

$371.23

1,113.69

29,698.4

60)30,812.09

$5,135

The reason for this is, that in the interest year there are 360 days, there-
fore if you multiply by 360 and divide by 60, you do the same as multiply-
ing by 6 per cent. If true for 360 days, it must be true for any other
number of days, greater or less.

For 5 per cent., multiply by the number of days and divide by 72,

same as 360 7«

Op A

Eight per cent., multiply by the number of days and divide by 45—

8 .

Nine per cent., multiply by the number of days and divide by 40 =

Seven per cent, does not give an even quotient. Your easiest way is to
get the interest at 6 per cent., and then add ^ of the result.

Seven and three-tenths you get accurately by multiplying by number of

days and dividing by 50. In this case, however, we reckon the year at the

365 3650
calendar number of days, 365. You get the result thus, yy = ~~r^~~ — 50.

'To '°

For reckoning in months at 6 per cent., always remember that eacrj
month is £ per cent. For two months you simply reckon one per cent. ;
four months you reckon two ; six months, three ; eight months, four, etc.
All well and send much love.

Hastily and very affectionately,

Your Father.

From Mr. Blaine to Walker :

Saratoga, N.Y., August 15, 1871.
The day after you sailed, your mother went home and T came to this
place, where we have been since. Emmons went same day to New York ;
thence to Niagara; thence to Cleveland; thence to Chicago; and then

252 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

home via Pittsburgh. He left Chicago last evening, will be in New York
to-morrow morning, and home Thursday P.M. . . . Your mother, I
have no doubt, is sending you a letter full of domestic news by this same
mail. ... Be very careful and prudent in your money matters. I
want you to have everything needful for your comfort, culture, and enjoy-
ment, but do not forget that my fortune is not a large one.

Most lovingly and tenderly,

Your Father.

To Walker :

Augusta, August 21, 1871.

. . . The great event since I wrote you a Aveek ago is your father's
Saratoga serenade speech, which he made last Wednesday evening. An
immense crowd assembled to hear him, and he has been overwhelmed
with congratulations. I think myself he was most happy, and perhaps I
should be more difficult than almost any one else to please. All the papers
have said their say about it, pro and con. . . . Emmons has expected
to leave for Andover, via Boston, to-morrow, but has had a telegram this
afternoon from your father telling him not to leave till he hears from him ;
so possibly he may not go till Wednesday. I hope he may not, for no
tongue can adequately portray my loneliness since I came from Boston the
day after you sailed. I have, to myself, to lead two lives entirely distinct
from each other. The one when I am with your father, all variety, wide-
awake, gay ; the other —

From President Grant :

Washington, August 31, 1871.

Dear Mr. Speaker : Your favor of the 28th inst. was received yes-
terday just before I started for Washington. I have given Mr. Hamlin,
and two other gentlemen who called with him, a reply to the questions
contained in your letter. I can reach Bangor on Tuesday evening, the
17th of October, and can remain do/vn East, low down, until about Friday
morning. I cannot, however, leave the limits of the United States. Some-
how I am under the impression that there is a statute, or some provision,
against the President leaving the territory of the United States. However,
whether there is or not, I think I will not be the one to establish the prec-
edent of an executive going beyond the limits of his country. I antici-
pate a very pleasant visit to Maine. It will be' the second time only that
it has fallen to my lot to get so far East, and I never got among cleverer
people. When I was -there before I had not yet become a politician, had
not arrayed a section and a half against me, and it was, too, just at the
close of a great war in which the ignorant, but enthusiastic, Maine people,
not looking to the "New York World" and other equally veracious Demo-
cratic papers for true light, supposed I had taken a small part. Their
ardor being cooled by time, and true light having been forced in, in spite
of Yankee prejudice in favor of a united country, may make a change now.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 253

I will trust myself among them again, however, Providence permitting,
taking all the chances of having very pleasant recollections dashed.

My kindest regards to Mrs. Blaine and the children, who I hope are all
well and enjoying their vacation.

From Mr. Blaine to Walker :

Augusta, August 28, 1871.

Seeing that General Schenck is on the Continent, I have feared that you
might have missed the cheerful welcome you anticipated in London. . . .

I would not go to Paris until you know that Mr. Washburn is there. .
I shall assume that you have made your hasty run to Scotland before this
reaches you.

I should get to work on French as soon as I well could ; and be sure
to pursue it with great diligence, but not to the detriment of a great
deal of out-door exercise and plenty of observation of what is going on
around you.

I more and more incline to the belief that Paris is the best place. I have
so suggested to Mr. Washburn in a note that goes out by this mail. As
soon as you reach Paris call on Mr. Washburn. It would be well for
you to write him a line a few days before you leave London, advising him
of the day you will reach Paris.

Your mother writes a full budget of news.

To Walker :

Augusta, September 8, 1871.

. . . Your father and I had the first reading of your letter in the
carriage over Malta Hill. How delighted we were to hear from you I
cannot express. Your father is well jDleased with you. Thinks you
outdo him as a traveller. He was saying, at the supper-table, that next
summer if Emmons wanted to go over to meet you, he should make no
objection ; whereupon Alice insists that he told you over and over again
to keep away from Americans ! " Surely Emmons is an American ! " .
Your father expects, Tuesday, to leave for Pennsylvania. The local poli-
tics are becoming very interesting. A partisan warfare is waged between
the Journal and the Standard, and, of course, your father is the mark
for most of the shafts and honors. W., it is reported, has gone over to
the Democrats. . . . You cannot think how high the partisan spirit
seems to run this election. Your father has just had sent him from down
town a Democrat sheet, which that party, in lack of a daily paper, have
just issued. Two-thirds of it certainly devoted to him. . . . How glad
I shall be when the city and State are well carried, Monday evening!
. . . I am immensely interested, for I feel that there has been a
deliberate effort to break down your father. Nothing at the bottom of it,
I presume, but envy.

Monday evening. Well, Walker, the election is over and well over.
Every ward in this city is carried by Republicans — a thing which 1 think

254 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

has hardly ever been before. This city is carried by 239. Other towns
have thrown very large votes. Grain p [a venerable neighbor] voted
among the first, fearing that he might die during the day if he put it off.
Every one congratulates your father on the election in this city as a per-
sonal compliment. How he would feel to have had it telegraphed all
over the country, as it was to be, that Augusta, the home of Morrill and
Blaine, had gone Democratic !

To Walker :

Augusta, September 12, 1871.

We have had a great treat this afternoon, viz., your first and second
batch of London letters, the last date of which was August 30. Father
expected to go to Boston to-day, but, as his stay is quite a serious one, two
weeks at least in Pennsylvania, and as there were a great many telegrams
concerning election to receive and to send away, he concluded to defer his
departure till to-morrow ; so he was here to read out your letters. First, they
were read in the " spare chamber ,1 — S., M., and I the audience. When
about half through. Alice and Q. added themselves to the little circle,
the former very indignant that We had not sent for her to hear the begin-
ning of the narrative. Then George was told to put old Prince into harness
and go for Aunt C. Of course, she was more than ready; so at supper
we had reading number two, and, Aunt H. coming in during the evening,
there was a third reading, your father officiating every time. We all
think you are doing splendidly, seeing a great deal, and describing all to
us with great accuracy and freshness. But do not write any more on both
sides of that paper. Your father says use it, if you wish, but write only
on one side. You have no idea how impatiently we want to read, and how
slowly we have to feel our way. . . . The election, as you will see by
the papers your father sent you this morning, has turned out splendidly. A
grand vindication of your dearest dad, that of this town is. All the capital
of the Democratic party seemed to be centred in him. . . . He got
off yesterday noon, started in his usual hurry. At the last moment, there
was the kev of his strong box missing1 — was fortunate enough to find it,
carelessly left on the clock ! At the " Journal " office there was proof to
correct, cars meantime in. Then there was the bank, and at every corner
some one running to stop him. However, he got off, cheerful and bright, for
he feels that he has conquered gloriously in this town, and I have already
had two notes from him — one sent from Brunswick and another from Port-
land. . . . You are a dear, good boy, and your letters give us unbounded
satisfaction. . . . And, by the way, one of the things about your letters
which pleased your father especially is the address. I often see him
showing it and challenging admiration for it. ... I greatly miss the
enjoyment of reading your letters with him. We have, since they began
to come, read them together, and generally alone, and, sympathizing with
you and with each other to the fullest, we have felt united over you to a
wonderful degree. Always may you give as much joy and satisfaction to

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 255

our hearts as you have in the way you have improved the first two weeks
of your stay in Europe.

To Walker :

Augusta, September, 21, 1871.

. . . The mail also brought me a letter from your father, written
Sunday afternoon at Elizabeth, when he was wandering- over coal-fields
and thinking sadly of his mother.

To Walker :

Augusta, September 24, 1871.

. . . It is a week last Wednesday since your father went away, and I
am beginning, as you may suppose, to long for his good company once
more. He left Pittsburgh Friday evening, was in New York yesterday, and
telegraphed me to write him to Parker House by last night's mail, so that
I expect him home next Wednesday. He spent his time in Elizabeth
going over coal-fields, but I do not yet know whether he purchased any
more of that kind of property.

. . . He has succeeded in purchasing some more coal-land — only
$28,000 worth, however. Payments very easy. I expect him home
Wednesday. . . . Gramp hopes to live to vote for Grant next Pres-
ident. Thinks Mr. Blaine will certainly be the next, but he shall not be
here to vote for him ; shall intercede for him in heaven, however.

From Mr. Blaine to Walker :

Boston, September 25, 1871.

I am thus far on my return from Pennsylvania, where I have been for
ten days past.

I reached here at ten Saturday night.

Emmons had come up to meet me in the afternoon, and spent yesterday
(Sunday) with me. We went to church in the Old South, and in the after-
noon drove out to Uncle Jacob's. This morning at seven Emmons
returned to Andover. He had received your letter from Edinburgh. I
think he is studying very well this session, and seems really very much in-
terested in Mr. Tilton — is growing rapidly. . . .

I hope you will get settled down to study in Paris at once. Be sure to
get into a good family where you will hear no English and the best of
French. Mr. Washburn will give you good advice, I am sure. 1 am
writing very hastily, relying on your mother to give you all the details of
news. . . .

Massachusetts is in a great ferment over the Butler nomination. The
convention is at Worcester on Monday, and the result will probably be
known to you before you receive this. I think Butler will be beaten, but
others fear his nomination.

256 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

From Walker :

September 27, 1871.

I cannot bear to think of missing the presidential election next fall. 1
want to be at home and stump the State like the man who stumped it with
Daniel Webster — held the horse while the great Daniel harangued the
audience from the buggy.

From Mr. Blaine to Walker :

Augusta, September 28, 1871.

. . . The great event just now in the public mind is the defeat of
Butler at Worcester yesterday. You know the Mr. Washburn who is
nominated — one of the best of men. . . . Alice is making fine prog-
ress in her music.

To Walker:

Augusta, September 28, 1871.

Tuesday evening, just before eight, I got a telegram from your father
saying that he was on the train due at that hour, and would expect to find
George at the depot. . . . The night was stornry, and George had been
dismissed till the next day. Of course there was not a bit of meat in the
house. However, it was everything to have him coming home. Mary
flew down the lane, and George's father came to the rescue and har-
nessed. A good supper was knocked up with the help of Mons, and at
fifteen minutes past eight your dear dad was comfortably housed, sitting
before a blazing fire in the back parlor. He had spent Monday night at
Hamilton in company with the Stowes, having, of course, a most brilliant
time, Harriet Beech er being in one of her most communicative, social
moods. Emmons went back to Andover Monday morning early, looking,
your father says, as well as he ever saw him in his life, and appearing like
a good boy and a faithful scholar. He thinks he shall lay up on his allow-
ance! One hundred dollars is due him already, though, of course, he has
not paid his board.

Augusta, October 5, 1871.
. . . In the library Mr. Sherman [Mr. Blaine's private secre-
tary] is diligently at work, making an accurate list of committees, to-
gether with resignations and new members and the outs, — a very nice
"job" indeed, — and I heard him tell your father yesterday he thought
he had gone over the names, in his anxiety, some thirty times. In the
nursery, Bedlam, under the generalship of Alice, has evidently broken
loose. There are gathered J. and M. and Alice and Eliza, and as their
leader stands in awe of no one, the liberty I permit soon becomes license.
. . . Your dear father, I am happy to say, has gone out for a walk,
and, as he turned his face down-town ward, I am in hopes his admiring
constituency will have the pleasure of seeing him! 1 think, perhaps,
he never stood so high with them before. Certainly he never stood

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 257

higher. This morning I rode down town with Q. to get the darling some
boots, also to canvass the field a little before making the change in his
clothes. At half-past twelve, just as we were turning our faces home-
wards, your father hailed us from Mr. Hurder's saloon, to come over and
have Q.'s picture taken. His dress was torn and his boots shabby, but X
hope we got something that will at least remind you of the little brother.
Your father also sat; and Alice, who came in on her way from school,
wanted to, but it was too late. Your father has just interrupted me to
read some letters about his recent coal purchases. He is immensely
pleased. Finds that the M.'s were after the very property he has pur-
chased. . . . Since I wrote you he has returned from Boston. He was
there only one day, but in that time bought blankets and got my mended
jewelry from Shreve & Stanwood, where it has been ever since you sailed,
and had business interviews unsatisfactory and satisfactory with Warren
Fisher and Mr. Hayes, and, to my great surprise, he got home on the
four o'clock train yesterday afternoon, his beloved Kinglake (" Crimea''1)
still accompanying him. . . . You. see, Walker, I write you the most
trivial details of our life. I go out but little, and even if T went more my
narrative would still run on the same way. I wrote just such letters to
your father when he was away as you are, and he said the very sight of
the home names was a refreshment to him. . . . Mrs. Pike has in-
quired with the greatest interest for you. She thinks she never saw such
children, meaning you, your brothers and sisters ! Father has gone to

, loudly bewailing his sad fate in having to leave his pleasant li reside,

his darling Q,., and his sweet M. Mr. Sherman is waiting for this letter,
and now nothing remains but for me to bid my dearest boy good-by. 1
send you no advice, for you know, better than T can tell you in words, the
youth and man I wish you to be. God bless and keep you! Be sure to
write about your financial matters, as the dada wishes to know.

From TTon. E. P>. Washburn :

Paris, October 5, 1871.

1>laine : The great question which now agitates all circles in Paris —
business, social, political, and diplomatic — is, whether or not "Blaine is
sony.11

An early and a categorical answer " Yes1' or " No" would lend to the
quiet of Europe.

To Mr. Blaine from Hon. Horace Greeley:

New York, October 6, 1871.
. . . I would like to visit Bangor with your crowd, but I am chosen
defendant in a libel suit which is to be tried ihe week of your festival. As
I am seldom chosen anything, I feel obliged to accept.

258 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

To Walker : ■

Augusta, October 8, 1871.

. . I get no line from you. A week yesterday morning since we
heard from you. Your father sits in the parlor toasting his feet over the
fire, a suspicious dampness having settled upon them in the garden, where
he and Tom Sherman have been exercising or exorcising — which you like.
I have just been saying to him, "Am I not better to thee than ten sons?"
" Yes,'1 he says, "and if you were better than twenty, I still want the
sons.1' I thought he was uneasy about you, but he says he is not. Still,
my dear boy, be particular to send off a letter, if of ever so few lines, by
frequent mails. . . . Your father and Mr. Sherman are still desper-
ately busy over the committees. It is part of the power of the Speaker,
and, like everything else worth anything, is a rock of offence and a block
of stumbling to many, though to others the chief corner-stone. . . .
Friday he expects to go to Boston to participate in the honors paid the
President, all of which he will see, and a part of which be, as he is him-
self the city's guest. Tuesday he expects simply to come through town
with the President on his way to Bangor. The President stops, I believe,
about twenty minutes only. He — your father — hates it, but I suppose il
would not do for the President to come into Maine and the Speaker not be
here to see him. Mr. Morrill gets rid of the whole thing by starting tc
Kansas to see May to-morrow.

From Mr. Blaine to Walker:

Augusta, October 9, 1871.

We are eager to hear from you in Paris. ... I still cling to the
belief that Paris is your jilace, but you must confine yourself to French
society and not allow yourself to be much in the American colony. I do not
wish you to overstudy or too closely confine yourself, but I am very
anxious for you to acquire French and study Paris in all its moods and
tenses, by your American eyes.

I am now in the very midst of the troubles and perplexities of making up
my committees, and a most vexatious job I find it. The resignation of
Burton O. Cooke, of Illinois, and the nomination of Mr. Washburn for gov-
ernor of Massachusetts, throw two important chairmanships into my hands
— District of Columbia and Claims. . . .

I close this just as Mr. Homan comes sauntering in for an evening call.

From General Sherman :

Washington, October 13, 1871.

Dear Blaine : 1 am just back from St. Louis and Lancaster, and find
your letter of the 5th, and the official invitation to assist in the ceremonies
of opening the European and North American Railroad. Of course 1
wish I could come, but there is a reason which you can better understand

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 259

than any man living, and yet which I ought not to submit to a corporate
body. Mr. Swing's life is now flickering in its socket, so that any moment
the dread notice may come. I took Ellen out last week, and he seemed so
utterly feeble that she could not venture with me to the St. Louis fair, and I
left her at Lancaster. On my return there on Tuesday last he was better, and
we came home yesterday, leaving him in this uncertain condition. Just as
we started we learned that his old faithful physician, Dr. Roustler, had
fallen dead, and we dared hardly reveal the whole truth, though he read
it in our acts. I beg you will, then, aid me in explaining to the good people
of Bangor that, however anxious I may be to be present on the 17th, I am
restrained by private reasons that are overwhelming. Of course I will
answer the president of the company in general terms.

To Walker :

Augusta, October 14, 1871.

. . . Your father goes to Boston to-day at twelve M. to meet the
President. He stops at the St. James, and has written Emmons to meet
him there this evening. I have had a letter from him this morning; full
of the Chicago calamity. He was so full of Chicago he would think of
nothing* else.

M. and Q. are playing on the sofa. The latter has been trying all the
morning for a cat. I heard him before breakfast on the joorch calling to
George to go out and find him a cat. There are so many on the premises
that they go out very much as one would hunt an elephant in Africa. Sure
enough, he came in a few minutes ago hugging up a very fair specimen
of the feline race. This is a specimen of M.'s manoeuvring to get the kit-
ten : " Oh, Q., you be the mother, and play that you are out shopping to
buy something for the baby's birthday, a little gold chain or something.
I'll be the nurse and stay at home and take care of the baby. Here, darling,
come to nursey," and Q., overpowered by the argument, surrenders, and
M. sits on the sofa, fondling and enjoying to her heart's content.

I do not know how much you may have seen of the Chicago fire. All the
prominent newspaper accounts, doubtless. There never was, and God
grant there never may be, anything like it. Perhaps you know that your
father has been very much urged to buy in Chicago lands, and when he
was in Boston to see you off, a gentleman from C, engaged in real-estate
business in that city, was at the Parker House, pushing the matter very
hard. I supposed that your father had invested a good many thousands,
but it seems his lucky star is still in the ascendant, for when in Pennsylva-
nia lately lie decided to use all his money in coal-lands, and sent back there
all the papers, bonds, etc., connected with this business. . . .

Think of the winter which is before those crowds of people ! Any
quantity of work, but no shelter. In live years, your father thinks less,
Chicago will be rebuilt. ... I suppose Mons and he are to-day at
the St. James. Sunday the President comes to Bangor, stops here about
twenty minutes. I shall go to the depot and get a passing word with

260 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

your dear daddy, who is to keep with the President till Friday ....
I have heard from your father this afternoon. He reached Boston
at 8.30 Saturday evening. Found Emmons and an alderman waiting for him.
Saw the President, the P.M., Mrs. Grant and Nellie, and the boy. Break-
fasted with them. Then went to Dr. Putnam's church, Roxbury. Emmons
and the Grant boy went with Collector Russell, to attend service on the
school-ship. . . . To-morrow they come to Maine. I expect to go to
the depot to see your father, but he has to keep on to Bangor, not
returning till Friday. . . . Aunt C. is down spending the evening.
She has copied nearly all your letters into a book. Alice thinks it will be
so interesting to Walker's children and children's children to read them.
. . . Emmons is in distress for your Greek lexicon. He is so economi-
cal now that he hates to buy a new one.

October 19.
. . . Father is in Bangor, accompanying the President. I took M.
and Q. and rode as near the depot as I dared Tuesday afternoon. There
was a great crowd. I did not see him, as I sat high up the hill in the
carriage ; neither did I see the other dignitaries who were present, but T
saw, best of all, your father, who, as soon as he had introduced the Pres-
ident to Mayor Evelyth, hunted us up and spent a delightful quarter
of an hour at the carriage. ... I think, from the newspaper
accounts, that the whole celebration at Bangor must be a great success.
Your father told me that he dined at Mr. Hooper's Sunday evening with
Agassiz, Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell, and other savans. Enjoyed it ex-
tremely. . . . We were fearfully disappointed not to receive a letter
from you. Your father could not believe that I had none for him. . . .
You cannot tell how anxious it makes me not to hear.

October 23.
. . . Your father sits here at the table toiling away over his com-
mittees. Hard, hard work. As fast as he gets them arranged, just so
fast some after-consideration comes up which disarranges not one, but
many, and over topples the whole row of bricks. It is a matter in which
no one can help him. . . . The door-bell has been ringing the whole
morning, your father seeing not one in twenty who call. Yesterday
Newman Smyth preached for us. I went out with your father and Alice in
the morning, your father also in the evening. In the afternoon he took
the three home children and went up on the knoll. . . . Saturday was
made memorable by the arrival of your first Paris letter. You cannot
think how anxious we were to hear. As I told you in my last, your father
could not believe that I had not a letter for him when I met him Tuesday.
Still he would not permit me to express the least anxiety, but when he
came Friday afternoon, and still no letter, he could not quite conceal his
own anxiety. Of course, we calculated for the despatcli bag, and should
have allowed for one day more before quite giving up, but when I came
out of my room at the ringing of the breakfast-bell Saturday morning, I

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 261

was greeted by the joyful words, "A letter of the longest kind from
Walker." Down we sat at the table, and while I poured coffee and tea
and otherwise waited on the children, your father read. Then when he
had read about half, I took the manuscript and read out while he ate his
breakfast. With thankful hearts, we read of your getting to Paris and
among friends. Now I shall feel entirely different from what I have
while you were in London, isolated. We like your arrangement about
school very much. Of course, it is an experiment, but I hope it will work
satisfactorily. At any rate, you will not fail to master French. Friday
morning I had a telegram from your father, saying that he would not be
at home till afternoon. He had left Bangror the night before with the Presi-
dent, and gone through to Portland. Then, after a wearisome barouche
procession, at one o'clock he took leave of His Excellency and set his face
homewards, and here he now is, and here he expects to stay for at least a
week. I suppose there never was anything like the time they had in
Bangor. The speeches were good as they could be. Underlying the
speeches was the best of feeling. Hospitality flowed like a river, and
not an untoward circumstance marred the perfect whole. Your father
stopped with Mr. Hamlin, and was obliged to borrow his host's dress coat
to wear to the dinner and reception. Don't you think he must have looked
funny? As Hannibal never wears coats of any other cut, of course he
had one in reserve for himself.

. . . Your father is waiting to take my letter to the j)ost-office, so T
must say good-night to my dear boy. I long to see you. No words can
express how much. I have every confidence that you will not abuse your
father's indulgence, and if you make any mistakes, be sure to write me or
him all about it. Do not be afraid, under any circumstances, of giving us
your fullest confidence. When your father was in Bangor he saw a great
deal of Rear- Admiral Al den. He sails very soon for Europe. Takes out
General Sherman. His ship is the "Wabash," the flagship of the European
squadron. He has invited you to go with him, but your father felt obliged
to decline, because he wants you to improve your stay in Paris by the
acquisition of French.

From Mr. Blaine to Walker :

Augusta, October 24, 1871.

Your mother and I observed with much concern and no little pain that
after you returned to London your letters seemed a little low-spirited.
You did not go anywhere and seemed all tired of London. . . . There
seemed a perfect cessation of interest. ... I shall, of course, expect
the most absolute frankness from you, with a very full explanation of the
cause of your low spirits after you return. . . .

And here hit me caution you in regard to loaning money. You must not
do it. Your letter of credit is to supply your own wants, not to enable
you to loan money to others.1 . . . But don't let it prey on your

1 Mr. Blaine's conjecture wan right. Walker had loaned a large Bum, bill it was to a friend
and wan duly returned.

262 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

spirits. Be cheerful, enjoy yourself, and acquire French as rapidly as you
can; and, above all, do not in any event suffer yourself to be led astray.
Do not permit yourself to do anything which you would blush to confess
to your mother or to me.

I do not wish you to feel if you have loaned money that I blame you
too harshly. You will understand that I write in the deepest and tenderest
affection for you. You are the very apple of my eye, and anything wrong
with you goes to the very core of my heart.

Now, if you have had any sort of mishap or trouble that you do not
wish to write about in your home letters, Avrite me a private note to the
Parker House, Boston, marking, "To be called for.11 As I shall be in
Boston every few days in November (D.Y.), I shall easily get it without
observation.

Your frankness towards me must be equal to my affection for you.

From Mr. Blaine to Walker :

Augusta, October 26, 1871.
. . . So long as there is perfect and absolute frankness between us,
I feel at ease in regard to you ; but where concealment begins, trouble be-
gins. . . . We stripped the house yesterday of every spare piece of
clothing for the Wisconsin and Michigan sufferers, so while you are en-
joying yourself in Paris this winter, your pleasure will not be decreased
by knowing that your former clothing is warming the backs of some
destitute lads on the shores of the North-western Lakes.

From Mr. Blaine to Walker :

Augusta, October 30, 1871.
We are about to have postal cars now through here all the way to St.
John, and as soon as the European and North American road is finished to
Halifax (May, 1872), they expect to send the foreign mails that way, ex-
pecting to gain fully thirty-six to forty-eight hours in the regular trans-
mission of letters between Boston and London, and at least twenty-four
between New York and London. Boston letters have now all to go to
New York. The gain from here would be still greater.

. . . I was busy all day yesterday with a special agent of the Post-
Office Department, and with the railroad authorities, in arranging postal
cars from Boston to St. John, to begin November 13. . . . You
must not get the impression that my resources are very large. They are
not. I have all the time to plan, to calculate, and to provide for my large
expenditures, and while I wish my children to enjoy themselves and not
feel pinched, I wish them at the same time to be prudent and careful, and
in any and every event to be free and unreserved with me in all their acts
and deeds.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 263

(Enclosing photograph.) Augusta, November 7, 1871.

This is Q. — just as he was caught upon the street about four weeks
since. He is a great driver. To-day I was out exercising in the back
yard, and, looking up on the top of the portico, found the rogue quietly sit-
ting there. He had crawled out from the gallery, and did not seem to
know that he was out of place at all. Alice is having her face taken, and
will send you soon. I enclose a letter to you which she was busy writing
a few days ago.

To Walker :

Augusta, November 12, 1871.

. . . Father left for New York Wednesday. I could hardly let him
go. I needed his reviving society so much. But he had wool and cotton
manufacturers to meet in Boston, dinners, breakfasts, and lunches, all or
some, to give and take in New York, and, over and above all, pressures, to
resist or permit, of Congressional committees. He had to go, but felt that
my desire to keep him was all right and natural ; so, with a man's appre-
ciation of a woman's nature, he promised to buy silk dresses for M. and
Alice, to say nothing of half a dozen for myself. When I look at the bed
and the little heap of flannel on it, laces, silks, feathers, and gew-gaws of
every description resolve themselves into preposterousness ; but your
father is strong of will, and I am weak, and he is determined that I shall
be in society this winter, and I know I shall. . . . Since he left, I
have heard from him several times. Every one pleasant and pleased to
see him, but he says, after his own bright fireside, inexpressibly dull to
him.

. . . . Your father will be delighted to find that you are getting under
headway in French. Let nothing keep you from earnest application. Oh,
how fond I was of study when I was your age ! I never had any gift at
writing. In this deficiency I am sorry to see that Emmons is my own
child. He writes me little — short, unsatisfactory letters usually, mostly
taken up in acknowledging the arrival of my own, and ending always one
way. According to his own story he is a perfect Mussulman for prayers
— the evening bell invariably calling him away from his letter. . . .
Greatly to your father's discomfort, I cannot go on till after the holidays.
On this I take my stand, and he has to submit. He will sleep in the house,
have a servant or two, and take his meals at Wormley's, and the manage
will open with the New Year. . . .

Have just had the pleasure of reading two letters from your father, one
written yesterday afternoon, the other in the evening. . . . He had
been to see "Lord Dundreary" by the same actor you saw in London.
Said it seemed to bring you very near. Was exceedingly anxious to get
your letter. I sent it to him by the early mail of the morning. The chil-
dren have been out all the afternoon making a snowman. For anything
of this kind Alice is really artistic, and this afternoon she has surpassed
herself.

264 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAISE.

From Mr. Blaine to Walker :

Augusta, November 18, 1871.

I returned from New York yesterday after a week's absence. I came
from Boston via Andover, and having telegraphed Emmons he met me at
Wilmington Junction and rode to Lawrence ; distance, nine miles ; time,
twenty minutes. He is well and seems to be studying well. . . .

Russell Jones, our Minister at Brussells, I know very well. He is a very
clever gentleman. But I would rather have you adhere closely to your
studies than to do any writing just now.

Do not study German to the neglect of French. I would far rather
have you push the latter with all energy, so that you can speedily begin to
read history, geography, etc. I do not, however, object to German if your
teacher thinks it will not interfere with your French. Study six hours a
day faithfully, take plenty of exercise, and enjoy yourself in every reason-
able and proper way.

I am glad you are so much at Mr. Washburn's, but do not go more than
seems to you proper. In other words, do not wear out your welcome. I
must trust to your discretion, of course, in this as in most other things.

From Mr. Washburn :

Paris, November 21, 1871.

Dear Blaine: Mr. Elliot C. Cowden, of New York, but who lives here
more than half the time, a most excellent, intelligent, agreeable, hos-
pitable man, and one of my most highly esteemed friends, leaves to-mor-
row for home. He knows all about Walker, and can tell you what a nice
boy he is and how well he is getting along. He will visit Washington, and
I want you to go with him and see the President, as he can tell him, as
well as yourself, all about us. . . . Among other things, please in-
troduce him to Butler, as I want him to find out Butler's authority for de-
claring that " Blaine was sorry."

To Walker :

Augusta, November 26, 1871.

. . . Down-stairs Mr. Sherman is trying to put some final touches to
the copying of the committees. Alas ! If final touches are not soon put
to them, I am afraid your father will give out entirely. . . • . To-mor-
row he leaves for Washington, getting there Thursday or Friday. Fie
made his usual preparation last night by having up a barber at the house.
The door-bell was ringing continuously, and people calling on him all the
time, so after the tonsorial professor had been introduced to my room, and
a large linen spread down for the protection of the carpet, Emmons sat
down. His hair had been cut quite lately in Boston, but it certainly needed
clipping, and then Mons was not averse to saving one fee ! When he was
through, we put Q. into his high chair. The pretty little fellow Avould
not permit himself even to wink. When his head was cropped, we had

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 265

up father. It is a work of art now to cut his hair and leave at the same
time enough on the head. Happily, however, this desirable end was
achieved and at ten Monsieur took his leave. . . . Emmons' report
oame by the morning's mail, and is, I believe, quite satisfactory. What
did not come, and what your father, Alice, Emmons, and I were all watch-
in <r for at the window a full half hour before Harry Brown came along1,
was a blue enveloped letter from you. Your father would allow no one
to go to the door for it but himself ; but alas ! though there was a very
bright letter from G., a racy one from Horace White, and a gossipy one
from Joe Manley, who had ridden over a Western railroad with Colfax
and had interviewed him, there was nothing from across the water. The
detention by the despatch bag is sometimes very much longer than it should
be. Your father is particularly anxious for this letter, as he thinks it
must answer his.

To Walker :

Augusta, November 29, 1871.

This morning, to my great delight, — for I had given up expecting any-
thing from the " Scotia," — your two letters in reply to your father's turned
up. I at once telegraphed him to the Parker House. His anxiety I knew
was great, and he could not get your letter till he reached Washington.
He will be so pleased at his own shrewd guessing that he will not be very
severe on you. Your letters were admirable. I never had a fear that you
had done anything wrong. You made a great mistake in not writing
about it.

. . . I have had three letters from your father to-day, all of course
written yesterday — in the afternoon, after tea, and at bed-time. . . . I
am sorry to say that Mr. Fisher seems to be fast losing in the esteem of all
good men. Every new discovery your father makes only seems to show
a baseness still deeper. Will he ever reach the bottom of his treachery
towards him? . . . Emmons has been skating all day. Fun for him,
but hard for the horse, as he rides to his pleasure ground, blankets poor
old Prince, and comes home only when he is hungry. I expect he takes
girls, as he has the best carriage. He is so kind and pleasant, so bright
and gay, 1 can refuse him nothing. I make a very poor mother.

To Mr. Blaine from Walker:

Paris, November 17, 1871.

. . . I am sorry that, in the very first of the whole matter, I did not
write you fully and openly. I did intend and wish to have the most per-
fect frankness. I am studying very hard now, much harder and better than
I have ever done before, and were it not that I fear you may be a little
displeased with me, should be in every way perfectly happy. 1 trust thai
1 have given full explanation of everything in my former letter.

266 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

From Mr. Blaine to Walker :

Washington, December 8, 1871.

. . . You will have seen before this all about my committees in the
New York papers.

I am keeping bachelor's hall — none of the family being with me.
. . . They will come on after the holidays. It seems lonely to be here
by myself after such pleasant and lively times as I have had for the past
two winters. We expect, however, to take a recess on the 21st till after
New Year's, and you may depend I will promptly report in Augusta.

. . . Your expressions of confidence and affection are very grateful
to me. A child can scarcely know or appreciate the deep love and solici-
tude of a parent. Your welfare and success in life are objects of daily
care, and I trust of daily prayer, with me. You are my pride and my hope,
and if anything should go wrong with you I think it would kill me. But
I have the greatest confidence in you. My sending you to Europe was
surely a great proof of this at your tender age — trusting you all alone.
There are few boys at sixteen whom I would so trust. . .

To Mr. Blaine :

Augusta, December 11, 1871.

. . . Professor Barbour has been down to see me this afternoon,
really overflowing with congratulations on your most happy selection of
committees. Says he shall tell you to cut off the tail of a dog. When
Alcibiades did so many fine things that he was afraid of being forced into
some great office, he cut off the tail of a dog to show that he could do a
foolish deed.

Mr. Blaine to Walker :

Washington, December 11, 1871.

. . . I fully understand and appreciate your desire to remain at your
studies during the winter, and not go off travelling. As I said before, I
leave this wholly to your own judgment, though at your age I, of course,
consider the acquisition of the languages the most important. Rome and
all Italy " will keep for a future tour," but your golden opportunity to
acquire French may never again recur with such favoring auspices and
circumstances. I do not wish you in any way to stint yourself in attending
the innocent amusements of Paris — theatres, operas, etc., leaving you to
be the judge of what is proper to expend of time and money in that
direction.

They are improving Washington very rapidly and very greatly, — and
I think extravagantly, — expending $4,000,000 on the streets and squares,
raising the money by sale of city bonds, and heaping up taxes for the
future.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 267

From Mr. Blaine to Walker :

December 15, 1871.

. . . I have by same mail with yours a letter from Madame Heidler,
speaking in very kind and flattering terms of your progress and your be-
havior. This is, of course, very gratifying to me, and will be so to your
mother when she receives it.

To Walker :

Augusta, December 28, 1871.

After getting off your letter Monday evening, I turned my attention to
your father's toilet. I do not know whether or not I wrote you that we
were invited to the golden wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Fuller, and that just
at the time when I was rejoicing in the thought of wearing some of my
finery in Augusta, it came out that your father had no clothes at home,
excepting those in which he was then standing, a roughish suit a year old.
What Chicago had not swallowed up had gone to Washington. We were
both full of chagrin, as you may believe. The father took a candle and
made search in the trunk-room, but nothing came of it but two gaiters, and
even those were not alike. To match the gaiters, I myself went west-
ward and returned triumphant, bringing on my arm a pair of black
trousers not too much the worse for wear, a swallow-tail coat, very much
of a swallow too, made in Paris when your father was in Europe, —
lavender gloves, almost new, turned up in the pockets ; in short, every
essential of a first-class society dress was drummed up from one quarter
or another, with the single exception of a white cravat, and at nine o'clock
behold us in the narrow sleigh, with George for postilion, en route. You
never saw any one so pleased as was your father with his dress. When I
went down into the parlor, on my way to the sleigh, I found all the burners
lighted, while he turned himself about and about, admiring old clothes as
good as new. As good? A thousand times better in his eyes! Of the
wedding, there was a table loaded with presents, a handsome supper, a
poem by Madame Dillingham, read by Mr. Beach, and sung to the tune of
" Auld lang syne," the house trimmed with Christmas greens, the whole
Williams clan, and, last, a dance, the chorus jig, led off by Mrs. Fuller
and Arthur Edwards' grandfather. Emmons was invited, but preferred
to spend his evening with the W. girls; he told George he might stay in
the kitchen and he would drive over for us. When he rang the bell Aunt
II. came to the door, so, of course, Mons had to go in . . . . Emmons
got off Sunday noon. We have not heard from him since his arrival at
Andover, for Emmons, though a very good talker, holds a more cramped
pen than even I do. Father wrote to Mr. Tilton, telling him that he,
and he alone, was to blame for the delay in Mons1 return.

268 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

XII.

CREDIT MOBILIER.

A S the presidential election of 1872 drew on, discontent
-*-^- with the administration became, if not very deep, very
demonstrative. Early in the year a group of the leading mal-
contents came to Washington and held conference with Mr.
Blaine regarding the situation. At a dinner in his house there
was a full, frank, and confidential consultation. They desired
and proposed to organize a movement antagonistic to the Presi-
dent, with Mr. Blaine — tentatively — at its head as candidate
for the succession.

He had disagreed often enough with the President to be
supposed ready for organized opposition.

In the ensuing campaign it was publicly reported, to offset
his advocacy of President Grant, that he had said, " The only
way to have a good, square talk with the President was to get
him behind a pair of horses that he liked to drive," and that on
another occasion, leaving the President after a long interview,
he had exclaimed that Grant had no more sense than a horse.
It is true that he was often impatient with the President's views,
or lack of views, and occasionally intolerant of his methods, as
might well be with a President Avho had served his administra-
tive apprenticeship at the head of the army ; but Mr. Blaine
held steadfastly an underlying respect for his character, for his
patriotism, for his achievements, and for his standing with the
people. Occasional disapproval or disagreement is a far step
from declaration of Avar. He not only declined to join the
movement, but tried to convince its advocates of its undesirable-
ness and its futility — in vain. They left him regretfully, as-
suring him that they left him behind, and that he had made the
mistake of his life in rejecting the opportunity for reform and
promotion.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 269

Reform was the watchword, investigation the weapon of the
new party. Every leader in every governmental department
seemed to be set afight for his honor. A dozen investigations
were dragging their slow and sometimes slimy length across
the boards at the same time. The Democratic party, despairing
of snccess on a question of principle, was only too glad to join
the Reform party — or the Liberal Republican party, as it other-
wise called itself — on a question of personal character. The
Japanese embassy under Iwakura came over to meet Arinori
Mori and to study the institutions of the Republic, and was
received with welcome and much rejoicing. The arbitration
of the Alabama claims, a distinct advance in the world's prog-
ress, had gone so far as to sign the Treaty of Washington
May 8, 1871, to ratify it June 11, and to proclaim it July 4.
Every intelligent American citizen and Christian was watching
the outcome. The Chinese Commission was here to inspect
our educational systems, the young Prince of Russia, supposed
to be on pleasure bent, was struggling through the country
as best he could under the weight of Catacazy, and Gilmore was
singing his international love-songs in the Boston Coliseum
against all the winds of Heaven and the breezes of criticism.
The American people looked and listened, but the Juggernaut
of investigation went steadily on.

The Southern Rebel saw the Northern Abolitionist open-
ing for him the path of preferment through the gateway of
scandal, and the old foes became firm allies. It was Grant,
they proclaimed, who was blocking the wheels of Reform, and
Grant must be gotten rid of. A feeble blast was blown on
the " one term " bugle, but it had small summoning power.
" One term '' had never been an urgent question, and the
people could not be made to bring it to an issue on the
man who had been most conspicuous in saving the nation
from destruction. General Banks attempted to bring for-
ward a term of six years. Mr. Blaine, if there was to be a
change, favored a term of two years, to diminish rather than
by a longer term to increase, the strain of presidential election.;
but there was no vitality in the question, and it was never
fairly launched. Mi-. Sumner, not without reason I'm- liis iv-
sentments, forgot his Civil Rights Bill, for which he had persist-

270 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

ently and heroically labored, and publicly and formally joined
hands with the men who had secured its defeat. Mr. Blaine
at once wrote him a lmblic letter of remonstrance :

July 31, 1872.

Your letter of July 29 lias created profound pain among your former
political friends throughout New England. Your power to injure President
Grant was exhausted in your remarkable speech in the Senate. Your power
to injure yourself was not fully exercised until you announced an open
alliance on your part with the Southern secessionists in their effort to
destroy the Republican party.

I have but recently read with much interest the circumstantial and mi-
nute account given by you in the fourth volume of your works, of the
manner in which you were struck down in the Senate Chamber in 1856, for
defending the rights of the negio. The Democratic party throughout the
South and, according to your own showing, to some extent in the North
also, approved the assault upon you. Mr. Toombs, of Georgia, openly
announced his approval of it in the Senate ; and Jefferson Davis, four months
after its occurrence, wrote a letter to South Carolina in fulsome eulogy of
Mr. Brooks for having so nearly taken your life. It is safe to say that
every man in the South who rejoiced over the attempt to murder you was
afterwards found in the Rebel conspiracy to murder the nation. It is still
safer to say that every one of them who survives is to-day your fellow-laborer
in support of Horace Greeley. He would have been a rash prophet who in
that day would have predicted your fast alliance sixteen years after
with Messrs. Toombs and Davis in their efforts to reinstate their party in
power. In all the strange mutations of American politics, nothing so mar-
vellous has ever occurred as the fellowship of Robert Toombs, Jefferson
Davis, and Charles Sumner, in a joint effort to drive the Republican party
from power, and hand over the Government to the political control of those
who so recently sought to destroy it.

It is of no avail for you to take refuge behind the Republican record of
Horace Greeley. Conceding for the sake of argument (as I do not in fact
believe) that Horace Greeley would remain firm in his Republican princi-
ples, he would be. powerless against the Congress that would come into
power with him in ease of his election. Wc have had a recent and striking
illustration, in the case of Andrew Johnson, of the inability of the President
to enforce a policy or even a measure against the will of Congress. What
more power would there be in Horace Greeley to enforce a Republican
policy against a Democratic; Congress than there was in Andrew Johnson
to enforce a Democratic policy against a Rejmblican Congress. And besides,
Horace Greeley has already in his letter of acceptance taken ground practi-
cally against the Republican doctrine so often enforced by yourself of
the duty of the National Government to secure the rights of every citizen
to protection of life, person, and property. In Mr. Greeley's letter, accept-
ing the Cincinnati nomination, he pleases every Ku-Klux villain in the South

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 271

by his slogan about " local self-government," and his inveighing, in Rebel
parlance, against " centralization."

You cannot forget, Mr. Sumner, how often, during the late session of
Congress, you conferred with me in regard to the possibility of having
your Civil Rights Bill passed by the House. It was introduced by your
personal friend, Mr. Hooper, and nothing prevented its passage by the
House, except the rancorous and factious hostility of the Democratic mem-
bers. If I have correctly examined the Globe, the Democratic members
on seventeen different occasions resisted the passage of the Civil Rights
Bill, by the parliamentary process knoAvn as filibustering. They would
not even allow it to come to a vote.

Two intelligent colored members from South Carolina, Elliott and
Rainey, begged of the Democratic side of the House merely to allow the
Civil Rights Bill to be voted on, and they were answered with a denial so
absolute that it amounted to a scornful jeer at the rights of the colored
man. And now you lend your voice and influence to the reelection of
these Democratic members who are cooperating with you in the support
of Mr. Greeley. Do you not know, and will you not, as a candid man,
acknowledge that with these men in power in Congress the rights of the
colored man are absolutely sacrificed, so far as these rights depend on
federal legislation?

Still further, the rights of the colored men in this country are secured,
if secured at all, by the three great constitutional amendments, the Thir-
teenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth. To give these amendments scope and
effect legislation by Congress is imperatively required, as you have so
often and so eloquently demonstrated. But the Democratic party are on
record in the most conspicuous manner against any legislation on the
subject. It was only in the month of February last that my colleague, Mr.
Peters, offered a resolution in the House of Representatives, affirming the
" validity of the Constitutional Amendments, and of such reasonable legis-
lation of Congress as may be necessary to make them in their letter and
spirit most effectual." This resolution, very mild and guarded as you will
see, was adopted by 124 yeas to 58 nays. Only eight of the yeas were
Democrats. All the nays were Democrats. . . .

It is idle to affirm, as some Democrats did, in a resolution offered by Mr.
Brooks, of New York, that " these amendments are valid parts of the Con-
stitution," so long as the same men on the same day vote that these
provisions of those amendments should not be enforced by Congressional
legislation. The amendments are but sounding brass and tinkling cymbals
to the colored man, until Congress makes them effective and practical.
Nay, more ; if the rights of the colored man are to be left to the legislation
of the Southern States, without Congressional intervention, he would,
under a Democratic administration, be deprived of the right of suffrage in
less than two years, and he would bo very lucky if he escaped some form
of chattel slavery or peonage. And in proof of this adage I might quote
volumes of reasons and wisdom from the speeches of Charles Sumner.

Your argument thai Horace Greeley docs not become a Democrat by

272 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

receiving Democratic votes, proving it by the analogy of your own elec-
tion to the Senate, is hardlv candid. The point is not what Mr. Greeley
will become, but what will be the complexion of the great legislative
branch of the Government, with all its vast and controlling power?
You know very well, Mr. Sumner, that if Mr. Greeley is elected Presi-
dent, Congress is handed over to the control of the men who have
persistently denied the rights of the black man. What course you will
personally pursue toward the colored man is of small consequence, after
you have transferred the power of the government to his enemy.

The colored men of this country are not as a class enlightened, but they
have wonderful instincts, and when they read your letter they will know
that at a crisis in their fate, you deserted them. Charles Sumner, coop-
erating with Jefferson Davis, is not the same Charles Sumner they have
hitherto idolized, any more than Horace Greeley, cheered to the echo in
Tammany Hall, is the same Horace Greeley whom the Republicans have
hitherto trusted. The black men of the country will never be ungrateful
for what you have done for them in the past, nor in the bitterness of their
hearts will they ever forget that, heated and blinded by personal hatred
of one man, you turned your back on the rights of the millions to whom in
past years you have stood as a shield. . . .

Mr. Sumner replied, defending his course in the interests
of harmony and reconciliation. But Horace Greeley, Apostle of
Freedom, Tribune of the People, found Mr. Blaine's letter " pre-
tentious " and worse ; marvelled that this " superserviceable
henchman" should "rush in unbidden " to the presence of Sena-
tor Sumner ; thought it kind in Mr. Sumner " to take any notice
of his small antagonist," and avowed that " if Mr. Speaker Blaine
is not fairly extinguished by Senator Sumner's rejoinder we de-
spair of ever seeing this pertinacious young man put down."

The presidential conventions began in May. Mr. Greeley de-
clined to attend the Republican convention at Philadelphia
because he found no trustworthy assurances of Reform, and he
signed a call for an earlier convention at Cincinnati of Reunion
and Reform Associations, by which convention he was himself
nominated for the presidency. The Republican convention
was warned that there was nothing for it to do at Philadelphia
but throw Grant overboard, yet the Republican convention in
June nominated Grant without opposition, almost without
effort ; after which the country was told that the biggest thing
before it was The Honest Men against The Thieves, and
" Republican venality and rapacityr " became a battle-cry with
men who had fought bravely in the fore-front of the Republican

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 278

ranks. The Democratic convention met at Baltimore on the
ninth of July and accepted and strove to assimilate both Reform
platform and candidate. I believe there was also a " Straight "
Democratic convention at Louisville, Ky., which nominated
John Quincy Adams for the presidency ; and a Labor Reform
party, with its convention and candidate at Columbus, Ohio.

Then union and harmony shrieked from every raucous throat.
" The New York Tribune," powerful with Horace Greeley's good-
ness and genius, proclaimed that party lines were everywhere
rapidly disappearing ; that the Republican party was rent
asunder. Sumner and Greeley and Chase on one side, Wendell
Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison on the other, seemed to
justify the statement. The colored people, bewildered by the
fight of the giants who had been their leaders, besought
Whittier's counsel. The gentle Quaker, pained to the heart by
strife between friends equally dear, bade his questioners to fol-
low logic and conscience, but not prejudice or passion. He saw
no reason, he told them, why they should not vote for Grant,
but they need not on that account condemn Sumner who had
valiantly upheld their cause. They might vote for Greeley, but
might not on that account strike down Phillips and Garrison,
their friends.

As early as July Mr. Blaine marked out an honorable course
towards Mr. Greeley. In a speech at the Lincoln County, Maine,
Republican Convention he said : " The Republicans will make
no attack on the personal character of Mr. Greeley, for they
know nothing against him. He enjoyed Republican confidence
and admiration in an extraordinary degree until he showed
a willingness to become identified with a party which, according
to his own repeated declarations, has made an unpatriotic and
mischievous record since 1860, and is unworthy to be trusted
on a single question of interest and importance to the people of
the United States. Let it be the only indictment against Mr.
Greeley that he has consented to stand as the candidate and
representative of that party."

But from the beginning the Greeley party not only recognized
in Mr. Blaine a formidable toe, but seemed to regard him with the
bitterness dm* to a recusant, and directed against him its fiercest
fire, which was too often a foul tire. The " Tribune " carried the

274 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

war into Maine and depicted Mr. Blaine as no powerful oppo-
nent, but one hard pressed to save himself from defeat. Its
columns harbored the prediction that he would not have his
usual elegant leisure to do general missionary work as hereto-
fore. Maine was " in a state of general uprising against him."
There was to be a " continuation of the history whose first
pages were written in the Conkling-Fry conflict." The
prophets of evil admitted, in the very act of crushing him, that
he was a " brilliant politician." " No man can better wield the
elements. He is bold, aggressive, dangerous."

As time went on, Mr. Blaine's prospects grew, in the estima-
tion of the Reform candidate, more and more desperate. His
affairs assumed a very threatening aspect. It would not be strange
if he should be defeated for Congress by a decided majority. Mr.
Greeley bore his own standard into the enemy's camp, and was
received at Augusta with great enthusiasm — and some of his
advocates were entertained at Mr. Blaine's house ! Sanguine
Reformers avowed that Mr. Blaine's friends were moving heaven
and earth to save him. They were paying a hundred dollars a
vote, but he would have a large majority against him outside of
his own county. Then the majority began to topple against him
in his own county, and even while voting for him in his district
they hated him for his despotic rule. It was impossible he
should have more than 1,300 majority, all bought or frightened
into his support. It was comfortably and " generally conceded that
this is Blaine's last race, whatever may happen." Certainly, as
the " Tribune " solaced itself withal, the situation was " looking
bad for Blaine."

At the same time, and without any apparent perception of in-
consistency, the same authority declared that Mr. Blaine
" owned " his district. As the day of election drew near he
" owned the State, and was more powerful than Hamlin and
Morrill rolled into one." He had not only a general corruption
fund, but was 'himself a millionaire, "though he had come into
the State a carpet-bagger and an adventurer a few years ago,
and had borrowed the money to make his first trip to Congress."
The Reform party admitted that it had had in Maine fck magnifi-
cent opportunity for a generalship which was not forthcoming"
while Blaine's forces were " admirably organized with battalions

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 275

of speakers and tons of documents," as well as " unlimited
money." " By an organized plan and an especial fund they
brought home every voter. Incoming trains brought heavy
freights from all quarters, and they will get out the last man."

With the sweeping charge of corruption and terrorization it is
strange that even the writers should not have observed that their
specifications were of not only innocent but highly praiseworthy
and patriotic expenditures.

As early as July 6 Mr. Blaine's opinion was asked by the im-
partial news-gatherer. He answered quietly that he thought
Maine would give its customary majority for Governor Perham !

Blaine men, on the eve of election, projected a majority of
14,000, but the Greeley men pronounced their data worthless.
Yet, although the latter had early protested that Mr. Blaine's
defeat would not only be a great relief to the subjugated voters
of his district, but a greater relief to the country, the Blaine
tide was coming in so deep and strong that towards the end of
the contest they " would not be surprised if our enemies get
not only all the doubtful votes, but many which are not now
supposed to be doubtful. "

At the Lincoln County Convention in July 27, Mr. Blaine had
made a statement and a prophecy : " The opponents of President
Grant adopt the most unwise of policies when they seek to
make personal warfare upon him, to cast opprobrium upon him,
to throw calumny and suspicion upon his good name. The
strength of the President before the people is due not alone
to his brilliant military achievements, but to that vigor and
directness of character, that rugged personal integrity, which in
every relation of life have distinguished him. . .

" The result of the election will show that thousands of people
in every loyal State, who perhaps differ from General Grant in
certain views of public questions, will resent the imputations
upon his character as a personal affront to themselves. The
people of the United States feel profound gratitude to the Pres-
ident for his illustrious services to the Union during the war,
and they will not hear him maligned and insulted
without hot resentment of the wrong,"

As soon as the election returns were in Mr. Blaine telegraphed
the result:

•2li\ BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

To the President of the United States, Long Branch,, New Jersey :

We have carried the State for Governor Perham by more than fifteen
thousand majority, a net gain of five thousand on last year's vote. We
have carried every county in Maine, something we have achieved but once
before. We have carried all the Congress districts, the closest by well-
nigh two thousand majority. We have elected every Senator and chosen
more than four-fifths of the House of Representatives. Our victory is com-
plete and overwhelming at all points, and insures you more than twenty-
five thousand majority in November.

Mr. Blaine himself had a majority in everyone of the twenty-
seven towns of his county, six of which were usually Demo-
cratic. His majority in bis district was three thousand five
hundred.

And the campaign poet gayly sang :

" Greeleyism is from this time dead :
Maine has knocked it on the head."

While the presidential contest was yet in its acute stages, the
" Credit Mobilier " question was taken up by the Reform candi-
date and pushed to the front.

The Speaker and other leading members of Congress were
charged with having accepted stocks of the Union Pacific
Road as bribes from Hon. Oakes Ames, also a member of
Congress.

After the great victory of the Maine election, a month before
the national election, Mr. Greeley's paper declared roundly
and definitely, " The Speaker is proved to have received thirty-
two thousand five hundred shares of assessable stock of the
Union Pacific Railroad, and two thousand unassessable shares
of the same stock.

" Speaker Blaine is proved to have received allotments valued
at $1,625,000, and unassessed allotments valued at #295,000,
and two thousand shares more allotted but unassessed. The
two latter lots were secured by Blaine for himself, while the
thirty-two thousand five hundred shares were supposed to be
for distribution among his supporters in helping to procure the
passage of the bill." The question was repeatedly discussed in
the editorial columns, "how he became a millionaire on a
Congressman's pay." The fc' New York Tribune," founded and

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 277

edited by Horace Greeley, lowered to the level of declaring that
" Blaine had no other business than his Congressional duties, "
and that he had apparently " lived up to his salary as a Con-
gressman."

When this charge appeared definitely, Mr. Blaine was em-
ploying the elegant leisure which had been prohibited him by
prophecy in doing the general missionary work which the
Reformers had promised themselves would be impossible, owing
to their own hard pressure against him. Before a great public
assembly which he was addressing in Cleveland, Ohio, he made
answer to the charge :

" In 1862, when the act passed, I had not taken my seat in
Congress, I had not been elected to Congress, indeed I had not
been even nominated for Congress. When the act to which
the ' Tribune ' refers became a law, I was member of the Maine
Legislature and Speaker of the Lower House. I had no more to
do with Congressional legislation than the fish-wardens and
tide-waiters on the Kennebec river, and yet the ' Tribune '
asserts and repeats that for my services and influence in
Congress at the time I was a member of the Maine Legislature,
I received nearly $2,000,000 in stock of a great Erie road cor-
poration.

"And now, gentlemen, if I were to stop here after demonstrat-
ing the utter absurdity of this charge, the 'Tribune' would come
out coolly and say that Speaker Blaine had not denied it.

" Let me, then, deny it in the presence of this vast assemblage,
and deny it in the most emphatic manner. Neither in 1862, nor
in any subsequent year, did I ever receive or own, directly or
indirectly, a single dollar of stock in the Eastern Division of
the Union Pacific Railroad Company or any other division of
the Pacific Railroad Company. Nor did I ever receive a dollar,
directly or indirectly, from the sale of any stock of that com-
pany. In short, gentlemen, I stamp the whole story as not
oidy false on its face, but absurd and ridiculous. But I do not
expect to make a denial that will satisfy the ' Tribune.' A
few weeks since, when the story was started, I published ;i card
on the eve of the Maine election, saying I had never owned,
directl\ or indirectly, through myself or through another, a
single dollar of stock in the k Credit Mobilier.' The k New

278 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

York Tribune ' pronounced this denial evasive and unsatis-
factory, and said I did not deny that I had received dividends
or profits therefrom. Any candid man, I think, could see that
my card was intended to be exhaustive and to exclude all sup-
positions of ownership. Let me say now, however, that not
only did I never own a share in the ' Credit Mobilier,' but I
never received, directly or indirectly, a single penny therefrom,
in any manner or shape whatever.

"But this mania for bearing false witness against your neigh-
bor has seized Mr. Greeley personally, as well as the 4 New
York Tribune,' for I observe that in a recent speech in Penn-
sylvania he states that more than $100,000 had been expended
by the Republicans of Maine in the purchase of votes at the
recent election. Now, in the very nature of things it would be
impossible for Mr. Greeley to know that this was true, but I
know it is absolutely untrue. I am Chairman of the State
Committee, and on my order every dollar of the funds of
that committee was disbursed, and from first to last we had
in all, control of but little more than $12,000, and I fur-
ther assert that every dollar of this amount was expended
either in payment of speakers, distribution of documents and
papers, or the bringing home of absent voters. These accounts
of the State committees are kept with rigid exactness, and the
entire committee of sixteen men will testify to the truth of
what I state."

Mr. Blaine was right in presuming that Mr. Greeley would
not consider his denial satisfactory. With evil ingenuity, he
argued that Mr. Blaine "might very well contrive to say of
moneys received from Oakes Ames, that he never received them
from the 4 Credit Mobilier,' " and he " only provokes contempt
by the effort to produce the impression that the administration
only spent $12,000 in the Maine canvass. There is hardly
a politician in the. State who will not regard this as a pre-
posterous and grotesque caricature of the known admitted
truth."

And he continued to iterate and reiterate the story of
" Blaine's Credit Mobilier Funds," of " the men who bought up
Blaine," and of " Mr. Blaine as a poor man in 1862, and in 1872
reckoned by his friends and neighbors in Augusta as a million-

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 279

aire, on his salary as a Congressman," and he even fore-
shadowed his conviction and expulsion from Congress.

On the 1st of October Mr. Blaine wrote to General Thomas
Ewing from Cleveland, Ohio :

Cleveland, Ohio, October 1, 1872.

I send you herewith copies of the "New York Tribune'11 of September
28th and 30th, containing the remarkable statement that I received nearly
$2,000,000 of stock of the Union Pacific Railroad, Eastern Division, as a
bribe to myself and other members of Congress for our aid in procuring
the passage of the original act of incorporation in 1862. The charge is
based, as you will see, on a certain paper made out in May, 1863, contain-
ing a list of contracts alleged to have been made by Col. J. C. Stone and
yourself, as agents of the Leavenworth, Pawnee, & Western Railroad
Company — afterwards changed into Union Pacific, Eastern Division. You
and Colonel Stone are thus made sponsors of the charge preferred against
me by the "New York Tribune.1'

The whole accusation is so entirely groundless, and withal so extraor-
dinary, that it excites my curiosity rather than my indignation. As I
never in my life even so much as saw a certificate of stock in the railroad
company referred to, and never had a dollar's interest therein, I cannot
imagine the origin of the story. Hence I write to you for some solution
of the mystery. Colonel Stone I do not know personally, and do not think
I ever saw. As I was not a member of Congress at the time the act
referred to was passed, and had not even been nominated for Congress,
the "Tribune" charge is, of course, absurd, but I should be glad to hear
from you if there be any possible explanation of it.

The political line that separates us will not, I am sure, prevent your
recognizing the claim I have upon your friendly candor, nor will it forbid
my making public use of your reply should I deem it needful. . . .

Lancaster, Ohio, October 7, 1872.
Hon. James G. Blaine, Speaker House Representatives:

My Dear Sir: Your letter of the 1st inst., from Cleveland, was re-
ceived by me yesterday on returning home after an absence of ten days.
I had previously seen the " New York Tribunes" of 28th and 30th Septem-
ber, in which is published, with editorial comments, what purports to be
a list (made by Gen. J. C. Stone, of Leavenworth, Kansas, dated May,
1863) of contracts alleged to have been made by him and myself jointly
as officers of the Leavenworth, Pawnee, & Western Railroad Company
(afterwards the Union Pacific Railroad, Eastern Division, and now the
Kansas Pacific) to procure the passage of the original Pacific Railroad law
of 1862.

On this list your name is said to appear, first as the recipient of $1,920,000
of the stock of that company, and a second time as the recipient of $10,000
of the stock. And on the faith of these entries you are accused of having

280 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

taken a bribe to aid in procuring the passage of the law of 1862, and also
of having acted as agent of the company in using a large part of its stock
to corrupt other members of Congress.

So far as the charge imputes to you personal corruption in office, it is
conclusively disproved by public records accessible to all, which show that
you did not enter Congress for nearly a year and a half after the law re-
ferred to' was passed. And as to the other branch of the charge, my
general knowledge of the business of the company, and especially my
intimacy with you, make it certain that you could not have had any con-
tract with the company without my knowing the fact ; and I unhesitatingly
declare that you were not in any manner, or at any time, directly or in-
directly, employed by the company, or in any way interested in its affairs
as stockholder, agent, or otherwise, in any capacity whatever.

Your brother, J. E. Blaine, at that time Clerk of the District Court at
Leavenworth, and one of the early settlers of Kansas, was the owner of
$10,000 of the stock of the Leavenworth, Pawnee, & Western Railroad
Company, which, indeed, was held very generally among influential men
of all parties along the line of the road in Kansas. But that was in 1861
or 1862 — and a considerable period before you were even nominated for
your first term in Congress. Beyond that, there never was at any time
the remotest interest in the company held by any of your family. The
entry of $1,920,000 of stock opposite the name of " Blaine" was therefore
wholly a fiction or a blunder, and the grave imputations on your character
and on that of the officers of the company are utterly groundless and with-
out a shadow of justification.

I know nothing whatever of the list alleged to have been furnished by
General Stone. It purports to have been prepared nearly a year after the
act had been passed, long after I had entered the military service, and more
than six months before you first took your seat in Congress. I am in-
formed that General Stone is now in Europe. He will doubtless take
occasion, when he learns of these charges, to speak for himself about them.
So far as my knowledge of the affairs of the company goes, I deliberately
assert that it never, by any of its officers, agents, or attorneys, made any
contract, the proceeds of which there was good reason to believe were to
be in any manner participated in by any member of Congress or other
public officer.

Very truly yours,

Thomas Eaving, Jr.

The " Tribune " strove to disguise its defeat under " A case
of brothers." But it was not a case of brothers. It was no
case at all. Neither Speaker Blaine nor his brother J. E. Blaine
had done what the " Tribune " alleged that Speaker Blaine was
proved to have done ; but the " Tribune " did admit that Gen-
eral Ewing's explanation seemed entirely satisfactory and trust-

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 281

worthy. It took u pleasure, therefore, in withdrawing in the
promptest and fullest manner the imputations upon Mr. Blaine,5'
regarding his immense wealth from that source, but not those
" equally damaging imputations put upon him by Oakes Ames
and Colonel McComb."

The heaviest gun having thus been spiked, the Credit Mobilier
cannonade against Mi*. Blaine ceased, except when a few
days before the election, in sullen response to Mr. Blaine's
" repeating for the thirtieth or fortieth time old jokes about
Dundreary," the equally old story of Mr. Blaine's " having no
other occupation and living up to his salary " was repeated.

One can imagine how effectively Mr. Blaine would apply
before great popular gatherings the Dundreary farce, " If you
had a brother would he like cheese ? "

The national election came and brought to Mr. Greeley over-
whelming defeat, to President Grant triumphant reelection.
For the twenty-five thousand majority which Mr. Blaine prom-
ised, Maine gave the President thirty thousand. New York, his
own State, went heavily against Mr. Greeley. On November 5
the Tribune admitted that there was " scarcely a parallel to
the completeness of the rout and the triumph." Every Northern
State and several Southern States were in the Republican
column.

Before the month of the election closed Mr. Greeley died.
His friends and his opponents, many of whom were his
warmest admirers, the men who had maligned him and the
men whom he had maligned, stood shocked, sorrowful, silent,
above his tragic grave. His successful rival, the President
of the United States, grieved and hurt beyond words by the
attacks of the campaign, paid the tribute of national respect
at his funeral. The beloved poet Whittier, anguished by the
dissensions which had shadowed the last days of the great
editor, and now doubly anguished by his premature death,
could rejoice only, but more significantly perhaps than he
meant, that he had himself "been preserved from saying one
word through partisan zeal or difference of opinion which
could add bitterness to his life."

By his message, completed probably before Mr. Greeley's
death, though read in Congress afterwards but before his

282 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

burial, the President showed how deeply the iron had
entered his soul. Against the habit of his life he spoke of
himself as the subject of "abuse and slander scarcely ever
equalled in political history."

The " Tribune," loyal to its dead founder, suggested that
" it would have been a most graceful act in the victor in that
contest to have forgotten for a moment his petty griefs and laid
on the grave of his dead rival a wreath of pleasant memories."

But to the soldier words were serious things. He could not
comprehend the newspaper use of them as graceful gestures, or
campaign methods, or even funereal wreaths. Neither could
the newspaper understand that an honest man who uses words
seriously cannot find himself branded as a thief without ex-
periencing a grief that is in no sense petty. It was his victory
which demonstrated that the President's grief was not petty, —
not vexation over disappointment, but a moral and righteous
resentment which no success could quench, — only forgiveness
upon repentance.

The beauty and beneficence of his life is Mr. Greeley's noble
legacy to his country ; but the evil that men do, no less than
the good, lives after them, however gladly we would close our
eyes to the bitter harvest. Let it be remembered only that
we may rise on stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher
things.

The accused men had agreed to demand an investigation, and
upon the reassembling of Congress, the Speaker called a Dem-
ocrat to the chair, and, on the floor of the House, moved for the
appointment of a Committee of Investigation by the Democratic
Chairman pro tern., upon the " Credit Mobilier " charges. The
investigation developed that Mr. Blaine held none of the stock.
He took care, however, to receive no false advantage from the
exemption. While testifying that Mr. Ames had offered him
the stock, and that he had declined it, he was explicit and em-
phatic in affirming also that he attributed no wrong to Mr.
Ames in offering it, no credit to himself in refusing it, and, by
implication, no fault to those who had accepted it.

" I beg to say," he testified, " in justice to Mr. Ames, but more
especially in justice to myself, that it never once occurred to me

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 283

that he was trying to bribe me or in any way influence my vote
or action as a representative. I understood him to say that he
was the owner of more of the stock than he wished to carry,
and was offering some of it to friends at cost and interest to
him, a slight advance over par value. The amount offered
me was very small and made little impression on my mind,
indeed was well-nigh forgotten until recalled by the incidents
which led to this investigation." Mr. Ames testified to the
same effect, that Mr. Blaine never held any stock, or got any
advantage from " Credit Mobilier," " except abuse on its
account."

On the 8th of January, 1873, the " Tribune " made its final
recession, and though cause and consequence, accident and de-
sign, are rather jumbled, the recession is sufficiently explicit:

" We have no hestitation in saying that the record of the
Speaker in connection with this affair seems to be absolutely
clear, and it is a great satisfaction to us to be able to say it
— the greater since, from the accidental fact of his name head-
ing McComb's list, he has had to bear the brunt of the general
attack upon the whole business."

One of those men whose role in politics is, " Follow my
leader," thought he saw a way to success where the " Tribune "
had achieved a failure, and introduced a resolution for another
investigation on a different line of road, in Iowa, and appeared
before the Investigating Committee as prosecuting witness.

Mr. Blaine also appeared promptly before the Investigating
Committee, and remarking that he saw Mr. Stevenson, who had
introduced the resolution, present he would like Mr. Stevenson
to state the facts on which he based his resolution.

" The resolution alleges so and so. I want something to speak
to, and therefore request that Mr. Stevenson be sworn."

Mr. Stevenson was sworn, and affirmed that Mr. Oakes Ames
informed him that certain members of the House, including Mr.
Allison, Mr. Blaine, and others, were interested in this railroad.

Mr. Blaine. — Did you ever say to any one that you
thought you had caught the Speaker ?

Mr. STEVENSON. — I don't remember. .

Speaker Blaine. — Did you have such a conversation with
Senator Stevenson, of Kentucky?

284 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Mr. Stevenson. — I don't remember. I had a conversation
with him on the subject.

Speaker Blaine. — And you said, " I have caught the
Speaker? "

Mr. Stevenson. — Not in that rough way. I may have
mentioned that I had something that would implicate the
Speaker in land grants.

Speaker Blaine. — Do you think your controlling motive
was the public good, or to catch the Speaker ?

Mr. Stevenson. — My object was to catch the Speaker, if he
was involved in this road, and I said further, that if the Speaker
of the House was engaged in such transactions, it was equal to
dealing in " Credit Mobilier " stock.

Naturally, with the accused investigating and cross-examining
the accuser, the investigation developed into a farce, and the
crowded committee-room became the scene of almost tumultu-
ous amusement. Mr. Blaine at length gave the true and unim-
portant story of his connection with the road, though protesting
that he was not under the smallest obligation to do so.

" The Iowa Falls and Sioux City Road never received an acre
of land by a direct act of Congress. The State of Iowa gave to
the company the remnant of the old land grant to the State in
1856. The road was built by a contracting company entirely
for cash. In this contracting company my particular and highly
valued friends, Messrs. A. & P. Coburn, the wealthiest men in
Maine, and as good men as ever lived, took $ 200,000 of stock,
and paid their assessments in hard cash. . . . The road
was finished to the last rail and spike, by the payment of cash
down. ... In January last, just a year ago, in settling up
some business . with the Messrs. Coburn, I took from them a
quantity of the stock of this road, for which I paid about sixty
in cash. That was the first of my ownership in the road. I
hold the stock in my own name, and the transaction is one
which Congress, "in my judgment, is no more called on to in-
vestigate than it would be to inquire into the weekly expenses
of my household. But at the same time I wish the committee
to understand that I make this explanation without the slight-
est reluctance."

Mr. Stevenson, apparently loath to be convinced — if one may

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 285

use Mr. Lincoln's phrase — that his rat-hole was not worth
watching, asked the Speaker as to the nature of his transactions
with the Messrs. Coburn.

" Do you mean in regard to this matter, or timber land in
Maine, or coal land in Pennsylvania ? If you would like an
interest in this railroad, Mr. Stevenson, I will sell it to you at a
slight advance."

As Mr. Blaine had previously declared that ever since he had
bought the shares he had been living in hope that they wTould
draw a dividend, but up to this time in vain, the proffer was
doubly provocative of laughter. Mr. Stevenson preferred to
wait till he was out of Congress, and Mr. Blaine agreed then
and there to " take it all off your hands when you are re-
elected."

Mr. Oakes Ames testified that he told Mr. Stevenson he had
got hold of the wrong road — that he thought he had sold some
bonds of the Sioux road to Mr. Blaine — thought he had sold
him $5,000, but could not remember.

" Ask me, Mr. Stevenson," prompted Mr. Blaine, " I can tell
you. I bought $6,000 of bonds from Mr. Ames and paid him
eighty cents on the dollar. At another time, in Boston, $15,000
at eighty cents on the dollar. I turned them in to the Messrs.
Coburn, partly at one price, partly another — eighty-five per
cent., ninety per cent. My business with the Messrs. Coburn is
very large."

" Is there anything else you want to know ? " inquired Mr.
Ames, after having mentioned his various railroads.

" I have no personal interest," replied the badgered prosecu-
tor. " The committee required me to come here." — " But,"
rejoined Mr. Ames, " the committee did not require you to go
into all these things outside of the resolution. I never knew
that it was a crime to build a railroad until this investigation
commenced, and I am not satisfied of it now."

The investigation brought great distress to worthy members,
great anxiety and anguish to their wives and families. Mr.
Blaine was indefatigable in defending and advising those who
were the objects of attack — an attack made with so much
vigor and with such assumption of guilt, that even the elect
who were not business adepts were deceived for a moment

286 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

into believing themselves to have committed sin without know-
ing it, and men faltered before the thought who had not faltered
before the cannon's mouth when their country was endangered,
while men who were familiar with business never quickened
step or shortened breath. " Sam Hooper," of Boston, it used
to be said, walked daily back and forth before the Speaker's
chair, with his pockets stuffed full of Credit Mobilier stock, a
single dividend bringing $100,000, not only unharmed, but
unassailed and undisturbed ; and Bingham, of Ohio, when asked
if he had any, shouted, " Yes, and only wished he had ten times
more," — and him, too, the bullets carefully passed by on the
other side ; but gentle and scholarly men, in the natural timidity
of their unwontedness, suffered many a pang, and the door-bell
sometimes rang Mr. Blaine from his bed at midnight to counsel
and console. I have seldom seen a more pathetic sight than that
of Oakes Ames, — a man of honored ancestry and stainless name,
the modest hero of the great Pacific Railroad, the man whose
energy had wrenched it from failure when to a less patriotic
insight the nation itself seemed a failure, and had made its
final link a guaranty of national peace and union, — sitting
silent, stunned into immobility before Mr. Blaine's library fire
with his head bowed on his breast, while the younger man,
alert and intent, applied himself indefatigably in and out of the
house, arranging for his defence and for that of the other men
who were implicated with him and who were equally guiltless
of bribery. Let it be repeated and remembered that the man
who bent his hoary head to calumny and contumely was the
man whose faith in the continuance of the Union, whose
unfaltering courage and whose imperial resources were proved
by his assumption of the struggling, failing road in the depth
of the war, and by his simple, dogged, glorious persistency till
the last golden spike was driven, and the world beheld the mar-
riage of the Eastern and Western shores of the Great Republic
amid shoutings of" Grace, grace unto it ! "

How futile it all seemed to the people after the panic was over
appears in the fact that the member of Congress who, by reason
of his conspicuousness and his sensitiveness, perhaps, suffered
most, received afterwards a prompt reelection by the people of
his own district to the House of Representatives, a triumphant

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 287

election by the people of his State to the Senate, and by the
people of the whole Nation to the presidency of the United
States.

How superficial was the morality, how valueless was the
judgment that condemned these men, a single incident shows.
Upon the conclusion of the investigation, and the censure of
Mr. Ames and Mr. Brooks before the bar of the House, the
leading religious newspaper of Mr. Ames' own State found
" original sin in the thing itself, let alone all the wickedness
which it drew after it. . . .

" We see not how any healthy soul could fail at once to de-
tect the intention of bribery in Mr. Ames and the consent to
be bribed on the part of those who became the recipients of its
stock. . . . On the whole, then, it would seem that the re-
port is well as far as it goes, but . . . obviously stops short
of exhausting the matter ; that Messrs. Brooks and Ames
deserve the ignominy which is advised for them ; and that
the whole subject needs deeper ploughing than it has yet
received."

A few weeks afterwards Mr. Ames returned to his home in
North Easton, and the friends and neighbors among whom he
had spent his honored and useful life ministered unto him a
triumphant entrance ; and then the columns of the same religious
journal found "nothing that anybody ought to object to, or that
was in any sense improper in the Credit Mobilier itself, or in
any of his [Mr. Ames'] actions in regard to it. We think
Hon. Marshall P. Wilder hit the nail on the head in his excel-
lent speech the other day in Salem, where he introduced Mr.
Ames into a long list of the most eminent and useful sons
of Massachusetts — with Hancock, Franklin, Morse, Field,
and Peabody, warmly ascribing all honor to his name, to
whose indomitable energy and perseverance we are indebted
more than to any other man for opening up across this con-
tinent a great highway for nations in all coming time."

On the 8th of May Oakes Ames died, and his sons bore
him to his burial, and all the community lamented over him.

Mr. James Brooks had already preceded him to the unheard
and unseen world, and the saddest chapter of the "Credit
Mobilier" was closed — closed with the death of three men,

288 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

accuser and accused, while the man chiefly aimed at was not
even hit.

If there is a moral to the story it has yet to be told. We only
know it is the way of God in the evolution of man.

The nearest approach to a moral is hinted in The " Tribune "
two years afterwards :

" There were laid before us yesterday certain startling docu-
ments gravely affecting high officials. The publication of
them seems to us a clear duty; but we are unwilling to permit
our columns to be used in promulgating papers that must bring
such discredit upon the American name, while there is the re-
motest possibility of our being able to establish their lack of
authenticity. We have, therefore, set on foot a thorough in-
vestigation "... which established the lack of authenticity,
and the papers remained unpublished.

When issues are vital, great men forge to the front by natu-
ral fitness, smaller men are exalted to their noblest moods,
and the nation is fused to one bent and purpose. The crisis
passes, and men relapse into self-seeking. Fault-finding seems
a higher work than well-doing. Men who are near the head
see no reason why they are not at the head, except the art-
fulness and arrogance of their leaders; and, unable to rise
farther, they seek to achieve the desired primacy by pulling the
primates down. Hence the scandal and scum of political life
in its sluggish phases, the small questions agitated as if they
were great, the sucking doves essaying to roar like raging lions,
the placid pool of ordinary life lashed into a foaming sea of
corruption. But when real issues are again in question, human
nature rises again to meet them, casts off its inhumanities, and
exalts itself anew in a glorious, if transient, transformation.
Therefore we live.

While excitement was still at fever heat, Mr. Blaine found
occasion to take the floor to secure a pension for a widow.
General Sherman told the story years before Mr. Blaine's death :

" I was seated in my office at the old War Department, now
destroyed and replaced by a better one, when my orderly pro-
duced the card of ' Mrs. Wood,' widow of the late Assistant
Surgeon-General, U.S.A. Of course I instructed him to show
the lady in. She was deeply veiled, and without unveiling

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 289

handed me a letter in the familiar handwriting of the venerable
Gen. David Hunter, asking me to befriend t the bearer.' Cast-
ing my eyes over it I exclaimed, 4 What ! are you the widow of
my old Surgeon-General Wood and the daughter of Gen.
Zachary Taylor ? ' — 4 Yes,' she answered, raised her veil, and
revealed her features, then of an old lady, but beyond question
the daughter of Gen. Zachary Taylor. 4 Dear Mrs. Wood, what
does this mean ? What can I do for you ? ' She replied, 'I tlo
not know, but General Hunter, our steadfast friend, has sent
me to you,' and she went on to explain : *• When my husband
died in 1869 I supposed I had estate enough to satisfy my
moderate wants. I went to Louisiana, took possession of the
old sugar plantation, collected a few of the old slaves with
promises of wages or shares, tried to make a living, but every-
thing was out of joint. I then tried a lease with no better
success. Now my daughter writes me from Austria that she is
very sick, and begs me to come to her. General Sherman,' I
must go to my daughter, and I have not a cent. My old friends
are all dead, and I know not what to do.' I naturally inquired
how much money was necessary. She said a thousand dollars.
I had not the money. General Hunter had not the money.
' How about your pension ? ' — ' When my husband died, after
forty-four years of faithful service in the Florida war, in the
Mexican war, and the great civil war, 1 thought 1 could take
care of myself, and never asked for a pension, but now my child
calls to me from abroad.' — 4 Mrs. Wood, I am sure we can easily
make up a case under the General Pension Law, which will
give you $30 a month, but it can only date from the time of
your formal application.' — ' What good will that do me ? ' she
exclaimed, ' my daughter is calling for me now! My passage
across the ocean will cost #120, and the incidental expenses
afterward will run up to a full thousand.' After a few moments'
thought, I said, ' Mrs. Wood, we must get a special bill, put-
ting your name on the same list with that of Mrs. General
Worth, Mrs. General Sumner, and others, and have this special
pension to date back to your husband's death, viz., March 28,
1869. This will require an Act of Congress. What member
of that body do you know from Louisiana ? ' — ' Alas, none' —
4 What member from Kentucky ? ' — ' Not one.' — ' Do you know

290 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

anybody in Congress ? ' — ' Not a single member.' — ' Don't you
know Mr. Blaine ? He is Speaker of the House, a fellow of
infinite wit and of unbounded generosity ? ' No, she had never
met Mr. Blaine. ' Now, my dear Mrs. Wood, can you meet me
this afternoon at the Speaker's room, say at four P.M., punct-
ually?'— 'I will do anything,' she answered, 'that you advise.'
— ' Then meet me at the Speaker's room, south wing of the
Capitol, at four o'clock this evening.' Of course she did.

" I was there ahead of time, sent my card to Mr. Speaker
Blaine, who was in his chair presiding over a noisy House, but
who, as always, responded quickly to my call. In a few words
I explained the whole case, and we went together to the
Speaker's room across the hall, behind the ' chair,' where sat
the lady, closely veiled. No courtier since the days of Charle-
magne ever approached a lady with more delicacy and grace
than did Mr. Speaker Blaine the afflicted woman. After a few
words of inquiry and explanation, Blaine continued : " Your
father was the first man I ever shouted for as President, and for
you, his daughter, I will do all a man can in this complicated
Government. I will make your case my own. Don't leave
this city till you hear from me.' Finding I had touched the
proper chord of his generous nature, I advised Mrs. Wood to
return to General Hunter's and await the result. Blaine
escorted her to the stairway with many friendly expressions,
and returned to the Speaker's chair.

" I did not remain, but learned from a friend afterwards the
sequel. Blaine sat in his chair about an hour, giving attention
to the business of the House, occasionally scribbling on a bit of
paper, and when a lull occurred he called some member to take
his place, and Walked straight to Mr. Holman, the ' Universal
Objector,' saying : ' Holman, I have a little matter of great
interest which I want to rush through ; please don't " object." ' — -
'What is it?' — 'A special pension for the widow of Surgeon
Wood, the daughter of Gen. Zachary Taylor.' — 'Is it all
right ? ' — 'Of course it is all right, and every American should
blush that this thing could be.' — 'Well,' said Holman, 'go
ahead ; I will be out of the way, in the cloak-room.' Watching
his opportunity, James G. Blaine, as a member of Congress for
Maine, got the eye and ear of the acting Speaker, made one of

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 291

his most eloquent and beautiful speeches, introduced his little
bill for the pension of Mrs. Wood for $50 a month, to date back
to the time of Surgeon Wood's death (about four years), which
would give her about $ 2,400 arrears and $600 a year for life. It
was rushed through the House by unanimous consent, and
Blaine followed it through to the Senate and to the President,
where it became a law, and this most deserving lady was en-
abled to go to Austria to be with her daughter in her illness.
I understand that both are now dead, and that the overflowing
Treasury of the United States is no longer taxed by this pen-
sion, but I must rescue from oblivion the memory of this pure
act of unrecorded benevolence."

General Sherman's mode of justifying himself for printing
the story without Mr. Blaine's permission, and Mr. Blaine's
mode of presenting the case to Congress, are equally character-
istic. " Pensions," said the straightforward splendid old soldier,
" pensions are not always matters of legal contract, but of
charity, wmich blesses him who gives as well as receives ; and
I, of all men, fully recognize the difficulty of making pen-
sions subject to the tender feelings of an executive officer ; but
when I discover an instance illustrating the genuine feeling
no one should object to my recording it, and printing it if
need be."

Mr. Blaine's speech, to which General Sherman referred,
was brief: "A few moments since I had an interview in
my parlor which deeply touched me. It was with the
widow of the late Robert C. Wood, late Assistant Surgeon
General in the Army of the United States. This lady is
the daughter of the late Major-General Zachary Taylor, Presi-
dent of the United States. She presented a petition, which I
will not have even read or placed on the files of the House, be-
cause it discloses a fact which ought not to exist — that the
daughter of Zachary Taylor needs aid in any form. I ventured
to assure her when she put her petition in my hands, and asked
me to take charge of it, that I did not believe there would be a
dissenting voice in the Congress of the United States upon a
proposition to grant her a pension suitable to her rank, and
to the memory of her great and honored father. I ask unani-
mous consent to introduce for consideration at this time a bill

292 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

for her relief." Needless to say, unanimous consent was
given, the bill was received, read a first and second time, en-
grossed, read a third time, and passed unanimously and im-
mediately.

Another bill, which made a stir quite out of proportion to
its importance or its iniquity was ignominiously dubbed the
" Salary Grab Bill." The objectionable point was that Congress-
men not only raised their own salaries, but made the increase
go back and cover the whole term of the Congress then near
closing. Mr. Blaine, as soon as the measure was proposed, dis-
cerned its weakness, and opposed the bill. When he saw that it
was about to be passed, he simply withdrew himself from its
operation by placing the Speaker alongside the Vice-President
and the Cabinet, upon whose salaries the bill was not to take
effect until after the Fourth of March, and asked unanimous
consent to put in " the word c hereafter,' to follow the words
4 shall receive.' This will affect whoever shall be Speaker of
the House of Representatives hereafter, and does not affect the
Speaker of this House, but leaves him upon the same plane
with the Vice-President and Cabinet officers, upon the salary
as before adjusted."

It can hardly be said that unanimous consent was given, for
the Speaker pushed his matter through so swiftly that members
hardly knew what he was doing till too late for effective dissent.
One man was quick enough to object and another sprang to his
feet, but by high-handed usurpation of authority, Mr. Blaine
took his pen and wrote the " hereafter " into the text of the bill
before him and declared the amendment adopted !

Mr. Hale, of Maine, speaking afterwards of the great unpopu-
larity of the bill, illustrated it with humorous solemnity: "I
swear, if I travelled by the railroad as far as it would take me,
and then had to take the stage-coach, and then go horse-back,
and then walk, and then follow a squirrel-track in the woods,
and at the end of that came on a man chopping a log — what-
ever he did not know he would know all about the salary-grab
and be the maddest man of all ! "

When, near the close of a long session, the Speaker wished
the pages to have a full month's pay for little more than a half
month's work, thinking their unwearied fidelity through day

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 293

and night service had richly earned it, he put and carried the
motion, as one member expressed it, " heels over head,"
and " The Chair hears no objection," by giving no time to
hear it.

When a vote was to be counted, he would stand erect, hold-
ing the gavel by its head and pointing the handle at each
standing member before him, turning from the extreme right
to the extreme left as he counted, and the motion of the gavel
was like chain-lightning. If challenged to explain his dynamics
consistently with his mathematics, he would reply, laughing,
" The Speaker knows how to count."

He never made a point of small things. No such honesty as
dividing his official from his personal correspondence ever com-
plicated his use of the frank. Making a rapid mental calcula-
tion, he placed the franking privilege as a matter of three
hundred dollars a year to each member and held that it was not
worth talking about one way or the other. If suspicion or
odium clung to it, and the people wanted it abolished, abolish
it, — it was not worth defence or delay ; but until it was
abolished, he used it freely, franking his own letters and letters
of friends who happened to be under his roof, or under whose
roof he happened to be, as has been from the foundation of the
frank, and just as freely as he used his purchased postage stamps
after the frank was abolished.

In the spring of 1873 Mr. Blaine made a journey to Cali-
fornia. Waiting in Washington for the Maine snows to be re-
duced to two feet deep on a level, according to his own account,
he was not able to leave Augusta till the ninth of May, which gave
too little time for the most desirable tour. He wished Emmons
to join the customary " town-meeting," and consulted with his
tutor, Mr. Waterhouse, who replied :

I do not think ho is overworked. He is studying assiduously, to be
sure. lie must do that to enter Harvard well, and nothing short of enter-
ing well would satisfy his desire. During his stay in Newton, Emmons
has, in attention to study, and in conduct generally, done his duty, and done
it in a manner that deserves high praise. I find no better boys anywhere
than he is. I do not indeed regard him as belonging to that class of boys
eulogized in the Sunday-school books, who attain sanctification in early
youth. He is not a religious phenomenon. But his morale, like his

294 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

jyhysique, is emphatically healthy. He is sound in the nobler parts. I
would trust him a good deal farther than I would most of the youthful
saints. Emmons has in him the elements of first-rate scholarship and a
fund of practical sense quite remarkable in one so young. To worst him
by an examination paper, or to fool him into selling a pony for a gross of
green spectacles, would be rather a difficult matter. I expect great things
of him. And, though the state of his health may not demand it, I am
strongly in favor of his taking the California trip.

Mr. Blaine was earnestly solicited to extend his visit to Ore-
gon with the promise to " . . . pnt you on the top shelf of
comfort, consideration, and attention Avhile you are in Oregon
and on the Sound.

. " You should also see the wonderful timber of the
Puget Sound Basin, compared with which the forests of Maine
are but nurseries of telegraph poles."

But he had already passed the time limits and was obliged to
leave Oregon for another day, which never came. But the
warmth of his reception in California and the pleasures of the
journey and the visit remained with him a grateful memory.

To Walker:

Washington, January 8, 1872.

. . . To my great surprise, we found ourselves, our children, and our
bundles, at the Worcester depot in ample season. For help, Emmons was
a host in himself. His father, good as he is, is not better. He wanted
dreadfully to go to Washington, but at the sleeping-car we separated —
he to return to Andover. . . . For the afternoon Judge Kelly brought
himself into the midst of our squalor, a huge brown paper parcel in
his hand, inquiring, in his magnificent voice, if we were Pennsylvanians
enough to love doughnuts. ... At five we reached Washington, were
quite fortunate in regard to company, only a few gentlemen finding us
out.

From Walker :

Paris, January 30, 1872.

. . . Went to a" little American restaurant. "Every tiling was very
small, but very clean, and they brought up such nice buckwheat cakes, that I
thought I would taste them. Ended by eating nine, and a large plate of
pumpkin pie ; at which I was very much rejoiced, as proving that I have
not entirely forgotten how to eat, notwithstanding my long course on French
cookery.

. . . This morning have finished in German the book which I was
learning by heart, and begin to feel now that I really know something

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 295

about German. Shall study very hard on it for the next two months. In
French I am quite well up. Don't find myself at all embarrassed in con-
versation, and can write almost without fault, though not, of course, like a
Frenchman, which I never shall do. . . . Father's forty-second birth-
day was Wednesday. I trust that I may live to see the double, the eighty-
fourth. Whenever I think of you, it always seems as though I had a very
young father, for I see many men of forty, and they always seem like very
young men to me. Then again, not having yet got to my majority, I feel
very young still myself. When I am twenty-one and through college, if
(D.V.) that ever happens, I suppose I shall feel so old, that father will
seem like a patriarch.

Well, I long very much to get home next year to go into college, for
until I am through I seem to be nothing more than a working, studying
zero, perhaps useful, like zero, in making up a sum, but nothing by and of
myself.

. . . Ever since I have been in Paris Mrs. Washburn has made her
house like a home ; that is, as much like a home as any stranger's house
could be, and for it I feel very much indebted to one of the kindest-
hearted women I have ever seen.

Paris, February, 1872.
. . . I was exceedingly worried, in reading the papers, to find that
father was absent from Congress two or three days on account of the
illness of Q. I have still a great deal of anxiety. My only solace is that
if the worst had happened, you would probably have telegraphed to me.

To Walker :

Washington, February 18, 1872.

. . . Here the door-bell rings. Douglass, who would, to quote
Chai'les Lamb, cast a damper over a funeral, answers it. Some one to see
the Speaker. Douglass discreetly answers that indeed he does not know
whether Mr. Blaine is home or not — if the gentleman will walk into the
parlor, he will see. Enter gentleman, and up-stairs Douglass. Returning,
he announces that Mr. Blaine has gone up to General Sherman's. A fib
with a circumstance, and Douglass, coming through the library where Mr.
Sherman and I are writing says he shall never get to heaven in this
world, and vanishes looking exceedingly pleased (for him) at the prospect.
Whereupon Mr. Sherman says to me in an aside, that he does not see what
his idea of heaven in this world can be. The day is quite pleasant. Father,
C, M., and I have been to our own church. Had an exceedingly earnest
and interesting sermon on missions in Turkey, — as interesting as a book
of travels. . . . Friday we had our presidential dinner. Father wanted
to defer it till Emmons came, but I could not let it overhang so long.
The President talked incessantly about himself. I have a certain sympathy
with him, for I think him an honest man, and no doubt he feels dread-
fully assailed. . . . After the dinner was over and the guests had
departed, father, Miss D., and myself went to the Arlington to attend the

296 BIOGRAPHY OF 7AMES G. BLAINE.

reception of the Japanese Minister. I went out to supper with the Minis-
ter himself, a lively little Jap, rather taller than the average of his coun-
trymen, speaking English perfectly well. They, the Japs, seem to be
perfectly delighted at seeing so many ladies. Mrs. Schurz said when she
left M. Mori was standing motionless, his arm tight round a young lady's
waist. Imagine it! In the morning I was at the Capitol. I heard Mr.
Beck reply to Mr. Brownlow, a personal explanation, interesting to me
because of the perfectly impartial ruling of your father, though to do it,
he had to decide against Mr. Stevenson, Mr. Hale, and Mr. Garfield.
. . . Q. is fast getting well. He hears now almost as well as ever.
It is very interesting to see the past come back to him. Sometimes things
rush in on him, and he is so eager, he cannot make himself understood.
Yesterday morning, I heard him say to Annie who was dressing him,
"Oh, Annie, you mustn't say naughty words, you'll go to jail, sir, if you
say bad words, W. F. says ' it's a fraud.1 " — "A fraud," says Annie, " what's
a fraud ? " — " Why, you know, ' afrod a- would a-wooing go.' " When we
were coming on, A. T. was in the car, and was lamenting that W. F. was so
addicted to slang — everything with him was " it's a fraud." Q. heard him
and was very much impressed at the time. The phrase was so suggestive
of Emmons. When Annie said " dreadful," he felt like upbraiding her, and
as soon as he commenced, the whole reprehensible conduct of W. F. came
back, and then I discovered the queer association of ideas. I shall leave
your father to write you about Hanover. I am not really competent to
advise. Whatever he and you decide on will be right. Only I want you
to make the acquisition of French, and I want you at home. The Presi-
dent tells me that his son, who is at Harvard, intends going to Germany to
spend his third year. It seems they allow the third year to be passed in
Germany, the student to retain his class rank on his return, provided he
can pass the requisite examination, and meanwhile the boy picks up Ger-
man. . . . We get down to breakfast soon after nine. Father sits
down in his seat and at once proceeds to bury himself in newspapers.
Douglass, the slow, gradually works round among the mutton chops, the
grits, the butter, the apples, the ham, and the drinkables, and by the
time everything is as cold as a stone, eating begins. Father does not even
offer the steak. As we take three morning papers and the mail is always
large, you can imagine how social we are. I dare not abandon the chil-
dren, so while C. and the pater satisfy their hungry minds, I look out for
the hungry little folks, — and when I and they are through the readers
wake up and are ready to be waited on. Just as we were getting through
this morning, somebody or other remembered our dinner party of to-day,
and then it was discovered that no orders had been given for the dinner,
that the bill of fare had not even been made out. Such an explosion as at
once followed ! However, everything is all straightened out now.

March 3, 1872.
. . . To-morrow, at twelve, I go to the White House to assist in the
formal reception of the Japanese. Mrs. Fish has been in twice about it

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 297

to-day already, Mr. Fish once. The most punctilious arrangements are
made for the ceremony. As it is the first ambassador this country has
ever received, it behooves us to be particular. Your father puts some one
in the chair and then hastens down himself to assist in the ceremonies.
All the ladies are in full dress morning costumes, no bonnets. In the
evening I go to the opera to hear Parepa in " Figaro.1' Sunday evening I
go to Masonic Temple to assist in another reception of the Japs. Mrs. Fish,
wife of Secretary of State ; Mrs. Colfax, wife of President of Senate; Mrs.
Blaine, wife of Speaker of the House ; and Mrs. Banks, wife of Chairman
of Committee of Foreign Affairs, are the ladies to receive. Wednesday I
have a reception and in the evening go to the opera again to hear Parepa.
Thursday we are engaged at the Bristows, and Saturday afternoon father
to the matinee. . . . Thursday afternoon — I am just up from down
town, where I have been buying a little frippery for to-night. I went to
the White House yesterday, as I anticipated. The ceremonies were all
gone through with, according to programme. The President and Cabinet
and a few officers received the chief of the Japanese dignitaries, and then
they were brought into the blue room and presented to Mrs. Grant and her
ladies. Mrs. Grant had Mrs. Colfax on her right, myself on the left. I
was quite unprepared for the womanliness and cordiality and thoroughly
unaffected kindliness of Mrs. Grant's reception of them. I could not have
done half so well. Fortunately I knew Mr. Mori, so that I could break
the dead spell a little. Another thing also helped me personally very much.
The chief interpreter turned out to be a young Mr. Rice, son of Elisha,
and nephew of Judge Rice, who went from Augusta to Japan at the age of
ten. Of course he got introduced to me, and we had a great deal to talk
about, to the evident admiration of our Asiatic friends, who looked on with
longing eyes. In the evening, took a carriage and went to Parepa's opera.
The singing and acting were superb. . . . Father opened the door to
us at our first summons. The poor man had lost Parepa and had nothing
to compensate. Over one hundred twenty-five guests sat down to the
dinner, in a room built over a stable. Mr. Robeson seated between
two Japanese dignitaries, neither of whom, of course, could speak one
English word. The dinner, father said, seemed to be served by the acre,
and after standing it as long as he could, he concluded to slip out. As
soon as they saw your father start, Mr. Voorhees and Mr. Beck also rose,
and I should not be surprised to hear that quite a stampede then com-
menced, but, afraid of the consequences, our father beat a hasty retreat
home. ... I assisted at the reception last night. Mrs. Colfax, I, Mrs.
Fish, and Mrs. Banks. When supper was announced, Iwakura went first,
having on his right arm Mrs. Colfax, the Vice-President on his left.
Then came Minister Mori, Mrs. Fish and your father on either arm. Then
the second ambassador, I on his right arm, Secretary Fish on his left.
Who came after I know not, every faculty of mine being absorbed in
analyzing my feelings — so curious. Not one word could my poor Asiatic
understand of my language, and Mr. Fish, having the whole diplomatique
corps to keep straight, was continually looking back and calling out to

298 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

some greater or lesser dignitary to fall into line. When we had marched
back from the supper-room into the hall, all our formal duties were over.
We got home about twelve. This morning we have been up to the House
to see them received by your father. Tremendous crowd there, and as
your father insisted upon Q. going, and M. was to go anyhow, I feel as
though I have been out pleasuring with my nursery.

From V. :

March 4, 1872.

Mr. Yonge, who has lately returned from Paris, brought a letter from
Walker, of whom he speaks in the highest terms. Yesterday Secretary
and Mrs. Fish came around to arrange about the Japanese. Mrs/. Fish
came on from New York on purpose, and the storm of Saturday kept her
in, and, as the ceremonies begin to-day, it seemed to be a work of necessity.
Secretary Fish had the programme all arranged and a diagram where all
were to stand, and instructions for the Japanese and all, even to the dress
of our people.

Later. Everything went off well, only one of the Japanese's hats came
off when he bowed. They wear their hats as a matter of etiquette. The
President received them in the big east room, and then he gave his arm to
the head ambassador, and the Cabinet and the rest came in order and were
presented to Mrs. Grant. She appeared beautifully, told them how glad
she was to see them, congratulated them on their arrival after so severe a
journey, and hoped the young ladies would come and see her at the White
House. H. spoke of it to the President afterwards. He said yes, she did
better than he, for his knees trembled under him. " What! " said H., "a
brave man like you !" Yes, he said, his knees shook as they never shook
before, and he had his words all written out beforehand, too, like all the
rest.

From Mr. Blaine to Walker:

Washington, March 6, 1872.

. . . Tell Mr. Washburn not to be disturbed by the apparent bick-
ering and quarrelling in political circles. General Grant will be nomi-
nated at Philadelphia by acclammation. Electoral vote, 357 ; Grant, 191 ;
opposition, 122; doubtful, 44.

The tendency is for a better result than this. Indiana will pretty surely
go with us, so will Nevada and Oregon, while our chance for New York
is worth counting.

To Walker:

March 12, 1872.

Please date your letters more accurately. Your pater blows a blast
which might reach across the Atlantic, when he sees one of your missives
commencing with a Friday morning, or a Tuesday, or a Monday, or so on.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES Q. BLAINE. 299

We heard from you Sunday morning, and I yesterday sent the letter to
Augusta. Emmons was coming away from Andover, so I did not detain it
for him. It will be happiness enough for him to be with us. I had the
game dinner he writes for all ordered, but about an hour ago came a
telegram from New York saying that he had lost the connection and could
not be home till ten. M. is at school. I do not know how she will bear
the disappointment. She was expecting to be dressed in white with blue
on skirt, to meet him. " I do want," said she this morning, when she was
deciding on her toilet, " to hear Emmons say, ' How nobby you look ! " Her
education might have for its motto "festina lente." She gets to school some-
where about ten, and is often at home before her father gets started for the
Capitol. . . . Saturday father, C, your sister M. went to matinee.

. . . The pater came home as slangy as W. F., saying and resaying
"It's a fraud.11 Every part was shorn and clipped, and the voice of the
prompter was audible enough to mar all the effect. At six your father
dined with the territorial delegates. . . .

In the evening we all went to the billiard-room for amusement, C. and
father played, and such wild strikes never were seen before. . . .

Wednesday morning. Emmons got here at half-past ten last evening. He
missed the train yesterday morning, simply because he had not been par-
ticular about the time-table. I need not say that we have all been alive
this morning. Your big brother first went all over the house in his night-
gown. Next he put on his coat over it, and again perambulated, and
lastly he dressed himself en regie and came down to breakfast. All we
wanted was to have you here. Mary Wilson got every dish for Em-
mons she could think of, and to one and all he did full justice.
After Mons had had his supper, he and your father went up for a game of
billiards. Of course, Mons distanced his partner a long way. .
Your father seems very much opposed to your leaving Paris. He is
anxious for you to be sure of French. At the same time, ne likes to have
you do anything you want to. If you would like it he would prefer your
staying another year in Europe, but I do not think I could give my consent.
At any rate, I should come over with Emmons and travel for the summer.
Q. is getting well very fast. He looks like a snow-drop. Is wonderfully
interesting.

Postscript of a letter from Hon. Elihu Washburn to Mr.
Blaine, Paris, April, 1872 :

Private.

How is it going on at home ? Can^ we " smash 'em " handsomely,
all the soreheads to the contrary notwithstanding? Write me just as fully
as you have time as to the real situation.

Walker is getting along splendidly. He is all that the fondest parent
could wish, and we have come to feel in him almost the same interest we
have in our own children. If he were my boy I should have him remain

300 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

here an additional year. He would then be perfect master of the German
and French and would keep up with his other studies besides. He can
learn the languages a great deal faster now than he would after coming
back here after graduating.

From Walker :

. . . As this letter will reach you about the time that Mons is at home
for his vacation, tell him to study his Latin and Greek as he never studied
them before. I thought that they were not worth much, but my little
knowledge has lightened up the French language in a most amazing man-
ner. If one knows Greek and Latin, or only the latter and English
thoroughly, the French language is but a mere child's play. The differ-
ence is amazing when you attempt to learn French through reasoning and
taking the derivations, and by mere force of memory, as we learn Eng-
lish. . . . The person who knows Latin well, and cannot learn the
French language in two months, provided he speaks it all the time, and
reasons it out, is a dunce. ... I see that Gratiot Washburn has
been nominated by the President as Second Secretary to the Legation in
Paris, and I do not doubt but that he has been before now confirmed. I am
very glad, for he is a very nice young fellow. ... I hope you will
send me some word soon about Germany. I am very anxious to acquire
the language, and I feel that it would be much better for me to go there.
I cannot stav in Paris during the summer, probably not longer than the
15th sure, and I am anxious to stay in Germany for four months, work-
ing with assiduity. One lesson every day in French will keep me well
up.

To Walker:

Washington, May 1, 1872.

I am just congratulating myself on our excellent habit, lately inaug-
urated, — can a habit be lately inaugurated ? — of getting up for a half-
past eight breakfast — so now at 9.15 we are all at liberty to go our
several ways : father to the parlor crowded full of gentlemen ; Slier my to
his writing-table ; C. to the baby, the petted darling of upstairs, down-
stairs, and my lady's chamber; M. and Q. with spade and shovel
to the yard, and the mamma to her dearest and best of boys. . .
Everything has gone on very quietly since my last date. Indeed, Walker,
we are a most happy family. So much of life and so much love do
not often go together. The affectionate people are almost always quiet.
. . Everything political, English and American, seems to be in a sort
of a snarl. Things, I believe, will all come out right. Your father was
so impressed with the fatal influence which any concession on the part of
Mr. Fish would have on our political situation, that he went in to talk
over matters with him Sunday evening. Was there till a very late hour.
Commercial interests bring heavily to bear en the question.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 301

To Walker :

Washington, May 7, 1872.

To-morrow will be your seventeenth birthday. ... I shall not at-
tempt any advice to the good boy, who I do not believe needs it, for how
can one have a better guide than conscience ? But I do from the bottom
of my heart thank you, Walker, for all the anxiety you have spared me.
I have always trusted you, — so has your father, — and never have you
abused the trust. Continue ye in this love. . . . The little sister is out
in all the glory of the cherry rosettes and short dresses. Has called on
Miss Ripley, Mrs. Fish, and is now gone to Mrs. Hale's — all in honor of
the brother she has never seen. . . .

To Walker from Mr. Blaine :

Washington, May 8, 1872.

You are seventeen years old to-day. Almost a grown man ! I hope you
will continue to be a good boy, and make a good man. Remember that
there is no success in this life that is not founded on virtue and purity," and
a religious consecration of all we have to God. Do not forget your capac-
ities, your abilities, and your responsibilities. . . .

By same mail herewith you will receive from Jay Cooke an additional
letter of credit for £50 ; should you desire or need a few pounds more,
Mr. Washburn will furnish you the amount. I shall write him in regard
to it, and he will speak to you, rather than you to him. ... I want
you to come early enough in June to be here, or rather at home, by the 24th
or 26th, or at all events, the first of July. I want you to go by way of the
Rhine, round through Belgium, taking, say, Strasburg, Baden, Frankfort,
and Homburg en route. You can do this in a few days, and will be gov-
erned somewhat by securing a fellow-traveller. At Brussels you will take
a run over to Waterloo. . . . You will see how strangely politics are
tending here. Greeley's nomination is very strange. ... I wish you
to come on the " Scotia " or " Russia" — take whichever one Captain Lott
commands ; if you can secure a good state-room on her. The enclosed
card will introduce you to Captain Lott.

From Mr. Blaine to Walker :

May 22, 1872.

I presume you need more money than I have sent, and you will find
herewith an additional letter for £40. This should pay your passage home
and all other expenses, including such presents as you may desire to bring.
I would not go very largely into presents, as I do not wish you to smuggle
anything, or in any way evade the duties. . . . With this additional
letter of credit you will not need to ask Mr. Washburn for any aid or
loan. ... Be a good boy, always in all ways.

To V.:

Augusta, June 16, 1872.

Mr. Blaine and the boys — the elder ones — have just driven off to
church, — three fans, a cotton umbrella, and a horse and buggy, amongst

302 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

them. The papa took the umbrella, Emmons drove, and Walker fanned, and
I only hoj)e they may step far enough heavenward to pay for the earthly
trouble — for Mons, in harnessing1, broke out into a heat which nothing
could allay — his father, in the supreme moment of departure, turned round
to tell us how large his head felt, while Walker, with the prospect of three
or four favorite girls to flirt with, was eminently content. Q. and M.
were in the yard to see them off; Q. all currant and raspberry from his
throat to the hem of his frock, but clean as to the face and sweeter than
honey in the honeycomb ; his last word to the martyrologists being, Hulloa
— a greeting, which they seemed to think a pitiful satire.

When we got home we found that no entreaties had prevailed on Alice
to wear one of her new dresses. S. had had them all made, and made
beautifully, and there they hung by the closetful. When we arrived the
set time had fully come, and she has now the fine satisfaction of dressing
well every day. Yesterday she began to go to dancing-school, a branch
of her education I have been very anxious for her to attend to. The
boys are clever as can be. Walker devoted to M. and L. — and Emmons
to swimming, the "New York Ledger," base-ball, and all sorts of boy
business.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. O. P. Morton:

Indianapolis, July 22, 1872.

We would be very glad to have you come into Indiana and make several
speeches if it is in your power to do so. Your great reputation will draw
large crowds, and what you say will have much influence with our people.
The contest here will be hard fought and most bitter, and we shall require
all the assistance possible. I shall await your answer with anxiety.

Free trade is a beautiful theory, but in practice, neither you nor I will
live long enough to see it prevail. But the result of the present agitation
will be to lower seriously the rate of duties levied by the existing tariff,
and that is a consummation devoutly to be wished. I am more than will-
ing to speed the day.

To Mr. Blaine, from Judge Hoar:

Concord, November 8, 1872.

Thank you for your note, which is very kind. My only dissatisfaction
with the result of the election is that I am chosen to the House of Repre-
sentatives— though calling it a "bear garden11 is not inconsistent with
the highest admiration for the keeper of the animals. You have done so
much to contribute to the splendid victory, that I think you are fairly
entitled to feel as if you owned it.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 303

From V. :

Washington, 1873.

How much have you seen of Mr. Blaine's tilt with Mr. Stevenson ? He
came to Mr. Blaine afterwards rather complaining1 of his treatment. Mr.
Blaine told him he did not want to attack him, but he could not help it,
Mr. Stevenson brought it on himselfo Mr. Stevenson said of course he
"could not stand up against a man of Mr. Blaine's talent and courage which
was perfectly audacious." He objected that Mr. Blaine had made him appear
to swear falsely. "Why, Job," said Mr. Blaine, "that's the very point. ■
Have you just got that through your head ? " The committee-room was
full, and they say Mr. Blaine went at him shovel and tongs, and carried
all before him ; even the ' ' Tribune " says the Speaker came off with flying
colors, and the "Herald" quite abuses Stevenson. George W. Curtis, at
the Fish dinner, complimented Mr. Blaine very highly, especially upon
shining so brightly in the midst of so much darkness.

From General Sherman :

Washington, Feb. 5, 1873.

Dear Blaine : Mrs. Wood's full name is Ann Mackall Taylor Wood.
Her habitual signature is Ann M. Wood.

She heard of the event in the House last night from the Hunters, who
were with you at Robeson's, and they say her sense of gratitude was
beautiful, especially in the compliment to her father's memory.

From V. :

Washington, February, 1873.

Mr. Blaine went to church yesterday for the first time, and astonished
Mr. Whittlesey, a regular attendant, by informing him he had not seen
him out before this winter.

In the afternoon, at a matinee at Colonel Audenried's, saw Mrs. James
Brooks, who is in great trouble about her husband who is deeply implicated
in Credit Mobilier. I comforted her all I could ; saw also General Sherman,
the Bristcds, and many other acquaintances and friends. In the evening
Mr. Blaine had a splendid dinner. Mr. Evarts, the great lawyer, Geneva
arbitrator, etc. ; Horace Clark, Vanderbilt's son-in-law, a lawyer ; Judge
Watts and his brother, with whose father Mr. Blaine's father studied law,
and Horace Maynard, of Pennsylvania. Mr. Evarts is a thin, sharp-
featured, keen-faced man, quiet but calm, clear, acute, witty, and when
the flash of his wit is too bright and swift for the popular comprehension,
enjoying it all his lane or telegraphing across the table with his eyes to
some one who does comprehend the additional fun contributed by the non-
comprehending.

304 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES Q. BLAINE.

To Mr. Blaine, from E. A. Rollins :

Philadelphia.

I do not credit half the news I see in the newspapers, more particularly
since the Credit Mobilier investigation began. Glad you are all right, not
in fact only, but in reputation. You made a grand witness with reference
to the Iowa road, and made grand good points on Stevenson. Everybody
was laughing about it this way. I wish all our friends were all right in
every way in this matter, in fact, in substance, and form.

From Mr. Blaine :

Washington, March 26, 1873.

I forgot to tell you of a very remarkable coincidence that hapf>ened just
as you left on Saturday last. You recollect your questioning me to see if
I remember Mr. Rollins' street and number aright. [Two hundred and
thirty-five Forty-second street.] As I turned from the depot, as your
train was rolling out, Tom Sherman handed me some letters to mark
for answer, and among them one from Eastern Express Company, show-
ing balance with them to my credit, $235.42, and that was the very first
letter I opened. Now, had a coincidence of figures like unto this
happened in any trial at law, it would have been almost conclusive of
guilt or innocence, as the case might be. These fortuitous coincidences
should make us very careful about rash conclusions based on " sich.1'

Moral. — Give all the doubts to Schuyler.

From President Grant to Mr. Blaine :

Long Branch, N.J., July 18, 1873.

My dear Mr. Speaker : Your favor of the 13th is at hand, having
been received a day or two since. It is not possible for me to answer
definitely as to the time I can make the visit to the State of Maine and to
you, proposed before we left Washington. But I can say that it will
not be before the 5th of August, and that I will endeavor to make it as
near that time as possible, informing you by telegraph the exact day
when I shall leave here the moment it is fixed upon. My stay in Maine
will be from six to eight days. If, however, you and Mrs. Blaine have
any visit or trip you wish to make that would be in the slightest degree
interfered with by this selection of time, I beg you to let me know. Any
time after the 5th during the month of August would suit me as well as
that particular time. I name it because I have guests invited to my house
up to about that date.

Mrs. Grant and Nellie, both of whom will accompany me, join in kindest
regards to Mrs. Blaine and yourself.

From the President to Mr. Blaine :

Long Branch, August 1, 1873.
As the time approaches when I had hoped to visit you in Maine, with my
family, I find it will be impossible to go as early as I had set, and that it

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLA1NK 305

will be impossible for Mrs. Grant to go at all. Mr. Dent has been failing
for the last few days rapidly, the effects of old age and a dropsical ten-
dency, and I do not believe would survive Mrs. Grant's absence for a
week. He cannot last long at best.

The first of next week I must go to Washington to spend a couple of
days. On my return I will inform you by telegraph about when I can go,
if not prevented by circumstances.

I beg of you not to postpone or abandon any plans you or Mrs. Blaine
may have formed for the summer, on account of my proposed visit. If
not prevented from going by the sickness or death of Mr. Dent, one time
will suit me as well as another, up to the middle of September.

From the President to Mr. Blaine :

Long Branch, August 7, 1873.
On my return from Washington I find your letter of the 5th inst., from
which I infer you had not received the last one I wrote to you. In that I
stated that unless something unforeseen should prevent, I would leave here
on Monday next for Augusta, Me., taking the night train from New York
City. My party will consist of my two youngest sons, Nellie, General
Babcock, and myself. My intention is to return by way of the White
Mountains, Lake Champlain, and Lake George, provided I can get back by
the 22d inst. There is nothing now to prevent my going at that time.

From Harper & Brothers :

New York, August 14, 1873.

In reply to yours of the 11th, we beg leave to say ; ... 3d. That
we also like Mr. Blaine, and are sorry if we said anything (which we
never did) that by the utmost feminine ingenuity could be interpreted to the
contrary. He is as independent as any man we ever knew, and is abun-
dantly able to take care of himself always and in all ways. As your
Western friends say, we can safely "go a blind on him." 0, si sic omnes!

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. Samuel J. Randall :

Philadelphia, September 29, 1873.

Do you expect to be south soon, say as far as New York or Philadelphia P
I would like to see you and confer as to some legislation during next ses-
sion, principally on a subject which has caused much public expression
during the recess.

You are to be made to discriminate among the Republican members

from Pennsylvania as to a successor to Mr. . ... I mention

these facts with no possible intention to draw from you any expression
thereon ; simply, however, to keep you advised.

My district is quiet as to " Back pay," and I apprehend no opposition to
my renomination by Demoeratic convention nor as to the reelection,

306 BIOGRAPHY OE JAMES O. BLAINE.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. W. A. Wheeler :

Malone, October 21, 1873.

I have yours of 30th ult. It is true that there has been an effort in the
New York delegation to induce me to withdraw my declination of a can-
didacy for the Speakership. As to the motive, so far as I can fathom it, it
originates mainly in State pride, with perhaps an opinion that the delega-
tion would, in the event of my election, gain something in the construc-
tion of the committees. A number of Western men are also pressing me
to become a candidate, assigning various reasons : such as the domination of
New England in both ends of the Capitol ; that you will give the best places
on committees to those implicated in the Credit Mobilier affair, etc., etc.
To all these solicitations I have but one response : " I will not suffer myself
to be pitted against Mr. Blaine in any contingency. "'

You had my word for this a year ago, and the statute of limitations has
not }ret run upon it. No matter what rumor may at any time say, you may
rest confidently upon my assurance.

I am afraid the West will annoy you greatly in the making up of the
committees. Credit Mobilier puts you in a delicate position with refer-
ence to some old friends, and your action in construction of committees
will have a very important bearing upon your political future. We are
evidently only in the outer circles of the political maelstrom which is to
swallow up all the wicked politicians, and no one, for some time to come,
can expect the public favor who has not a claim to political sanctity.

As to committees, my preference is for that which probably you could
not give me without embarrassment — Chairman of Foreign Affairs. I
don't want, in any contingency, to have any further connection with
railroads.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. Fernando Wood :

New York, October 29, 1873.
My Dear Sir : I enclose a slip from the " New York Times " of to-day.
If you require any pecuniary aid as a loan, I am at your service, having
just now a surplus. Supposing that in your position a favor from a politi-
cal opponent would be more desirable than from one who might have
favors to ask in return, I offer myself as a personal friend.

{Enclosed.)

' JAY COOKE & CO.'S ASSETS.

The "Evening Star" has the following explanation of how Speaker
Blaine's name appears in the list of Jay Cooke & Co.'s debtors: "Anions
the assets of Jay Cooke & Co. an item of some $30,000 from Hon. Jas. G.
Blaine is reported. We find, on inquiry, that the amount due from Mr.
Blaine to the firm is for money borrowed on a long mortgage in 1869,
when he purchased his residence on Fifteenth street, in this city. The

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 307

mortgage is not mature until 1875. The amount is amply secured by the
intrinsic value of the residence."

From Mr. Blaine to Mr. Wood:

Augusta, October 31, 1873.

My dear Sir : I thank you very sincerely for your kind favor and its
kind offer. I thank you none the less heartily because I am not under the
necessity of availing myself of your generous tender of aid. The strin-
gency in the money market pinches me somewhat, but not beyond my
power of control.

To Mr. Blaine, from Jay Cooke & Co., bankers :

Washington, November 5, 1873.

The newspapers are in some way misstating your indebtedness to our
firm. Your principal debt is for money loaned you, when you purchased
your house on Fifteenth street on which we hold a mortgage for $33,333.33,
last payment due April 1, 1875. Besides this, you have a note discounted
for $5,000, amply secured by Chicago bonds as collateral. You are also
held by us on another note for $1,000, which your good nature induced you
to indorse, and which we shall expect you to pa}7, unless the principal
pays. This is all. If we could realize as readily on all our assets as on
these, we should at once have a heavy surplus on hand.

From Hon. S. S. Cox :

New Y^ork, November 5, 1873.
My dear Mr. Speaker: For I must again cultivate the old prefix.
Your congratulation was the first to reach me. I am sure it made me very
happy. We have lived an eventful life together under trying circum-
stances ; and to miss your face in the House, and as its head, would be to
miss the House itself.

I should be pleased to serve on the Ways and Means. It is generally
expected, as all my studies, since I left college, have led me in the direc-
tion of the economics. . . . My majority is equal to my opponents1
vote. I led my ticket largely. With the assurance that you will be
Speaker, beyond a peradventure, and with the wishes for a happy winter
— a happier than last —

I am, as ever,

your friend.

From Mr. Blaine to Walker :

Augusta, Me., November 12, 1873.

I have very fully reflected on your case, and have come to the following
conclusions :

First. The Faculty, \ think, were not logical in their treatment and con-
clusions. They should either have remitted punishment, or expelled yon

308 BIOGRAPHY OP JAMES G. BLAtNE.

— for a hazer should always be expelled remorselessly. A middle course
was, I repeat, illogical. The court-martial that tried Fitz John Porter
merely sentenced him to be dropped from the rolls. This was sharjjly
criticised at the time, as wholly an inconsistent verdict — for, as old Mr.
Ewing well said, " Porter should have been cleared or shot" Something
analogous applies to the case of you boys. The Yale Faculty, however,
proceeded apparently on the basis of the old trial justice with the man
accused of stealing a horse — "Not guilty ; but don't you ever do it again."

Second. My whole conclusion in regard to the course of you bo}^s is, that
you behaved very foolishly. You tried the impossible game of ' ' running with
the hare and holding with the hounds.11 You had to proceed by an indirection
and a deception, and hence placed yourselves in an indefensible attitude,
and got into trouble. If you could not make open resistance to the hazers
and join issue with them, you should have gone to your rooms. I would
have justified all of you in getting into the most desperate fight — one that
would have roused the whole college, and the city too, if need be — in re-
sisting an outrage upon a friend ; but when you had to resort to an artifice
and an evasion, and apparently join the drunken crowd of assailants, you
forfeited all the moral strength of your position — Hinc illce lachrymce.

I am glad to hear that you are studying well, and if the Faculty should
keep you out six months, you probably will not be the loser in your
studies. I have great faith in good tutoring.

From Mr. Blaine :

Augusta, November 12, 1873.

Suspension is always a silly punishment: The idle boy likes it, the
industrious, ambitious boy may be greatly injured by it. It always seemed
to me just as absurd as to punish a soldier for misconduct, by depriving
him of the opportunity to drill. All offenders in a college, short of those
requiring expulsion, can be punished in an exemplary manner by many
little deprivations of privilege, which the student would keenly feel. I
think the boys are doing well at Hartford. I agree with you fully in re-
gard to the inexpediency of having a controversy with the Faculty. Let
the boys grin and bear it.

To Mr. Blaine,- from General Garfield :

Washington, December 5, 1873.

You are so crowded with calls and vexations, that I will write a few
words in addition to the suggestions I made yesterday.

My colleague, Mr. Monroe, is, as I told you, specially desirous of being
made chairman of some committee, such as Pensions, Education and Labor,
or some committee of similar grade, and if it is at all possible I hope you
will so arrange it. In the tempest which raged in Ohio over the increase
of salary, Mr. Monroe was fortunate in having the full approval of the
people in his record on that subject, and I have no doubt it would be very

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 309

generally acceptable to the people if he were given a committee. Mr.
Monroe is warmly my friend, and it would gratify me very much if you
can do what is here suggested.

Several other suggestions have been made and written to me which I
will not weary you with, but I enclose a note or two for your consideration.
I will also mention that W. H. Stone, a Democrat of St. Louis, is anxious
to be a member of the Committee on Commerce. I have been unwilling
to bore you in reference to these things, but couldn't avoid it. Let me say,
in conclusion, that I hope there will be cultivated between those of us who
have borne the storms of the last ten years such a close intimacy, and
working together for the sake of comradeship and the general good, that
we may aid each other in many ways.

I will not close without assuring you that those of us who have been
the special objects of assault during the last year appreciate more highly
than you know of the courage and manliness with which you stand by
them. I am sure you will never have occasion to regret it.

310 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

XIII.

FROM THE SPEAKERSHIP TO THE SENATE.

|~N accepting his seventh unanimous nomination in 1874 as
-*- representative to Congress, Mr. Blaine was able to con-
gratulate his constituents that the currency question, at
one time threatening to divide parties, and, which would be far
more serious, to divide sections, was " in process of a happy
adjustment, partly by wise and temperate enactment, passed
by a large majority in both branches of Congress and approved
by the President, but in a far greater degree by the operation
of causes more powerful than any legislation can be." The
old questions of protection and free trade were still before the
people, especially in Maine, in their extreme form. Canada
was trying to negotiate a reciprocity treaty with our govern-
ment in which, as Mr. Blaine pointed out, the reciprocity was,
like that of its predecessor, all on one side. The treaty which
was terminated in 1866 inflicted upon Maine " during the
eleven years of its existence, a loss of fifty millions of dollars.
It presented the anomaly of giving to the Canadians the control
in our own markets of certain leading articles, on terms far
more favorable than our own people had ever enjoyed. The
utmost stretch of the Divine command is to love our neighbor
as ourselves, and I can certainly see nothing in personal duty
or public policy which should lead us to prefer our Canadian
neighbors to our own people.

" The treaty of reciprocity now proposed is understood to
include the admission of Canadian vessels to free American
registry, and the full enjoyment of our coasting and lake trade.
Thus, the ship-building and commercial interests of the United
States, just recovering from the terrible blows dealt by British-
built cruisers during the war, are again to be struck down by
giving advantages, hitherto undreamed of, to the ships of the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 311

very power that inflicted the previous injury. . . . To
illustrate : If the United States will agree to admit Canadian
vessels to American registry and the coasting-trade, Canada
will admit straw hats, mule harness, and rat-traps free of duty.
. . . Let us simply place Canada on the same basis with
other foreign countries, — taxing her products, or admitting
them free, according to our own judgment of the interest of
our own revenue, and the pursuits and needs of our own people,
— always bearing in mind that in governmental as in family
matters, c charity begins at home,' and that 4 he who pro-
videth not for those of his own house is worse than an
infidel.' "

Even more important than the protection of manufactures Mr.
Blaine considered the protection of United States citizenship,
and urged in his public addresses that it was required by every
principle on which the Republican party had been formed and
sustained, and for which the war had been waged. " The
strength of a column is the strength of its weakest part, and
the strength of government protection to citizenship is not that
which goes out to the wealthy and the influential, to the strong
and the mighty, but it is that which protects and upholds the
lowly, the poor, and the weak."

Another address called attention to a fact of wide and great
importance, but almost, if not altogether, unnoticed. Mr.
Blaine had been invited to speak, incidentally, to the Northern
Wisconsin Agricultural and Mechanical Association at their
annual fair in Oshkosh. He had accepted, but learned shortly
before the designated day that, without consulting him, the
association had made him the chief speaker. He therefore
prefaced his address with the apology : " If this large audience
shall feel disappointed with the result, they must not lay the
charge at my door, but hold the officers of the association re-
sponsible in such exemplary damages as a good Wisconsin sense
of justice may impose.

" I believe, by modern usage, an address before an agricul-
tural society is expected to leave agriculture severely alone ;
on the very sound and sensible presumption that the audi-
ence have more knowledge on that subject than the speaker
is likely to possess. In my own case, certainly, I am ready

312 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE,

to admit the full force of such presumption ; for, although
I was born and reared in an agricultural community in west-
ern Pennsylvania, and have lived all the years of my maturer
life in the best agricultural districts of Maine, I do not claim
such practical knowledge of the great art and science as
would enable me to give one word of needed instruction to the
assemblage which I have now the honor to address." He then
brought up the subject of debt, — national, State, county, and
town, — beginning with a slight sketch of the origin and growth
of debts, showing that the vast mass of the world's debt was
incurred " not to promote the ends of peace, not to develop ag-
riculture or the mechanic arts, not to improve harbors and the
navigation of rivers, not to found institutions of learning, or of
charity, or of mercy, not to elevate the standard of culture
among the masses, not for any or all of these laudable objects,
but for the waste, the cruelty, the untold agonies of war. The
vast mass of this prodigious sum-total not only went for war,
but for wars of ambition and conquest, in which the fate of
reigning dynasties was the stake, and not the well-being of the
people or even the aggrandizement of the nation itself in the
higher and better sense. In our own country we have had four
wars, and with the exception of that with Mexico, they may
certainly and fairly be called defensive on our part, for they
were assuredly wars essential to our national existence and in-
dependence. But still this fact makes us no exception to the
rest of the world ; and war, however unavoidable in our case,
was nevertheless the direct cause of our national burden. Our
total national indebtedness to-day is twenty-one hundred and
forty millions of dollars (12,140,000,000) ; and of this great
sum sixty-four . millions ($64,000,000) given towards the con-
struction of a railroad to the Pacific is all that was incurred for
works of peace. The remainder was expended in the long and
bloody and desolating struggle in which secession was resisted
and destroyed, and in which we won the privilege of continuing
to exist as the United States of America.

" But in regard to the national debt, whatever vain regrets
we may indulge over the loss of so much treasure and the fear-
ful sacrifice of that which is beyond earthly price, we have this
to console, — that the war which gave rise to it was unavoidable,

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 313

apparently forecast as part of the great experience of bitterness
and of blood through which it was our destiny as a nation to
pass, and that out of its sorrowful depths we have emerged a re-
generated people, doing justice to a race long oppressed, educat-
ing ourselves to higher standards of liberty and of law, and having
our feet henceforth shod with the preparation of the Gospel of
Peace.

"Leaving the consideration of our national debt as an obliga-
tion not within our discretion, except as to the best and most
honorable means of reducing and discharging it, I invite your
attention to those less observed, but even more burdensome,
forms of obligation contracted by States, counties, cities, and
smaller municipalities, and contracted oftentimes, I may add,
with an extravagance and prodigality that seem to invite
calamity."

He then gave a startling array of figures, all the more im-
pressive for being entirely apart from politics, showing not
only the alarming increase of debt, but the recklessness with
which it was created, and the extravagance by which it was
attended. " I venture the assertion, based on careful scrutiny
of the facts, that, taking the aggregate of State debts as they
stand to-day, there has not been realized on the average fifty
cents permanent value for each dollar raised and expended."
He ended by suggesting for the defence of the people against
themselves more stringent restriction of the power of State
legislation to incur debts, and a more careful definition of the
precise ends for which municipal credit should be used, together
with some adequate safeguard against the overlapping of
municipal and county debts, so that the smaller organization
should not find itself involved in the embarrassments of the
larger ; quoting as a safe governing principle the advice of Mr.
Jefferson : " Never borrow a dollar without laying a tax at the
same instant for paying the interest annually, and the principal
within a given term ; and consider that tax as pledged to the
creditors on the public faith."

It was not flattering to the sagacity of self-governing people,
who love to rebuke the extravagances of their national Con-
gress, but are not given to accusing themselves of far greater
extravagance. It was, however, a timely and necessary warning,

314 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

and arrested general attention at home, while in England its
information regarding our situation and resources was used by
public speakers with marked effect.

One of the interesting incidents of the winter of 1874-75, im-
portant in the light of subsequent events, was the presence in
Washington of Kalakaua, king of the Hawaiian islands. On
the 18th of December he was received by the House of Repre-
sentatives. Escorted by Senator Cameron of Pennsylvania, and
Representative Orth of Indiana, he entered the hall and took
his position in the centre aisle fronting the Speaker, who
welcomed him on behalf of the American Congress, empha-
sizing the visit as "the first instance in which a reigning
sovereign has set foot upon the soil of the United States, and it
is a significant circumstance that the visit comes to us from
the West, and not from the East." With a few words of
personal courtesy and compliment, the Speaker assured his
majesty that " our whole people cherish for your subjects
the most friendly regard. They trust and believe that the
relations of the two countries will always be as peaceful
as the great sea that rolls between us — uniting and not
dividing."

Chief-Justice Allen, of Hawaii, — and Maine, — read the
king's reply of graceful acknowledgment that " for any success
in government, and for our progress in a higher civilization, we
are very much indebted to the government and people of this
great country. Your laws and your civilization have been in a
great degree our model." The Speaker then left the chair for
a more personal greeting to the king, before he withdrew with
his suite.

The elections of 1874 gave the House of Representatives to
the Democratic party for the first time since the Rebellion.
Naturally many Republicans were greatly alarmed at seeing the
balance of power about to pass into the hands of their oppo-
nents, so lately armed foes of the country. Many members of
the House of Representatives had been in the rebel ranks, —
softened by time into " confederate " ranks. The Republican
party, without cleaving into distinct factions, gravitated in two
distinct directions, — towards further repressive legislation on
the one hand, on the other towards the enforcement of present

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 315

law through the machinery already provided. The administra-
tion led in the first direction the radical element. Mr. Blaine
was universally recognized as head of the more conservative
forces. The presidential election of 1876 was near enough to
be an estimated, if not always a perceptible motive. Desire for
a third election to the presidency was attributed to President
Grant. Denial was hardly possible to him, and his most
intimate friends advocated " a third term." By common con-
sent Mr. Blaine was counted as the rival candidate, whether
he would or not, and he certainly gave no sign that he would
not. He was in the prime of life, thoroughly versed not only
in historical but in practical politics — a phrase not less weighty
for being warped into a petty and corrupt interpretation. The
ideal policy of this great nation was already shaping itself, in
his ardent thought, towards new advances in national power,
and individual prosperity and happiness. He had no misgiving
as to the correctness of his judgment on those points, or his
ability to guide the country along the course which he deemed
its true and high destiny. He was always eager to use the one
in furtherance of the other. It was not timely or necessary for
him to avow, but he did not disavow, the candidacy. He had a
full sense of the greatness of the position, a greatness not to
be minimized by unworthy seeking, or by insincere pretence of
not seeking. He had a strong sense of its influence, a solemn
sense of its responsibility. He accepted the opportunity, and
would have accepted the presidency with all his heart and soul,
with all his mind and strength. But he did not and could not
do what many both in his own party and in the opposition
wished him to do, — withdraw from the House of Representa-
tives that he might avoid embarrassing complications. When the
anti-third term resolution was put to vote in the House early in
the winter of 1875-76, he was quite willing to absent himself and
meet the not ill-humored raillery of having made public procla-
mation of his candidacy, rather than cast a vote which seemed
to reflect so directly on the President. But he was not willing
to relinquish his work and retire from his post rather than run
the risk of such complications. He would not exchange a
present certain opportunity for a future which was only
possibility.

316 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Several of the Southern States were in a very unsettled con-
dition. Arkansas was agitated almost to the point of the
bayonet by internal political conflict. The Louisiana elec-
tion troubles were at culmination. Mr. Kellogg and Mr.
McEneiy were both claiming the governorship of the State.
Behind the one were the returning board, the administration,
and the army ; the other based his title on the popular vote.
The administration party maintained that the honest vote
was prevented by intimidation, and must be secured by
federal interposition. The anti-administrationists maintained,
on the contrary, that Louisiana votes, returned as polled under
the State government supervision, aided by United States
supervisors and United States troops, gave the State Legislature
to conservatives ; that a returning board of seven men, none of
them citizens of Louisiana, was called as a board of arbitrators
to determine who were the men chosen by the people of that
State to represent them in their own Legislature ; that this re-
turning board had rejected the governor chosen by the people,
and had installed in the Legislature Republicans who had never
even made a contest for seats, and that these had been kept in by
federal baj^onets. The State House was guarded and conserva-
tive legislators were ejected by federal troops. Such a state of
things ten years after the war was over could but be eminently
unsatisfactory. The North no more liked to see, than the South
to feel, United States soldiers entering a capitol, and turning
out members of the Legislature. The aggrieved State main-
tained that she respected the National government, but detested
the State government as fraudulent. The President's opponents
insisted that it was the result of his officious and unconstitu-
tional intermeddling. The radical wing of his supporters
affirmed that it was due to the rebellious spirit yet rampant in
the South. The conservative wing sought to compose the
differences and bring about a better feeling and condition,
without antagonizing the President, or widening the party dis-
affection. Of these Mr. Blaine was chief.

A compromise was effected. A committee was appointed
by the Speaker of the House, whose decision Louisiana
promised to accept. Its final recommendation was that Kel-
logg should be recognized as the de facto governor, that the

BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 317

errors of the Republican enrolling board should be corrected,
and the popular branch of the Legislature given to the
Democrats.

Some of the spring elections were made to turn virtually on
the third-term question, as involving the President's vindica-
tion. New Hampshire came out strongly against third term,
and won. In Connecticut the Republican platform contained
a full approval of the administration, and lost. Mr. Blaine was
reproached on the one side for giving, in his Connecticut
speeches, an apology for the President rather than cordial sup-
port ; and on the other side for giving, if not justification, at
least an apology for the President. Against complaint of sec-
tionalism he declared broadly and definitely that the sectional
question would not cease until the Union was everywhere
respected, the majesty of the law everywhere recognized ; until
the rights of the humblest were everywhere conceded, and
freedom of speech was nowhere denied; until Wendell Phillips
and General Logan could speak as freely in Georgia as Gordon
and Lamar in New Hampshire ; until every man entitled to
suffrage was freely accorded the privilege of voting. He also
took occasion to say that before the report of the House
Committee had been received, the President had wisely and
necessarily reached its conclusion, which was the only practi-
cable adjustment. Any other would have involved wrong on
one hand, anarchy on the other.

But he declared as definitely that he had no faith in any
special form of additional coercive legislation. He believed
that legislation had gone as far as was prudent or promis-
ing. He thought the time had come for reliance on other forces.
He could not advise or consent to any interference with an
existing State government except under the express terms of
the Constitution and under an exigency so pressing as to in-
volve the public safety. " What is wanted is not more law, but
a better public opinion."

Both sides agreed that he was right in appealing to the gen-
eral feeling that the Democrats could not be trusted, and the
most radical began to observe and remark with approval that
Mr. Blaine had not condemned outside, but had labored within
the party to correct mistakes and to prevent their repetition.

318 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

The Civil Rights bill, characterized by its opponents as a
bill to abolish the color line and the Federal Elections bill, by
corresponding authority characterized as " the force bill," and
" a bill to facilitate executive interference with elections," were
before Congress and were discussed with great and warm in-
terest. The Republican party was passing from power in the
House, and the more radical Republicans deemed the enactment
of these bills sufficiently important to justify drastic measures.
They insisted that the Speaker should refuse to recognize the
Democrats making dilatory motions, and should recognize only
the Republicans who were in charge of the bills. Mr. Blaine
maintained that the dilatory motions were perfectly in accord-
ance with the rules of the House, and no choice was left him
but to recognize their movers.

The object aimed at in both bills, Mr. Blaine desired and sought,
but he did not think it attainable in the prescribed direction.
He believed that the two bills were an attempt to accomplish
by legislation what legislation can never accomplish. Clearly
seeing the great wrongs of the freedman at the hands of South-
ern prejudice and pride, he saw as clearly that no great advan-
tage is to be gained by legislating against human pride and
prejudice. Always outspoken for a free and pure ballot as
essential to the life of a republic, he had a historic patience,
could make allowance, and strove to introduce other and varied
interests of business and patriotism that should divert the
thought of the South from sectional matters and enlist its own
financial prosperity and material progress in the cause of human
rights, thus dividing the " solid South " on non-political issues,
making the colored vote valuable and to be sought by each
party, rather than worthless because abhorred by both. To
him it seemed that we were in danger of losing a practical
advance, certified by the logic of statistics and the testimony
of unprejudiced -observers, for a sentimental advantage that
undoubtedly showed better on paper and rang out better in
oratorical rhetoric and even syllogism, but left both white
and black at the South waging their unequal and profitless
war, — because the friction of humanity must always be allowed
for in the working of pure logic.

In the spring of 1874 rumors were abroad that Independent

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 319

editors were designing to form a party by joining the hard-
money Democrats, with Speaker Blaine for a candidate, " be-
cause he was more popular with the Democrats than any other
Republican ; " and again in the winter of 1874-75 a section
of the Republican party that was impatient of slow processes
undertook to form a new party, and endeavored to secure the
alliance of Mr. Blaine. His unsurpassed power as a popular
leader was everywhere recognized and acknowledged, and it
was equally manifest that in principle he was steadfast, un-
movable — antagonizing Republicans with promptness and effect,
whenever necessary in the interests of good government. If
his cooperation could be secured, it was believed that the people
would follow ; that the new party would immediately form and
move without halt in the right direction.

The disaffected Republicans assembled in force in Washing-
ton and made direct overtures to Mr. Blaine in his own house.
He received them with his usual light-hearted cordiality and
hospitality, conducted what could hardly be called the negotia-
tions with abundance of argument enlivened with much illus-
tration and anecdote ; but his opinion could not be changed or
his course in the least degree influenced. He never for one
moment countenanced a secession from the Republican party.
What the " Independents " could not understand was the
principle upon which Mr. Blaine assented and dissented.
That on one and another point he should resist his party to
the utmost, yet refuse to abandon it altogether, was to them
strangely inexplicable. He was first and last in demanding a
free vote and a fair count, and yet he had constantly, stubbornly,
and effectually, though quietly, opposed the " force bill " with
its extreme and dangerous power of suspending the writ of
habeas corpus, and using the army in the suppression of vio-
lence, without reference to the State authorities. He had cor-
dially advocated Grant's reelection, yet was well known to be
firmly opposed to the third term. The direct road may not be
wholly in sight from every point upon it, but it is none the less
the direct road. What seemed to uncomprehending observers,
or what insincere observers chose to characterize as tereriver-
sation, or caprice, or timidity, was the instantaneous and
instinctive application of unchanged and unchanging principle.

320 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Mr. Blaine, moreover, did not believe that parties are ever
formed on Monboddo's theory of the construction of language,
by a company of learned men assembled for the purpose. Parties
form themselves and whirl up their own leaders in the storm.
The Republican party had not outlived its usefulness. He held
it to be sound at the heart — occasionally and incidentally wrong,
substantially right. Its organization, traditions, principles, were
too valuable to be thrown aside. He foresaw his own deposi-
tion from the speakership, not only with tranquillity, but with
abundant hope of greater opportunity ; of putting his hand
more directly to the helm and heading the noble ship more
surely on her true course. He felt no need of a new party, and
saw no hope in leaving the old party.

The 4th of March came, and he relinquished the chair amid
the warmest expressions of personal regret and regard, not only
from his own partisans, but from his comrades in the oppo-
sition. " As a work of art," says an unemotional eye-witness,
" his speech was perfect, but no one who reads it can appreciate
its effect as it was delivered to the vast throng. The deep feel-
ing which was apparent in every word and sentence aroused
corresponding sympathy, and when he closed, threw down the
gavel and left the chair, no such scene has been witnessed in
the House by the oldest habitue of the Capitol."

It was the beginning of our centennial years, and he took an
interested part in the Concord and Lexington celebrations,
whose patriotism could no more be chilled by the April's un-
timely fierce cold than could the patriotism of our fathers be
withered by the untimely heat of its predecessor one hundred
years before.

In October, with a small party of friends, he paid a vacation
visit of a week of more to our British neighbors in the Provinces,
touching all along the way, through St. John to Halifax, inspect-
ing the Citadel, — now but a pleasant international jest, — and the
beautiful "Bellerophon," as peaceful as a white-winged bird, but
which might turn the jest into a sombre fact ; interchanging
courtesies with the Provincial authorities, and building with
swift, sure hand upon history and poetry, upon race resources
and position, a future of fair promise.

In December he went back to Congress to be one of the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 32i

minority on the floor of the House, with the Democrats naturally
exulting in their new and novel majority.

And in one day the tide had turned, and the majority, sur-
prised and sobered, found themselves swept on and swept under
to a familiar but unwelcome subordinacy.

The occasion was a quiet little Democratic attempt to un-
settle the Louisiana settlement. The members elected to the
House from Louisiana presented themselves for admission.
The greater number of them held certificates from both Kellogg
and McEnery ; one held a certificate from Kellogg alone and
had no competitor. These were at once admitted. One,
Frank Morey, had a certificate from Governor Kellogg, but had
a competitor whose certificate was signed by McEnery. Hon.
Fernando Wood moved that these contesting applications
should be sent to the Committee on Elections for decision —
thereby silently assuming that the governorship was still in
question. But this apparently harmless arrangement was upset
by Mr. Blaine the moment it was launched, with the declara-
tion that McEnery had no more claim to be considered
governor of Louisiana than had Mr. Wood to be governor of
New York ; and, ably supported by Wheeler, of New York,
who had been chairman of the House Committee on Louisiana
Affairs, against the gentle Lamar and the witty Cox and all
other comers, he proceeded to wrest victory from the jaws of
defeat, till Speaker Kerr sent down to his friends on the floor
the word of advice for withdrawal, and the experienced Mr.
Holman led the perplexed ranks of his party, who had thought
it incumbent upon them to follow Mr. Wood, safely back into
camp. The Republicans were as little used to being in the
minority as the Democrats were to being in a majority, and
were as much astonished as their opponents to see the Demo-
cratic party " broken in two " on their first party vote, Mr.
Wood's budding leadership blighted, and such men as Mr.
Lamar and Mr. Cox turned adrift, on the first day of the ses-
sion. They took heart at once, and in the elation of their unex-
pected triumph openly declared that " the whole conduct of
affairs might as well be put into Blaine's hands for the winter;"
that not only could ho be trusted to lead, but that a man who can
" achieve the unprecedented parliamentary triumph of defeating

322 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

and demoralizing the majority on the first day of the session,
will be sure to shape the action of any caucus or conference,
and can fear neither his foes of the other party nor rivals in
his own."

The school question, as connected with sectarianism, had
been more than usually prominent before the country, and in
one State at least it had been considered the pivotal point on
which a governor — Mr. Hayes, of Ohio — was elected over
his Democratic opponent, Mr. Allen. Mr. Blaine thought the
matter too fundamental to be left to the varying fortunes of
partisanship, and in October, 1875, he had written to a citizen
of Ohio a letter whose substance was afterwards formulated in
a constitutional amendment which should forever prohibit any
State interference for or against an establishment of religion or
the free exercise thereof, or any portion of the public-school
money, whether raised by taxation or derived from any public
funds, from being placed under the control of any religious sect
or divided among sects or denominations.

Another measure which the Democrats hoped to carry un-
opposed if not unobserved in the glow of good feeling char-
acterizing the first centennial year, Mr. Blaine promptly laid
hold of to the advancement of public virtue and of the Repub
lican party.

A rebellion, never exceeded in magnitude, had been followed
by a victory never exceeded in magnanimity. The government
in the hands of Republicans had from time to time remitted the
penalties of rebellion, until only about seven hundred and fifty
men remained outside of pardon and citizenship. The last
Congress had reported a general amnesty bill through the
House Committee of Rules, of which the Speaker is chairman.
Mr. Blaine had not wholly approved the bill, and had in com-
mittee objected to certain of its features. He had, however,
been willing that it- should be brought before the House, but had
asked certain members to oppose it in the House and had not
himself taken the floor against it.

Early in the new session the Democrats, not unwilling to
receive some small share of the glory and grace of the final
amnesty in our centennial year, presented a bill for general am-
nesty through Mr. Randall, of Pennsylvania, afterwards Speaker.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 823

Mr. Blaine at once gave notice that he should offer an amend-
ment. On the 10th of January Mr. Randall called up his bill
relieving all persons in the United States from the disabilities
imposed by the fourteenth article of amendment to the Con-
stitution. Mr. Blaine at once projected his amendment, in the
nature of a substitute, that " all persons in the United States
under the disabilities imposed by the fourteenth amendment,
with the exception of Jefferson Davis, late president of the so-
called confederate States, shall be relieved of such disabilities,
upon their appearing before any judge of a United States court,
and taking and subscribing an oath that they will support and
defend the Constitution of the United States, and bear true faith
and allegiance to the same."

The exception of one man, and the condition that those who
wished their disabilities removed should certify their change of
heart by swearing allegiance to the government that must re-
move them, seems but a slight modification of the amnesty reso-
lution, a very mild display of Republican revenge ; but it proved
to be the little candle that lighted up the whole scene.

Mr. Randall declined to admit the amendment to vote or de-
bate. The Republicans refused to permit it to be summarily
smothered, and therefore defeated the bill, which required a two-
thirds vote. Mr. Blaine then moved to reconsider, and thus
gained control of the bill, which he at once opened to debate
and amendment, thereby gaining opportunity to offer his amend-
ment as a substitute for the original bill. He then addressed
the House, emphasizing the spirit and defining the position of
the Republican party regarding the people of the Southern
States :

" Every time the question of amnesty has been brought be-
fore the House by a gentleman on that side for the last two
Congresses, it has been done with a certain flourish of magna-
nimity which seems to convey an imputation on this side of the
House. It seemed to charge the Republican party, which has
been in control of the government for the last fifteen years, with
being bigoted, narrow, and illiberal, grinding down certain gen-
tlemen in the Southern States under a great tyranny, from which
the hard-heartedness of this side of the House constantly refuses
to relieve them.

324 BlOGUAPIIY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

" If I may anticipate as much wisdom as ought to character-
ize the gentlemen on the other side of the House, this may be
the last time that amnesty will be discussed in the American
Congress. I therefore desire, and under the rules of the House,
with no thanks to that side for the privilege, to place on record
just what the Republican party has done in this matter. I wish
to place it there as an imperishable record of liberality, and mag-
nanimity, and mercy far beyond any that has ever been shown
before in the world's history by conqueror to conquered."

A concise review demonstrated that restoration to citizen-
ship of those lately in rebellion had gone steadily on, till only
about seven hundred and fifty men remained outside the par-
don of the United States government: and that of these men
three hundred and twenty-five were officers of the United
States, educated at its own expense at West Point ; two hundred
and ninety-five were officers of the navy ; the remainder were
Senators and Representatives of the Thirty-sixth and Thirty-
seventh Congresses, officers in the judicial service, heads of
departments, and foreign ministers of the United States. To
their restoration to citizenship he offered no objection.

" All I ask is that each of these gentlemen shall show his
good faith by coming forward and taking the oath which you
on that side of the House and we on this side of the House take
and gladly take. It is a very small exaction to make as a pre-
liminary to full restoration to all the rights of citizenship.

" In my amendment I have excepted Jefferson Davis from
amnesty. I do not place his exclusion on the ground that Mr.
Davis was, as he has been commonly called, the head and front
of the Rebellion, because on that ground I do not think the
exception would be tenable. Mr. Davis was in that respect as
guilty, no more so, no less so, than thousands of others who
have already received the benefit and grace of amnesty. Prob-
ably he was far less efficient as an enemy of the United States ;
probably lie was far more useful as a disturber of the councils
of the confederacy, than many who have already received am-
nesty. It is not because of any particular and special damage
that he above others did to the Union, or because he was person-
ally or especially of consequence, that I except him. But I
except him on this ground : that he was the author knowingly,

BIOGBAPHT OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 325

deliberately, guiltily, and wilfully, of the gigantic murders and
crimes at Anderson ville."

He then produced in detail the awful proof of his awful ar-
raignment, from the testimony of Democrats and Republicans,
of Southern men and Northern men, of soldiers and the clergy ;
testimony concerning bloodhounds set upon skeletons that
escaped from the unspeakable horrors of Andersonville, - — tes-
timony sworn to before Congress by a great cloud of witnesses,
recorded in its annals, and concurred in by Democrats and by
Republicans. All this he charged upon the deliberate knowl-
edge and intent of Jefferson Davis, since Winder and Wirz
were his creatures, acting under his appointment and orders,
and even sustained by him.

" The poor victim Wirz deserved his death for brutal treat-
ment and murder of many victims ; but it was a weak policy on
the part of our government to allow Jefferson Davis to go at
large and hang Wirz. Wirz was nothing in the world but a
mere subordinate, and there was no special reason for singling
him out for death. I do not say he did not deserve it. He
deserved no mercy ; but his execution seemed like skipping over
the president, superintendent, and board of directors in the case
of a great railroad accident and hanging the brakeman of the
rear car.

" There is no proposition here to punish Jefferson Davis. No-
body is seeking to do it. That time has gone by. The statute
of limitations, the common feelings of humanity, supervene for
his benefit. But what you ask us to do is to declare by a vote
of two-thirds of both branches of Congress that we consider
Mr. Davis worthy to fill the highest offices in the United States
if he can find a constituency to endorse him. He is already a
voter ; he can buy and he can sell ; he can go and he can come.
He is as free as any man in the United States. This bill pro-
poses that Mr. Davis, by a two-thirds vote of the Senate and a
two-thirds vote of the House, shall be declared eligible and
worthy to fill any office up to the presidency of the United
States. For one, upon full deliberation, I refuse my assent to
that proposition."

Mr. Blaine was not content with making no charge against
the Southern people.

326 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

" I do not arraign the Southern people for these inhumanities.
God forbid that I should charge sympathy with such wrongs
upon the mass of any people. There were many evidences of great
uneasiness in the South about the condition of Andersonville.
One of the great crimes of Jefferson Davis was that, besides
conniving at the cruelty, he concealed it from the Southern
people. He labored not only to conceal it, but to make false
statements about it. This is not a proposition to punish Jeffer-
son Davis. Nobody is attempting that. But here and now I
express my firm conviction, that there is not a government, a
civilized government, on the face of the globe — I am very sure
there is not a European government — that would not have
arrested Mr. Davis at the close of the war, and when they had
him in their power would not have tried him for maltreatment
of the prisoners of war and shot him within thirty days.
France, Russia, England, Germany, Austria, any one of them
would have done it."

"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 pre-
sented, 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 kinsmen there, most of us had friends there,
all of us had countrymen there. In the name of those kinsmen,
friends, and countrymen I here protest, and shall with my vote
protest, against calling back and crowning with the honors of
full American citizenship the man who organized that murder."

It is hardly possible to exaggerate the sensation produced by
this speech, near and far, immediate and lasting. In the
House the opposition raged with a violence which to the ob-
server seemed portentous, but which now seems creditable and
indeed inevitable. From the horror and the crime of Anderson-
ville, the South recoiled as strongly as the North. Their hearts
refused to receive the witness of their heads. They simply
denied atrocities which they could neither justify nor disprove.

The more astute saw, too, that the controversy was putting
them terribly in the wrong before the people ; was doing them
politically more harm than even the quiet passage of an am-
nesty bill could have done them good. Under the goading of

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 327

this formidable opponent, the weaker brethren were exposing
their weakest points, making them still weaker and more de-
fenceless. Ineffectual attempts were made to stay the torrent.
It was doubly hard to lose a victory, so nearly ensured, by the
sudden necessity of making a political stand on an issue im-
moral and indefensible.

" Has not the time of the gentleman from Maine expired ? "
but the Speaker was obliged to answer that it had not.

" Can he claim the floor ? " was asked when, after brief sur-
cease, he was up again.

" Certainly, I have the floor for an hour, and you cannot pre-
vent it."

u I did not ask the gentleman from Maine."

But the Speaker, whom the questioner did ask, ruled honor-
ably, if reluctantly, that the gentleman from Maine was in
order.

"Will the gentleman allow me a moment ? " he asked when
off the floor, and " no ! no ! "came from a dozen storm-centres on
the Democratic side of the house.

Vainly he protested, " Do not be alarmed. I only want a
moment." His " moments " had a terror of their own.

Mr. Cox made a vain attempt at response, but it was perfunc-
tory and ineffective. Mr. Hill, of Georgia, with the courage of
despair attempted to neutralize the effect by charging that equal
atrocities were perpetrated upon Southern prisoners at the North ;
but Northern Democrats from the locality of the rebel prisoners
were summoned to testify on the spot, and between two opposing
fires, their Northern constituencies and their Southern allies, gave
unwilling but direct testimony against an allegation so false as
to be suicidally foolish ; while Southern Democrats were refuted
by unexpected quotations from their own speeches in other
halls. Angry men cried out on the floor that Mr. Blaine was
spoiling the opportunities of the centennial year for universal
harmony. He was like some " magician of the black art, with
devilish incantation, calling up grim and gory spectres from the
political inferno to mar the fair form of the festal cheer of the
Republic." He Avas speaking out " hate and venom." He was
"a ghoul," "a howling hyena," and other unpleasant objects
of history and imagination. But no rage or rhetoric could

328 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

disguise the simple fact that what he sought and all he sought
was a prohibition of national honors for the author of crimes
against humanity, and for the others the Divine condition of
pardon, — the asking for it. The father went out to meet his
prodigal son a great way off, but not while the prodigal sat
sulking among his swine ; not till he had said, and suited the
action to the word, " I will arise and go to my father, and will
say unto him, Father, I have sinned."

Two days afterwards — January 12 — General Garfield fol-
lowed Mr. Blaine, and in his best manner, with his own indi-
viduality and independence, defended every position that Mr.
Blaine had taken.

Of Mr. Hill's statement that the atrocities of Andersonville
do not begin to compare with the atrocities of Elmira, of Fort
Douglas, or of Fort Delaware, and that of all the atrocities,
both at Andersonville and Elmira, the Confederate government
stands acquitted from all responsibility and blame, — General
Garfield said :

" I stand in the presence of that statement with an amaze-
ment that I am utterly incapable of expressing. I look upon
the serene and manly face of the gentleman who uttered it, and
I wonder what influence of the supernal or nether gods could
have touched him with madness for the moment and led him to
make that dreadful statement. I pause ; and I ask the three
Democrats on this floor who happen to represent the districts
where are located the three places named, if there be one of
them who does not know that this charge is fearfully and awfully
untrue ? [A pause.] Their silence answers me. They are
strangers to me, but I know they will repel the charge with all
the energy of their manhood."

Mr. Blaine, resuming the floor, designated the two questions
of our treatment of rebel prisoners and whose was the blame
for breaking exchange as points on which General Garfield had
left him nothing to say. " No gentleman in this House has
answered, no gentleman can answer, one fact presented by him."
But he pressed harder and fortified by further indisputable
evidence, by the words of the Southern men themselves, the ter-
rible truths which had been met only with futile denial and more
futile resentment, and especially emphasized his citations as

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 329

being always from Confederate, never from Union prisoners — ■
till the cry was repeated :

Has not the time of the gentleman from Maine expired ?

The Speaker (pro tempore'). — The time of the gentleman
from Maine has not expired.

Mr. Hancock. — He commenced ten minutes before one
o'clock.

Mr. Jones (of Kentucky). - — The gentleman from Maine is
constantly violating the rales of this House.

Mr. Blaine. — In what respect?

The Speaker (pro tempore). — The gentleman from Kentucky
is out of order. The Speaker of the House set the dial exactly
at the time the gentleman from Maine commenced his speech,
showing exactly when his hour will expire, and the present
occupant of the chair when that time is reached will notify
the House.

On the 14th the Democrats attempted by a coup d'etat to
pass their amnesty bill ; but Mr. Blaine anticipated them,
rallied the now thoroughly aroused Republicans to their posts
of vantage, and forced the Democrats to the necessity of oppos-
ing in open day an amnesty , bill which gave pardon for the
asking to every man but one, and which the Republicans would
combine with Democrats in passing, in order to bring up a bill
which they knew could not be passed at all ; and having mar-
shalled all forces in full array, he dismissed them as one having
authority :

" I hold in my hand a letter which I endeavored to have this
morning the poor privilege of reading, and which I could not
get ; but again under the rules of the House, always beneficent,
and which I have no doubt will always be beneficent as admin-
istered by the honorable occupant of the chair, I have that
privilege. This morning I received a letter which I commend
to gentlemen from the South. With that fascinating eloquence
which my friend from Massachusetts (Mr. Banks) possesses, he
called your attention to the great value in this centennial year
of having no man in the length and breadth of the land under
the slightest political disabilities, and why except poor Jefferson
Davis? I have here a letter written to me without any request,
and, so far as I know, without any expectation that it would

330 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

be made public ; but I am sure that even if it be a private letter
the gentleman writing it will pardon me for reading it.
It is as follows :

Raleigh, N.C., January 12, 1876.

My dear Sir : I observe there is excitement in the House on the amnesty
proposition.

In 1870 I was impeached and removed from office as governor of this
State solely because of a movement which I put on foot according to the
Constitution and the law to suppress the bloody Ku-Klux. This was done
by the Democrats of the State, the allies, and the echoes of Northern
Democrats. I was also disqualified by the judgment of removal from hold-
in 2* office in this State. The Democratic Legislature of this State and its
late constitutional convention were appealed to in vain by my friends to
remove this disability. The late convention, in which the Democrats had
one majority by fraud, refused by a strict party vote to remove my disa-
bilities thus imposed ; and I am now the only man in North Carolina who
cannot hold office.

I think these facts should be borne in mind, when the Democrats in Con-
gress clamor for relief to the late insurgent leaders. Pardon the liberty I
have taken in referring to this matter, and believe me, truly, your friend,

W. W. HOLDEN.

Hon. James G. Blaine.

" Gentlemen, what have you to say to that?

" Now, I wish to make this proposition, that I may bring my
bill before the House by unanimous consent, and I will yield to
any gentleman to move an amendment to it. I will give to that
side of the House all I have asked for this side. If it be
the case that gentlemen will refuse that proposition, then it is
because they do not want any bill passed. I am for a practi-
cable amnesty. I am for an amnesty that will go through."

Mr. Robbins, of North Carolina. — I object.

Mr. Blaine. — Now, Mr. Speaker, I will end this matter,
which I have within my power : I withdraw the motion to
reconsider.

And Jefferson Davis went to his grave a man without a
country.

Many of Mr. Blaine's political and personal friends doubted
the wisdom of his course, — feared the stirring up of ill-feeling,
deprecated possible consequences, did not understand how he
who opposed the force bill could also oppose the amnesty bill.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 331

They thought the country was " weary of strife, wanted con-
ciliation, and not renewal of acerbity. Everybody was sick of
the whole Southern business. The country had a chance to
make money and wanted to be let alone."

He was sternly warned by the Republican press that such
movements would " lose him the presidency." In noting can-
didates " Speaker Blaine was already counted out." " Hot corn
was not dropped more suddenly than our candidate James G.
Blaine." " It was smartness, but not statesmanship." It was
hoped that " his speech on the second day would retrieve the
errors of his first." He had not " only destroyed the centen-
nial harmony in the land, but the centennial appropriation in
Congress."

But Mr. Blaine never mistook the temper and touch of the
people. Across the leaders, athwart apparent tendencies, he
appealed to the general sense of justice, to the conscience,
the reason, the heart ; and the response was sure. In this case
it was electric. The nation was tired of strife and wanted
peace, but not with Jefferson Davis as a chief corner-stone.
Outside of politics, regardless of parties, over all the North, in
crowded city and remote hamlet, here, there, everywhere, was
a father, a mother, wife, sister, daughter, in whose heart dwelt
an undying memory, the memory of some one dearer than life,
who had sunk in the mud of Andersonville, his only bed, and
had died in the mud where he sank ; memories of dear ones
who had gone out men and had returned — but let us forget.
Jefferson Davis was not honored, and it is lawful now to
forget.

To these suvivors Mr. Blaine's words spoke like a voice from
heaven. Their unspeakable sorrows were not forgotten ; their
unspeakable wrongs were not to be whelmed in a rush even of
centennial good feeling, and the centennial was all the more
worth celebrating because they were not. Letters came pour-
ing in upon Mr. Blaine. Steam was not swift enough. From
every quarter the lightning flashed gratitude to the man who
had touched a sacred woe with sympathetic hand. Eveiy mail
and every minute brought messages of love and thanks.

The echoes of disapproval had not died away before Repub-
lican conventions began to pass resolutions denouncing Mr.

332 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Hill and endorsing Speaker Blaine " for his noble defence in
opposition to the amnesty bill." It began soon to be dis-
covered by the newspapers that Mr. Blaine's great blunder in
making the speech had been more than offset by Mr. Hill's
monstrous errors in answering it. Then came a letter from
Mr. Jefferson Davis, on the 27th of Januaiy, citing to an
astonished world his " inexcusable tortures and privations at
Fortress Munroe," the " want and suffering of men in Northern
prisons," and the extraordinary argument that " to remove
political disabilities, which there was not legal power to impose,
was not an act of so much grace," and that he had been cen-
sured " because I would not visit on the helpless prisoners in
our hands such barbarities " as had been inflicted on Southern
prisoners by the North.

Then men remembered that Mr. Blaine had avowed his
desire that the people should know the animus of these unre-
pentant rebel leaders who were as busy as they had been
before the war in consolidating the old slave States into one
compact, political organization, which, with a very few votes
from the North, should govern the country; and even those who
had decried his appeal, declared that one-half of Davis's letter
was taken up in showing that Blaine was right ! " It is
Blaine's luck," was the half vexed, half admiring comment.
" He will be marching through the country now as the cham-
pion of disabled Union soldiers, just as he did a month ago as
champion of public schools." He even received the tribute
of imitation, and other men smote the same chords, but drew
thence only a languid note and passed in music out of sight.

Leaving the discussion to wear itself away, Mr. Blaine
turned to other things. An irredeemable paper currency still
seemed to many a way of escape from poverty, and the " Rag
Baby " was fondled and scourged through the country. The
essential nature and value of the circulating medium Mr. Blaine
believed to be a matter about which parties should agree never
to disagree. On the 10th of February he spoke in the House,
arguing witli great force from the experience of the world, the
necessity of a specie standard, a necessity which the greater
necessity of war had temporarily overborne, and which contin-
ued prostration of business had permitted to be overlooked.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 333

Government notes as legal tender had been the last and suc-
cessful resort of war ; but he demonstrated the disorder and
disaster that must follow a reliance on an irredeemable paper
currency as relief from business stagnation, or as anything but
the addition of permanent confusion to whatever burden we
might be laboring under.

All occasion for such argument has happily long since
passed; yet so clear in statement, so pertinent in illustration,
so picturesque and forceful in arrangement, so vivid in style, so
patriotic and proud was his presentation, that it can be read
to-day with keen interest and pleasure. Amid the many inflation
schemes fatal to both honor and prosperity, it was welcomed
as a guiding voice on a darkened and perilous way.

Public approval of Mr. Blaine's position on the currency was
outspoken. Men of affairs said that while his speech on am-
nesty appealed to patriotic sentiment, his soundness on money
showed hard-headed business ability. Even the omniscients of
the lecture-room and the editorial chair, who had thought his
44 amnesty performances mere smartness," admitted this to be
as near statesmanship as they ever allow Congressmen to
approach. Before the month was out, the newspapers were
declaring that " Blaine is the only one of the candidates mak-
ing real headway." He was "popular with the people." Men
might be never so tired of strife, never so eager to make
money, but " Blaine is gathering in the States." When the
" post-tradership scandals " were before Congress, " the Repub-
licans had the best of the discussion, not because their argu-
ments were stronger, but because Blaine, by his skilful
leadership, persistency, and strength of lungs bore down all
opposition. What with Ben Hill and the Rag Baby, the under-
tow of Blaine sentiment is unmistakable."

When the reformers put forward a bill prohibiting election
contributions from government clerks, Mr. Blaine went a step
further, and moved an amendment prohibiting election contribu-
tions also from members of Congress while they were candidates
for Congress ; but took occasion to warn the reformers that one
or two men behind the polling-booth can do more mischief than
a thousand bribed men can do outside. It seemed in the right
line and harmless, and Mr. Caulfield, who had it in charge,

334 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

permitted him to introduce it ; but evidently fearing some mys-
terious consequence, took back his permission in a panic, and
Mr. Blaine was forced to get possession of the bill and introduce
his amendment as an original proposition.

By April, palliation and modifications and secondary causes
were thrown aside, and leading Republican journals admitted
that Mr. Blaine had with " consummate sagacity sounded the
key-note of his policy in his amnesty speech last winter. Many
of his best friends then thought he had made a frightful
blunder, but he understood the temper of the Republican
masses better than they." And on the lines which he laid
down that winter the victory of 1876 was won.

The situation became to the party which had been sixteen
years out of power, acute and critical. As the life and death
questions of slavery and reconstruction receded, leaving victory
with the nation, private ambitions grew more restless and party
opposition more hopeful. The Republican State defeats of
Grant's second term augured the possibility of a national defeat
in 1876. But it became constantly more evident that one man
in particular must be disabled before success could be assured.
From party defeat as from party triumph the Democrats and the
reformers observed with dismay that this man came out stronger
than he went in, and that behind him followed a great admiring
and enthusiastic army of the loyal, sturdy, controlling masses of
the Republican party, — an army whose ranks were constantly
swelling in numbers, in strength, in momentum. Whether it
were the dry matters of finance or the more emotional questions
of amnesty, or public concerns of less defined if not less impor-
tant traits than either, mere political opposition was of no avail.
There must be a resort to some other expedient.

The politics of those who opposed the Republicans seemed to
consist mainly of investigation. To justify a new party, it
seemed necessary to demonstrate that the chief men of the old
Republican party were scoundrels. In number and extent the
investigations set on foot during that Democratic reform winter
were unprecedented. Whether it was the aftermath of the
Credit Mobilier, or whether human nature, after rising to the
height of great questions, must, upon their settlement and with-
drawal, react in false and feeble and futile issues, the air was

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 335

heavy with charges and counter-charges of corruption. Mr.
William Lloyd Garrison lifted up his voice and protested
that the nation's work was being ever better done, and was
laughed at for his pains by the professional reformers. From
the Credit Mobilier storm Mr. Blaine had emerged untouched ;
but his name had been mentioned in connection with railroads,
and railroads had not yet been taken from the " Index Expurga-
torius." The popular prejudice regarding railroads might yet
be turned to account against him.

Indefinite and anonymous but scandalous rumors began to
steal about. On February 28, 1876, Mr. Blaine received a let-
ter from a friend which gave them definite shape, and the
authority of Mr. John Scott C. Harrison, of Indianapolis, a
government director of the Union Pacific Railroad Company,
a road which derived its franchises from the national govern-
ment. This story was that shortly after Mr. Harrison became a
director, he found seventy-five worthless bonds of the Little
Rock and Fort Smith Railroad among the assets of the com-
pany. Upon inquiry, he learned that the company, in return for
a favor done it by Mr. James G. Blaine, a member of Con-
gress, had loaned him 164,000, had accepted his worthless bonds
as security, and that Mr. Blaine had never repaid the loan.
The draft had been ordered on motion of Thomas Scott, presi-
dent of the road, and was made payable to the order of Morton,
Bliss, & Co., New York. This information Mr. Harrison re-
ceived from Mr. Rollins, an officer of the company. Such, with
many variations and details, was the substance of the rumors.
The favor for which Mr. Blaine received the 164,000 was not
stated, but the implication was of corrupt legislation.

This letter Mr. Blaine answered with a denial of the whole
statement so far as it concerned himself ; but no private denial
could make headway against a tale intended for public cir-
culation. On April 11 an Indianapolis newspaper opened
its columns formally to the charge, unwittingly revealing the
animus of the attack in the first sentence : " A prominent
banker of this city is in possession of a secret, the exposure of
which will forever blast the prospects of a certain candidate for
the presidency."

As Mr. Blaine did not immediately reply, the utterers of

336 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

the tale began to demand that Mr. Blaine ask an immediate
investigation, and to threaten that " if he does not, J. S. C. Har-
rison will go before the Judiciary Committee of the House as
government director of the road and demand an immediate
investigation ; " and when a week had passed some not perhaps
so unfriendly as timid observers began to fear that " Blaine had
made a mistake in not asking an investigation."

Mr. Blaine had his own way of meeting these rumors. His
private letter of denial had been enough to meet honest doubt.
To the public charge he made public answer in the full House
of Representatives, not demanding investigation, but bringing
proof that defied investigation.

It was on the 24th of April, a rainy and dismal day, but the
House was crowded. Mr. Blaine read his speech from manuscript.

Mr. Blaine. — Mr. Speaker, with the leave of the House, so
kindly granted, I shall proceed to submit certain facts and cor-
rect certain errors personal to myself. The dates of the corre-
spondence embraced in my statement will show that it was
impossible for me to make it earlier. I will be as brief as
the circumstances shall permit. For some months past a charge
against me .has been circulating in private, and was recently
made public, designing to show that I had, in some indirect
manner, received the large sum of $ 64,000 from the Union
Pacific Railroad Company in 1871, — for what services or for
what purposes has never been stated. The alleged proof of this
serious accusation was based, according to the original story,
upon the authority of E. H. Rollins, treasurer of the Union
Pacific Company, who, it was averred, had full knowledge that
I got the money ; and also upon the authority of Morton, Bliss,
& Co., bankers of New York, through whom the draft for
164,000 was said to have been negotiated for my benefit, as they
confidentially knew. Hearing of this charge some weeks in
advance of its publication, I procured the following statement
from the two principal witnesses who were quoted as having
such definite knowledge against me:

Union Pacific Railroad Company,
Boston, March 31, 187G.
Dear Sir : In response to your inquiry, I beg leave to state that I have
been treasurer of the Union Pacific Railroad Company since April 8, 1871,

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 337

and have necessarily known of all disbursements made since that date.
During that entire period, up to the present time, I am sure that no money
has been paid in any way or to any person by the company in which you
were interested in any manner whatever.

I make this statement in justice to the company, to you, and to myself.

Very respectfully yours,

E. H. Rollins.
Hon. James G. Blaine.

New York, April 6, 1876.
Dear Sir : In answer to your inquiry we beg to say that no draft, note,
or check, or other evidence of value, has ever passed through our books in
which you were known or supposed to have any interest of an}T kind,
direct or indirect.

We remain, very respectfully, your obedient servants,

Morton, Bliss, & Co.
Hon. James G.Blaine,

Washington, D.C.

Some persons on reading the letter of Morton, Bliss, & Co.
said that its denial seemed to be confined to any payment
that had passed through their " books," whereas they might
have paid a draft in which I was interested and yet no entry of
it made on their "books." On this criticism being made known
to the firm, they at once addressed me the following letter:

New York, April 13, 1876.

Dear Sir : It has been suggested to us that our letter of the 6th instant was
not sufficiently inclusive or exclusive. In that letter we stated " that no
draft, note, or check, or other evidence of value, has ever passed through
our books in which you were known or supposed to have any interest, direct
or indirect." It may be proper for us to add that nothing has been paid by
us, in any form or at any time, to any person or any corporation, in which
you were known, believed, or supposed to have any interest whatever.
We remain, very respectfully, your obedient servants,

Morton, Bliss, & Co.
Hon. J. G. Blaine,

Washington, D.C.

The two witnesses quoted for the original charge having thus
effectually disposed of it, the charge itself reappeared in an-
other form, to this effect, namely, that a certain draft was

338 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

negotiated at the house of Morton, Bliss, & Co., in 1871, through
Thomas A. Scott, then president of the Union Pacific Railroad
Company, for the sum of $ 64, 000, and that $75,000 of the bonds
of the Little Rock and Forth Smith Railroad Company were
pledged as collateral ; that the Union Pacific Company paid the
draft and took up the collateral ; that the cash proceeds of it
went to me, and that I had furnished, or sold, or in some way
conveyed or transferred to Thomas A. Scott these Little Rock
and Fort Smith bonds which had been used as collateral ; that
the bonds in reality had belonged to me or some friend or con-
stituent of mine for whom I was acting. I endeavor to state
the charge in its boldest form and in all its phases.

I desire here and now to declare that all and every part of
this story that connects my name with it is absolutely untrue,
without one particle of foundation in fact, and without a tittle
of evidence to substantiate it. I never had any transaction of
any kind with Thomas A. Scott concerning bonds of the Little
Rock and Fort Smith road or the bonds of any other railroad,
or any business in any way connected with railroads, directly
or indirectly, immediately or remotely. I never had any busi-
ness transaction whatever with the Union Pacific Railroad
Company or any of its officers or agents or representatives, and
never in any manner received from that company, directly or
indirectly, a single dollar in money, or stocks, or bonds, or any
other form of value. And as to the particular transaction re-
ferred to, I never so much as heard of it until nearly two years
after its alleged occurrence, when it was talked of at the time
of the Credit Mobil ier investigation in 1873. But, while my
denial ought to be conclusive, I should greatly regret to be com-
pelled to leave the matter there. I am fortunately able to sus-
tain my own declaration by the most conclusive evidence that
the case admits of or that human testimony can supply. If any
person or persons Juiow the truth or falsity of these charges, it
must be the officers of the Union Pacific Railroad Company. I
accordingly addressed a note to the president of that company,
a gentleman who has been a director of the company from its
organization, I believe, and who has a more thorough acquaint-
ance with its business transactions probably than any other
man. The correspondence which I here submit will explain

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 339

itself, and leaves nothing to be said. I will read the letters in
their proper order. They need no comment :

Washington, D.C., April 13, 1876.
Dear Sir : You have doubtless observed the scandal now in circulation
in regard to my having been interested in certain bonds of the Little Rock
and Fort Smith road, alleged to have been purchased by your company in
1871.

It is due to me, I think, that some statement in regard to the subject
should be made by yourself as the official head of the Union Pacific Rail-
road Company.

Very respectfully,

J. G. Blaine.
Sidney Dillon, Esq.,

President Union Pacific Railroad Company.

Office Union Pacific Railroad Company,

New York, April 15, 1876.
Dear Sir: I have your favor of the 13th instant, and in reply desire
to say that I have this day written Col. Thomas A. Scott, who was presi-
dent of the Union Pacific Railroad Company at the time of the transaction
referred to, a letter of which I send a copy herewith. On receipt of his
reply I will enclose it to you.

Very respectfully,

Sidney Dillon, President.
Hon. James G. Blaine,

Washington, D.C.

Office of the Union Pacific Railroad Company,

New York, April 15, 1876.
Dear Sir : The press of the country are making allegations that cer-
tain bonds of the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad, purchased by the
Union Pacific Railroad Company in 1871, were obtained from Hon. James
(J. Blaine, of Maine, or that the avails in some form went to his benefit,
and that the knowledge of these facts rests with the officers of the com-
pany and with yourself.

These statements are injurious both to Mr. Blaine and to the Union
Pacific Railroad Company. There were never any facts to warrant them,
and I think that a statement to the public is due both from you and myself.
I desire, as president of the company, to repel any such inference in the
most emphatic manner, and would be glad to hear from you on the subject.

Very respectfully,

Sidney Dillon, President.
Col. Thomas A. Scott,

Philadelphia, Perm.

340 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Office Union Pacific Railroad Company,
New York, April 22, 1876.
Dear Sir : As I advised you some days ago, I wrote Col. Thomas
A. Scott, and beg leave to enclose you his reply.

I desire further to say that I was a director of the company and a mem-
ber of the executive committee in 1871, and to add my testimony to that of
Colonel Scott's in verification of all that he has stated in the enclosed
letter.

Truly yours,

Sidney Dillon, President.
Hon. James G. Blaine,

Washington, D.C.

Philadelphia, April 21, 1876.

My dear Sir : I have your letter, under date New York, April 15,
1876. . . .

In reply, I beg leave to say that, much as I dislike the idea of entering
into any of the controversies that are before the public in these days of
scandal, from which but few men in public life seem to be exempt, I feel
it my duty to state :

That the Little Rock and Fort Smith bonds purchased by the Union
Pacific Railroad Company in 1871 were not purchased or received from
Mr. Blaine, directly or indirectly, and that of the money paid by the
Union Pacific Railroad Company, or of the avails of said bonds, not one
dollar went to Mr. Blaine, or to any person for him, or for his benefit in
any form.

All statements to the effect that Mr. Blaine ever had any transactions
with me, directly or indirectly, involving money or valuables of any kind,
are absolutely without foundation in fact.

I take pleasure in making this statement to you, and you may use it in

any manner you deem best for the interest of the Union Pacific Railroad

Company.

Very truly yours,

Thomas A. Scott.
Sidney Dillon, Esq.,

President Union Pacific Railroad Company, New York.

This closes the testimony I have wished to offer.

Several newspapers — some of them, doubtless, from friendly
motives — have urged that I should ask for a committee to in-
vestigate these charges. I might have done that and awaited
the delay and slow progress that inevitably attend all congres-
sional investigations. Three and a half years ago I moved a
committee to investigate the Credit Mobilier charges, and

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 341

though every particle of proof, in complete exculpation of my-
self, was before the committee in thirty-six hours after its first
meeting, I was compelled to wait for more than two months,
indeed seventy full days, before I got a public report exonerat-
ing and vindicating me from the charges. If I had asked for
a committee to investigate the pending matter, I should have
been compelled to wait its necessarily slow action, with the
charge all the while hanging over me, undenied and unanswered ;
and, pending the proceedings of an investigation which I had
myself asked, propriety would have forbidden my collecting
and publishing the decisive proofs which I have now submitted.
For these reasons I have deemed that the shortest and most ex-
peditious mode of vindication was the one which I was bound
to choose by every consideration of myself personally and of my
official relations. I have not omitted the testimony of a single
material witness to the transaction on which the accusation
against me is based, and unlesss I misapprehend the scope and
force of the testimony it leaves no charge against me. In any
and all events, I am ready to submit the whole matter to the
candid judgment of the House and the country ; and if the
House thinks the matter should be further inquired into, I beg
to express my entire readiness to give all the assistance in my
power to make the investigation as thorough, as rigid, and as
impartial as possible.

To give a seeming corroboration or foundation to the story
which I have disproved, the absurd rumor has lately appeared
in certain newspapers that I was the owner of from 1150,000 to
1250,000 of the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad bonds,
which I received without consideration, and that it was from
these bonds that Thomas A. Scott received his $75,000. The
statement is gratuitously and utterly false. No responsible
author appears anywhere for this unfounded story, but in dis-
missing it I desire to make the following explicit statement :
More than twenty-three years ago, in the closing days of Mr.
Fillmore's administration, the government granted to the State
of Arkansas some public, lands within its own limits to be ap-
plied to the construction of railroads in that State. The Legis-
lature of Arkansas incorporated the Little Rock and Fort Smith
Railroad Company the same year, and gave; to the company a

342 BIOGBAPHT OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

portion of the lands it had received from the general govern-
ment to aid in the construction of the road — about five thou-
sand acres to the mile, I think. But the company were unable
to raise any money for the enterprise, though they made the
most strenuous efforts, and when the war broke out in 1861 —
eight years after the State had given the lands to the company
■ — not a mile of the road was built. Of course nothing was
done during the war. After the war all the grants of land
previously made to the Southern States, were renewed in gross
in the session of 1865-66. The Little Rock and Fort Smith
Company again received a grant from the State, and again tried
to raise money to build their road; but 1865, 1866, and 1867
passed without their getting a dollar. Finally, toward the close
of 1868, a company of Boston gentlemen, representing consider-
able capital, undertook its construction. In raising the requisite
means they placed the bonds of the road on the New England
market in the summer of 1869, offering them on terms which
seemed very favorable to the purchaser, and offering them at a
time when investments of this kind were fatally popular. In
common with hundreds of other people in New England and
other parts of the country, I bought some of these bonds, — not
a very large amount, — paymg for them at precisely the same
rate that others paid. I never heard, and do not believe, that
the Little Rock Company — which I know is controlled by
highly honorable men — ever parted with a bond to any person
except at the regular price fixed for their sale. The enterprise,
though apparently very promising, proved unsuccessful, as so
many similar projects did about the same time. I lost a con-
siderable sum of money (over $20,000) by my investment, and
I presume New England made a net loss of $2, 000,000 in com-
pleting that road for Arkansas, as she has lost over one hundred
million by similar ventures West and South within the last
twelve years. In. addition to my investment in the bonds I
united with others in raising some money for the company when
it met its first financial troubles. Proceedings are now pending
in the United States Circuit Court in Arkansas, to which I am
a party of record, for the reimbursement of the money so
advanced. All the bonds which I ever purchased I continued
to hold ; and when the company was reorganized in 1871, I

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 343

exchanged them for stock and bonds in the new concern, which
I still own. My whole connection with the road has been open
as the day. If there had been anything to conceal about it I
should never have touched it. Wherever concealment is desir-
able avoidance is advisable, and I do not know any better test
to apply to the honor and fairness of a business transaction.

As to the question of propriety involved in a member of
Congress holding an investment of this kind, it must be re-
membered that the lands were granted to the State of Arkansas,
and not to the railroad company, and that the company derived
its life, franchise, and value wholly from the State. And to the
State the company is amenable and answerable, and not in any
sense to Congress. Since I purchased the bonds but one act of
Congress has passed in any way touching the subject, and that
was merely to rectify a previous mistake in legislation. I take
it, when any security, from government bonds to town script,
is offered at public sale to anyone who can pay for it, every
American citizen is free to buy. If you exclude a Representa-
tive from the investment on the ground that in some secondary
or remote way the legislation of Congress has affected or may
affect the value of the article, then yOu exclude every man on
this floor, not only from holding a government bond or a share
in a national bank, but also from owning a flock of sheep, or a
field of hemp, or a tobacco plantation, or a cotton-mill, or an
iron-furnace ; all for these interests are vitally affected by the
tariff legislation on which we vote at every session, and of which
an important measure is even now pending in the Committee
of the Whole. In the seven intervening years since the Little
Rock and Fort Smith bonds were placed on the market, I know
few investments that have not been more affected by the legis-
lation of Congress. But this case does not require to be
shielded by any such comparisons or citations, for I repeat
that the Little Rock road derived all it had from the State of
Arkansas, and not from Congress. It was in the discretion of
Congress to give or withhold from the State, but it was solely
in the discretion of the State to give or withhold from the
Little Rock Railroad Company.

When the Little Rock road fell into the financial troubles
of which I have spoken, there were certain interests connected

344 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

with it that were under peculiarly pressing embarrassment and
that needed relief. There had been at different times very con-
siderable talk about inducing the Atlantic and Pacific road —
which on its southern branch was to be a connecting line east
and west with the Little Rock and Fort Smith, and the Mis-
souri, Kansas, and Texas road, which would be a connecting
line both north and south at the point of junction — to aid the
Little Rock and Fort Smith enterprise by taking some of its
securities, — a practice very common among connecting roads.
To both these roads the completion of the Little Rock road was
of very great importance. Accordingly, in the spring of 1871,
when only one coupon had been passed by the Little Rock
Company on one series of its bonds and none passed on the
other, and when there was sanguine hope of getting the enter-
prise on its feet again, the Atlantic and Pacific Company took
one hundred thousand of its bonds and one hundred thousand
of its stock for the gross sum of 179,000 ; and the Missouri,
Kansas, and Texas, if I remember correctly, took half the
amount at the same rate. This was done not for the corpora-
tion itself, but for an interest largely engaged in the construc-
tion of the road. With the circumstances attending the
negotiation with the Atlantic and Pacific road I was entirely
familiar, and with several of its officers I have long been well
acquainted. I also knew all about the negotiation with the
Missouri, Kansas, and Texas road, though I never to my knowl-
edge saw any of its officers, and never had an interview with
any of them on any subject. But in the case of both roads, I
desire to say that the bonds sold to them did not belong to me,
nor did I have one dollar's pecuniary interest in the whole
transaction with either company.

The infamous insinuation, made in certain quarters, that I
engaged to use my influence in Congress for the Atlantic and
Pacific road and also for the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas in
consideration of their purchasing these securities, hardly merits
notice. The officers and directors of both companies, so far as
I have known the one and heard of the other, are high-minded,
honorable gentlemen, and they would have justly spurned
me from their presence had I been willing to submit an offer
so dishonorable and mutually degrading. I had no pecuniary

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 345

stake in the negotiation, and I should have loved infamy for
infamy's sake had I bartered my personal and official honor in
the transaction. And I am sure that every man connected with
either company would repel the dishonoring suggestion as
warmly as I do myself. The whole affair had no more connec-
tion with congressional legislation than any one of the ten
thousand similar transactions that are constantly occurring in.
the business world.

Of a like character with the insinuation just answered is that
which, in an irresponsible and anonymous way, attempts to con-
nect the ownership of Little Rock and Fort Smith bonds with
the legislation of last winter respecting the State government of
Arkansas. There are some accusations which it is difficult to
repel with, sufficient force because of their mixture of absurdity,
depravity, and falsehood. I never heard this stupid slander
until within a few days, and I venture to say there is not a
responsible man in the country of the slightest sense who can
discern the remotest connection between the two things that
are alleged to have an intimate and infamous relation.

Let me now, Mr. Speaker, briefly summarize what I have pre-
sented :

First, that the story of my receiving $64,000 or any other sum
of money or other thing of value from the Union Pacific Rail-
road Company, directly or indirectly, or in any form, for myself
or for another, is absolutely disproved by the most conclusive
testimony.

Second, that no bond of mine was ever sold to the Atlantic
and Pacific, or the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad Com-
pany, and that not a single dollar of money from either of those
companies ever went to my profit or benefit.

Third, that instead of receiving bonds of the Little Rock and
Fort Smith road as a gratuity, I never had one except at the
regular market price, and that instead of making a large fortune
out of that company I have incurred a severe pecuniary loss
from my investment in its securities which I still retain.

I can hardly expect that any statement from me will stop the
work of those who have so industriously circulated these calum-
nies. For months past the effort has been energetic and contin-
uous to spread these stories in private circles. Emissaries of

346 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

slander have visited the editorial rooms of leading Republican
papers from Boston to Omaha, and whispered of revelations to
come that were too terrible even to be spoken in loud tones.
And at last the revelations have been made !

I am now, Mr. Speaker, in the fourteenth year of a not inac-
tive service in this hall. I have taken and have given blows.
I have, no doubt, said many things in the heat of debate which
I would now gladly recall. I have, no doubt, given votes
which in fuller light I would gladly change. But I have never
done anything in my public career for which I could be put
to the faintest blush in any presence, or for which I cannot
answer to my constituents, my conscience, and the great
Searcher of hearts.

To all right-thinking men, the answer was sufficient ; the case
was concluded. The most captious reformer was constrained
to admit that " Mr. Blaine stands fully acquitted before the peo-
ple," venturing to add only the suggestion that it would have
" greatly strengthened Mr. Blaine's explanation and denial if he
could have submitted facts showing precisely to whom or for
what purpose the sum of $64,000 for some worthless Arkansas
railroad bonds was paid."

But as doubt was not the beginning of the attack, refutation
was not necessarily the end. The point was not to dismiss
charges which could not be proved, but to keep alive charges
which had been disproved, until after the meeting of the National
Republican Convention in June, which was to nominate a can-
didate for the presidency. This might be accomplished by the
mere institution of a congressional investigation, which there
was no difficulty in procuring from a Democratic House. On
May 2 a resolution was adopted instructing the judiciary com-
mittee to inquire if any such transaction took place, and if
so, whether the transaction was from corrupt design, and avIio
were the guilty persons. Mr. Tarbox, of Massachusetts, who
fathered the resolution, had previously distinguished himself by
surreptitiously obtaining and using in the House the text of Mr.
Blaine's speech on the currency before it was delivered, to the
great displeasure of all honorable men, especially among his
Democratic allies.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 347

The investigation was opened on May 15th. It may be
mentioned as indicative of the level of Mr. Blaine's opponents
that on the same morning the old charge of Credit Mobilier
days regarding the Kansas Pacific bonds, which had been aban-
doned as " a case of brothers," reappeared in long columns of
the newspapers, rearranged as a fresh and fatal discovery. A
development of the fatuity of malice it proved to be, for Mr.
Stuart trampled it to a second death five days after.

Mr. Blaine was present at the investigation, surrounded by
watchful and alert friends, as well as by eager political oppo-
nents ; but he permitted nothing to escape him. Every weak
point was brought out by skilful question or pregnant remark.
All the material facts which he had stated to the House were
repeated as sworn testimony before the committee. Mr. Morton,
of the firm of Morton, Bliss, & Co., and Mr. Sidney Dillon, the
president, took oath to the purport of their letters, and swore
that they had never heard Mr. Blaine's name in connection with
the $64,000.

Mr. Rollins, who had been made responsible for the story, sup-
ported his letter by his oath, but admitted that he might at
some time long ago have said that the bonds were Mr. Blaine's,
though he had no remembrance of saying so, and not the
slightest reason for thinking so.

Mr. John Scott C. Harrison under oath knew nothing but what
Mr. Rollins had told him. Mr. Carnegie, a member of the
Union Pacific and of the executive committee, who transacted
a great deal of President Scott's business for him, testified that
he had never heard Mr. Blaine's name in connection with the
164,000.

Crowning all this conclusive, sufficient, but negative testi-
mony came positive testimony in the sworn statement of Mr.
Thomas A. Scott, that the $64,000 Little Rock and Fort Smith
bonds were his, that he had received them from Mr. Josiah Cald-
ivell, who ivas constructing the road, and that he had sold them to
the company at a higher than the market price, as compensation
for extraordinary services rendered the road as its president !

At this point Mr. Blaine claimed that he was entitled to
have judgment on the $64,000 bonds. Mr. Lawrence, the only

348 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

member of the sub-committee who had not been in the rebel
ranks, declared that the investigation had utterly failed to put
guilt on Mr. Blaine, and that no suspicion attached to him.

All in vain. The New York convention, which had met at
Syracuse on the 25th of March, had developed a suspicion that
it held two Blaine votes for every Conkling vote. New Hamp-
shire had spoken unmistakably for Blaine. The delegations
continued to " come in for Blaine." The investigation must
go on.

The evidence was in. All that remained was babble, which
can, doubtless, be found in the chronicles of that day by all
who desire it. To most of this Mr. Blaine listened with
varying degrees of disgust and contempt, which he was not
always careful to conceal. The testimony before the committee
was so frivolous on the one side, so conclusive on the other,
that no reason appeared for not bringing in the report, and Mr.
Blaine was publicly congratulated on his successful defence,
exactly as if a just report had been rendered.

There remained only two weeks to the national convention.
The Illinois convention was overwhelmingly for Blaine ;
there was a spontaneous outburst for him in Missouri, and
on June 1st Iowa declared for Blaine.

There began to be whisperings in the underworld that Mr.
Blaine might be implicated in corrupt legislation with the
Northern Pacific Railroad. Mr. Blaine answered simply : " From
first to last in all the legislation touching Pacific railroads, I
never had an interest of a penny in one of them nor in any of
their branches, directly or indirectly."

Idle words for beasts of prey.

A final deadly blow was heralded. An incriminating letter
existed. Witnesses were coming from Boston who would show
not only that Mr. Blaine was implicated in Northern Pacific
bribery, but that. he had been the owner of the $64,000 bonds.
These witnesses proved to be Mr. Elisha Atkins, Mr. Warren
Fisher, and Mr. James Mulligan. Mr. Atkins was a director of
the Union Pacific road. With Mr. Fisher Mr. Blaine had
been connected in Little Rock and Fort Smith and some other
investments. Their relations had been friendly until the ter-
mination of the business connection, which had long ceased

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 349

to be satisfactory to Mr. Blaine. Mr. Mulligan had once been
the clerk of Mr. Blaine's brother-in-law, Mr. Jacob Stan wood,
in Boston, and afterwards of Mr. Fisher. With Mulligan Mr.
Blaine was so slightly and remotely associated, that when on
May 29 a telegram from Boston told him that Mulligan was
on the way to Washington with hostile intentions, and a
member of his family asked him what the telegram meant, he
only answered carelessly, " I am sure I do not know ! "

It was soon reported that Mr. Mulligan had private letters
from Mr. Blaine to Mr. Fisher during the time when they had
common interests. Mr. Blaine was incredulous, as there had
been the understanding, frequent at the closing of business
transactions, that correspondence should be destroyed. It was
of no special importance, and Mr. Blaine had left the arrange-
ment to complete itself. He promptly sent a servant to their
hotel asking Mr. Fisher and Mr. Mulligan to come to his
house. Mr. Fisher came alone, and upon questioning him Mr.
Blaine learned that an indefinite number of his letters had not
been destroyed, and were in Mulligan's possession by Mr.
Fisher's own act.

The three witnesses appeared before the committee. The
testimony of Mr. Atkins and Mr. Fisher was entirely negative.
Neither knew of any such transactions as were alleged. Mr.
Mulligan was equally uninformed, except that he had understood
Mr. Atkins to say that seventy-five bonds went from Mr.
Blaine to Mr. Scott and were " worked off" upon the Union
Pacific ; " but he knew nothing about it himself. Mr. Atkins
testified without delay that he never said it to Mr. Mulligan,
but that Mr. Mulligan said it to him ! Mr. Atkins testified
also that Mr. Mulligan had a grudge against Mr. Blaine —
thought Mr. Blaine did not treat him right many years ago in
the settlement of the estate of his brother-in-law, Stanwood;
said, " Mr. Blaine went back on him."

While the committee was hearing this testimony, as it must
be called, Mr. Blaine sat in the committee-room, lost in
thought, communicating with no one, every feature drooping,
presenting to the observer an appearance of deep melancholy.
It was an attitude perfectly familiar to his intimates, and meant
only abstraction. Often when thinking, his soul seemed

350 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

drawn away, leaving his face inert, vacant. He was utterly
unable to pose for effect, or to consider how he was appearing.
In a committee crowded with alert foes and newsgatherers, this
change from his usual intent attention was almost embarrassing
to his friends.

In truth Mr. Blaine was not so much interested in the testi-
mony or in the committee, as in his own letters so treacherously
manipulated.

As soon as he had decided what to do, he quietly secured an
adjournment. His course was, as always, the straightforward
one. As Mulligan would not come to him, he went to Mul-
ligan, and asked from him the surrender of the letters. Mr.
Mulligan refused. Mr. Blaine attempted reasoning, but to
that Mr. Mulligan was impervious. He took the position that
the private letters of a public man are public, and doggedly
insisted that he should retain the letters and publish them at
his pleasure either before or after the investigation. Mr. Blaine
suggested that Mulligan return them to Mr. Fisher, who was
present, and who alone besides himself had right to them. But
Mr. Fisher declined to receive them, and directed Mulligan to
give them to Mr. Blaine. Mulligan declared that "he would
not give them up to God Almighty or His Father."

Whereupon, without further parley, Mr. Blaine took the let-
ters, calling upon Mr. Fisher and Mr. Atkins to witness his act.

Returning home he at once sent for two friends from the
House and requested their inspection of the letters.

The next morning Mr. Mulligan appeared before the com-
mittee and gave them an account of the interview, reducing it
to his own level in the narration. The Democratic element in
the committee- tried to get at the contents of the letters. Mr.
Blaine demanded to be heard before they went into his private
letters. Mr. Frye, of the minority, ijrotested that there was no
rule of law by which the witness could be interrogated at this
point regarding the contents of the letters. Mr. Hunton (of
Virginia) was frank enough to admit that " this committee is
not governed by the ordinary rules of law," and Mr. Mulligan
was induced to swear that the bonds which Mr. Caldwell sold to
Mr. Scott were the bonds that he had received from Mr. Blaine,
and that Mr. Blaine had acknowledged it in his own letter.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 351

When at length Mr. Blaine was permitted to testify, he gave
a full account of the circumstances attending his seizure of the
letters, pronounced Mulligan's detention of them illegal, took
his stand on his rights as a citizen, and declined to yield the let-
ters to the committee. He informed them that he had consulted
friends, should submit the letters to counsel, and be guided by
their advice ; but at present he refused to yield the letters.

The next morning he submitted the written opinion of the
Hon. J. S. Black, of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, and Senator
Matt. H. Carpenter, of Wisconsin, a Republican, and it was
read in committee.

Washington, June 2, 1876.

The Hon. James G. Blaine has laid before us fifteen letters written by
him to Warren Fisher, Jr., between the years 1864 and 1872 inclusive, and
three other papers in the same package — making eighteen papers in all —
which he informs us he received from James Mulligan on the 31st of May,
1876, at the Riggs House, in the city of Washington. We have carefully
examined these letters and papers at Mr. Blaine's request, with intent to
ascertain whether they relate to the subject-matter which the Judiciary
Committee of the House of Representatives are authorized to inquire into
by resolution of the House, passed May 2, 1876.

We do not hesitate to say that the letters and papers aforesaid have no
relevancy whatever to the matter under inquiry. We have no doubt the
committee itself would decide the question of their relevance the same
way. As a result of this it follows that Mr. Blaine having the letters and
papers in his possession is not bound to surrender them. Referring to Mr.
Blaine's private affairs, and being wholly beyond the range of the investi-
gation which the committee is authorized to make, it would be most unjust
and tyrannical as well as illegal to demand their production. We advise
Mr. Blaine to assert his right as an American citizen, and resist any such
demand to the last extremity.

(Signed) J. S. Black,

Matt. II. Carpenter,

Counsellors at Law.

The committee were at their wits' end. Not only were the let-
ters, from which they had expected so much, in Mr. Blaine's actual
and legal possession, with no means in sight by which he
could be dispossessed, but there was this irrefutable evidence
that the letters were not relevant. The sub-committee referred
the situation to the Judiciary Committee, on Saturday, June
3d. After much vain attempt to grapple with it themselves,

352 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Mr. Scott Lord proposed to bring it before the House for deci-
sion ; but his proposition was vigorously rejected, one member
remarking that though they did not know what to do, they
knew what not to do, and that was, " not to have Blaine cavort-
ing round on the floor of the House." After protracted and
perplexed discussion, the matter was postponed to Tuesday,
June 6th. But the committee gave no sign that they would
render a report. The three witnesses — Atkins, Mulligan, and
Fisher — were discharged, and by night it became known that
the committee would not bring the question before the House.

Then Mr. Blaine determined that he would. The committee
had postponed all consideration of the matter till Tuesday,
June 6th. Mr. Blaine resolved to consider it on Monday, June
5th. After the morning hour, the Geneva Award bill was
in order, but Mr. Blaine claimed the floor on a question of
privilege.

As soon as the word " Blaine is up " went through the Capi-
tol the galleries, the aisles, the floor of the House, the corri-
dors filled. Ail the door-ways were bulging out with men who
by no possibility could hear anything more than the tones of a
voice and the swell of applause ; but the spirit of the occasion
held them fast.

Mr. Blaine. — If the morning hour has expired, I will rise
to a question of privilege.

The Speaker (pro tempore^). — The morning hour has
expired.

Mr. Blaine. — Mr. Speaker, on the 2d day of May this
resolution was passed by the House :

Whereas it is publicly alleged, and is not denied by the officers of the
Union Pacific Railroad Company, that that corporation did, in the year
1871 or 1872, become the owner of certain bonds of the Little Rock and
Fort Smith Railroad Company, for which bonds the said Union Pacific
Railroad Company paid a consideration largely in excess of their actual
or market value, and that the board of directors of said Union Pacific
Railroad Company, though urged, have neglected to investigate said
transaction: Therefore,

Be it resolved, That the Committee on the Judiciary be instructed to in-
quire if any such transaction took place, and, if so, what were the circum-
stances and inducements thereto, from what person or persons said bonds
were obtained and upon what consideration, and whether the transaction

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 353

was from corrupt design or in furtherance of any corrupt object ; and that
the committee have power to send for persons and papers.

That resolution on its face, and in its fair intent, was
obviously designed to find out whether any improper thing had
been done by the Union Pacific Railroad Company ; and of
course, incidentally thereto, to find out with whom the transac-
tion was made. The gentleman who offered that resolution
offered it when I was not in the House, and my colleague (Mr.
Frye), after it was objected to, went to the gentleman and
stated that he would have no objection to it, as he knew I
would not have, if I were present in the House. The gentle-
man from Massachusetts (Mr. Tarbox), to whom I refer, took
especial pains to say to my colleague that the resolution was
not in any sense aimed at me. The gentleman will pardon me
if I say that I had a slight incredulity upon that assurance
given by him to my colleague.

No sooner was the sub-committee designated than it became
entirely obvious that the resolution was solely and only aimed
at me. I think there had not been three questions asked until
it was obvious that the investigation was to be a personal one
upon me, and that the Union Pacific Railroad or any other
incident of the transaction was secondary, insignificant, and
unimportant. I do not complain of that ; I do not say that I
had any reason to complain of it. If the investigation was to
be made in that personal sense, I was ready to meet it.

The gentleman on whose statement the accusation rested,
Mr. Harrison, was first called. He stated what he knew from
rumor. Then there were called Mr. Rollins, Mr. Morton, and
Mr. Millard, from Omaha, a government director of the Union
Pacific road, and finally Thomas A. Scott. The testimony was
completely and conclusively in disproof of the charge that
there was any possibility that I could have had anything to
do with the transaction.

I expected (and I so stated to the gentleman from Virginia,
the honorable chairman of the sub-committee) that I should
have an early report; but the case was prolonged, and pro-
longed, and prolonged ; and when last week the witnesses had
seemed to be exhausted, I was somewhat surprised to be told

354 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

that the committee would now turn to investigate a transaction
of the Northern Pacific Railroad Company on a newspaper
report that there had been some effort on my part with a frieud
in Boston to procure for him a share in that road, which effort
had proved abortive, the money having been returned. I asked
the honorable gentleman from Virginia on what authority he
had made that investigation — not that I cared about it ; I begged
him to be assured I did not ; and the three witnesses that he
called could not have been more favorable to me within any
possibility. But I wanted to know on what authority I was to
be arraigned before the country upon an investigation of that
kind ; and a resolution offered in this House on the 31st of
January by the gentleman from California (Mr. Luttrell) was
read as the authority for investigating that little transaction
in Boston. I ask the House to bear with me while I read a
somewhat lengthy resolution :

Whereas, the several railroad companies hereinafter named, to wit : the
Northern Pacific, the Kansas Pacific, the Union Pacific, the Central Branch
of the Union Pacific, the Western Pacific, the Southern Pacific, the Sioux
City and Pacific, the Northern Pacific, the Texas and Pacific, and all the
Pacific roads or branches to which bonds or other subsidies have been
granted by the government, have received from the United States, under
the act of Congress of July 1, 1862, the act of March 3, 1874, and the
several acts amendatory thereof, money subsidies amounting to over
$64,000,000, land subsidies amounting to over 220,000,000 acres of the
public domain, bond subsidies amounting to $ , and interest amount-
ing to $ , to aid in the construction of their several roads ; and whereas

it is but just and proper that the government and people should understand
the status of such roads and the disposition made by such companies in the
construction of their roads of the subsidies granted by the government:
Therefore,

Be it resolved, That the Judiciary Committee be and are hereby in-
structed and authorized to inquire into and report to this House, first,
whether the several railroad companies hereinbefore named, or any of
them, have, in the construction of their railroads and telegraph lines, fully
complied with the requirements of law granting money, bonds, and land
subsidies to aid such companies in the construction of their railroads and
telegraph lines ; second, whether the several railroad companies or any of
them have formed within themselves corporate or construction companies
for the purpose of subletting to such corporate or construction companies
contracts for building and equipping said roads or any portion thereof,
and, if so, whether the money, land, and bond subsidies granted by the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 355

government have been properly applied by said companies or any of them
in the construction of their road or roads ; third, whether the several rail-
road companies or any of them have forfeited their land subsidies by failing
to construct and equip their road or roads or any portion of them as re-
quired by law ; and, fourth, that, for the purpose of making a thorough
investigation of the several Pacific railroads or any of them, the Judiciary
Committee shall have full power to send for persons and papers, and, after
thorough investigation shall have been made, shall report to this House
such measure or bill as will secure to the government full indemnity for
all losses occasioned by fraudulent transactions or negligence on the part of
said railroad companies or any of them, or on the part of any corporate or
construction company, in the expenditures of moneys, bonds, or interest,
or in the disposition of land donated by the government for the construction
of the roads or any of them or any portion thereof, and for the non-pay-
ment of interest lawfully due the government, or any other claim or claims
the United States may have against such railroad company or companies.

That resolution embraces a very wide scope. It undoubtedly
embraces a great many things which it is highly proper for the
government to look into ; but I think the gentleman from
California who offered that resolution will be greatly surprised
to find that the first movement made under it to investigate
what the Northern Pacific Railroad Company has done was to
bring the whole force of that resolution to find out the circum-
stances of a little transaction in Boston which never became a
transaction at all. I asked the gentleman from Virginia how
he deduced his power. Well, he said, it would take three
months to go through the whole matter, but in about
three months it would reach this point, and that he might as
well begin on me right there. He began ; and three witnesses
testified precisely what the circumstances were. I had no
sooner got through with that, than I was advised that in another
part of the Capitol, without the slightest notice in the world
being given to me, with no monition, no warning to me, I was
being arraigned before a committee known as the Real Estate
Pool Committee, which was originally organized to examine
into the affairs of the estate of Jay Cooke & Co., and whose
powers were enlarged on the third day of April by the follow-
ing resolution :

Whereas, on the 24th day of January, A.l). 1870, the House adopted tho
following1 resolution :

356 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

" Resolved, That a special committee of five members of this House, to
be selected by the Speaker, be appointed to inquire into the nature and
history of said real-estate pool and the character of said settlement, with
the amount of property involved, in which Jay Cooke & Co. were in-
terested, and the amount paid or to be paid in settlement, with power to
send for persons and papers and report to this House."' Therefore,

Be it resolved, That said committee be further authorized and directed to
likewise investigate any and all matters touching the official misconduct
of any officer of the government of the United States or of any member of
the present Congress of the United States which may come to the knowl-
edge of said committee : Provided, That this resolution shall not affect any
such matter now being investigated by any other committee under authority
of either House of Congress ; and for this j^urpose said committee shall
have the same powers to send for persons and papers as conferred by said
original resolution.

They began an investigation, which, I am credibly informed,
and I think the chairman of that committee will not deny, was
specifically aimed at me. I had no notice of it, not the remot-
est ; no opportunity to be confronted with witnesses. I had no
idea that any such thing was going on, not the slightest. So
that on three distinct charges I was being investigated at the
same time, and having no opportunity to meet any one of
them ; and I understand, though I was not present, that the
gentleman from Virginia has this morning introduced a fourth,
to find out something about the Kansas Pacific Railroad, a
transaction fifteen years old, if it ever existed, and has summoned
numerous witnesses.

Now, I say — and I state it boldly — that, under these
general powers to investigate Pacific railroads and their trans-
actions, the whole enginery of this committee is aimed person-
ally at me ; and I want that to be understood by the country.
I have no objection to it ; but I want you by name to organize
a committee to investigate James G. Blaine. I want to meet
the question squarely. That is the whole aim and intent ; and
the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Hunton) and the gentleman
from Kentucky (Mr. Knott) will pardon me for saying that
when this investigation was organized I felt that such was the
whole purpose and object. I ivill not further make personal
references, for I do not wish to stir up any blood on this ques-
tion ; but ever since a certain debate here in January it has

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 357

been known that there are gentlemen in this hall whose feelings
were peculiarly exasperated toward me. And I beg the gentle-
man from Kentucky, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee,
to remember that when this matter affecting me went to his
committee, while there were seven Democratic members of that
committee, he took as the majority of the sub-committee the
two who were from the South and had been in the rebel army.

Then when the investigation began, the gentleman from
Virginia who conducted it insisted under that resolution,
which was obviously on its face limited to the seventy-
five thousand dollar transaction — the transaction with the
Union Pacific Railroad — he insisted on going into all the
affairs of the Fort Smith Railroad as incidental thereto, and
pursued that to such an extent that finally I had myself,
through my colleague, Mr. Frye, to take an appeal to the whole
committee, and the committee decided that the gentleman had
no right to go there. But when he came back and resumed the
examination, he began again exactly in the same way, and was
stopped there and then by my colleague who sits in front, not
as my attorney, but as my friend.

When the famous witness, Mulligan, came here loaded with in-
formation in regard to the Fort Smith road, the gentleman from
Virginia drew out what he knew had no reference whatever to
the question of investigation. He then and there insisted on
all of my private memoranda being allowed to be exhibited by
that man in reference to business that had no more connection,
no more relation, no more to do with that investigation, than
with the North Pole.

And the gentleman tried his best, also, — though I believe
that has been abandoned, — to capture and use and control my
private correspondence. This man had selected, out of corre-
spondence running over a great many years, letters which he
thought would be peculiarly damaging to me. He came here
loaded with them. He came here for a sensation. He came
here primed. He came here on that particular errand. I was
advised of it, and I obtained those letters under circu instances
which have been notoriously scattered throughout the United
States, and are known to everybody. I have them. T claim I
have the entire right to those letters, not only by natural right,

358 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

but upon all the precedents and principles of law, as the man
who held those letters in possession held them wrongfully. The
committee that attempted to take those letters from that man
for use against me proceeded wrongfully. They proceeded in
all boldness to a most defiant violation of the ordinary private
and personal rights which belong to every American citizen, and
I was willing to stand and meet the Judiciary Committee on
this floor. I wanted them to introduce it. I wanted the gen-
tleman from Kentucky and the gentleman from Virginia to
introduce that question upon this floor, but they did not do it.

Mr. Knott (in his seat). — I know you did.

Mr. Blaine. — Very well.

Mr. Knott. — ■ I know you wanted to be made a martyr of.
[Laughter.]

Mr. Blaine. — And you did not want to, and there is the
difference. [Laughter and applause.] I go a little further;
you did not dare to.

Mr. Knott. — We will talk about that hereafter.

Mr. Blaine. — I wanted to meet that question. I wanted
to invoke all the power you had in this House on that question.
I repeat, the Judiciary Committee, I understand, have aban-
doned that issue against me. I stood up and declined, not only
on the conclusion of my own mind, but by eminent legal
advice. I was standing behind the rights which belong to
every American citizen, and if they wanted to treat the ques-
tion in my person anywhere in the legislative halls or judicial
halls I was ready. Then there went forth everywhere the
idea and impression that because I would not permit that
man, or any man whom I could prevent, from holding as a
menace over my head my private correspondence, there must be
something in it most deadly and destructive to my reputation.
I would like any gentleman on this floor — and all gentlemen
on this floor are. presumed to be men of affairs, whose business
has been varied, whose intercourse has been large — I would
like any gentleman to stand up here and tell me that he is
willing and ready to have his private correspondence scanned
over and made public for the last eight or ten years. I would
like any gentleman to say that. Does it imply guilt ? Does it
imply wrong-doing ? Does it imply any sense of weakness that

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 359

a man will protect his private correspondence ? No, sir ; it is
the first instinct to do it, and it is the last outrage upon any
man to violate it.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I say that I have defied the power of the
House to compel me to produce those letters. I speak with all
respect to this House. I know its powers, and I trust I respect
them. But I say this House has no more power to order what
shall be done or not done with my private correspondence than
it has with what I shall do in the nurture and education of my
children ; not a particle. The right is as sacred in the one case
as it is in the other. But, sir, having vindicated that right,
standing by it, ready to make any sacrifice in the defence of it,
here and now, if any gentleman wants to take issue with me on
behalf of this House, I am ready for any extremity of contest
or conflict in behalf of so sacred a right. And while I am so, I
am not afraid to show the letters. Thank God Almighty,
I am not afraid to show them. There they are (holding up a
package of letters). There is the very original package. And
with some sense of humiliation, with a mortification that I do
not pretend to conceal, with a sense of outrage which I think
any man in my position would feel, I invite the confidence of
forty-four million of my countrymen while I read those letters
from this desk.

He was hardly permitted to finish the sentence. The tense listen-
ing broke into applause prolonged, insuppressible — applause
that widened in great waves through the land as the wires
flashed the words, " Blaine is reading the letters."
• It was afterwards remembered as characteristic of Mr. Blaine
that in taking his countrymen into his confidence he had not
reckoned them according to the last census, but had allowed for
the subsequent increase of the population !

A slight explanation prefaced the reading of each letter.
Referring only to matters long past, of no present or public in-
terest, their unsensational character gave a distinct relief to the
strained attention of the audience. But it was noted that the
letters revealed one thing which Mi'. Blaine had withheld. He
had told the truth, but not the whole truth. He had said
enough to justify himself, but it was not possible for him to

360 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

glorify himself. The letters certified more than his honesty or
his honor, — his magnanimity. They showed that when the
Fort Smith enterprise proved unsuccessful he not only met his
own loss, but assumed the losses of " those innocent persons
who invested on my request." Two of his friends, Hon. Abner
Coburn and Mr. Charles B. Haseltine, a staunch Democrat,
refused to accept reimbursement, on the ground that it was a
financial venture and that each man's risk was his own. But
Mr. Blaine would not himself apply that principle.

At the conclusion of the reading he went on :

" 1 do not wish to detain the House, but I have one or two more
observations to make. The specific charge that went to the com-
mittee of which the honorable gentleman from Virginia is chair-
man, so far as it affects me, was whether I was a party in interest
to the sixty-four thousand dollar transaction ; and I submit that
up to this time there has not been one particle of proof before the
committee sustaining that charge. Gentlemen have said what
they had heard somebody else say, and generally when that
somebody else was brought on the stand it appeared that he did
not say it at all. Col. Thomas A. Scott swore very positively
and distinctly under the most rigid cross-examination all about it.
Let me call attention to that letter of mine which Mulligan says
refers to that. I ask your attention, gentlemen, as closely as if
you were a jury, while I show the absurdity of that statement.
It is in evidence that, with the exception of a small fraction,
the bonds which were sold to parties in Maine were first-mort-
gage bonds. It is in evidence over and over again that the
bonds which went to the Union Pacific road were land-grant
bonds. Therefore it is a moral impossibility the bonds taken
up to Maine should have gone to the Union Pacific Railroad.
They were of different series, different kinds, different colors,
everything different, — as different as if not issued within a
thousand miles of each other. So on its face it is shown it
could not be so.

" There has not been, I say, one positive piece of testimony in
any direction. They sent to Arkansas to get some hearsay
about bonds. They sent to Boston to get some hearsay. Mul-
ligan was contradicted by Fisher, and Atkins and Scott swore
directly against him. Morton, of Morton, Bliss, & Co., never

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 361

heard my name in the matter. Carnegie, who negotiated the
note, never heard my name in that connection. Rollins said
it was one of the intangible rumors he spoke of as floating in
the air. Gentlemen who have lived any time in Washington
need not be told that intangible rumors get considerable circu-
lation here ; and if a man is to be held accountable before the
bar of public opinion for intangible rumors, who in the House
will stand?

" Now, gentlemen, those letters I have read were picked out of
correspondence extending over fifteen years. The man did his
worst, the very worst he could, out of the most intimate busi-
ness correspondence of my life. I ask, gentlemen, if any of
you — and I ask it with some feeling — can stand a severer
scrutiny of or more rigid investigation into your private cor-
respondence ? That was the worst he could do."

He paused. The silence was expectant.

" There is one piece of testimony wanting. There is but one
thing to close the complete circle of evidence. There is but one
witness whom I could not have, to whom the Judiciary Com-
mittee, taking into account the great and intimate connection
he had with the transaction, was asked to send a cable de-
spatch, — and I ask the gentleman from Kentucky if that
despatch was sent to him ? "

" Who ? " suggested Mr. Frye, in an undertone.

" Josiah Caldwell."

Mr. Knott responded blandly, " I will reply to the gentleman
that Judge Hunton and myself have both endeavored to get
Mr. Caldwell's address, and have not yet got it."

Then came the unexpected and upsetting question from Mr.
Blaine, " Has the gentleman from Kentucky received a despatch
from Mr. Caldwell ? "

The House was breathless.

"I — will explain that — directly," replied Mr. Knott.

" I want a categorical answer," demanded Mr. Blaine.

" I have received," gasped Mr. Knott, " a despatch purporting
to be from Mr. Caldwell."

" You did ! "

" How did you know I got it ? " asked Mr. Knott in the very
fatuity of surprise.

362 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

" When did you get it ? " questioned Mr. Blaine, sternly. " I
want the gentleman from Kentucky to answer when he got it."

" Answer my question first," parried Mr. Knott.
. "I never heard of it until yesterday."

" How did you hear it? "

Mr. Blaine thrust aside the frivolous questioning, and for all
answer towered down the aisle, holding high a despatch in his
uplifted hand, and standing in the open space in front of the
Speaker, in full view of the whole assembly, in the very face of
Mr. Knott he pronounced with deliberate intense distinctness :

" You got a despatch last Thursday morning at eight o'clock
from Josiah Caldwell completely and absolutely exonerating
me from this charge, — and you have suppressed it ! '

There was one instant of silence. Then went up from the
great congregation such a sound as never those halls had heard
before. It was not a shout, not a cheer, but rather a cry, the
primal inarticulate voice of all souls fused in one, a victorious
voice of horror, anger, exultation, triumph ; rising, swelling,
sinking, renewing in an ecstasy that could not end.

The House simply went to pieces. The vast audience dis-
solved into individual human beings abandoned to individual
expression. For fifteen minutes nothing else was done. It
seemed as if nothing else ever would be done. The Speaker is
reported to have called to order, but only the reporters heard
him. He is said to have complained piteously that he was not
responsible, that the door-keepers had let in upon the floor twice
as many visitors as there were members, and that the House
would be cleared if the applause was repeated ; but the applause
was repeated at will, and no one left till he chose to go.

Mr. Blaine at length rose and offered a resolution, the most
extraordinary perhaps that was ever offered in a Legislative
assembly, or that an investigating committee ever encountered,
— a resolution which, in fact, put the investigating committee
under investigation by the accused :

Resolved, That the Committee on the Judiciary be instructed to report
forthwith to the House whether in acting under the resolution of the House
of May 2, relative to the purchase by the Pacific Railroad Company of
seventy-five land-grant bonds of the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad,
it has sent any telegram to one Josiah Caldwell, in Europe, and received

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 363

a reply thereto. And, if so, to report said telegram and reply, with the
date when said reply was received, and the reasons why the same has been
suppressed.

" And after that," suggested Mr. Blaine, rapidly, " add ' or
whether they have heard from Josiah Caldwell in any way.'
Just add those words, ' and what.' Give it to me and I will
modify it ; " and seizing a pen he swiftly scratched in the words,
called the previous question on the resolution, and with another
wild, long-continued applause from floor and gallery, the House
adjourned and the audience slowly melted away.

364 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

From V. :

Washington, April 13, 1874.

I have just returned from the funeral of Charles Sumner at the Senate
Chamber. The body was lying in the rotunda. There was a procession,
or file, three or four deep, extending from the coffin, around the outer
circle, to the door, waiting to take a farewell look. As we were with a
Senator, we were allowed to cross directly to the coffin without waiting.
There was a pained look on the face, and the head seemed to be almost bent
forward and the face shortened. The coffin was loaded with flowers.
The face was far more natural than I feared to find it. We went im-
mediately into the Senate gallery. What met the eye was very impressive
— what met the ear was less so. Nothing of the latter was so forceful to
me as the subdued manner in which the unanimous " ay ! " was pronounced
by the Senators when the few motions of adjournment were put. The
Senators and members of Congress were all in badges of mourning. The
Speaker and the escort wore broad white silk scarfs across the shoulder
and breast, falling behind. When the President pro tern, announced " The
House of Representatives," all the Senators arose. Mr. Blaine and the
clerk, Mr. McPherson, headed the procession. Mr. Blaine's look and bear-
ing were very fine. He is always dignified upon occasion — being
naturally so. He mounted to the side of the President of the Senate and
the House filed in ; then the Chief Justice and the associate judges of the
Supreme Court were announced and walked in with their floating heavy
silk gowns ; then, " The President and the Cabinet ; " then, preceded by the
ministers and the pall-bearers, Charles Sumner came into the Senate Cham-
ber for the last time. Although the whole coffin-lid was glass, the flowers
chiefly covered it. As I looked down from the gallery I could see the
lower part of his face and his folded hands. The greatness was in the
man, and nothing could minish aught thereof, but . . . voice and soul
did what they could. However, Sumner lay there undisturbed and grand.
When " the Senate of the United States consigns the body of Charles
Sumner to the sergeant-at-arms," etc., Carpenter's words were good
though his manner was not weighty. I could not help thinking how
Sumner's own voice would have spoken like the voice of an archangel.
Then they filed out as they had filed in, except the President, who slipped
through a side-door followed by the Cabinet. ... It was not till
after Mr. Blaine had left for the Capitol, Wednesday, that a servant came
up and told us that Mr. Sumner had been sick all night, and was thought
to be dying. From: time to time reports of his death came, but they proved
to be false, till the last one at about 3 P.M. Mr. Blaine was in in the
forenoon. He said Mr. Sumner lay with his eyes closed, the muscles of
his face much contracted as if he suffered, breathing heavily, and every
now and then clutching his breast over his heart. They sent for Carl
Schurz quite early in the morning. He went over, stayed awhile, then
came back and told his wife it seemed so sad to have no woman there, he
wished she would go over, and she went back with him directly. They

BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 365

found the parlors below full of black women crying, the only white person
being Dr. Mary Walker, walking around in her demoniac old trousers.
Mr. Blaine said it was as quiet and orderly as possible when he was there.
Before Mrs. Schurz's arrival so many gentlemen had come down from the
Capitol that it was not thought best for her to enter the room, and she
went home again. Mr. Hooper and Judge Hoar were in close attendance.
Crowds, many of them colored ])eople, surrounded the house during the
day. One of the most touching sights to-day was the long procession of
colored men, shabby, but all decent, five deep, following immediately after
the hearse, to the station, of their own freewill and gratitude. The hearse
was drawn by four milk-white horses. Do you remember seeing that
almost his last words, often repeated, were, " I am so tired. I want rest " ?
Mr. Hoar said his brother, looking over his papers after his death, found
one of his earliest papers, a college oration, for aught I know, in which he
said, " How should a man ask rest except in the grave ! " Mrs. Fish was in
yesterday, and as she was going out she said that Mr. Fish had not been
out since Tuesday. He had something of a cold, and the death of Sumner,
and the remembrance of their early friendship, and their late estrange-
ment, gave him so much grief and shock that he was really ill. He was
at the Senate to-day, but he looked very pale. Sumner was in the Senate
only the day before he died, remaining long enough to be present at the
presentation of the vote rescinding his censure. Won't Whittier be glad?
I suppose it is chiefly owing to him that the censure was taken back.
. . Mr. Blaine appointed a colored member to go to Boston. . . .
At dinner, Monday night, Secretary Fish began to say something about
Mr. Blaine being President — indirectly, of course. I stopped him, play-
fully of course ; told him I could not help common people talking about it,
but he should not ; that while I had no objections to the presidency, I had
decided objections to Mr. Blaine's going through life as a disappointed
candidate. After the company was gone, one of the outside waiters
came into the parlors to ask Mr. Blaine, " How did you like the dinner, sah ?
Hope to serve you a better one in the White House, sah," with the broadest
of grins. At Governor Buckingham's, Mr. Fish was telling a gentleman
how I had lectured him here ; so I told him the negro story, that he might
see what good company he was in. He declared that that was the rising
race, held the balance of power, and he was wise to be on their side. . . .

Washington, May 20, 1874.
. . . We dined at Mr. Chandler's last night. . . . M. and Q.,
Lulu, L. C, and the little D. had a small table in the corner of the same
room, with L.'s nurse to wait on them, and it was very cunning. They
were still all the first part of the time, but after a while their little voices
began to bubble quite freely. Mr. Blaine and L. sat nearly back to back,
and Mr. Blaine would turn around and pinch his cheek once in a while,
and make him laugh. Towards the last, L. pulled Mr. Blaine's sleeve, and
whispered, " I've had a yighl nice time." . . ,

366 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

From Walker : .

Denver, July 19, 1874.

Dearest Mother : . . . Thursday evening we drove out to see the
war-dance of the Ute Indians. It took place at their camp some two or
three miles from the city, out on the prairie. The contrast was very strong
between the civilization of this city, and the wild, savage, somewhat bac-
chante scene presented by the Indian dance. Indeed, this seems to me the
country of contrasts.

Perhaps the handsomest man I have seen anywhere out here — a mild,
peaceable face, handsome as the creation of an artist — was at the same
time the worst specimen in dress and manner of a border ruffian. I can
understand now the parts of Bret Harte's stories which have hitherto
seemed defects, in which this contrast is so sharply displayed. We drove
out there, arriving at their camp about seven o'clock. The evening was
charming. In the background, the Rocky mountains, with purple ame-
thyst tints, lit into gold by the sunset's last beams. In the foreground the
Ute tents, round wigwams, their ponies straying here and there, and the
warriors, some of them gathered in small groups, around the scattered
camp-fires. Several carriages and barouches filled with ladies and gentle-
men were drawn up near to the circle which the dancers made. The occa-
sion of this dance was the obtaining of three scalps by the Utes from the
Cheyennes. How many the Utes, not as good fighters as the Cheyennes,
lost in obtaining them, I know not. Nearly all the Ute warriors were
drawn up in a semicircle, and were saying a rude barbaric chant, which
nevertheless had more of harmony in it than I expected. They accom-
panied their song — if one may so call it— by beating on a sort of drum.
The squaws and maidens danced around within this semicircle, in a sort of
concentric circle. The steps were of two kinds, — one a shuffle, advancing
the front foot and then bringing the back foot up to it, the other a hop,
holding the two feet close together and taking short jumps. The warriors
all the time beat time with drums, and all the people joined in the rude
chant. The three scalps were carried around by as many women, and were
held aloft on poles. At the conclusion of the song, which ended in a sort of
yelp or cat-call such as you may hear the boys in a theatre indulge in, they
trailed the scalj)s in the dust, symbolical, as I understood it, of the abase-
ment of their foes. The attire of the Indians was varied. I found great
difficulty in distinguishing the women from the men, but, like all the
daughters of Eve, I found that they wore a sort of skirt. In features they
differed little from those of the opposite sex. One woman wore a magnifi-
cent tiara made of eagle's feathers. They were sewed on a strip of
blanket, and reached nearly to her feet. Some of the leggins worn by the
men were embroidered magnificently with beads. The attire, however,
was very diverse. One of the chief warriors was exceedingly proud of an
old beaver hat which he wore ; and one of the young children was
wrapped up in an old red print tablecloth. The children were the best-
looking portion of the whole tribe. They wore very little clothing and

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 367

were all handsomely formed ; but in feature — bah ! One old Indian wore a
large silver medal, on one side of which was a medallion of Washington,
and on the other, two clasped hands and the pipe of peace. The old
Indian had obtained it from some Cheyenne to whom it had been presented
by the simple process of slaying its former owner in battle.

From Mr. Blaine's uncle, Hon. Jno. H. Ewing :

Washington, Pa., August 27, 187-4.

My dear Friend and Kinsman : Your favor was duly received, en-
closing draft of one thousand dollars' donation to Washington and Jefferson
College, for which you have the sincere thanks of the trustees and faculty,
and your many warm friends here, and I hope most sincerely that ere long
we shall have the pleasure to manifest our good feeling to you in a more
honorable and substantial manner. The course of our State convention will
have a good effect in one respect, yet it was ill-advised ; it will show that
Pennsylvania is not in favor of third term. He had better rest on his
honors.

I feel that your prospects are very good for the succession, if nothing
should arise prior to the time for next nomination. If Grant sees that he
has no chance, he will go in for you ; but he must first be satisfied of that
fact. It is not necessary for you to commit yourself on any of the great
leading questions of currency. The prosperity of the country will depend
much more upon good crops than any legislation.

The country must have time to < right herself: she has overtraded and
speculated too much, with too little work. The desire to get rich in haste
has ruined the country ; she must get back to the old-fashioned way of
making a living by honest labor. Take care of the leading men of the
country : the mass will follow.

I shall at all times be pleased to hear from you. My best and warmest
friendship to your boys, who endeared themselves to all of us while here.

From Hon. M. C. Kerr :

New Albany, Ind., November 21, 1874.
Absence from home for a few days prevented a more prompt acknowl-
edgment of your very kind letter of the 13th inst. Accept my sincere
thanks for your congratulations and the kindly reference to the speakership
in connection with my name. Permit me to say in all frankness that I do
not look upon the event to which you refer as at all probable. It is no
doubt possible, and if it should happen, I am sure no reflection would (rive
me more disquiet than that which makes me realize the essential difficulty
there would be in an untried hand attempting to preside over such a body
after one who had performed that duty with such signal ability and success
as you have done. Without reference to that matter, however, I shall be
very glad to meet you in the 44th, and there renew our service together.

368 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

From Mr. Blaine :

Boston, December 3, 1874.

Just as we were finishing dinner, or supper, at 7.30, Q. started off, on
leave as I found from Emmons, to look at Boston by gas-light. A. and the
girls went out separately to do some little shopping. As soon as I found Q.
was gone, I was ready, and made Emmons start out one direction, while I
went the other. I went up Tremont, and he down, and up near the Park-
street church I met the little toad, as quietly looking at the sights as any-
body. I never let him know I had been uneasy, and he and I had a good
long walk after we met Emmons. Mons is now out calling. Q. said he
had been " round the square," a very comprehensive term. No news. Of
course I feel very badly about going away. I am pursued here by tele-
grams, and I can be ill spared. But I am doing my duty, and that always
squares matters.

To Mr. Blaine :

Ohio, January 27, 1875.

I want to vote the Republican ticket this year, and therefore I want to
see you the candidate. There are a great many people about here who feel
the same way. I have talked with four or five leading men, and they all
prefer you to Governor Hayes. ... I find no State or sectional feeling
at all. There is no real Hayes movement, and the nomination of Morton is
positively dreaded by the best men in the party. But M. is working like
a nailer.

I suppose you see General Garfield often. I would like to suggest, if
you will not think it impertinent, that you should talk a little with him
about the advisability of your coming out here for a little visit to me.
There are several of us who are willing to give a good deal of time for 3tou,
if we only knew how. We could learn more by talking with you an hour
or so than in any other way. General Garfield knows this district
thoroughly, and can tell you all you want to know about the advisability
of a visit. . . . The amnesty debate has left you stronger than before,
and has strengthened the Republican party in an unexpected manner.

Washington, January 29, 1875.
A mild, rainy day. Mr. Blaine came home from the House at six this
morning, and is still in bed, at 2 P.M. They are filibustering — the mi-
nority staving offthe,civil rights bill, and the majority determined to fight
it out and to show that the rules of the House need to be altered so that a
minority shall not be able to block legislation. They have been in contin-
uous session since Wednesday noon, but have now adjourned over till to-
morrow. Report says that Mr. Blaine distinguished himself last night by
the wisdom and decision of his rulings. Butler and his allies were trying
all the while to bring the new rule into disrepute, and to have Mr. Blaine
arrogate a quorum where no quorum voted — but in vain.

BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 369

From Walker :

March 1, 1875.

. . . I wish I could have been in Washington during the last two

weeks. Have you observed the very great change in the , and the

tone of compliment it now so habitually assumes in speaking of the
ex-Speaker? And, speaking of speakers, this is the last letter I shall ever
address to Speaker Blaine. I hope that the " paternal's " valedictory is a
good one. I should dislike to see six years of such good service terminate
in any poor speech, though I know father's must be good.

From V. :

Washington, March 2, 1875. '

. . . Mr. Blaine did not get home from the House till 1.30 this
morning ; said he was crazy at having to stay so. Everything was going on
smoothly, but every one said he must not go ; and sure enough, at the very
last Butler slipped in fifty thousand dollars, and Mr. Blaine slipped it
out again, and felt paid for staying.

Washington, March 4, 1875.
We are no longer Speaker. ... It has been an "ovation." Mr.
Blaine was at the House all night, came home about half-past eight, took
bath and breakfast, returned directly, Congress re-assembling at half-past
nine. He sent the carriage back for us, and we all, down even to Q., went
up. Q. knew beforehand that he was going, and must needs add to his
delight by tormenting T. with the fact that he was going and she wasn't.
Then, " T., do you know your papa isn't going to be Speaker any more?
He is going to stop being Speaker. Aren't you sorry ? " — " Well," said T.,
" he isn't going to stop being papa." Mrs. Dawes was in the Speaker's
seat, and all the Maine ladies, Mrs. Frye, Burleigh, and Hale. M. went on
the floor with E. F. and Q. also under charge of Mr. Sherman and J. S.
Legislation went on until almost the minute hand was on twelve. The
crowd increased every moment — galleries, aisles, steps, slowly darkening,
and the open sjiaces on the floor finally filled up till it was just one great
sea of blackness. Messengers were coming in from the Senate, stopping
near the door, then handing bills to others who passed up the centre aisle
to deliver them at the desk. Mr. Blaine and the clerk of the House were
rapidly signing bills, which were snatched by waiting messengers, who
rushed down the front aisle on the full run to carry them to the Senate, and
suddenly down came the gavel, and Mr. Dawes rose and reported that the
committee appointed to wait upon the President to ask if he had any further
message for the House reported that he had none. Then Mr. Blaine again
struck the gavel, three times slowly, and the great assemblage hushed
to perfect stillness. In a clear voice, audible to the farthest corner of the
House, the Speaker made his (-losing address, which you will have read
before you see this. It was perfect, — terse, deliberate, simple, touching,

370 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

manly, closing with, "the House of Representatives is adjourned with-
out day." Everybody was moved, and the very clerks at the desk wiped
their eyes. At the close, there came such a clapjDing of applause, again
and again repeated, and no one stirred from his place except Mr. Blaine,
who immediately left the chair ; but the ajDplause kept on, and he turned
partly back and bowed his acknowledgments, and as still they did not stop,
he went up to the clerk's desk in front of his own and lower, and bowed
again, and still they applauded, till finally he sat down. Then there was a
moving, and he stood at the edge of the raised platform, and people went
up and by, and shook hands. Every one says, nothing like it ever happened
before. Then, though very slowly, the vast congregation melted away.
One lady, whom I did not know, behind me, asked me if Mr. Blaine had
been up all night. She thought it was so wonderful. She did not know him,
but she could not help crying herself: she never heard anything so touching.
Mr. Ramsdell was quite carried away with enthusiasm. First he came
under our gallery, looked up and clapped, then met us on the stairs.
♦'Oh ! it was splendid,11 he said, " nothing ever like it before — never was
such a speech nor such a reception.11 I said, " Splendid, indeed, to have the
Speaker lose his chair." " Oh ! " he said, " he only lost it to get something
hisrher and better." However, Mr. Blaine is well warned at home to care
for none of these things ; but it is gratifying to retire from six years1 ser-
vice with such plaudits, and they came from both sides. The other night
after one of his rulings against B., and in accordance with law, a South-
erner and a Democrat sent up a note to him. " By G — d, I am proud of
you. . . • You looked magnificent. God bless you ! "

The whole town is ringing with Mr. Blaine1s speech and reception.
Meeting Mr. Phelps walking, he said he had never seen the English
lancruao-e used with more force. J. S. comes in and says every one is
talking about it — that he wanted to cry and to cheer himself, and he went
out and found G. wiping his eyes. In fact, we have already got to laugh-
ing about it, and Mr. Chandler has just sent in a note saying he has but
just got over his crying; but it Avas no laughing matter at the time. In-
deed, Mr. Blaine felt a good deal himself, and could not quite control his
voice at first, though I did not detect it at all ; but those who were near him
said he did hesitate a moment, and he admits that he felt a twitter in his
knees. It is a very easy thing to write about, but one must be on the spot
to feel it — the immense concourse, the incessant noise suddenly closing
with the three slow knocks, and then a silence so vast, and the sense of
sympathy and separation — and the clear voice and strong, simple words of
a man himself so simple and so strong. ... I have written at a hand-
gallop, but hope you will make it out.

To Mr. Blaine :

Little Rock, Ark., March 5, 1875.
Dear Sir : With this I take great pleasure in forwarding to you a true
copy of a joint resolution just passed by the Legislature of this State. It is

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 371

but a feeble although a most heartfelt testimonial of a suffering people to
the noble stand yourself and others took in their defence.

As Congress had adjourned when this resolution was adopted, the Legis-
lature deemed it proper to have the same forwarded to you as the late
Speaker, and I now perform that duty with feelings of the deepest sensi-
bility, and express the hope that you may live long to serve and honor our
common country. With great respect,

I am, most truly,

A. H. Garland,

Governor of Arkansas.

Senate Concurrent Resolution, No. 36.

Whereas, in the recent contest before the Congress of the United States
to overthrow the present State government, it is evident that the true ex-
pression of the sentiment of the people of this State was recognized and
endorsed in Congress by the Conservative Representatives, without regard
to party,

Therefore, be it resolved, by the senate of the State of Arkansas, the
House of Representatives concurring, that while the thanks of the people
of this State are due to those in Congress who vindicated their rights, they
are especially due to the Republicans of that body who remained true to
our State, and that they may not be mistaken, and have cause to regret
their action, Arkansas is hereby pledged to a fair, just, and faithful enforce-
ment of the laws, to the end that all people may still have their rights, and
that her course shall be " Charity to all and malice toward none."

Resolved further, That the Governor is hereby directed to forward a
copy of these resolutions to the Hon. James G. Blaine, Speaker of the
House of Representatives.

Approved March 4, 1875.

A. H. Garland,

Governor of Arkansas.

From G. :

Washington, March 23, 1875.

. . . Mr. Blaine criticised the expression, " Touching the Almighty,"
etc. Isaid, " But it is Bible." — "Is it Bible ?"—" I think so." — " Won't
believe it till I see it." I went for my Concordance. He found the verse
and was silent a long while, so I called out, " How is it? " — " The scamps
have put in 'touching,'' but it is in italics — ^wasn't in the original Hebrew
as / read the Bible."

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. John II. Ewing :

Washington, Penn., May 4, 1875.
I have learned with much pleasure from Dr. Hays thai you have agreed
to meet with us at our next college commencement on the last of June. 1

372 BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

am gratified to know that we shall have the pleasure of your company
upon that occasion, and personally I feel that your presence will afford us
much pleasure, to meet once more one who is so nearly identified with my
family. Those feelings of early life grow stronger as we advance in life.
You will make my house your home while you are here. . . . And do
not forget my good boys, who gave us so much interest when here last
with you, that all our 37oung people were so delighted with, and ask me
frequently when they will be here again.

You will come directly to my house. Mrs. Ewing and myself will take
no denial, as we all feel that we have claims upon you that none others
here can have.

From Mr. Blaine :

New York, June 13, 1875.

My telegram will have relieved you from any uneasiness that might be
created by the newspaper accounts of the railroad accident, although I
do not know what those accounts may be. The car I was in was thrown
down headlong from the track and rolled clear over, and there we were, an
indistinguishable mass of men, women, chairs, sofas, carpet-bags, umbrellas,
and so forth.

I was sitting in the next chair to Annie Louise Gary, when the fearful
crash came, and as soon as motion ceased, I found that she was not hurt,
except a slight bruise on the shoulder ; but on attempting to rise myself, I
found my right side so lame and so painful, that I certainly thought some
ribs were broken. We all managed in the course of ten or fifteen minutes,
with the aid of the people outside, to get out of the car, and into the
station (Tremont), about ten miles from New York. Here we had to
wait in the utmost discomfort for more than two hours for a wrecking
train to come up from New York and relieve us.

I reached the Fifth Avenue Hotel about quarter of two. I had Dr.
Ruppaner summoned immediately, and on close examination he found no
ribs broken, but a severe contusion along my right side, with lesser bruises
on different parts of my body. He had me well rubbed with chloroform
liniment, and I got to sleep in the course of an hour, and slept till nine
o'clock.

I am very stiff to-day, and full of aches and pains ; but have great cause
for thankfulness that I got off without any real injury. I have not a parti-
cle of fever, thus showing I sustained no internal injury whatever. Vice-
President Wilson was in the next car and got off without a scratch. The
train was running thirty-five miles an hour, in the dark and rain, so that no
element was lacking to make the accident fearful.

Secretary Robeson is here, and has been to see me twice to-day — and
madam, also here, has sent her maid to do anything she can for me, — a
kind service, but not needed.

I shall hope to be up to-morrow, though possibly it may not be prudent
to move round much for a day or two. ... I could see, in this

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 378

accident, how utterly impossible it is for passengers to escape from a car
that takes fire. Had this car taken fire, I don't see how any one of us
could ever have got out; but, fortunately, there was no kerosene, — the
Boston line using these large candles.

From Walker:

New Haven, Tuesday, June 15, 1875.

. . . I have been so busy lately in my preparations for the " annuals '
that I have had no time to write. Indeed, almost every moment has been
spent either in exercise or in reading physics. I bristle all over with
physics, and should you come near me you would be in danger of an
electric discharge, or of seeing the solar spectrum plainly visible upon
my brow.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. Rutherford B. Hayes :

Fremont, Ohio, June 16, 1875.

Thanks for your note. Maine hurt us badly by a big loss eight years
ago in the pinch of our suffrage fight. Since, she has done us " a power of
good " on several occasions by handsome gains. I am glad you can
promise well this year. After it is done, come over and help us. We
shall need it. The secret of our enthusiastic convention is the school
question. The Democrats take the hint and are on the retreat. They wiil
probably adopt a good sound plank on that subject. If they can get the
people to trust them on that topic, their chance of success is good. Other-
wise, otherwise.

We have been losing strength in Ohio for several years by emigration
of Republican farmers, and especially of the young men who were in the
army. In their places have come Catholic foreigners. Last year on a
tolerably full vote they had 17,000 majority — the vote being larger than
when Allen beat Noyes by a scratch. In the cities this spring we are still
more decisively beaten. Whether the reaction has spent its force is the
question. We shall crowd them on the school and other State issues. By
the time your election is over, we shall need help, and fresh men, with
general topics. Let me know if we may reckon on your help. Thanking
you for your encouragement. . . .

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. J. II. Ewing :

Washington, Prnn., June 22, 1875.
I learn by the papers that you met with an accident on railroad near
New York, but have been unable to Learn the character of your injuries,
and whether they are of so serious a character as to prevent your being
with us on the 30th inst., at our college commencement. It will be a great
disappointment to your friends should you not be able to be present. Will
you let me hear from you as early as possible ?

374 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

June 24, 1875.
. . . Mr. Blaine was bruised and mauled, not seriously injured, but
the accident was a frightful one — near midnight; the car wabbled and
jerked and was finally thrown off at right angles from the track — thirty
feet away — and left on its side ; cut two telegraph poles off clean, broke
every chair off, and the people and everything were hurled and huddled
into a heap. The long sofa struck Mr. Blaine in the side, but the doctor
says the hurt is purely muscular. His clothes were torn off him. He
keeps his hat as a memento. He says he can never in his thought face
death more closely than he did then. He says he did not think of his sins
at all. Dear old soul, he has not any to think of, — none to speak of cer-
tainly; but he thought, "So this is the end of it all, and what a blow it
would be to them at home, and most of all how badly Walker would feel
that he had not telegraphed him to come to the station in New Haven and
have the last look at him ! "

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. E. C. Ingersoll :

June 24, 1875.

Now that you are out of danger, I congratulate you upon your recovery,
and upon your escape from death. I suppose your escape will be accounted
providential, but to my mind it would have been more providential not to
have happened. But be this as it may, I am awfully glad that you got off
as well as you did.

The political outlook is improving each day, and you are gaining
strength constantly. I meet men from all portions of the country daily, and
they talk of you in a way that makes my heart feel glad and strong.

From G. :

June 28, 1875.

. . . Dr. Smith sounded Emmons's praise for engineering that party
through Harvard class-day ; said he could not do it himself, and gave up
early in the fray.. . . . Emmons went away gay as a lark at six o'clock
in the morning. • I suppose he has his faults, and will come to nothing like
the rest of us ; but at present he seems perfect. ... I cannot help
comforting myself with reflecting that there are people who require more
provocation to be '.' confined to bed " than the beloved ex-Speaker.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. Elisha H. Allen :

Honolulu, July 23, 1875.
. . . For the kind interest which you have taken in our island affairs
you are held in grateful remembrance.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 375

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. Z. Chandler :

Detroit, August 15, 1875.
The campaign of 76 is now being fought in Ohio, and while the outlook
is admirable, we should leave no stone unturned to make assurance doubly
sure. Either inflation, repudiation, and d— n — n are to win in Ohio, or hon-
esty and coin at an early day. I want you to go to Ohio and make as many
speeches as you can at an early day. Elevate the standard as high as }*ou
would in any Eastern State. The gage of battle has been thrown down,
and we must accept, whether we would or not. If timid souls fear the loss
of a few votes, elevate it higher, and my word for it we shall gain ten
votes where we lose one.

From Messrs. J. Y. Calhoun and W. E. Gapen :

Bloomington, III., August 21, 1875.

We write you as " native Pennsylvanians," coming here from the local-
ity where you were born.

Mr. Calhoun you will no doubt remember as a college-mate at Wash-
ington College. He wishes to renew the old acquaintance and revive the
memories of " Auld Lang Syne."

Mr. Gapen was "born and raised" in Fredericktown on the Mononga-
hela river in Washington county ; and while he never met you but once
(which was in Washington city during your first term in Congress), he
knew your relatives — the Bells, Gillespies, and Ewings — and also your
friends Judge William McKennan and the other lawyers at Washington
— George V. Lawrence and others.

Of course we are both familiar with your political history, and are grati-
fied at your success ; and we congratulate you on having achieved the diffi-
cult task of spending such a long time in active political life without
having given cause of offence to any one.

And this brings us to say that in view of our early associations it is a
great pleasure to us to see the attention of the people turned to you as their
candidate for President.

It is scarcely necessary for us to add that we are in favor of your nomi-
nation and election, and that we desire to do all we can to accomplish those
ends.

Mr. Calhoun has not heretofore been identified with the Republican
party. Mr. Gapen has always been a Republican, and was one of the dele-
gates (with the late Hon. Andrew Stewart, of Fayette county, and Alex-
ander Murdock, of Washington county) from his congressional district
in Pennsylvania to the Chicago convention in 1860 that nominated Mr.
Lincoln.

Of course you know better than we how political matters should be con-
ducted ; but a suggestion occurs to us which we will make — and that is :

376 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

wouldn't it be well for you to make a visit to the State of Illinois some
time during the fall or winter and make an address at some prominent
point, — say at Chicago, Springfield, or this city, — on some occasion of
general public interest (not on politics, of course), and thus become per-
sonally acquainted with our people? And if such an occasion should
occur, would you come?

From Mr. Samuel L. Clemens to Mr. Blaine :

Hartford, October 7, 1875.
* . . . Mr. N. sends me, at this late day, certified copies of his creden-
tials. Among them I find one from you dated Washington, January 14, 71,
in which you recommend this Mr. N. to the Secretary of State as a proper
person to bear despatches to London. You say have "known him for some
time as a most estimable and worthy man, devoted to the Union cause in
Virginia at the hazard of life and the loss of property." You also say,
"And I have no hesitation in commending him as strictly trustworthy."
Please write me quickly an answer to the following questions :

1. Is that a genuine document?

2. If so, do you still regard Mr. N. as you did in 71 ?

All who have met him here think the man a fraud, but if he isn't, I want
to right the wrong I have done him.

From Mr. Blaine to Mr. Clemens :

Augusta, Me., October 9, 1875.

Infandum jubes renovare dolorem, 0 dementia !

After the late cruel war was over, Washington was for several years the
resort of those suffering patriots from the South, who through all rebel
persecutions had been true to the Union ; and the number was so great that
the wonder often was where the Richmond government found soldiers
enough to fill its armies. Of these Union heroes and devotees was N. He
appeared there about 1868 or 1869. He had fled from oppression in the
land of his birth, only to find still more grievous tyranny in the land of his
adoption. He looked as though he had been at once the victim of kingly
vengeance and the object of concentrated rebel malignity. His mug was
like that of Oliver Twist, and he evoked your pity even if its first of kin,
contempt, went along with it. He obtained some very small place in one
of the departments, and held it, I think, for a year or two. He fastened on
me as his last hope, and continually brought me notes of commendation,
letters of introduction, and rewards of merit. But he never insulted me
with a reference to his being a candidate for anything. He uses that card
only with green people in the country, for in Washington, candidates go for
nothing. It's only the chaps that are elected that count.

The idea finally occurred to N. that a good way to be avenged at once on

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 377

all his enemies, to make Queen Victoria and Jeff. Davis both feel bad at
the same time, would be to have a commission as bearer of despatches to
England. As carrying a mail-bag across the Atlantic on a Cunard steamer
seemed a cheap and convenient way of exhibiting triumph over the dead
confederacy and hurling defiance at England at the same time, I gave N. a
letter to the Secretary of State, though I had no idea that I wrote quite so
gushingly as the quotations you send me imply. But it is quite possible
that seeing N. before me the impersonation of fidelity to the Union and
honest hatred of the Britishers, I was carried beyond the bounds of discre-
tion and indulged in some eccentricities of speech. But, alas ! my real con-
victions are that N. in all his pitiful poverty belongs to that innumerable
caravan of dead beats whose headquarters are in Washington. It does my
very soul good to know that Hartford is getting its share. Your evident
impatience under the affliction, your lack of sympathy and compassion for
the harmless swindler, show how ill-fitted you would be for the stern duties
of a Representative in Congress. And if the advent of N. teaches you
Hartford saints no other lesson, let it deeply impress on your minds a newer,
keener, fresher appreciation of the trials and the troubles, the beggars, the
bores, the swindlers, and the scalawags wherewith the average Congress-
man is evermore afflicted.

Excuse my brief note. If I had time, I would give you a full account
of N.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. E. R. Hoar :

Concord, September 7, 1875.

. . . If you should get the nomination for the presidency next year,

which I should be glad to believe, and would gladly aid, you may depend

upon my lifting up my voice like a pelican in the wilderness, or a sparrow

on the housetops, in support of such a consummation devoutly to be wished.

From Walker :

New Haven, October 31, 1875.

. . . I fear I have made no mention of your letter including one from
Mons concerning his Harvard affairs. (So the young " swell " is furnishing
his room a la Eastlake. ... I wish, that you would send me Hil-
dreth's " History of the United States.1' I will treat the books carefully. I
am taking a course of lectures in the post graduate department from Pro-
fessor Sumner on the political and financial history of the United States,
and Hildreth's History is good reading to accompany the course. I have
been devouring Thackeray's "Virginians" (the meal is not yet quite fin-
ished, Heaven be praised!), and am now ready to vote Thackeray the most
delightful of authors.

. . . Let me hear from you often. You can have no idea how much
I enjoy the letters from home. More and more every year home becomes
nearer and dearer to me.

378 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. W. E. Niblack :

December 19, 1875.

You perhaps remember that I told you last spring after the adjournment
that you ought to resign and retire on the laurels you had won as Speaker.
That on the floor you would constantly be running risks in votes that you
would be called upon to give, and in various other ways.

I was reminded of what I had said to you by your failure to vote on the
anti-third term resolution the other day. To make the matter worse, how-
ever, it was telegraphed West Friday night, that when Grant was informed
of your failure to vote on that resolution, he remarked, "Blaine is not in
anybody's way, so he need not be so d — d careful." This to my mind
serves to illustrate the force of the suggestion I made as to the antago-
nism you will have to meet in various ways while you are in your present
position. I do not doubt your ability to hold your own as well as any one
else could under the circumstances, and I sincerely wish you personal suc-
cess in your present position, as well as in all others to which you may be
called.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. Samuel L. Clemens :

. . . Now that I have started after this youth, I shall not feel content
until I shall have destroyed his Hartford market for him.

A couple of his most prominent endorsers are dead. I wish I knew
whether they endorsed N. before they died or after.

p.S. — I wish you would let me publish your entire letter just as it
stands ; it is just what I want.

From V. :

Washington, January 15, 1876.

At Mrs. Fish's reception last night . . . Mr. Blaine received an-
other "perfect ovation." Everybody was congratulating him and Mrs.
Blaine. General Garfield could not contain himself. He nearly hugged
Mrs. Blaine. "Oh! your glorious old Jim." It was the first time I ever
heard any one call him Jim ; but I forgave Mr. Garfield on the spot. Gen-
eral Garfield says that in the whole thirteen years he has been in the House
of Representatives, he never saw so brilliant a victory as that of Mr.
Blaine's yesterday, Mr. Randall first brought up his amnesty bill. Mr.
Blaine brought up his amendment to have the seven hundred and fifty who
were to receive amnesty first take an oath, and to exclude Jeff. Davis.
They tried in every way to keep him from speaking, but he has always
spoken when he designed to speak. He laid out the ground on Monday.
Mr. Cox replied in a very weak manner, mere jest and in no respect meet-
in"* Mr. Blaine's points. His own friends were extremely dissatisfied, but
he could not help it. He had no heart in it. Tuesday Mr. Hill, of Georgia,

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 379

spoke — very bitter and extreme, but far better adapted to the subject
because not frivolous. Wednesday General Garfield proved more at
length, and conclusively, what Mr. Blaine had alleged, that Jefferson
Davis was responsible for the infamy of Andersonville. I never heard
him speak better. He had one thing to do, and did it well. Thursday
Mr. Blaine closed debate with another speech, less symmetrical than
the first, because he had only to meet the points that came up, and
could not lay it out quite so squarely, but very effective. It ended
without a vote by the bill being referred to the judiciary, where it was
supposed it would lie indefinitely, awaiting its turn with seven hundred
others. Yesterday morning Governor Holden, of North Carolina, sent him
a letter, which he said at breakfast he would have given its weight in
diamonds for the day before, that he might produce it in the discussion.
That morning I walked up to the Capitol with him, and had hardly got
home before a note came to send up Governor Holders letter instantly.
It seems that the Democrats, having no work blocked out, got hold of the
bills and drew this one out, and were going to have a vote at once with
Banks's amendment — accepting the oath, and Jeff. Davis with it. Our
people pulled in all the men from the lobby and outside to fill the vote
against it. They got the negro members in a room by themselves and
labored with them, and finally they got them compacted, and really got
seven more votes, I think it was, than were needed to defeat the bill, which
requires a two-thirds vote. Then Mr. Blaine moved to reconsider. What
he wanted was a record on the Jefferson Davis amendment separately. He
said that such was the temper of the House that they could probably get their
amnesty bill through, but he wished every one who wanted Davis in to
record his vote, ay or no. This the Democrats did not wish to do. They
wished to record on the amnesty bill, but had no relish for being advertised
through the country as advocates for Davis. So then Mr. Blaine withdrew
his motion to reconsider, which effectually killed the bill. The Democrats
were completely surprised and dismayed. One of the morning papers says,
"People are beginning to think that Mr. Ex-Speaker Blaine, by himself
alone, constitutes the majority of the House of Representatives." The
papers give you no idea of it. They, indeed, are generally offish, and damn
with faint praise ; but it has been a wonderful battle and a splendid victory.
He is perfect master of the situation. He knows the parliamentary rules by
instinct. He is absolutely without fear or nervousness, and talks with just
as much freedom as by our own table in Hamilton, and in precisely the
same way. His impetuosity is overpowering. The only difference is that
instead of a few admiring women he has a crowd of angry and baffled men
in front of him ; and sometimes it seemed as if the whole sixty rebels on
the other side were on their feet at once, and he just defying them all.
Old members here say that they never saw anything so superbly done.
Professor Seelye spoke once — very well too, but illogically — agreeing to
the oath, but thinking best to let Jeff. Davis alone. Mr. Blaine addressed
him in his second speech to refute him, but interjected "whose cooperation
I crave." Professor Seelye shook hands with him afterwards very cordially,

380 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

and said, " You know I don't exactly agree with you, but you have been
a conquering hero through this whole debate.1'

From Hon. J. W. Webb to Mr. Blaine :

January 15, 1876.
Hon. J. G. Blaine:

My dear Sir : When a public man ably and fearlessly discharges his
whole duty in defence of the right, he ordinarily finds his reward in the
approbation of the people, indicated through the public press of the
country ; but when a portion of that press, to which he naturally looks for
approval when right, openly misrepresents his motives, mistakes his
actions, and seeks to build up public opinion against him, by assuming
that the people are passing an adverse sentence upon his conduct, it be-
comes the duty of all who have taken part in public affairs to come to the
rescue.

At seventy-four I may justly claim to have retired from political life ;
but the time has been when I had a right to be heard, both as a judge and a
representative of public opinion ; and I feel it incumbent upon me to say to
you, that, in common with the Republican sentiment of the country, and of
the convictions of all honest and patriotic men, of all parties and of all
sections of the country, I most cordially approve of your course in object-
ing to amnestying the infamous leader of the late Rebellion. What you
said and did was a duty and, therefore, a necessity ; and whatever the
consequences, you richly merit the thanks and gratitude of all right-
minded persons ; and I am proud to say that you are reaping your reward.
But it is said by your traducers, that you have not only injured the Repub-
lican party, but that you have virtually destroyed your prospects of a
nomination to the presidency, by having dared to be true to your princi-
ples and to the principles and feelings of those who not only put down the
Rebellion, but crushed out human slavery, and stamped with infamy all
concerned in the horrors of Andersonville.

Now, in regard to candidates for the presidency and with " president
making 11 I have probably had as much to do as any man living ; and as
you know, I have rarely been mistaken in regard to results. Your talents
and your public services and prominent position made you a candidate all
too soon, and you were gradually sinking into the position which was
always fatal to Webster and Clay, — conceded merits and ability, and the
absence of an exciting cause or excuse for every man's feeling that they
were called uj:>on to fight a battle in your behalf. Such a condition ever
has been and ever will be fatal to the success of public men under our
institutions, and from this, thank God, you have escaped.

I have been too long absent from the country to judge what were your
chances for a nomination and election to the presidency last week ; but I
do know, as assuredly as I know that I am now writing to you, that what-
ever your chances then were, they have been increased an hundredfold
by your course on the amnesty bill. Men and women who only respected

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 381

you before, absolutely admire and love you now. You have struck the
chord to which all the better feelings of their nature respond ; and be
assured that thousands everywhere, who cared very little one week ago
who received the nomination from the Republican convention, now offer
up prayers for your success ; and by the frank and earnest expression of
their feelings will do much to accomplish their triumph. . . . During
the week there have been nightly, social gatherings ; and I am happy to
say that I have not met with a solitary individual who has not approved
of your course, and condemned in very decided terms the conduct of my
old friend Samuel Bowles, in the " Republican." But I need not tell you
that the so-called " Independent Press," . . . have become and are
thorough-going Democratic papers. Alas for the independence of the
press ! It has vanished ; and all because the purpose of newspapers has
been lost sight of. Nowadays they are made to sell. When you and I
were editors we did not follow, but made, public sentiment ; and we also
made presidents. But things have changed now.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. Wendell Phillips:

January 16, 1876.

Allow me to congratulate you on your triumph. Such the country re-
gards it. I thank you most heartily for the check you've given to this
ridiculous gash which threatens to wash away half the landmarks of our
war-gain, — one-third of it devilish craft; one-third hypocrisy; the rest,
perhaps, honest stupidity.

Such a protest was needed just now to stun this drunken people into a
sober estimate of their position and danger. You were most emphatically
the man to make it. Thanks for your fidelity, and hearty congratulations
on your admirable success.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. W. G. Brownlow (of Tennessee) :

Washington, January 16, 1876.
. . . St. John said, " We know that we have passed from death
unto life because we love the brethren." Mr. Hill has always been a very
devout brother Methodist of mine, and I judge him by this rule in reading
his utterances in the House in view of his professed desire for reconcili-
ation. ... If you meet the enemy again this session, I can only wish
you the success which has already crowned your efforts.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. Charles Emory Smith :

Albany, January 18, 1876.
I must congratulate you upon your brilliant fight and splendid success
in the House. It was magnificent. Its effects are being felt everywhere.

382 BIOGBAPHT OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Republicans are stirred and enkindled, the opposition confounded and
overwhelmed. ... I made it a part of my business to follow you
closely, to publish your speech in full, and to have my say, as enclosed.

The same is true of the school question. . . . You compel the whole
country to follow you with interest.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mrs. Ellen Ewing Sherman :

St. Louis, February 4, 1876.

My dear Cousin : Here I am fighting Catholic editors, and going forth
daily armed "cap-a-pie " in your defence, wherever there may be a mis-
creant bold enough to assail you — and you have not condescended to
answer my letter. ... I am for you always — and as a family we all
are — the general included ; for we know that you would fill the position
of President with honor and dignity, and add, by your administration, a
lustre and a glory to the country.

But shall we have that satisfaction ? Your demonstration regarding the
State Constitutions and school laws will play sad havoc with your interests
among our Irish friends and Catholics ; but time may change this. At any
rate, you have my heart-felt and heart-strong wishes for the attainment of
your ambitious ends here, and for what is so much beyond, as to make
this, indeed, be, as St. Paul says, dross and dirt. . . . E. has told me
of your great kindness to her. May Heaven bless you, my dear grand-
cousin! I am very proud of you.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. Benson J. Lossing :

Dover Plains, N.Y., February 14, 1876.

. . . The " Southern Historical Society" have expressed a desire to
have "all" the Confederate archives in the hands of our government,
" published." I think such publication would arraign Mr. Davis as a crim-
inal in a stronger light than you have placed him. There is a paper
among them that shows that he was willing to have the drama of Guy
Fawkes repeated in our country. It is a communication from a Southern
man, or a sympathizer with the Confederates, to blow up the Capitol at
Washington, while Congress was in session, in the summer of 1861. The
proposition seems to have been favorably entertained by Davis, who, by
an endorsement on the back of the paper, referred it to the proper depart-
ment to act in the matter. This fact was communicated to me by the late
Francis Lieber, LL.D., who was enrployed by our government to arrange
the Confederate archives.

It seems to me that the greatest boon which the leaders in that wretched
Rebellion can pray for is to be forgotten. They have injured the Southern
people a thousandfold more than they have us of the North. ... I
am willing to forgive all the injury that men have inflicted upon the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 383

Nation, but it is neither wise nor wholesome for us to forget them. There
was great wisdom and truth in the remark of Cicero against Cataline,
"Mercy toward traitors is cruelty to the State."

To Mr. Blaine, from Chicago :

February 23, 1876.

At the Republican conference meeting held here yesterday, there were
about fifty of the captains, lieutenants, and sergeants of the party at roll-
call, from all parts of the State. In fact it was a State convention, except
in form. The presidential expression was quite generally in your favor.
. . . When you made your two speeches on the amnesty question, the
Eastern papers denounced you, and said you had ruined yourself politically.
I did not think so. We followed up the Andersonville Jeff. Davis business,
until the responsive echoes came back from the old guard. As the West
warmed up, the East began to catch a little of the heat. Your currency
speech was well received, and strengthened you much with the " honest-
money " classes, who don't care a great deal about party politics.
Wisconsin spoke out quite plainly in your favor, and so will the rest of the
Western States in due time.

From G. :

Washington, February 26, 1876.

Before he sat down, Mr. Curtis (G. W.) gave a long look around the
(round) table, the flowers, and the company, and said to me softly, " I often
hear people speak of a ' beautiful dinner,1 but this is indeed a beautiful
dinner." Or you may choose what Senator O. said to Mr. Blaine after-
wards, " Why, it was a devil of a time !" . . . Sir Edward Thornton
thought Mr. Blaine was mistaken about a man's being expelled from the
House some years ago, and offered to bet a gold sovereign against a half
eagle. Mr. Blaine took it, and Sir Edward has just sent in the sovereign,
with a very handsome letter. . . . Judge Hoar was invited, being
here on a visit, but was engaged elsewhere, and came in after dinner,
bright, and full of cordiality. He says in a letter this (Monday) morning,
that the President (or as he says, " the individual in question") assured
him that he should do nothing to oust Bristow. This, however, you need
not proclaim. Also that the President said, to Mr. Blaine the other day, he
should support the nominee of the Cincinnati convention, and had no idea
who it would be, but said, " Mr. Blaine, if I wanted to ruin you, I should
come out for you. On whomsoever the weight of this administration falls,
it will crush him ;" and I rather pitied him, for it cannot be a pleasant
thing to know.

From Walker :

New Haven, February 28, 1876.

. . . I hear and read on every hand all sort of rumors and prophe-
cies, but am keeping my mind well off the subject by going deep into

384 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

history. Saturday brought the nicest letter from father I ever remember
to have received, a letter which I shall certainly preserve.

Washington, March 2, 1876.
The other day when Washington Territory elected Blaine delegates,
Mr. Blaine came in flourishing his telegram, " Well, Maine is for me, and
Washington Territory is for me ; the little gap between it is for my friends
to fill up!"

From Judge Noah Davis:

New York, March 10, 1875.

I beg leave to add a single globule to the flood of congratulations you
are receiving.

Of all " the Speakers," you are the most fortunate in your retiracy, for
no one ever left the chair with approbation so universal and so wholly
free from partisanship ; and while this is true, no one can say you have
not been at all times faithful to the principles of your party, and earnestly
alive to its integrity.

I can only hope that, in the new role of leader of the minority in the
House, you may be able to win for yourself the same meed of credit, and
largely to contribute to restore the (almost) lost prestige of Republicanism.
I do not despair of the future. I have faith still, that Republican princi-
ples may triumph in the centennial contest. But it must be through an
openly avowed determination to abandon errors, undo wrongs, and make
the party what it formerly was, the champion of right.

I think no man in the country has in larger measure the popular confi-
dence than yourself, and I am quite sure that no one can bring back so
great a number of the doubting, fearing, and almost despairing Republi-
cans as you.

I hope this will find you well, happy, and hopeful.

From Walker :

New Haven, March 16, 1876.

After vacation there are only ten weeks more in Yale. I hope to be
an A.B., and have what is called by courtesy an education.

Wasn't New Hampshire a faithful State? I suppose now they will try
to fight out the battle in Connecticut. Governor English is personally so
popular, and such a good governor, that I think there is very little pros-
pect of his defeat; but Mr. Robinson, the Republican candidate, who is a
strong man, will make a good run, and materially reduce the majority of
'75, thus giving only a normal victory to the Democrats. If Governor
English is beaten, I would stake everything I had that the Republicans
will win the next presidential election. Aren't you getting tired of hearing
Aristides continually called the just? I am. It reminds me of what I
heard that an old letter of Jno. Adams contained, written in '98, when

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 385

there were prospects of foreign complications, and the great G. W. was
made commander-in-chief of the army, and some one wrote to Jno. Adams
congratulating him on having the cooperation of the father of his country.
"I would have you know," wrote back Jno. Adams, "that there were
other gentlemen who fought for this country than Mr. Washington. I am
getting tired of hearing continually of Mr. Washington," etc. I begin to
have something the same feeling. But I am growing cross and crabbed ;
so with love to all. . .

From Walker:

New Haven, March 26, 1876.

Dearest Mother : Since you were so kind as to have no objection to
my bringing on a fellow to spend the spring vacation, I have invited my
chum to come on, and he has accepted. ... As Mark Twain lectured
that evening before the Law School Club, and as I had never heard him, I
was led away from hearing the general. However, I called on him that
evening, and he thought I had heard him, which did quite as well. . . .
The general talked somewhat on politics, thought father could carry New
York were he nominated, and said that he was opposed to a pledged delega-
tion from that State, though he was personally a friend and admirer of
Senator Conkling. He was very complimentary to father personally, though
somewhat doubtful of Republican success in the national campaign next
fall. Polite to the utmost verge as usual. . . . Then Friday evening
I went out to a little party, where I had a pleasant evening, though they
insisted on playing twenty questions, a game, a subtle invention of the
adversary to bore one nearly to death. The party was made up of all
ages, and I would have been much better entertained had I been let alone.
Why don't people learn that when two or three people are gathered to-
gether, they can best be entertained by being allowed to entertain them-
selves ? . . . I am beginning to count time in small numbers until my
graduation now, as there are only ten weeks after the next vacation.

From V. :

March 29, 1876.

. . . Mrs. Bancroft told me that at the Syracuse convention a gen-
tleman said to G. W. Curtis, " I understand you dined with Mr. Blaine,
and that he offered you the English mission." — "Ah!" said Mr. Curtis,
" my price has risen. I thought I was bought by the dinner alone."

To Mr. Blaine, from Judge Noah Davis :

New York, April 25, 1876.
I have just read your vindication of yesterday. It is clear, explicit, and
complete. I have never had a doubt of the utter falsity of the charges

386 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

against you — and hereafter, no honorable man can have one. I am glad
you have taken the mode you have to meet the slanderers ; for I am sure
your vindication will be universally regarded as the frank and bold utter-
ances of innocence and truth. Thanks and congratulations.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. A. P. Gould :

Thomaston, Me., April 25, 1876.
Allow me to congratulate you upon your complete vindication of your-
self in the House yesterday. I wish to express my gratification that slan-
der is likely, in this instance, to recoil upon the heads of its promoters.
The charge was an improbable one ; but in these days of general corrup-
tion almost any charge against a public man is credited by many. I trust
that the attempt to defeat your nomination by such foul means will ad-
vance your prospects, as it ought. I am of that number of Democrats
who would prefer your success to that of any other person yet named as
the probable nominee of the Republican party. If we cannot have a Dem-
ocratic President (which I trust we may), I prefer a man of political expe-
rience and naturally conservative tendencies, such as I know you possess,
unless you have very much changed from what you were when I knew you
best.

From John G. Whittier :

Amesbury, 18th, 5th mo., 1876.

I was not knowingly a candidate for the Cincinnati convention. . . .
I do not feel able to go through such a labor. The complete vindication
of Mr. Blaine from the Democratic charges is very satisfactory J to all
Republicans.

To Mr. Blaine from Col. John Hay :

May 26, 1876.

I hope your health is prospering as well as your affairs. I think you
should give all your time now to your own constitution, so as to be ready to
protect the other one next year.

I spent a week or two in Illinois just before the convention met, but
soon found I was calling the righteous to repentance. I was astonished,
after all the Chicago Tribune's shouting, to find absolutely no Bristow sen-
timent; in fact very little of anything but Blaine. Of course there is still
the danger of some midnight trade, though it is hard to see where the
elements of it are at present.

Anyhow, I shall take this opportunity to congratulate you on your
immense success before the people.

From V. :

Washington, May 25, 1876.

. . . The conventions yesterday went very handsomely for Mr. Blaine,
as you have doubtless seen. People here are jubilant over it. Telegram

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 387

after telegram coming in " solid for Blaine." Many think it is a foregone
conclusion. I should think so myself, if it depended upon popular feeling.
I think the country is noticeably for him even to enthusiasm — quite
unusually so for a contested nomination. Why I am not on the whole
confident is that there are so many ways by which the will of the people is
defeated. Those who know "the ropes" can "pull the wires " and get
the machinery into their hands. Mr. Blaine knows "the machine" as
well as any one, but the trouble with him is that there are some things he
will not do, and one of them is to truck and dicker. Whatever can be got
by organizing forces, by foresight and combination and sagacity, he will do.
He does not affect to be indifferent. He will do anything that an honorable
man should ; but there he stops. Of one thing you may be sure : it is no
small compliment to receive the suffrage of so many conventions. What-
ever happens, it is very gratifying to see State after State coming in for
him. . . . Just here, another telegram from Missouri. "We count
for you a clear majority." You must remember, too, that this is done in
the face of all the scandal which they are persistently bringing up against
him, and is therefore the more satisfactory. I don't pin any faith in the
future, but I exult now, just as A. always sounds victory at croquet as soon
as her ball bobs through the first wicket. The investigation is an outrage,
and many Democrats are coming to think so. Governor Connor, of Maine,
told H. that the Democrats down in Maine were as mad about it as the
Republicans. S. writes that Deacon H. of their church turned round to
E. last Sunday while the minister was pronouncing the benediction, and
said, " Did you see Colonel Scott's splendid vindication of Mr. Blaine ? "
loud enough for all the neighbors to hear. He was so happy he could
not wait. ... If Mr. Blaine should not be nominated, I think we
shall go home about June 20th. If he is, we shall be delayed.

To Mr. Blaine, from Rev. Dr. Webb:

Boston, May 29, 1876.

My dear Mr. Blaine : Good deal like the day of judgment, isn't it ?
Everything you ever did, and most of the things you ever refused to do,
mustered and massed and hurled at you with the force of jealousy,
malignity, and enraged malice. Only in that day the Judge is not a man
that he should lie, nor are his accusers to.be savages with tomahawk and
scalping-knife, to hack and scalp, and then try afterwards. . . .

But what I want is to preach a little to you as my old parishioner : ask
Mrs. Blaine if she don't believe in the total, and unlimited, and absolute
depravity of some men ? . . .

Secondly. Do you keep calm, and sleep nine hours every night ; and if
you can't keep calm, keep as calm as you can. The strain upon you must
be something fearful. It frightens me to see reports of your illness. The
stake is large, but your life is not to be endangered. You may not be
conscious of the tension. This " secondly" is the main thing which I want
you to notice and profit by, — restrain your feelings, restrain your menial

388 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

action, put brain and heart regularly to rest. A little more trust in God,
my brother, a resting on His providence, this will help you just now.
And may God bless you ! Amen.

Washington, May 29, 1876.

. . . Judge Allen was also in, a Maine man, now judge in Hawaiian
Islands. He had just come from Bangor, and said he had a solemn
message which he was commissioned to deliver from Judge Appleton,
and many others in Maine, that they wanted to assure Mr. Blaine in
the most emphatic manner that their confidence in him was absolute and
unimpaired ; that they, who had known him and loved him and watched
him from his youth, were following him still with unwavering devotion and
trust ; that all the attacks upon him only endeared him to them the more ;
that no words could express the indignation of Maine, Democrat as well as
Republican, at the persecution of which he is the object, and which only
shows how formidable he is to the enemy ; that they know how open and
above-board were all these business transactions which the scoundrels
are trying to make capital out of; that they were familiar with them at
the time, and know there was no breath of impropriety in them, etc.
Indeed, Judge Allen in giving the message to H. for Mr. Blaine, told her
that she could not use language too strong ; and the tears came into his
eyes, and H. could not speak, and he was so excited that he would hold her
hand, then start, then take it again and begin new. . . . However,
it will only last a fortnight, unless he is nominated, in which case I sup-
pose they will keep it up till November, and may the Lord have mercy
on their souls ! I don't think I should if I could get at them. . . . The
over-sanguine think it is a foregone conclusion for Mr. Blaine, but I do not
by any means. The popular voice is unmistakably for him; but it is useless
to underrate the power of desperate men with strong machinery in their
hands, and the Democrats will leave no stone unturned to prevent the nomi-
nation of the strongest candidate. Two weeks will satisfy all curiosity.

. . We are invited to go to Mount Vernon to-day with the emperor
and empress, and also to meet them at Lady Thornton's this evening.

. . I do not believe Mr. Blaine will have time for the second.
As the time draws near, the fight waxes hotter and hotter, and the devil
and all his angels seem to have taken the field. If the issue depended
upon people who know Mr. Blaine, there could be no doubt of its char-
acter • but it seems hardly possible that the great outside world should not
think in all these repeated attacks there is no smoke without some fire.
One gentleman said this morning that all this would do Mr. Blaine no
harm, but that he had never yet known the strongest candidate win, and
that Mr. Blaine, being the strongest, would inevitably lose.

From Walker :

New Haven, June 2, 1876.

My dear Father: I have just read the statement of Mulligan and
your own of yesterday. ... It seems to me that the principle which

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 389

you have laid down about private correspondence is one of the most valu-
able that can be impressed upon public law with reference to political
investigations. That a committee which has been given limited powers
should assert unlimited power threatens everybody. The Court of Star
Chamber did not assert or really grasp more arbitrary power than the
American House of Representatives has been doing all winter and is doing
to-day. The precedents for the case of Hallett Kilbourn are to be found in
the assertions of the Houses of Parliament, and that of these investigating
committees in the Star Chamber of the Stuarts. Dispassionately I think
that the principle you have laid down is one worth the contending for, and
I would not give up those letters in any event.

I trust to see in to-morrow's papers that you have produced the testimony
of lawyers to sustain you in your point. If the public has got to know all
the purely personal secrets of a man's private life, why then I am an aris-
tocrat or a Helot, I care not which. I want to be counted as against such a
public. But it seems to me that there is one thing which now is needful.
Personally, however little you may care for the nomination at Cincinnati,
you need it more and more for these brutal lying attacks. Nothing suc-
ceeds like success, and the very men who in newspapers shout to-day that
Blaine is ruined, to-morrow, should you be a candidate and, as would be
undoubtedly true, elected, would hurl their hats to the sky in your honor.

" How proud you must be," said a friend to Cromwell when he returned
from his campaign in Ireland, " to see the crowds of people that have
turned out to honor you ! " — " Yes," was the reply, " but how many more
would have turned out to see me hanged!" The public press and the
canaille will shout and deride, and praise and huzza in the same breath the
same man.

But however painful the attacks of perjuring witnesses and more-than-
perjuring newspapers may be, however distressing an investigation con-
ducted for partisan ends and purposes and with partisan bitterness and hate,
may prove, there is one Tribunal which will need to pass no judgment, and
to whom the testimony of suborned and lying witnesses is of no possible
account. Your children, those who may read and reason now, and those
who will learn to do so hereafter, will need no distinction to make a father's
name dearer, and no praise of men or good repute to make his honor
greater. " I have learned," once said Horace Binney, " that the honors of
a public life are but barren, and the distress and anxiety great ; but the
esteem of friends and the love of kindred is a solace that never fails, and
a pleasure that never proves delusive." Of the latter you are certainly
assured.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. William M. Evarts :

Windsor, Vt., June 3, 1876.
I have never been in much danger of becoming enamored of politics,
but I confess I am greatly shocked at the wretches who are pursuing you

390 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

when and because you are winning the race. I see the instruments of this
envy and malice are New England born, which distresses me the more.
Still there is a hope that Mulligan may turn out Irish in birth as well as
race.

I dare say you have more letters of respect and sympathy than you care
to read, but I thought you would not impute this to a desire for a " consul-
ship,'1 and so send it.

From Walker :

South College, June 4, 1876.

I wrote father a note Friday afternoon, and I am afraid that you may
have got a wrong idea as to what I meant. I did not intend to say that I
thought public opinion was to be despised, or that political life was a thing
to be shunned and avoided. An honest and impartial opinion of the major-
ity we must acknowledge as the highest verdict. But I do think that if
public opinion breaks loose from reason, and, in a blind devotion to what
it considers a laudable end, rushes over to a judgment unwarranted and
partisan, it is very little worthy of consideration. And, on the other hand,
while I think a political existence one, if not the, most honorable of all
careers, yet I also see the hard trials and anxieties very clearly. I am
enough of an aristocrat not to cut my coat and fashion my shirt collar to
suit the opinion of the mass, if I wish otherwise. And I have seen the un-
pleasant features of political life brought out recently in such bold outlines,
that I have no desire to enter on that career. The position which father
has taken is one that will do him honor, and, I think, benefit him politically.
The attack of the " Mulligan guards " will prove ineffectual. . . .

To Emmons :

Washington, June 4, 1876.

I have been very anxious to hear from you to know how you were
enduring, like a good son, the fiery ordeal through which your father is
passing.

Its fierceness no one but himself can know, but, walking it, he feels
peculiarly for you and Walker.

The defeat in the convention is as the small dust of the balance to him,
though no one better knows than himself the prize for which he was con-
tending. But the thought which takes the manhood out of him is that you
and Walker, who are just entering life, may, perhaps, be forced to see, not
only all your proud and happy anticipations disappointed, but yourselves
put on the defensive. . . .

He has been upstairs looking up the order of a speech for the House
to-morrow, but it is very likely it will never be made, as every new-comer
has different advice to give. . . .

I find it difficult to command my thoughts, but there is one thing I must
say, though I presume and hope you will laugh at my fears. I have been
afraid you might go into Boston and do something to Mulligan; but you

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 391

have sense enough to know that nothing could be worse for your father
than notoriety of that kind. Keep yourself as patient and hopeful as you
can. . . . All of us are well, and your father has a great reserve of
pluck and resource.

Walnut Street, 7 o'clock, 6 June, 1876.
My dear Sir : This minute I have laid by your speech of yesterday.
You have macerated these scamps. With head erect and with defiant tone
you have scattered the wretched crew of calumniators and spies on private

life and private intercourse. The of the administration cabal do not

see that in tarnishing your name they besoil their party. They do not see
that in thus overthrowing you they prepare the way for the defeat of the

Republican nominee. But what does or care for that party.

They are neither of them of that party. They have used it and would now
destroy it. You have beaten them as I believed you would, and I rejoice
with you and with the party, as all men will do here.
Truly your friend, with respect,

Benjamin Harris Brewster.

From John G. Whittier:

Amesbury, 6th mo., 6, 1876.

. . . But. how splendidly Mr. Blaine held himself in his fight with the
ex-Confederates of the committee ! I hope thee saw it. . . . He has
cleared himself of the charges against him. He has had an awful ordeal.
The game of the presidency is not worth such a candle. Any man who is
named for the White House will soon be in the condition of the man out
West who was everywhere well spoken of until in an evil hour he allowed
himself to stand for General Court, and found himself so abused that he
had to call his dog to see if he was himself or somebody else.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. E. McPherson :

Gettysburg, June 7, 1876.
I read yesterday your speech of Monday, with choking utterance, and
with tears of thankfulness and joy that you were able so utterly to con-
found the base conspirators who were attempting your life. With this
was mingled the highest admiration for the power you displayed, and for
the terrible force with which you drove home your blows. There is but
one sentiment here, and there must be but one everywhere on the face of
the earth where civilized people dwell, and that is of thorough sympathy
for, and admiration of, you ; and among friends a more determined pur-
pose than ever to stand by you, and to do whatever may be required to
attest the feeling of friendship. I feel it as a great loss that I failed to see
the scene, but in the midst of my engagements could not get away. .
With congratulations to Mrs. Blaine on the overwhelming defeat of this
conspiracy. . . .

392 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. William Orton :

New York, June 8, 1876.
. . . I congratulate you sincerely and heartily upon your substantial
victory over your enemies. When partisan hates overcome all the instincts
of manhood, it is time for those who have any manhood left to cease to be
partisans.

From G. :

Washington, June, 1876.

. . . We did not tell Mr. Blaine we were going to the House, as he
rather did not wish us to go, but helped him with his papers and letters
till the last minute, and the moment he was out of the house we flew.
He had got through the first part of his speech, but was on the letters. I
cannot tell you the effect. There never was such a rout. Knott and
Hunton were deserted even by their own party ; not one of the leading
Democrats came to their aid. The cheering when Mr. Blaine marched
down the aisle and charged Knott with having suppressed the telegram
was indescribable. It seemed to come up from all over the House. It
was wild and long and deep. It was a perfect roar of triumph. Knott
seemed to shrivel visibly in the hot flame of wrath. Observe how Mr.
Blaine led him on by asking if he had sent to Mr. Caldwell. Mr. Kasson
came up into the gallery, said there had been no such feeling since the
emancipation clause was introduced into the Constitution. Mr. Ramsdell
said, "Made you feel happy, didn't it?" — "Happy," said Mr. Kasson,

" I was crazy.'1 Mr. ("Ben") Wade said, "Blaine is the d dest man

to handle. He has got them down again." A Bristow delegate said,
"I have been a Bristow man through and through, but I shall vote for the

man that has put the Democrats in h 1 twice." Everybody is coming in

congratulating, and I must stop. They say the nomination is certain, but
I do not depend upon that. Mr. Hale says Mr. Blaine never did anything
so fine. Mr. Frye says if they can only get him into a fight, he is as brave
as a lion ; but when he is at home all alone, or with only intimate friends,
he is so disgusted with the lowness of the fight and with having to go up to
that committee-room to watch those nasty rebels and Democrats, that he is
almost ready to throw up the whole thing. His Monday's fight has done
him a great good. Mr. Frye said there was a stranger, an Englishman,
who said to him in committee-room the other day, " In all my travels this
is the most humiliating thing I have seen. Here is a man of great name
and great fame forced to stand up and defend his character before two
men, who, twelve years ago, stood with a halter round their necks. My
God ! think of it." Mr. Frye and Hale and nearly all Mr. Blaine's most in-
timate friends are gone to Cincinnati.

Washington, June 9, 1876.
. . . F. came in Monday to tell Mr. Blaine what a villain Mulligan is,
but his information was of such a nature as hardly to be available. Besides

BIOGBAPHT OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 393

that, Mulligan was pretty well disposed of by the time F. got here. . . .
Mr. Chittenden, of New York, says he noticed a Democratic friend
clapping, last Monday, as enthusiastic as himself. Mr. Blaine thinks the
revise (?) of all these attacks will defeat him ; but we don't much care now.
He has put himself on a height from which no defeated nomination can
displace him, and will be beaten not only with honor, but with distinction.
People say if he could only go to Cincinnati himself, the case would be
sure. It is the universal verdict that nobody can resist himself. At the
House yesterday, Mr. Ramsdell met us first with " Well, there is another
gone to join the great army of corpses, — Tarbox." Then L., of Hart-
ford, who was in the House and heard it, said Tarbox did seem so poor
and mean and abject and helpless, that one could hardly help pitying him.
He is Judge Hoar's successor, and defeated Ayer, the cherry pectoral man,
who is said now to be in an insane asylum, which gave rise yesterday to
the remark that the Massachusetts folks are great fools : they ought to
have sent Ayer to Congress, and put Tarbox in the insane retreat ! The
Democrats tried to prevent him from speaking, and the scene the day
before was exceedingly amusing. He arose to speak, and Mr. Kasson
reminded him that Mr. Blaine was not present, so he stopped. Scott Lord
took the floor on another subject. Mr. Blaine was brought in, but when
Scott Lord got through, Tarbox did not rise. Then Mr. Blaine inter-
rupted the fresh speaker to notify Mr. Tarbox that he was here, and
Mr. Hale said Blaine looked yerj much as if he was "here," and Tarbox
said he did not wish to go on. The House all laughed and I suppose
Tarbox took the bits in his mouth next day. Morrison, the Ways and
Means chairman, went to him in the morning and said, " Tarbox, do you be-
lieve in a hell ?" Tarbox made some kind of surprised reply. " Because
you will before the day is over." Then the way in which Mr. Blaine took
the investigating committee in hand and investigated them ! V., a friendly
foe, says, " They had digged a pit before him. It was engulf ment or a des-
perate leap. Blaine cleared it with plenty of room to spare." Mr. R.
says that S. (a Western Democrat) goes around growling, " Anybody else
would have been killed on half ; but Blaine is always rising. Another
day like this would nominate him." Mr. Kelly, with his voice of many
waters, says, " I have been in Congress when Constitutional Amendments
have been passed, when men have been denounced as traitors, when vic-
tories have been proclaimed, and the enemies of the country overthrown 5
but I have never seen anything so thrilling as this ! "

394 BIOGBAPHT OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

XIV.

THE WORK OF THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION.

HHHE investigating committee practically disappeared on the
-*- fifth of June. They had some meetings afterwards, but
they had been permanently deflected from their original
purpose, and the question henceforth before them was not the
entanglement of Mr. Blaine, but the disentanglement of Mr.
Knott. The nature, motive, and methods of the investigation
had been too thoroughly exposed for it ever again to assume
standing among men. In the committee room and on the floor
of the House, Mr. Blaine spoke a few rare words of haughty
and supreme contempt which proved to be parting words, and
appeared before them no more. After he had gone, some signs
of malign life stirred in the House, but Mr. Blaine's friends,
finding that their magnanimity had been abused by the " cul-
prits,"— to use General Garfield's designation, — turned and
tore them in pieces. Deprived of the vitality which his pres-
ence lent, the committee never pulled itself together enough
to make a report.

There was no need. Mr. Blaine had made his own report to
the great tribunal, to the highest Court of Appeal on earth,
the people, and received from them at once and forever, not
merely the award of innocence, but the plaudit of righteous-
ness. Thenceforth he became, and as long as he lived remained,
the one prominent Republican candidate for the presidency,
more eagerly desired by a larger number than any President had
ever been, and followed and loved as a leader with an ardor
that had relation to no place except that which he had made in
the hearts of the people ; and it is to be observed that the bulk
of his nominating vote came always from the electing States,
while the very candidates who were brought forward to defeat
him in the nomination depended upon the Blaine votes for elec-
tion — and received them.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 395

Nevertheless evil did a deadly work. To a nature as deli-
cately organized as strongly endowed, friendly yet seclusive, of
honor in the blood and therefore not on the lips, this struggle
fierce and prolonged, against the cold, close coil of the politi-
cal devil-fish, had a slimy repulsion utterly apart from the glow
of manly combat with wind and wave. Standing up steadfastly
to the defence of his reputation, in which the hopes, the faith,
and the welfare of a great multitude were centred and attacked,
Mr. Blaine was not infrequently overtaken by a sudden horror
of inward loathing which only an ever present sense of the wide
interests involved enabled him to surmount. During all that
hideous time no word of impatience broke from him to mar the
intense sympathy of the household whose life was bound up in
him. When once as he was endlessly pacing back and forth
through the long suite of rooms, silent, absorbed, a detaining
hand was laid on his arm, he said gently, " Do not mind me,"
but continued his walk. Once lying on the sofa, ill with a
slight malaria, he suddenly raised his clenched hand high and
exclaimed in a voice thick with emotion, " When I think —
when I think — that there lives in this broad land one single
human being who doubts my integrity, I would rather have
stayed " — but instantly controlled himself and did not finish
the sentence. His magnificent bearing in the front of the fight,
his stately and splendid march to an unprecedented personal
triumph, permitted no hint of the acuteness of his suffering.
His patience and gentleness at home were beyond words.

The severe strain removed, a reaction came. On the Sunday
after he had snatched his case from the suppression and suffoca-
tion of the committee, and had submitted it to the impartial
judgment of men, he came from his chamber to the drawing-
room well and strong as usual to all appearance. Through the
spring he had been several times somewhat indisposed from
malaria and disgust ; but this morning he pronounced himself
fresher and more elastic than he had felt for some days, and
telegraphed cheerfully to his friends in Cincinnati who were
already gathering for the convention that was formally to meet
on the next Wednesday. When summoned to breakfast he
walked into the dining-room with a child perched on each
shoulder. It was a warm day and the carriage was suggested

396 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

for church, but he preferred to walk. Nearing the church door,
with no comprehensible warning he sank down unconscious
upon the stone step in the arms of his wife, who could save him
only from falling. Help was instantly at hand. An omnibus
standing on the street was driven up, in which he was laid and
taken immediately home. For the sake of air he was placed
upon the floor in the hall, with the doors wide open, while a
bed was prepared in the drawing-room. So quickly the tidings
flew that the street was blocked with a sorrowful, sympathetic
throng who gazed incredulous at the prostrate form. General
Sherman, utterly skeptical, bent over the bed and called
" Blaine ! Blaine ! " as if it were a summons to battle ; but only
the ring of his own voice shook the air, and only his own lip
quivered. The house filled with friends who went where they
listed, but the master was far away, locked in impenetrable
sleep. Hour after hour numbered themselves into days while
this slumber held him ; then the clouds slightly parted, slowly
lifted, gradually, yet at the end suddenly, rolled away, never to
return. On Tuesday afternoon all the channels of the mind
were cleared, and while the telegraph was flashing to Cincinnati
tidings that he was dead, he telegraphed the message in his
own handwriting, " I am entirely convalescent, suffering only
from physical weakness. Impress upon my friends the great
depth of gratitude I feel for the unparalleled steadfastness with
which they have adhered to me in my hour of trial."

Under such circumstances the Blaine delegates met in
convention at Cincinnati on June 14, and waged their heroic
battle for the country and for him. Into the midst of all
their plans had broken the certainty that he was sick unto
death, the uncertainty at any moment whether it might not be
death, and the air continued to be thick with rumors and
counter-rumors. Yet they rallied to his standard with a con-
stancy that knew no second choice. Mr. Robert G. Ingersoll
formally introduced his name to the convention with an elo-
quence whose timely truths were touched with living fire which
set the whole vast audience aflame with heroic enthusiasm.

" . . . The Republicans of the United States demand as
their leader in the great contest of 1876 a man of intellect, a
man of integrity, a man of well-known and approved political

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 397

opinions. They demand a statesman. They demand a reformer
after as well as before the election. They demand a politician
in the highest, the broadest, and the best sense of that word.
They demand a man acquainted with public affairs, with the
wants of the people, with the requirements of the hour not only,
but with the demands of the future. They demand a man
broad enough to comprehend the relation of this government
to the other nations of the earth. They demand a man well
versed in the powers, duties, and prerogatives of each and every
department of this government. They demand a man who will
sacredly preserve the financial honor of the United States ; one
who knows enough to know that the national debt must be paid
through the prosperity of this people ; one who knows enough
to know that all the financial theories in the world cannot re-
deem a single dollar; one who knows enough to know that all
the money must be made not by law, but by labor ; one who
knows enough to know that the people of the United States
have the industry to make the money, and the honor to pay it
over, just as soon as they can. The Republicans of the United
States demand a man who knows that prosperity and resump-
tion, when they come, must come together ; when they come
they will come hand in hand through the golden harvest field ;
hand in hand by the whirling spindles and the turning wheels;
hand in hand past the open furnace doors ; hand in hand by the
flaming forges ; hand in hand by the chimneys filled with eager
fire, raked and grasped by the hands of the countless sons of
toil. This money must be dug out of the earth. You cannot
make it by passing resolutions in a political convention. The
Republicans of the United States want a man who knows that
this government should protect every citizen at home or
abroad ; who knows that any government that will not de-
fend its defenders, and will not protect its protectors, is a dis-
grace to the map of the world. They demand a man who
believes in the eternal separation and divorcement of church
and school. They demand a man whose political reputation is
spotless as a star ; but they do not demand that their candi-
date shall have a certificate of moral character signed by the
Confederate Congress. The man who has, in full, complete
and rounded measure all of these splendid qualifications is the

398 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

present grand and gallant leader of the Republican party,
James G. Blaine.

" Our country, crowned by the vast and marvellous achieve-
ments of its first century, asks for a man worthy of her past and
prophetic of her future ; asks for a man who has the audacity
of genius ; asks for a man who has the grandest combination of
heart, conscience, and brain the world ever saw. That man is
James G. Blaine. For the Republican hosts, led by this in-
trepid man, there can be no such thing as defeat.

" This is a grand year, — a year filled with the recollections of
the Revolution ; filled with proud and tender memories of the
sacred past ; . . filled with legends of liberty ; — a year

in which the sons of freedom will drink from the fountain of
enthusiasm ; a year in which the people call for the man who
has preserved in Congress what their soldiers won upon the
field ; a year in which they call for the man who has torn from
the throat of treason the tongue of slander ; the man who has
snatched the mask of Democracy from the hideous face of the
Rebellion ; the man who, like the intellectual athlete, has stood
in the arena of debate, challenging all comers, and who, up to
the present moment, is a total stranger to defeat. 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 forehead of every traitor
to his country and every maligner of his fair reputation. For
the Republican party to desert that gallant man now is as
though an army should desert their general upon the field of
battle. . . . James G. Blaine is now and has been for years
the bearer of the sacred standard of the Republican party. I
call it- sacred because no human being can stand beneath its
folds without becoming and without remaining free. . . .

" Gentleman of the Convention : In the name of the great
Republic, the only Republic that ever existed upon the face of
the earth ; in the name of all her defenders and of all her sup-
porters ; in the name of all her soldiers living ; in the name of
all her soldiers that died upon the field of battle ; and in the
name of those that perished in the skeleton clutch of famine at
Andersonville and Libby, whose sufferings he so vividly remem-
bers, — Illinois — Illinois — nominates for the next President of

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 399

this country that prince of parliamentarians, that leader of
leaders, James G. Blaine."

The voting began on the third day of the convention. Three
hundred and seventy-nine votes were necessary to a choice.
On the first ballot Mr. Blaine had 285 votes, from twenty-eight
States and seven Territories. Morton had 124 votes, 30 from
his own State, Indiana, the remainder from the South. Bristow
had 113 votes from nineteen States and one Territory. Conkling
had 99 votes, 69 from his own State, New York, 8 from Georgia,
7 from North Carolina. Hayes had the 44 votes of his own
State, Ohio, and 17 scattering votes. Hartranft had the 58
votes of his own State, Pennsylvania.

On the second ballot Mr. Blaine gained 11 votes. Every hour
developed a popularity throughout the country which surprised
even his friends and stimulated his opponents to the desperate
combinations and more than desperate measures which alone
could defeat him. The sixth ballot gave him 308 votes. There
was no break from his ranks, and it was evident that many States
which presented candidates of their own were so warmly for
Blaine that any wavering on the part of any one would send the
delegates flocking to his standard. The delegations represented
in this only a very general feeling outside the convention ; as in
New York where Mr. Conkling, then at the height of his power
and fame, was put forward as the candidate of the State and was
loyally supported by her delegation. Yet when the balloting
pointed seemingly to the inevitable nomination of Mr. Blaine,
the great crowd assembled around the bulletin board burst into
a tumultuous, spontaneous shout, cheer upon cheer, from the
storage battery of enthusiasm that seemed always awaiting the
mention of Mr. Blaine's name.

The question thus with the supporters of every other leader
became, not how to nominate their candidate, but how to hold
back their delegates from nominating Blaine. Finally, a com-
bination was forced of all others against the strongest, Blaine,
on the weakest, Hayes. Mr. Blaine's last vote was his highest,
351 ; but Mr. Hayes, who in the beginning had but 61 votes,
and who was so little known as to have made no enemies, and
so little feared as to inspire no jealousies, on the 16th of June
received 384 votes, which gave him the nomination.

400 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Calmest, coolest, most discerning of all, Mr. Blaine sat in
his library and from morning forecast the result. Before the
decisive vote was fully counted, his message of congratulation
written with his own hand was on the way to Mr. Hayes.

" I offer you my sincerest congratulations on your nomina-
tion. It will be alike my highest pleasure as well as my first
political duty to do the utmost in my power to promote your
election. The earliest moments of my returning and confirmed
health will be devoted to securing you as large a vote in Maine
as she would have given for myself."

This was followed by a message of thanks to Messrs. Hamlin,
Hale, Frye, and other friends for their untiring service, and
a request to Mr. Hale to call on Mr. Hayes and present Mr.
Blaine's congratulations in person.

The disappointment to his political allies and to personal
friends was great, and it was not free from the bitterness that
springs from the suspicion of foul play ; but they emulated
Mr. Blaine's loyalty. The defeated delegates left the conven-
tion jeering the victors, and then went into the contest and sup-
ported them. Many took a roundabout way to their homes
through Washington to comfort themselves with a look at the
man of their first and only choice, to hold up his hands, to
receive from him strength, to communicate to him the new
revelation they had received at the Convention of his standing
before the people.

But to Mr. Blaine had also come a revelation. Hitherto he
had gone from strength to strength and from glory to glory, as
glory goes in the world, through the regular gateway of promo-
tion, without check. He had thought to win this highest prize
of all as he had won the others, in the natural way, by honora-
ble competition, and the success of the fittest. But he saw that
this race was not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. He
felt what he had often seen, that a presidential election is not a
logical sequence. Fitness for the position, desire of the people,
has no relation to it. A national convention is an organization
for preventing the people from having the candidate they want,
and providing them with a candidate whom the leaders are
willing to have. Mr. Blaine had too much work on hand, he
had too serious plans in mind, to spend his time in beating the

BIOGBAPHT OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 401

air. If the great opportunity of the presidency could not come
to him in the legitimate way of adaptation and achievement, it
was not his opportunity. He belonged to the work, not to the
place that was open by accident and closed to him. He saw,
also, that while the presidency itself is a great opportunity, a
presidential candidacy is in many respects a hindrance. Im-
portant issues brought forward by an assumed claimant do not
receive the attention which sound judgment requires, by reason
of that gallinaceous scratching which calls itself " looking be-
low the surface," and which demonstrates the depth and quality
of its own insight by seeing in every measure and movement
only a " bid for the presidency."

And yet another consideration influenced him which must be
mentioned. The nature of the opposition that had been brought
to bear upon him was so low, so revolting, that no prize what-
ever was high enough to tempt a second encounter. He had
made a small thing great by the greatness of his treatment ; but
though his reputation had been enhanced, it seemed to him that
the game was not worth the candle. His honesty had been
assailed only to keep him from the presidency. Every manly
motive forced him to its defence. He wrested himself wrath-
fully, scornfully, from the unexpected toils, but he preferred
to relinquish the presidency rather than continue or provoke
conflicts foul in their origin, fruitless seemingly to the cause of
good government. Never afterwards did he make one move-
ment towards a candidacy ; never did any solicitation thereto
receive the consent of his own mind, and never the consent of
his lips except as it seemed to him cowardice, the abandonment
of comrades and betrayal of causes, to refuse it. Whatever
assistance he subsequently lent to support of his candidacy was
rendered with an insurmountable personal reluctance, from a
conviction that it would be ignoble not to do it.

The reluctance was augmented by the fact that he ever after
underrated his own personality as a factor in the political prob-
lem. He saw, he could not help seeing, the extraordinary, ever-
increasing love of the people, for it followed him wherever he
moved, and surrounded him wherever he stopped. It was not
confined to personal association. It was strong, tender, active,
unquenchable in men who had never seen him and avIio exacted

402 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

no recognition, even, in return. But it had not availed. Every
weapon brought against him he had turned and blunted till it
fell harmless at his feet. Success seemed already achieved.
Then he himself was cast down. That was of God. Whatever
is beyond a man's own best effort is God to him, whether it be
the acquisition of power, the ransom of a soul, or the swinging
of a star in the sky. He resumed his work with unflagging
ardor and devotion, with a penetration that never failed, with
a hope as wide as the world, but without taking the presidency
into account.

And the greatest successes of his career came afterwards
For to his genius was added an element of self-surrender, — or
if that be too strong a word for a man in whom self had always
seemed merged in purpose, — the selfhood which had always
been but a secondary factor, now ceased to be a factor at all.
Disaffected towards any other external and personal goal than
he had already gained, he gave himself, undetached and wholly,
in his public service, to the service of the country. This is an
objective conclusion from closest every-day association in the
intimacy of family life. There is no sign that he ever classified
himself, ever wasted time in explaining or adjusting his rela-
tions with the universe, or made any ado over unselfishness, or
duty, or denial. He went his way as cheerful, as unpretending,
as simple-hearted as the schoolboy whistling along the brook.

On the evening of June 19th he was sufficiently restored to
address from his own door-stone a throng of citizens who had
gathered with a serenade to see and hear him. Then he went
home to renew his strength from the sea-coast and the mountains
of Maine ; and in the autumn he went east and west to win the
Republican party to the election of Hayes. It was hard work,
but great multitudes followed him and greater multitudes
besought him, and whatever was doubtful, this was certain,
that the heart of the people beat with one desire to certify the
honor and love in which they held him.

Wherever he went the same words are true with simple
change of name :

" The Republican demonstration in Newark on Tuesday in
honor of the Hon. J. G. Blaine was the most remarkable event
of the campaign in this State. In its proportion and in the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 403

degree of enthusiasm shown, the afternoon meeting, and likewise
the reception and street parade in the evening, were beyond
comparison with any previous demonstration in New Jersey."

" Many expressed their devotion to him as they took him by
the hand, in such words as these : ' Sorry we cannot vote for
you this time, but we will next,' and ' Thank the Lord I have
got a chance to take you by the hand,' and many other similar
expressions. . . . Cannon on the park thundered out tones
of welcome, fireworks blazed incessantly. . . ."

" Mr. Blaine left the residence of Mr. Peddie in a carriage
for the Market-street depot. Down Market street the boys in
blue opened ranks, occupying each side of the street while the
distinguished guest drove between, and was greeted along the
whole route by continuous cheers, the boys having determined
to give the Senator the grandest send-off possible. . . ."

" The reception of Mr. Blaine at the hall of the Cooper Union,
last evening, was one of the grandest of demonstrations which
even this city has ever witnessed. In every respect the audi-
ence was one which reflected credit upon the intelligence and
patriotism of the metropolis."

" The appearance of the ex-Speaker was the signal for a most
enthusiastic and tumultuous reception. Men cheered until they
were hoarse, women waved their handkerchiefs, and for full five
minutes the air resounded with the continuous applause."

" The scene when Mr. Blaine left the rostrum was a repeti-
tion of his welcome. It was generally conceded that the meet-
ing was one of the most memorable in the annals of New York
politics."

Mr. Blaine everywhere led his forces for Hayes, but it was
perhaps not possible for him to secure, even in Maine, what his
telegram to Mr. Hayes had promised to attempt, as large a vote
for that gentleman as he would himself have received. Mr.
Hayes was elected President, but by so small a majority that
the result was for some time in doubt, and was never uni-
versally conceded. Congress met under the heavy cloud of a
disputed presidential election.

Maine had not waited for the national convention to honor
her representative under fire. On the tenth of June, four days
before the national convention, the Maine State convention

404 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

had recommended him for the senatorship to complete the term
of Mr. Morrill who had resigned to take a seat in the cabinet.
Governor Connor had at once appointed Mr. Blaine, and in
December he entered the Senate. For the few winter weeks he
stayed in Washington without his family, visiting Augusta, how-
ever, several times, and having his elder sons occasionally with
him. Alone, he was theoretically forlorn and homesick, but
actually he seems to have been unusually gay, — though the
two are not incompatible, — seldom dining in his own house
except when he gave dinner-parties, which he fondly endowed
with great culinary and other success in his reports, whatever
may have been the actual menu of a man who took little thought
of the " regular order " of home, but had small liking for French
cookery ; whose first cry when he returned from the most elab-
orate dinners was for " something to eat,'" and a bit of cold
chicken or roast beef with bread and butter and jam had to
atone for the many sins of the chef; who finally abandoned his
place at the table to his boys or even to their boy visitors, took
refuge at his wife's elbow, and from that point of vantage made
proclamation that he would not carve even a mashed potato !
The very beggars whining to him over the fence when he was
at dumb-bells in the garden, he meanly sent around to the back
door, assuring them that he was only a boarder. But for all
such shortcomings the blame must rest on the unlimited in-
dulgence which surrounded him, and would have spoiled him
had he been spoilable.

The continued and increasing agitation under the unwilling-
ness of the Democrats to accept Mr. Hayes's election gave so
much alarm that an electoral commission was proposed for
another decision. The popular Republican opinion was that the
Democrats had by fraud and the forcible suppression of the
negro vote, attempted to secure the Louisiana, Florida, and
South Carolina vote for Tilden, and that the Republicans had
baffled them by securing the honest vote of those States for
Hayes. The popular Democratic claim was that the honest
vote was for Tilden, and that the vote was secured for Hayes by
fraud and the suppression of the white vote by federal troops.

Mr. Hayes was elected by one majority if the vote of Louisi-
ana, South Carolina, and Florida had been cast for him. If

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 405

not, Tilden was elected. It became, therefore, of the utmost
importance to ascertain beyond question the vote of these three
States, and extraordinary measures were taken. Each party
had sent down a detachment of its best men to supervise the
counting of the votes. The Union men in the South were
greatly strengthened by the evidence of national sympathy and
support, and had stood firm against the menace by which they
were surrounded. The result had been the confirmation of
Senator Chandler's midnight telegram on the morning of the
7th of November : " Rutherford B. Hayes has received one
hundred and eighty-five electoral votes and is elected." But
the Democrats were as far as ever from being satisfied.

The settlement of the disputed election was of the first inter-
est and importance. The proposed commission was to be formed
of three Republicans and two Democrats from the Republican
Senate, three Democrats and two Republicans from the Demo-
cratic House, and four judges from the Supreme Court, who
were to select a fifth. Its decisions were to be final.

Mr. Blaine was opposed to the creation of this commission,
believing that the existing machinery of the government was
fully adequate, and that President Grant's sturdy patriotism
might be relied on to enforce the execution of the law. Years
afterwards he spoke of it openly in the Senate as " a makeshift,
purely and entirely a makeshift, and a pretty rickety one it was."
These views he expressed with great frankness everywhere,
but he made no captious opposition. He favored and indeed
urged a constitutional amendment enabling the Supreme Court
thereafter to settle all such cases ; but without some constitu-
tional amendment he protested publicly that Congress had not
the power to settle the question in other than the prescribed
way, or power to transfer the power, or to vest a power so tre-
mendous in any body of men whatever.

The sturdy belief of a large number of American citizens in
the ability of their government is fitly represented in a letter
received by Mr. Blaine from a citizen of Maine :

Bethel, January, 1877.

. . . I do not believe a new departure is called for. To the com-
mon mind, unbiased and unprejudiced, no difficulty presents itself under

406 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

the constitutional provision. By that I would stand, and declare Hayes
elected, and inaugurate him, and if the Democrats wish to appeal to the
courts, let them do so, and we will quietly abide their decision. The call-
ino; in members of the court to sit with coordinate branches of the govern-
ment upon questions which may be presented to them to decide judicially
is, to say the least, questionable, and to my mind unconstitutional.

Mr. Blaine's counsels did not prevail. Democrats and Re-
publicans agreed on the commission and promised to respect its
findings, — the Democrats more enthusiastically than the Repub-
licans,— the vote for it in Congress being Democratic in the
ratio of ten to one. To the public mind there was something allur-
ing, even imposing, in the spectacle of a question so important
submitted to a council entirely non-partisan. Why the country,
or any citizen of the country, should count it non-partisan, it is
difficult to see. It was strictly though equally partisan, the
two parties being exactly represented in the Senate and House
members and in the four supreme judges.

The fifteenth man was expected to be Judge Davis, who was
called an Independent, but who had acted with the Democrats,
and had voted for Mr. Tilden in the late election. Judge Davis,
however, was elected by the Democratic Illinois Legislature as
a Democratic Senator the very day before the commission was
to be voted on, in the House, and Judge Bradley, a Republican,
was selected for the commission. On every important question
its vote was divided by strictly partisan lines. In the end Mr.
Hayes was declared elected by the non-partisan tribunal just as
he had been declared elected by the party politics of the country.
The defeated party accepted the decision of this extra-judicial
tribunal with no more confidence or acquiescence than had
attended the previous decisions, ordinary and extraordinary.
They had pronounced the original election a fraud, and with
equal frankness after its work was done they pronounced the
electoral commission a fraud.

The advance of the South is seen in the fact that they did
not organize a second rebellion. The retrogression of the North
may perhaps be found in rumors that the Republicans, fearing
a tumult from the result of the electoral commission, as they
had feared a tumult from the result of the national election,
compromised with the Southern leaders as they had compromised

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 407

before, but far more seriously, agreeing to abandon the State
elections in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina, if the South
would relinquish the national election. These three States were
the only ones in the South on which the Republicans retained
any visible hold.

A Democratic movement for the reduction of the army
seemed under the circumstances almost sinister. Mr. Blaine
opposed it with pungency and power. It was claimed in the
Senate that the negro Democratic vote was repressed in the
South by the mere presence of United States troops. " I want
it to go on record," responded Mr. Blaine, " that the negroes in
South Carolina were so eager to vote the Democratic ticket
after the Hamburgh massacre [by white men in South Carolina]
that it took the entire army of the United States to restrain
them," — and the laugh that followed showed how palpable was
the absurdity of such pretence. He pointed out that it was the
South, not the North, which complained of the size of the army,
although, on the authority of General Sherman, there were be-
tween the Potomac and the borders of Texas only an " army "
of a thousand men. Senator Bayard declared frankly that it
was the use of the army and not its numbers that was objec-
tionable. " Would the Senator from Delaware," asked Mr.
Blaine, " consider it to be quite within the scope of the consti-
tutional powers of the President to say that in a given instance
the President should command the army in one way, and in
another way that he should not command it ? "

" I have grave doubts," replied Mr. Bayard, " but there is no
time now given for due discussion."

Mr. Blaine pushed the question, but in vain — " Did you ever
find an act of Parliament that said the king should command
the army in a certain way ? Is the power of Congress over the
army absolute any more than the power of Parliament over
the British army ? "

Without even the small tribute of circumlocution the declara-
tion was definitely and defiantly made that the army appropria-
tion would depend on such restriction on troops in Louisiana
as would prevent the President from installing and maintaining
Governor Packard in Louisiana !

Mr. Hayes was inaugurated on the 4th of March, and the

408 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

rumors began to wear an ugly look of confirmation. The appli-
cation of Southern Senators for admission brought the question
at once to the crisis. Mr. Blaine, antagonizing some Republican
comrades, advocated the admission of Mr. Lamar, from Missis-
sippi, with a personal compliment for the Senator-elect ; but he
advocated also the admission of Mr. Kellogg, from Louisiana.
He had not been in favor of the formation of the electoral com-
mission, but he was in favor of keeping strictly to its conclusions.
"Whatever doubts may have attached to the validity of the
Louisiana returning board had been dispelled by the electoral
commission, and the same returns that were at the basis of the
national election and made Hayes President, were at the basis
of the State election and made Packard Governor and Kellogg
Senator.

The Cincinnati convention had " sacredly pledged " the Re-
publican party and the Republican administration " to put in
exercise all their constitutional powers for securing to every
American citizen exact equality in the exercise of all civil,
political, and public rights."

Governor Hayes in his letter of acceptance had emphasized
his adherence to this principle, and had urged as an argument to
be prominently used in the campaign the danger arising from a
solid South ; and when after the election he had thought him-
self defeated, he had said that he did not care for himself, but
for the poor colored men of the South, whose fate would be
worse than when they were in slavery, and that Northern men
could not live there and would leave. Northern Republicans
who had gone down to the contested States to confirm the
presidential vote, had assured the intimidated Republicans there
that the National and the State governments should stand or
fall together.

The President of the United States had sent a despatch to
the headquarters of the Department of the Gulf :

January 14.
It has been the policy of the administration to take no part in the settle-
ment of the question of rightful government in the State of Louisiana — at
least not until the Congressional Committees now there have made their
report ; but it is not proper to sit quietly by and see the State Government
gradually taken possession of by one of the claimants for gubernatorial
honors by illegal means.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 409

The Supreme Court set up by Mr. Mcholls can receive no more recog-
nition than any other equal number of lawyers convened on the call of any
other citizen of the State.

A Returning Board existing in accordance with law, and having judicial
as well as ministerial powers over the count of the votes, and in declaring
the result of the late election, has given certificates of election to the Legis-
lature of the State. A legal quorum of each House holding such certificates
met and declared Mr. Packard Governor.

Should there be a necessity for the recognition of either, it must be
Packard.

But the signs multiplied that Packard and Kellogg were
not to be sustained. Mr. Blaine was profoundly moved by
what seemed to him an utter betrayal of faith both to the
Southern State governments and to the national government.
The presence of federal troops at the polls, in however small
numbers, was a proof of an unsatisfactory state of things ; but
federal troops had sustained the same relation to the State as to
the National election, and federal troops had been summoned
in the legal way by the State governments. To accept the
votes cast under the protection of the flag for President and to
withdraw the protection of the flag from those cast for governor
seemed to Mr. Blaine not only the very dishonor of selfishness,
but of suicide ; seemed to place the President in the attitude
of affixing the stamp of fraud upon his own administration.
Mr. Blaine reiterated protests against it, with almost passion-
ate vehemence. That any Senator who considered the electoral
vote of Louisiana as legally and properly cast for Hayes could
permit himself to doubt that S. B. Packard, who had nearly one
thousand votes more than the electoral ticket received, was
equally of right the governor of Louisiana, seemed to him im-
possible. He sent word to some who were named as the prin-
cipal promoters of this strange policy that he would openly
denounce it in the Senate.

March 6th, two days after the inauguration, he kept his word.
" The electoral commission decided that the Louisiana return-
ing board was a legal and constitutional body competent to do
what it did do. What it did do was to declare who were the
presidential electors of that State ; it did also declare who
were the Legislature ; and the Legislature, performing a mere
ministerial duty, declared who was the governor ; and I stand

410 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

here, if I stand alone, to say that the honor and the credit and
the faith of the Republican party, in so far as the election of
Hayes and Wheeler is concerned, are as indissoiubly united in
maintaining the rightfulness of the return of that body as the
illustrious House of Hanover that sits on the throne of England
to-day is in maintaining the rightfulness of the revolution of
1688. Discredit Packard and you discredit Hayes. Hold that
Packard is not the legal governor of Louisiana, and Presi-
dent Hayes has no title, and the honored vice-president who
presides over our deliberations has no title to his chair. The
Legislature, the governor, and the presidential electors of
Louisiana, all derive their legality and their right to act from
the same source and the same count, and if the one is discred-
ited the other is discredited.

" I know that there has been a great deal said here and there,
in the corridors of the capitol, around and about, in by-places
and high-places, of late, that some arrangement had been made
by which Packard was not to be recognized and upheld. I
want to know who had the authority to make any such arrange-
ment ? I deny it. I deny it without being authorized to speak
for the administration that now exists. But I deny it on the
simple broad ground that it is an impossibility. ... I deny
it on the broad ground that President Hayes possesses charac-
ter, common-sense, self-respect, patriotism, all of which he has
in high measure. I deny it on all the grounds that can in-
fluence human action, on all the grounds on which men can be
held to personal and political and official responsibility. I deny
it for him, and I shall find myself grievously disappointed,
wounded, and humiliated if my denial is not vindicated in the
policy of the administration. But whether it be vindicated or
whether it be not, I care not. It is not the duty of a Senator
to inquire what the policy of an administration may be, but
what it ought to be ; and I hope a Republican Senate will say
that on this point there shall be no authority in this land large
enough or adventurous enough to compromise the honor of the
national administration or the good name of the great Republi-
can party that called that administration into existence."

But prominent Democrats continued — after the decision of
the commission, as before — to declare that the electoral vote

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 411

did not belong to Hayes and Wheeler ; that it was a fraud to
give it to them.

Mr. Bayard likened Mr. Blaine's opposition to fire-bells in
the night kindling anew the flames of sectional discord. Into
Mr. Blaine's argument that if the electoral commission was
good enough to find the presidential returns valid, it was good
enough to find the State returns valid, Mr. Thurman interpolated
the aside " that it was not good for anything except to be hung."
The electoral commission which was to allay strife and restore
peace by its non-partisan decision could have done so, if at all,
only by deciding for the Democratic and against the Republican
party. The decision at the polls, the decision of Mr. Hayes's
committee, and the decision , of the electoral commission
availed nothing so long as three Republican governors re-
mained at the head of three Southern States. The Democratic
leaders demanded simply that the Republican administration
should do what a Democratic administration would have done
if the people had voted it into existence ; or as the Democratic
party put it, if the Republican administration and the electoral
commission had permitted it to be installed.

Unable to believe that Republican faith could be violated if
its demands were understood, Mr. Blaine repeated in every
possible guise his conviction that the movement against the
State governments was a simple invitation to the Republicans
to abandon the ground on which the people of the United
States had accepted the election of Hayes and Wheeler. On
the 7th of March he read in the Senate a telegram from D. H.
Chamberlain, Governor of South Carolina, to Hon. D. T. Corbin :

March 6th. I have just had a long interview with Haskell, who brings
letters to me from Stanley Matthews and Mr. Evarts [of Mr. Hayes's
eabinet]. The purport of Matthews's letter is that I ought to yield my
rights for the good of country. This is embarrassing beyond endurance.
If such action is desired I want to know it authoritatively. I am not act-
ing for myself, and I cannot assume such responsibility. Please inquire and
telegraph me to-night.

Mr. Haskell, it appeared, was chairman of the Democratic
State committee of South Carolina, and Mr. Blaine charac-
terized the proposition as empowering him " to treat with Gov-
ernor Chamberlain for the surrender of the State." There was

412 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

rumor of a similar letter carried to New Orleans by a Mr.
Burke.

" Is there any Senator on this floor," inquired Mr. Blaine,
" who desires to stand sponsor for that despatch, or for the
policy that it covers ? Is there any Senator here who proposes
to abandon the remnant that is left of the Republican party
between the Potomac and the Rio Grande, and that it shall go
down for the public good ? I do not propose either at the beck
of Mr. Stanley Matthews or Mr. Evarts to say that the public
good requires that the remnant of the brave men who have
borne the flag and the brunt of the battle in the Southern
States against persecutions unparalleled in this country shall
retire for the public good. . . . The few innocent remarks
which I made yesterday sounded to Mr. Bayard like fire-bells in
the night ; they seemed destined to rekindle the fires of sectional
aggression. That Senator and myself represent different
schools in politics, . . . different ideas before the war, dur-
ing, and since. I propose for myself, as long as I may be in-
trusted with a seat on this floor, that, whoever else shall halt
or grow weak in maintaining it, so long as I have the strength I
will stand for Southern Union men of both colors ; and when I
cease to do that before any presence, North or South, in official
bodies or before public assemblies, may nry tongue cleave to the
roof of my mouth and my right hand forget its cunning."

Mr. Evarts immediately desired it to be stated that he did
not endorse Mr. Stanley Matthews to the extent implied ; that
the letter was presented him by Haskell, and he wrote upon it,
substantially, that he had read it, that he desired to see the
troubles in South Carolina composed and to hear from Governor
Chamberlain upon the subject ; and the President was declared
to be in nowise responsible for the letter.

Nevertheless the work went on to completion. Under the
irresistible pressure of the national administration, culminating
in withdrawal of the federal troops, the Republican legislatures
crumbled, the Republican governors withdrew, and the solid
South was reestablished.

It was a great surprise and a great grief to Mr. Blaine. One
of the most ardent hopes which he had cherished was the res-
toration of the South. One of the great possibilities of the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 413

presidency was in this direction. It was entirely in line with
his political course, though his discriminating treatment of the
amnesty proposal led the "unthinking and the wrong-intending
into a directly opposite interpretation. He believed that the
general government could be so administered as to develop the
material resources of the South, encourage a diversity of indus-
try and interest, and elevate the moral standard of both races ;
that it could peacefully, powerfully, and legitimately press for-
ward the education of the ignorant classes ; the conciliation of the
higher classes ; the independence, prosperity, happiness, and har-
mony of all classes. He believed firmly in the protection of
the blacks, but not in the nagging of the whites. His thorough
sympathy with the first in its wrongs did not prevent his sym-
pathy with the second in its woes, as real. He desired eagerly
the withdrawal of federal troops, but he desired it as a sign of
perfected patriotic reunion, not as a condition precedent to
the relinquishment of projected rebellion. His standing with
the Southern leaders was proof that his faith was not without
reason. Many of them were his attached personal friends and
daily associates. Perhaps by none was he more tenderly cher-
ished than by some to whom he was in constant and active
political opposition. All manner of cordial service and senti-
ment were exchanged between men whose diverse public views
did not interfere with private respect and social attraction, and
he believed that they could be enthusiastically enlisted in the
true up-building of the South.

The Republican press rather languidly but rather largely
accepted, if it did not uphold, the work of the Republican
administration ; and Mr. Blaine's opposition was attempted to
be dismissed as merely "factious" and "sore." So great is the
power of the administration, in whose councils at that time Mr.
Blaine stood substantially alone.

But there was wide, earnest, and even bitter opposition, find-
ing voice in the country papers rather than in the larger metro-
politan press. Captain, now Representative Boutelle, held up
the new policy in his Bangor " Whig and Courier " to every blast
and whiff of censure and contempt. Mr., now Senator, Chandler,
pierced all its joints and sutures with his sharp satires poison-
tipped ; and when the people spoke authoritatively, they spoke

414 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

with no uncertain sound. Pennsylvania, which gave Hayes
nearly 20,000 majority, lost 140,000 Republican votes at the
next election and gave the State to the Democrats. Ohio, the
President's own State, exchanged her 7,000 Hayes majority for
a 27,000 Democratic majority by keeping back nearly 90,000
Republican votes ; while Iowa, which had repudiated the policy
of the administration, kept her State vote well up to her presi-
dential vote. In the Maine State Convention of August 9,
1877, a resolution approving President Hayes's policy was offered
only to be met by a sharp counter-resolution of censure ; and it
required all Mr. Blaine's power of personal persuasion and reas-
oning to convince the convention that it was organized for
State and not National matters. Harmony was restored by not
referring to the President at all, and by greeting Mr. Blaine
with " deafening applause."

Washington, June 12, 1876.
Mr. Blaine had seemed unusually bright and well Sunday morning ; said
he was hungry at breakfast, which he has not been before for weeks. A
telegraph wire is on the library table, and Mr. Hale sent a despatch from
Cincinnati, and Mr. Blaine replied to it that everything was looking well
here, brighter than it had for a month. Mrs. Blaine wanted to drive
to church, but he wanted her to walk with him. They walked together
a part of the way, and then he took TVs hand and walked with her and M.
But as usual we were forming and breaking line, and when we were close
to the church, he was ahead of us and we noticed that he was holding his
handkerchief to his eyes as if wiping something away from them. H. said,
"Anything in your eye, father?" He did not answer, and she repeated,
" Have you got something in your eye ? " Then he just turned as if to lean
on the fence, and said, " No ; my head ! my head ! " and sank down on the
step. H. sat down instantly and held his head. He did not fall, but sank
down, and I thought instantly lapsed into unconsciousness, but H. said
that he said he feared it was a sunstroke. Some gentlemen from the
church lifted him into an omnibus that chanced to be near by, and brought
him home. They wheeled the parlor sofa into the hall to lay him on, but
H. told the men to push that aside and lay him on the lloor. Then a bed
was brought down into the parlor, because it would be so much cooler —
and there he lies. The doctors say that his symptoms are all favorable,
and that he is steadily improving, but I cannot see it. There is no sign of
apoplexy or paralysis. He uses all his limbs, turns in bed strongly, takes
beef -tea with relish, but he does not come out of his veil wholly. But he
recognizes and calls "Mamma,11 says "A.11 sometimes when he looks at
me, looked around the parlor very inquiringly this morning and asked why
he was there ; asked H. what was the matter, and when she said, " Nothing,11

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 415

he said, " Crying? " But to think of his great, strong, splendid mind so
locked up — only forty-six, and of magnificent health. They say the
trouble is cerebral depression, caused first by the great mental strain upon
him, and immediately by the excessive heat. He has suffered much from
the annoyance of this investigation. Work has not hurt him. All political
opposition, all the duties of the speakership, and all the daring of his bat-
tles this winter, he entered into with zest ; but this standing up and parry-
ing assassin-stabs upon his character in a committee-room, fighting curs like
Mulligan, this was mortally disgusting to him. Oh, how many times the
poor darling has expressed his loathing of it ! but he said he must go, or
everything would be distorted and twisted to his defamation ; and as soon
as one charge was disproved they brought up another, and when all who
knew anything about it had sworn to his integrity, they brought up the
villains and gossips who knew nothing about it to bear false witness
against him. ... I think I am more hopeless about him than is any one
else, so you must make some allowance. His nomination looked so sure,
that they had to devise some extraordinary way to defeat him. Then came
his splendid speech, and the tide was turned and promised to take him into
port bravely ; but now he sails with God the seas. Do not think I care for
the nomination. It is the man only who lies on the bed, helpless and
innocent and sweet as a little child. I can never be thankful enough that
this did not come till after his splendid Monday. Nothing in his life was
ever so magnificent and overpowering. . . . More than death is to be
feared for him a shattered life; but we cannot see a handbreadth before
our eyes, and can only wait and meet what comes. The doctors say he
needs chiefly rest and silence, and that he will recover entirely.

3 P.M. I feel very much encouraged this afternoon. Surgeon -General
Barnes and all three of the other doctors concur in saying that every group
of symptoms is favorable, and that all he needs is building up. When he
wakes, he almost always says, " Church," because I suppose there is where
he left himself. He also said, " Telegraph to Mr. Hale." And when he
had taken all he wanted of something, he said, " That'll do," as naturally
as possible. . . . The President has just been in to inquire; only heard
of it at eleven when he returned from Annapolis. Walker came this morn-
ing at six. The Postmaster-General sent a special message to have an en-
gine bring him down from New Hampshire in season to take the New York
train. I hope to be able to send you better news to-morrow. If you hear
nothing, you may suppose he is going on in gradual improvement, just as I
hope he is at present.

From John G. Whittier :

13th, 6 Mo.

. . . The news of the sudden, severe illness of Mr. Blaine reached
me last night. Nothing for a long time has so saddened me. The paper
this morning says he is improving. God grant it may be true ! If I were
a member of the Cincinnati Convention and before inclined to some other
candidate, I would vote for him now, sick or well, as a rebuke to hired

416 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

slanderers and ex-Rebel investigators. The sympathies of the whole
country must be with him.

I never doubted Mr. Blaine's perfect right to attend to his business mat-
ters and buy and sell R.R. stocks while a M. C. I was only sorry because
his enemies could use it against him. That he has been honest in his
transactions I have no doubt. His very letters to Fisher show his delicate
sense of honor, and his solicitude that no one should lose by him. These
letters seem to me to be his best vindication.

Dear friend, I can well understand thy grief and anxiety. . . . Long
ere this I hope he has so far recovered that your hearts are full of thank-
fulness. God bless you all!

Washington, June 14, 1876.
I suppose you got my letter, written at about the lowest ebb, just as 1
was feeling at the highest. The change yesterday was marvellous, and
seemed like a miracle. One moment he was asking, "Where am I?"
and, " What day is it ? " and the next he was talking as naturally as ever
in his life. But really there was a marked change even in the morning.
He seemed to me a new man, but he spoke with difficulty, hardly more
than single words, and that in a whisper that you had to put your ear
close to his lips to hear. Monday, when he was beginning to arouse, he
would say half a dozen times during the day, evidently after a great effort
to satisfy himself, " Church ? " His mind seemed to be going feebly back
to what it knew last. Then he would ask, " What day is it? " and " Is it
Sunday ? Is it dark yet ? " etc. But yesterday almost everything lie said
was coherent, though he did discourage me once by asking, " Where am
I ? " But in the afternoon his mind came fully back, and he is now pre-
cisely as he always was, only weak. He is even getting impatient of the
doctors. He told me this morning, that these homoeopathic doctors are so
enamored of the case that they can't let it go. He says that all yesterday
and before, he knew perfectly well what was said, but found difficulty in
replying. He said it seemed as if the wires that go to himself from others
were all in good working order, but the wires that go from himself to
others were down. The only anxiety now is, that he shall not over-exert
himself. He wants all the telegrams and papers read to him, and will
take hold and read himself, but not much, as it would hurt his eyes.
Emmons got here Monday about 4 P.M. The sun was not out when we
went to church, and it was not particularly uncomfortable, yet it was a
very warm day, but very likely the heat would not have caused it had he
been in full strength. I count his foes just as much to blame as if there
had been no sun. Everything looks favorable to-day to his nomination.
The house has been full of excitement, of course, and will remain so until
after the nomination. New England has behaved shabbily. . . . Massa-
chusetts is wabbling all over Cincinnati, frittering away her own strength,
and doing no one any good so far as I can see. The idea of her forces strag-
gling across the country to Kentucky, and losing all the credit and influence
she might get by consolidating the New England vote upon the New England

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 417

man, and taking all his honor to herself ! Sunday night I was awaiting
every moment the possibility of a change for the worse. The doctor has
stayed every night so far, and Mrs. Blaine sleeps what she can on the sofa
in the parlor. Mr. Blaine's appetite is good, and the rest may be beneficial
to him. He seems as quiet and unexcited as possible ; says he rather
dreads than desires the nomination ; but if he gets the nomination, would
rather like to get the election ! Do you see how differently Republicans
treat the Speaker from Democrats the ex-Speaker? As I write, we are
constantly getting news from Cincinnati on the library table by telegraph.
" Curtis is reading the Reform Club address amidst great applause.1'
" Committee out," etc., etc. ; so that we know what is going on all the
time. It is not very soothing, but nothing so exciting as if nothing had
happened. I suppose that editorial was the one that called forth more than
a thousand letters of protest from Maine, saying that the subscribers meant
to have a Republican newspaper, and if that paper was not going to be
one, Maine proposed to have one that was. As it has large circulation in
Maine, it hauled in its horns instantly. The convention must be in high
spirits, for pretty much everything that is done is received "with great
applause," the telegraph ticks out. Walker and Emmons will go back
probably the last of the week, if their father continues to mend. Q. and
T. had a high fight of words this morning, because Q. said " papa did not
know me so good as he did Q." If possible, I will send you a telegram if
Mr. Blaine is nominated, if I can get the wire, but if it is any one else you
may whistle for it. Mr. Blaine has just announced his determination to
go out to drive, and has sent for Mr. Fish's carriage. Three telegrams
were sent from Washington yesterday, saying he was dead. I suppose
there are people who wish he were. Still the sympathy and friendliness
manifested for him were very widespread. Dr. Verdi said he never has
seen anything like the interest shown in this since Seward was attacked,
whom he attended. The doctors are elated, and especially the homoeopaths,
who were at variance with the old school. Still, each one seems to be
satisfied that he was right, so I do not think we need mind. The street has
been barricaded at each end, the entrance to the house barricaded, a bul-
letin put up three times a day, and a policeman stationed to keep off the
crowd, and a servant at the door to answer inquiries. I have held a good
many levees myself at the front door, and in the vestibule, and on the
steps. There is the queerest mingling of politics and medicine. I believe
if his attack had not been so public, if people had not seen him lying in
his terrible unconsciousness, the whole thing is so quick and " dramatic,"
that his foes would say he made it all up.

Washington, June 16, 1876.
Mr. Blaine is as bright and calm as ever, and seems quite content. He
has the relief of not having the campaign on his shoulders, and undoubt-
edly the years will be freer and happier than they would be had lie got
the nomination and election, and it is undoubtedly better for his health ;
but I do not deny that it is a risk which [ would gladly have taken !

418 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

General Hurlburt said to me yesterday, " It is the last time for a century
that the North-west will permit New England to have a President, and she
does it now, not because of any regard for New England, but because she
likes the man." And here was a man who had won the very first place in
the country, and New England might have elected him on the first ballot.
Instead of which she went against her own, and nominated a man that
nobody ever heard of. Massachusetts might have elected him on the last
ballot ; but she chooses rather to have an administration in which she has
no influence. Mr. Blaine's friends stuck to him with unparalleled fidelity.
Every one says the fight was most magnificent, — that never was a man so
sustained to the end. Among his friends the feeling, which of course no
outside person can have, is of enthusiastic admiration and sympathy for
the splendid victory. He fought the whole field, without money, against
the administration, without any clap-trap at all, — and he had ballot after
ballot, as many votes as the three other highest candidates put together.
And we have wasted all the enthusiasm which Mr. Blaine's nomination
would have elicited. Who can enthuse for Hayes ? Mr. Blaine has just
gone out to drive with Secretary Fish. Is this not a cruel blow coming
just upon his sickness ? And yet it may be the best thing that could have
happened. You may remember that Mr. Blaine has always prophesied
the Great Unknown. Early this morning came a telegram that they had
combined on Bristow ; but Mr. Blaine said no, that could not be true.
They would combine on Hayes. The convention has nominated a man
whom nobody wanted, and left a man whom so many do want. Bitter
messages come in from all quarters by the telegram. If Mr. Blaine can
only keep his health !

To Mr. Blaine, from Colonel Hay :

Cleveland, Ohio, June 17, 1876.

It is a bitter disappointment to all of us, but still we can see that you
received the greatest personal tribute yesterday which has ever been given
to a public man in this country. Without a single machine vote, in face
of the most energetic machine work, you had not only your three hundred
and fifty-one votes, but also the cowardly good-will of the Ohio and Penn-
sylvania delegations, three-fourths of whom would have voted for you
if they had dared defy the machine lash.

I hope you will let me repeat what I said the other day, that your health
should now be your first care. Don't let any overstrained ideas of honor and
duty induce you to overwork yourself this summer. It is not necessary
either for yourself or the ticket.

Washington, June 19, 187G.
. . . As soon as Mr. Blaine is able to travel, he will leave Washing-
ton. . . . He is very well and in excellent spirits; ever so much better
than before his attack. I think that really was a sort of crisis and did
him good. I feared that after the nomination was really over and the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 419

excitement gone, there might come a reaction, but there is none so far.
He sees every one who calls, and their name is Legion, — all the returning
delegates coming to make their reports, and their reports are all alike, —
of a magnificent support in the convention, a splendid following, the
greatest enthusiasm, three-fourths of the convention really wanting him,
but cheated out of the nomination by the tricks of their leaders, who
had the whole force of the administration, all the machinery and a great
deal of money, all the treasury and the so-called reform element, besides the
local feeling of Cincinnati and the newspapers. All this Mr. Blaine fought
single-handed and under his sunstroke. They say that the only large paper
in Cincinnati that was decent to Mr. Blaine was the "Enquirer," a Dem-
ocratic paper. Blaine men paid no money, bought nobody, made no
bargains, had no clap -trap, but just fought on the strength of his personal
character. The news of his illness was a terrible blow, but they stuck to
him right through ; said they would rather have Blaine's executor for
President than any other candidate. They would listen to no second choice.
Men stood up and voted for him in solid column, — after they knew Hayes
was nominated ; and after Hayes's nomination was announced they cheered
Blaine lustily. No one had any idea of his strength before ; that this
defeat has developed it, and that he comes out of the contest far stronger
than he went in ; that the way the votes stuck to him is unparalleled.

From Walker :

Yale College, June 21, 1876.

. . . The more I think of tlie result at Cincinnati (I don't think
very much of it, however), the better am I satisfied. . . . Tell father
that I shall be disappointed if he doesn't make me his private secretary
for the summer, as I think Tom needs rest, and I have no doubt some hard
work would do me good every way.

From Mrs. H. H. Greenough :

Cambridge.

. . . I have never seen any expression of feeling so strong as that
which was created by the announcement of Mr. Blaine's illness, since the
hour of Lincoln's death. It seemed to strike a blow to every heart and
to paralyze every other thought ; and it is a joy unspeakable that even
at its most anxious moment he was able to use his vast influence to
strengthen the safeguards of the country which it was the general wish
to leave in his hands, so that whatever else might happen his patriotism
was as remarkable as the power he wielded or could have wielded as its
head.

Your son Emmons is as worthy, dear Mrs. Blaine, of his father's fame
as a mother could desire. Every reward will, I am sure, be his or found
in him, and I am very thankful for my dear grandson's sake that they so
early have chosen each other for friends. Mr. Longfellow, who was here
when your son called, regarded him with a great deal of interest, and said that

420 BIOQRAPHT OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Mr. Blaine was his candidate, his one choice, and that he deeply regretted
the persecution which had led, possibly, to his illness and which might yet
cause defeat to the Republican party. Of course he deplored the action of
the convention, excepting that by your husband's approval of it. its wisdom
must be taken for granted.

From Hon. T. Ewing:

St. Louis, June 30, 1876.

I thank you for your very cordial letter received before leaving home
for the convention here, and assure you that your family have as large a
place in our hearts as we have in yours.

You may perhaps notice in the platform adopted here a shameful attack
on Mr. Blaine. I was a member of the Committee on Resolutions, and
moved to strike out that clause of the platform which had been brought out
from New York by the Tildenites, who controlled a large majority of the
convention and ruled it absolutely from first to last. My motion led to an
excited and angry debate of an hour and a half, and was lost at last by a
vote of eighteen to twenty. I then prepared a resolution to offer in open
convention to strike out that charge. But the Tilden men cut us off from

debate and amendments by the previous question, and carried the platform
through in spite of all opposition. If I had supposed we were to be choked
off so arrogantly, I would have made a minority report on that subject, as
I did on the specie resumption law. The reason I did not was that I could
get no one to join me in so pronounced an opposition to the action of the
committee, and I thought an amendment offered from the floor and sup-
ported by an appropriate speech would be more likely to carry than a
minority report made by but one of thirty-eight members of the Committee
on Resolutions.

I sincerely hope Mr. Blaine will be restored to his pristine and amazing
intellectual vigor.

Thos. Ewing.

To Mr. Blaine :

July 3, 1870.
Have you observed that the Faneuil Hall speakers, Thursday night, were
quite as busy apologizing for not having nominated you as ratifying Hayes ?
Mr. Goddard has brought over an Englishman with whom he fell in love

abroad and whom they are lionizing in Boston. Talking politics, of course,
some one censured your having sought office too much, etc. " What is
that, what is that?11 cried the Englishman. " That is not the way we do
in England. We think it is the manly way to come out openly and honestly,"
and went on putting their cant to shame, and as the canters fall at John
BulPs feet they speedily recanted. A blacksmith here is indignant at New
England not taking a New England President. " If Blaine had been

nominated, I should have put on five more men and would have given him
twenty-five votes. As it is I have already dismissed three men since the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 421

convention and shall send away two more to-morrow." B. says that the
Saturday before Mr. Blaine was ill, a man in Lynn said to him, " No living
man can stand the strain that is on him. If they don't kill him one way,
they will another." Be sure you lie low and see that they don't. . .
Mr. French saj^s Judge Hoar says if he ever is sent to another nominat-
ing convention he hopes to carry a larger stock of wisdom with him ;
that he took what little he possessed, but it did not seem to be enough to
go round the delegation. . . . Dr. Smith was in the train; inquired
for you with a great deal of feeling ; said he was glad you had grace given
you not to murder Mulligan on the spot, as you had the right to do, — though
I won't vouch for the exact words ; said he thought a large number were
represented by a prominent man in his congregation who had not been an
especial Blaine man till within a fortnight of the convention, but the events
of that fortnight brought him out strong, though he consoles himself since
the convention by saying that your time has not yet come, that you will go
in with more 6clat in four years, or even in eight years, than now ; but we
will not lend ourselves to any such folly, will we ?

House of Representatives,

Washington, D.C., August 3, 1876.
My dear Blaine : This has been a great day for you in the House. You
have at last found not only an equal, but a superior in power to destroy
one of your enemies. Said superior is Proctor Knott. He has smashed him-
self even more completely than you smashed him. You will see it all in
the " Record." I will only say that Frye and Hale covered themselves with
glory. Scores of your friends were ready to go in if there had been any
need. But those who did speak left nothing to be desired.
Loving you as ever, T am,

Your friend,

J. A. Garfield.
From John G. Whittier :

Bear Camp, R. House, West Ossipee, N.H.

9th Mo. 10, 1876.
. . . The newspapers have located me in half a dozen places, and
the last I heard of myself after leaving my " cottage at the Shoals," I have
been reported as living " secluded and hermit-like" at Martha's Vineyard,
the guest of a distinguished New Yorker. This State is now alive with
political caucuses and flag-raisings, but all say that we lack the enthusiasm
which is wanted in such a canvass. There can be no doubt that Mr. Blaine
would have been a stronger candidate in most of the States. The real hope
of the Republicans lies in the folly of the Democrats, which, from present
appearances, is not likely to fail them. I am sorry that my dear friend
Adams has allowed his name to be used by the Democrats, but he will not
have a large following in Massachusetts.

422 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Columbus, Ohio, September 14, 1876.
My dear Mr. Blaine : How gloriously you have done ! I congratulate
you, and thank you. This will give heart and life to our friends every-
where. We need the encouragement. In this State and in Indiana the
greenback heresy is strong. At the State elections all factions of the
Dem. will be united against us. We shall be vastly stronger in Novem-
ber. Our strong ground is the dread of a solid South, rebel rule, etc., etc.
I hope you will make these topics prominent in your speeches. It leads
people away from " hard times,11 which is our deadliest foe.
» Sincerely,

R. B. Hayes.

From Walker :

Cincinnati, October 1, 1876.

Dearest Mother : After we left Cleveland at seven o'clock Monday
morning last we had a somewhat prosaic ride to Lafayette, arriving there
about eight in the evening. Had to wait for dinner until we reached Fort
Wayne, at 3.30 P.M., and then did not have very much of a meal. At
Lafayette Mr. Orth met us and took us to his house. . . . Had supper
after reaching there, and had a very comfortable night's sleep. Next day
we went to the battle-ground, distant some six miles, and there was a very
large meeting. Father spoke in the afternoon for about an hour and ten
minutes. I timed him so that he should not speak too long. ... In
the evening there was a reception at Judge Orth's, from which father
was called away to speak in the square. Goodloe, who was the last
speaker in the afternoon, and who spoke very well, was speaking when
we arrived, and after he had finished in about ten minutes the crowd
began to call for father ; but a little fellow who had been ' ' sj31ilin1 ,1 all
day for a chance to speak had to be introduced. He spoke about five
minutes and said nothing, and then they yelled "Blaine.11 He plead
with the crowd to hear him out, but they yelled ; then the chairman
plead, and finally he gave it up and took his seat, saying as he passed
me, " It's no use for anybody to try to speak to this crowd to-night.11 When
father commenced to speak, you never saw a better-behaved audience, and
he spoke for three-quarters of an hour, and spoke magnificently, making a
portion of his old 1868 speech, and a good deal that was new to me. Rob-
ert Lincoln said that it was the finest campaign speech he ever listened to.
Next day I got up at 7 A.M. and rode about Lafayette, which is a very
pretty town. At 9.30 we started for Plymouth, in the northern part of the
State. At Pau, where we changed cars, wc met General Logan, who went
up to Plymouth with us and spoke after father. The Chicago Glee Club
also was there, and they sang magnificently. From Plymouth we went by
special train to Fort Wayne, and Logan and the Glee Club along, and there
was a meeting gathered to hear father at three hours' notice, of at least five
thousand people. Coming down, the train stopped at Columbia City, and
father spoke to three or four hundred people for ten minutes from the rear
of the car. Father spoke over an hour at Fort Wayne, and Logan spoke

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 423

half an hour. . . . The next day we went around and called at the
Colerich's. Mrs. Colerich was a Walpole and her mother was a Gil-
lespie. The old lady (she is between sixty and seventy) is the perfect
image of Mrs. Sherman. The old gentleman is a fine old Irishman who
insisted on kissing me. You never saw two j>eople so glad to see us.
The old lady was very much affected and kissed me when I came away.
They are nice old people ... At Plymouth saw Johnny Ewing, son
of Philemon, who has come over from Notre Dame to see father — a
nice-looking boy. Sent my love by him to Mother Angela. Took train
from Fort Wayne Thursday for Muncie and Indianapolis. At the for-
mer place, where we changed cars, father spoke some twenty-five min-
utes. At Indianapolis found Mr. Chandler, Mr. McPherson, Governor
Noyes, and others. Had a magnificent meeting in the opera-house, jammed
with people who had been waiting over an hour. Father spoke an hour
and a half and was followed by Noyes. Left Indianapolis at 7.30, Mr.
Chandler coming with us to Cincinnati, and went to Mitchell in Southern
Indiana in Hunter's district, where they had a meeting in a grove of eight
to ten thousand people, all hoosiers. Father spoke an hour, and spoke well.
From there we came to Cincinnati, leaving Mitchell at three, reaching Cin-
cinnati at nine. I was glad to get out of Indiana, — i.e., Southern Indiana,
— and glad enough to get to a city. While we were waiting at the depot in
Mitchell, a fellow came by, his face streaming with blood and a crowd of
about twenty hooting and chasing at his heels. He was drunk and had
shouted " Hurrah for Tilden ! " Of course he was not badly hurt, but it was
not a pleasant sight at best. Reached Cincinnati at nine Friday evening, and
yesterday afternoon father spoke in Hartwell, and in the evening here to
the largest meeting ever held in Cincinnati, and afterwards saw a torchlight
procession of about five thousand men. Father was followed by Mr. Frye
who is here with Mrs. F. . . . I spent most of yesterday with Rufus
Smith, and to-day have been to church and to dinner with a son of an old
college friend of father's who presided at the meeting last night. Young
H. I knew at Andover, where he was a classmate of Emmons. I am
enjoying the trip immensely. It is a grand way to see the country, and is
altogether very enjoyable.

To Mr. Blaine, from John Jay :

New York, January 25, 1877.

It occurs to me that there may yet be a chance of defeating the Electoral
Bill by an appeal from all quarters of the country to the Chief Justice of
the Supreme Court, to lend it no sanction by the action of its members till
its constitutionality has been affirmed. Pray let me know by telegraph if
you think there is a chance of this and how we had best proceed.

I regard the measure as the most unconstitutional and wicked since the
fugitive slave law, and its influences and results perhaps fatal to our
government.

424 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

From Walker :•

Brooklyn, January 26, 1877.

. . . I am glad that you disapprove of the compromise. I was
pleased to see that father voted against it, and pleased to see that he gave
so good and statesmanlike reasons for doing so. I have a certain amount
of contempt for Senators who, in discussing a measure which, like this, pro-
posed to " shoot Niagara,1' as Garfield says, can find no better reasons for
opposing this measure or favoring that, than that it will tend to count
Mr. Hayes in, or to elect Mr. Tilden. I have enough of conservatism in
me to prefer seeing Mr. Tilden President ten times rather than to see so
dangerous a precedent once established. Yet the plan is, I fear, as good
as adopted. However, heaven and the Illinois Legislature be praised,
David Davis will not probably be the judge to decide it. The idea of
calling Davis an Independent! I do not believe that there will be a better
Democrat in the whole Senate next session than this ex-judge. . . .
Ashbel Green, a prominent lawyer in New Jersey, who was badly beaten
by the abattoir man, remarked last year in a public speech in New Jersey
that " Blaine feigned a faint in Washington," which I hope damns him in
your eyes as it does in mine.

To Mr. Blaine, from Walker :

Brooklyn, January 26, 1877.

I have just received a letter from mother, which I take pleasure in send-
ing you, as another evidence of how much she will be pleased at your vote
on the compromise. I am glad that you voted against the bill, and still
more glad at the grounds on which you based your vote. The question is,
it seems to me, as Garfield says, not so much one for us and the people of
the present as the generations yet to come. Should this bill pass, and
nothing be done to the Constitution by way of amendment, affairs are left
in a fearful snarl. Even as it is, supposing that an amendment is passed
which changes our whole system of election, it seems to me that a very
dangerous precedent has been established, — a precedent which will permit
a partisan Congress in future time, in case of emergency, of which they
are judges, to strain any constitutional provision to the uttermost verge.
But I am very glad that in your opposition you put it on constitutional
grounds. It is very small and very cheap in men to falsify their record and
to oppose this question merely because if it passes there is a possibility that
Mr. Tilden may be President of the country for the next four years. The
question is too important to be regarded from such a partisan standpoint.

From Mr. Blaine :

Senate, February 3, 1877.

. . . The Representatives Hall, Maine, — that was the theatre of a
great deal of early pride and power to the undersigned. It never covered
the horizon of my hopes and ambitions, but while in it and of it I worked
as though there was no other theatre of action in the world.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 425

From Walker :

Brooklyn, N.Y., February 10, 1877.

. . . What a world of gayety you are living in. I should think that
you would occasionally sigh for the calms of an undistracted city like
Washington. It is rather a strange thing to me to look at this country
now in decidedly the most dangerous and ominous time I ever saw, and
to see how quiet we all are and with how much sang-froid every one
behaves. Business prostrate, the results of our great election in doubt,
rebellious articles in print, sacrifices of precedents as old as the Con-
stitution without a moment's consideration ; and yet thanks to a compara-
tively scattered population and diversities of interest, and to some extent,
too, to the ruined and prostrate South, we move along as quietly as under
settled de jure de facto constitutional means and methods. The compro-
mise turns out, as Mons calls it, a give-away, but not on our side. What
do you suppose would be the condition of a nation like France, if topics of
so great national interest arose, or of England, if precedents were so
quietly swept away. ... I don't think I should care a fillip about
this wearisome election, save that I don't see what will become of the
thousands of clerks who will be turned out if S. J. T. goes in. Put in the
Litany, — I have in mine, — "From all dependence for daily bread on
the national government, and from all government clerkships, good Lord
deliver us." . . . I am now taking an extra course of lectures in
afternoons at the Law School, on the Constitutional History of Govern-
ments, and as I am thinking of taking another course, all my afternoons
are therewith occupied., i.e., afternoons of the first four days of the week.
. . . Father wrote me a short note the other day, and sent $55, the
sole remainder, so he wrote, of a $1,000 investment in Michigan silver
mines. . . . What an extravagance has father ventured into in buying
a watch ! How he has liberalized since he ordered me five years ago
not to wear standing collars on pain of his displeasure! . . .

From Mr. Blaine :

Washington, February 16, 1877.

Walker came early this morning, by night train from New York. We
breakfasted together at Wormley's, and lie went to the cajDitol with me.
I made a brief speech on the Pacific Railroad bill, and a very good one, I
think, being, of course, an impartial judge. We arc going out to-night to
make swell calls in several directions. We have just come in from dining
at Wormley's together, and find Joe Manley here — bright and cheery and
newsy. . . . Louisiana is decided in our favor — just heard it; would
telegraph, but you would not get the despatch till morning, when you
will get it fuller in the morning paper. This practically settles the
election, and we may count on Hayes as next President with some degree
of confidence, indeed with certainty.

426 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

From Mr. Blaine :

February 23, 1877.

. . . We got Oregon's result, just before recess. What a fearful
commentary on all ideas of fairness that vote of eight to seven is ! I
mean the seven to sustain that frightful fraud of Cronin's.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. Wendell Phillips :

March 5, 77.

If Hayes withdraws the troops from the South, murder and intimidation
will rule there. The South, stronger in votes than before emancipation,
will carry her point and be substantially victorious spite of Appomattox ;
there will be no Republican State south of Pennsylvania ; the next Con-
gress and the next President will be Democratic. Far better to have Tilden
than Hayes with such a policy. Yours cordially, and trusting youll save
us if you can from such madness. . . .

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. William Lloyd Garrison :

Boston, March 8, 1877.
Though I am not one of your constituents, I desire most heartily to thank
you for your recent manly, eloquent, and patriotic utterances in the Senate,
while justly asserting the validity of Senator Kellogg's election, and the
legitimacy of the claim of Governor Packard, of Louisiana, and of Governor
Chamberlain, of South Carolina, to the recognition and support of the
general government. Be assured, to you will be accorded the warm
approval of all those tried and true souls in the land who remember too
vividly the awful consequences that have resulted in the past from cow-
ardly compromises with the despotic and rebellious spirit of the South to
sanction any more such insane attempts to " draw out leviathan with a
hook," to harmonize radically hostile elements, and to paciticate disloyalty,
by treating it with special consideration. Of course, you will be most
furiously assailed by the pseudo-Democratic organs, North and South ; but
this will be sure proof that you have sagaciously struck the right key-note,
in the right place, and at the right time, and manfully met the issue pre-
sented by the incorrigible enemies of equal rights and legitimate govern-
ment. So they writhed and howled at the delivery of your nobly patriotic
speech on the amnesty bill, at a former session of Congress — a speech
which proved as potent as the spear of Ithuriel when it touched the dis-
sembling toad, and evoked the demon in his real shape — a speech to
which the only reasonable objection that could be made was its surpassing
clemency to the whole rebel mass, making but a single exception in the
person of the arch-traitor of them all, Jefferson Davis, and he excepted,
only because of his official responsibility for the unparalleled horrors of
Andersonville — a speech which, by the vials of wrath it brought upon
your head, notwithstanding its excessive magnanimity, demonstrated that
nothino" will " conciliate the South " but to put the control of the federal
o-overnment and the destiny of the nation into her hands, as in the days of
her oligarchal supremacy.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 427

You will be blamed in another quarter. There is a weak, timid, pur-
blind, compromising element in the Republican party, which your out-
spoken words of sound reason and timely warning will greatly disturb,
because its panacea for all our national divisions is "conciliation,1'
meaning thereby a truckling to the South as in the days of yore, and a
stolid indifference to the fate of her colored population. The elimination
of this element from the party would greatly add to its strength and effi-
ciency, as it is ever a drag in any great emergency. That which it seeks
to " conciliate,11 — by sacrificing principle to expediency, — is devoid of all
sense of honor, every pulsation of patriotism, every feeling of nationality.
Its wishes are neither to be gratified nor consulted. The truly loyal at the
South need no conciliation; to the disloyal no concession should be made.
If President Hayes shall be true to his inaugural professions, his adminis-
tration will be a shield of defence to the oppressed against their lawless
oppressors. God grant he maybe equal to his responsibilities! He cannot
do better than to respond in word and deed to your noble declaration :
"Whoever else shall halt or grow weak in maintaining it, so long as I
have the strength I will stand for the Southern Union men of both colors ;
and when I cease to do that, before any presence North or South, may my
tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, and my right hand forget its cun-
ning. Yours to uphold justice,

Wm. Lloyd Garrison.

From Walker :

Washington, February 23, 1877.

Dearest Mother: I suppose that you have special telegrams to
Augusta, giving the result of the vote in the electoral commission from
time to time. At any rate, long before this letter reaches you, you will
know that Oregon is decided, by this non-partisan commission, in our
favor. As I heard Mr. Evarts say to-day, that South Carolina would
occupy very little time indeed (you know the Committee of the House
which visited the State declared that the Hayes electors were fully
elected) , I presume that Hayes may be regarded now as the next Presi-
dent. Bring on a new relay of cabinet-makers. ... I was present
in the House, and heard Seelye and Pierce announce that they could not
vote to admit Louisiana as belonging to Hayes. They desired to throw
out the vote altogether. I am more and more convinced that being Inde-
pendent simply means " being on t'other side." I was rather disappointed
in the vote on Oregon. I wanted to see one vote something better than
8 to 7. Father was not up this morning until eleven, but has been at the
Senate all day, and is now sitting here writing. He is quite well, I
think. The loneliness of his life grows on him, however.

From Mr. Blaine :

Washington, February 26, 1877.

Walker got off as per appt. at 9.20 last night; said as he was leaving
that he had never spent a more pleasant or profitable week in his life.
. . . I have greatly enjoyed his being here.

428 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

From G.

Augusta, February 27, 1877.
. Alice went back yesterday morning quite happy. Emmons
goes back to-night. He is a remarkable youth for one of his }^ears. The
care he takes of everybody and everything, and the way he throws him-
self into every breach, is more like forty than twenty.

From Walker :

Brooklyn, March 7, 1877.

Dearest Mother: I have just been reading father's great speech
yesterday. It was grand, as I think. If this administration is going to
make a foolish move in the very beginning, what will it come to in the
end? At all events, I feel sure that father is right and that he will be sus-
tained by the Republican party everywhere. The appointment of Devens,
if true, is very good. I am glad that no Maine man is in the cabinet if this
administration is going to act in this manner. Write me what you think of
the speech.

To Mr. Blaine, from Walker :

Brooklyn, March 7, 1877.

I have just finished reading the account of your speech of yesterday in
the Senate. I want to write one line to say how much I was impressed
with it and how much I admire your course. You are sure to be sus-
tained by the Republican party en masse in the Northern and Western
States. I don't think that you owe anything to this administration what-
ever (while Hayes does owe almost his election to you), and j^ou are
certainly far stronger with the Republican party than this administra-
tion can ever be. . . . If Hayes recognizes Nichols he ought to
resign. It is an avow^ed acknowledgment that he holds his seat unlawfully
and that Tilden was justly elected. I sincerely hope that the commenda-
tion which 'your course is to-day receiving from Republicans throughout
the United States will deter him from doing anything so humiliating
to the party which elected him and to national political honor. Can't you
have The Record of this session sent to me, unless you have promised it
elsewhere ? Again congratulating you, I am, as ever.

From Walker :

Brooklyn, March 19, 1877.

Dearest Mother : Isn't 18th Alice's birthday ? At all events, I have
just written her a note and sent her a couple of ribbons. If I am mis-
taken, she has a couple of ribbons anyway, and is so much the better off.
There are so many birthdays in the numerous Blaine family, that I am never
quite certain. I keep run of Mons's and my own, and then I get muddled
witli March, and April, and October, and teens, and twenties. I have no
doubt you know, but supposing you write them down so as to have some
record. By and by we may get mixed, and when I am an aged bachelor

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 429

dyeing my hair to look young and wearing false teeth like John D., T.
may go to snubbing me under the impression that she is the older. It is a
matter of importance to me, for as the younger members grow up, I feel
the power which seniority gives growing more and more a poor, frail wand,
no longer an instrument of power. When I am twenty-five and A. twenty,
I shan't be half so well able to snub her as when I was twenty and she fif-
teen. Well, the Senate has adjourned, and now we shall see what is going
to be the policy of this administration. . . . What do you think I have
been doing lately ? Reading Scott's poetry. . . . I began " Marmion "
Friday and read it through almost at a sitting. Began it because I was
ashamed to confess to myself that I had never read it, and I read it with
immense zest. I think I must inherit both a taste and distaste for poetry,
— the former from you, the latter from the paternal, though I found T. G.
when in Washington greatly impressed with "Mireio " and profoundly moved
by Cowper's " Grave.11 He insulted me by asking if I had read the latter.
. . . The pater's favorite stanza was one beginning, " Like a sick
child that knoweth not his mother while she blesses,11 it may interest
you to know. . . . You dou't know how I desire to get home. I doir't
like New York at all, and I want to see you all and settle down in Augusta
immensely, — for the summer, I mean. . . . Love to nearly every-
body in Augusta, most of all to those beneath your roof.

From Mr. Blaine :

Washington, March 25, 1877.

I have not much to tell you to-day, and fortunately I have not, for, Sun-
day as it is, the house has been crowded all day with visitors of every name
and nation, whom Martha and Lewis have in vain endeavored to keep out
and fend off. I forgot, in my hurried note of yesterday, to tell you what a
pleasant interview I had had at the White House, and how very anxious
the President seems to be civil to me. He is finding a good deal of trouble
in his Southern policy. He is beginning, I think, to see, if not the error
of his ways, yet the immense magnitude of the question which he thought
would down at his simple bidding. ... I stayed only a few minutes,
and at 11 was in bed, — quite early for me, as my average is after 12, but I
sleep late and make it up. ... I shall not be at home till close of the
week, and you need not tell any one when I am expected, for I want to
escape the crowds there that are running my life out of me here.

Augusta, March 26, 1877.
You need not believe a word of Mr. Blaine^ opposition to the cabinet.
Evarts, Sherman, and McCreary are men whom he would have chosen
himself. The President sent for him Sunday before his inauguration, to
ask about the New England member, and of the list of eleven which he
had, he took the one Mr. Blaine advised, — Devens. Mr. Hale had previ-
ously declined, and the President said he could not take Frye, as he did not
know him. Mr. Devens was a friend of Mr. Blaine's all last summer, and

430 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

tried to get Blaine delegates sent to Cincinnati. So you can see how wild
are all the stories about Mr. Blaine's opposing the cabinet. He is expected
home this week.

From Walker :

Brooklyn, April 6, 1877.
Dearest Mother : You must have heard from father all about the
pleasant time which we had together in New York, so of that I write noth-
ing, save to say that I spent the pleasantest twenty-four hours almost since
I have been here. . . . Thanks for your care and reservation of the
"irregular [room]." I ought to learn something and do something in
Augusta this year. There is good society, plenty of books, lots of air, and
home, and I am really going to make an earnest effort to accomplish
something.

From Walker :

Brooklyn, April 16, 1877.
. . . Spiritually I am degenerating, as far as church-going is a
factor. 1 have not been to church for many Sundays, save yester-
day, and I don't desire to go for many more if I am to hear as poor a
sermon as I heard yesterday. I don't dislike the Episcopal church, but
when it lays itself out it can get up the poorest sermon I ever listened to.
This particular curate — who was old enough to know better — preached a
sermon on death. He had a very bad English accent, and he gradually,
solemnly, and sweetly led his congregation down into the tombs, and then
quietly abandoned them without a ray of sunlight or a gleam of hope.
His ideas were old, he was old, and his sermon was old ; and I am sure every
one of the congregation felt temporally half an hour older, and mentally
not a half a second. But the singing was superb and the day glorious, and
the company quite good, and on the whole I rather enjoyed myself. I am
this evening far beyond my depths in the law of executory devises. I am
sure that the man who wrote the text-book did not know very much about
the subject. Of course I shall know infinitely less. At the end my knowl-
edge very probably will be nil. I am so disgusted with politics that I can
say nothing. I was delighted with father's despatch, of course — more than
delighted. I can't believe that the Republican party is in sympathy with
Hayes. A President refusing to interfere in State affairs, and then consti-
tuting a Legislature disregarding the credentials of the returning board
in Louisiana, as this infernal commission now proposes to do. Why, he
stamps illegitimacy all over his certificate of birth. He draws the bar
sinister across his coat of arms. He is like a man who has been ac-
quitted on the testimony of one witness, and then indicts this witness for
perjury. The situation down South seems to me just this. The popula-
tion of New Orleans is in favor of Nicholls, and they propose to run the
State, and I believe reduce the negro to as bad a condition as he ever was in
while enslaved. And to think that just as the Republican party in one or

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 431

two Southern States was getting on a good basis, should step in and kick
down the ladder by which he rose to power, and with it endanger the rights
of the people for whom he mourned so long and so loud ! I hope that
the junior Senator from Maine will speak in no uncertain tones on this
question even though he battles alone for the right. . . . Sometimes I
work myself up to such a pitch that I no longer feel myself sane or
logical on the whole matter. . . .

From Almet F. Jenks, to Emmons Blaine, Geneva :

In Frenchman's Bay on the way to Mt. Desert,
on board of the " flrefly " steamer.

August 1, 1877.
My dear Emmons : " Yo ho cheerily, men, Captain Reese of the ' Man-
tlepiece.,,1 I never saw a letter before that ended in reality with its date.
This does, for like the argument of a poem, the skeleton has been given
and my bright genius must fill the rest. However, I thought it might
please you if I should jot a line, or rather heave a line, from our log, or a log
from our line, or something in Captain Marryat's vein, or in the manner of
E. K. Kane. . . . The party has made thirteen all the way, and just as
we get seated, the Hon. J. G. B. disappears, and brings in some provincial
to make up fourteen at the table. . . . The setting sun shines on a
broken and shattered table of cheese, olives, ham-sandwiches, etc. The
American flag floats at the stern. Mr. R. and Mrs. R., Mr. B. and Mr. H.,
are sitting in the stern quoting poetry. Mr. C. H., Miss G., Miss B., and
M. are playing whist. W. is for'ards smoking a cig., and I guess Miss B.
is getting up a praise meeting among the crew, which by the way consists
wholly of able-bodied captains. We are having a jolly good time, and I
am glad that I can quote my Horace from a different verse and chapter
from you.

" Cras ingens iterabimus, aequor."

From Mr. Blaine, to Hon. W. H. West :

Augusta, Me., August 25, 1877.
Dear Judge : Your letter greatly surprises me : . . . though I
dissent from much that I see attributed to you, your position is still
immeasurably better than that of the Democrats. And aside from
political affiliation, my personal sympathies are all with you. I do not
forget the tie of nativity that binds us both to the good old county of
Washington, nor the still stronger bond that unites us in the brotherhood
of the same Alma Mater. Nor will either of us, I trust, ever fail to re-
member that grand old race of men from whom we are both descended, —
the mingled Scotch and Scotch-Irish who peopled so large a portion of
Central and Western Pennsylvania; a race whose modest claim in all
generations is that they never turn their backs on a friend or a foe.

432 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

XV.

IN THE SENATE.

r I ^HE Southern policy adopted by the administration of Pres-
-*- ident Hayes was a bitter and lasting disappointment to
Mr. Blaine. He felt that the wheels of progress had been
turned backward and an inestimable ground of vantage lost;
that it would be years before the country could stand in full
view of a right and permanent adjustment of sectional relations
with the power and prestige which she held on the day of
Hayes's election. In his opposition to the administration policy
Mr. Blaine antagonized many of the leaders of the Republican
party, but of stalwart Republicanism, to use his own phrase, he
was more than ever the chosen and cherished head. So long as
the President's policy might be affected he gave it his close
attention and every urgency in what he deemed the only right
direction. When it was completed, when the Republican Legis-
latures of three States had vanished at the touch of the adminis-
tration wand, when the solid South — which, during the electoral
contest, had seemed so dangerous to Mr. Hayes as to require
discussion more than any question of protection to American
labor or to American schools — had been reestablished by
President Hayes, Mr. Blaine wasted no time in regrets, but
turned to matters still in the shaping. " Nothing is so weaken-
ing as regret " was a maxim of his life.

During his first winter in the Senate, interest had been ab-
sorbed by the dispute regarding the presidency. The spring
was given chiefly to the question of the President's policy.

Again selected as one of the visitors to West Point, Mr. Blaine
went in June, 1877, and, as was his wont, made it a pleasure
trip by taking his family and adding to the tour of inspection
a visit to the beautiful scenery of the Catskills, the haunts c/
Washington Irving, and to Saratoga.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 438

During the winter of 1877-78 he was in the full tide of
vigorous activity. Many of the measures under review were
but remotely allied to the exciting questions of the South
from which the flame seems never far. The laws of the cur-
rency, the changes of tariff*, the modes and roads of traffic, con-
cern the well-being of a nation, but not with the heat of more
palpably moral themes ; yet whatever Mr. Blaine discussed was
the question of the day. The distinctive measure of the Forty-
fifth Congress was the passage of the bill to authorize the
free coinage of the standard silver dollar of 41 2 J grains,
and to restore its legal-tender character. Resumption of
specie payment which had been fixed for 1879 was threatened
by a movement which looked toward inflation and instability
as the basis of national credit, which would secure remoneti-
zation of silver without regard to changed conditions, or
any knowledge of sequences or prescience of consequences.
On this bill Mr. Blaine gave thorough cooperation with the
President. Deprecating the coinage of inferior dollars, he
traced to its proper sources the deterioration of silver, and
was emphatic in asserting the necessity of reestablishing
silver as money. His position was indeed imperative, being
in logical harmony with every attitude of his mind and every
previous utterance regarding this important question — which
to him had never been a question. He held it to be a theme
on which there can be no rationally divergent views, though
there are many theories. He held that gold and silver are
the money of the Constitution, and that such a silver dollar
should be coined as would not only do justice among our
citizens at home, but prove an absolute barricade against the
gold monometallists. He did not believe 41 2 J grains of silver
would make such a dollar. The bill was passed, was vetoed
by the President, and then passed over the President's veto.
Mr. Blaine was obliged to antagonize many of his fellow-
citizens in the great and far West, but the depth and breadth
of a wrong public opinion gave only the more clearness and
intensity to his opposition. In financial circles he was recog-
nized as emphasizing principles which are the groundwork of
national dealings among men. The philosophic student was
gratified to see the experience of other nations appropriated to

434 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

the guidance of the republic, while a clear recognition of the
dignity, the power, the authority, and the independent standing
of this nation in the family of nations gave equal satisfaction
to the patriotic American.

The same observant critical and judicial attitude is shown in
the position which he took in regard to the Halifax award, an
attitude which has not been too common in our experience, and
which is as far from the traditional hatred towards England
as it is from the traditional self-conceit of America. England
came presently to think it for her interest to invest Mr. Blaine
with antipathy, if not hostility, to herself. No misapprehension
could be greater. He did indeed once remark to Sir Edward
Thornton that England as against the United States was
always wrong, but he also added that as against the rest of the
world she was always right. This, of course, was a friendly
exaggeration, but Sir Edward thought enough of the compli-
ment to put it in his despatches. Mr. Blaine had a keen
appreciation of the wide reach, the unremitting vigilance,
the unity, and the continuity of English diplomacy — so
keen that he believed it necessary for this country to meet
it with all her resources of watchfulness and resolution. If
England had cause against him, it was that he discerned afar
all encroachments upon American suzerainty, and sounded
the warning and summoned the forces of resistance. The
country was often slow to arouse and slower to understand.
It is not to the discredit of America that her isolated posi-
tion and her sweep of the hemispheres should have made her
somewhat self-sufficient. It took time to convince her that
the modern mind in annihilating space and creating neighbor-
hood had changed the old order and established new responsi-
bility. Not infrequently the silly-wise and the ignorant-learned
hung upon the forward movement their ancient saws, but in the
vast audience that had come to wait upon Mr. Blaine's words
— an audience representing every State and every class in the
great Republic — there was always a nucleus upon which he
could depend and whose sympathy and strength overbore all
the alarm of envy, the indifference of stupidity, the clack of
frivolity.

In the wake of the Alabama arbitration came the settle-

BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 435

ment of the Fisheries dispute. The Alabama award had
given $15,000,000 to the United States, which Great Britain
had promptly paid. Six years afterwards the Halifax Com-
mission had awarded $5,500,000 to Great Britain for the Fish-
eries, which, to complete the equation, should be promptly
paid. Thus the subject presented itself succinctly with a
specious parallelism of fair and manly dealing.

Mr. Blaine brought a few important facts from the back-
ground to the front, and the relation of all the facts was
changed. He offered in the Senate a resolution of inquiry in
regard to the selection of the Belgian minister, Mr. Delfosse,
as the third commissioner, and developed a series of transac-
tions which England has found it more convenient to ignore
than to justify.

After giving in detail the various steps of the tortuous path
by which England, against the protest of our government, im-
posed the Belgian commissioner upon the arbitration, and the
reasons why this was an appointment unfit to be made, dis-
graceful to England in the suggestion, still more in the
insistence, he reviewed the finding of the commissioner,
showed that it was such as was to be expected and predicted
from a commission so constructed, — an award " whose injustice
is so palpable that it is difficult to treat it with the respect due
to all subjects involving international relations." While point-
ing out that England's course had been sufficiently dishon-
orable to invalidate the arbitration, he did not counsel its
rejection. He believed that the arbitration of consultation
is so great an improvement over the arbitration of war that
it was better to accept the unjust conclusion than to throw
into contempt the new Court of Nations, as yet little estab-
lished ; but he thought it equally necessary that its injus-
tice should be thoroughly exposed, and that England should
learn that, though overreached, this country was not hood-
winked. He stamped it upon the popular mind that the
award would be paid not because it was fair, or was founded
upon any fact or evidence submitted to the Halifax Commis-
sion. Honor permitted its payment, but paid without protest,
the award would be used thereafter as a just measure of the
value of the Fisheries; therefore it was "our duty to show

436 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

that the rate fixed by the Halifax Commission has no founda-
tion whatever in truth or in fact, and that no evidence was
before the Commission to justify the award. . . . The
verdict rendered at Halifax was not legally binding under the
terms of the treaty." . . .

The country took a high-spirited part. Secretary Evarts
presented to the Foreign Secretary of Great Britain the adverse
argument in full — and paid the money.

England did not refute the argument — but took the money.

Large questions did not . monopolize Mr. Blaine's attention.
He had a passion for human happiness. Whenever a human
being could be helped, he was eager to afford help. When
frontiersmen were oppressed by a rash but official attempt
to save the trees, he was as earnest and intent to prevent
the suffering of the mountain wood-choppers as if they had
been a nation enchained. He desired, as every intelligent
American must, the preservation of our forests. He opposed,
as every human being must, their wanton destruction ; but he
was far more wroth at seeing a wild law striking down the
hardy woodmen than at seeing a pioneer axe laid at the root of
the hardy trees. He held in view and held up to view that laws
are made for man and not man for laws. New lands cannot be
occupied unless the settlers can have firewood. On unsurveyed
lands not offered for sale no wood could be bought, and he pro-
tested that the pioneer who could not buy wood should be per-
mitted to do what pioneers had done without hindrance from the
first settlement of this country, — help themselves.

The initiatory, arbitrary, and illegal steps of a reform possibly
well-meant, but administered in complete ignorance of the con-
ditions, were creating distress and danger. LaAVS aimed at a
reckless traffic in timber, to the wanton destruction of forests,
were applied against the pioneer cutting wood among the moun-
tains for his household fire. Long usage was broken in upon at
various points in the West and South-west. Industries were
paralyzed, property was seized, honest men were arrested at the
very beginning of winter, and hundreds of families subjected to
great suffering and greater apprehension. Mr. Blaine wasted no
words. An industrious community, in twenty-four hours reduced
to starvation in the name of law, left him no choice of words,

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 437

and he not only denounced as an outrage, but satirized as an
absurdity, the United States government standing over the
woodpiles in the backyards of the settlers in Montana, " in a
snowstorm which threatened to cut them off from all communi-
cation with the outer world, only leaving the wire which led to
the Interior Department, over which the word should come from
the secretary, ' Not a stick of that wood shall be burnt until
one dollar a cord is paid into the treasury of the United States '
— a stumpage, he was careful to ascertain and point out, greater
than in Massachusetts, greater than in the woods in sight from
the Capitol where he was speaking.

" You cannot show in the history of the government where a
settler in a Territory has been charged for his firewood."

" That is not the question," interposed a defender of the
measure.

" That is precisely the question ! " And he reiterated,
" Charge $1 a cord stumpage for firewood in a remote gorge
in the Rocky Mountains — $5,000 wrung out of a distant Ter-
ritory, with no representation in the Senate, on the eve of winter.
The woodland in sight of the spire of Trinity Church in the city
of New York will not pay what the Secretary of the Interior ex-
acted of those distant settlers in Montana. There is no place
sufficiently settled, there is no population sufficiently dense, in
this country, to justify what the Secretary of the Interior de-
manded and collected from these distant people in the remote
solitudes of the Rocky Mountains."

There was wide misapprehension on the subject. The fire-
wood of citizens cut on harsh mountain-sides and hauled twelve
miles to their homes was ordered to be seized. All the firewood
cut for the town of Helena on the public lands was to be seized,
no previous notice having been given that the custom of the
country or the former usage of the department was to be
changed. All the fuel piled up for the use of citizens, and
even for soldiers in garrison, cut under contract with the War
Department, was seized — taken possession of as though it were
stolen goods purloined in the night-time and just found on the
person of the apprehended thief; and Mr. Blaine was repre-
sented as " rushing to the defence of timber-thieves," his
" clients," a the worst element of society." He accepted the

438 BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

issue. " I am glad to have the hardy settlers in the Territories
who are carrying forward the civilization of the country and
battling with the elements, classed among my clients. I am
glad to stand for them in any court or in any presence against
the ignorance or the malice of any one, and feel ashamed of
myself for some of my Eastern friends."

One of these Eastern friends tried to stem his impetuosity,
beginning gently, " His first point was that there was an obso-
lete law — "

" I never used the word, never ! ': interrupted Mr. Blaine.
" The Senator is confusing me with some other Senator. I said
there was no laAv at all. Do not put words in my mouth and
then answer them."

" The Senator's first point was that there was an obsolete
law—"

" I never used the phrase at all. The Senator cannot find it
in what I said."

" Perhaps the Senator will not boil over quite so often."

"Not a bit."

Thereupon Senator Sargent, of California, interposed, " Allow
me — - that was my argument."

" I understand it was the argument of the Senator from
Maine, and — "

" Will the Senator allow me a moment ? I used the argu-
ment, and the Senator from Maine took me to task for it quite
sharply ; he said there was no law at all, obsolete or not."

" I held an entirely different opinion," insisted Mr. Blaine.

" I should like to allow myself a moment, if the gentlemen
please," continued the interrupted Senator patiently. " The
Senator from Maine declared that every Secretary of the Treas-
ury from Alexander Hamilton down to Chandler — "

" Chandler never was Secretary of the Treasury ! " interposed
the Senator from Maine.

In this matter he had the full sympathy and even solicitation
of Southern Senators, many of whose constituents were " depre-
dators " on unsurveyed lands ; and the offensive legislation was
submerged in the Senate by a vote of forty-two to four.

Adequate protection to American labor was his constant
care. In the spring of 1878, he offered resolutions against any

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 439

radical changes in the tariff, and in favor of a fixed policy which
should so maintain our tariff for revenue as to afford the re-
quired protection. " One of the most mischievous measures in
its effects would be a roving commission appointed on the idea
that when they get through running hither and thither over the
country and examining this way and that about the tariff, cer-
tain recommendations were to be made, certain changes were to
take place. Nothing would more effectually unsettle the busi-
ness of the country. We have had a great many of these com-
missions on divers and sundry subjects, and I have never known
them to do a particle of good so far as producing a result in
practical legislation."

" There is no more hurtful agitation to-day in this country
than the agitation of the tariff."

Already he was scanning South American fields ; reminding
Senators that " of an annual total export from Brazil of less
than $90,000,000 we take $40,000,000. Of $500,000,000 for the
last six years we have taken nearly $250,000,000. ... I
suppose the idea is that we had better take our coffee, dye-
woods, and other things of that sort from Brazil in British
bottoms. . . . The Senator talks of a lobby being here.
That is always the cry when anything comes up, ' There is a
lobby ! ' "

Later in the same session of Congress, Mr. Blaine still further
defined his position — a position little likely to increase the
complacency with which he was viewed by England. It was
a foreshadowing of his future course in the State Depart-
ment, a hint of what he would have attempted in the presi-
dency, and was perhaps the first actual development of the
policy with which his name became afterwards inseparably asso-
ciated, — the fraternization of the Americas. In English eyes
this seems a menace to Great Britain. To Mr. Blaine it meant
not only increased prosperity to the Americas, but peace on the
whole earth, good-will to all men.

The immediate question was of granting aid to a line of
American steamers to Brazil. He . discerned beyond com-
mercial advantage threefold national harvests. He had made
a study of the resources, needs, aspirations, possibilities of the
southern hemisphere. Nothing could be more in consonance

440 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

with his political ideal than to bring the wealth, the energy,
and the good will of the North to bear on the natural and or-
derly development of our own disaffected South, to win har-
mony through material activities, to find a common advantage
in the cultivation of neighborhood friendship with the nations
of Southern America. Sharply opposing every output of the
spirit of slavery, he was as alert for every possible point of
agreement with the South. He received a keenly sympathetic
hearing from Southern Senators, who saw in his plans an open-
ing for their section, full of promise. Dom Pedro had visited
Washington while Mr. Blaine was in the thick of the fight with
his rebel detractors, but he was not too much absorbed to ac-
quaint himself with the character, aims and methods, of that
extraordinary emperor ; and in the advances made by him for
steamship communication he saw an advantage which on every
account it was short-sightedness to disregard, folly to disregard
on the plea of subsidy : " We may stand here and talk about the
wrongfulness of subsidies and the impolicy of granting them until
doomsday ; and Great Britain will applaud every speech of that
kind made in the American Congress, and will quietly subsidize
her steamers and take possession of the carrying-trade of the
world. Great Britain to-day makes annually out of the com-
merce of the United States a larger sum than the interest on
our public debt. She receives more in the way of net profits on
the carrying-trade which America gives her than the interest
on the vast national debt with which we are burdened to-day."

All small suspicion he swept aside as impertinent and un-
worthy, and stood on the broad ground of our national
development. Should we surrender our navigation laws of
eighty years' standing and become tributary to Great Britain ?
He did not antagonize Great Britain. He rather commended
the wisdom and foresight with which she guarded her
naval supremacy, but it irked him to see our country sleep
on her magnificent coasts while the fallacious but vigilant
Liliputians bound fast her giant limbs to an ignoble repose.
With the eloquence of impatience he pointed out the folly of
playing into England's hands. " She does not intend that any
European nation shall ever become a great naval and commer-
cial power. There is no rival left to her in the commercial

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 441

world, and if she can buy us out, or bully us out, of a tariff that
shall protect American industries, and bluff us out of enter-
prises that shall stimulate lines of American steamships, she will
have done all she desires to do for her factories and for her
commerce. . . . Is this country willing calmly to resign the
sceptre of the ocean to Great Britain ? "

Three years later, on another phase of the same subject he
referred with admiration to the strong hand with which Great
Britain maintains her sovereignty of the seas, and stigmatized
the fatuous blindness of the American government. " For
twenty years the Congress of the United States has not done
one solitary thing to uphold the navigation interests of the
United States.

" An energetic and able man John Roach, of New York, an
Irishman by birth, long a citizen of the United States ; a man
of remarkable ability, energy, and integrity, who found a great
ocean highway unoccupied, and had the enterprise to put
American vessels of the best construction and great power upon
it, has been held up to scorn and to reproach, because he came
to the American Congress and said, c If you will do for this
enterprise what the Emperor of Brazil will do, I will give you
a great line of steamships from New York to Rio Janeiro.'
. . . And Senators, I regret to say, who represent the pro-
tective system of this country, remarked with quiet compla-
cency, ' If Brazil is willing to pay for the line, we need not/
Just as soon as it was found that we would not pay, a
combination of English ship-builders said, 'We will put on our
ships and run that American line off, we will break down this
attempt of the United States to begin a race upon the ocean ; '
and they have pretty nearly succeeded, while we have looked on
with apparent unconcern. . . . It is not to help Mr. John
Roach or Mr. Richard Roe, but to make a great and compre-
hensive policy. ... I do not expect this Congress to do
anything. I am not talking with the slightest hope of success.
But I know success will come sometime. . .

" We have the largest ocean frontage of any nation on the
globe. We front all continents. . . . We are by our posi-
tion in need of a navy.

" It is idle to fight against the inventions of the world. The

442 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

great highways of international commerce will be occupied, and
occupied almost to the exclusion of sailing-vessels, by ocean
steamers. The people of the United States can take a great
part in that race whenever they make up their minds that the
instrumentality by which England conquered is the one which
they must use ; they can take it whenever they make up their
minds that a mercantile marine and a naval establishment must
grow and go together hand in hand. . . . The election
showed that the overwhelming public opinion of this country
is interested in keeping up American manufactures against for-
eign manufactures. I say to the upholders of protection that
Protection cannot be permanently maintained without building
up the commercial marine of this country."

Encouraged by the wavering of the Republican party before
Southern threats of sedition, the Democrats contested sub-
sequent elections with renewed hope and spirit. Maine,
disappointed and disapproving, startled Republicans by her
September election in 1878. To some it seemed imperative, in
copy of the Administration's Southern policy, to recall wander-
ing greenbackers to Republican ranks by practically appropri-
ating the Democratic standard. To one such adviser Mr.
Blaine wrote : " The Republican party may be doomed this year
to general defeat, but you will pardon me for saying that if it
should attempt to assume the ground indicated by you, it would
be covered with ridicule and could not escape ignominy. There
are to be two parties in this country on the question of the
finances : the one for ' honest money,' the other for 4 wild in-
flation ' — the one for maintaining the national honor, the
other leading to the verge and possibly leaping over the preci-
pice of repudiation — the one composed mainly of the loyal
Union men who contracted the debt to subdue the Rebellion,
the other embracing all the bad elements that sought the over-
throw of our government. The line will be sharply defined as
the contest waxes warm."

To Mr. Blaine the financial integrity of the country was
second only, if second, to equality of rights, and he confined
debate chiefly to these points. He was everywhere in requisi-
tion. In every capital city of the North he spoke to crowds

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 443

beyond counting, Even to themes like the currency, not only
complicated but often heavy, he brought a lucidity of statement,
a novelty of illustration, a picturesqueness of grouping, that
riveted the attention and made a convincing argument inter-
esting, and even amusing. He quoted with equal zest from
" a very wise old political leader in Kennebec of the past genera-
tion — Ben White, of Monmouth," to his associates : " Stand still
while you stand well," and " Don't venture on experiments,"
and from Sir Robert Peel to Lord John Russell, that " Your
amendment, even if right in principle, was wrong in time ; " and
of the two, the people perhaps liked Ben White the better.

On the Southern question, he especially emphasized the
danger to the white man of permitting the destruction of the
liberty of the black man. " By destroying the political power
of the negro in South Carolina and Mississippi, the Confederate
soldier is to-day casting two votes in the control of our national
policy where the Union soldier of Pennsylvania and New
England casts but one. With this state of things the American
people will not rest content. We shall be compelled, from self-
interest and self-protection, in the end to resist that which at
the outset we should resist from principle."

The wild tide of inflation was presently stemmed and stayed,
but in the autumn of 1.878 the Democrats gained control of
both Houses of Congress.

While on his tour through the North-west, discussing the
greenback question with untiring earnestness, with a vigor
which carried conviction, with a winning personality which
gained for him a lasting hold upon the affections of the great
community, his abounding nature could enter into quieter
scenes with equal sympathy. How facile was his knowledge,
how quick his eye for color, how deftly he caught and grouped
the striking points of past and present for such a setting to his
facts as brought even statistics into the realm of art, yet made
all rivers run into the sea, is shown in an address at the Minne-
apolis fair, in the midst of the fall campaign.

The same facility of adaptation, power to seize instantly the
salient features of a situation, to discern their vitality, develop
their bearings, and invest them with an atmosphere appears in a
speech he made at the dinner of the New England Society in

444' BIOQBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

New York the. same year. A gentle humor, a pleasant satire,
played through it, befitting a festivity, but wherever his thought
rested even by the way, thither trooped other thoughts, kin-
dred thoughts, the relations of things, so that his humor
shimmered over the surface of a rock-fast world. The note of
sympathy and tenderness with which the speech closed is alto-
gether characteristic :

" In this brilliant assemblage, surrounded with everything that
gives comfort and grace and elegance to social life, in this
meeting, protected by law, itself representing law, let me recall
one sad memory — the memory of those who in 1620 landed on
the Plymouth shore and did not survive the first year. Of all
the men engaged in heroic contests, those deserve our tenderest
remembrance who, making all the sacrifice and enduring all the
hardship, are not permitted to enjoy the triumph. Quincy died
before the first shot was fired in the Revolution which he did so
much to create ; Warren was killed at the first clash of arms in
defence of the cause which was so sacred to his patriotic heart;
Reynolds, rallying his corps for the critical battle of Gettysburg,
fell while yet its fate was doubtful ; McPherson, in the great
march to the sea, lost his life before the triumphant close of
that daring and romantic expedition. For these and all like
unto them, from Plymouth Rock to the last battle-field of the
Civil war, who perished in their pride, and perished before they
could know that they were dying not in vain, but for a cause
destined to victory, I offer, and I am sure you will join with me
in offering, our veneration and our homage."

The entering wedge having not only ceased to be driven
further into the solid South, but having been withdrawn, the
partially cleft sections naturally sprang back into greater
density. After the elections of 1878, Southern newspapers in
exulting editorials sent the " greetings of a solid South to a
divided North," and joyously boasted that they " had no fears of
a solid North." Mr. Blaine, however, did not hesitate to try
other resources to secure the desired end. He had hoped to
unite Southern interests and self-advancement in the upholding
of law, but at any rate law must be upheld — from without, if
not from within.

Immediately upon the assembling of Congress, December 2,

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G, BLAINE. 445

he submitted a resolution to the Senate embodying his treatment
of the Southern question during the election debates. He pre-
sented it as not merely a question of cruelty, violence, robbery
of citizenship for the negro, but of " far wider range, of porten-
tous magnitude ; viz., whether the white voter of the North
shall be equal to the white voter of the South in shaping the
policy and fixing the destiny of this country ; or whether, to
state it more baldly, the white man who fought in the ranks of
the Union army shall have as weighty and influential a vote in
the government of the republic as the white man who fought
in the ranks of the rebel army. The one fought to uphold,
the other to destroy, the Union of the States, and to-day he who
fought to destroy is a far more important factor in the govern-
ment of the nation than he who fought to uphold" — and
the astounding statements he fortified by an impregnable and
original array of facts which no one attempted to disprove.

His answer to the taunt, "What are you going to do about
it?" has the element of prophecy which inheres in knowledge
logically classified, and there was in his closing words a rare
sternness, in his manner a repressed feeling, that seemed to
touch the religious sentiment. , " Those who imagine it to be
conclusive do not know the temper of the American people.
. . . I know something of public opinion in the North. I
know a great deal about the views, wishes, and purposes of the
Republican party of the nation. Within that entire great or-
ganization there is not one man, whose opinion is entitled to be
quoted, that does not desire peace and harmony and friendship,
a patriotic and fraternal union between the North and the
South. Yet no guise of State rights will close the eyes of our
people to the necessity of correcting a great national wrong.
Nor should the South make the fatal mistake of concluding
that injustice to the negro is not also injustice to the white man.
. . . In words which are those of friendship, however they
may be accepted, I tell the men of the South here on this floor
and beyond this chamber, that even if they could strip the
negro of his constitutional rights they can never permanently
maintain the inequality of white men in this nation. . . .
In a memorable debate in the House of Commons, Mr. Macaulay
reminded Daniel O'Connell, when he was moving for Repeal,

446 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE,

that the English Whigs had endured calumny, abuse, popular
fury, loss of position, exclusion from Parliament, rather than that
the great agitator himself should be less than a British subject ;
and Mr. Macaulay warned him that they would never suffer
him to be more. Let me now remind you that the government
under whose protecting flag we sit to-day sacrificed myriads of
lives and expended thousands of millions of treasure that our
countrymen of the South should remain citizens of the United
States, having equal personal rights and equal political privileges
with all other citizens. I venture, now and here, to warn the
men of the South, in the exact words of Macaulay, that we will
never suffer them to be more ! "

The Teller Committee was formed as a result of this move-
ment, and its report became an official record of the crimes
which established and attended the " solid South and rebel
rule."

The triumphant Democracy of the Forty-sixth Congress at-
tempted to undo the legislation which had been enacted by a
Republican Congress under President Lincoln. As earnestly
as if the ground of vantage had not been abandoned by a
Republican administration, Mr. Blaine reviewed and renewed
the unwearying contest. The law was that no federal soldier
should be at the polls in any State election " unless it be neces-
sary to repel the armed enemies of the United States, or to
keep peace at the polls." The Democrats desired the repeal of
this law, and Mr. Blaine drew attention to the fact that they had
so phrased their movement as to create the impression that the
Republicans in the administration of the general government had
been using troops right and left in every direction, by reason of
which the Democrats as soon as they came into power, enacted this
section ; whereas the law was passed by a Republican Congress
in February, 1865, in the midst of a war. The Republican ad-
ministration had a million bayonets at its command. Thus
situated, with the amplest possible power to interfere with elec-
tions had they so designed, with soldiers in every county and
hamlet of the United States, the Republican party themselves
placed that provision on the statute book, and Abraham Lincoln
signed it.

With mingled humor, satire, and resentment, he proceeded to

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 447

scatter this small army over the continent, calling the South-
ern Senators to witness the danger to their liberties involved in
the presence of this handful of soldiers among so many citizens.

"Does my gallant friend from Georgia [Mr. Gordon], who
knows better than I the force and strength of military organiza-
tion, — does he, the senior Senator, and does the junior also [Mr.
Benjamin H. Hill] , — does either of those Senators feel alarm at
the presence of twenty-nine federal soldiers in Georgia? There
are just twenty-nine there — not one more. And they are
guarding the entrance to the harbor of Savannah.

" I believe the Senator from Delaware [Mr. Bayard] has been
alarmed, greatly alarmed, about the overriding of the popular
ballot by troops of the United States. In Delaware there is
not a single armed man, not one. The United States has not
even one soldier in the State.

" I think my friend from Alabama [Mr. Morgan] is greatly
excited over this question, and in his State there are thirty-two
federal soldiers, located at an arsenal of the United States."

Having summoned the troops from each State successively, he
marshalled them in one general parade : " The entire South
has eleven hundred and fifty-five soldiers to intimidate, over-
run, oppress, and destroy the liberties of fifteen million people,
and rob them of freedom at the polls. Not quite one for each
county, one for every seven hundred square miles ; so that
if you make a territorial distribution, I would remind the
honorable Senator from Delaware that the quota for his State
would be three — ' one ragged sergeant and two abreast,' as
the old song lias it. . . . In New England we have three
hundred and eighty soldiers. Throughout the South it does not
run quite seventy to the million people. In New England we
have absolutely one hundred and twenty soldiers to the million.
New England is far more overrun to-day by the federal soldiery,
far more, than is the whole South. I never heard any one com-
plain about it in New England, or express any great fear of
his liberties being endangered by the presence of a handful of
federal troops. . . . How amazing it would be to any man
in Europe if he were told that in a territory larger than France
and Spain and Portugal and Great Britain and Holland and
Belgium and the German Empire all combined, there are but

448 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

eleven hundred and fifty-five soldiers — that this mad cry, this
false issue, this absurd talk, is based upon the presence of eleven
hundred and fifty-five soldiers on eight hundred and fifty thou-
sand square miles of territory. The whole number of soldiers
thus complained of is not a third of the police in the city of
New York. I repeat, the number indicts the Democracy ; it
shows the whole charge to be without foundation ; it derides the
issue as a false, scandalous, and partisan makeshift.

" What then is the real motive underlying this movement ?
It is not the troops ; that is evident. . . . The issue on the
troops, being a false one, conceals the true issue, which is simply
to get rid of the federal presence at the federal elections, to get
rid of the civil power of the United States in the election of
representatives to the Congress of the United States. . . .
We are told, too, a rather novel thing — that if Ave do not take
these laws, we are not to have the appropriations.
They say all appropriations are to be refused ; not merely the
army appropriation, for they do not stop at that."

Naming the various departments with a slight reference to
the importance of their work, all of which was to be at the
mercy of the desired repeal, to be abandoned if this were not
secured, all of which " were taken by the throat, highwayman
style, commanded to stand and deliver in the name of the
Democratic congressional caucus," he closed by pointing out
the sinister significance of the Democratic position in words as
serious as suggestive :

" A leading Democrat from the South, a man who has cour-
age and frankness and many good qualities, has boasted publicly
that the Democracy are in power for the first time in eighteen
years, and they do not intend to stop until they have wiped
out every vestige of every war measure. . . . All the war
measures of Abraham Lincoln are to be wiped out !

u The Bourbons of France busied themselves, after the res-
toration, in removing every trace of Napoleon's power and
grandeur, even chiselling the fc N ' from public monuments
raised to perpetuate his glory ; but the dead man's hand from
St. Helena reached out and destroyed them in their pride and
in their folly. Let the Senators on the other side of this
chamber remember, let the Democratic party North and

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 449

South remember, that the tomb of the martyred President on
the prairies of Illinois is not less sacred or less potent with the
American people than was the dust of Napoleon to the France
that he loved ! "

During Mr. Blaine's senatorship a strange and threatening
cloud appeared in the West and quickly overshadowed the
country. The advent of the Chinese had begun quietly, with-
out observation, without opposition. It was simultaneous with
the advent of the American citizen in California. In process
of time it came to be not unattended with pomp and circum-
stance. The Chinese Embassy, under the conduct of Mr. Bur-
lingame, was a stately and stirring historical romance. None
the less, the Mongolian was an element alien to Republican
civilization, unassimilated if not unassimilable, and violence was
soon developed. But violence is itself only a symptom, not a
recourse, in republics. The Legislature of California took up
the matter in the orderly American fashion and prohibited
Chinese immigration. The courts pronounced this unconstitu-
tional, and an appeal was made to the Senate in the shape of
a proposal to abrogate so much of the Burlingame treaty as
permitted the free immigration of Chinese. Mr. Blaine planted
the standard at once on strong, high, broad ground. He declared
for restriction of the immigration, maintaining the right to do so
from the highest international law founded on the natural law of
self-preservation. The expediency of doing it he deduced from
the actual results of the immigration, and its presage of wide
disaster to the American freeman and the American home. Of
this ground the nation is just entering into peaceful occupation,
but on that day he entered it alone. Only the Pacific States,
under the blight, cried out for relief ; but to the East, which had
felt no evil, Mr. Blaine's position meant a wanton reversal of
the policy of the fathers, a sweeping away of the ancient land-
marks. To the churches it seemed a reflection upon the power
of religion, an insult to missionary spirit and life The South
saw a race trouble that was not African, and could not resist
the pleasure of a taunt. The Abolitionists feared that the
North was countenancing against the Chinese the same tyranny
that the South had practised on the negro, and trembled. Mr.

450 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. .

Blaine's honored friend and co-laborer, Mr. William Lloyd
Garrison, was moved to public remonstrance. Against them
all, in the Senate and outside the Senate, with voice and pen Mr.
Blaine stood unmoved. He did not believe that the problems of
the Old World are to be solved by complicating the problems
of the New World. From passing facts, from history, from the
conclusions of reason on law and on religion, towards the
Chinese and towards the American, lie drew one lesson, main-
tained one position, — if the admonitions of our own history
were anything to us, we should regard the race trouble as the
one thing to be dreaded, the one thing to be avoided.

" We have this day to choose whether we shall have for the
Pacific coast the civilization of Christ or the civilization of
Confucius.

" The allegation that the exclusion of the Chinese is inhumane
and unchristian need not be considered in presence of the fact
that their admission to the country provokes conflicts which the
laws are unable to restrain.

" The wealthy classes in a republic where suffrage is univer-
sal cannot safely legislate for cheap labor.

"Nowhere on earth has free labor been brought in competition
with any form of servile labor, in which the free labor did not
come down to the level of the servile labor. . . . The lower
strata pull down the upper. The upper never elevate the
lower.

" I feel that I am pleading the cause of the free American
laborer, and of his children, and of his children's children, the
cause of ' the house against the hovel, of the comfort of the
freeman against the squalor of the slave.' "

Of all the opposition which Mr. Blaine met in his political

course, the opposition to his Chinese policy was perhaps the

most sincere, conscientious, universal, and wrong-headed. It

was the opposition of profound ignorance, but an ignorance the

rather to be expected because no draft had ever been made

upon knowledge. The exigency was new. Ignorance could only

bring1 forward the general arguments of ignorance, the universal-
is O O O

asylum theory, the one-blood theory. It confounded distinc-
tions in blind and anxious precipitancy ; denounced restriction
in China as persecution in California ; counted observance of

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 451

the law of nature as violation of the law of nations ; and in the
attempt to place justice on a firm foundation of truth saw
only the coronation of injustice by force and fraud and greed.
Against this clamor Mr. Blaine's voice seemed like that of
one crying in the wilderness, and the wilderness only answered
back with shouts about union with hoodlums and sandlots, with
sneers at bids for the presidency ; but to-day the poets are call-
ing upon patriots to

" Stand in double trust,
Guardians of liberty and of the right
Against the myriads that swarming come
From the dark pestilential dens which reek
With all the Old World's foulness,"

and the religious journals that were bitterest against Mr. Blaine
now fortify his positions by long arguments from learned
professors.

In the autumn of 1879, he achieved a success so complete
as to veil the magnitude of the task accomplished. Much of
his life was applied to attracting and fastening men's attention
in new directions, to breaking ground in new fields, — a work
so difficult and prolonged that the closer cultivation had to
be assigned to later hands. This work, on the contrary, was
short, concentrated, an Iliad-in-nuce, touching the very founda-
tions of social self-government, representing in little — yet in
as large an area as Troy — all that is menacing and all that is
promising in our institutions. In nothing did he ever show
comprehension more quick and wide, a bolder grasp, that un-
swervingness of purpose which is named courage, inexhaustible
wealth of resource, ability to cope with a situation full of del-
icacy and full of danger, and to conquer it by sheer moral force,
the supreme mastery of intellect and will. His knowledge of
men inspired combinations which justified his forecast of what
they could do, and his inflexible yet intangible pressure that
they should do it. But it is a history that must forever remain
without a historian. A mere outline is alone possible.

The annual State election in Maine on Sept. 8, 1879, was
hotly contested. The vote of the September and October

452 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

States is of especial importance. The Administration policy
of 1876-77 weakening the Republican party everywhere and
everywhere reviving Democratic hopes, the Administration ap-
pealed, though unnecessarily, to Mr. Blaine. A member of the
Cabinet wrote him in July:

" We must carry this election both in Maine and Ohio. It is
the turning campaign in our time."

Hon. E. B. Washburne, forgetting some interesting points
of recent history, adjured Mr. Blaine to "go to the people
on the only real question, Shall the government of the
country be turned over to the rebels ? Cry aloud

and spare not. . . . Make your campaign to the last
degree aggressive. Don't stop to reply to the greenback
babble, but attack the rebels along the whole line.
We cannot afford to lose Maine this year — have a greenback
Governor and a copperhead United States Senator. In such
an event I would want to burn down the Norlands and never
return again to the State." Others, prominent Republicans,
took a different view:

"Are you sure that your political prospects depend upon
Maine going Republican this time ? Is not the party almost
too sure of your State ? Would it not, after all, be just as well
for us to say in 1880, when the convention meets, that Maine
is doubtful, that it must be carried, and that there is but one
man who can do it, and that is Blaine ? Suppose Ohio should
go Democratic and Maine Republican, would any gentleman
from Maine receive the nomination ? "

This, however, was not in Mr. Blaine's line of action or
thought.

In Maine a third party was in the field, known as the Fusion-
ists, — " greenback " or " fiat-money " Republicans, — ready, as
the name suggests, to combine with the Democrats Avhenever it
might seem desirable. The election showed a great Republican
triumph. The popular vote had not indeed chosen a governor
— only carried the election into the Legislature ; but although
the official returns are not declared until the first Wednesday
of January, when they are laid before the House of Repre-
sentatives by the Governor and Council, the popular A^ote was
so openly and minutely reported by the press and accepted by

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 453

the people, that there was no doubt, since a Republican majority
was returned to both Senate and House.

The Constitution of Maine requires that " fair copies of the
lists of votes shall be attested by the selectmen and town clerks
of towns, and assessors of plantations, and sealed up in open
town and plantation meetings ; and the town and plantation
clerks, respectively, shall cause the same to be delivered into the
secretary's office thirty days at least before the first Wednesday
in January, annually. And the governor and council shall
examine the returned copies of such lists, and also all lists of
votes of citizens in the military service returned to the secre-
tary's office, and twenty days before the said first Wednesday
of January, annually, shall issue a summons to such persons as
shall appear to be elected by a plurality of all the votes returned,
to attend and take their seats. But all such lists shall be laid
before the House of Representatives on the first Wednesday of
January, annually, and they shall finally determine who are
elected." The same provision is made in case of Senators, and
the manner of making up the returns is the same in the cities
of the State.

Soon after the election, rumors that the Republican majority
was to be counted out created great excitement. Mr. Blaine
was in Boston when Emmons came, bringing as a bit of in-
credible political gossip the hint of such an attempt. Mr.
Blaine whistled it down the wind, yet Emmons was so sure-
footed that his father was uneasy. He stayed that night in
a country-house near Boston where he was very much at
home, and he spent the evening pacing back and forth through
the rooms, occasionally whistling a bar, smiling abstractedly
or giving a cheerful but detached answer when addressed.
The next day he went home and remained there till the incip-
ient revolution was suffocated and the legitimate Legislature
installed.

The early rumors ripened into ugly facts. Returns had been
tampered with. Defective returns from places giving Fusion
majorities were destroyed, and replaced by completed returns,
while defective returns disclosing Republican majorities were
retained. The names of selectmen were, without their knowl-
edge or consent, signed to fraudulent returns. Names of

454 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Republican candidates were erased and names incorrectly given
were inserted, whereby the true vote was lost. An H as the
initial letter of the middle name would be changed into an A
by giving a curved top to the H, the different color of the ink
and the line of joinder between the letter and amendment being
clearly definable. By such means the Senate was to be given
to the Fusionists, the House to the Democrats.

The wrath of the Republicans #was hot. It would have been
bad enough to be voted out. They utterly refused to be counted
out. The national Congress assembled, but Mr. Blaine stayed
in Maine. The State Committee, the legislators-elect, the
lawyers whom they retained, urged Mr. Blaine to remain and
" see them through." During the whole struggle his house,
next the State House, was the headquarters of the forces of law
and order, the fortress whence the fight was made. The State
House was held by the fraudulent Fusion Legislature, guarded
by the Democratic Governor and Council. Arms were secured
and ammunition was stored. Springfield and Enfield rifles,
loaded with nails and cut lead, were placed in the Adjutant-
General's room, and in the library of the State House. Law-
less " roughs and shoulder hitters " from prisons and jails
were stationed under arms and drilled by night. There was
desperate danger. The younger Republicans were ready, eager,
to fight. Their resentment at being supposed capable of sub-
mitting to this glaring fraud was continually at the kindling
point. Many Republicans outside the State, — and some even
within the State, — fearing the stain of blood in Northern poli-
tics, counselled a present yielding, to be avenged b}^ an over-
whelming vote against the fraud at the next election. Mr.
Blaine saw no reason for delay. No subsequent election could
have more claim than the election already held. But all his
nature was against an appeal to the illogical test of physical
force — an appeal which in itself sounded the defeat of the
higher force. To a solution peaceful and just he bent every
energy.

His chief fear was lest a chance shot should precipitate an
unintended conflict. That harm should come to himself never
seemed to enter his mind, could not be got into his mind. It
was preoccupied. People thronged to his house day and night.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 455

Locks and keys became a thing of the past. The door-bells
ceased to ring and men walked in at will, an almost contin-
uous procession passing through the long corridor that led from
the front door to his library in the rear. Not a depredation
was ever committed — only the necessary wear and tear of
carpets had a tale to tell. Even the children's play was not
disturbed by all the crowds. In the quasi privacy of a corner
of the long double dining-room where the children played,
Mr. Blaine was one day found writing an important paper.
" How can you write with these children here ? " asked the
seeker.

" It is because they are here that I can write," was the quick
answer.

Many men came from a distance, and to save time were fed at
the house. The chief cook was a Southern colored woman
whose courage rose and fell with the political phases. When
success perched on Republican banners, she cooked day and
night with no apparent regard to diurnal revolutions in earth
or heaven. When the battle seemed to falter, all her heart and
strength failed. Coming into the dining-room one midnight,
Emmons found his mother giving orders regarding a fresh
arrival of men who had come in on the night express. " I
am really afraid, most of all, that Caroline will give out." —
" Go to bed, mother," commanded Emmons gayly, " and send
Caroline to bed. I will engineer this party through " — which
he did, and they all ate and were filled !

Another night, looking from her window, Mrs. Blaine was
startled at seeing a long line of men dimly outlined against
the fence, between the house and the State House. In a mo-
ment a cordial, unknown voice called through the darkness,
" We are all friends, Mrs. Blaine." There had been reports of
a meditated attack upon the house, and a well-armed corps had
summoned and stationed themselves to meet it. It never came.

Mr. Blaine's theory was that with thorough preparation it
never would come. The whole country-side was a volunteer
camp and council ready for emergency. When men were
wanted, messengers were ready to go for them by day or by
night. Sleighs and snow-shoes defied even the darkness of a
Maine winter. Horses and riders might flounder and upset in

456 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

snow-drifts, but they rolled out, righted themselves, and went
on. No questions were asked at the silent houses — scarcely a
stop was necessary. It was only to awake the sleepers. A
tousled head ivould be thrust from an opened window just far
enough to shout " I'll be down," the window closed, and the
Paul Reveres sped to the next house.

The Republicans upbore their cause with splendid devotion and
self-control. The fighting-men were restrained with the assur-
ance that in the last resort they should be appealed to ; but the
last resort was never reached. The mob was confronted by
the appointed servants of law. Their turbulent leaders quailed
before the calm, authoritative decision of the Supreme Court.
The highest moral forces of society, mobilized by a directing
hand for the defeat of lawlessness, converged upon the proud
old State House, slowly but firmly, and finally pressed out the
fraudulent Legislature upon the sidewalk, — where it quickly
succumbed to the sting of epithet, disappeared under the rattle
of ridicule, — installed the legal Legislature in its rightful place,
and resumed their calm, strong flow.

The victories of peace are celebrated with less blare than
those of war, but they are not less signal — they are, perhaps,
more fruitful. When Mr. Blaine went back to the Senate he
went with no parade, but he wore the laurels of a State twice
victorious — once over ignorance, once over fraud.

Senator Frye before a national convention pictured the peril
and the rescue as a ship in a night-storm " freighted with all
that is precious in the principles of our republic ; with the
rights of the American citizenship, with all that is guaranteed
to the American citizen by our Constitution. The eyes of the
whole nation were on her, and intense anxiety filled every
American heart lest the grand old ship, the ' State of Maine,'
might go down beneath the waves forever, carrying her precious
freight with her. But there was a man at the helm, calm,
deliberate, commanding ; sagacious, he made even the foolish
man wise ; courageous, he inspired the timid with courage ;
hopeful, he gave heart to the dismayed, and he brought that
good old ship safely into harbor, into safety ; and she floats to-
day greater, purer, stronger, for her baptism of danger. That
man was heroic, and his name was James G. Blaine."

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 457

It will have been seen that Mr. Blaine's methods in the
Senate, as in the House, were distinctively his own. Before
taking part in debate he had made careful observations. " I
think," he wrote soon after his entrance, when I get my bear-
ings and distances and feel at home in my seat, I shall find
debating in the Senate very easy. There are few there that
are good at catching on the fly. The House training makes
a man so much more ready, alert, and prepared than the
slow methods of the Senate. I am feeling my way very
cautiously and do not propose to lose any points."

But he could not be other than himself. His way was
straight. Roundabout approaches were utterly foreign to him.
Elaborate statements of admitted positions seemed a waste of
time. Verbal inflations he was fain to puncture on the spot.
A built-up dignity had to him something comical. Its humor
or homeliness never prevented him from using an illustra-
tion that came ready to his hand, and if the adoption of a
popular phrase would sharpen a point he did not hesitate.
This readiness was accompanied not only by a comprehending
knowledge of the large reaches of history, but a portentous
memory of minor and chiefly forgotten details, which made him
formidable even at " catching on the fly." A date half-hidden
on a moss-grown grave-stone, never became moss-grown in his
mind, and an old grave-yard within reach of any ride or ramble
he would not leave unvisited, even if he had to climb the walls
and part the brambles and cut away the mosses to inspect its
consecrated records.

When Senator Hill, of Georgia, would divest himself of the
guilt of secession, reading in the Senate from his own letters
before secession — "I will consent to the dissolution of the
Union as I would consent to the death of my father, never from
choice, only from necessity, and then in sorrow and sadness of
heart " - — Mr. Blaine brought up Georgia's vote for the ordi-
nance of secession, 208 for, among which was Mr. Hill's, 89
against. " The Senator from Georgia," he commented, " who
would consent to it just as he would to the death of his father,
made up his mind that if two hundred and eight men wanted
to murder the old man, he would join with them. Rather than
be in a minority, he would join the murderous crowd and be a

458 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

parricide." And the tumultuous laughter and applause, if not
senatorial, were all on the side of the Union and the Consti-
tution.

If the question was for a floor for the National Museum, he
threw the economy of a concrete floor to the winds, thought it
scorn for a great nation to indulge in the demagogue's saving,
and paved the nation's floors with befitting marble tiles.

An Indian war he would thrust back in the twinkling of an
eye. " Sensitiveness between two great nations is a point that
must always be held at the point of the sword. Between the
United States with 50,000,000 and 4,000 Utes in the mountains
of Colorado there can be no question of dignity. Whatever
our theory of their treatment, the most expensive of all is treat-
ing them by war."

When a Democratic Senator quoted Daniel Webster as hav-
ing called this country " a confederacy of States," " a confed-
eration of States," "a compact" and "a compact between the
States," Mr. Blaine not only disputed the quotation and defied
its production, but traced the error to its source, and made the
citation thenceforth impossible to any intelligent and honorable
man. It was a work not less significant than congenial, for
the National Sovereignty, its grandeur and glory were the ideal
of his political life. With truth and heart could he have
adopted as his own the lofty declaration of Daniel Webster:
" The preservation of the Union, the maintenance of the Con-
stitution, and the advancement of the country to still higher
stages of prosperity and renown have constituted my polar star
during the whole of my political life."

But to the frequent charge brought against him in the Senate,
as in the House, that he had a habit of interrupting speakers,
his closest friends, if candid, must do what he never would do,
plead guilty. He was so brimming with information, he was so
keen-scented for a fallacy, that it seemed impossible not to give
chase at once to a false statement, not to run down a limping
syllogism, and he thought time lagged withal between the scent
and the start. Mr. Blaine did interrupt, and with a frequency
proportioned to his interest in the theme under discussion rather
than to the custom of the Senate, and the Senate bore his
marauding with as good grace as could be expected, taking

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 459

revenge as opportunity offered. Mr. Blaine having once asked
permission in the decorous senatorial way, of Mr. Carpenter,
received answer, " I have never known that Senator restrained
by any rule from saying anything he wanted to say, and I
certainly desire, as far as I am personally concerned, to release
him now."

On another occasion the same Senator asked the presiding
officer, "Who has the floor?"

" The Senator from Wisconsin is entitled to the floor."

" I was getting so much in doubt about it that I thought
probably I was intruding upon the Senator from Maine," and
perhaps no one joined in the laugh that followed such sallies
with keener appreciation than Mr. Blaine. "There," ex-
claimed his good friend, Mr. Thurman, himself provoked out
of senatorial dignity — " there is another example of the mode
of the Senator from Maine. Without asking my leave he
springs to his feet and interjects a speech of his right into the
midst of my remarks. It may be right, but it is not the usage
of the Senate, never was before the Senator came into this body."

" If I were a betting man," growled the same Senator on a
similar occasion, in whose growl, however, there was always an
undertone of amused good-nature, a twinkle of friendly fun
beneath his shaggy eyebrows, " which I am not, I would give
longer odds than were ever given on the race-course, that there
will not be a Senator who will speak in favor of this bill, that
the Senator from Maine will not stick his speech right in the
centre of the speech of the Senator who is speaking, and do it
more than once."

Setting an example, the Senator from Delaware asked:

" Would it be agreeable to the Senator for me to make a
remark ? "

Mr. Blaine. — Of course.

Mr. Bayard. — Mr. President, it is not for me to gauge the
motives or describe the intent of the honorable Senator from
Maine —

Mr. Blaine. — Nor would it be parliamentary !

All pretence of being a lawyer Mr. Blaine disavowed with a
frankness which sometimes misled men into discovering limi-
tations that might never have been discovered if he had not

460 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

himself disclaimed legal pretension ; and many an opponent
formed the habit of Richter's Titan, " when an open-hearted
soul showed him its breaches of marching in upon it through
those breaches, as if he himself had made them." Yet they
were not wholly without provocation. Mr. Blaine's disclaimers
were often precursors of trouble.

" I feel very modest about correcting the gentleman upon a
question of law" — but it was observed that if he hesitated, he
gave himself the benefit of the doubt and made the correction.

" The gentleman is a distinguished lawyer. I am not a lawyer
at all, and I would like to ask" — a question that was haply
embarrassing even to a distinguished lawyer.

" If I were a lawyer I should say " — what was just as much
to the legal point as if he had been a lawyer. In fact, he had
had the signal advantage of two years' legal training and legal
study without that narrowing effect of legal practice which in
his day caused it to be said of a famous Senator that he would
have been a great man if he had not been a great lawyer.

When Mr. Blaine dared to say of an eminent lawyer on the
other side of the Chamber, that " he was arguing this great
question as if we were restrained by the narrowest dogmas of
the law," — it was high time that he should be taught to know
his place.

A combination was formed in the Senate to teach him. At
least such was the report that new around Washington one
morning and sent every free agent in town to the Senate
Chamber. The point under discussion was whether a part of
the Alabama award money should be paid to the insurance
companies, or to the ship-owners. The great lawyers of the
Senate were on the side of the insurance companies. Mr. Blaine
agreed with his friend Mr. Frye who had charge of the bill in
the House and who fought it through both House and Senate
to final success, that those companies were reimbursed for their
losses by the high rates of insurance paid during the war, and
that the ship captains and owners deserved consideration. The
lawyers were confining it to technical legal points, thus ruling
out lay debate and presenting a felicitous opportunity for Mr.
Blaine to be "put down."

"I have been often reminded," said Mr. Blaine, "that I was

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 461

not myself a lawyer — wit that it seemed to me would have been
brighter and its thrust a little keener if I had ever professed to
be a lawyer. For the satisfaction of those who may have this
killing taunt still in reserve, I beg to say that I am not a lawyer.
I never was in court as an attorney, nor as a plaintiff, nor as a
defendant, nor as a juror, nor as a witness. In that vast sea of
adventure I am an ' exculpated cruiser.' ' He not only ridi-
culed but riddled the attempt of Senate lawyers to discredit
Caleb Cushing's conclusive testimony on the ill-starred plea
that the pamphlet cited in Congress as Mr. Cushing's carried
no legal proof of its authenticity. This palpably absurd as-
sumption he buried under a funeral pile of testimony, topped
by the decisive word from that other brilliant man of genius,
dead ere his prime, Richard SpofTord, who was watching the
fray, and whom Mr. Blaine presented as qualified and entitled
to represent Caleb Cushing by study of law in his office, by long
personal association, by intimate relations with him at the bar,
his clerk when he was Attorney-General. Mr. Spofford affirmed
" that the opinion was not only Mr. Cushing's, but was given
partly at my instance, and was reprinted from time to time for
Congress."

The careful calculation that fixed the amount of the Geneva
award, Mr. Blaine scattered to the winds. " Great Britain
wanted seven millions — we wanted twenty-two or three.
Stsempfli went up into a high mountain in Switzerland for six
or eight weeks, less or more — I have forgotten what the period
was — to make this calculation, and after he had taken all the
elements that were before him, what result did he produce ?
He produced exactly the result that an Ohio or Maine farmer
would have produced in a dispute between neighbors. Chalk-
ing on the barn-door, he split the difference. In my judgment,
there never was anything in the whole process but an old-fash-
ioned chalking on the barn-door." He apologized for having
used the word split when Mr. Cushing's book said dividing —
" but to men who are not lawyers it means the same thing."
His rapid and rattling volleys no less than the roar of his heavi-
est guns, caused a lively commotion in the Senate, and there
were hurried consultations among the embattled lawyers. See-
ing Senators Carpenter and Thurman with their heads close

462 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

together in conversation, he drew all eyes upon them — " I am
very anxious that the two honorable Senators should know just
what Mr. Gushing said, just how little I know about this case."

" It is not possible that the honorable Senator from Ohio who
has indulged himself often in the little wit of reminding me that
I am not a lawyer, asks me where a great case is to be found ! "

" Mr. Morrill's proposition to join — I will use a legal phrase
for the benefit of the Senator from Wisconsin, — ' jine drives '
as the lumbermen say, for I am arguing this on law points."

" The blind idea which Mr. Cushing had, that the persons who
had actually lost, had as much claim on this fund as those who
had actually profited."

" The Senator, I imagine," questioned an opponent rather
superciliously, "has heard of such a thing as the right of subro-
gation ? " — "I heard it all demolished the other day by the
Senator from Massachusetts," was Mr. Blaine's instant reply.

He was even spurred on by the spirit of the occasion to
an unusual but not wholly inartistic self-reference. " I
have here the digest of the opinions of the Second Comp-
troller -whose decisions settle the ownership of more money
than all the Supreme Court decisions of the country. I will
read from it for the instruction of the honorable Senator,
and I mean literally for his instruction, for with all the large
learning of the honorable Senator he has skimmed over the
mere superficial facts of this case, and I say to him that as a
good lawyer, one of the first requirements is to get at the
facts, and the Senator does not understand the facts. In regard
to them, I will venture to say to him as Mr. Webster said iii
this body on a memorable occasion, ' I am to be inquired of by
the honorable Senator, and not informed.' "

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. Lot M. Morrill :

Portland, August 22, 1877.
Dear Senator, — I have your despatch. Don't refuse to be present at
an old-fashioned mass meeting at Wayne on Monday of next week.
You will do the service — I the benediction.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 463

From Mr. Blaine, to Emmons (returning from Europe) :

Augusta, August 31, 1877.
Doubtful if this reaches you. I write it with Tom, Jack, Almet, and
Joe Smith in the library sending off election documents. If you feel like
it and have time, hadn't you better run over to Queenstown, taking the
steamer there and getting a glimpse of Ireland ? I merely suggest it.
Do as you please.

From Mr. Blaine :

Friday P.M., on train near Portland.

What I wanted you to tell C. is to leave when he does leave on 10.17
A.M. train and telegraph R. at Rye Beach to meet him at Portsmouth
Depot at half-past three. Tell C. when he arrives at the depot just to wait
in gentlemen's room, as R. will probably not drive up till a few minutes
after the train is gone. Be sure and keep Miss C. for a day or two.
Have W. get up a croquet or archery party or a ride or drive or something
of the kind. Her father can join her when she is ready to leave at Ports-
mouth. She can come along in Pullman, Walker escorting her as far as
Portland and putting her in Pullman car there. I am met everywhere by
everybody with a perfect shower of congratulations on all hands. I find
yesterday is regarded as a great day for the party and for me. It is the
universal theme of talk. See that Fred sows more grass-seed, and inquire
of George W. what good fertilizer can be used to stimulate the bare
places — something not visible when put on. Mr. Homan could tell you.
Forward my mail to-night, including what may come at 8. Send me the
" Lewiston Journal " of to-day — and keep all the papers carefully to send
as I ma}7 ask. Write a line to-night.

To Mr. Blaine, from Judge (afterwards Secretary) W. H.

Hunt :

New Orleans, January 9, 1878.

Allow me to introduce to you a gentleman in every way entitled to
your esteem and confidence. A Republican in his politics, he had the
manhood to avow openly his opinions at the last election in Louisiana.
As a consequence he has been subjected to an ostracism so cruel as to
lead him to abandon his birthplace and seek a new home in the far West.
I hope and believe you may have it in your power to render him some
service.

From V. :

Washington, February 23, 1878.

. . . Not a week before his speech, Mr. Blaine was published in the
Washington papers as a played-out man with a nervous system as weak
as a woman's, and capable only of spurts. Since then little has been
said of it.

464 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

. . . In the evening several gentlemen were here working on the
Railroad Bill. When I see how earnestly and honestly these men are de-
liberating about that matter, how vast are the interests involved ; how
laboriously they counsel together, far into the night, eager of course for
their own interests, yet studying the law at all points, the flimsy flings
at them seem beneath contempt !

March 20. . . . At a dinner last night, at my left was Lamar, of
Mississippi, who is a dreamer, a vague sort of man with the temperament
of genius, if not genius itself, full of real timidity and self-mistrust, has to
be praised a great deal and is quite dependent on your kindness in company

— says, " I never was angry but once with Mr. Blaine, whom I love very
much, and that was because he spoke ill of a friend of mine. I did not
dare say anything for fear he would pounce down on me, so I took it
out in sulking. I did not speak to him for weeks. He did not know it,
nobocty knew it, but I did not speak to him.1' — " Who was the friend?"

— "Jefferson Davis."

And again : " Mr. Blaine, now, for all his bouts in Congress, hasn't any
malice, hasn't really malice enough. But for mercy's sake don't try to
put it into him, for he comes down on persons enough, if he doesn't always
come down on the right ones." He says if Conkling should speak of
him, or to him, as he does to some, he would shoot him ; that life
is not so sacred at the South as it is with us at the North, and he would
rather shoot a man or be shot himself than to be told that he stole.
He says that the Chisholm tragedy cannot be exaggerated, that his
constituency is not intelligent, but that they never meant to shoot the
girl. ... I said I was not rich, but I knew how to be poor. He said
it was not so with him, he was poor and did not know how to be; that
was the reason his wife was not with him here, because he wras poor.
He lives constantly in fear of brain disease, is like a child, sometimes
utterly depressed in spirits. [Mr. Phelps was asked whom lie would like
to be next at dinner, and he said Lamar, as he knew him and liked him,
but Lamar scarcely spoke to him all dinner-time. . . . Dr. Loringsays
the Rules of the House are the most ingenious invention for obstructing
business he ever saw, and the ex-Speaker tells him that is because he is a
new member, and by his second term he will be talking about the ignorance
of the new fellows who can't get the run of the Rules.

. . A. speaks of one day's report contradicting another, which is
true; but if people personally friendly make such mistakes, what can
you expect of people that are bitterly hostile? Many went off at half-cock
about the fisheries matter, not in the least knowing what they were talk-
ing about. Mr. Blaine had been at the State Departments and examined
the pajjers, and knew exactly where he stood before he began. So about
the timber matter. He had been in consultation with officials ; he had the
statistics all before him ; he had the authority of the delegate and a petition
from five thousand citizens. But men who had never heard of the
thing till he opened it in Congress, instantly began their random lire
with no real knowledge of the matter, and no idea that Mr. Blaine had any.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 465

April 1. ... Mr. W. took a long walk with Mr. Blaine, and from his
entire affection for him, as he said, and as I fully believe, undertook to talk
seriously with him about his course, asking him if he did not think he was
making himself very unpopular. Mr. Blaine told him there were three
courses he could take. He could speak and act in advocacy of measures
and policies in which he did not believe, but which were adopted by the
administration, and so get praise ; or he could suppress his convictions and
keep still, and so avoid censure ; or he could act in accordance with his con-
victions and principles for what seemed to him the best service of the
country, let come what would. These three courses were alone open to
him — which would Mr. W. have him take? Of course there was but
one answer. Then he asked Mr. W. to specify, Of course the timber ques-
tion was one. Mr. Blaine asked him how he accounted for the fact that
the Senate passed his amendment by a vote of forty-two to four, which is,
I think, the most one-sided of any vote in the Senate this winter. Then
the fisheries question, which Mr. Blaine explained to him, and which
seemed to be a new revelation to him, he exclaiming, " Why, they don't
understand it so in Boston at all.'" Mr. W. is the warmest personal friend
of Mr. Blaine and has been staunch through all. . . . Mr. Bancroft
cannot understand Mr. Fish's backdown on the Delfosse matter. Mr.
Fish fought Delfosse through the whole three months, and then changed
so suddenly that Sir Edward told Mr. Blaine he feared he must suddenly
have discovered some special reason why Delfosse would be favorable to
America and against England. Mr. Blaine thinks the matter utterly dis-
creditable to England. . . . Sir Edward Thornton dined here Thursday
night, also Caleb Cushing, Senator Booth, R. S. and H. P. Spofford, Secre-
tary Sherman, Stanley Matthews, D., of New York, and W. W. Phelps, Mrs.
B., and Mrs. N. Wasn't it a menagerie ? Mr. N. was away, but got home at
3 A.M., and came in after breakfast to ask how his wife behaved, and when
he was told " magnificently," said it was only out of respect to her hosts, or
fear, for at General Burnside's she was dreadful — heard some one saying
that the no wine at the White House was a matter of principle, and called out
from the other end of the table, " How could that be when the President drank
wine at Mr. Bancroft's the other night and drank all kinds ? " There was dan-
ger lest Mrs. N . should claw D. for her husband's sake, but she was gracious,
Went out with Caleb Cushing, who is an Anglo-phobiac, and was put as
far from Sir Edward as possible. Of course Sir Edward was there. Mr.
N. said "Blaine was almost in a personal quarrel with him, so they could
not leave him out." Sir Edward is very sensitive about the fisheries mat-
ter, and talked about it a good deal after dinner, and Mr. Blaine, being
his host, could not very well clapper-claw him. Stanley Matthews's last
railroad speech in the Senate was considered very able. Dick Spofford
sat next to Sir Edward on my left, and is very fond of England, and Stan-
ley Matthews next to Phelps, who would be a liberal, and next to Secre-
tary Sherman, whom he wanted to see — so our wild beasts all kept their
claws sheathed and we had a very interesting tabic. Mr. (Z.) Chandler
says we shall inevitably lose the elections this fall, but sweep the country

466 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

in 1880 — that he has his finger on the public pulse in every State; that
Hayes told Mr. Cameron and himself that he would appoint Christiancy to
Mexico — I think it was — and then appointed somebody else, because said
Mr. C. "he knew that the Legislature would put me into the Senate in
about one minute." Mr. Chandler told the Cabinet the way they were
going on was like preparing for battle by killing all the officers.

To Mr. Blaine, from Emmons :

PORCELLIAN CLUB.

. . . I have seen no one from Maine for the last fortnight, so that I
have no idea which way the wind is blowing. ... I am getting up a
speech which I propose delivering in the backwoods this summer under
the auspices of the State Committee, provided the compensation is up to
my price. Seriously I should like to try my wings in this campaign.
There is so much to be said that I want to find out if it is easy to say it.
Still I will wait till I see you before I arrange appointments.

Class Day comes Friday and Commencement the Wednesday following.
I suppose I shall be at home Saturday week at latest. . . . Lest I
should not hit you again with my letters, will you please send me a check
for $350, — and blessings crown your parental head ?

With my love to all the family that are left — that I suppose means the
young attorney only.

From Mr. Blaine, to General Garfield :

Augusta, Me., July 3, 1878.

Our State Convention will meet at Portland, Tuesda}T, July 30.

Call enclosed. You must come and help us start the campaign.

We want you to talk hard money and skip all points of difference. No
Hayes — no anti-Hayes. Come and stay with us a good part of August,
or as long as you can. But in no event fail to come to the State Conven-
tion. Let me announce you now. We will give you a royal welcome.

Let me hear from you at once.

From Mr. Blaine :

Tuesday Night, Ten o'clock — July 14.
I went to Boston yesterday — transacted my business this morning, and
started for home on the noon train, 12.30. In the Boston depot met Senator
Sargent en route to Hampton to look for summer quarters. The cars
being crowded, we took the rear one, expecting to change at Salem. We
fell into " animated conversation,'1 reached Lynn without noticing it, and
as nobody seemed to leave the car, I thought it all right — till I looked out
and saw the train a hundred yards off. We had got into a Marblehead car,

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 467

and there we were in Lynn at 1 P.M. ; no other train to Portland till the
sleeping-train — the 3.15 and 6 trains both being taken off under the new
regime. At onee we set out to improve the situation; went to the Saga-
more and lunched ; took a carriage and drove over on the Nahant beach,
and got back in time to take a train to Salem, reaching there at 3 ; then
we took a carriage and drove to Witch Hill, to the old Custom-House,
and to every other spot in Salem, and at 4.30 took the Conway train, Sar-
gent getting off at Hampton, and I coming up here to spend the night, and
here I am — reaching here at 8.15. I shall go home in the morning.
Now, wasn't this making the most of a day? Had it been you, you would
have sat down and cried.

From Walker :

San Francisco, July 25, 1878.

Dearest Mother : We are back safely from Sitka. Let me give you
a programme of the trip. We stayed in Victoria until the afternoon of the
3d of July, driving around the town and going to Esquimault Bay, the har-
bor for the British fleet, where we visited H.M.S. " Shah," which puts any
vessel of the United States to shame, though she is only a light armed frig-
ate. There we set sail for Nanaimo, where we spent most of July 4.
There was a celebration some mile or two from the town, but we did not
have time to go out to see it as the hour of our departure was uncertain.
From Nanaimo we went to Wrangel, reaching there Sunday the 7th. At
ten o'clock the night of the 4th we went through Eucabale Rapids (now
called Simpson's Narrows — a change for the worse) . The scene was wild
enough. The current swept along at the rate of sixteen or eighteen miles
per hour, and our boat raced madly. The foam beat on the rocks on
either side, and the high hills covered with pine made the whiteness of the
foam-beaten phosphorescent waves all the more vivid. As we stood on the
bridge while the boat seemed just to avoid striking the rocks, I could only
think of Mark Twain's frightful oath, " Bv the shadow of death but he's a
lightning pilot ! " But no chains parted and no bolts wrenched asunder, and
so we avoided the fate of the good ship " Saranac," whose bones lie like Sir
Patrick Spen's, full fifty fathom deep. Then the next day and the next on we
went through narrow channels where grim giants of mountains guard the
straits on either hand, where the solitude is so intense that it seems as though
like Coleridge's mariner we were the first who ever burst into that silent
sea, past mountains whose snow-topped peaks peer out from under the
coverlid of clouds as though they were seven giant sleepers, whose rest
was thus trivially and rudely broken ; past young Niagaras without a name,
jiast golden archipelagoes ; by thousands of snow-capped mountains, through
myriads of fir-covered isles ; but everywhere a dead, appalling silence, a
gull or eagle the only animal, the wake of the " California" the only trace
of life. I despair of conveying any impression of the grandeur of the
scenery, any idea of the profundity of the silence, the awe of the solitude.
Imagine a narrow strait one hundred miles long, bounded on either side by

468 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINK

mountains, three to five thousand feet high, with eternal snow on their sum-
mits, clad in deep green fir; where strips of white marble only serve to
deaden the green color which overspreads hill and sea, and where the nar-
rowing Symplegades whiten the straits of Propontis with spray. Imagine
valleys unexplored as grand as the Yosemite, mountains unclimbed as pre-
cipitous as Washington, and all surrounded by the Dead Sea, portentously
calm, lit up by daylight which never ceases, so that the sun rises in the east
and the moon in the west at the same time while you sit comfortably read-
ing on deck at half-past ten at night.

We reached Wrangel at ten o'clock Sunday morning, a wretched place,
nine-tenths Indian, one-tenth white, Indians as a rule the better; where
we saw an Indian boy tortured beneath the cross in the cemetery for witch-
craft, and heard of a girl drowned two days before for the same reason.
From Wrangel to Sitka, reaching there Monday. We only stopped at that
time for about ten minutes and then went to a cannery some six miles dis-
tant, returning to Sitka the next day. At Sitka Tuesday evening we had a
ball. Present, everybody in Sitka. I danced with an Irishwoman, and the
daughter of a Russian tailor, with Miss Kastrikoff, Mademoiselle Kassia-
baroff, Mein Fraulein Kastiemittenoff, and hobnobbed with butcher, baker,
and candlestick-maker. We explored Sitka, and I have a box of curios
which I hope will be some amusement to you.

The harbor is magnificent. Alps rise on Alps, and there are two or three
barely extinct volcanoes. The town is wretched. Such a state of things
as now exist in Alaska never existed before. I mean to scribble something
about it when I get leisure and authorities, so I now forbear. From Sitka
on Wednesday to Klahwach, reaching there Thursday. Klahwach is mud,
and a cannery, a meaner place than Yuena by all odds. Then back to
Wrangel, then to Victoria, then to Port Townsend, where we left the
steamer, spent the night, and the next day came down through the
Sound, having a superb view of Mt. Rainier and the Olympic Range.
Reached Portland last Friday afternoon and stayed there until Monday.
Rode out to Vancouver to call on Mrs. Howard, and left Portland Tues-
day. Reached here at one to-day, via S.S. " Oregon.11 To-morrow we
go to the Geysers, on Sunday to San Rafael, and on Monday to Santa
Cruz.

To Mr. Blaine :

Ellsworth, August 20, 1878.

I am extremely anxious for you to speak in this county once or twice,
and as soon as possible. Mr. Hale says you are very busy, crowded on all
sides, and he does not wish to take you from the close districts, but I have

not the same feeling. L did an immense amount of mischief, the

county looks badly, and I want you to turn the tide for us. All who heard
you at Belfast say your speech was the best they ever listened to, and that
it would do us infinite good. Then, too, all turn out to hear you, and the
talk is that the Greenbackers propose to keep away from Republican
meetings.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 469

To Mr. Blaine, from General Garfield:

Canton, O., August 25, 1878.

Please telegraph me at Mentor on receipt of this, where ray first speech
in Maine is to be. I want to stay in O. till the last moment I can reach
you in time.

I have only been able to get away on the promise that I will bring you
and Hale and Frye back with me. We are needy and greedy, and
demand three for one. You are abundant and generous, and will give
what we want.

From Mr. Blaine, to General Garfield :

Chicago, September 29, 1878.
I find all your telegrams here — I had left home before they reached
me. But, my dear friend, it grew to be impossible for me to come to you.
I was engaged last month to open in Iowa, October 1, and I could not get
started West in season to make a halt in Ohio. I would have come, how-
ever, against all odds and all points had you needed me. But you did not,
Reed will be with you.

From V. :

, Washington, February 5, 1879.

. . . We went to the observatory last night and looked through the
big telescope . . . under the guidance of Professor Hall, who discov-
ered the moons of Mars, and who feels very sure of them ; says they will be
around again before long. And when Mr. Blaine gets home he demon-
strates astronomically that Mars could not have any moons, and with such
a scientific aroma that it would deceive the very elect, if they did not know
that he does not know, and knows we know that he does not know anything
about it. But as a tour deforce it was captivating. We could only mrcass
him in retort by suggesting what a pity he had waited for Professor Hall's
back to be turned before confounding science. Then lie flourishes his
carpenter's rule :

" If the sun were a two-foot globe, Mars would be represented by a
largish pin's head revolving in a circle G45 feet in diameter. Now, your
new moons are only allowed to be ten miles in diameter, one-four hun-
dredth the size of Mars. Do you mean to tell me that the human eye can
discern, over a hundred feet away, a sj^eck no bigger than the four hun-
dredth part of a pin's head? Can't do it. Nobody ever did it. Mars
hasn't any moons. If he lias, nobody ever saw them."

" Is Professor Hall a knave, then ? "

" Oh, no. I suppose something crawled across the glass. Or he saw
a candle spark flying around. He never saw any moons. It is only a
cow's foot in the crock of milk."

470 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. H. S. Foote :

New Orleans, March 25, 1879.

Feeling assured that you are not indifferent to the fate of the bill
pending in the Senate for the benefit of the "Methodist Publishing
House,1' and knowing well the liberality of your temper and your freedom
from everything like petty and narrow prejudices, whether sectional or sec-
tarian, I have ventured to make an earnest appeal to you. . . .

Senator Bailey, as you know, has charge of this bill. ... I wrote
him a letter about ten days ago, in which I stated that if he judged it
expedient, I would address you such a communication as the present one.
. . . Without his formal consent, I enclose you his response, . . .
by reading which you will see how much esteemed and respected you are
by a Southern Senator of political principles different from your own, but
whose manliness and generosity of temper enable him to do full justice
to an eminent political opponent.

" . . . By all means write to Mr. Blaine, and solicit his great influ-
ence in behalf of the bill. His head and heart approve this act of justice
and beneficence to a great charity, and, he is one of the few men of great
prominence in public life that will dare to follow the promptings of his
generous nature."

. . Whatever course you may conclude to adopt, I shall become
not the less your warm political and personal friend, as I have been in
the past. . . .

I am hoping that the day is not far distant when the people of New
Orleans will have the happiness of seeing you. . . . I do not doubt that
you will find all true patriots here prepared to accord you a most enthu-
siastic reception.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. C. M. Reed :

Washington, Pa., April 12, 1879.
. . . Had our meeting not broken up suddenly, I would have been
glad to tell some things of Washington county. With a population of
more than 50,000, there is not a licensed tavern in the county, so that
any of your New England friends who might want a drink of the ardent
must bring the bottle with them. Yet we have no prohibitory law, solely
the force of public sentiment. I sometimes tell a story of our parson,
Dr. Bronson. During the war he went out as agent of the Christian Com-
mission. At Washington, by way of saving hotel bills, they had a large
warehouse with settees to accommodate the delegates going to and from
the army. Dr. Bronson arrived Saturday P.M., and in the evening got out
his brush and razors, and was shaving himself and blacking his boots
preparatory to Sabbath. An old New England delegate walked up and
said aloud, " I never saw that man before, but if I were to guess I would
say he was an old- school Presbyterian preacher; and if I would continue

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 471

to guess, I would say he was from Pennsylvania; and if I were to guess
further, would say he was from Washington county, and perhaps from
Cannonsburg, the only place I ever saw where the people began to pre-
pare for the Sabbath on Saturday evening.11 He was educated at Jeffer-
son College.

Dr. B. wore an old slouch hat and shaggy overcoat, and did not look
clerical. Some of your old college friends and others inquire for you
with great interest, Alex. Wilson among the number.

ToM. :

Augusta, August 1, 1879.

. . . The dust from your chariot wheels had not subsided before I
found myself engaged in a little round with Alice, who hoped she should
never be called selfish again, seeing she had not hesitated to give you her
lisle thread gloves, when yours, through your own carelessness in the su-
preme moment of your departure, were found wanting. In vain your
father assured her that lisle thread gloves grow on every bush, and that
he would make her a present of half a dozen pairs. The little maid would
have her will, and said "Nay, we are even.11 And then the three who were
left, Alice, the pater, and I, adjourned to the billiard-room, where I looked
on at this child beating what Emmons and E. would call her governor,
dropping her cue in the middle of the game, and vanishing without cere-
mony as she remembered that the ice-cream for her picnic was unordered.

Six o'clock in the morning. While we were at dinner I received a tele-
gram from saying he would like to spend Sunday with us. Needless

to say I telegraphed back, "Delighted,11 though it made Emmons wince,
as he had arranged to go to Old Orchard with Orville Baker to-morrow. But
he is a generous boy and refuses to leave me in the lurch, so that arrange-
ment has been unarranged. Then came the getting off to the picnic.
A. E. took the Homan wagon and Yorick, and drove out A. T. M. and D.,
a freezer of ice-cream, A. P. MorrilPs umbrella, which in an evil moment
he had left here, and wraps enough for an arctic country in case the
weather should change. As soon as they were comfortably off, I devoted
myself to Mr. Hale and your father, packing the latter^ bag and mending
his old alpaca coat. Then the new horse was put to the borrowed buggy,
and your father and Mr. Hale mounted and Tom took the nothing which
was left for a seat and drove them down.

August 3. . . . Your father got home at two this morning very tired
and perhaps a little cross. He had a fine meeting at Saco.
Emmons, your father, Mr. Reed, and Mr. F. — you see I do not pay much
attention to precedence — have just started on a drive, your father holding
the reins. As Mr. Reed is on the back seat, imagine the way in which his
eyes will wander from those horses. . . .

August 6. . . . Mr. Frye was here to breakfast, he came yesterday
afternoon, and spoke in the evening. I went to hear him, and was capti-
vated. He and your father have now gone to Mt. Vernon, driving over.

472 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Just before they got away, Mr. Hale turned up, dined with us, and now he
has left for JN or ridge woek. . . . The mail has come brin^ino- us a
highly prized letter from Walker and a postal from Emmons. Walker
returns thanks for a check, and Emmons asks for an X, and time may come
and time may go, but money is needed forever. Thursday noon I went
to Richmond with your father, who left for Portland, and Kittery, and
Hamilton, while I returned with the Bishops in their car.

August 10. . . . Sunday afternoon again, and Mr. Ecob preached
an advanced sermon, in which I was much interested, and then dinner, and
there being an apple pie left, Alice took it up to Mr. Ecob ; and this is all.
The library and billiard-room are both full of men. It is passing into a
radiant afternoon, the sky all lovely blue and clouds, the earth all dewy
green, and I am going in to see if your father will not drive around Collins'
with me, for he has never seen it. Monday afternoon, 5 o'clock. . . .
Since dinner I have had out the carriage, and been to the station for
Emmons, but his welcome visage was not there to gladden my eyes, and
I came home to learn that he had sent a telegram early in the day to say
that he would not be here till 8. Father forgot to tell me ! . . . I
took my ride yesterday afternoon, but T. would go with us, and the new
horse is excessively slow. When we were about half-way through, your
father seized the reins and whip, and declared he would find out whether
there were any go in the creature, but by the time he had administered
two blows, T. was beside herself, and he stopped. It was enough, how-
ever, as from that moment we had no trouble.

To M.:

Augusta, August 13, 1879.

. . . . Father is reading your letter on the porch, and remarks that
you say " one pleasing affect," meaning effect. ... I went to Granite
Hall last night to hear Mr. Chandler. He made a good speech. . . .
Father came on the four o'clock train, having had a charming day on
his travels. At six (next A.M.) left for Waldoboro'. With great de-
votion and difficulty I got him downstairs in season to make a comfortable
breakfast, when I delightedly passed him and his bag and his winter
overcoat and Emmons' summer one and his own alpaca into Frederick's
hands, who speedily, but with much anguish to the old phaeton, conveyed
him to the station.

August 14. . . All day, Emmons alone has represented the junior

part of the Blaine family, and has most agreeably fulfilled the function, cor-
recting proof for " Honest Truth," reading, endorsing, and sending tele-
grams, borrowing my last V, tearing down town a dozen times for his
father, carving a mighty sirloin of roast beef for dinner, the knife so sharp
it went into it like butter, to use his own words, playing billiards whenever
your father found a minute in which to whistle " For he might have been a
Prussian," and to hold a cue ; and finally getting your father to the station
with his thin coats and his bag, though I packed the bag, and Maggie N.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 473

collected the coats, and Millie and Maggie and Tom and Emmons and I all
joined in the search for the hat, which finally, retaining its crown and rim,
when any respectable hat would have given up the ghost, was found under all
the newspapers and all the books, having evidently been used all day for
a cushion by every sitter-down in the library. I hovered on the outskirts
to bid him good-by, afraid to come recklessly to the front, lest he should
want some money, and I have only three silver quarters in my dear little
purse ; I have drawn so much money this month — how can any one who
never listens to or enters into a detail understand it ? But M. is off on her
travels and Q. on his, and Emmons has been, and Alice and T. to-day, and
from the grain that feeds the horses to the butter that spreads my bread, I
pay for everything.

August 18. ... I write now to you, as connectedly as may be with
Mr. and Mrs. Hale, Mr. Davis (Governor), and Mr. Bartlett in the room.
The conversation too is on Maine politics — that most interesting and discour-
aging of topics — for here are the Democrats coming into the conventions
and capturing the Greenbackers in various counties, and your father so occu-
pied that after he emerges from his chamber in the morning I do not require,
nor receive, so much civility as a word from him, and sometimes I am so
deeply disgusted with American politics — our whole system of popular
government, with its passion, its excitement, disappointment, and bitter
reaction — that any sphere, however humble, which gives a man to his
family, seems to me better than the prize of high place.

Mrs. Hale came Friday evening with your father, who boarded the train
on which she was — not at Etna, but at Newport — he having, after being
driven to Etna from E. Corinth, procured a ride for himself on a hand
car to Newport, that he might see Mr. Dexter about the old wagon. The
night was dark, and first he lost his hat, for which they retraced their steps
some half-mile, and then his bag was found missing, and for this they went
back two miles but found it not, but the next morning at ten the express
delivered it, much the worse for its travels, the Pullman having gone over
it. The contents were found spilled along the side of the track. One shirt
was cut all to pieces, the toilet apparatus was never found, and the bag was
ruined ; but it never seemed to enter his dear head that the escapade was a
risky and foolish one, and not to be expected from a man of his habits, and
although he saw Mr. D. he forgot to ask the price at which the wagon was
sold, so we were in as much uncertainty as ever. Clarence came from
Portland and spent Saturday with us, stopping in Gardiner to hear Eugene
speak that evening, and Emmons drove down after tea in the darkness and
rain, carrying along Mr. Updegraff, and at eleven or shortly after they all
arrived at this hospitable mansion, where a couple of bottles of champagne
and a good supper helped out the welcome which was awaiting them.
While at breakfast yesterday, Mr. S.'s card was sent in. Your father was
not up, but Emmons saw him and told him where to go to church, and
invited him to dinner at two. The day was dreadfully rainy, but Mrs. II.,
Clarence, Emmons, and I braved the discomfort of a long ride for the sake
of hearing Mr. Ecob, who gave us a delightful service ; and then we came

474 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

home to find your father still in bed, where he stayed till dinner-time, when
lie got up and came down to enact the' host in his most delightful manner,
carving, talking, making welcome in his own inimitable way, till Mr. S.
tore himself away, coming back to tea, while Mr. Updegraff made no
pretence of going, but stayed right on till eleven o'clock, and then Mrs.
Milliken came to tea and sang hymns and "Pinafore" all the evening.
Clarence went this morning, and your father and Updegraff and S. and
Governor Davis to Winthrop at one, first having a dinner here, and then at
four Mr. H. left for Waterville, and it has rained and rained and rained, and
now at eleven in the evening Emmons has just gone for Mr. Hale, and the
Winthrop team has returned, and they have all had supper here, and now
with the heavens opening and the floods descending Emmons returns,
bringing Mr. Hale and followed by D., bringing up Mr. Downes and Mr.
Campbell, who are to go back on the Pullman, and who will spend the
intermediate hours in the library.

To Mr. Blaine, from Secretary Evarts :

Windsor, Vt., August 23, 79.
. I feel a good deal of confidence that we shall come out all right
in your Maine election. If we do, you will have, and should have, the
credit for it.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. John Roach :

New York, August 29, 1879.
. . . With all my heart I hope you will succeed in bringing your
campaign to a success. But I think it is of great importance that you
should carry your State. Allow me to suggest something — I believe in
detail work. Would it not be a good plan to appoint scouts, or, as you
might call them " whippers-in," selecting those districts where there are men
to follow up and bring out every vote ? One hundred men divided into one
hundred districts who would have at their command one hundred fast
teams, follow those persons up. Every vote brought up and deposited
counts. . . . . Go ahead ; poor as I am I will stand by you. The English
are doing everything to break up my line. We are now shipping goods
from Europe to Rio, then bringing coffee from Rio to New York for twenty
cents per bag, or three dollars and forty cents per ton ; going from New
York to Liverpool — not returning to Rio from New York. This has cer-
tainly broken down the English Merchants1 Line, which was spoken of in
the Senate so much. They compel us to bring coffee back for twenty cents
per bag, or three dollars and forty cents per ton for five thousand miles.
The lowest price paid for coffee to New York before my line was started
was from fifty to seventy cents per bag, or from eight dollars and fifty cents
to ten dollars per ton. I am going to stick it out for another year. Think
of my plan as a politician with regard to the detail work.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 475

To Mr. Blaine, from Walker :

St. Paul, Minn., August 30, 1879.

. . . Next Tuesday is the day of the Republican State Convention,
and I shall sail in for a political acquaintance among the delegates on that
day. I have been this morning to see a County Convention in session.

Now, one thing, and don't forget this. You must have a telegram sent
me from home on the afternoon of the election, as early in the evening
as possible, say, by seven or eight o'clock, stating what the probable
results are, and have it sent to Metropolitan Hotel, as the office will be
closed. I want an accurate one, for my own information.

Tell Mons, if he can spare the time from his French audiences, I wish
he would ask Mr. Stratton to make out a certificate of the fact that I am a
member of the bar in Maine and send it out here to me. I shall want it
when I apply for admission in Minnesota. Tell Mons also not to forgot
my Stephen's Pleading.

This from the "Pioneer Press" of this morning. Don't you think the
family is quite well advertised in Minn. ?

A CHIP OF THE OLD BLOCK.

Maine Letter to the New York Tribune.

"Mr. Emmons Blaine, the second son of the Senator, who graduated
last year at Harvard and is now studying law, shows a decided taste and
aptitude for political work. He is the right-hand man of his father
in the labors of the central committee, and is doing some very creditable
stump-speaking. Next week he is going away up to the valley of the
upper St. Johns, a journey involving a ride of nearly one hundred miles
through a wilderness, to visit some French Canadian settlements and
speak to the natives in their own language. This venturesome experi-
ment, it is said, was never tried before in a Maine canvass."

To Mr. Blaine, from Col. John Hay :

Cleveland, September 11, 1879.

Pass greatly on ! Thou that hast overcome ! . . . You have won
the most prodigious personal victory of the time.

From Walker :

St. Paul, September 13, 1879.

. . . The Maine election has been a great victory, for which, praise
be to father. I think it deserves to be recorded as his greatest personal
triumph.

. . . Everything the country over looks most cheering for Republi-
can victory next year, but really I have something the feeling, — " What
care I how fair she be, if she be not fair to me ! " For if anybody deserved

476 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

it he does, and how are we going to be enthusiastic over . But I

breathe not.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. John H. Ewing:

Washington, September 25, 1879.
. . . Your friends here are very desirous that you shall visit your
old home before you return East. I am aware of your many engagements,
but still hope you can so arrange as to give us a passing visit. There is
no place in this wide world where you have so many warm friends.

To Mr. Blaine, from Walker:

St. Paul, Minn., October 7, 1879.
. . . 1 also send you the printed argument submitted by Governor
Davis and Mr. Lowry, and copy of letter addressed to the Secretary
of the Interior, and Attorney-General. . . . Please do whatever you
can in the matter. Many of the gentlemen who are thus sued and
harassed, you know. They are good Republicans and old friends of yours,
and most honorable men, and I can't help believing that the responsibility
fairly belongs on other shoulders than those upon which the impractical
Dutchman is trying to put it. ... I see that you are to speak in Iowa
City on the 11th. Cannot you manage it so as to come here by way of
Sioux City, if you only stay for a day or two. You would enjoy the trip,
I think, and I know people here would like to see you. You went by St.
Paul last time, you know.

October 8. . . . St. Paul is quite a gay city, and what with two law
courts on which I am dancing attendance, and the reading of the law, I get
along quite busily. I wish you could get clients as easily as you can ac-
quaintances. In the latter respect I don't have much to reproach myself
with. They seem to have heard the name before, and the society is very
pleasant.

November 4. . . . I have been admitted to the bar of the State, which
happened last Saturday ; second, I have become a citizen of the State, and
have just returned from the polls, where I exercised the freeman's privilege
by voting the straight Republican ticket; third, I have started a law school,
and am now giving, at five o'clock every evening, instruction in the law
to some three young gentlemen, and I find that it is likely to be of great
benefit to me as well, as it refreshes and systematizes my knowledge to a
verv great extent. ... I feel encouraged since I have been about the
courts and watched the progress of litigation. I don't by any means think
I am a great lawyer, but I think with work I can become a pretty good one,
and I feel a little more confidence as I mentally measure other men and
myself against them. But experimenlia docet, and a year from now I shall
probably be both wiser and sadder.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 477

To V. :

New York, November 9, 1879.

. . . Here I am, having a most delightful second visit. Mr. Blaine
is with me. . . . We are just from church, all but Mr. Blaine, who
spent the precious hours in which I was learning how to bring up a
family, in writing an article, as many pages of closely covered manuscript
lying on the table testify ; and as the children are too old to be now set in
other grooves, perhaps he is the happier for not being made to see how
much we have left to nature and to Providence, which we ought as parents
to have pursued and trained.

. . . Mr. Blaine, as you know, is in the best of health and spirits,
while Grant is booming along, and welcome, if I were the only one to be
consulted.

From Walker :

. . . The newspapers are full of the great Senator [Chandler] . So
far as reputation is concerned, he died at the very pinnacle of his personal
fame. It is very curious to me to see how the ideas that two years ago
were unpopular and would not have brought men into prominence, are,
by the whirl of politics, so popular that to-day everybody applauds the
course and laments the dead. . . . Father had a glorious meeting in
New York, and politics are all afloat, and no one can tell how the wind will
blow, save that it will always blow for me from Augusta, where is the
heart and hearth and home of ever yours.

November 15, 1879. I send you by this mail a copy of the morning's
paper, in which you will find a little squib of mine anent the Garcelon
declaration of war and an editorial comment thereon. I don't believe
Garcelon and the council will dare try any such game, or that it will ever
come to anything, but I thought it could do no harm to start a war-whoop
in this far West.

November 20. ... I think Grant will be nominated for the presi-
dency. Father can aft'ord to wait, even though he never gets it. But have
you observed that he is more popular than ever throughout the country, and
I think we can content ourselves with that, and let Grant be President.

To Emmons :

Augusta, November 21, 79.

This is one of my tavern weeks — the board being spread for all who
come. The Republican crowd melted away by Wednesday — Mr. Reed
going that day at noon. . . . Ft. Smith & Little Rock has fallen from
thirty-seven and a half to thirty- two.

Father had made up his mind this morning to give five hundred dollars
to the Old Ladies' Home, and it looks like a slap in the face from Prov-
idence to find things going the wrong way in the afternoon. Don't you
think so ?

478 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

The last news, or report of the situation, is the convening of the Superior
Court at Augusta, Monday, the Chief Justice in the chair — though that is
not the name of his seat.

Your father is in the best of spirits, though what is to be the end of this
audacity no one knows. He expects now to leave town Sunday, though I
don't believe he can. George Weeks and Mr. Sprague are now in consul-
tation with him in the library. Have you an overcoat for Mr. Brown ? If
you have not, I shall be under the painful necessity of giving him a new
one, as I cannot see him drive in your father's old blue flannel. Is the
heavy overcoat hanging here yours, and shall I give it ? It looks too
handsome. Caroline has cooked two hundred and fifty chickens since July,
and is now beginning on turkeys. She is more to be dreaded than the
foxes which have killed off all the Caldwell turkeys on which I always
depend for Christmas. My pen will not permit of further writing, but my
love knows no limitations.

From Hon. W. E. Chandler :

Washington, December 13, 1879.

. . . Frye and I are fighting the battle without our chieftain. Do
you know I think the beloved does not like to fight as well as he once
did ? But we cannot fight third term and all who beat us before, unless
we pitch in. Forbearance toward the crowd is folly. We must be con-
fident and aggressive ; and if we are, there are many signs that we shall
win. Are we to fight or to wilt ?

To Mr. Blaine, from Emmons (telegrarri) :

Chicago, January 31, 1880.
May you double before you quit.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 479

XVI.

SECRETARY OF STATE.

A S the day of the Republican National Convention in 1880
-*--*- drew near, the masses of the Republican party signi-
fied more and more clearly their choice. The defeat of 1876
seemed at once and permanently to have intensified the desire
of Republicans that Mr. Blaine should be the candidate. His
four years in the Senate had widened the desire, had deepened
it to determination. Sundry leaders of the party were fain to
lead in other directions. Some were inspired by an honorable
personal ambition which their great qualities and great service
justified. The larger part of the opposition is best suggested
in a characteristic reference by Mr. John Hay to that " lofty
and magnanimous spirit to which malice and meanness were
so impossible, and therefore so furiously hostile." The whole
country knew that in Mr. Blaine they were dealing with an
independent and unbending force, and all that was not warmly
with him was desperate against him. But against him no
other political leader had any showing. Many Democrats
avowed more or less openly that they would regard being
beaten by him as next to success.

General Grant was in the distinguished retirement of an
ex-President, the victorious general of modern history. His
warmest friends could desire nothing better than that he should
so remain. But the men who sought above all things Mr.
Blaine's defeat were ready to sacrifice General Grant's brilliant
repose to their purpose. There is reason to believe that he con-
sented to their scheme with reluctance and under misapprehen-
sion ; that he was led to believe that the American people were
not unalterably opposed to a third term, if that third term
were his term — notwithstanding that one of his chief mana-
gers, a brave and popular general, was rejected as a delegate in

480 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

his own district, and that ten districts out of nineteen in Grant's
own State of Illinois protested that the delegates for Grant were
fraudulently chosen, till the convention was forced to respect
them and to admit the rightfully chosen delegates. Friends
wrote General Grant advising him to withdraw, affirming that
it was an outrage on him to put him into this fight, and that he
would surely be beaten at the polls if he were nominated ; but
other counsels held his attention.

Mr. Blaine apprehended nothing sinister or ulterior in Gen-
eral Grant's purpose, but, under the circumstances, believed
his candidacy to be a menace, and his election a dangerous
precedent. There was no emergency to call for the innovation,
nor had President Grant's civil administration been so excep-
tionally successful as to justify it. The election of any Repub-
lican president was doubtful. The election of ex-President
Grant seemed to Mr. Blaine as impracticable as it was undesir-
able. Mr. Blaine's opponents assumed not only that Grant was
the only man whose hold upon the people was strong enough
to surmount Mr. Blaine's, but that it was strong enough to
enforce his election if by any means his nomination could be
secured. They were willing to put his name and fame to the
hazard to wrest from the people's pride a violation of the
people's judgment.

Mr. Blaine was forever disaffected towards the candidacy,
but he was not unwilling to throw himself into the breach to
prevent the defeat and threatened disruption of the Repub-
lican party. His long detention in Maine by the " count-out,"
and his non-action in regard to the national convention occa-
sioned much affectionate grumbling among his intimate friends
vainly attempting to rouse him to personal action. " I won-
der when you will get off to Washington," wrote one to a
member of his family. " I don't see how the conspirators can
stand against that opinion of the court — one of the finest papers
ever written, in view of the circumstances. Generally it seems
as if things were going wrong — there is no logic in affairs.
Here is Grant getting the benefit of revived radicalism, and the
beloved — -well, he is to be Vice-President!"

January 27. " My congratulations on the recent decision of
the Supreme Court, which ought to give the final blow to the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 481

State stealers, and I hope will satisfy the grumblers who have
been anxiously hoping Mr. Blaine would make a mistake. . . .
But the anti-Grant, pro-Blaine men are righting without a leader ;
they are very valiant, but are flopping like a chicken with his
head cut off. Perhaps, when Maine is disposed of, our captain
will mount the saddle instead of running alongside holding on
to Grant's stirrups. There, do not be mad at that, it is mild
compared with my feelings.

" I am glad he lies in bed till noon. I do not want him to be
sick. But more men are slaving and exciting themselves
for him all over this country than ever did for a man before.
He thinks that is all right, he is getting used to it."

And to Mr. Blaine : "I hope you will take the leash off your
friends and let them go to work. Pennsylvania showed clearly
that Grant could not be elected."

Walker, returned to Minnesota from Maine, felt the thrill
with youthful intensity but preserved his gravity. "It was
delightful and made me feel as if I belonged here, to be
welcomed back as I was. I think the position father takes
admirable, but I sincerely trust that, happen what may, nobody
in the country, no matter how hostile, will have any right to
say that he is a chronic seeker for the nomination. Personally
it does not worry or annoy me as it did in '76."

March 8. " I want the fight made fairly and squarely from
this out. If Grant is nominated he is going to be defeated ;
if he is defeated we sha'n't regain the Republican ascendency
for many, many years. . . . But I wish that forever we
might be out of all fights or win them. And if you ever hear
of me in politics it will be as nothing higher than a Ward
Alderman to which I shall be bidden by the unanimous voice of
my fellow countrymen." Ten days later he was " too engrossed
in the politics of the country to give great attention to the laws
of the State ! "

So far as his own nomination was concerned Mr. Blaine
could not be aroused. He declared that lie was like the old
soldier who always counted himself for dead when the battle
opened, so every time he came out alive it was clear gain ; but
he was frankly against the third-term movement, which he
considered unwarrantable in its purpose and methods. " Mr.

482 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Blaine," said a letter of the time, " walked to Mr. Cameron's
house with him and Mr. Robeson a night or two ago after they
had been here, and talked plainly about the third term ; told
Mr. Cameron he would gladly give 150,000 to be free from the
wisps and thongs that bound him so that he could make battle
with him and Conkling for the great crime they are committing
in forcing Grant upon an unwilling people. Mr. Blaine gets so
impatient sometimes over being a candidate that he can hardly
contain himself. If it were not for the hosts involved in him
I do not think he would hesitate one-half minute in sacrificing
any possible presidency and rushing full front into the anti-
third term fight. General H. says if Grant is nominated, no
Democratic nominee can save him from being beaten, except
Tilden."

Every week the extraordinary urgency increased — urgency
that Mr. Blaine should wish the nomination, that he should
want the nomination ; arguments were plied to members of his
family to induce them to induce him to want it, to work for it.
" He owes it to himself and to his friends all over this country
who are ready to sacrifice everything for his success, to do all
that lies in his power to win at Chicago." Every plea of party
fealty was used. " There is more involved than Mr. Blaine's
success. The nomination of Grant is the inevitable defeat of
the Republican party and the triumph of Democracy with all
its attending evils."

The pressure upon him to go to Chicago was very strong.
" I beg of you to have Mr. Blaine think of this matter. If lie is
on the ground to tend his own fight he will be nominated. It is
the judgment of all his friends here [Augusta], even the careful
considerate men, that he should go. I do not think I can
possibly state this case as strong as it is. He is a candidate
and it is right and just that lie should use all honorable means
to secure his nomination. More, it is due to his friends. It is
impossible for Mr. Blaine to have any man at Chicago who
could represent him as Conkling represents Grant, for no man
does stand as Mr. Blaine's mouth-piece. . . . I do want
him to succeed as I want to live. His defeat will be to me a
blow that will shadoAV my life. I am so wrought up in his
success because of my admiration and love for him, that there

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 483

is no sacrifice I could make for his success which I would not
gladly offer."

This, however, was absolutely out of the question. It was a
point to which Mr. Blaine could not bring himself.

General Grant had been making a tour of the world and he
went into the nomination contest through the Golden Gate of
the Pacific, his laurels still quivering with the world's plaudits.
Mr. Blaine met him with the prestige of a defeat four years
before, with whatever antagonisms might have followed many
subsequent battles ; but the military conqueror was broken.

The first contest in the convention was made upon the unit rule,
or representation by States, which was upheld by the Grant
men, against the more direct district representation, which was
held by the Blaine men. The convention adopted district repre-
sentation by a vote of 449 to 306. Thirty-six ballots were
taken on the nomination. President Grant started with 304
votes and Mr. Blaine with 284 ; but, as in 1876, Mr. Blaine's
votes were from the electing States, his opponent's votes from
the nominating States. Of other candidates, Mr. Sherman had
93 votes ; Mr. Elihu B. Washburne, 31 ; Mr. George F. Edmunds,
34 ; Mr. William Windom, 10.,

Telegrams between the convention and Mr. Blaine's house
were in constant exchange. Mr. Frye reported : ..." It is
hard to hold back your friends in the Convention, and they are
held back against my wishes. I submit only for peace, believing
submission to be a mistake." Mr. Hale telegraphed : " Ever
since morning our rooms have been crowded with delegates from
twenty-three different States. Newspaper men say that our crowd
to-day has been much larger than all other head-quarters com-
bined. Mr. Hamlin has been a great accession and has helped us
amazingly. The unit rule will have a hard road to travel. The
tough fight will be over the legitimate fruit of its destruction —
district representation. ... I talked with General Arthur
(of New York) this morning fully. He is dead set for the
unit rule — says anything else would throw away the power of
a State in the national convention. With delegations voting
individually, I think we can beat the unit rule by 100 — that
Grant is beaten as largely. Then we must take our chances on
the break-up."

484 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Telegrams came all night to Washington.

Mr. Sherman was waked by messenger from the telegraph office, who
told, from the sidewalk below, that there was great excitement in Chicago,
and they thought Mr. Blaine ought to know it. They had been up once
and found it impossible to rouse anybody; "the incidental mention of
Blaine's name by a Californian roused gallery and convention to wild
cheering for five minutes." Then Mr. Hale telegraphs : " The Grant men
made a point of seeing who could howl loudest and longest, and cheered
and hurrahed and waved flags for fifteen minutes — Conkling himself con-
descending to wave. After they had tired themselves out, the Blaine men
took it up and shouted twenty minutes ; " Mr. Hale says the Grant men got
enough of it. Four of their tallest men mounted on settees and Hale
mounted on their shoulders and waved the fiag, expecting every minute, he
said, that he should fall and break his neck. Think of the position for a
man who is not an acrobat! Meanwhile Mr. Blaine went off to bed dead
sleepy, and is this morning reading the papers with provoking indifference.
He is not of course indifferent, but he is self-possessed, and when I heard
him talking yesterday, with all the force and fire of the Senate, I thought
it was a pity to take him away from the Senate after all. Mr. Chandler
telegraphs, as things are now he considers the chances of Mr. Blaine's
nomination as 4 to 1, but not to be counted on till it comes.

Through 34 ballots Mr. Blaine's strength could not be shaken.
Mr. Sherman on the thirtieth ballot rose to 120. Mr. Wash-
burne to 44. Mr. Edmunds never again went so high as on
the first ballot, and Mr. Windom never higher. Mr. Conkling
on the thirty-first ballot received his only vote, 1. General
Garfield on the thirty-fourth received 17 votes. Mr. Blaine in
Washington was in constant telegraphic communication with
the convention, and on the next ballot the Blaine forces gave
General Garfield 250 votes. On the thirty-sixth ballot the out-
lying forces joined the Blaine men and Garfield received 399
votes, which nominated him.

The result was most welcome to Mr. Blaine. Not only was the
third-term movement overthrown, but the man selected was his
early and close friend, a man of ideas and aspirations, with whom
he could work in harmony and hope. All General Garfield's
political weakness, so far as he had any, lay in the sphere of the
lesser rather than the greater politics. Mr. Blaine used to tell
him banteringly that he had been spoiled by his constituents
who elected and reelected him so entirely as a matter of course

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 485

that he did not know what personal opposition was or how to
handle it.

If Mr. Blaine's friends could not as readily as himself merge
regrets at his failure to receive the nomination, in rejoicings
over his essential and important triumph, they none the less
overwhelmed him with congratulations. By the sagacity and
swiftness of his self-devotion, he was declared to have averted a
dangerous alternative and to have restored a defaced and dis-
honored ideal of patriotism ; and his defeat was crowned with
the tokens of victory.

The nomination by the Democrats of the beloved and honored
General Hancock increased the uncertainty of the result. An-
ticipating a sharp struggle between the two parties Mr. Blaine
prepared for it by rest at White Sulphur Springs, of which his
own account June 22 is :

•" Senator Booth and I have fallen into a regular and very
agreeable routine ; rise at eight ; spend half an hour at the
spring ; breakfast at nine ; take our bath at twelve ; dine at two ;
do nothing in particular until five when we mount two easy
good riding horses and ride for two hours ; at 7.80 tea ; at ten
we retire.

"We have a cottage of three rooms all to ourselves, and are
getting along very lazily and very comfortably and I think
gaining daily. My gout is rapidly disappearing and I think I
shall come out all bright and new."

He came out, as he hoped, bright and new. His spirit
animated his friends, and those who had been first in seeking his
nomination were first also in securing General Garfield's elec-
tion. The "Plumed Knight" of Mr. Ingersoll's eloquence, four
years before had at once touched the imagination of men. Mr.
Blaine deprecated and disallowed it, but something of the hero-
worship which disappears only in a nation's decadence caught
the note of fitness, a touch of the grace and graciousness of an
earlier time, and a helmet with white plume became the signal
of the hosts who fought his battle, not under his banner, and
won the victories he prized, the triumph of national honor and
individual well-being.

Mr. Conkling had not been able to accept defeat with the
patriotic acquiescence or the cheerful anticipation of better luck

486 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

next time, which characterizes that large part of the American
people that is doomed to annual political disappointment. It
remained for a while a question whether he would join the
Republican councils, or whether he would actively or passively
oppose them. His defection would have been greatly regretted,
his adhesion was earnestly desired. Republicans, however, were
confident that his sincerity and his sense must in the end lead
him to the right course.

From the moment of Mr. Garfield's nomination Mr. Blaine
identified himself with his friend. Letters, notes, suggestions,
arguments, questions, answers, flew back and forth between
them. Mr. Blaine bethought himself, occasionally, to make a
quasi-apology for his abundant proffer of opinion, but never
until the proffer had been made ! The two men walked in
harmony. They could take each other for granted. There was
no more friction than was necessary to polish and perfection.
They had the same ends in view, and where they differed as to
means they compromised on the best practicable.

While Mr. Blaine was still at White Sulphur Springs General
Garfield wrote him from Mentor, Ohio, June 29, 1880 :

My dear Blaine : I was greatly disappointed at not seeing you again
before I left Washington, for there were many things I wanted to say to
you, and still more which I wanted you to say to me. . . . The feeling
among Republicans generally is hopeful and good. Your friends, partak-
ing of your own spirit, are generous and helpful, because they love a
common cause, and because you and they are responsible for my nomina-
tion. In one quarter alone the oracles are dumb and seem not yet to have
determined whether it shall be peace or war.

I have not yet touched the letter of acceptance. Please write me your
suggestions on any phase of it you please, but specially on these points :

1. The Chinese question, — you know the platform is pretty full on that
subject — but our Pacific coast friends are anxious, and this side the moun-
tains are suspicious. Please write such a paragraph as you would use.

2. The civil service plank. Please give me your best thoughts on the
subject, and embody them in a drafted paragraph.

3. The Southern question.

4. The silver question ; and finally anything else that is in your heart.

July 4 came the answer from White Sulphur Springs :

My dear Garfield : Let me answer condensedly. First, on

financial question, no man has a better record than yourself, and no man

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 487

can express himself better. You need neither hint nor help on the ques-
tion in any of its phases. Second, on Southern question, you and I have
not at all times precisely agreed ; but I am sure you will find it easy to treat
it in a manner that will satisfy all shades of Republican opinion. Third,
on Chinese question, you must recognize that the three Pacific States will
be largely, if not entirely, controlled by it. And you will, I think, be
compelled to take the ground that a servile class — assimilating in all its
conditions of labor to chattel slavery — must be excluded from free immi-
gration. It is far better that you should clothe the proposition in your own
language than that you should take any phrase of mine. Your letter will
be thereby more completely logical and harmonious.

I cannot believe that New York parties will hold back from your cordial
support. A little time must be allowed for pouting and petting ; but they
cannot in the end afford to scuttle a ship on which they are passengers.
I think your nomination has been splendidly received, and that a great
wave will roll over the country bearing you onward to victory. It will
start just about the time the pop beer corks for Hancock have all fizzed out.
God bless you and preserve you! If I had not the watering-place laziness
full upon me I would write more, but I presume you thank me for making
it so brief.

Mentor, O., July 21, 1880.

My dear Blaine : Thanks for your good letter of the 4th inst.

I think you and I are not far apart on any essential doctrine of the
party.

How do you find the situation in Maine? By this time, you know it with
your peculiar thoroughness.

Did you get the inside of affairs in Old Virginia, so as to see any good
likely to come to us from their fight?

Let me know your plans and hopes, and always send me any sugges-
tions. I don't see how the New York friends can stand off very long. I
give them time and silence as the best I can do for them.

Mentor, O., July 30, 1880.
My dear Blaine : . . . The trip to New York was greatly against
my judgment. But, at last, the committee are nearly or quite unanimous
that I ought to go. . . . It is therefore too late to retreat, as I
have just telegraphed you, and, my dear friend, you must stand by me.
Many of our friends who have written me think there are evidences that
a few leaders in New York meditate treachery, and say that the visit
will either prevent it or so develop it, that the country will understand
it and place the responsibility where it belongs. Of one thing you may
be assured : There shall be no surrender to any unreasonable demand. I
will do nothing to compromise myself or the noble men who stand up to
the fight. Of course, it is possible that the trip will make matters worse
rather than better, but the risk must now be taken ; I am sure you will not
disappoint me. I want to go over the ground with you so soon as I reach

488 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

New York, and I want you to find the exact situation if possible before I
arrive. I want to know how large a force C. has behind him, and just
what the trouble is. I will not be treated as a suspected Republican. If 1
cannot have comradeship with the leaders of the party, there shall be no
relations whatever. I think the letter of acceptance is broad enough and
generous enough for all who want success. If the Regulars wish to repel
the Independents, they waut the party defeated. If that is the situation
we ought to know it.

Mr. Blaine took up the electoral contest as his own, beginning
as usual with Maine, whose State election in September was
always considered to strike the note for the national election of
November. Maine had another disappointment to overcome in
the loss of her candidate, the Republicans did not gain the full
effect of their victory in the count-out until two years of dis-
cussion had fully set forth its character to the people, change
in the Constitution had for the first time given the election to
a plurality ; and Fusionists and Democrats worked together
with renewed hope and with a success most valuable to the
Republicans. At the State election September 13, 1880, there
was no majority. The Fusion candidate in nearly 150,000
votes had a plurality of less than 200. The disaffected and
indifferent were roused to a sense of danger, to a consciousness
that if a national victory were to be achieved it would only be
by combined and constant effort.

" I am watching" your splendid campaign in Maine with great
satisfaction and pride," wrote General Garfield on the seventh
of September ; and again on the fourteenth :

The Democracy of Maine has again enabled you to fight a great battle
in the presence of the nation for the purity of the ballot-box.

I will have your Ohio meetings announced to-morrow morning in ac-
cordance with the programme I mailed you some days ago. . . .

With kindest regards and with great admiration for the energy you
have displayed in this remarkable campaign, I remain,

As ever, your friend,

J. A. Garfield.

Many were dismayed by the Maine election. General Gar-
field preserved his equanimity. Mr. Blaine saw only in-
ducement to redoubled effort. He went through the country
speaking with unabated energy till his voice failed him.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 489

Augusta, Me., October 29, 1880.

My dear Garfield : I have your kind note of inquiry. My health is
good; my trouble was like Hancock's tariff issue, "purely local.''1 I had
rough hoarseness which prevented my speaking, but I was not sorry to be
forced to come home. I have been doing some effective work here.
T think your election is sure. You will have every northern State, I
think. I regard Nevada as the least certain. I do not feel absolutely
certain of California. But there will be enough. Your triumph will be
as joyous to me as my own would have been. All that I am, all that I
can do, will be at the service of your administration. My love to your
wife and my respectful salutation to your venerable mother. "What a
proud woman the Queen maun be ! " Will endeavor to telegraph you early
Tuesday evening of the result in Maine.

A part of this " effective work " appeared the same day in
the " Bangor Whig and Courier, " in a letter written by Mr.
Blaine to a prominent and influential Irish citizen in Eastern
Maine :

I received your friendly letter with much pleasure. Let me say in
reply, that the course of yourself and other Irish voters is one of the most
extraordinary anomalies in our political history. Never, probably, since
the execution of Robert Emmet, has the feeling of Irishmen, the world
over, been so bitter against England and Englishmen as it is at this hour ;
and yet the great mass of the Irish voters in the United States will, on
Tuesday next, vote precisely as Englishmen would have them vote — for
the interests of England.

Having seen Ireland reduced to misery and driven to despair by what
they regard as the unjust policy of England, the Irishmen of America use
their suffrage as though they were the agents and servants of the English
Tories. The Free-traders of England desire nothing so much as the defeat
of Garfield and the election of Hancock. They wish to break down
the protective tariff and cripple our manufactures, and nine-tenths of the
Irish voters in this country respond with alacrity, " Yes, we will do your
bidding and vote to j)lease you, even though it reduce our own wages and
take the bread from the mouths of our children."

There are many able men and many clever writers among the Irish in
America, but I have never met any one of them able enough or clever
enough to explain this anomaly on any basis of logic and good sense

I am glad to see from your esteemed favor that the subject is beginning
to trouble you. The more you think of it the more you will be troubled,
I am sure. And you will be driven finally to the conclusion that the pros-
perity of the Irish in this country depends as largely as that of any other
class upon the maintenance of the financ^l and industrial policy repre-
sented by the Republican party.

490 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Garfield was elected by a majority which admitted no dis-
pute, and Mr. Blaine adopted his administration with absorb-
ing ardor. The cross-fire of letters, notes, and suggestions
went on with renewed enthusiasm. Mr. Blaine's mind was
teeming with purposes, plans, hopes. Large questions of
policy, secondary yet scarcely subordinate questions of persons,
alike engaged his attention. He watched every sign of the
times for harm or help to the new administration. " I can see
you smiling," he wrote to General Garfield, " at my arguing
a point that is in every sense absurd, but I am talking from the
Washington and not the Mentor standpoint."

Senate Chamber, December 10, 1880.

I redeem a promise made you to write fully and freely ... in strict
confidence. I shall discuss many topics under several heads :

1. The more I think of the State Department the more I am inclined
thereto, though up to this time, and still continuing, my mind is the theatre
of conflicting arguments and even emotions. I believe with you as Presi-
dent, and in your full confidence, I could do much to build up the party as
the result of strong and wise policy. I find myself drawn towards it, and
possibly by the date which you fixed as a limit I may be wholly and
enthusiastically disposed thereunto. . . .

2. . . . You are to have a second term or to be overthrown .

by the Grant crowd. . . . An analysis of the Chicago vote before your
name came forward shows that out of 167 actual or possible Republican
districts in the country, Grant had only 32, his delegates being almost
wholly from States and districts hopelessly Democratic. Sherman,
Edmunds, and Washburne had only 36 Republican districts behind them
all while I had 99- My vote became your vote — and the final division
when Sherman and the others were all welded as against Grant is as
follows :

Garfield, 135 Republican districts.
• Grant, 32

But the Grant forces were never more busy than at this hour. . . .
Of course it would not be wise to make war on them. Indeed, that would
be folly. They must not be knocked down with bludgeons : they must
have their throats cut with a feather. . . . The Republican party of
this country is divided into three sections. First the great body of the
North, with congressional representation and electoral strength behind
it, is with the section which for convenience of designation I will call the
Blaine section, — I mean the strength behind me in two national conven-
tions. In some States this strength went for " favorite sons,11 as Ohio for
Hayes in 76 and Sherman in '80. You are the only Ohio man who on pure

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 491

absolute personal preference could have beaten me in that State either in 76
or 180. It was the " locality-struck " that carried it against me both for
Hayes and Sherman. Now this Blaine section is all yours with some
additional strength that Blaine could not get, and represents the reliable
strong background of preference, friendship, and love on which your
administration must rest for success. I use the designation " Blaine " only
for convenience to identify the class. They are all now Garfield without
rebate or reserve " waiving demand and notice."

The second section is the Grant section, taking all the South practically,
with the machine in New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois — and having the
aid of rule or ruin leaders. ... I think I am not wrong in saying that
this section contains all the desperate bad men of the party, bent on loot
and booty, and ready for any Mexican invasion or Caribbean annexation, and
looking to excitements and filibustering and possibly to a Spanish war as
legitimate means of continuing political power for a clique. These men
are to be handled with skill, always remembering that they are harmless
when out of power, ■and desperate when in possession of it.

The third section is the Reformers by profession, the "unco good.1'
They are to be treated with respect, but they are the worst possible political
advisers — upstarts, conceited, foolish, vain, without knowledge of meas-
ures, ignorant of men, shouting a shibboleth which represents nothing of
practical reform that you are not a thousand times jjledged to ! They
are noisy but not numerous, pharisaical but not practical, ambitious but
not wise, pretentious but not powerful ! They can be easily dealt with,
andean be hitched to your administration with ease. 1 could handle them
myself without trouble. You can do it more easily still.

In this threefold division of the Republican party, your true friends
will be found on the first.

In the second section will be found all the men who have an ulterior
purpose, who accept your administration because they cannot help it, and
are looking as longingly to a restoration of Grant as the cavaliers of Eng-
land, in the time of the Protector, looked for a return of the Stuarts.

The third section can be made to cooperate harmoniously with the first,
but never with the second, — you can see that at a glance.

I have written at immoderate and immodest length : my pen ran away
from me ! I find all that I have said is merely introductory to a personal
discussion of Cabinet ministers, which I shall venture to lay before you in
a subsequent note if you desire it. That you can indicate ; ... of
course I do not ask assent, dissent, or comment from you. But I desire
to submit certain views touching men which may in the end prove valuable
to you, if you wish to receive them.

I wish you would say to Mrs. Garfield that the knowledge that she de-
sires me in your Cabinet is more valuable to me than even the desire of the
President-elect himself. Indeed, I would not think of going into the Cabi-
net at all if Mrs. Garfield was not friendly and favorable. Please read
this letter to her and her alone.

492 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Washington, December 13, 1880.

If you will turn to the treaty of Washington you will see that the
concessions and guarantees contained in xviii to xxv, and in articles
xxviii, xxix, xxx, have a ten-year limit for notice and two years after
notice. This throws the whole subject open for fresh and I hope more
lasting adjustment during your "first lerm.^ The subjects involved are
the Fisheries, the navigation of Lake Michigan by British vessels, the
freedom of the St. John, the right of transit for Canadian j^oods through
our territory, the free international use of the Welland canal, the St. Clair
Flats canal, and many other topics. In short it opens the whole Canadian
question and gives a splendid opportunity to achieve some things of
which we have already spoken.

Whereupon in the most provoking manner in comes a petty little
proposition to institute a commission now on the Fisheries on account of
the Fortune Bay shindy — the result of which will be that on the magnifi-
cent domain for diplomacy which properly opens to your administration
in March, 1881, you will find some obtrusive squatters whom you will be
compelled to warn off before you can begin proper settlements and
improvements. I do not wish to take any notice of the movements or
make the slightest criticism, lest I might seem to give color to rumors
about the State Department which thus far are the merest wild, vague
speculation, and upon which I have never given a wink. But can't you
quietly drop a note to Hayes suggesting that the whole question of a
readjustment of Canadian matters should be left without embarrassment to
your administration ? He will be compelled to take heed of the simplest
request you can make, and thus the matter can be very quietly ended.

I want you to read my letters to Mrs. Garfield ;
the advice of a sensible woman in matters of statecraft is invaluable.

Don't be afraid that I intend to write you daily.

December 15, 1880.

I do not know but that my reference to Mrs. Garfield as a valuable
adviser needs some explanation. I know that all her instinct will be
right and all her counsel valuable. I want her to be to you what the wives of
several of your " illustrious predecessors" have been to their husbands.
Mrs. Washington made it possible for Jefferson and Hamilton to get
along in the same Cabinet, kept John Adams on friendly terms with the
Pater Patriae, and preserved Washington from extravagance and ill
temper on the French question. She is also credited by good social
tradition with the tact which secured the confirmation of Jay's Treaty —
especially for inducing Fisher Ames' great speech.

Mrs. Madison saved the administration of her husband — held him back
from the extremes of Jeffersonism and enabled him to escape from the
terrible dilemma of the war of '12. But for her, DeWitt Clinton would
have been chosen President in 1812. Did you ever notice, by the way, how
fearfully near he came to it any way ?

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 493

Mrs. Polk saved her husband from the blunder of making Benton
Lieutenant-General and placing him in command over Scott and Taylor ;
and she tried to avert the blunder of stripping Taylor of his army while
on the Saltillo line for the City of Mexico — a petty persecution which
went far to make Taylor President two years after.

I could give examples on the other side, but I prefer to mention ladies
only in the language of compliment.

From all these blunders Mrs. Garfield will be assuredly and happily
exempt, and I augur the happiest results from her advent. I am very
anxious and ambitious to see your administration a great social success
as well as a great political success, and the one has very much to do
with the other. . . . Your administration will never incur similar
hazards, but you must not neglect or overlook brilliant society prestige
as among the political dynamics. I hope Mrs. Garfield will excuse the
freedom with which I use her name. I only mean by it to attest the
confidence with which I look forward to her command of the social forces
which will so much contribute to the glory of your reign.

Mentor, O., December 19, 1880.
My dear Blaine. Yours of the 10th, 13th, and 15th came duly to
hand and were read with great interest. I have been so raided upon
that I have not been able to acknowledge them until now. Besides, I
have had some serious work with a party of important persons — with a
prospect of a serious, perhaps dangerous, misunderstanding. I think,
however, that I shall see daylight through the tangle. . . . Your
grouping of the elements which now compose the Republican party is
striking, and I think is correct. I have not yet seen a complete list of
the Chicago delegates, but I think the per cents, you give are nearly
accurate. Your first group is, no doubt, the chief electing force of the
party. The second, though quite inferior as an electing force, was
nevertheless the leading nominating force, and hence passes in public
estimation for more than it really is. For this reason, among others, it
must not be ignored or neglected. In your next letter please give
me your views of the best way to recognize it, so as not to be shackled,
and yet to do fair justice. The third group, the Independents, are very
impracticable in methods, but still they embrace a class of people who
ought to be with us — and reasonable pains should be taken to retain
them. They did good service in the late campaign. My idea, in refer-
ence to their question, is that we should harness all the civil service reform
sentiment of the country to the work of getting Congress to pass a law
defining and fixing the tenure of the great mass of inferior offices and the
ground for removals, and thus remove, as far as possible, from Congress
and the Executive, the endless annoyance that comes from the swarm of
small office-seekers. Offer this as a beginning — to be followed up later,
if the experiment is successful. Let the Reformers wrestle with Congress
rather than with the Executive, How does this strike you ?

494 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Please write me fully your view of persons who come in the range of
wise choice. Tell me also what you think would be the attitude of the
second group towards you incase you should go into the State Department.
I will write to the President and suggest that the Canadian question be not
taken up piecemeal. I have sent your letters to Mrs. Garfield, who has
greatly enjoyed your terse and vigorous characterizations of the various
classes that make up our Republican array. Let me hear from you again

soon.

Very truly yours,

J. A. Garfield.

December 23, 1880.
My dear Garfield : ... In answer I can say that second section,
so far as I can see, would take the appointment very cordially, all the
Grant Senators, with one or two exceptions, being outspoken. . . .

J. G. Blaine.

Washington, December 20, 1880.

My dear Mrs. Garfield : I enclose one of the most important letters
(to myself) which I ever wrote.

I send it under cover to you because I wish no eye but yours and the
General's to see it. Its conclusion need not be made public until after
inauguration.

Washington, D.C., December 20, 1880.

My dear Garfield: Your generous invitation to enter }^our Cab-
inet as Secretary of State has been under consideration for more than
three weeks. The thought had never once occurred to my mind until you
presented it, with such cogent arguments in its favor and with such
warmth of personal friendship in aid of your kind offer.

I know that an early answer is desirable, and I have waited only long
enough to make up my mind definitely and conclusively. I therefore say
to you, in the same cordial spirit in which you invited me, that I accept
the position.

It is proper for me to add that I make this decision, not for the honor
of the promotion it gives me in the public service, but because I believe I
can be useful to the country and the party, — useful to you as the responsi-
ble leader of the party and the great head of the government. I am
influenced somewhat, perhaps, by the letters I am daily receiving urging me
to accept, written to me in consequence of the mere unauthorized news-
paper report that you were intending to offer me the place. I have been
especially pleased and even surprised at the cordial and widely extended
feeling in my favor throughout New England.

In accepting this important post I shall give all that I am and all that I
can hope to be freely and joyfully to your service. You need no pledge
of my loyalty both in heart and in act. I should be false to myself did I

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 495

not prove true to the great trust you confide to me and to your own
personal and political fortunes in the present and in the future.

Your administration must be made brilliantly successful and strong in
the confidence and pride of the people ; not obviously directing its
energies to reelection, but compelling that result by the logic of events
and by the imperious necessities of the situation.

To that most desirable consummation I feel that, next to yourself, I can
contribute more influence than any other man. I say this, not from
egotism or vain-glory, but merely as a deduction from an analysis of
the political forces which have been at work in the country for five years
past, and which will be operative for many years to come.

I hail it as one of the happiest circumstances connected with this
important affair, that in allying my j>°litical fortunes with yours — or
rather merging mine in yours — my heart goes with my head, and that I
carry to you, not only political support, but personal and devoted friend-
ship. I can but regard it as somewhat remarkable that two men of the
same age, entering Congress at the same time, influenced by the same
aims and ambitions, should never, for a single moment in eighteen years,
have a misunderstanding or a coolness, and that their friendship has
steadily strengthened with their strength.

It is this fact which has led me to the momentous conclusion embodied in
this letter, — for however much T might admire you as a statesman, I would
not enter your Cabinet if I did not believe in you as a man and love you
as a friend.

Faithfully yours,

J. G. Blaine.

Mentor, O., December 23, 1880.

My dear Blaine : Yours of the 20th inst. is at hand, and gives me
great satisfaction. Our long and eventful service together, and our friend-
ship, never for a moment interrupted, but tested in so many ways, give
assurance that we can happily unite in working out the important prob-
lems which confront us. I would not rejoice in your decision if I did not
confidently believe that you can serve the country, in the new field, even
more effectively than in the position you now so worthily fill.

The whole-heartedness with which you accede to my request is everyway
gratifying, and goes far to lighten the burden whose weight I feel in
advance. It will be better for you, and is indispensably necessary to me,
that this decision should be known to nobody but ourselves and our wives.

. . . I have written to the President in reference to the Fisheries and
other Canadian questions. . . .

To General Garfield, from Mr. Blaine :

New York, December 24, 1880.
Your Secretary of the Treasury should be taken from the West. This
is so evident that I do not stop to argue. lie must be identified with

496 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

an agricultural community, not a manufacturing or commercial com-
munity.

The West to which you are limited embraces these Sates : Ohio, Indi-
ana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa. These seven and
no more ! West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri geographically west are
politically south. Kansas and Nebraska are classed and groujDed with
States and Territories beyond the Missouri — distinct in location and in inter-
est. I assume you do not want to take a Secretary of the Treasury from
Ohio. . . .

Then comes Allison. You reach him by the process of exclusion, be-
cause you can find no other man in the Territory named so fit — nor is
there any other man so fit, with you and John Sherman counted out. Sher-
man said the other day that he thought Allison better posted in financial
legislation than any man in Congress, except Garfield and Blaine. This
is authentic. Allison is known to you thoroughly — and long. He is
true, kind, reasonable, fair, honest, and good. He is methodical, indus-
trious, and intelligent — and would be a splendid man to sail along with
smoothly and successfully. He would always hearken to your views. In
the whole United States I do not believe you could do so well.

With you as President, taking your two chief advisers from the friends
of your manhood — who all entered Congress the same da}% all the same
age nearly, and all three in unbroken harmony of friendship for eighteen
years — there would be presented a picture without a precedent — poetic
as well as political.

I do not wish to urge any man upon you, but I want you to have a
perfectly staunch friend in the Treasury. Shall send you some other sug-
gestions soon.

General Garfield, to Mr. Blaine :

Mentor, O., January 7, 1881.

I note what you say in reference to the Treasury. How do you think
your suggestion would be received by the protective tariff men and the
very hard money men; in short, by Eastern Republicans? Could he put
himself in line on those questions, so as to leave no serious discord between
his view and mine ? Please be ready and give me very certain information
on these points. We must not take any backward steps in finance — though
I think we can broaden the field so as to include more of our friends than
we have done heretofore.

Don't fail to get through a funding bill (at not less than ;U per cent.)
before January ends.

To General Garfield, from Mr. Blaine :

Washington, January 7, 1881.
I am glad you have sent for Colonel Hay, and now as Lincoln used to say
to Stanton, " You can fight it out between you.11 . . .

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 497

All kind of speculation rages here about the Cabinet, but I hope you stub-
bornly adhere to your determination to consider February and the first four
days of March as better for decision than December or January. Cabinet-
making is a trade that becomes quickly embarrassed if it be conducted
with long paper. Don't put any out. See how freely I dispense advice.
Perhaps you can as easily dispense with it.

General Garfield was a large-nature d man and could not be
made to see that smaller natures could find aught objectionable
in a continuance of the old close relations. General Garfield
desired Mr. Blaine to come to Mentor, and it was the latter who
had to suggest that it might " lead to infinite gossip about c fixing
up a Cabinet' — might arouse suspicion, start unpleasant rumor,
and create needless prejudice."

Mr. Conkling had allowed himself to be partially conciliated
before the election and had aided in the electoral struggle, but
became an increasingly prominent object for conciliation after the
election. General Garfield and Mr. Blaine were equally desir-
ous of harmony in the interests of effectiveness, but neither
was willing to sacrifice one faction to another. They believed
that justice and patience would, in the end, destroy faction and
beget peace. The question was indeed considered by Mr. Gar-
field, Mr. Blaine, and some others, whether a reconciliation
might not be brought about by asking Mr. Conkling into the
Cabinet. General Garfield thought that if he should accept and
there should be peace all would be well. If it were to be war,
fighting at short range might be better than from behind the
entrenchments of an executive session. Yet he could never
quite get his own consent to the suggestion, though there was a
certain audacity in it that made it interesting. Mr. Blaine on
reflection felt that it would be unwise and impracticable, partly
for reasons personal to Mr. Conkling, partly because it would
produce a coalition Cabinet with proverbial failure waiting
upon it, and would alienate the 50,000 Garfield Republicans of
New York at the outset.

It would be personally unpleasant and politically disastrous to have him
in Cabinet association. . . . No Cabinet could get along with him, nor
could the President himself. . . . He would insult everybody hav-
ing business with his department whom he did not happen to like, and
he really happens to dislike about ninety-nine in every hundred of his

498 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

acquaintances. . . . Conkling is bound to go with you anyway if your
treatment of him be decent and honorable, and you will never deal other-
wise with him. . . . You can always trust a man not to saw off the
limb of a tree when he is on the other end.

General Garfield, to Mr. Blaine :

Mentor, O., January 15, 1881.

... I am disappointed at your resol ution about coming here, for I want
to see you for very many reasons. Still it may be better to postpone your
coming until February — sometime during the first half of that month. I
think you had better come openly, as others have come, and let the public
put any construction on it they please. Perhaps by that time the affairs
in New York will be in such a shape that I can go there. But until the
trials are disposed of, I don1! think it best to put myself in a position to be
clawed over by a Democratic Tombs lawyer. I had heard that you
favored Wayne McVeagh. Don't you think the latter would meet two
wants, viz., satisfy Cameron, and please the Independents ? Write me
fully on these points. . . . The oftener you write the better I shall be
pleased.

January 17. How do you feel over the financial outlook ? Think of
$1,300,000 of money in circulation, with silver certificates increasing in-
definitely, the coinage of 89-cent dollars going on ad nauseam, and from
every unknown crack and cranny of the world the old fractional silver,
antedating I860, coming back to us, perhaps being manufactured be}Tond
our jurisdiction, and shipped here at a profit of twenty-five percent.,
and no law for retiring it. How many miles above Niagara are we ?

If the funding bill fixes the roll at three per cent., the law will fail. If
no bill passes, an extra session may be necessary, which is bad. Write me
on these things.

P.S. What I have said about old fractional silver would be made more
dangerous if publicly known.

To General Garfield, from Mr. Blaine :

U.S. Senate, January 18, 1881.
. . . . Your administration must be as actually and veritably clean
as that of was pretentiously and ostentatiously so.

January 20.

Don't say no to the following !

My judgment is very strong in favor of your coming to Washington for
a week or ten days — say from any day next week. . . . The vast
advantage of this would be found in the entire removal of all possible
jealousy. . . . Every man that goes to Mentor (I mean every leading
man) is popularly considered to be invited there, and those who are not,

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 499

feel jealous, wounded, and angry. If you came here you could hear
every man's story, all on equal basis, and none would be excluded. If
Conkling, Logan, Carpenter, Edmunds, and all others did not then see you
it would be their fault. This course commits you to nothing except a
patient and courteous hearing of the party chieftains, and a fair considera-
tion of their personal and party claims. This attention and civility, which
will cost you nothing, may save and avert infinite annoyance, and serious
trouble afterward.

This idea is not originally mine, but I most cordially and unreservedly
approve it. . . Unless you have some overwhelming reasons to the

contrary (which I cannot anticipate) I beg you will in this case yield to
the judgment of your best friends.

From General Garfield, to Mr. Blaine :

Mentor, O., January 24, 1881.

The Conkling men want me to go to them. They hear rumors which dis-
quiet them ; that they are to be ignored, etc. The road to Mentor is open
and they shall be welcomed and treated fairly. Cameron came, and I do
not hear that he complains of his treatment. One Senator writes me that
Conkling has heard that I interfered against him in the New York sen-
atorial election (which is not true), and the writer thinks I ought to go to
Washington and disabuse his mind on that question. I am not a suit6r for
favors at the hand of any who do not care to open correspondence with
me, and to appear to be so would create a world of misunderstandings.
If in the end they are treated fairly, it will cure the apprehension of evil
they now feel. In making the visit I should necessarily be compelled to
decline interviews with so many people, that the wounded birds would be
a majority. Besides, I know it will not be possible to gratify the wishes,
and even approximately meet the expectations, of most of those I should
consult. Two courses are open to me, as a substitute for the proposed
visit : First, To go to Washington a week or ten days before the inaugura-
tion, leaving the full cast of the Cabinet open until then. Second, To invite
Conkling and Logan and such others as may be thought best to visit me
here soon. What do you think of these propositions ?

I understand your embarrassment in coming. It is enhanced by the talk
of a class of people that you are to dominate the administration to the ex-
clusion of other elements. You can do a great deal to allay that fear. If
those I have named should come, or even be invited, it would relieve your
visit of embarrassment. ... I have only cared to keep your designa-
tion to the State Department a secret until well into February. Then I
prefer it should be known. The public has already passed judgment upon
the wisdom of the choice ; and the only motive I have had for secrecy was
to prevent the jealousy of rival forces. I mean to make an appointment
for New York which shall give Conkling no just ground of complaint, and
no undue advantage if he means fiffht.

500 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

The Southern member still eludes me, as Creusa's image eluded iEneas.
One by one the Southern roses fade. Do you know of a magnolia blossom
that will stand our Northern climate ?

To General Garfield, from Mr. Blaine :

U.S. Senate, January 28, 1881.

I have yours in regard to coming to Washington. I don't know but your
reasons are good. At all events I would not have you come against your
conviction and your will. I think, however, it would have the very happiest
effect if you were to invite Conkling and Logan to Mentor, — of course
inviting them separately, in neither*^ note mentioning the other, and there-
fore not recognizing that they are united in any common cause or repre-
senting any quasi-hostile force to you. ... I shall never urge a man
upon you for the Cabinet, but I will not hesitate to protest vigorously against
wrong men. I think that is a good distinction for me to observe.

If you intend to invite Logan and Conkling, please do so at once. You
need invite no one else. The Triumvirate will all have had a chance at
you, and the Garfield men proper care nothing for the etiquette of an
invitation. ... Excuse my freedom in tendering advice so lavishly,
but I am very anxious that you should do just the right thing with Conkling.

General Garfield, to Mr. Blaine :

Mentor, O., January 31, 1881.
I have written Logan (in answer to a recent letter making some sug-
gestions), and have invited him to visit me. T think he will come. I will
write Conkling and ask him to come here for a conference. Whatever his
answer, it will stop the cry of exclusiveness.

From General Garfield, to Mr. Blaine :

Mentor, ()., January 25, 1881.
I have just received a letter from Frye, in which he says there is danger
that the Legislature of Maine will adjourn about the middle of February.
You know about this better than I, and 1 write to say that whenever you
think it is necessary to make public your future plans by resignation, let
me know and I will send yon a formal letter which you can make the basis
of your resignation. I had supposed your Legislature would sit till into
March, and that you could stay in the Senate a day or two after the inaugu-
ration, and help organize the new Senate. Please let me know your wish
in this matter and write me immediately. Of course it will not do to run
any risk of having an appointment of a Senator made by your Governor.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 501

To General Garfield, from Mr. Blaine :

Washington, February 5, 1881.
. . . I want you to remember that you are elected President of the
United States, that the power of the Executive is lodged in your hands, and
that you have all the power and rights and are bound to assert and maintain
all the dignity and independence of the great office. All I fear is that your
instinctive generosity will carry you beyond the limits of fair justice to
yourself, and that you will err on that side. I say this because I do not
want you to trust the great patronage departments where there is the re-
motest danger of their being used adversely to your personal interests. You
want a secretary of the treasury and postmaster-general, to whom you can
talk as freely and as closely as you can to me, and in whose fidelity to you
personally there can be no shadow of doubt. ... I disclaim all and
every effort to force or attempt to force anybody on you, but I am awfully
anxious that you shall have a true friend in the treasury. ... I think
a Western man at the head of the treasury is a sine qua non for your
success. ... I beg you to keep your thoughts in that direction.

To General Garfield, from Mr. Blaine (by telegraph) :

February 9, 1881.
The count was perfectly smooth and unobstructed. You are now the
President-elect and inherit your great office by the divine right of a con-
stitutional majority. I congratulate the American people.

To General Garfield, from Mr. Blaine :

Washington, February 13, 1881.
... I have been confined to my room for a week with a sharp attack
of my old enemy, the gout. ... In some way gout is associated in
the public mind with drinking and high living, of neither of which
I am at all guilty. I inherit my diathesis, but manage by temperance
and careful living to run clear of outbreaks, but the execrable weather
of the past month betrayed me. I have improved my hours of misery
by reading " Trevelyan's Early Days of Fox,11 and am freshly reminded
that gout, at least in England, is the concomitant of wise statesmanship,
so that I hope your administration will not suffer from the only
physical ailment which I know myself to possess. In all other re-
gards my health has been exceedingly good throughout the winter.
. . . I suppose they have been after you in divers and sundry ways to
intervene in the Pennsylvania Senatorial fight. It seems to me that the
policy you proclaimed when I saw you in November of non-intervention in
all such matters is the only one you can wisely adopt ami safely follow.
. . . I am afraid there are cunning preparations being made by a small

502 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

cabal to steal half a million a year during your administration. I again beg
you to keep yourself free from all possible committals as to the minor
Cabinet which in the department is even more important than the major.
I beg you also to be very careful ... as some harpies have designs there,
inconsistent with your wishes for the public welfare. Mr. Lincoln used to
say " anybody " could be always had, but " somebody " was most difficult to
find. How truly you realize this in your search for the seven Constitutional
advisers. . . . N. tells me that he faithfully narrated to you all that I
charged him with respecting the importance of giving to William E.
Chandler the Solicitor-Generalship.

Tell Mrs. Garfield we are all waiting to welcome her to the national
palace. Of courtiers there will be many, but of true friends there will also
be many.

General Garfield to Mr. Blaine :

Mentor, February 15, 1881.
I too have been reading Trevelyan's " Life of Fox." Brilliant as the
book is I am sure it cannot altogether alienate the pains of gout, even
though that disease appears to have added lustre to the fame of Lord
Chatham.

To the President-elect, from Mr. Blaine :

Washington, February 16, 1881.

. . I assume that you will give one place to New England, one place
to New York, one place to Pennsylvania, and one to the South. This leaves
you only three for the great West, extending from the base of the
Alleghanies to the foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains. No Republican
Cabinet has been organized from Lincoln's till now that did not assign three
members to this great section, unless we except some of those extraor-
dinary combinations of Grant's in which at one time he put two Massa-
chusetts men into the Cabinet, and at another, two New York men. But
Grant's notions of Cabinet-making are abnormal. . . . When you take
the nine Republican States that begin with Ohio and end with Kansas, you
have the very heart of the Republican party, and your administration must
nurture, develop, and sustain the party in those States. Not satisfied with
its strength to-day, you must increase it by strong additions in Ohio and
Indiana and by better organization and discipline in Illinois.

. . The last two Southern Cabinet members came from Tennessee.
Would it not be better to seek a representative from another State ? The
more 1 turn the subject over " upside down and t'other end to," the more
I come to the conclusion that Wayne MacVeagh on the whole is the strong
hold for Pennsylvania and for the Reformers. There is no other Cabinet
stone in your hand that will kill so many political dogs at one throw. I
guess you'd better fire it.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 503

March 1. This idea strikes me: why might it not be wise to consult
Conkling himself? ... I have a notion that he would as lief have one as
the other.

Senate Chamber, Washington.

My dear President-elect and to-day actual: . . . You do not
want to be bothered with Cabinet matters this forenoon. I shall so infer
unless you send me word otherwise. I will report at the White House as
soon after the inauguration as possible. I have not entered it for thirty-
seven months, my last visit being February 4, 1878.

Better let things remain in statu quo until after you reach the White
House.

Riggs House, Washington, 10 A.M., March 4, 1881.
Dear Blaine : . . . Come to me at the White House the first mo-
ment I am free. With the love of comradeship of eighteen years and with

faith in the next four,

I am as ever yours,

J. A. Garfield.

Mr. Blaine at once assumed the office of Secretary of State,
an office to which he was as imperatively designated by the will
of the people, as he was cordially appointed by the President.
On the 5th of March, Walker, to his great joy, was appointed
by his father a clerk in the Department of State and private
secretary to the Secretary of State, an employment most con-
genial to his tastes, but whose priceless perquisite was that it
enabled him to live where his heart always remained^ at home.
Mr. Robert R. Hitt, First Secretary of Legation in Paris,
was summoned home to become First Assistant Secretary of
State, — and the cherished life-long friend of the Secretary.

To Mr. Blaine, the globe in his library was like an inspiration.
On it he would trace, with a friend, not only the geography of
the earth, but the paths and progress of the human race. He
saw overcrowded Europe with its four hundred millions di-
vided into hostile camps, forever jostling each other, and over-
crowded Asia with its eight hundred millions laborious, patient,
silent, and between them our own continent stretching north
and south, — the natural entrepot of both worlds, but unaware
and inactive. It had been too busily occupied with growing to
take measurement of its growth. Its boastful, youthful talk
had happily subsided, but it had not yet quite learned that it was
entitled to an authoritative voice among the nations. " Friend-

504 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

ship with all " can never be a maxim outworn. " Entangling
alliances " is a phrase which our happy history has robbed of
its appositeness. So the country lay supine, a sleeping beauty,
waiting the magic touch that should arouse her to her rightful
inheritance.

When Mr. Blaine entered political life, Protection could
hardly be called a living question. It was little more than
what General Hancock had named it, a " local issue," and its
locality was limited. Its inter-relations were imperfectly seen,
and therefore its universality was hardly imagined. In the
West and Northwest even Republican platforms and leaders
advocated a tariff for revenue only. Mr. Blaine disputed this
ground at the beginning, and incessantly advocated a tariff for
the protection of American labor, for the upbuilding of manu-
facture, for the rewarding of agriculture, for the increase of
commercial interchange and the establishment of practical as
well as theoretical independence of foreign countries. The vast
and perfectly free internal trade among the States he repeatedly
brought to public notice and debate. While the nation was
waking to the importance of this trade, and was growing rich
and replete under this policy of protection, he was looking to
new fields in which the enterprise already begun, the industry
already engaged, and the wealth already produced, should find
still further extension. At last the opportunity had come.

He laid out his work in the most practical manner. Holding
that the whole continent belongs to the new order, he viewed
Canada as already in the line of natural assimilation, akin in
blood, traditions, institutions, and safely to be left to the peace-
ful development of time. The Latin nations to the south, of a
different race but tending to Republican institutions, would
have a healthier growth by retaining their autonomies, but
could be cherished and strengthened by the great republic of
the north. The bickerings, turmoil, revolutions, which made
their daily chronicles, once removed and, still better, prevented,
industry would find its natural reward in wealth, and wealth
would stimulate industry. Their inexhaustible material re-
sources would be developed. Trade relations would speedily
be established. The South furnishing all that Ave lack and
needing what we can supply, commercial treaties would be

■■•.-.♦♦.•.■;*- .

SIP

. .■■■:;•■■■ ■■:■■

MR. BLAINE AT FIFTY-ONE.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 505

made. Reciprocity, the complement of Protection, would
speedily follow. Political harmony, international friendship,
and national prosperity would enable the American republics
to give the law to the world, and that law would be peace, and
in the train of peace, prosperity, true progress, happiness.

But first must be peace. This, Mr. Blaine believed could be
accomplished only by the aid of our own country, which must at
once abandon her attitude of segregation and isolation, and as-
sume the fraternal relations and responsibilities of a nation not
only the most powerful of the Western hemisphere, but the
founder and, in some sense, the guarantor and guardian of
Republican principles on the American continent. European
powers had been interested in promoting strife between the
Spanish- American countries. Weak Southern republics were
in European toils, unwilling victims, unwitting accomplices of
those who had no interest in republics save to wrest from them
personal gain ; whose object was to foment the discord which it
was our advantage to allay. Mr. Blaine's purpose was to con-
solidate their interests and conciliate their friendship with the
strong republic of the North, — ultimately building up by the
natural alliances of mental activity, comfort, and culture, a con-
tinental system of governments by the people and for the
people, in which the United States should hold the first place
because first in the confidence of all. His aspiration was to
win for our country the primacy of peace, otherwhere sought
through war. He believed the time had fully come to estab-
lish and perpetuate the Republic of God; to show that the path
of prosperity need not be a way of blood and tears, but lies
along the prosperity and happiness of other nations.

Immediately a revivification, which was like the thrill of new
life, stirred in the republic. A straw shows the way of the
wind ; a despatch addressed to one of the smaller Southern
nations, the new Secretary directed to be re-written with greater
deference, explaining, " We will reserve that tone for the
strong nations." It was evident that occasional and inciden-
tal intervention was inadequate, and that a comprehensive
plan should be adopted if war were to cease in the Western
hemisphere. Formal proposals should be made and discussion
shared by all the States, of some method by which the Christian

506 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

principles of Christian nations should prevail in national affairs.
Southern turbulence was recognized as not a theme for jest,
still less a reason for avoidance, but a matter for the concen-
tration of the most serions thought. The President and the
Secretary of State agreed upon a plan to invite all the inde-
pendent governments of North and South America to meet in
a Peace Congress at Washington.

Mr. John Quincy Adams, who put the Monroe doctrine into
the President's message in 1823, had planned a similar Congress
to meet at the Isthmus of Panama; but the plan encountered
great opposition in the National Congress, and was never car-
ried out. The country adopted enough of the Adams-Monroe
doctrine to keep the heavy hand of the Holy Alliance from
forcing the revolted colonies back to Spain, but slept while
England put her vigorous sickle to the harvests which the
United States had enabled the South to plant, but had forbid-
den Spain to reap. So far short of comprehending the
Adams-Monroe doctrine had our statesmen been, that in the
Clayton-Bulwer treaty they had formulated and, as Great Brit-
ain maintained, had perpetuated equality of transit rights
between herself and the United States, across the isthmus.
For sixty years the slumber had lasted when Garfield and
Blaine opened a new page and summoned to Washington a
Congress of all the Americas.

The three republics of Chile, Peru, and Bolivia were in a
state of war whose result had been not only defeat for Peru, but
a dissolution of her government. To secure the attention
and attendance of these States, tranquillity must first be re-
stored. It was a matter of great importance and delicacy to
interpose for the autonomy of the conquered without trenching
upon the sensitive pride of the conqueror, to convince both that
it was against the interests of all that a South American nation
should perish. A provisional government had been formed in
Peru and was viewed with favor by Chile. The American
Minister was instructed to recognize it if it were supported by
the character and intelligence of Peru, and were honestly work-
ing to reestablish domestic order and restore peace with Chile;
to assure the Peruvians of the sympathy of the United States,
and to encourage them to accept even hard conditions, rather

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 507

than by demanding too much, to force the continuance of
Chilian control.

At the same time, recognizing the rights which Chile had ac-
quired by success, the Minister was instructed to impress upon
the Chilian authorities, in possession of Peru, that the more
liberal and considerate their policy the surer would it be to
secure a lasting settlement. Relying upon Chile's declaration
that it was not a war for conquest, but for guarantee of future
peace, he was to exert all his influence to induce Chile not to
insist upon cession of territory, the last humiliation of war, as
a sine qua non of peace, as a condition precedent to negotiation,
but only as a subject of negotiation ; and to secure for the
provisional government a sufficient freedom and force of action
to give it standing at home and abroad.

The same friendly voice warned off intruders and gave notice
that American questions were to be disentangled from foreign
and monarchical complications. With the assurance that the
government of the United States was seeking only to perform
the part of a friend to all the South American republics, were
coupled the significant hint and hope that the negotiations for
peace would be conducted, and final settlement between the two
countries determined, without invoking on either side the aid
or intervention of any European power ; and that the United
States would regret to be compelled to consider how far a more
active interposition might be forced upon it, by any attempted
complication of this question with European politics.

Even the friendly overtures of the French President towards
concerted intervention by France, Great Britain, and the United
States were sympathetically and respectfully declined, with the
reminder that the United States had not belonged to that
system of States, of which France and Great Britain are im-
portant members, and had never participated or desired to
participate in the adjustment of their contentions ; while by
their proximity of situation, similarity in origin and frame of
government, unity of political interest on all questions of foreign
intercourse, and their geographical remoteness from Europe,
the republics of America are younger sisters of this govern-
ment.

The same warning signal was promptly hoisted over the

508 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Isthmus of Panama. Mr. Blaine saw that the increasing com-
merce of the world pressing hard up against our shores could not
much longer be restrained, but must pierce that narrow neck of
land and flow through from ocean to ocean irresistible as their
tides. Many thought he was making a casus belli. He was sim-
ply making good the coast-line of America. The Great Powers
of Europe, already considering a joint guarantee of the fut-
ure interoceanic canal, were reminded that every step deemed
requisite in the premises had been taken by this government
in the last generation and required no reenforcement, accession,
or assent from any other power ; that this government had al-
ways vindicated the neutrality so guaranteed, and apprehended
no contingency in which such vindication would not be within
its power; and that any movement towards supplementing this
guarantee would be regarded as an uncalled for intrusion.
The integrity of our motives was set forth with no less frank-
ness and detail than the distinctness of our intention to
retain political control of the isthmus transit in cooperation
with the United States of Colombia and with the United States
of Colombia only, of whose coast-line, equally with our own, the
projected canal would form a part. Professing and proving
a policy of peace and friendship towards every government and
people, this government conveyed in the plainest manner its
conviction that any extension to our shores of the political
system by which the Great Powers have controlled and deter-
mined events in Europe, would be attended with danger to the
peace and welfare of this nation. Emphasis was laid upon the
fact that this was not the development of a new course or
the beginning of aggressive measures. It was the pronounced
adherence of the United States to principles long since enun-
ciated by the highest authority of the government, and now
firmly inwoven as an integral and important part of our na-
tional policy.

With England as the most interested, the most aggressive, and
the strongest maritime nation, the argument was pressed the
closest ; and essential modifications of the Clayton-Bulwer
treaty, made more than thirty years before under exceptional
conditions which had long ceased to exist, were urged with
a clearness and force which have never been met, while the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 509

Secretary's familiar acquaintance with British history, from
the earliest time to our own, enabled him to use the argumentum
ad hominem with a force that never can be met. The Ameri-
can Minister was instructed, and empowered if necessary, cour-
teously to communicate his instructions, that " this government,
with respect to European States, will not consent to perpetuate
any treaty that impeaches our rightful and long-established claim
to priority on the American continent ; that the right of Euro-
pean powers to assent to the terms of neutrality implies the right
to dissent, and thus the whole question would be thrown open
for contention as an international issue ; that it is the fixed pur-
pose of the United States to consider it strictly and solely as
an American question, to be dealt with and decided by the
American powers. . . . Whenever, in the judgment of the
United States government, the time shall be auspicious and the
conditions favorable for the construction of the Nicaraguan canal,
no aid will be needed outside of the resources of our own govern-
ment and people. . . . Between the United States and the
other American Republics there can be no hostility, no jealousy,
no rivalry, no distrust — the United States will act in entire har-
mony with the governments within whose territory the canals
shall be located. The present proposal of this government is
to free the Clayton-Bulwer treaty from embarrassing features,
and to leave it, as its framers intended it should be, a full and
perfect settlement, for all time, of all possible issues between
the United States and Great Britain with regard to Central
America." It was urged that the existing status was practical
abrogation, since no agreement was ever reached as to what its
language meant ; and should be recognized by the formal abro-
gation of certain clauses, especially the one forbidding the
United States to fortify the canal in conjunction with the
country in which it was to be located. This clause, Mr. Blaine
pointed out, left the great naval power of Great Britain perfectly
unrestrained while preventing the United States from using its
equally illimitable military power. Clear-sighted English jour-
nals saw at once and proclaimed that the Secretary of State de-
signed to establish a despotism over all the Americas, while the
directness of his language caused great distress to the etiquette
of England ; but no one furnished a formula under which

510 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

American determination to take this continent in hand alone
could be so diplomatically couched as to win the approbation
of England.

To the new administration which had just come into power
in Mexico, the new administration of the North sent cordial
congratulations, desiring that the ties of commercial and indus-
trial interchange should be so continued and increased as to
strengthen the mutual good-will of the two countries, and that
the development of Mexican resources, even by cooperation of
United States citizens, should be for the primary benefit of the
Mexican people themselves, recognizing in the independence and
integrity of the Mexican nation a natural finality which enabled
both Republics to unite in a closer union of political sympathy
and friendship.

Trouble having arisen between Mexico and Guatemala on a
question of boundaries, the latter State asked the good offices
of this government as the natural protector of Republican
interests. They were promptly and warmly rendered. The
unselfishness of American interposition was illustrated by the
support which the United States had freely lent to Mexico even
when we were engaged in a desperate domestic struggle, and
only that broader selfishness was appealed to which involves the
benefit of all in the benefit of one. To upbuild strong Re-
publican governments in Spanish America, and to cement the
natural union of these Republics against the tendencies of other
and distant forms of government, was avowed to be the cher-
ished plan of the President ; and the strength, the generosity, and
the friendliness of Mexico were alike and earnestly addressed
in favor of a settlement of differences by diplomacy or by
arbitration, rather than by the conflict of arms. Mexico was
reminded that the two governments acting in cordial harmony
could induce all other independent governments of North and
South America to aid in fixing the policy of peace forever
between nations of the Western hemisphere. With or with-
out the cooperation of Mexico, this government announced its
determination to continue the policy of peace.

When the Guatemalan Envoy was presented to the President,
complimentary reference was made to his family, honorably
distinguished at the siege of Saragossa, and the President

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 511

expressed his great personal and official interest in the reunion
of Central America, and his hope to see its accomplishment dur-
ing his own administration.

Watchmen on the outer walls reported that Great Britain was
insinuating herself between Hawaii and the United States.
Instantly the American flag was flung. Hawaii was a preempted
and important port of American commerce encircling the world.
It was officered by Americans, and was to be held by Ameri-
cans. The Hawaiian government was assured that if any other
power should deem it proper to employ undue influence to per-
suade or compel action in derogation of the treaty of 1875, the
government of the United States would not be unobservant of its
rights and interests, and would be neither unwilling nor unpre-
pared to support the Hawaiian government in the faithful dis-
charge of its treaty obligations. The good will of the Hawaiian
government was not impeached, and its desire to carry out
treaty provisions in good faith was encouraged, but the Ameri-
can position was restated with a comprehensiveness which in-
cluded every form of finesse or legal technicality whereby
Hawaii, without formal change of government, might be brought
under the controlling influence of a foreign power. " The gov-
ernment of the United States has always avowed and now
repeats that, under no circumstances will it permit the transfer
of the territory or sovereignty of these islands to any of the
European powers. It is too obvious for argument that the pos-
session of these islands by a great maritime power would not
only be a dangerous diminution of the just and necessary in-
fluence of the United States in the waters of the Pacific, but
in case of international difficulty it would be a positive threat
to American interests too important to be lightly risked.

" The policy of this country with regard to the Pacific is the
natural complement to its Atlantic policy. The history of our
European relations for fifty years shows the jealous concern with
which the United States has guarded its control of the coast
from foreign interference. Its attitude toward Cuba is in point.
That rich island, the key to the Gulf of Mexico, is, though in
the hands of Spain, a part of the American commercial system.
My predecessor, Mr. Secretary Everett, showed that, without
forcing or even coveting possession of the island, its condition

512 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

was essentially an. American question ; that if ever ceasing to
be Spanish, Cuba must necessarily become American, and not
fall under any other European domination, and that the cease-
less movement of segregation of American interests from Euro-
pean control, and unification in a broader American sphere of
independent life, could not and should not be checked. The
material possession of Hawaii is not desired by the United States
any more than was that of Cuba. But under no circumstances
can the United States permit any change in the territorial con-
trol of either which would cut it adrift from the American system,
whereto they both indispensably belong, by the operation of natu-
ral laws, and must belong by the operation of political necessity.
The United States was one of the first among the great nations
of the world to take an active interest in the upbuilding of
Hawaiian independence, and the creation of a new and potential
life for its people. It has consistently endeavored, and with
success, to enlarge the material prosperity of Hawaii on an inde-
pendent basis. It proposes to be equally unremitting in its
efforts hereafter to maintain and develop the advantages which
have accrued to Hawaii, and to draw closer the ties which imper-
atively unite it to the great body of American Commonwealths.
It firmly believes that the position of the Hawaiian Islands, as
the key to the dominion of the American Pacific, demands their
neutrality, to which end it will earnestly cooperate with the
native government. If, through any cause, the maintenance of
such a position of neutrality should be found by Hawaii to be
impracticable, this government would then unhesitatingly meet
the altered situation by seeking an avowedly American solution
for the grave issues presented."

The attention of the administration was not, however, ab-
sorbed by the new policy, or hostile to the Old World. The
United States Minister at St. Petersburg was directed to
consult informally with his British colleague there, touching
wrongs done to American and British Hebrews in Russia, and
the United States Minister at London was instructed to bring
the subject to the formal attention of Her Britannic Majesty's
government, in the firm belief that the community of interests
between the United States and England in this great question
of civil rights and equal tolerance of creed for their respective

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 513

citizens in foreign lands would lead to consideration of the
matter with a view to common action thereon. It was suggested
that a movement might be initiated embracing other powers
whose service in the work of progress was commensurate with our
own, to the end that Russia might be influenced by their joint
representations, and that, while abating no part of his intention
to press upon the Russian government the just claim of Ameri-
can citizens to less harsh treatment in the empire by reason of
their faith, the President would await with pleasure an oppor-
tunity for an interchange of views upon the subject with the
government of Her Majesty.

Upon the assassination of Czar Alexander, nine days after
President Garfield's inauguration, the American government
was prompt to signalize not only its abhorrence of assassination
as a crime and a failure, but American gratitude to the slain
emperor. It recalled his generous policy towards this country
in its hour of supreme trial — more noticeable in contrast with
the policy of England and of France. The latter the Secretary
was careful however to attribute to the already overthrown
dynasty of Buonaparte, and not to the French people, who
"have always been our friends;" and with the heartiest wishes
for the success of the new Emperor as a sovereign joined wishes
as hearty for the prosperity and happiness of the Russian people.

The Irish question, over which England has for generations
struggled with varying degrees of failure, vexed the politics of
this as of other administrations. Law-abiding Irishmen, natu-
ralized into American citizens, and imprisoned by the British
authorities upon accusation of crime while visiting their mother-
country, are a fruitful source of trouble. This government dis-
claimed desire to shield any citizens from the legal consequences
of their acts, but it must " insist upon the safeguards common to
English and American law — the right of the accused to be in-
formed immediately upon arrest of the specific crime or offence
upon which he is held, to be afforded an opportunity for
a speedy trial before an impartial court and jury, and to prompt
release in case there is no specific charge against him."

When the Umpire of the Spanish Claims Commission gave an
opinion whose effect was to undo a decree of court naturaliz-
ing a Spanish claimant, the State Department extinguished it

514 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

with the simple principle that Congress can exercise no greater
right overan American citizen than the Constitution gives, and
that what the Executive Department cannot do, it cannot per-
mit a commission to do ; and the timeliness and vigor of their
utterance gave to these old truths a new power.

The Secretary's report upon our consular courts in Eastern
countries, pointing out defects and suggesting needed modifica-
tions in the extra-territorial jurisdictional systems, is brought
into strong relief by the great movement which, fifteen years
afterwards, is changing the face of the Eastern world.

All this wide-reaching beneficence came to a crazy and calam-
itous end.

From the great measures which the President loved he was
necessarily often called to consider minor but important points :
the filling of subordinate offices, the reconciling of small and
often of selfish interests, all of which, however distasteful, was
indispensable to the smooth running of the government machin-
ery, and was therefore his imperative duty. It was such details
that made him cry out one day impatiently to Mr. Blaine, " T have
been dealing all these years with ideas, and here I am dealing
only with persons. I have been heretofore treating of the
fundamental principles of government, and here I am consider-
ing all day whether A or B shall be appointed to this or that
office." And again, " My God ! what is there in this place that
a man should ever want to get into it?"

While conducting his own department with a novel vigor
which was sometimes mistaken for aggressiveness, Mr. Blaine
steadfastly upheld the President through his lesser cares and
annoyances with cheerful common-sense, never making small
things great, or great things small. He acted on one principle,
" To all complaints whether coming from high or low there is
but one answer to give, — treat both sides fairly, and in this
line you must be as firm and resolute as if you were fighting
Chickamauga over again." Regarding two men who found
themselves unable to work together, he suggested to the
President, " I am to-day sitting in a Cabinet with two associ-
ates who have abused me far more and far more harshly than
ever A abused B. A never impeached B's personal or official
integrity. Both C and I) have attempted to publicly impeach

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 515

mine. If you can show the magnanimity of overlooking what
A said of you — when you are directly responsible for his
appointment — surely B can overlook what he said of him
when he is not responsible at all. Do as you please in your
own best judgment."

He believed that the President had showed a chivalric
generosity towards all comers, sometimes to his own manifest
disadvantage. " Blaine and I," the President once said, " have
too much feeling to be where we are — we have too much pain
in the refusals we have constantly to make."

The Secretary believed the power and dignity of the Execu-
tive involved in the right of nomination to the great offices.
" John Sherman at the height of his prestige as Secretary of
the Treasury desired removals and appointments to which Presi-
dent Hayes could not consent, and Sherman submitted. You
are a far greater man than Hayes, and John Sherman is a far
greater man than F. If Sherman should submit to Hayes, a
fortiori should F submit to Garfield. If F carries his point
now, you will have seven masters in the Cabinet instead of
seven ministers under your own Constitutional direction."

From New York he wrote the President of the " splendid
impression your work has made," and " If the gentlemen who
have had nine or ten consecutive large appointments are growl-
ing, it only shows their utter unreasonableness and discloses
the design that would have used your administration to crush
your friends."

But these troubles were over. Mr. Conkling, leader of the
defeated faction, whose large capacity for discontent and extraor-
dinary ability in its expression had induced the most vigor-
ous and persistent attacks on the constitutional prerogatives
of the Chief Executive, falsified Mr. Blaine's augury, and
sawed off the limb of the tree while he was on its outer end.
Failing to secure from President Garfield all the appointments
which he imperiously demanded, and from the Senate the rejec-
tion of all those which he imperiously opposed, he resigned his
seat in that body. His constituents acquiesced in his action, re-
fused to return him to the Senate, and he was thus forever
retired from public life.

On the evening of June 30, the President walked from the

516 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

White House to Mr. Blaine's. Mrs. Blaine, chancing to see
him from the window, immediately opened the door to him her-
self, and perhaps gave him one more night in this world ; for the
assassin, lurking in the darkness opposite, faltered. When the
visit was concluded, Mr. Blaine walked home with the President
leisurely, and again his life was spared, for the assassin follow-
ing stealthily behind, could not nerve himself in the double
presence. The President was to go next day to Massachusetts
to celebrate the anniversary of his college, and Mr. Blaine
promised to meet him at the White House and accompany him
to the station. In the morning the President's elder sons,
boys of fourteen and sixteen, who were going with him, rushed
into their father's room as soon as they were up and before he
had risen, and in the heat of youthful blood one of them took
a flying leap over his bed. " There," exclaimed the youngster,
"you are President of the United States, but you can't do
that." — " I don't know about that" said the President of the
United States, and immediately rose and did it ; and further,
tucking a boy under each arm, carried them to their rooms and
depositing them on the floor bade them " dress."

Mr. Blaine awoke late, and to keep his appointment drove to
the White House before breakfast, begging his family to await
his return. They waited and he did not come.

He had driven to the station with the President " slowly,
in conscious enjoyment of the beautiful morning, with an un-
wonted sense of leisure and a keen anticipation of pleasure."
They alighted and walked arm in arm nearly across the outer
room when the assassin fired the fatal bullet. It wrought a
fell work, but it passed Mr. Blaine by four inches.

Through all that sad summer the centre of the administra-
tion was a bed of weakness and pain, and never a great
country moved so softly. It seemed as if a hush was upon the
world. Hope rose and fell and swayed again ; rumors chased
each other, buoyant, sanguine, despairing. Men became pres-
ently aware that the bulletins of Mr. Blaine might be depended
on, and waited for them — as they that watch for the morning.
They were scientifically prepared, from personal observation,
surgical consultation, careful comparison, with delicate judg-
ment, in measured and accurate language. When there was

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 517

ground for encouragement he gave it freely, but it was in
the midst of rose-colored reports that his steady good faith with
the people gave them premonition of the end.

It came on the nineteenth of September.

During the long illness Mr. Blaine was practically at the head
of the administration, and the tranquillity of a self-governing
people was not for one moment disturbed. After the death of
the President the Vice-President took the oath of office and
became President.

Mr. Arthur had not been nominated to the vice-presidency
with a view to the succession. His political experience and
apparently his political interest had been chiefly confined to the
city of New York. With Mr. Blaine his relations had been en-
tirely friendly, though never intimate. When, under President
Hayes' administration, Mr. Blaine had thought him too severely
attacked as Collector of the Port of New York, he had defended
him warmly. Walker, in a letter of that time, had written from
New York :

" . . . I met Collector Arthur, who was very cordial, inviting
me to his house and to the Custom House, and telling me that
he would be very glad to do for me anything that lay in his
power. c Your father has laid me under a debt of gratitude,'
said he. ' Of course I learnt of his speech only in confidence,
but he made a magnificent defence for me in Executive ses-
sion.' "

The transition from the collectorship to continental politics — -
for the vice-presidency need not be accounted of — was abrupt.
Those who were nearest the Vice-President at the time of the
assassination thought him alive to the magnitude of the issue, and
the impressiveness of the situation ; thought that he dreaded
rather than desired the Presidency. When the hour came he
bore the test as well as the country had a right to expect. So
long as Mr. Blaine remained in the State Department, its foreign
policy was wide in scope, high in motive, positive, progressive,
imposing. When he retired, it was broken in pieces. To its
integrity and to its destruction the President maintained an
attitude of equal acquiescence.

On the 22d of September Mr. Blaine, with the other mem-
bers of the Cabinet, tendered his resignation. President Arthur

518 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

desired all to remain until after the regular meeting of Congress
in December. On October 13th Mr. Blaine renewed his resigna-
tion in a note to the President :

As Secretary Windom's expected return to the Senate may precipitate a
vacancy in the Treasury Department in a few days, I have thought it might
also render an earlier reconstruction of your Cabinet desirable to you. In
that event I trust you will not be embarrassed, at least so far as I am con-
cerned, by your previous assignment of a date for withdrawal. It will be
entirely agreeable to me to turn over the department to my successor on
any clay that will prove most desirable and convenient for yourself. I
intended to say this to you yesterday, but from pressure of other things
forgot it.

The President repeated his request that Mr. Blaine should
remain until December, and he remained.

In October came the pleasing duty of receiving the guests of
the nation, the families of Yon Steuben and of Lafayette, who in
July had been invited to be present at our centennial celebra-
tions, especially of the surrender of Yorktown. In writing the
invitations, care was taken to distribute the glory and the grati-
tude as widely as possible over the countries of the respective
guests. In arranging their reception and entertainment, espe-
cially the five days' trip to Yorktown, Mr. Blaine and Mr. Hitt
generously awarded the lion's share of the work and the praise
to Walker, whose appointment, July 1, as Third Assistant Secre-
tary had been a pleasant surprise from President Garfield, and
was the last appointment that he signed. Alsace and Lorraine
were still in the memory of France, and Yorktown itself was
celebrating British defeat, but the strong spirit of peace over-
bore all discord, and when Mr. Blaine pronounced that " in
recognition of the friendly relations so long and so happily sub-
sisting between Great Britain and the United States, in the trust
and confidence of peace and good will between the two conti-
nents, for all the centuries to come, ... it is hereby ordered
that at the close of these services, commemorative of the valor
and success of our forefathers in their patriotic struggle for
independence, the British flag shall be saluted by the forces of
the army and navy of the United States now at Yorktown,"
the great acclaim was echoed around the world.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 519

Arrangements for the Peace Congress, which had been inter-
rupted by the assassination, were renewed, and on the 29th
of November the President extended "to all the independent
countries of North and South America an earnest invitation
to participate in a General Congress to be held in the city of
Washington on the twenty-fourth day of November, 1882, for the
purpose of considering and discussing the methods of prevent-
ing war between the nations of America. He desires that the
attention of the Congress shall be strictly confined to this one
great object ; that its sole aim shall be to seek a way of per-
manently averting the horrors of cruel and bloody combat be-
tween countries, oftenest of one blood and speech, or the even
worse calamity of internal commotion and civil strife ; that it
shall regard the burdensome and far-reaching consequences of
such struggles, exhausted finances, oppressive debt, onerous taxa^
tion, ruined cities, paralyzed industries, devastated fields, ruthless
conscription, the slaughter of men, the grief of the widow and
the orphan ; — with a legacy of embittered resentments, that long
survive those who provoked them and heavily afflict the innocent
generations that come after."

The day was set far ahead in the hope that Chile, Peru, and
Bolivia might compose their differences in season to take part
in the deliberations of the Congress.

Instructions to the ministers to Peru and Chile had been
explicit, and were framed with a view to the reestablishment of
domestic order and the restoration of peace. The sympathy of
the United States was freely proffered, and while the claims
of American citizens were to be defended, the ministers were
cautioned against taking unfair advantage of the disturbed con-
dition of society, either in pressing American claims or in adopt-
ing and pushing the claims of citizens or corporations of other
countries. Some misapprehensions of facts or some mistakes of
judgment by the ministers, partly occasioned perhaps by the
pardonable error of too great sympathy with the nation to which
each was accredited, created erroneous and hurtful impressions
in Peru and Chile regarding the intentions of the United States,
and special envoys were sent to the two countries, not to su-
persede the ministers, but to assume control of the negotiations.
In this delicate matter, bearing not only on the general interests

520 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

of peace, but on the especial interests of trie new movement
for continental friendship, the Secretary selected two men in
whose diplomacy he had the utmost confidence, Hon. William
H. Trescott, a South Carolina Democrat, who had been assist-
ant secretary of State under General Cass and special envoy
to China, and Walker Blaine.

Unhappily before they reached their destination Mr. Blaine's
resignation of the secretaryship had taken effect, Mr. Freling-
huysen's appointment had been confirmed, and an attack upon
his predecessor's policy was made all along the line. The in-
vitations to the Peace Congress were practically cancelled by
Secretary Frelinghuysen January 9, 1882, but not before half
the nations invited, and by far the most populous half, had
gladly and even enthusiastically accepted them. An inaccu-
rate copy of the invitation was surreptitiously published and
misrepresented in newspapers. Secretary Blaine's instructions
to the special envoys were published, together with new in-
structions practically revoking the former and without notice
to the envoys who were thereby publicly discredited, and whose
mission was practically reduced to witnessing the spoliation of
Peru. Private letters to Secretary Blaine were garbled and
sent to the Senate. A persistent attempt was made to wear
away the foreign policy of the Garfield administration with the
corrosion of personal scandal, and to substitute for it a home
policy of which no other object appeared than the destruction
of Mr. Blaine as a political power. Investigations were set
on foot in which prolonged and vindictive effort was made to
prove that, as the popular mind apprehended it, his South Amer-
ican policy had consisted in trying to put the guano beds of Peru
into his own pocket. While official papers still slept in the
State Department rumors were started outside that Mr. Blaine
meant to plunge the country into war, that the Peace Congress
had been convoked without President Arthur's knowledge, that
Messrs. Trescott and Walker Blaine had been despatched with
secret instructions from the Secretary, and the nation was con-
gratulated that Mr. Frelinghuysen, if not so brilliant a Secretary
as Mr. Blaine, was " safe."

Mr. Blaine was more than ever impatient at the malign petti-
ness of the men and the measures employed to overthrow him,

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 521

but he availed himself of this ignoble opposition to unfold his
plans to the public view and stamp them on the American mind,
so that whatever the issue of the moment, the great policy of
peace, of continental fraternity, of Christian government, should
be the policy of the future. As always lie fought in the open.
He addressed to the President a public letter of remonstrance :

To the President of the United States :

February 3, 1882.

The suggestion that a Congress of all American nations should assemble
in the city of Washington for the purpose of agreeing on such a basis of
arbitration for International troubles as would remove all possibility of war
in the Western Hemisphere, was warmly approved by your predecessor.

. . After your accession to the Presidency I acquainted you with the
project, and submitted to you a draft for the invitation. You received the
suggestion with appreciative consideration, and, after carefully examining
the form of invitation, directed it to be sent. . . . In a communication,
recently sent to the Senate, addressed by the present Secretary of State the
ninth of last month to Mr. Trescott, now on a special mission to Peru and
Chile, I was greatly surprised to find a proposition looking to the annul-
ment of these invitations, and I was still more surprised when I read the
reasons assigned. I quote Mr. Frelinghuysen1s language :

" The United States is at peace with all nations, and the President
wishes hereafter to determine whether it will conduce to the general peace,
which he would cherish and promote, for this government to enter into
negotiations and consultation for the promotion of peace with selected
friendly nationalities without extending the line of confidence to other
people with whom the United States is on equally friendly terms. If such
partial confidence would create jealousy and ill will, peace, the object
sought by such consultation, would not be promoted.11 .

If I correctly apprehend the meaning of these words, it is that we might
offend some European powers if we should hold in the United States a
Congress of "selected nationalities11 of America. This is certainly a
new position for the United States, and one which I earnestly beg you
will not permit this government to assume. European Powers assemble
in Congress whenever an object seems to them of sufficient gravity to
justify it. I have never heard of their consulting the Government of the
United States in regard to the propriety of their so assembling, nor have
I ever known of their inviting an American representative to be present ;
nor would there, in my opinion, be any good reason for their so doing.
Two Presidents of the United States, in the year 1881, adjudged it to be
expedient that American Powers should meet in Congress for the sole pur-
pose of agreeing upon some basis for arbitration of differences that may
arise between them, and for the prevention, as far as possible, of wars in

522 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

the future. If that movement is now to be arrested for fear it may give
offence in Europe the voluntary humiliation of the United States could not
be more complete, unless we should petition European Governments for
the privilege of holding the Congress.

It is difficult to see how this country could be placed in a less enviable
position than would be secured by sending in November a cordial invitation
to all the Independent Nations in America to meet in Washington for the
sole purpose of devising measures of peace, and in January recalling the
invitation for fear it might create "jealousy and ill will11 on the part of
monarchical governments in Europe. It would be difficult to devise a
more effective way for the United States to lose the friendship of its Amer-
ican neighbors, and it would certainly not add to our prestige in the Euro-
pean world. Nor can I see, Mr. President, how European Governments
should feel "jealousy and ill will11 toward the United States because of an
effort on its part to assure lasting peace between the nations of America,
unless indeed it be the interest of the European Powers that the American
Nations should at intervals fall into war, and bring reproach on Republican
institutions. But from that very circumstance I see an additional and pow-
erful motive for American governments to be at peace among themselves.
. To revoke that invitation for any cause would be embarrassing ; to
revoke it for avowed fear of "jealousy and ill will11 on the part of Euro-
pean Powers would appeal as little to American pride as to American hos-
pitality. Those you have invited may decline, and, having now cause to
doubt their welcome, will perhaps do so. This would break up the Con-
gress, but it would not touch our dignity.

He asked, perhaps it might be truer to say, he extorted, permis-
sion to publish his State papers for the judgment of men. He
reviewed the foreign policy of the Garfield administration and
accentuated its two primal points, — first, to bring about peace,
and prevent future wars in North and South America ; second,
to cultivate such friendly relations of reciprocity with all Amer-
ican countries as would lead to a large increase in the export
trade of the United States, by supplying those fabrics in which
we are abundantly able to compete with the manufacturing
nations of Europe. He protested against a policy which would
destroy American commerce on the Pacific coast and build up
English interests on its ruins. He dismissed the Avar cry as
nonsense, showed that we were in line with the safest prece-
dents, and that the steady moral pressure of the United States
was needed to offset the heavy hand of England which Peru
felt upon her at every turn.

So vigorous, aggressive, and complete was his defence that

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 523

the case against him broke down, the chief witness became en-
tirely discredited, five of his own counsel testifying over their
signatures to his false witness, and the result was to fix Mr.
Blaine's policy more firmly in the minds, and devotion to him-
self more deeply in the hearts of the American people.

In this storm of detraction and of misapprehension, Mr.
Blaine was writing the eulogy of President Garfield, which he
had been asked to pronounce before the two Houses of Congress.
He had at first declined, thinking his close identification with
Garfield during the four active months of his administration
must lend to any eulogy an appearance of egotism. He was
moreover contemplating a memoir of Garfield in which he could
speak without embarrassment of matters which could not now
be discussed, yet must be mentioned. He was forced, however,
to yield to the urgency of Governor Mc Kin ley and the com-
mittee, representing not only Congress, but the people. Before
this eulogy, delivered in the House of Representatives, February
27, 1882, to an assembly the most distinguished that can be
gathered, hostility itself was hushed. The lucidity and concen-
tration of the narrative, the classic severity and beauty of the
language, the repressed feeling, the insight which lifted Garfield's
pedigree from the zone of demagogism to the dignity of self-
respecting independence, the courtesy, the stately gravity, the
matchless yet firm delicacy with which the orator touched the
trouble of the time in which the President sitting before him
was so fatef ully involved, — met, mastered, all the demands of
the occasion. Vigor and clearness were expected. The modera-
tion, tenderness, and sweetness of the eulogy were beyond an-
ticipation. Something of surprise was expressed that Mr. Blaine
had now showed himself capable of touching and swaying the
sensibilities as he had been accustomed to sway the reason
and judgments of men. His allusion to Gladstone called forth
the acknowledgment of the English minister. The New York
Association for the Advancement of Science and Art invited
him to deliver the oration in the Academy of Music, but it
had been written for one occasion and was never repeated.

524 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

To Mr. Blaine^ from ex-Postmaster General Jewell :

Detroit, June 10, 1880.
I am sad, glad, and mad, mostly the latter. ... To think that New
England votes kept you out of the reward you had so well earned ! It's the
last chance New England will have for a long time for a President. I
upbraided all my friends in Connecticut, Vermont, or Massachusetts in these
delegations, and all admitted that 'twas you who had almost alone made any
nomination but Grant's possible. All admitted it and the obligation to
you. Most of the Grant people now admit you to be their preference, but they
had promised to ''stick to the old man11 and so did. ... I have this
comfort. I have not humiliated myself. . . . Frye, Hale, and Chand-
ler, how they did work! Brilliant, able work, only it didn't win. After
you I felt more regrets for them. Then for Governor Dennison to adopt
the tail of Conkling's machine and force it on the convention. Frye should
have had that ; but no, t\\Qj must conciliate New York.

To Mr. Blaine, from Wendell Phillips :

June 22, 1880.
Thanks for all you made time to do, — letters and personal calls on the

Secretary, — for s. I have been so deeply interested in their lot that

lean hardly tell you how much I feel their debt and mine to you. I know
I need not add my deep sense of personal disappointment.

. . Of course you feel no special chagrin over Chicago results.
Full of life, you are sure your Mends and the Sta.te will need you in the
future. But /may not live to rejoice in your success.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. William C. Goodloe :

Lexington, August 6, 1880.

I do not know that my slight acquaintance with you would justify my
writing to you on any subject, but I was one of those who strongly
favored your nomination at Chicago and confidently hoped for your suc-
cess. I was innocent enough to suppose that a man who was the over-
whelming choice of the delegates representing Republican districts
throughout the Union would not be opposed by those from the Democratic
districts, and that, too, in favor of a man whose nomination would not
only have violated a cherished national tradition, but would have inevi-
tably led through Republican dissension to his certain and humiliating
defeat.

I was disappointed that you were not nominated, but was not disappointed
in my oft-repeated assertion that you were the only man in America who
was strong enough in himself, and who had sufficient hold upon the people
to drive Grant from the track. That you did this no one can deny, and in
doing so, that you saved from utter disintegration and ultimate disaster the
Republican party, is equally incontrovertible.

The nomination of General Garfield — the happiest possible issue out of
the nasty Grant mess — and all the party success we may achieve under
him, is traceable directly to your influence.

BTOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 525

The country as well as the Republican party owes you a debt of grati-
tude which can never be fully repaid, but I trust that so far as it may be
within the power of those who admire your course and feel grateful for its
results, that the great benefits we have derived from your patriotism
and statesmanship may neither be forgotten nor in any manner overlooked.

To Mr. Blaine, from Walker :

Belfast, September 4, 1880.

. . . is perfectly willing to speak twice a day, and is, I think,

capable of doing good. Should you send him to Lincoln, I wish you would
have him put into pretty decent towns. He has stood this week very well,
and it has been the very hardest part of all campaigning, — poor food, dull
audiences, and hard work. I am glad you did not send Allison. It would

have been an insult to a Senator, and I apologize to for it. He deserves

the recompense now of some decent meetings. ... I don't think we
can carry Waldo county, but with hard cash their majority can be pulled so
low that Milliken will be elected. I hope you will send them all you can
afford from State Committee funds, as the expenses of bringing voters to
polls, and getting men out, will be very great.

Augusta, September 25. . . . If we have any luck in Ohio and Indi-
ana, we can, in my opinion, carry Maine by making a hard fight and close
organization and by sending Solon and others into the small towns where
they have influence as individuals. . . . Emmons and I went to the
State Fair at Lewiston Thursday morning. . . . Saw a good many of
our political friends — all full of pluck and ready to work for November.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. Robeson :

Camden, October 9, 1880.

I hear you are doing great work in Indiana and Ohio . But as every
State and place you go through on your return will be trying to hold you,
you must not forget j^our promise to New Jersey and that you are an-
nounced and placarded all over the State. Kilpatrick is to meet you Friday.
He expects you to speak at Deckerton on that day, and in the evening go on
to Newton and show yourself there ; from thence you are to go to Trenton
(Saturday), to speak to three counties. This is the most important thing
in the State, so don't let Kill get you off to do anything else. Saturday
evening you come to me in Camden to spend a quiet Sunday, and on Mon-
day afternoon you go to Millville in my district, and on Tuesday I turn
you over to the rest of the State — for three other speeches. You will have
to go to Kill's district again, but it will be easily reached from anywhere
(except Deckerton), but on no account must you fail for the two meetings
at Trenton on the 16th, and 18th at Millville.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. Neal Dow :

Portland, October 26, 1880.
Your note of yesterday is just received. I was never a more stalwart
Republican than I am now, and most earnestly wishing success to Mr.

526 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Garfield, than whom there is no man in the country I would prefer to see
President except yourself, whose nomination I earnestly desire.

From Walker :

St. Paul, November, 1880.

The first news of yesterday's great triumph received in St. Paul was
Mons1 telegraph, for which I wish you would thank the lad. I have been
for the past week stumping. I spoke at Hudson to the largest meeting
ever held in the place. A great procession of over 1,000 torches in a little
town of not more than 2,000 people — special trains running in from every
portion of the country. Thursday I went to River Falls where I spoke to
another very large meeting, and Friday to Eau Claire where they had the
largest meeting ever held in the town. . . . The largest hall in the
place was filled, and all the standing room taken, and as I felt that I made
very fair speeches and everybody else said very good ones, I was quite
content. At Hudson the speaking was out of doors and the evening very
cold. The smoke from naphtha-burning torches poured down m}^ throat and
made me so husky that I could not speak more than a quarter of an hour,
but at River Falls and Eau Claire I spoke in doors and about an hour each
time. They made me stay over until Saturday evening in Eau Claire, and
go to a neighboring village where there are large lumber mills, where I
talked for an hour to the lumbermen, who seemed pleased. Colonel Spooner,
of Hudson, who is the attorney for the lawyers1 railroad, spoke with me in
Hudson, River Falls, and Eau Claire, — a very bright fellow, considered one
of the most capable lawyers in this part of the country. ... I saw
a great many Maine people in Eau Claire. Dined with a Mr. Bullen who
came from New Sharon, and is now a wealthy lumberman ; and called on
an old gentleman named Bliss, who used to live in Pittston, and was County
Commissioner for Kennebec many years ago. They are all great admirers
of father in that part of Wisconsin, and everybody desired to send regards
to him. You may imagine that I was pleased with my reception in
Wisconsin on account of its flattery to myself slightly, but mostly as indic-
ative of the tremendous strength that father evidently has in the real
hearts of the people in the North-west. Well, dearest mother, the election
is over — leroiestmorl — for which all thanks be to kind Heaven which
divides our lives into years — vive le roi. I am of course intensely de-
lighted at the grand way in which Maine has been redeemed, and 1
really can't help earnestly and solemnly believing that the election of
Hancock would have been a calamity. It would have greatly unsettled
everything, would have discouraged capital and put back the development
of this country immensely. Patriotically and personally as living in this
new land, and determined to prosper with its prosperity. I am thankful that
the Republican party has triumphed. . . . Besides my political work
in Wisconsin I have done very little. I have secured my offices. I have
very charming rooms, which I am occupying, and which are nearly put to
rights. . . . Expect to starve to death in the practice of the law
physically, but I think with a full mind. ... I feel . now as though I

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 527

would like to take the train for home to-night and have a renewal of my
old Andover feelings. I suppose it will be the ultimate making of me,
but it is going through a valley of sorrow to reach the mountain of success.

To General Garfield, from Walker Blaine •

St. Paul, November 4, 1880.

My dear General: Permit me to join my poor note of congratulation
upon your magnificent triumph, to the countless letters of rejoicing
which you are now receiving. It must assuredly be gratifying to you, as it
is to all your friends, that after such a campaign of slander, detraction,
lying, and forgery, your countrymen have passed such a vote of confidence
in you, and the principles you represent, as they did on Tuesday last. I
joined one of the largest crowds ever assembled on such an occasion in
St. Paul on Tuesday last, and shouted myself hoarse with the rest, as the
details of our triumph came pouring in, and our enthusiasm was not caused
by the evanescent feelings of joy at partisan triumph, but each and all felt
deep gratitude and thankfulness that what we earnestly and fully be-
lieved to be the right had won.

You must know, and I know that you will feel pleased, that the intelli-
gent young men of the country took more interest than ever before in
political affairs, and that a vast majority of that class favored your election.
May I say, as one of that number who worked humbly but heartily for
your success, that we believe confidently that your administration will
make republicanism more than ever respected, and worthy of respect, and
that the next administration will be one of strength, of intelligence, and of
honor.

May I ask you to present my compliments and congratulations to Mrs.
Garfield, and that you will grant me the honor of calling myself,

Your very sincere friend and supporter.

To Mr. Blaine, from Walker :

St. Paul, November 7, 1880.

... I have great faith and hope and belief in the State and in the town.
It is your State emphatically. The people are for you now as they always
have been, and that is a great capital in the start. Then I know a great
many people here, and they are very kind to me. The town is growing
most rapidly. It is the legal centre of what is destined to be a great
empire. There is reputation to be won, money to be made, honor to be
gained, and the thing that more will help me to-day than anything else is
that I am from the East and have position and acquaintance there.
Socially I am established, and I think that a social position every way helps
a man. So I should be a fool indeed if I did not see that this was my
chance.

One thing more. The way in which Maine has come back for Garfield

528 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

is magnificent for the State and for you personally. I did not think this
year that you would have been elected, if nominated. I doubt it still, not-
withstanding Garfield's victory. Spurred by your strength in the country,
the Democracy would have shown more sense and fought a stronger
campaign. But the fight took such aspect in Chicago that it became a
Kilkenny cat quarrel. You needs kill yourself in defeating Grant. But
I trust to time in all things. You may never be President, but I believe
that the day has come for greater statesmanship in this country than ever
before — that graver questions are to be brought forward for legislation,
and I know you will not be silent in your place. It is my earnest convic-
tion that though we beat them, the last election teaches lessons of greater
danger to our government than ever before. ... I don't care a
rap personally about the presidency, but I do count with all my heart
upon seeing you lead in the great crises of politics and of legisla-
tion.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. Theo. F. Randolph :

Morristown, November 18, 1880.
. . . You will believe me, I am sure, when I say that, like many
Democrats, my philosophy would have been greater — very much — had
the presidency fallen to you. Four years of federal administration by you
would have ended the sectional contests.

From Walker :

St. Paul, November 30, 1880.

. . . I have started my office and am feeling some encouragement
about success. The clients and the fees do not pour in very rapidly, it is
true, but I shall not be discouraged, as I have only been in the office two
days.

. . . Yesterday I went to Minneapolis to pay my parting respects to
Mrs. Washburn who leaves to-day for Washington. She was very nice
and very pleasant, and I enjoyed my visit exceedingly. . . . As to
putting the mark high, I have set up such an ideal that to approximate it
I shall be driven to spend all my days in Minnesota. I am not in danger
of being satisfied with a moderate degree of success, you may rest
assured.

December 9. ... I have been blue with cold, and I think my
spirits must have congealed with my toes. Such a cold winter the oldest
inhabitant is put to his trumps to parallel, and I hope to live to be a very
old citizen and never see another like it. . . . The papers here posi-
tively announce that father has been offered the Secretaryship of State
and has not }ret declined it. I wish, should he be so inclined — I won't
say foolishly, for I don't know the reason — as to accept it, that Garfield

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 529

would make me Private Secretary to the State Department. It might be
ruination, but it would surely be warmth. . . .

December 24. . . . I sent a little box of things home. They will at
least serve to remind you all on Xmas day of my existence, and of the
longing which I have and shall ever have to be with you ; and if you
would only make up your mind to be Secretary of State, and to make me
Private Secretary to that official, I should be content, though my ambition
miofht not be realized.

To V.:

Augusta, December 3, 1880.

. . I am left absolutely alone with my servants, every want antici-
pated, not a room in the house not at summer heat, sunshine and open tires
vieingwith each other. . . . Four horses and pony in the stable, sleighs
and robes in abundance and the beautiful snow ; every longing satisfied,
with full salvation blessed — what can I need ? My sins — that is, my
sinners. First of all, I miss Mr. Blaine. I cannot bear the orderly array
of my life. I miss the envelopes in the gravy, the bespattered table linen,
the uncertainty of the meals, for you know he always starts out on his con-
stitutional when he hears them taking in dinner. I miss his unvarying
attention, and as constant neglect. When alone with him I am not my
own — when others are in, go as you please is the rule, and the alternation
suits me exactly. Then the boys — oh, how I miss them. They know all
I ever knew — and I have forgotten much — they are fresh and untiring as
the sun which never sets — they are loving and want sympathy — old
enough to be companions, too young to assert their rights, taking every-
thing as of grace, and of their fulness I am a partaker. Blessed relation-
ship — the man child to his mother.

To Mr. Blaine, from Walker :

St. Paul, January 3, 1881.

Mother wrote me some time since, under the strictest seal of confidence,
that you were seriously entertaining General Garfield's proposition of ac-
cepting the State Department. I have been thinking it over, and I talked
it over with Mons in Chicago. I see very well at the outset some of the
difficulties and dangers that lie in the way. You have been eighteen years
in the legislative department of the government, and your whole career
has been spent in debate and legislation. It is then rather a grave change
to leave the Senate and take charge of an administrative department. The
new work you may possibly not like, but there will be the compen-
sation of jrreater leisure and a less wearing life. . . . This is a con-
sideration of considerable importance to you and to us all. But this is
not the greatest reason why I desire this thing. . . . You have made
a great reputation in debate — never having been unhorsed or overthrown ;
you have made a great reputation as a political leader and chieftain. I
do not think you can greatly enhance it in either direction. Did your

530 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

going into the State Department simply mean that you were to be Secretary
of State, I do not think any of your friends would greatly desire it. But
your taking that position will mean — and the country will so understand it —
that you are the head of the administration under the President, and the
chief counsellor of its policy. The struggle which I thought inevitable in
legislation between protection and free trade is postponed. The great
question for our party is that of administration. One bad administration,
one weak administration, has nearly bankrupted the Republican party, and
if stupidity were not the leading coefficient in our Democratic friends1
make-up, they might have beaten us in this election. If we can have a
strong, a pure, and an intelligent administration in this country for four
years, the Republican party will gain a long lease of power, and the country
great prosperity. I think that the attitude of the administration towards
the South, if wisely taken, will build up a strong Republican party in that
section, and the executive branch of the government is the one in which
reputation is to be earned. All these things, the added ease of life, the
escape from disagreeable friction in the Senate, the field which is new and
for the present wider, make me take this stand. I want you to make sure
that there is a strong Cabinet, and that abroad we are represented as a
great nation should be. I don't want above all things any jobbery in any

department, and the items which I see in our papers that is to be

Secretary of the Interior, though I believe them not, do not please me. I
have written you freely, perhaps foolishly. Whatever you may do, I of
course shall believe is done for the best, but my inclinations you now see.
You will judge for the best in all things. I hope that 1881 will be a year
of unmixed pleasure and happiness to all, and that you will believe me ever

Your most loving son.

From Emmons :

Chicago, January 12, 1881.
. I am delighted to think we are going to build, but I am
awfully afraid that father will build a cheap house. I hope he will
not. I don't want him to ruin himself on such an investment, but cheap
houses are not going to pay in Washington, and it will not pay him. I
hope he will get a. good architect and take advice in his plans. I don't
think his own record as a builder is free from criticism, and this will be a
thing that he can't revise or refix. But whatever it is, don't let it be a
cheap, money-saving house. lrou never can sell one, and you never will
like one if I know anything.

The Cabinet begins to grow on me more and more, and I am quite a
diplomat already. . . . My first month has gone by and I have not
yet seen the color of the company's money, so I must again come to the
family exchequer. I don't want the money this week, but some time in the
course of a fortnight, if the genial Thomas can elicit a check for about
$125, I should send it back with the warmest kind of an endorsement.
As you said to Jacky aj:>ropos of Christmas, — " Think on these things."

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 531

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. Emery A. Storrs :

Chicago, January 17, 1881.
There was something so princely and broad-gauged in your allusions to
General Grant as recently published that I cannot refrain from saying to
you, how gratifying your course in that particular is to all fair-minded men.
Of course the spectacle of so great and commanding a figure in our his-
tory as General Grant, compelled to come down to a hand-to-hand struggle
for a livelihood, is much more humiliating to us as a people than the neces-
sity can be to General Grant himself, and the spectacle of his great com-
petitor, so generously declaring his own position, must be most gratifying
to every man who is proud of our great public men.

To Walker :

Washington, .January 19, 1881.
. Dinner is over, and Alice, your father, Q., and C. A., after all
sorts of contretemps, are off to hear McCullough in " Virginius." After they
were in the hall, Alice had to go upstairs and change her dress, the dearest
pater in the world objecting to a white dress and black cloak and red bon-
net. I think his pipes were just the least little bit in the world previously
put out by my not cordially cooperating in the lot on 16th street.

From Walker :

St. Paul, January 19, 1881.

I am immensely happy, as Mons is in town, having arrived this morning,
and though he has been at work, and I have been busy during most of the day,
still I have greatly enjoyed what little I have seen of him. . . . He
looks as well and as handsome as ever, and that's saying enough.
Is father really going to build ? I read a long description of the new
house one day, and a denial upon authority in the next morning's paper.
Hope that father will not so frame his action as to let Governor P. put
anybody in the Senate for even an hour, though of course it is absurd to even
hint by inference that he would do so.

To Mr. Blaine, from Walker:

St. Paul, January 27, 1881.

. . . From what T can gleam from the papers Mr. Conkling intends
to pronounce and announce himself in hostility to Garfield's administra-
tion, and to endeavor to build up a division in the party which will either
bring Grant or himself forward in four years. This will of course be some-
what difficult for him to do, but as in Mr. Conkling's mind Republicanism
and Conklingism are and must be synonymous, I think he will make the
effort. It will add somewhat to Garfield's complications, and really seems
to me the only cloud that can be seen upon the sky of the Republican
party's future. I would venture two suggestions for what they arc worth.

532 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

1. That you have as good a Cabinet as can possibly be made, and that no
man be put in any position who will endeavor to use the patronage of a
department for any personal ends, or the ends of any faction. The party's
and the country's good ought to be clearly announced as above any personal
considerations, and nobody should be put into a Cabinet position who will
attempt to pull down Garfield, or build up anybody. Mr. Garfield is Pres-
ident, and his Cabinet should be composed of men loyal to the party, and
to him. 2. It seems to me very important that somebody should be picked
out for Secretary of the Treasury who will commend himself to the earnest
confidence of all the business men, for, if the bubble keeps expanding,
there will be a financial burst within two or three years, and panics are
always detrimental to the party in power. The party certainly deserves
success, and ought to, and can have a long lease of power, but it will de-
mand good legislation and good administration to prevent overthrow, if the
panic which seems imminent should occur. 3. I want you to arrange so as
not to give P. the opportunity to appoint a Senator for even a single day,
but so that the Legislature may elect at once.

January 31. The day reminds me that you have reached your fifty-first
birthday, and I am now more than half as old as you, though still lacking
greatly of attaining one-half your worth in goodness or in wisdom. I see
by the newspapers that you are still as eloquent, as strong, and as con-
vincing as ever in the Senate, though the " Scribbler " adds that your beard
and hair are a little whiter than last year, but if on my fifty-first birthday
you can only say one tithe of half the things that I feel, but cannot express
to you, I shall be content to be as bald as the country's eagle, and shall re-
gard my uncrowned poll as fit emblem of my pride.

That you may live to reap yet more and more honors which you deserve,
and as the greatest pride and joy to all your children, is the sincere prayer of

Your most affectionate son.

From Emmons :

Chicago, February 3, 1881.

. . . I am sorry Dr. Barker is coming on, for I can already see father
furtively putting new prescriptions in his pocket and preparing himself for
another conflict with modern drug's. Don't let them be alone together for
a moment. . ... Business is dull to-day. Not a soul lias been near
me except my fellow-clerks, who wander in now and then and indulge in a
companionable yawn. ... I wish you could understand the agony of
having nothing to do and yet not being able to go out and look for anything
to amuse one's self with. . . . Tell father I shall send him some stock
points this spring. He won't follow my advice, but T shall have the satis-
faction of saying, " I told you so."

To Emmons :

Washington, February 17, 1881.

. . . Your father gets up every day and goes downstairs about noon,
cheerful, gay even, entertaining as no other man knows how to be.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 533

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. Schuyler Colfax :

South Bend, March 5, 1881.
. . . After your stormy years of public life in our stormy era, with
"lance1' always in readiness, I think you will enjoy the calm and dignified
and elevated career of the Secretary of State. And if the new administra-
tion can successfully grapple with and settle the questions grouped to-
gether in the President's remarkably successful Inaugural, the whole
Republican party, as well as history, will give you all honor as enduring
as the nation itself.

To Mr. Blaine, from Gen. O. O. Howard :

West Point, March 8, 1881.
I do not know whether it is properly a subject of congratulation that you
have been appointed Secretary of State. . . . But your friends rejoice
at your appointment for the strength it promises to the government in its
present administration. May the same kind Father watch over you and
enlarge your vision — as you shall now more and more take in the whole
world — as he has in past emergencies !

To Emmons :

Washington.

March 11. . . . Everything in the new situation continues to give
satisfaction. The head of the department is in gay spirits, his secretary
rapidly developing into an industrious and attentive officer.

March 14. Imagine what a family matter that assassination must have
seemed when Alice came running to the door yesterday as I came from
church to tell me of it, and when I saw Bartolomei himself sitting in my
own parlor, and crossing and recrossing himself while he prayed devoutly
before reading the despatches ; for all the news there was for hours was
contained in the telegrams to the Secretary of State. Poor emperor —
dogged to his death at last. I think he must be enrolled araono; the
martyrs.

March 18. Tuesday your father and I assisted at the requiem mass for
the czar. I had never anticipated going into black for any of the European
sovereigns, but with Mrs. Hale's assistance I did ! She was here when I
was dressing, and pinned my old black lace cape on to my old black chip,
so that I went en regie.

March 24. The secretaryship grows more and more agreeable. . .
We have the plans for the house, and they are so huge and so expensive,
that we are now engaged in striking out every pretty thing, to reduce the
expenditure to the limits of your father's purse.

534 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

From President Garfield :

Executive Mansion, Washington, March 27, 1881.
Just as we are starting for church, your note comes. It is like the cur-
rent of the Gulf Stream conquering the Arctic Sea — and I thank you for
it. Above all the worriments and contradictions of politics, arises my
anxiety for Blaine's health. I cannot do good work with " the half of my
surviving soul1' prostrate and in pain.

. I will try to see him a moment on the way from church.
Your last paragraph comes like a benediction, for which I give you
thanks.

To Emmons :

Washington, March 28, 1881.

I am writing in my room ; present, your father, Alice, Walker, Tom
Sherman, and a messenger from the State Department; subject, shall we
send message, recognizing Charles as King of Roumania? . . . There
are lots of things which hitch in our new position which make the situation
interesting. Flowers have just come from Mrs. Garfield, and yesterday
she and the President were both here. They hate the situation, but this is
not to be spoken of, and I never want to be nearer the White House than I
now am.

From M. A. Dodge :

Washington, April 15, 1881.

. . . Wednesday I went out to dinner with Postmaster-General James,
but sat between Secretary Windom and the President, who said it was his
first meal outside the White House. In the course of the evening- I asked
him if there was any foundation on which the Conkling men could build
their assertion that he had promised not to appoint a New York collector
until he had consulted Conkling. He said, none whatever — that Conkling
was there two hours and he trying to consult Conkling1s wishes all he could,
relinquishing men who were personally objectionable to Conkling; and
Conkling in a most offensive way told Garfield that if the anti-Conkling
men must be recognized they should be sent out of the country, and he
would hold his nose and go into the cloak-room when their names came
up. After the two hours were over and Conkling rose to go, C. said,
with a wave of his hand, " By the way, when are you going to clean out
the Custom House?'1 — " Oh, we won't talk about that yet," said Garfield.
He says that "yet" is the only sign of a promise — all they have to build
on, and if any Senator raises a question of veracity between himself and
that man, he will never forgive him. He spoke with great earnestness
and feeling. . . .

April 25. . . . The President not only has not one spark of jealousy
himself, but seems not to have any " realizing sense " that any one else can

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 535

have. At supper last night at the White House he spoke out as innocently
as possible across the table to Mr. Blaine, "Do hurry back from New
York. I shall be awfully lonesome without you." After supper a good
many people called, but we came away early as Mr. Blaine took the 10 P.M.
train. I went up to say good-night to the President, who was talking with
General Sherman on a sofa, but the P. took me off by myself and made me
sit down again, and when Mr. and Mrs. Blaine came up — which I fancy
was the raison d'etre o1 the manoeuvre — we had an interesting quadrilateral.
It amuses me when there to see the President constantly, and I think un-
consciously, trying to get off somewhere with Mr. Blaine.

April 26. Mr. Blaine wrote to the President to-day from New York that
the feeling there towards the administration is very warm, strong, and
cordial — full of hope and confidence.

From Mr. W. W. Phelps :

May, 1881.

. . . Didn't Mr. Blaine save me from folly, with his peremptory
"Decidedly no"? How nice it is, when a man knows his own mind —
even for his friends.

. I can believe the Dispatch dinner was dull. Did Mr. Blaine put
on the look of Far-away Moses and refuse to look at the present and to
talk of anything? We have seen him so before.

To M. :

May 17. Your father has lost one pair of glasses and I have stepped
on the spectacles. I need not say who enjoys those still extant, so I write
blindly, unable to discern one letter. . . . We had yesterday, with the
rest of the world, the sensational resignations. They produce no excitement
here, and I have yet to hear one criticism complimentary of Conkling, though
I have seen all sorts of people and of every shade of cowardice. Mrs. Gar-
field is better, and if the doctors are not too much for her, she will get well.

. . . Just before dinner I walked out with your father to the " lot."
They commenced grading yesterday, and we are to have it in December.

May 22. After church I walked around to the White House, where I
had the privilege of seeing the President. ... I am sorry to say that
I have grave fears about Mrs. Garfield.

After hearing exactly how she is, I confess I am very uneasy. Still the
doctors say she will get well, and if she does, I shall not be surprised if she
comes to Maine and stays awhile with me. She has to go where she can be
perfectly quiet, and you know, to use your own tongue, for that, Augusta
takes the cake. Your father received a letter from Mr. Morton this morn-
ing, asking if he should engage passage for you, with them, on the " Ame-
rique." You ought to have heard T.\s howl, " It has just spoiled my Sunday
and I have been looking forward to it all the week." This brought your

536 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

father to terms, and he was very soon able to remember that General Hurl-
but would be going over later and could take charge of your inconvenient
self. . . • When this role is tilled, we shall be ready to leave, though I
have many misgivings as to the boy I leave behind me, or as Garfield would
say, the dear one. I do not mean Walker, but your father. . . . Stocks
have gone up tremendously, so we shall put the last inch into the house.
You cannot think how much praise has been showered on Walker for his
urbanity and efficiency these last days. Mr. Lamar says, no such young
man has been in Washington.

May 17. Your father eating his breakfast this moment, and Walker
talking to him on the new, original and striking topic of i:>rocuring places
for female applicants. " Miss C, " Walker says, " is as nice a little girl as
I ever saw, and writes a beautiful hand ; we must provide for her ; " and
your father answers, "But I must first look out for Mrs. B. Get her a
place, then the decks will be cleared for Miss C," and to this enters a card
from Mrs. Chandler, with of course a woman attached whom I am to see
and help. I have had this morning a long and delightful letter from Mr.
Phelps, sent from Queenstown, with agreeable mention of you, and we
are this moment anxiously awaiting a cablegram from him, on the sub-
ject of house lots, for do you know your father, with that independence
of criticism which makes him so delightful and surprising a comrade, has
conceived a sort of disgust with the 16th-street place, on account of the
vicinage of stables, and although he has had that immense tract graded, is
not going to build on it, and fastening his affections on a lot on Massachu-
setts avenue, P, and 20th streets, comes upon the surprising fact that Mr.
Phelps is the owner thereof; hence a cablegram and the waited-for reply.
In my letter Mr. Phelps says, " While I was struggling with the hasp of my
trunk, I told Hopkins, who was in the room, to buy that other piece of land
forme." . . . His father said to me only yesterday, "I am just like
Jamie — when I want a thing, I want it dreadfully. " They are a pair
of J amies . . . after which Augusta, and summer and freedom and out
of doors.

From Mr. Blaine :

Washington, May 26, 1881.

In your contest at Albany I beg you in no event to think of uniting with
the Democrats. The other side may and probably will do that, but if
Conkling should be elected in that way his worst enemy would pity him. If
we should defeat him in that way he would at once regain £>ower with and
over the Republican masses of New York and the country.

I beg you not to entertain a coalition with the Democrats so as to give
them one Senator, in any conceivable event. Republican candidates
anxious to be elected may counsel differently, but I beg of you to take my
advice in this matter.

As this is the only letter I have written you touching this whole contro-
versy, I beg you to give it weight accordingly.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 537

To G. : ,

May 29, 1881.
. I am Avritino: fast and far, and I understand that there is a letter
from you to me at the State Department, which Mr. Blaine and Walker
have both read, and which they assure me has nothing in it. . . ,.

May 31. We are not to build on 16th street. Mr. Pendleton takes our
rejected lot, and he and Mr. Robeson divide the residuum. Now we go out to
Massachusetts avenue beyond the Stewart House. That dear Mr. Phelps
had bought this land, though he didn't know it, and has cabled us that we
may have as much of the land as we want, if we will make the dining-room
larger. Isn't that just like him ? A wonderful situation.

To M.:

June 6. Your father is downstairs and has been out driving, need I
say in the direction of the lots, old and new. First we go to 16th
street to look it over and say how little we like it, then to 20th street
to admire. On the latter site they are grading to-day. With your father,
Walker is now discussing the Fortune Bay award, which he has watched
very carefully and been much interested in. I judge that he makes a great
impression and your father is exceedingly pleased with him.

June 15. It is the day and hour when I expected to be in Boston, at this
precise moment buying a Chuddali shawl, and here I am, for your father
has taken it into his head to get well, and when an idea gets lodgment in
that capacious brain, you know, it becomes a power and drives the weak
body ; so now we are on the high road to health, and all clumsy vehicles
of notions, like going home to get rest, malaria in Washington, Bright's
disease, etc., etc., must clear the track or be ridden down. If it were not
for T. and Q. I should be content to stay on and on, but I deeply sympa-
thize with those waifs. "Poor little children," Walker said, "I would
give twenty dollars to console T. this minute."

June 22. Your father is perfectly well, but is unwilling to have us
leave him or to leave with us. The President is away and the new
house is starting. He likes to watch every spadeful of earth which he can
snatch time to see thrown out. Meantime Emmons, who is with us, makes
the delay bearable. Poor fellow, he came Saturday evening expecting to
transact business for his R.R. and go Monday, and he found himself on
Wednesday held back at arm's length by the red tape of the circumlocution
office, with no immediate prospect of any capitulation. He has a great deal
of pride, I think, in carrying to a successful conclusion this first busi-
ness intrusted to him, and there is every prospect of his failing, so of
course he feels a little blue. He has grown very manly during his stay in
Chicago — the boy has gone — and he seems to be quite interested in his
business.

538 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

From Mr. Blaine, to Mr. T. B. Searight:

Department of State, Washington, June 28, 1881.
My dear Friend : The u maple molasses " came to hand and revived
memories of boyhood clays — and recalled many most pleasant associations
with you. The flavor recalled the Fulton House and " Joe" and George
Driver and the "Squires" most vividly. Every time I get a line from
you I am quickened in my desire to visit the familiar scenes long gone by.
You can have no idea how dreamy and delicious the pleasures and pastimes
of that ancient era seem to me. They sometimes rise to my mental vision
as a mirage on the sea will to the eye, excluding all things else for the
time from the memory, the imagination, and the desires. You have passed
your life near the old haunts, and have lived along with the changes and
seen the ancient lines gradually effaced. But to me the country is still the
land of forty years ago, with stage-coaches and wayside inns, and the
" Louis McLane " and " Consul," and the college full of good fellows, and
the seminary crowded with pretty, good girls, and the dances at Caldwell's
tavern, and the sleigh-rides with John Steep for driver, and the sweet-
hearts that we loved so freshly and so gushingly — and who are now
mothers and some of them, alas, grandmothers, while you and I, separated
by chains of mountain and a generation of years, still have hearts that beat
warmly for each other.

To M. :

Washington, June 28, 1881.

I think that Walker, Emmons, and your father will leave with the
caravan on Thursday.

July 3. Your father got up quite early yesterday morning, in order to
drive the President to the station, and at 9.30 Tom, the boys, Alice, and I
had breakfast. In the midst of it, the door-bell rang and Tom was called
out. Then he called Walker ; but as the house is besieged all the time,
we, who were so fortunate as to remain unsent for, paid no attention to
the prolonged absence of the absentees ; but shall I ever forget the
moment when Maggie, nurse, came running into the room crying, " They
have telephoned over to you, Mrs. Blaine, that the President is assassi-
nated." Emmons flew, for we all remembered, with one accord, that his
father was with him. By the time I had reached the door, I saw that it
must be true — everybody on the street, and wild. Mrs. Sherman got a
carriage and drove over to the White House. Found the streets in front
jammed and the doors closed, but they let us through and in. The
President still at the station, so drove thitherward. Met the mounted police
clearing the avenue, then the ambulance, turned and followed into that-
very gateway where, on the 4th of March, we had watched him enter.
I stood with Mrs. MacVeagh in the hall, when a dozen men bore him
above their heads, stretched on a mattress, and as he saw us and held us
with his eye, he kissed his hand to us — I thought I should die; and

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 539

when they brought him into his chamber and had laid him on the bed,
he turned his eyes to me, beckoned, and when I went to him, pulled me
down, kissed me again and again and said, " Whatever happens, I want
you to promise to look out for Crete,'1 — the name he always gives his
wife. ..." Don't leave me until Crete comes.11 I took my old bonnet
off and just stayed. I never left him a moment. Whatever hap-
pened in the room, I never blenched, and the day will never pass from
my memory. At six, or thereabouts, Mrs. Garfield came, frail, fatigued,
desperate, but firm and quiet and full of purpose to save, and I think
now there is a possibility of succeeding. ... I came from the White
House at two this morning and have been there all day, but not in the
room. Emmons is here.

July 6. I must send you a line, if only to let you know that in these
times, which are history, you are remembered and sympathized with.
.. . . After breakfast I went with your father to the White House, and
finding that their arrangements for nursing were all made for the day, I
came immediately away. It looks as though Mr. Garfield would live. He is
now, six o'clock, still comfortable and has asked for beefsteak. They will
not, of course, let him have it. Mrs. Sherman and Tom were there, who
came to let the President and Mrs. Garfield know that yesterday the
men of his order made their communion an offering for the Presidents
recovery. Your father has stayed in and read and signed despatches and
received callers, and now W. and your father have gone to the White
House to make inquiries and thence to pay their daily visit to V.P.
Arthur, who is on Capitol Hill. . , . . When I was with the President
yesterday, as I was all the forenoon, he looked up at me and said, " When
I am ready to eat, I am going to break into Mrs. Blaine's larder."

July 8. Everything seems to be going as well with the President as the
most loving heart can wish. All peoples and tongues vie with each other
to do him honor. No danger now, no anxiety about paralysis, or bullet
in the liver, and every prospect of a speedy recovery in all his parts.
Arthur can go back to New York, and we soon to Augusta, and all the
pain and love and anticipated peril will not be lost on the country.
I have been to the White House this morning, but saw none but officials.
Left your father there in consultation with the doctors. Emmons opened
the door to me when I finally came home. His case is still undecided,
and I think his hopes are low. Your father holds up wonderfully.
Jacky keeps on the even tenor of his way ; all days at the State Depart-
ment, all evenings at the White House. ... I suppose you have
noticed that the President came here Friday afternoon. He sat with me
an hour, waiting for your father, gave me his inaugural nicely bound with
his autograph in it. Wanted to go to Augusta, but hated the long tail to
his kite, on this trip. Finally your father came and they walked away
together. Now it seems this Guiteau followed him to this house, waited
to shoot him on his return, but not wanting to hurt Secretary Blaine, had
to give it up that time.

July 15. This date reminds me that I have only once before stayed

540 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

as late as this in Washington. In 1870, on this very day, I saw Congress
adjourn in palm-leaf fans and linen dusters, only your father, the Speaker,
had on an alpaca. He sits here this blessed moment in another, and
with him Emmons, in shirt-sleeves, lamenting the Solicitor's decision,
which is against him. Tom is at the door, warding off one of your fath-
ers countrywomen. . . . Just at nine last night we received Walker's
telegram from Augusta. Swing low, sweet chariot, and take me in next
week, for all the doctors, male and female, cannot long keep the
President on his back, and when he is pronounced out of danger, we expect
to leave. I spent yesterday in reading " Don John " — found it very interest-
ing; but think the author should have kept the clue for identification, for
the satisfaction of the reader. She has no right to assume the prerogative
of Providence. You should hear your father, to whom I have told the
story, scold about it. I have not been at the White House for two days,
but Emmons and your father were over last night. Found everything
monotonously comfortable.

July 19. To-night I shall probably call at the White House — the
least pleasing hour of the twenty-four, as I am obliged to content myself
with a mere formality, when I long to be of real service.

From Walker to M. :

July 19. I was met at the station here by Mons, who goes to Chicago
to-morrow morning, and goes, I fear, with a rather heavy heart. Father,
mother, Mons, and I took a long and very jrieasant drive, inspecting the
house, which is coming on apace, on our way. I hope that we may all get
away very soon and once more join you at Augusta.

From Hon. W. E. Chandler:

Concord, N.H., July 18, 1881.

I hope the official family are all happy and harmonious. Before the
blow at the President furnished news from Washington which excluded

all else, it had become a little monotonous to read only of what and

were doing. But it always is so; the pretenders make the most noise. It
was very kind in them, however, to relieve Mr. Blaine from all complicity
with the star route frauds.

The beloved wrote me a sweet and evasive letter in which he intimated
that I went away from Washington out of temper, and that he had
delayed writing me because he wished me to recover. He was mis-
taken. I have been entirely amiable and calm. That he knows how
constant my affection is for himself and you and your family, and takes
advantage of it sometimes, does not destroy the sentiment on my
part. Intellectually I perceive what sentimentally affects me not.
. . . I am thankful to be allowed to believe that the President will
recover. I have not been hopeful even; now I am very fearful. But

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 541

the indications continue so good that I ought to be more confident than I
am. The whole country has been agonized about the President, and is
almost deifying him already. This worship will make him all-powerful
if he lives. ... It touches the country to hear that the President
asked whether it is worth while to struggle so hard for such a little span
of life. . . . Please stop all these telegrams about the assassin's
movements and conversations. As little allusion as possible should be
made to him. . . . He has actually been allowed to give his views as
to Arthur's Cabinet, to name his men and have them printed by leave of
the Department of Justice. Cannot you stop this ?

From Mr. Blaine :

Washington, July 14.

. . . Garfield, I think, is surely destined to be much more speedily
well and out than is generally thought. I differ from the doctors about the
direction of the ball - — have never believed that the liver was pierced at all
— and think the event will prove that I am right.

ToM.:

July 22. Your father saw the President for six minutes yesterday
morning, the first time since that fateful Saturday. They had put him
(the Prex) off day after day, till he would be denied no longer. He looked
better than your father expected to see him, though his voice was weak.
Mrs. Garfield told me yesterday, she considered him out of danger. Isn't
it wonderfully good ? Every night we drive out to the new house, which
interests us immensely.

July 23. I do not know when we can come home. Your father does
not feel justified in leaving, and he is not willing for me to leave him.
How sorry I am, and what a summer this is ! But petty disappointments
must not be remembered. I am just home from the White House where I
have been sitting for two hours. Saw Drs. Agnew and Hamilton, the
Cabinet, Mrs. Garfield, and Molly. Every one looking very anxious and
sober. Mrs. Garfield said the President did not mind much who was in
the room with him to-day.

From Emmons :

Chicago, July 26. You can't conceive the uncertainty, doubt, and
anxiety that have taken possession of me since the President's relapse.
People out here seem quite hopeless. I do hope father is keeping up well
under this strain and heat. It worries me dreadfully to have him stay, but
every one else would worry to have him leave. An endless number of
people have spoken to me of his bearing under the excitement, and the
immensely good effect it had here on people.

542 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

To M. :

July 28. You can tell Mr. Homan that we are more confident of the
President's recovery this morning than we have ever been. When we shall
get away, I have no chance of knowing. Your father's stay here gives con-
fidence to every friend, and while he stays, I must. I do not feel that this
is necessary ; but he does, and I cannot unlearn the old habit of regarding
his word as law. Walker, as you may suppose, is more than satisfied, and
Alice will not listen to the proposition of going to Augusta, though I really
think she needs the change. We are all bright again about the President,
and I now feel a certain assurance as to his being carefully looked after,
which I have not hitherto had. Drs. Agnew and Hamilton will keep a
closer watch than before this fright.

To Mr. Blaine :

Hamilton, July 28, 1881.

Is there any such book as Debates on the adoption of the Constitution ?
A man walked away up two miles last night, and I had it not. He is very
intelligent, wants to get at what was the intention of the framers of the
Constitution ; heard Weaver speak in Danvers, and thinks he was wrong
as to his facts, — thinks Jackson was a hard-money man, etc. Is there any
life of Hamilton or of Jackson that would help him? I can't see that
Adams1 Gallatin throws any light on any part of the subject.

From Mr. Blaine :

Department of State, Washington, July 29, 1881.

Madison's reports of debates in the Convention that formed the Federal
Constitution give the only authentic rescript of what was said there. These
volumes, octavo, commonly called the Madison papers, were purchased from
the ex-President by Congress at an incredibly large price, to help him out
of the poverty in which he was thrown in his old days, partly by paying the
gambling debts of a worthless son-in-law who ought rather to have had his
neck wrung. The Madison papers are valuable, but like Macaulay's
History of England, they require a good deal of antecedent knowledge to
make them profitable or even intelligible reading. The debates that were
held in the various State conventions to which the Constitution was sub-
mitted for adoption were very enlightening. None better than those in
the Massachusetts convention, reported by Elliott, to be had in any jmblic
library in Boston. Jackson's opinions can be had at length in Parton's
life, as well as in his messages to Congress ; Hamilton's in full in his
famous reports as Secretary of the Treasury, especially that of 1789 and of
December, 1792, so that is all you need for your friend.

All well at the White House and this house.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 543

ToM.:

Washington, August 19.

. . . Visited the house twice, where your father's activity caused me
great anxiety, as he now mounts the ladders and overlooks the second -
story floor. Was at the White House twice, and took quite a drive. Poor
John ! [the coachman of the State Department carriage] the clouds have
returned after much rain, and neither the morning nor the evening is his
day.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. Thomas H. Clay :

Lexington, August 15, 1881.

I send to-day by Adams' Express a picture of my grandfather, Henry
Clay. The picture is a copy of a photograph taken in Philadelphia in the
early stage of photography. The artist gave it a number of years after-
ward to Mr. Rufus King, of Cincinnati, and he and Judge Nicolas Long-
worth were so impressed with the likeness that Mr. King, after sending me
a copy made by Judge Long worth, sent me the original to be copied here.
It was much faded, and the outlines of the copy were retouched with India
ink. The picture is not as perfect a likeness as I had hoped for, when I
referred to it in Washington ; yet, except for a certain immobility of the
features, I prefer it to any picture of him I have ever seen. The full-face
pictures of him are very few.

The frame about it is made of ash flooring-plank from the old house at
Ashland. It was in those days dressed on one side only with the plane,
and left hewed upon the other side, as you will observe by noticing the
under side of the frame. The nails on the side near each corner are
wrought, and were nailed in the plank when it was first laid at Ashland.

I send in the box, with the picture, my grandfather's manuscript of
"Notes of conversations with the British Plenipos," made on May 11th
and 16th, and June 7th and 9th, 1815, in London. These conversations
were held by Henry Clay and Albert Gallatin on the part of the United
States, and Messrs. Robinson, Goulburn, and Dr. Adams, representing the
British Government. I regret the lack of my grandfather's signature, but
for one who is as familiar as you probably are with his handwriting, it is
not necessary. I send you these things because of my appreciation of the
character of your public services, and because of your able defence of those
principles (especially that of protective tariff) which Henry Clay thought
so necessary to the welfare of our country.

To M. :

August 23.

I was at the White House last night. Miss Edson abandoned hope.
Why, indeed, should that angel tarry longer by that bed when the poor
sufferer has lost his own identity, praying to have that other man taken
from him away, and to be relieved from that other man's face which

544 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

cleaves to and drags upon his? About ten, or perhaps later, we came
home, when your father penned his bulletin to Lowell. We were just in
the seclusion of our own room when a carriage drove up. Of course we
think everything an usual means the White House, but this was R., who had
come, as it were, to have his doom from our lips. Your father went down
and let him in, but, alas ! could give him no comfort.

August 25. ... I suppose you can see as well as another that hope
is over. Every night I try to brace for that telephone which I am sure
before mornino; will send its shrill summons. The morning is a little
reassuring, for light of itself gives courage. Your father I follow upstairs
and down like a dog.

From Hon. W. E. Chandler:

Warner, N.H., August 29, 1881.

. . . Of course I have no patience with the fault-finders, and I think

Dr. ought to be suppressed ; but I wish the doctors had found out

before six weeks had passed where the ball went, and had kept opium out
of him, which, combined with the extreme heat of Washington, is likely to
prevent his recovery just as it seems evident that he might recover from
the direct influence of the ball. ... I do not feel as if I ever wanted
to set foot in its streets again. I expect to see its effect in the changed
looks and gray hairs of my friends who have been there during these
anxious weeks. It is pleasant to notice the universal commendation which
Mr. Blaine is receiving, both from the Democratic and the Republican
newspapers.

From Mr. Blaine :

Washington, September 6.

President left this morning at 6 o'clock. We follow in an hour. I trem-
ble for the experiment and its success, but it was fatal to stay here. . . .

Long Branch. The President holds his own. I wish I could say a great
deal more, but I cannot, and I am overcome with dread of the final result.
He is so greatly reduced ; still, he has lived out seventy-one days, and that
is a great thing. Was there ever a life so desired and so prayed for!
May God look down in mercy !

From Mrs. Garfield:

Mentor, O., October 3, 1881.

. . . Say to Walker for me that his tribute to the President is most
beautiful, and I prize it, not only for the sentiment of loving-kindness
shown, but for that which would have given the general so much delight, —
the ability to speak so well. The general was very fond of both Walker
and Emmons, as indeed of all your children, and my own admiration and
love for them is made precious by this knowledge.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 545

To Mr. Blaine, from Walker :

Washington, October 3, 1881.

Reached here safely at 6.30 this morning. I found Mr. Trescott
here at the department, full of sorrow. He says that there never has
been since the country began any administration of the Department of
State which in nine months could compare with this ; that the last thirty
years put together can't show as much, and that if you stay until the
report on foreign affairs is made, no President could possibly make the
change.

From Mr. Blaine :

Walker went to New York last night to superintend the reception of
the Germans. He is doing his work wonderfully well.

To M., in Europe :

Washington, November 6, 1881.

. . . I reached Philadelphia in time to lunch with your father, prepara-
tory to his leaving for New York on the limited. I looked so good to him
that he determined to £0 back to Washington with us, but Jackev's en-
treaties prevailed and the original plan was carried out. [Entertainment of
the nation's guests.] Before your father left Philadelphia, he sent telegrams
saying that you had sailed. Of course he took to himself all the credit for
the final perseverance of St. Margaret — dear soul — who finds fault?

. . . Our early breakfast was for Emmons' benefit, who wants to get
off to New York at 10.30 to attend the ball this evening, for which your
father has telegraphed him.

From Mr. Blaine :

. . . This eve I dine with the Germans. Everything passes off
delightfully — thanks to Walker, who has executive talent, a great deal.

To M.:

Washington, November 9, 1881.

. . . Your father and Jackey are still in New York, though I think it
would be more sensible if Walker would come home, for Emmons says he
is dead tired. They could not wake him up to go to the ball.
Your father stays now to oblige Arthur, who wants him to come over with
him.

From Mr. Blaine :

Washington.

I am sitting in prim waiting for the foreign guests, who will be here at
one o'clock, and I am having a thousand and one things groing on all
around me. Walker did splendidly in New York; made a most telling
speech at the dinner.

546 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

To M. :

November 25. . . . Walker leaves next week. Mr. Trescott with him.
They will be away the entire winter. Walker is both j^leased and sorry.
It looks good to him to stay here through the winter — at the same time, he
will be glad to add to his travels and experiences, and perhaps reputa-
tion. . . . The dinner at Mrs. Hunt's was exceptionally interesting.
Arthur is so social and fond of being away from his lonely habitation on
Capitol Hill, and etiquette requiring every one to stay till he leaves, it
becomes an interesting problem how to end a dinner before twelve o'clock
— but we did get home from the Hunts a little before that hour.

November 30. . . . Your father, Mr. Hitt, Trescott, Walker, and Tom
at the dining-room table — gas lighted — all diligently working on state
papers. . . . Walker is to go Friday. What do you suppose I can
do without him ? But the embarrassments of the change of the adminis-
tration he will be spared; also a society winter in Washington, which I
consider no loss for him ; also the risk of the loss of some of his pleas-
antest intimacies. . . . Your father gains constantly. He is now
regaining his flesh, which does not give him apparently the satisfaction it
ought.

December 7. . . . Will you please cultivate a plain hand? This morn-
ing's mail, coming before I was up, brought two welcome letters from you.
. Your father, seizing them and my glasses, commenced reading
with impetuosity, but at the first line he balked. I came to the rescue, and,
by omitting all proper names, managed to get through them. . . .
Alice is just starting for the trial ; your father and Mr. Chandler are talking
some Mexican matters, apparently of interest, as the former is fast lashing
himself into a fury. . . . Congress is in session, so we are daily ex-
pecting your father's head to roll in the basket. I cannot but feel a
little blue, though the person chiefly interested was never gayer or in
better health.

From Walker, to Mr. Blaine :

On Board Revenue Cutter, December 3, 1881.
. . . Good-by, dear father. I shall do my best to reflect credit upon
you and to in all ways act as you would have me.
Affectionately and with great love to all the family.

From Mr. Blaine, to Hon. F. T. Frelinghnysen :

Washington, December 10, 1881.
The President will, I presume, nominate you on Monday, and you will of
course be confirmed without reference.

If you have any special desire as to the day on which you will take

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 547

possession of the office, I will of course adjust my concluding matters to
your convenience. If you have no choice, 1 would be glad to have several
days to get everything squared and leave no ravellings wherewith to
trouble you.

If it be agreeable to you and Mrs. Frelinghuysen, it is the desire of Mrs.
Blaine and myself to have a reception in your honor on the evening of the
day on which you are installed, for the special purpose of presenting to
you the members of the Diplomatic Corps with their families.

Would Thursday, the twenty-second, prove agreeable to you. If you
desire an earlier day, I pray you to frankly name it.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. Frelinghuysen :

Newark, N.J., December 12, 1881.

The proposal of Mrs. Blaine and yourself to present Mrs. F. and me to
the Diplomatic Corps and their families is too kind and acceptable to be
declined. The time will of course be fixed to suit your convenience,
whether on the day of my installation or otherwise.

How long I should like it to be before you give possession and devolve
the responsibilities of your office on me, it would not be wise forme to say.
As to what time, under the circumstances, this better be done I will see
you. Mrs. F. and I, before the receipt of your letter, had decided to visit
Washington, for a few days, to see to our house, which we are overhaul-
ing, and I may see you on Wednesday.

To M.:

Washington, December 13, 1881.

. . . Frelinghuysen^ name was sent in yesterday, and yesterday con-
firmed, and in a few days he will take the oath of office, and for the first
time in twenty-three years your father finds himself out of public life, he
entering the Legislature in '58. Of course he is extremely busy, getting
ready to welcome his successor, so I cannot yet judge how the absolute
freedom will affect him, but I have few misgivings. . . . Your father
and I dined with the Hales Sunday evening, the first persons to eat at their
board since they went into the Morton house. I think the house they are
in charming, and we had a nice visit, your father being in one of his irre-
sistible moods, when no man, I care not who he may be, can surpass him.
Then, as Mr. Chandler says, I would rather hear him than eat. . .
I am so glad Walker is away through all these changes, as I find it easier
to preserve my own equanimity, with no one in whom to confide my little
asperities.

December 11. ... I have been again to-day to the trial, the most
interesting place, by all odds, in Washington ; and after enduring the bad
air and stifling companionship of the crowded court-room for three hours,
and after gaping with tin; rest of the crowd at the van till Guiteau sprang

548 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

into it like a-rabbit, I. drove home to find your father still at the department.
It is right and natural, and for the highest good of those most nearly con-
cerned, that my three children should be away, but it is not a costless sacri-
fice. I pay dearly for Emmons' business, for Walker's opportunities, and
for your French. . . . Last night Ave dined at the British Legation.
Twenty-four at the table, representing thirteen nationalities — ourselves the
only Americans. It was a pleasant dinner. The President has to-day
telegraphed Walker to be charge d'affaires at Chile, till Kilpatrick's suc-
cessor is appointed. Did you ever know such luck as he has ?
The President went into the White House Wednesday. . . .

To Walker:

Washington, December 13, 1881.

The bell is being pulled every moment, and at each tinkle I look up,
hoping to see a telegram which shall prove to be from the isthmus. . .
Clarence Hale is here, trying to get an answer from your father for Mr.
Rollins, from whose house he has just arrived, as to whether he will speak
at the New England dinner, and Mr. Frye is here and Robeson and Gibson
and Mr. West — these are all in, and there is a circle kept outside larger
than this privileged one. Mr. Frelinghuysen's name yesterday sent in and
at once confirmed. I cannot help feeling a little blue. Do you suppose a
prime minister ever went out without a secret feeling that he was deprived
of a right? Every day I see the wisdom of your timely absence. For
instance, at 's, it taxed all my equanimity to hear them calmly discuss-
ing your father's removal, without remembering to regret it, even to me.
Not the shadow of a shade of complimentary allusion passed the lips of
one. Everything that was kind was said of you, and with an air of pro-
prietorship which, had they been nice in other directions, would have
warmed my heart; but what care you, my dearest boy, what care I, for
any other name than your father's ? He himself says that you have more
of a reputation than he had at your age, but you must remember that he
was without advantage, while you are free born. . . . The first privi-
lege we shall enjoy is the giving a party to the Frelinghuysens to meet
the Diplomatic Corps, and I anticipate the luxury of choice in my guests.
I miss fearfully the courtesy and consideration of my dear boy, though the
darlings, T. and Q., devote themselves to my happiness. You ought to see
your little sister eulogizing Jack. "He is pious — yes, Q. — he never
upset a praying-stool in church, and laid it to his long knees."

From Walker:

On board ** Lackawanna,"

Panama, December 13, 1881.

. . . On Sunday morning as I was returning to the ship from the
railway company's office in Aspinwall, a man came up to me and intro-
duced himself as Mr. Snow, a native of Maine, who had been for six
years resident on the isthmus, and fifteen years residing in tropical climes,

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 549

returning every summer or two to Bangor. Maine is a very good state
to hail from. You are sure to meet some man from that part of the world
whereever you may be. . .

. . . Poor Kilpatrick, how short his enjoyment ! I recall his extrav-
agant joy when he received the place last May, and now he's gone, leaving
the little wife and the two children in Chile. ... I am extremely com-
plimented by the high honor which the President has paid in making me
charge. Mr. Trescott was, I think, extremely gratified, as it removes any
embarrassment that might attend the success of the mission by a new man
being sent. I hope, however, that some new minister may be sent pretty
quickly, so that after we have ended our work, I may not be compelled to
remain there very long. I wish if you see the President you would say
to him how highly I appreciate the honor which he has paid. I have
been gleaning what gossip I could about the Panama canal since coming
here, and as I am just going on shore for the last time, will pick up some
more. I send you a copy of to-day's paper. If we don't do anything in
South America, you can at least hear that, like Napoleon in Europe, we are

cutting up a of a swell down here. Of one thing you may be quite

sure, that this canal is going to be an extremely expensive thing for the
French, and that it will be many, many years before they complete it,
if they ever do.

To M., in Europe :

December 14, 1881.

. . . Everything connected , with the State Department is all right ;
most of all, the retiring Secretary, who went with me last night to an
auction of water-colors, and amused himself by buying many pictures.
. . . Do not feel uneasy about anything you may hear, politically. The
Chile and Peru business should not give you the slightest concern. It is a
decided policy, instead of drifting, as cowardly Americans only desire to
do. Your father has asserted the rights of this country, as was his bounden
duty.

To Walker :

Washington, December 16, 1881.

. . . The outgoing Secretary is still in gay spirits, and I think the
best of health. . . . Everything is going Stalwart way. D. came
into the parlor to see me during my call last night, and butter would
not melt in his mouth. He has all the generosity of the victor towards
the dying — but their great trump is Guiteau. Day before yesterday he
made, in court, an appeal to those who had " come into fat office through
him, to send in contributions. If they are afraid to do it over their own
names, let them do it on the sly ; but do it they must, or I will call names.'1

Mr. Frelinghuysen has exjjressed to your father his hopes that you will
remain in the department. He desires it on your father's account, and for
his own, everything he hears of you making him anxious to have you near

550 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

him. . . . Mr. Christiancy having been interviewed by the " Herald," and
stating that the first sentence or paragraph of your father's S. A. despatch
to him, as now published, had not been on the original paper, your father
wrote him, when he came down handsomely. His note will be given to
the press to-day. . . . Emmons has had another R. R. offer of an
$1,800 place. He decides to stay in Chicago.

December 16. . . . Your father has just looked up through his glasses
to say that he has bought Hitt's horse for $180. I hail this as the begin-
ning of a stable. It does seem absurd to have four horses and a pony in

Augusta, and hiring" a carriage here. . . . have been in from the

Guiteau trial, which they found extremely interesting, full of devotion to
the family, and anxious to see their way to the advent of Senator Blaine.
Needless to say that their would-be Senator takes no part in any plans of
this kind. I had a lovely letter from Mrs. Garfield this morning ; very
simple, very effective, and affecting. . . . All the Stalwarts are going
in, and though the mills of Arthur may seem to grind slow, they grind exceed-
ing fine ; but whatever you may read or hear, always remember that your
father is a very careful as well as able man, and that because the press criti-
cise you need feel no apprehension ; there often is advantage in the very
criticism. . . .

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. John T. Morgan:

Washington, December 1G, 1881.
I suppose that it will gratify you to know that the sentiments of the
Southern people are very kindly towards you, and that they take a broader
view of men and policies than they generally have credit for. The en-
closed article from the " Selma Times11 gives a fair view of the opinions
of the people of Alabama in respect of your political course. You well
know that you have not flattered them into such expressions ; and they
understand as well that they have not been coerced into an uncandid pro-
fession of great respect for you. Allow me, personally, to express my
deep regret that the country is, for the time, to lose the advantages of your
abilities and experience in its administrative councils, and that your friends
will lose the great and valued opportunity of discussing with you, as is
your habit, in a frank and free manner, all public questions that relate to
the honor and welfare of our country. Wishing you happiness in your
retirement from the cares of public service.

To M. :

Washington, December 19, 1881.

I am in the midst of punch-making, and Lewis has judiciously allowed a
stick of wood to fall on his side, and your father surrenders the portfolio
to-day to Mr. Frelinghuysen, and has now gone to the dejmrtment with
Secretary Hunt, and C. comes this afternoon, and to-night we give a re-
ception to the Corps Diplomatique to welcome Mr. and Mrs. Frelinghuysen

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 551

or vice versa, and Congress has unanimously asked your father to deliver
the oration at the congressional memorial exercises on the death of Gar-
field, and I am against his accepting as he is himself, though almost every
friend he has insists that he shall do it, and how it will end I know not.
One insuperable objection, it seems to me, is the emotion your father will
feel, embarrassing him to an uncontrollable extent, I am sure. And the
man is here about the flowers, and altogether it is a representative day in
the Blaine family as it has hitherto flourished, though very likely this is
the last of them. Well, to a good deal of this I can cheerfully say good-
by. Welcome to go is the punch and all that part of it, and if your
father does not miss these carking cares, as the starved Irishman misses
the heart of the potato, I am ready to lighten the ship by throwing over-
board all this old load. He says he does not, shall not, that he is not
thinking of it at all, but that all his trouble comes from his business opera-
tions, of the neglect of which he is deeply ashamed.

From Walker :

Near Callao, December 21, 1881.

We hope to be in Callao at 9 or 10 o'clock to-morrow morning, after the
smoothest and most charming voyage that you can imagine. There has
not been enough roll on the Pacific to require guards or ledges on the
table at any time since we left Panama. ... I have read a novel and a
history, studied a little Spanish, talked a great deal with Trescott, from
whom I daily learn something, and for whom my respect and admiration
daily augments.

To Mr. Blaine, from Walker :

U.S. Consulate at Callao, Christmas Day.
. . . Before we went we were offered a house in Lima, which we
were obliged to decline, but on going to thank the owner, who is said to be
the wealthiest man in Peru, we found quite a company of Peruvians
assembled, and were forced to sit down about four or five to a most sump-
tuous lunch, and after that they insisted upon our coming back to dine, a
most elaborate dinner being served at eight o'clock. While in Lima we had
three carriages with drivers in livery, the best carriages in Lima, con-
stantly a.t our disposition, and we had so many visitors that it was impossi-
ble to see anything of the town. I have just sent my books that were
given me, referring to the situation, to the boat. Three sailors carrying
them, and two others carrying boxes of wine which we were fairly com-
pelled to take. I think if we had given a hint they would have presented
us with fortunes. It was really embarrassing to avoid the attentions. I
really think that they look upon us as a sort of saviors, and Trescott says
it will be necessary to send a fleet to rescue us at the end of the mission, so
little will the performance that we hope to succeed in correspond with

552 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Peruvian expectation. I can assure you, however, that it made me proud
to hear how, with Spanish extravagance, they spoke of you, and it is per-
haps some source of food to one's vanity to be regarded as a great man by
a whole city for even two days, as I found Trescott and I were. I played
prince royal at the party last night.

I am of opinion that it was advantageous to go to Lima. For myself I
think I understand things much better. I flatter myself and do justice to
Trescott in saying that I think we made good impressions on both Chilians
and Peruvians. . . . One thing perhaps I ought to say, that is, that in
all this we acted quite unofficially, saying nothing and hearing everything.

To M.:

New York, December 29, 1881.

. . . My dearer self — and certainly he might apj3ly the title with
another significance to me — is looking up his sadly neglected stocks.
The only question now is, are they worth taking any notice of. All that
fine Fortunatus' purse which we held the strings of, and in which we had
only to insert the finger to pay therewith for the house, has melted from
the grasp which too carelessly held it, and we must look about for new
investments, the comfort of which I find in the inference that there is still
enough left to spare for investments. . . . Alice is always scrupulous
in unexpected places, thereby atoning for the monstrous liberty your father
takes with my correspondence — not only opening and reading my letters,
but forgetting to mention that they have ever been ; and often, weeks
after, I find the poor ill-used things in his pocket. He says he is not even
thinking of public affairs, while every issue of the press contains at least
one resume of his intentions and ambitions, the upshot of all being the
presidency in '84. I am fast becoming content with the situation. As soon
as people cease asking me if I am going to leave Washington, I shall be
entirely so.

From Walker :

Santiago, January 10, 1882.

. . . Chile has not overflowed with enthusiasm to quite so great an
extent as Peru, but our reception has been most marked. ... I
forgot to mention that when the President had finished his speech the crowd
cheered him, then Trescott, and when we were coming out, myself, which
was rather pleasant, as showing a better state of feeling.

There is a great deal more excitement in Chile than I had supposed before
coming. It seems to be the sole topic of talk here. It certainly is
the one thing mentioned in the newspapers, and the reporters chronicle
every little movement of ours with a persistency that is rather irritating.
On Monday Mr. Trescott has his first interview with Balmaceda. I shall
accompany him in all the interviews, and he has been most delightfully kind
to me in every way in admitting me to full confidence in all his views and
in taking me into advice and conference, so that I am really learning a
little about diplomacy under the best master of the art in America.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 553

Santiago de Chile, January 20, 1882.

. Mr. Trescott has had three interviews with Balmaceda. . . .
The position of affairs is about this. Nobody in Peru will, I think, sign a
treaty of peace with cession of territory. Nobody here, without.

January 28. ... Of course I am very sorry to see father say good-
by for a time to official life, but I had fully appreciated it before leaving
Washington, and had to some extent discounted any feeling which the
change might cause. ... I wrote a little note to father last night, but
forgot to say anything about his birthday. I would telegraph my con-
gratulations, but it would still further bankrupt the family.

It would really not do for me to say how great lions the members of the
commission are. Peru was almost at our feet, and every one in Chile is
devotion itself. If we come out successfully I expect to have a statue
erected both in Lima and in Santiago at public expense. . . . We are
standing on our dignity. You have no idea how well known father is down
here, — better than anybody, I think ; nor have you any idea how they hate
Hurl but, but they say that they gave Kilpatrick the grandest funeral ever
seen in Chile, government paying every bill, at a cost of more than $10,000.

To M. :

January 28, 1882, •
I do not know with what particularity the text of the Chile-Peruvian
papers may be cabled to Europe, but as there is a great deal of talk on this
side concerning them, I hasten to say, "Let not your heart be troubled,
neither let it be afraid.1' Only on the jjublication of these State papers
yesterday morning, in the daily newspapers, did your father know that his
instructions had been altered and revoked, — and when I say his instruc-
tions, you must remember that they are officially the President's acts, he
alone being responsible for them, — and it is he who has gone back on him-
self, for his friends must either admit that he does not know to what he
signs his name, or that he is vacillating and doubtful to the last degree.
In point of fact, the papers were all read to him, and he approved them,
understanding distinctly that they committed his government to a positive
policy. I suspect that has kept from the successive steps of altera-
tion and recantation, and that the President himself is not intelligent on the
matter. At any rate, he seemed completely unprepared for the charge of

fickleness yesterday morning. You remember, don't you, that told us

about Arthur's two passions, as he heard him discussed at Sam Ward's
dinner in New York — new coats being one, he having then already ordered
twenty-five from his tailor since the new year came in ; the other seeming
to do things, while never putting his mind or his hands near them? Your
father saw the President yesterday morning and had a courteous interview
with him. What he, the pater, may do hereafter 1 do not know, but at
present he has decided on the dignity of perfect silence ; but he says he
never wrote papers of which a man or his children ought to be more
proud, and that there is not a single word in them he would have changed.
. Your father is well, and bright and busy, but feels that he has

554 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

been treated with indignity, and that the whole thing is simply a deter-
mination to break him down.

February 2. . . . Jacky was very wise when he foresaw that this
dynasty might not settle itself into the saddle without an impulse to ride
down your father. When you wrote advising a eontiiet with Arthur from
the beginning, I thought you insane; but time, as usual, inclines me to an
admiration of your judgment. Undoubtedly, the State Department intended
the life of your father, which they expected to take with all due regard to
the convenances, and with so much dignity on their own part, that nobody
would know that any one was hurt, only by and by it would strike people
that our dearest dear was forever silenced. . . . They revoked his in-
structions, — though they were Arthur's as well ; they kept back his papers ;
they sent to Congress garbled despatches of Trescott's ; they published
private letters of Christiancy to be sent to Congress. . . . What does
it all amount to ? Your father will be vindicated in every particular. His
}3olicy is a patriotic one, and the people are going to recognize it. Not a
selfish thought is in it, but it is, in all its ramifications, American.
Your father is going this afternoon to Baltimore to dine with Mr. Garrett.
Last night we were at Mrs. Bancroft's. The President came up and asked
me to do him the honor of walking through the rooms with him. Of course
it was intentional. 1 complied, and we made a slow progress.
This attack has stimulated father, and he is as well as he ever was in his
life.

From Walker :

February 4, 1882.

. . . We are awaiting a telegram from the Department of State which
will decide a great many things, and our position here is at the present
moment most cruelly awkward. I expect nothing now but mortification
to the country, and to all of us personally as citizens of the country; but,
Heaven be thanked! the responsibility will not rest upon anyone of us.
Had they left us free I really think we could have done something here ;
as it is now, 1 look forward to nothing. I don't believe that in my time
the United States will ever get back influence worth considering with any
one of these South American countries, and if the department had stood
firm, we could, I honestly believe, have settled the question to the satisfac-
tion of all and to our own (the country's) advancement. Of course I am
writing you confidentially. As an officer of the department, 1 have no
opinions; individually I may have, but it's best not to express them. You
may judge how awkward the attitude is when I tell you that a telegram
sent a week ago last Monday (January 23d), which it was imperative to
have answered at once, has as yet received no reply, and when I assure
you that at the last interview with the Chilian Secretary, when I was about
to present the peace invitation he smiled blandly, and said perhaps I had
better not present it, as he had received a telegram stating that the United

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 555

States had abandoned the proposed congress, and then went on to inform
Mr. Trescott that the instructions given him by father had been published
at home, and new ones issued modifying them seriously, and that the last
had been published too. Of course we can't move a foot just now, and of
course we feel cruelly our awkward position. This is all very confidential,
but perhaps it will interest you a little. Anyway it is the thing which,
just now, most interests me. ... I should awfully like to have a
congressional nomination and election, with just one chance to take a fling
at this new (or old, which is it?) foreign policy of ours.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. John Jay :

New York, Februrary 6, 1882.

Your suggestion about our government asking permission of the
governments of Europe to deal as we like with American questions
recalls the fact that President Grant, in November, 1875, did ask, if not
their permission, at least their "moral support,1' for some plan of joint
action for restoring peace on the Island of Cuba.

I made some comments on this strange appeal to European powers to
interest themselves in an American question and to assist in deciding the
destiny of a Spanish colony in the New World, in a paper on "The
American Foreign Service,1' published in the " International Review,11 for
May and June, 1877, pages 6,7, and 8, at which I hope you may look. A
part of the correspondence was submitted to Congress on the 21st
January, 1876, including the letter to Mr. Cushing, number 266, November
5, 1875, suggesting that it may become the duty of other governments to
interfere ; but the correspondence on this subject with our minister at
Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Rome was not given. My
impression is, from the tone of some of the European papers, that our
government was quietly snubbed by several, if not by all, of their powers,
and that that was all it gained by soliciting the advice and support of
Europe rather than the advice of the American people.

If the Senate or House would call for the whole of that correspondence,
and any other with a foreign power involving the propriety of foreign
intervention in American questions, light might be thrown on the extent
to which we have been drifting from the spirit and true meaning of the
Monroe Doctrine.

To Walker :

February 8, 1882.

. . . You would be delighted could you see how well and
bright and happy your father is, dressed immaculately in one of his new
Baltimore suits, — carefully trimmed, quoad hair and beard, and in the

full exercise of a mental activity which makes cry for the little dog

at home, to know whether they be they. It would be impossible for me
to post you as to the situation, which is so interesting, that I am half the

5r>ti BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

time breathless with excitement. Still I congratulate you that you are not
here. Your position would be embarrassing, and if the State Department
did not drop you, you would feel obliged to drop it. There can be no
doubt, however, that a strong feeling is growing for your father's policy.
It appeals to the American sentiment, and the friends of the administra-
tion have done the President incalculable harm by rushing to his defence
with all sorts of wild assertions . . . which, proved to be true, would
condemn Arthur out and out. ... I must not forget to chronicle an

adroit little trick of Mrs. 's. We were all at a lovely party at her house

last Wednesday evening, and it was not till Saturday that I discovered that
all the other invitations, save ours, read, " To meet Secretary and Mrs. Frc-
linghuysen.11 Accordingly I asked your father if he would go to the B's to
a party given to the F's. " Most decidedly not," he said. So I looked up our
invitation and found, to my great satisfaction, there was no mention of the
Frelinghuysens in our notes. Now it turns out that all the other invitations
mentioned the Frelinghuysens. . . . So Monday afternoon, when I was

making my party call on Mrs. , I asked her about it. Why, the Fre-

linghuysen name was so long, that after writing out a good many invitations
she concluded to drop it, and our cards came among the abbreviated ones !
I assured her that her explanation was entirely satisfactory to me, but I
asked as a special favor that she make the same explanation to Mrs.
Frelinghuysen, at the same time telling her that our cards did not con-
tain their honored name. This she solemnly promised to perform. But
she looked at me scrutinizingly as she promised, no doubt deciding
whether it would be safe to remember to forget. . . . But do not
worry about anything. I am sure time will vindicate your father, and
he will be everywhere recognized as a minister who had the interests
of his own country in perpetual remembrance. Emmons is coming this
noon. He will be a great moral resource to me. . . . He says he is
going to Topeka, Kansas, and I have no doubt it is his destiny so to do —
as, so often as he ends the negotiations, blind fate reopens them, and we
know that what is writ is writ. He is a dear, delightful son. Business
tells on him, and he begins to look careworn and more man than boy. Of
course he lost no time in tasting the sweets of Washington Society.

From A.:

1882.

. . . I don't think Sec. F. has the least hostile wish or purpose
against Mr. Blaine. Nor has Arthur. Both wish to be good friends. Mr.
Blaine walking, met the President driving, and said the President's hat
went up high. "No higher than yours, I hope?11 I said severely, and he
said, " No, indeed.11 I don't believe A. or F. to this day know exactly what
all this row is about, but there is somebody behind them who does know,
and who is greatly surprised to find that Blaine does not lie still after the
vigorous down-pushing that they gave him.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 557

From Walker :

February 10, 1882.

. . . I have nothing to write about unless I go into a full explana-
tion of the position in which we find ourselves here, and I am so angry
and disgusted that I don't like to write about it. . . .

To M.:

February 13, 1882.
. . Since I wrote, Emmons has come and gone, and we miss him
fearfully, as he fills a relation to his parents which none of the younger
ones touch. ... I am as usual writing in my room, which has now,
as I have often told you, been converted into a sanctum sacred to
Garfield, and here your father, who cannot bear to be alone, though he
prohibits talking, is devoting himself to the most difficult portion of his
eulogy — the long sickness with its fatal termination. For the second
time this morning I see him taking from the drawer a fresh pocket-
handkerchief with which he vainly tries to hide his tears, and this time,
wholly overcome, he has beaten a retreat to the blue room. Oh,
M., there indeed is a Douglass tender and true; but if the writing so
moves him, how, with a great audience before him, is he ever to control
his emotion ? Two weeks from this very hour, unless the unforeseen pre-
vents, he will be in the thick of it. Emmons comes back to hear it. It will
not be eloquent, but it will be faithful. . . . Poor father! I wish he
could come downstairs.

February 18. . . . The eulogy is going to be good. Carefully
discriminating, it is an authoritative utterance of the ability and work of
Garfield, which, while it carefully ignores the author, shrinks from no
issue which the administration of Garfield involved. . . . Speaking of
foreign potentates reminds me that you are not to give yourself the slight-
est anxiety concerning your father's position, past or present. Whoever
has explanations or back-downs to make, it is certainly not he. Serene in
the consciousness of a policy, or policies, which looked out for the interests
of America, and which time is as sure to justify as it is to come, he may
well wait undisturbed. ... I can imagine your amusement at the
large place the eulogy occupies in my letters nowadays. When Q. was
snubbed by his father the otherday, he exclaimed, " Crushed by a eulo-
gist." All the time 1 am writing, imagine the careful criticism of language
going on — " the true prerogatives of his high office,'1 reads your father.
" Is that any better," says C, "than the true prerogatives of the presi-
dency ? " I join in the ensuing debate, and by and by we lay over that line
for to-morrow's fresh reading, and by and by I begin to listen again —
" He followed with quickening steps."

February 22. . . . This important document is now in the hands of
Tom, who is transcribing it. Nothing can equal the interest

taken in the day ; the pressure for seats and tickets is enormous. I am
quite sure you will be satisfied. C. has gone over and over it, winnowing

558 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

out the chaff, criticising the construction and language and grammar, and
your father has given to it all his best attention, and a careful selection of
facts, for of course he teems with knowledge sufficient for half a dozen
obituaries. In the midst of all this feeling, national and personal, your
father is stemming the tide of misconstruction and false statement, emanating

from the administration, its friends, and its newspapers. . . . says

the State Department is coming around entirely to all your father's policies.
The whole back-down has been a "put-up job1' to take the credit away
from him, condemn apparently, then bring forward the same policy as a

new measure by this administration. The plan, he says, is wholly 's.

It is a deliberate purpose, now partially executed. Really, and au fond,
there is no change. They expect to dupe the people by high-sounding
papers, but I doubt their success.

To Walker :

February 22.

Last night we all went to the Art Club's reception of Mr.
Corcoran. Your father gave the welcoming address, which was a perfect
gem, and given in a manner which made moist eyes. I felt it deeply my-
self, but when Mrs. Story said to me that she felt like crying whenever she
thought of it, I knew he had played on the harp of a thousand strings. It
was a complete surprise to me, Avho had not before heard one word of it.
Mr. Corcoran took me out to supper, and in every way in his power testi-
fied to his delight. Walker, you would have felt proud and tender, could
you have seen the dear pater giving, in a voice which was a caress and
a benediction in itself, the little address I enclose, — then see him step one
side, and with a simple dignity defer to Mr. Corcoran — nothing better was
ever done or said. Your dear little sister is reading out to Tom the eulogy,
while he copies. She told me just now, after two steady hours of appli-
cation, that she was extremely interested, that she had just come to the
assassination. ... I am afraid, dear Walker, that if you have depended
on me as to the situation here, personal and more general, you have leaned on
a broken reed. This morning I notice among the telegrams that you have
resigned, because of the strictures upon your father on his South American
course. I do not suppose you have done so, though your father for the
first time seems aware of the importance of keeping you posted as to the
public sentiment here. I am constantly writing family letters which I sup-
pose have the happy faculty of touching on things of the least importance.
1 am truly disgusted with myself as the universal correspondent anyway,
and I feel as though my children must long for the sight of another hand-
writing ; but to repair past neglects, I send you a budget cut indiscrim-
inately from the newspapers this morning. Do not for one moment imagine
that your father is going down under this preconcerted attack on the part
of the State Department and its friends. I imagine him very strong, and
that the administration has lost its grip upon this policy, which is so Ameri-
can that it is forced to be the popular will. In short, dear Walker, use

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 559

your own good sense, and ask yourself if it accords with your father's past,
that this attack does him anything but good.

From Mrs. Garfield :

Cleveland, O., February 28, 1882.

Mr. Blaine's advance sheets of his address reached us yesterday morning.

Thronging emotions and memories made my heart stand still. It was
the anniversary of the last day the general passed in our Mentor home.
The paper I held in my hand was the tribute of a grand, loving friend to
his memory. In one short year, hopes, ambitions," aspirations pure and
high, and almost assured, all swept away — nothing left but tears and
loyal, loving words to tell the story. I have tried to collect my thoughts
and my gratitude into some fit expression to tell Mr. Blaine how satisfied I
am with all he has said. It was such a true, unvarnished tale of his life.
His summing up of the influences — those coming through the blood of
ancestors, and those of circumstance which so richly dowered and so
rounded out his character — was so just ; and the final tribute to his work
and worth so magnanimous. My dear friend, if the spirit of General
Garfield is in the great universe, he must have been in that old hall, smiling
upon his old friend a grateful recognition. Pray say to Mr. Blaine that the
dear general's mother joins me in most sincere and heartfelt thanks to him ;
and in love to you all we all join.

These anniversary days are full of heartbreaks. One year ago this hour
the fateful journey to Washington had begun which ended at Lake View
Cemetery. How vividly the last hours at the home come back to me. After
the final preparations for departure were all made, and the last friend had
driven away, came the aimless wandering through the vacant rooms.
By accident the general and I met in the little library, where he had sat
through the long campaign and the busy winter. We looked through tears
into each other's eyes. Choking them back, the general said, "Darling,
shall we come back here again ? " I remember the startled feeling it gave
me, but I answered out of my hope, and we said good-by to the little
room .

Pardon me for wandering back into memories; as dear says, "I

have lost my life," and while I wait, my thoughts will go back to the life
that was with me once." .

What of M.? Is she happy and contented so far from you ? With your
children so scattered, your heart cannot be wholly free from pain.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. Beverley Tucker:

Washington, February 28, 1882.

" Once upon a time" my uncle, John Randolph, of Roanoke, after sitting

for hours, listening attentively, and as he always did, critically, to Littleton

Waller Fazewell's greatest effort at the bar, rose at its conclusion, and

grasping the hand of his great contemporary said, with his peculiar, shrill

560 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

voice, " Fazewell, I. thought I had heard something perfect at last, sir; but
what did you say horizon for ? " (instead of horizon) .

Had the great orator and statesman been an auditor of yours yesterday,
your exquisite address would have extorted a like compliment, without the
handicap of even so trivial a criticism. Can I say more

To Alice, at Fort Leavenworth :

Washington, March 1, 1882.
Now that the eulogy is over and all the books sent back to their several
libraries, and all the black-edged paper banished, and this formerly
heavily freighted table cleared up, you cannot think how bare and empty
the room seems. All the world may come into it now and find nothino-
out of order, and I miss the dear figure that for so many weeks has made
it his studio. He is downstairs, however, for he cannot make up his mind
to separate himself from his family, and I have this moment left him after
a whole morning's talk with Mr. Elkins and Emmons on R. ITs and coal.
Well, Alice, the eulogy has been made, fine and tender and concise, and has
been followed by an almost unbroken stream of congratulation. When I
say that I could ask nothing more for it, both as to audience, subject-
matter, time and place, delivery and reception, you will see that it equalled
the unequalled occasion, for probably your father had not in that vast
assembly a more exacting critic than myself. He has had the most de-
lightful and warm assurances from his friends both by letters and word of
mouth. The former I shall keep for a special scrap-book, and the latter I
shall cherish in my heart of hearts. . . . From the first word I knew
that your father had the ear of the audience. The attention was profound,
an4 the interest untiring. Probably you will miss nothing to compare with
it while away from us, and I am truly sorry that only Q. and Emmons, of
all the children, heard it.

To M.:

March 2, 1882.

. . . Our matutinal reunion was made delightful by a great number
of congratulatory letters. A very feeling one from Uncle Homan, to whom
your father had considerately sent an advanced copy of his eulogy, which
he read, he said, to the neighbors and friends, at the same hour that it was
delivered to the larger and more distinguished, but not more sympathetic
and appreciative and affectionate audience. One from Mrs. Garfield which
I shall hereafter send you, a truly beautiful letter, pathetic in its perfect
simplicity. ... I hope you will not tire of this theme, for really your
father made a great vault. Now I hope to have your approval, for the
orator has a high opinion of M.'s perception. . . . I do not think we
are on good terms with the President, though all the onus of the unpleas-
antness, if such there be, rests on him. I saw him at the Corcoran recep-
tion, but he was embarrassed. Your father did not even know he was
there. ' .

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 561

From Walker :

U.S. Consulate, Valparaiso, March 4, 1882.

. . . . I have received all the papers from New York containing the
full publications of the instructions and Mr. Trescott's confidential telegram.
To our request sent a week ago asking for immediate instructions, we
yesterday received a reply, stating that the President desired for the
present that Mr. Trescott and I should remain here to report upon the situ-
ation and urge his views. The only views we have to urge are G.
Washington's final address. ... I cannot tell you how sick at heart
and how disgusted I am. We have made ourselves absolutely contempti-
ble. Nothing more humiliating than our attitude can be conceived, and I
cannot but think that in the end the policy now adopted must be con-
demned. I hope father will let it go just as it will. His interview has
been republished here in every paper, and the things that are said in the
press are a little hard to me ; but I can stand that. What I can't stand is to
represent the government of the United States which has published to the
world the confidential communications of its minister and thus put an end
forever to diplomacy. There is one thing further, of which you must
judge better than I. I shall stay down here until they order me home,
doing the work that there is and holding my peace ; but when I get back it
may very well happen that it will be quite impossible for me to remain in
the department. ... I also think that they might make me M. C.
from Maine, but I don't suppose they will so regard it, and in fact I shall be
in such a meek and lowly frame of mind that I shall be content to break
stone on the highway. . . . Balmaceda gave me a long talk this morn-
ing. . . . This action of the administration, which has been published
and taken, as it seems to me, simply to break down father at home, has
disgraced (I fear irremediably) the government of the United States
abroad. It has made me sick at heart and ashamed, and I want to get away.
But I think we might as well throw away scabbards. ... I hope father
will hold no more interviews. Wait until the whole matter comes out, if
you wait a year.

March 18. . . . To-morrow I go to Vina del Mar to call upon Bal-
maceda. I ought to be in Lima during the first week in April, and am in
hopes that the last of May will see me restored to my bereaved family.
. . . ( )f course I am wild to get home, crazy for a talk with you all.
I see that the attack on father is bitter and violent, but he has beaten them
masterfully at every point. The letter was superb (the one to Arthur on
the Peace Congress), but why somebody doesn't take up that clause in Fre-
linghuysen's despatch in which he says that to have a foreign policy implies
an army and navy, and that is to tax our people for the benefit of
foreigners, I know not.

To M. :

Mahoh 24, 1882.
. . . Your father talking in the far corner of the dining-room in the
window, with Mr. Parsons, on business plans. . . . Here enters Fagin

562 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

with the morning "Tribune/1 and Mr. Parsons at once loses all that was

left of his listener. I have been answering notes, one to Mrs. , who has

invited your father to dine to-morrow with two charming ladies who wish
to meet Mr. Blaine. Alas, I had peremptory orders from headquarters to
decline, which I have done in honeyed accents, very different from those in

which the lion refused to be bored ; and one to , who has asked us to

dinner to meet . There, too, I have sent diplomatic regrets, which

should read in plain English, " I don't want to have anything to do with
that gang.'" ... I hope you will read and digest the interview of the
pater yesterday. We all deprecate the necessity of coming before the
public, but it is a question of self-preservation.

. . . Walker has left for Bolivia. Yes, dear, the administration may
hope to snuff out Mr. Blaine, but to-day, with all their official power, as a
Southern paper says, whenever Mr. Blaine pipes, they dance !

From Walker •

Lima, April 9, 1882.

. . . I read in the paper yesterday that new instructions had been
forwarded to Mr. Trescott in which the United States consent to territorial
cession ;. but we have received nothing. We have, however, become ac-
customed to seeing instructions published before we received them, and
are therefore not much surprised. I cannot tell you how disgusted, morti-
tied, and humiliated I feel by the action of our government in Washington.
It is disgraceful to our nation that men should be trusted with great offices
who will so misuse the power thus given them. . . . For the love of
Heaven and my own self-respect, get me ordered home and let me resign.
There is one great satisfaction to me, and that is father's eulogy on Gar-
iield, which I would rather have written than to have been President or
Secretary of State, or any other thing possible. That did make me prouder
than ever, I assure you. ... I heard of poor Hurlbut's death when at
Puno on my way back from La Paz. He died very suddenly, of angina
pectoris. The demonstration here at the funeral is said to have been very
grand and impressive. He was greatly liked and beloved by the Peruvians.
It's very strange, and makes me feel almost superstitious to think of both
Hurlbut and Kilpatrick.

To M. :

Washington, April 12, 1882.

. . . We had a tea company of eight gentlemen whom your father,
unmindful of our limited help, and that the market was not open on Sun-
day, and that Lewis and Caroline were unwarned, invited in a batch at
Mr. Sawyer's dinner-party which he attended after our arrival on Saturday
evening. Everything went oft", however, well and handsomely, the com-
pany proving distinguished, the supper bountiful and choice, and the host
unequalled. . . . Breakfast is over, and your father, downstairs, is
reading an old State paper of his on Guatemala to Emmons, in whose judg-
ment he seems to have great contidence.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 563

April 20. Emmons left for Chicago, with reluctance, Monday morn-
ing. Each visit home only seems to tighten the tie that binds this
beloved son to his mother. . . . The chief of his clan is more and
more devoting himself to business, till it is really assuring to note how
little he cares for the Senate, the Cabinet, or any other elevation. I am
delighted, because I have always regarded the hanging on to place as
one of the melancholy inevitables of political life ; so if now in the very
zenith of his reputation your father can seek other skies in which to shine,
is it not wiser for him, and better for us all ? . . . He has been able
through it [a Congressional Committee of investigation], in the most not-
able manner to get his S. A. policy before the world, and at last I believe
it will be known and read of all men. You cannot imagine how grand
he seems to me, — perfectly simple and natural, sleeping well and eating,
and without one particle of pettiness or vanity in his whole composition.

From G. :

Observe that it is not Mr. Blaine who is running around trying to settle
matters. Mr. Blaine is this minute sitting- at his desk writing1 a letter to
the Foreign Affairs Committee, protesting against their stopping the in-
vestigation here, when they had Shiphard up for weeks when there was
any slander to be uttered against the State Department, but now that a
great policy is concerned, they stop it in three days.

Mr. Blaine, from Hon. Wni. Pinkney Whyte :

Baltimore, April 24, 1882.

. . . I enjoyed this P.M. reading your evidence, or such scraps as the
evening paper gave, and saw that you had not lost a tittle of your snap and
vitality.

Of course, old Mulberry Shiphard's story only amused thoughtful people.

To M. :

Washington, May 1, 1892.

. I hope you will feel no less indignant than Emmons when
you are in full possession of the reports of the examinations ; but do
not you regret them ? There was nothing our beloved wanted so much
as to get his S. A. policy before the world, and a great deal of it is certainly
now where every one can read it. Moreover, all the diplomats evidently
regard the late Secretary of State as the one formidable American, and the
attention I receive when I go anywhere is very noticeable. In Europe, of
course, your father's policy, which is decidedly American, you will see very
much criticised, and you must remember that this is really greatly to his
credit. A policy which European countries would applaud could not be
very American.

May 8. . . . Your father returned from New York Saturday after-
noon. He telegraphed me to meet him at the station, and from there we

564 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

drove to the new house, where we found everything progressing favora-
bly ; then to the Broadhead house, where was a kettledrum, the house
cold, and I could not get "the beloved" soon enough away. By dint of
pacing all the rooms to convince me how superior my own were, he man-
aged to take exercise enough to keep himself warm. . . .

Mr. E. has been in and stayed an hour with me, and he and I agree that
although Mr. Blaine professes himself wearied with the hollowness of New
York society, he disports himself pretty actively in the hollow. But does
not the publisher promise handsomely ?

. . . The Maine Republicans are circulating a petition to your father
to represent the State as Congressman at Large. Nothing would as yet
induce him to go back to public life. To put the energy and time and
temper into the House which it would require to secure and hold its con-
trol, he told me this morning would lose him a million dollars, which the
same effort otherwise applied would make for him. k' Oh, mother, mother
Blaine ! " he said, " I have so much to do, I know not which way to turn/'
— " Good ! " said I. — " Yes," said he, " isn't it perfectly splendid ? "

From G. :

Washington, May 9, 1882.

. . . Sunday we three met the President on the street walking. None
of us saw him till he had nearly passed us. Then we bowed and saluted,
and Mr. Blaine coming out of his brown study went up to him as smiling
and cordial as could be, and he had to stop and turn back, and I will do
him the justice to say he was embarrassed, and Mr. Blaine advised him to
take long walks, etc., and look out for his health !

I have had a long talk with him, finding him very cheery and cheerful.
He says there is only one position which he covets in the future. The
presidency may go, but he would like to carry out his views of Statecraft,
in 1885, as Secretary of State. . . .

To M. :

May 28. . . . Your father has now reached home, having left Cin-
cinnati last night. His spirits are good as can be, so is his health, but
you cannot interest him in politics. In business, he is immersed.
Emmons leaves Chicago in two weeks, and goes to Cincinnati as Treasurer
of a R.R. He also has a position on a second road, the two together
giving him a salary of three thousand. T am so pleased for him.
eJaeky we look for on Thursda}7. He will resign, I suppose, when he has
straightened out his State Department business.

May 31. I came into the house Saturday afternoon. ... I found
Mr. Blaine still away. . . . While we were at lunch Sunday, came the
well-known ring and tat-a-tap, followed, as soon as three could get the door
open, by the beloved traveller himself, very dirty, but every cinder alive
with affection and good spirits. He regards his trip as a most successful
one.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 565

June 4. . . . Your father comes forward " to my sincerest and
best critic,1' — yes, I say, the best left, "the best always, you are
much more difficult to satisfy than A.11 — with his letter declining to run as
Congressman at Large, to his petitioners in Maine, and I listen and
approve heartily, but object to his " hence," which I consider an
earmark; at which he laughs and says, "As I am putting my name to it
in full — they will not have to look for the earmark, eh, Tom ? " ...
And Mr. Trescott, in a suit of light gray, which he says he has worn all
through Peru and Chile, but which is as fresh as though it had just seen
the light, comes in to turn over the ever-vexed question of South American
affairs, and Walker, who has been telephoned for from the State Depart-
ment to see Mr. Elkins, comes rubbing his hands with delight, saying, " The
whole round trip through Peru, Chile, and Bolivia did not afford me as
much pleasure as I have had to-day.11 . . . He is looking very well,
and I am lost in wonder, love, and praise at having such a boy. For he
has the whole South American business in his head, and he is a most
devoted brother to T., and to his father an anxious and attentive son, and
to you, M., all that even your exacting heart can ask. Your father came
last night, and only when Walker opened the door to him did he know that
he was here.

June 12. . . . Your father making his breakfast this hot, hot
morning off baked beans ; and WTalker, in that summer suit of those
summers gone, explaining the coffee and the coffee-making of South
America. . . . Here comes your dear Walker announcing, with that
irresistible lisp of his, "This is, my last final appearance.11 He means
that he is now going to tear himself away from his family for the State
Department. He has in his hand his summer hat, and under his arm an
immense envelope of despatches. . . . The last Clayton-Bulwer paper

is Mr. 's, and he is very proud of it, while your father thinks it

an utterly untenable ground which he has taken. ... I doubt if I
have given the technical language, but I would give more for what lies
within the frosty brow of my John Anderson than for all the brains of
all the 1s.

June 19. . . . Walker is awfully interesting — and of Emmons too
much cannot be said, but 1 spare you the impossible.

Augusta, June 29. ... I am at home — and so busy, — for your
father came with me to New York only, and he has promised to stay away
till Monday, so that these intervening days are all that I shall have for
preparing for the summer, now almost a month old.

Emmons met us at Boston, and with prompt energy hurried us across
the city, possessed himself of my twoscore of checks, and before I knew
it, I was on board the train. . . . The solemn stillness which all the
air holds suggests forcibly the loneliness you must have felt last summer
when you came home. ... 1 miss the good society of my Blaine
men — and then to-day has been so suggestive of a year ago ; when Q.
came home at a quarter past twelve and said that Guiteau would be
hun<r in fifteen minutes it seemed to me there was a visible hush through

566 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

all nature, and by and by the old telephone sounded, and this was said
into my waiting ear, — " He was hung at twelve thirty-five; he died in-
stantly. His neck was broken. " Every servant stopped his work to say,
" I'm glad he's gone ; " and even Mr. Homan could almost desire to give up
his anti-capital punishment principle in favor of Guiteau. Oh, if he only
could have died one little year earlier, the difference to me ! Your father
said the other day, as he drove by the State Department, " Here I fully
expected to raise my Ebenezer for eight years.11 But you must not
imagine that he suffers from one regret for public life ; quite the contrary,
you could not at present drive him back. The love will revive, I doubt
not, but now he is bound to try other paths.

From Mr. Blaine, to Walker :

Home, Sunday.

The Creswell offer looks tempting, but it is a needless sacrifice to
disfranchise one's self, and give up the honors of public life; — even if
your ambition should not lead that way, and even if opportunity should not
offer, it is still a gratification to be gifted with the right and power. For
that reason I incline to Chicago.

From Walker :

June 30, 1882.

Enclosed you will find a letter so that you will see that I am out of office
and a private citizen. Of course one doesn't give up a place so agreeable
without some regret, but I am fully assured that it is much better for me
to be out of office. ... A little coincidence that I should have gone in
as almost the last act of Garfield before he was shot, and out the day
Guiteau was hanged.

Enclosure : from Secretary Frelinghuysen to Walker Blaine :

June 30, 1882.
. . . During the short time of my official association with you, I have
learned, as every one else in the department had learned already, to enter-
tain a high respect and regard for you. I very much regret the separation
in official matters which your resignation occasions, and I hope you will
believe me when I say that if at any time I can manifest the respect and
regard which I have expressed by services to you, I shall be happy to
do so.

To Mr. Blaine, from Walker :

July 1, 1882.

. . . I thought it best to part on the best and kindest terms with
everybody in the building. I don't think 1 have left an enemy, or indeed
any but a friend, behind me, in the lesser places, and they have certainly

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 567

ever since I have been there been most kind to me. . . . Should I
take any place — even that one — for and by myself, would there ever be
any force in that against you ; could it ever possibly embarrass you ? If it
could they would use it, you know that well enough. My own cool view
is that you should stand aloof every way from this administration, saying
nothing and leaving the people to judge. Now, pray don't let anything
like this little matter in any way affect you. I would rather scrub for my
living or live on my parents than do that.

July 7, 1882. Cresswell was appointed counsel to-day. Mr. F. men-
tioned Cresswell as wishing it,1 which to me was very pleasing.

From Mr. Blaine, to M. :

Augusta, Me., July 22, 1882.

I am anxious to have you take the tour of Scotland with the Rollinses.
When you get back to Liverpool you must rely on the aid of Consul Pack-
ard to get you back to Paris. I will write him and see that agreeable ar-
rangements are made to ensure your getting back at the right time and not
too soon. We are glad that you are so greatly enjoying your trip. We
are very quiet at home. Emmons is with us ; has just started on a yachting
tour to the York County coast with the Richards. Jackey is in Washington,
where he has just been appointed assistant U.S. Counsel before the Court
of Alabama war claims.

I hope after your return from Scotland you may have some good oppor-
tunity to visit Ireland. By all means you must see Wales — especially
South Wales and Cornwall. The most charming views in the United
Kingdom are there. When you visit Burns1 birthplace — as you will — be
sure to sail from Ayr to Glasgow by the Firth of Clyde. Don't go both
ways by rail. It is splendid. See all you can. Enjoy all you can.
Learn all you can.

With love as deep as the ocean that divides us,

Mother and I send much love to the Rollinses. Pere el Jils et files —
or Phil.

To Mr. Blaine, from Walker :

Washington, July 23, 1882.

. . . 1st. The resolution directing that the investigation should be
closed was introduced on Friday last by Mr. Rice and adopted unanimously
by the committee. Its object was to end the investigation. ... I
don't think you realize how dead this whole investigation is, and how sick
and tired of it everybody is. It has had its day and is really a corpse.
. . . So far as matter of policy is concerned, that this committee will
not touch. On that you must take a popular verdict, and I am sure that
the country will sustain you. So far as this investigation concerns your

1 Walker's appointment as Assistant Counsel on the Geneva Award Distribution, which
was made the next month.

568 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

honor, you may be sure that the report will do you full justice. . . .
Next week you will have a report ; the week after, the public will forget
the whole matter. Next year you will get, so far as policy is concerned,
most ample justification.

July 25. ... I am greatly delighted at the unanimous action of
the committee. What I feared was that the statement mi Hit be admitted
by the vote of the Republican members, the Democrats on the committee
opposing. ... I called yesterday morning upon Barrios, the President
of Guatemala. He is very anxious to see you, saying many most flattering
things, among others that he had your picture in his house in Guatemala.
I told him that you had retired from public life, but would be most happy
to call upon him should you be in New York, where he has gone.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. W. W. Rice :

Washington, July 30, 1882.

I have not felt like writing you until my work in the investigation where
you have been so prominent was ended. I want to say to you now that,
in my judgment, the more they investigate your action as to Chile and
Peru, the better you will stand with the j>eople of the country. I have
learned more than I ever knew before of the utter unreliability of news-
papers. But truth sometimes prevails, despite them.

I do not know whether the report will be modified any by the full com-
mittee, but as it leaves our hands it is a quiet but absolute vindication of
you. I wish we could have made it more outspoken, for you deserve it in
this case, but the terms of the resolutions were somewhat restrictive. I
think, however, we have guarded all points sufficiently. I presume that
Belmont and Blount will non-concur.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. L. P. Morton :

San Moritz, August 11, 1882.

I have awaited the report of the committee on F. A., wishing to leave
you in a position where you could say that you had had no communication
from or with me, except the official correspondence, before expressing my
appreciation of your friendly incidental reference to me and to the merely
business character of the contract made by Morton, Bliss, & Co. with the
Credit Industriel.

I fancy some people thought at the start of this campaign that there had
been collusion and scheming between you and me! I congratulate you, as
I do myself, upon the result of this long, disagreeable affair.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 569

XVII.

YEARS FROM 1882 TO 1888.

A FTER the summer rest and the fall elections, which
-*--*- brought victory to Maine, but great overthrow to some
other Republican States, Mr. Blaine devoted his time to writ-
ing. Over all the ruin of his patriotic plans and his personal
expectations, he uttered no word of lament or regret, but went
forward to the next practicable thing. He tried to think that
money-making would gratify and satisfy him. He liked to exer-
cise the foresight and devise the combinations which make great
fortunes, but he had not patience to watch the issue. Business
opportunities were pressed upon him from coal mines and iron
mines in Pennsylvania, from silver mines in Colorado and Nevada,
from lecture-fields promising ,more than gold or silver, from rail-
roads, and from newspaper offices ; but literature, to which he
had often looked forward as the resource of his later and leisure
years, proved to be the only occupation which could engage his
permanent attention. Ever after tracing Csesar's journeys and
surveying his battle-fields in Europe, he had confessed historic
doubts regarding the Cesarean record. Though generally re-
ferred to in jest, he hoped one day to set forth these doubts in
earnest. The war of 1812 he considered of more importance than
had generally been attributed to it. He thought that its con-
sequences had never been measured, or its motive and end fully
comprehended by the American people ; and he cherished it as
one of the studies of that care-free old age which he promised
himself, — which, at least, he liked to talk about; but when at
length he settled upon his theme, it was the twenty years of
Congress, from Lincoln to Garfield.

Meanwhile the new house which he had begun in the spring
of 1881 was completed. Its supervision had been a relaxation
and diversion during the heavy days of President Garfield's

570 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

illness. It had been planned for the Secretary of State, and was
too large and too costly of maintenance for the private citi-
zen. Mr. Blaine furnished it and lived in it through the winter
of 1882-3, greatly enjoying the work of his hands, the wide
outlook, the nearness to woods and country walks. Every day,
often two or three times a day, he delighted to stroll over the
hills of Kalorama, and in the sunny winter weather, relieved
from heavy responsibility, full of the joy of life and love and
congenial work, his rich imagination, stimulated by contempla-
tion of the past, looked into the future far as human eye could
see, and made the capital city, already beautiful for situation,
the joy of the whole earth. With a free hand he would
stretch its parks among the woods, its avenues along the river,
rear its architectural glories, and garner its intellectual wealth.
The old idea of founding a great university in Washington
had been one of his dreams of the presidency. When the new
library building was decided on, he watched it as one stone
was laid upon another, closely as he had watched the going
up of his own house, and found nothing too beautiful or too
costly for the adornment of the city, which represents the loy-
alty of the people to the government of the people, by the
people, for the people.

Before he was quite ready to give it up, his house had recom-
mended itself to larger purses than his, and the next winter he
rented the Marcy House, on Lafayette square.

For the handling of his theme — " Twenty Years of Congress "
— he was so thoroughly furnished that he wrote with great
rapidity, consulting books chiefly for confirmation, seldom for
information. In 1876 Mr. W. S. Hartley, of Pennsylvania, who
had been in college with Mr. Blaine twenty-eight years before,
and had never seen him or corresponded with him since, went
with Mr. Montgomery, of Oregon, to call upon Mr. Blaine.
On the way Mr. Hartley among other reminiscences recalled
that " when Blaine left college to go to Kentucky, along with
several others, I sat up in his room until the stage was ready to
start on the Old National Road. The negro porter who was to
carry young Blaine's carpet-sack failed to come. Blaine ex-
pressed impatience, and I said, ' Blaine, I will carry your carpet-
sack if you will give me what you promised to give the negro

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 571

porter. What did you promise him ? ' — 4 A levy,' said Blaine ;
so I carried the carpet-sack and he gave me the levy." In the
course of the visit Mr. Montgomery said seriously, " Mr.
Blaine, a good many years ago something happened between
you and Mr. Hartley that has left a sting ; but I have brought
him up here to see if, after mutual explanations were made, you
could not be friends again." Mr. Blaine smiled, put up his
finger, and said, " I know what you refer to. You think I ought
to have given Bill a quarter for carrying down my carpet-sack
to the stage office, instead of a levy ; but a levy then was as
much as a quarter is now, and he was well paid ! '

Referring to this again in 1885 when Mr. Blaine was writing
his first volume, as an instance of ready memory, convenient if
not necessary in historical writing, Mr. Blaine said to Mr.
Montgomery, " I seldom talk of myself, but I will tell you what
happened just a little while ago. Robert C. Winthrop was here
to be present at the dedicating services of the Washington monu-
ment. He was speaker of the House when the cornerstone
was laid, and took part in the ceremony. I invited Hannibal
Hamlin and Mr. Winthrop to come to my home to luncheon.
At luncheon the question came up, who in that Congress 49-51
were the Senators from the States ? I repeated the names of
every one without mistake."

Delighting in his work, he was so engaged and joyous, so in-
tellectually radiant and stimulating, that he was delightful to
work with, well-affectionecl toward the most radical criticism,
and always buoyed up, even in hours of occasional lassitude, by
the constant if underlying consciousness that his book would
aid in the better understanding of popular government.

His first volume was finished, published, and launched upon
the world, meeting an instant success both popular and liter-
ary. The man who does, outranks the man who writes about
what is done; — "not because written speech is less of a force,
but because the speculation and criticism of the literature
that substantially influences the world make far less demand
than the actual conduct of great affairs on qualities which
are not rare in detail, but are amazingly rare in combina-
tion, — on temper, foresight, solidity, daring ; on strength,
strength of intelligence and strength of character." Mr.

572 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Blaine met both demands. He had conducted great affairs,
and he now placed them in literature, arranging and discussing
economical, constitutional, and international questions in con-
nection with the exigency which caused them and the forces
which controlled them. The people applauded with singular
unanimity, but the Republican party entered his library and
made good its claim upon him as a candidate for the presidency.
He could not be indifferent to the greatness of the tribute,
coming as it did after so many and so varied defeats, but he ab-
horred the processes of the candidacy. He uttered no word of
assent and made no movement of accord ; to so much lie had a
right : but he saw as well as others that political life was where
he led ; otherwise the party was drifting Arthur-ward either to
failure, or to a success worse than failure, because it meant
inaptitude and inaction, with responsibility. Mr. Blaine's plans
had been arrested, assaulted, apparently overthrown ; his ideas
had been stayed for wider and deeper planting. Multitudes, to
whom a systematic and organized peace with its corollary of
Reciprocity instead of conquest made slight appeal, were cap-
tivated by the idea that America should be American. The
American sentiment, once aroused, could not again be put
wholly to sleep, and men felt that movement was more manly
than stagnation. All this Americanism centered upon Mr.
Blaine and no other. Leaders who had been his bitterest
opponents in 1876 were now among his warmest advocates. Of
a large majority in the convention he was the first choice, and of
nearly all he was the second choice ; and the nomination, hardly
and vainly fought for by his friends in two conventions, came
in 1884 not only practically without dispute, but with an un-
precedented acclaim of triumphant affection. An eye-witness
says that when the States were being called for nominations,
" State by State," the clerk called out " Maine," and sank back
into his seat awaiting the response which he knew would follow.
There was an instant, clear, loud shout, the cheer rattling
through the hall like a volley of infantry, then deepening as it
grew in force like the roar of a cannon, then swelling like the
crash of a thunderbolt. With common impulse the audience,
delegates and spectators, sprang to their feet. From the stage
to the end of the hall, a distance of an eighth of a mile, the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 573

cheering, in dense waves of sound, hoarse and shrill, sharp
and clear, became a wild tumult of applause. When Judge
West, the blind orator of Ohio, was helped to the platform by
two young men, the applause rolled again through the hall,
and as the orator, lifting his right hand above his head, com-
pelled silence, ten minutes of uproar and storm was followed
by stillness in which a whisper could be heard. The clean-cut
sentences, brilliant delivery, and confident manner of the speaker
captivated the crowd. Point after point in his speech was
greeted with echoing cheers. At last the supreme moment
came :

" In the name of a majority of the delegates from the Repub-
lican States and their constituencies who must fight this battle,
I nominate James G. Blaine, of Maine." The magic word had
scarcely slipped from the orator's lips before audience and
convention caught it up. Applause rose and fell, subsiding
only to burst forth with increasing strength. A garlanded
helmet with its snow-white plume was raised from the platform
upon the point of a color standard. A long, loud shout signalled
its recognition. Flag after flag was stripped from the decora-
tions of the galleries and waved in the air. Men drew off
their coats and waved them, and the band essayed in vain to
drown the noise by playing its most tumultuous airs.

The nomination of the military hero, General Logan, for Vice-
President, added to the enthusiasm. Outside the convention,
" a hosanna went up from ocean to ocean," says Senator Thur-
ston, whose voice rang among the loudest in the paean. From
ocean to ocean the wires were burdened with " congratulations,"
"intense enthusiasm," "bands playing and guns booming,"
" Cumberland Valley, the home of your ancestors," pressing
warmly to the front. Bangor jammed into her streets and then
fired up a special train and went bodily to Augusta. California,
which had brought her railway train festooned, and bannered,
and blazoned, to Chicago, resolved to extend the little trip to
Augusta, and the novel spectacle of a gala train bearing Cali-
fornia to Mr. Blaine's house in spontaneous good-will, added a
touch of romance to the general satisfaction.

Mr. Blaine accepted the nomination, and after a very short
indulgence in the luxury of woe in the privacy of home, arose

574 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

and laid out the ground on which the contest should be con-
ducted, in a letter of acceptance on July 15, 1884.

The gratification of the Republican masses seemed to them
to ensure the election. Leaders well knew that the fight would
be close. The Republican party had been twenty-four years in
power, and was bearing all the burdens which such tenancy ac-
cumulates. The old issues, though undecided, had lost their
novelty. The new issues with which Mr. Blaine's name was
associated had been arrested by the assassin's bullet, and assailed
by the succeeding administration. There had been so little
time for the development of the Garfield foreign policy that
many derived their first knowledge of its existence from the
attacks made upon it. Business men, especially in Eastern
communities, who took their impressions from hostile distortion
of facts, and not from the facts themselves, had no other idea
of this incorporation of peace as a policy to be established by
reason, friendship, and self-interest, than that it meant jingoism
and war, and looked with timidity, if not with fright, upon
measures whose accomplishment would be the unlimited en-
largement of business ; and while they were urging an assurance
that there should be no war, the West was clamoring for an
assurance that there should be no back-down from a spirited
foreign policy.

Among the Irish were distinct signs of cleavage from the
Democratic party. Mr. Blaine's Irish blood and Catholic
affinities were in themselves prepossessing to the Irish. His
stand against arbitrary arrests of Irish-American citizens in
Ireland, and his demand for speedy and impartial trials, had
fastened Irish attention upon him. His exposure and even
ridicule of Irish-American fealty to English interests had borne
fruit. Influential Irishmen stood ready to seize the opportunity.
A divided Irish vote was second only in importance to a divided
Southern vote. These new conditions, the old long-contested
positions under new phases, and the banalities that drag in the
train of real issues, Mr. Blaine set himself to meet in his letter
of acceptance.

Perhaps there had never been a time when the American pro-
tective system looked more formidable to Europe. Hence, Mr.
Blaine's candidacy was received with sharp hostility abroad.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 575

London papers openly hailed the nomination of Mr. Cleveland
by the Democratic party as a result the most satisfactory they
could desire. Mr. Blaine did not formally argue the question of
protection, but he arrayed a few facts constituting the strongest
argument, and he especially pointed out the vast area of our
free trade among the States, and the enormous extent of our
internal commerce which protection reserves for the American
people, a market far greater than the foreign market, and one
which the foreigner — especially the British foreigner — is
hungry to break into. He pointed out the disaster to American
labor of such foreign incursion, or of any policy that arrays labor
and capital against each other; denounced the subjection of
American labor to the unfair competition of any cheap foreign
contract labor, and declared for such protection of labor and of
trade as should enable a man by his earnings " to live in com-
fort, educate his children, and save a sufficient amount for the
necessities of age."

He expounded the peaceful character and emphasized the
peaceful aims of Garfield's foreign policy, pronounced judg-
ment that it should be renewed and that it would at no dis-
tant day powerfully contribute to the universal acceptance of
the philanthropic and Christian principle of arbitration. He
enumerated the benefits to be expected from reciprocity
between North and South America. " No field promises so
much. No field has been cultivated so little. Our foreign
policy should be an American policy in its broadest and most
comprehensive sense, — a policy of peace, of friendship, of
commercial enlargement." That there was still a Southern
question he recognized with regret, but not without hope. He
believed that prejudices were yielding and that violence was ex-
ceptional. His own personal relations with Southern men could
but make him take an optimistic view, but he left no room for
doubt that any consolidation of Southern States on issues that
grow out of the memories of the war would summon the North-
ern States to combine in the assertion of nationality, and he
deprecated all attempts of the Democratic party to urge such
consolidation and thus waste in hurtful strife the energy that
should be devoted to industrial development.

Free-traders in the Republican party hesitated to join openly

576 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

in the British campaign for Cleveland, but preferred to oppose
protection, under the watchword of " spoils," in the ranks of
civil service reform. " People of importance " in Boston
promptly organized a " bolt " in favor of " a government free
from jobbery, free from jingoism ; " and while some took the
more lenient view that there Avas nothing personal against the
Republican candidate, they complained that he was " sur-
rounded by all the rascality and riff-raff of the Republican
party," and they desired " a candidate who should, like Caesar's
wife, be above suspicion ; " and proffered themselves to the
Democratic party in case Governor Cleveland should be its
nominee. Mr. Blaine retained the position he had always
occupied, — that the Republican party was itself the party of
reform, of reform not only advocated, but in daily accomplish-
ment, and that it should so continue. Corruption of the civil
service he had always and utterly rejected as the basis of reform,
and advocated only such constant re-formation as the constant
growth of public business required and as the prevailing integ-
rity and good sense of the people demanded. In 1882 he had
publicly advocated definite terms of office during which no
officer should be removed except for cause, specified, proved,
and recorded. These official terms should "break joints" with
the Presidential term, and thus prevent the annoyance and injury
caused to each new administration by the necessity of distrib-
uting offices. But he was not in favor of a life tenure. In the
critical position of a national candidate he refused to change
his ground, but in restating his position paid at the outset a
tribute to our much-maligned civil service, and a tribute which
redounded to the credit of his opponents as well as of his sup-
porters. He referred to his own experience, and suggested some
changes which he had indeed already referred to in the Garfield
eulogy, and which, therefore, could not be set aside as a "bid
for votes " even by those to whom " politics " means only per-
sonal aggrandizement.

A bimetallic standard established by international agreement,
the multiplication of land-owners against a tendency to con-
solidate large tracts of land in the ownership of individuals or of
corporations, and especially of aliens, encouragement to Ameri-
can navigation, and, strongest of all, a free and pure ballot as

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 577

the foundation of government, were among the points presented
for acceptance.

This letter of acceptance met an extraordinary welcome. Its
prudence in practical details gave a homely confidence, but
beyond and above this was something new, — a larger aim, a
higher atmosphere. Of the trivial he selected its best tendency
and dropped all else. In his mind the politics of a hemisphere
lay mapped out as clear as the politics of a province. The
shaping of a great future he touched with so easy and command-
ing a hand, that men gladly followed him away from the idle,
malicious tendencies of the hour, away even from the iteration
of past successes, into the region of hope and purpose and
imagination — which is called creative, but which never creates,
only combines and vitalizes.

The establishment of the " solid South " had the effect of
securing to the Democrats, without effort, the electoral votes of
sixteen Southern States, leaving all Democratic resources to be
concentrated upon the two or three additional Northern States
which might be necessary to national success.

Lists of names were constantly appearing of Irishmen of
influence who had always voted the Democratic ticket, but had
now declared for Blaine. Irish leagues and Hibernian asso-
ciations east and west came over to him. Irish-American
Blaine-Logan associations were formed, and publicly addressed
him as the " champion of protection to the industries of the
country and the resolute foe of a policy which, if adopted
by our government, would destroy our flourishing manufact-
ures and degrade the dignity and independence of American
labor to the pauper standard of Europe. . . . We regard
you as an advocate of the rights of American citizens at home
and abroad. We watched your career in public life, and we
have seen it to be guided by pure patriotism and honest
purpose. We have studied your record, and we find it without
spot or blemish. As a public man and a private citizen you have
borne yourself among us without just reproach. . . . We
address you in the ancient language of our fatherland because
we helieve that to you it will be a gratifying incident of the
campaign to receive an assurance of friendship and regard con-
veyed to you in the language of the race from which your

578 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

mother sprung, and which has given to this great republic many
of its bravest defenders and most devoted citizens."

But this threatened secession of the better element induced
frantic appeals to the lower class. It was proclaimed that
Mr. Blaine had been an apostate, a know-nothing, a persecutor
of Catholics. He was even included in a rabble that had com-
mitted an outrage upon Father Bapst, in Ellsworth, Maine,
twenty years before. Many members of the Catholic church
contradicted over their own names the absurd rumor, but the
contradiction was no part of Democratic campaign literature.

The labor question was stirring, and though the movements
of masses are often blind, a deep and true instinct must be
recognized underneath the movement. The eight-hour question
was in dispute. Trades-Unionists and Knights of Labor Avere
tinted, if not tainted, with foreign politics, and where their
politics was American, it was chiefly Democratic ; but under the
politics were human beings. A strike was Avide-spreading among
the coal-miners in Illinois, another was brooding sullenly over
Ohio. Strife between the Typographical Union and the Repub-
lican " New York Tribune " resisted all efforts at accommodation.
Upon the crest of these waves Gen. Benjamin F. Butler rode
with his wonted glee and Avith his wonted obliquity, lurching
now towards one party, and now towards the other, till men
declared that he had agreed to help Republicans in the East for
half his campaign expenses, and Democrats in the West for the
other half. If he meant to defeat Cleveland, they asked, why
Avas he " hippodroming through the West and smashing around
in Pennsylvania — strong Blaine sections ? '* If he meant to
defeat Blaine, Avhy was he making away with three hundred
thousand Democratic votes in the Democratic preserves of
Brooklyn and New York, where Blaine would have got only
one hundred thousand ?

After the State election in Maine Mr. Blaine, in response to
much urgency, made a tour of six weeks' duration. Confidence
in his wisdom as "safe," and in his presence as irresistible, had
become a " cult." Wherever he appeared the gatherings were
phenomenal. Special trains carried people a night's journey to
hear him, and a night's journey home again after the hearing
was over. More than four hundred popular assemblies he

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 579

addressed, often connecting some local or personal interest with
the national questions, thus giving individual application and
character to each address. This tour was a departure from
custom, but he said, " I am not speaking for myself. No man
ever met with a misfortune in being defeated for the presidency,
while men have met great misfortunes in being elected to it.
. I am pleading the cause of the American people.
I am pleading the cause of the American farmer, the Amer-
ican manufacturer, the American mechanic, and the American
laborer against the world. I am reproached by some excel-
lent people for appearing before these multitudes of my
countrymen upon the ground that it is inconsistent with the
dignity of the office for which I am named. I do not feel it
to be so. I know no reason why I should not face the American
people."

At the Worcester County Agricultural Fair he pointed out
that, contrary to the popular impression, there was not so
dense a population in the most crowded parts of Europe as
covered Massachusetts from Worcester to the sea, and that
the county was tenth in the Union in mechanical and manufac-
turing industries, fifteenth in agricultural industry and product,
and among the first in wealth and contentment.

To the students of the Michigan University : " During the
war we used to hear much about the rebel yell. It was said to
imply great vigor and determination, but it seems to me that
the young men of Michigan University who do me the honor to
appear here to-day could have terrified the whole army of Lee.
. I wish to leave with these young collegians a problem :
that is, to find out why so many college youths who are Free-
traders at twenty become Protectionists at forty ? I think the
answer will be found in the fact that at forty they have taken
degrees in the university of experience, which, after all, is much
wider than the university of theory in which our college boys
are taught. I was myself taught when I was in college the doc-
trine of free trade, but the United States stands as a perpetual
and irrefutable argument and example of the value of protection
to home industries in a new country. The responsibilities of an
educated American are higher, and deeper, and broader than
those of an educated man in any other land; and in proportion

580 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

as your opportunities are greater will you be held to sterner
account in this life and in the life which is to come."

The Southern question was precipitated into the canvass by
the South. To the old South, discontented, sullen, with face set
to the past and voice set to discord, he had only opposition.
For the new South, representing the awakened liberal and
national sentiment, he had only encouragement. In Indiana,
battleground between North and South, he asked a question
which was answered ten years later : " The aim of the Demo-
cratic party is to conjoin the electoral votes of New York and
Indiana with the electoral votes of the sixteen Southern States.
Do the citizens of those two States fully comprehend what it
means to trust the national credit, the national finances, the
national pensions, the Protective system, and all the great in-
terests which are under the control of the national government
to the old South, with its bitterness, its unreconciled temper, its
narrowness of vision, its hostility to all Northern interests, its
constant longing to revive an impossible past, its absolute inca-
pacity to measure the sweep of the present and the magnitude
of our future? "

Attempts had been made to organize an anti-Blaine feeling
among the Germans and combine them against the Republicans.
It was quietly but emphatically reported that Bismarck did not
want a strong administration at Washington, that a vigorous
foreign policy, exercised by a republic of unlimited resources
and the strongest financial credit, was a constant menace to
German absolutism, and a menace in particular to German colo-
nial development already fastening itself on South and Cen-
tral America and looking askance at Cuba. German opposition
to sumptuary legislation had been focussed upon the prohibitory
laws of Maine, which they read Blaine, and the Know-Nothing
party had been excavated for the purpose of fastening its re-
sponsibility upon Mr. Blaine. German mass-meeting delegations
and addresses gave him the opportunity not only to show the folly
of such lines of attack, but his familiarity with German history
and character both here and in the fatherland. "My birth and
rearing in Pennsylvania," he said to a large company gathered
to greet him in Chicago, " made me familiar from childhood
with the German character, with its steadiness, its industry, its

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 581

fidelity, its integrity, its truth in friendship, its loyalty to gov-
ernment. Pennsylvania owes much to her German population,
to the Muhlenbergs, the Heisters, the Wolfs, the Snyders, the
Markles, the Shunks, who have illustrated her annals, and with
whom I am connected by ties of good-will, of kindly associa-
tions inherited through five generations of family friendships
that are warm and cordial to-day. "

In West Virginia he recalled his boyhood in the Monongahela
Valley before he reminded his audience that while they had
been a slave-holding State, they never had a bank-bill circulat-
ing in West Virginia that would pass current five hundred miles
from home. " You have not to-day a single piece of paper
money circulating in West Virginia that is not good all around
the globe." Standing in the van of the new South he admon-
ished them to break the seemingly impregnable barrier of the
solid South, — "Solid on a prejudice ; solid on a tradition; solid
upon doctrines that separate the different portions of the Union,
— take your part in the solution of the industrial and financial
problems of the time, join in a great national movement which
shall in fact and in feeling, as well as in form, make us a people
with one union, one constitution, one destiny."

Mrs. Ewing relates a characteristic anecdote of his visit at
Lancaster, Ohio. At noon of the second day, returning with
him from a drive to Mr. Stanbury's place, she saw a carriage
containing three men coming towards them. " I suspect," said
she, "that carriage is coining for you, Mr. Blaine." "Yes," said
he, " but that is not the point. The point is that there is a man
on that front seat whom I have not seen for twenty-seven years,
and I have got just two minutes and a half to remember his
name in." Not another word was said till the carriages met,
when Mrs. E wing's anxiety came to an end by his jumping from
the carriage with hand extended, and a welcome beginning with
the remembered name — a spirit called from the vasty deep.

In Lancaster, political questions naturally gave way to recol-
lections. " In 1841 I was a schoolboy in this town, attend-
ing the school of Mr. William Lyons. . . . He taught
the youth of this vicinity with great success, with thorough-
ness, and with refinement. I know not whether lie be living,
but if he is, I beg to make my acknowledgments to him,

582 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

if these words may reach him, for his efficiency and excellence
as an instructor. As I look upon your faces I am carried back
to those days, to Lancaster as it then was. In that row of
dwellings on the opposite side of the street, in one of which I
then lived and am now a guest, resided at that time the three
leading lawyers of Ohio, — ■ Thomas Ewing, Henry Stanbury, and
Hocking Hunter."

We have already had General Sherman's impression of " Jim
Blaine and Tom Ewing," the two " bright and handsome
thorough-bred colts," — though General Sherman adds that
being himself a full-fledged graduate of the National Military
Academy, and a commissioned officer in the Third United States
Artillery, with a salary of sixty-five dollars a month, all in gold,
he could hardly stoop to notice these lads.

It is interesting to see that to one of them the great
general was then only " a tall and very slender young man,
straight as an arrow,, with a sharp face and a full suit of red
hair, home from West Point," while his brother, the Senator,
was but " another youth of this town — slender, tall, stately,
who had just left school, when I came here from my home
across the Pennsylvania line, and who had begun as a civil
engineer on the Muskingum-river improvements."

On Mr. Blaine's return to New York he found a dinner
arranged for him at Delmonico's, which he regretted as an umvise
political measure, but which furnished him the occasion for a
wise, strong word, thanking the " merchants, professional men, — -
leaders in the great and complex society of New York, — for
receiving me as the representative for the time of the principles
which you and I hold in common touching those great interests
which underlie, as we believe, the prosperity of the nation," and
reminding them that " New York is the largest manufacturing
city in the world, with perhaps a single exception ; that, of the
J|56, 000,000,000 of manufactures annually produced in the United
States, this Empire State furnishes one-fifth — $1,200,000,000 ;
of which this Empire City produces 1500,000,000 ; " that impor-
tant as the foreign trade is, representing the enormous sum of
$ 1,500,000,000 annually, "it sinks into insignificance and is
dwarfed out of sight when we think of those vast domestic
exchanges of which New York is the admitted centre, and which

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 583

annually exceed $20,000,000,000;" reminding them that a
change of government meant a change of policies, which meant
disaster to this great traffic, and that the South American policy
which had been so stigmatized as war, was peace. " This
nation to-day is in profound peace with the world. But, in my
judgment, it has before it a great duty which will not only
make that profound peace permanent, but set such an example
as will absolutely abolish war on this continent, and, by a great
example and a lofty moral precedent, ultimately abolish it in
other continents."

In Boston, on the 3d of November he spoke words better
understood to-day than when they were uttered. " I close this
canvass, Mr. Chairman, with a profound conviction that, intelli-
gent as the voters of the United States are, accustomed as they
are to give heed to the weight and tendency of the questions to be
decided, the people of the United States have not yet measured,
nor, as I believe, yet fully comprehended, what it would mean to
transfer this government to the absolute control of the Southern
States of this Union ... I here now repeat, that to transfer
the political power of the country to the Democratic party at this
time would by no means be one of those ordinary transfers of
the government from one party to another which the gray-
haired men within my view witnessed more than once in the
last generation. It would not be merely an instance of one
party going out and another coining in. It would be rather
a reversal and overturning of the industrial systems of the
government, of the financial systems of the government ; in
short, a transfer of the sovereignty of the country, of far greater
consequence than the ordinary changes of dynasty which occur
in European governments of a different form from ours."

Mr. Blaine had been everywhere received with an enthusiasm
inspiring to his own party, alarming to the other, which evi-
dently feared that a Republican victory under Blaine would
make the country Republican for an indefinite period. Ohio,
with a close contest, gave the October election to the Repub-
licans and made them confident of carrying every Northern
State in November. After this victory, which was largely attrib-
uted to Mr. Blaine's " magnificent audacity and genius," it was
estimated that from fifty to seventy per cent, of the total Irish

584 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

vote in New York would go to Mr. Blaine, and that the
Irish bolters from the Democratic party were two to one of
the bolters from the Republican party. This intensified the
struggle.

The Irish defection to Blaine was based on the increasing
understanding of his foreign policy and its interlacement with
Protection, and it carried a demand that the American flag should
fly from State Department as well as White House. " Even in
New Jersey" exclaimed an astonished observer, " the feeling in
Mr. Blaine's favor on account of this policy finds daily fuller
and fuller expression." It seemed Mr. Blaine's fate to be an
entering wedge, dividing all parties. A prominent Kentucky
Democrat was urged to go over and speak against him in Indi-
ana and Illinois. He replied, " I will attack Blaine's politics,
but if you want me to attack him I won't do it. Slanders upon
him ? No ; I will, on the contrary, take every occasion to deny
them. I have sat in the House with him for years, and a loftiei
man never lived." He was not sent. Free-trade Republicans,
calling themselves Independents, more bitter and unscrupulous
than original partisans, found no arrow too envenomed to be
used against the man whom they could not use, and they poured
out, without cessation, a stream of unmixed scandal as foun-
dation for their sole argument that a man about whom there
was so much scandal should not be President ; while other In-
dependents protested that this perverse and unworthy misrepre-
sentation did more to " vulgarize and to demoralize the public
than all the bossism or machinery with which we have ever yet
had to contend ; " that the Independents were themselves the
" authors of nine-tenths of all the scandals, and the only believ-
ers of the other tenth ; " that the composition, proceedings, and
general tone of the convention which nominated Mr. Blaine and
of the party which it represented was "better, purer, more amen-
able to conscience, soberer, and actuated by higher purposes ,!
than for a dozen years preceding ; and that after years of trouble
with the machine, " a statesman of conspicuous ability and the
highest general character, who had been twice before defeated
by the active opposition of the national administration, with
the use of its patronage against him, while he had no machine,
no patronage, both being persistently against him, had at last

BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 585

been enthusiastically nominated by our best party in the most
untrammelled convention in our recent history."

The carnival of slander became so reckless a riot, that Cath-
olic and Protestant churches were equally riven. Catholic
priests took occasion to say openly that those of the Catholic
faith who made Mr. Blaine out a Know-Nothing, an apostate,
and a persecutor of Catholics were the office-seekers of New
England. Father Murphy, of Augusta, proclaimed that the
" pleasantest relations had existed between himself and his
predecessors and Mr. Blaine for almost a quarter of a century ;
that the esteem in which he was held was proved by the fact
that more than half of our people who never before voted the
Republican ticket voted for his interests in the late State elec-
tion ; that more than half our priests in Maine would be glad of
his election with no object whatevertut admiration of his char-
acter as being facile princeps, the best President, and that
many of the most trusted Catholics in the country think well
of him, not because they expect any favor of him, but among
other reasons because they think he will not do them injustice
in an underhand way." Mr. Blaine was, in ecclesiastical lan-
guage, a member of an Orthodox church, in good and regular
standing, walking in all the ordinances of the Lord blameless ;
but the three chief organs of the Orthodox churches in the
nation not only opposed him, but opposed him with personal
slander so vile as utterly to discredit the standards of Orthodox
Congregationalism, — and the clergy could not hold their peace.
Dr. Webb stood up in Boston, whence sprang the cabal which
was characterized by the " Boston Advertiser " as " the most
dastardly group of political assassins who ever disgraced this or
any other country," and pronounced him " one of the noblest
characters I have ever known. The manoeuvres, bargains,
crimes, and plots which have been attributed to him within the
last few months might have been attributed to General Gordon,
in Khartoum, with as much truth." Dr. Ecob, who had gone from
Augusta to the First Presbyterian church of Albany, recoiled
as violently from the slanders, and affirmed in the " Albany
Evening Journal " that he had been ten years " pastor of the
church in Augusta, of which Mr. and Mrs. Blaine are members.
The satisfaction I take in his nomination is based upon such a

586 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

knowledge of him as only a pastor can gain. ... I have been
very near to Mr. Blaine, not only in the most trying political
crises, but in the sharper trial of great grief in the household,
and have never yet detected a false note. . . . His word
has always had back of it a clear purpose, and that purpose has
always been worthy of the highest manhood. In the church he
is honored and beloved. His influence, his wise counsels, his
purse are freely devoted to the interest of the noble Old South
Church, of Augusta. In his house he was always the soul of
geniality and good heart. It was always summer in that house
whatever the Maine winter might be without. And not only
his ' rich neighbors and kinsmen ' welcomed him home, but
a long line of the poor hailed the return of that family as
a special Providence. . . . Those who have known him
best are not surprised that his friends all over the country
have been determined that he should secure the highest
honor within their gift. It is because they believe in him.
. . . I, for one, shall put my conscience into my vote next
November."

His own city of Augusta, shocked, but self-possessed, con-
firmed the testimony of her clergy. "We have known him in
every relation of life, closely and intimately, and in every rela-
tion of life, we say in the presence of his daily associates, Mr.
Blaine has had a spotless career. ... In personal morals,
in habits of temperance and uprightness, in steadfast devotion
to all ordinary as well as extraordinary duties, Mr. Blaine has
been a pattern to our young men. His word is as good as
his bond. This whole community will attest his absolute in-
tegrity and liberality. The necessities of a political campaign
may tempt mud-throwers to assail Mr. Blaine's character ; but
against all such efforts we present a man who has the universal
respect, confidence, and attachment of the neighbors who have
known him throughout his whole career, and who know that he
has been a centre of good and not of evil all the days of his
life." His old friend, Governor Dingley, declared the personal
defamation a burlesque to " those who intimately knew Mr.
Blaine, the perfect purity and integrity of his private life, the
nobility of his aims and purposes, the magnanimity and kindli-
ness of his nature."

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 587

Republicans who believed in the principle of temperance
advocated the candidate, whose life, known and read of all men,
was a model of temperance, and all whose influence had been on
the side of temperance ; but those who transformed temperance
into a prohibition party platform chose a candidate of their
own and threw all their influence for the Democratic candidate.
Women were so interested that they held mass meetings for the
election of Mr. Blaine. But it is a curious fact in political
aeration that the women who made a party platform of woman-
hood went against the man who from youth upward had sancti-
fied and guarded home with his " perfect purity," measured
by womanhood's standard.

For all this opposition there was a common reason. Mr.
Blaine never evaded a real issue, but he could never be forced
into a false issue. He believed in temperance as a principle and
a practice, but not as a party, and could not be induced to flaunt
the party banners. Son of a Catholic mother, he was forbidden
not only by largeness of mind, but by tenderness of heart, from
all prejudice against Catholics. " I would not for a thousand
presidencies," he had said in 1876, " speak a disrespectful word
of my mother's religion ; " but he equally abhorred all political
appeal to religious prejudice, " the introduction of anything that
looks like a religious test or qualification for office in a republic
where perfect freedom of conscience is the birthright of every
citizen." ,

Against this opposition — large and small — his support
went on gathering volume and vigor, and promised to over-
bear every combination and segregation. A weak word proved
the fatal flaw through which all the carefully accumulated and
well-stored energy was wasted. Moved by the false witness
against Mr. Blaine, a company of more than a thousand clergy-
men, representing all Protestant denominations, Roman Catho-
lics, Jews, and Quakers, gathered at his hotel in New York on
the 29th of October to testify their respect and sympathy.
He received them on the stairs, they standing partly on the
stairs, partly in the corridor below. Among the many speakers
one made the baseless classification, " Rum, Romanism, and
Rebellion." The obnoxious phrase was instantly caught up by
the opposition, transferred from the unimportant clergyman to

588 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

the all-important. candidate, and as the utterance of Mr. Blaine,
was posted on the streets and distributed from churches. In
New Haven, on November first, he publicly corrected the false
report and demonstrated its absurdity; but all in vain. The
ignorant Irish took the alarm. There was no time for their
leaders to overtake them with the truth, and they rushed back
like frightened sheep to the Democratic-British fold whence
they had for a moment escaped. The Irish stampede made a
closer vote in New York State than either party had apparently
anticipated. The Democracy, better acquainted with the politi-
cal Irishman than the Republicans, proclaimed at the outset a
State plurality of 50,000 for Cleveland. The next day the
figures came down to 17,000, then to 12,000, the next day still
to 5,000, and at length dwindled to 456. To facile manipu-
lators, these manageable figures offered a terrible tempta-
tion. The election was on the fourth. It was nearly two weeks
before a decision was announced. Republicans more than hinted
that the Democrats were waiting to see how large the fraud was
required to be. General Butler openly proclaimed, and pro-
claimed as long as he lived, that the Brooklyn and New York
vote for himself was counted to Cleveland. Mr. Vrooman, of
the Republican State Committee, protested that they had " direct,
positive, and official information of frauds being perpetrated and
votes illegally counted in New York, St. Lawrence, Essex,
Niagara, and several other counties in this State. Men were
allowed to vote who had not registered, and votes cast for Butler
and St. John were counted for Cleveland." " In one election
district in this city we have twenty voters who are prepared to
make affidavit that they cast their ballots for Butler. In this
district not a single vote was recorded in his favor. They went
to the credit of Cleveland." The Cleveland and Butler ballots
were the same in shape and general appearance. It was not
until ten years later that John Y. McKane was imprisoned for
dumping into the ballot-box each year at Gravesend whatever
fictitious ballots the exigencies of his party required. Mr.
Blaine on the face of the returns, was beaten in New York
by 1,040 votes. A change of 600 votes, even counting the
fraudulent as genuine, would have given him to the presidency.
A change of 5,000 in the national vote would have given

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 589

every Northern State to the Republicans. As it was, leaving
out the protested vote of the cities of New York and Brooklyn,
Mr. Blaine had a majority of more than 400,000, nearly 500,000,
in the popular vote of the North. The vote of the South was
not free and was therefore never reckoned on by the Republican
party. Fraud is now affirmed and accepted, which was then
only suspected and reported. A high Democratic authority in
New York remarked after all was over, that " Grover Cleve-
land came near being elected President." The " Commercial
Advertiser " of January 29, 1893, said that reliable Democrats
asserted that they could name the very districts and the very
polling-booths in which enough votes were taken from Mr.
Blaine and given to his opponent to defeat the one and give
the other the majority. Mr. Blaine did not at the time be-
lieve that fraud could be unquestionably proved. The inspec-
tors were permitted by law to destroy the ballots as soon as
the returns had been made. He believed that a contest would
be hazardous, and dangerous to the public peace ; and he coun-
selled immediate acceptance of the declared result.

At Boston on the evening before election he had said, " I go
to my home to-morrow, not without a strong confidence in the
result of the ballot, but with a heart that shall not in the least
degree be troubled by any verdict that may be returned by
the American people." During the long waiting he was at
home in Augusta, and while men's foreboding grew heavier
of an event which had seemed incredible, old friends came
to his house, some eager and restless, some simply lingering
in speechless sorrow unable to stay away. Men drove in
from the country and loitered on the sidewalk till they caught
a glimpse of him at door or window, and then drove home
again content that they had seen his face and that he was yet
alive. To a telegram from Mr. Phelps ending with, " Are
you fairly well ? " he answered, " Never better in my life. Our
special misfortune was the loss of both New Jersey and Con-
necticut, which now seems at least possible, perhaps prob-
able. I class them both as easily preventable accidents. I was
not sustained in the canvass by many who had personally a far
greater stake than I. They are likely to have leisure for re-
flection and for a cool calculation of the small sums they were

590 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

asked in vain to. contribute. If the country is lost it will be
some satisfaction to realize that the class which permitted it to
be sacrificed will feel the result most keenly. But I fear you
may think me ill-natured if I keep on. I really am not, and
feel as placid as a summer's day. Personally, I care less than
my nearest friends would believe, but for the cause and for
many friends, I profoundly deplore the result."

On the night of the 18th of November, after the decision had
been announced and accepted, a great multitude assembled be-
fore his house, sombre and silent. When Mr. Blaine appeared
at the door the whole scene changed. Clear, cheerful, strong,
as if it were the voice of victory, his voice rang out on the
night air. " Friends and neighbors, the national contest is over,
and by the narrowest of margins we have lost." His tall figure
stood erect in full relief under the lights, as he thanked them
for their superb support. " No other expression of public con-
fidence and esteem could equal that of the people among whom
I have lived for thirty years, and to whom I am attached by all
the ties that ennoble human nature, and give joy and dignity to
life. After Maine, indeed with Maine, my first thought is always
of Pennsylvania. How can I fittingly express my thanks for
that unparalleled majority, of more than eighty thousand votes ?
— a popular indorsement which has deeply touched my heart
and which has, if possible, increased my affection for the grand
old Commonwealth, — an affection which I inherited from my
ancestry, and which I shall transmit to my children." All who
had marshalled themselves around him he remembered. With
that definiteness which made his recognition valuable, he traced
his support to its sources. " To the true and zealous friends
in New England, who were nobly steadfast to the Republican
party and its candidates, and to the eminent scholars and divines,
who, stepping aside from their ordinary vocations, made my
cause their cause, and to loyalty to principle added the special
compliment of standing as my personal representatives in the
struggle ; . . . to that magnificent cordon of States
that stretches from the foot-hills of the Alleghanies to the
Golden Gate of the Pacific, — beginning with Ohio and ending
with California, — where the Republican banner was borne so
loftily that but a single State failed to join in the wide acclaim

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 591

of triumph ; to the Republicans of the Empire State who
fought against foes from within and foes from without, and who
waged so strong a battle that a change of one vote in every two
thousand would have given us the victory in the nation ; . . .
to that great body of workingmen — both native and foreign
born — who gave me their earnest support, breaking from old
personal and party ties, and finding in the principles which I
represented in the canvass the safeguard and protection of their
fireside interests," he rendered special gratitude ; but with all
grateful acknowledgment for loyalty to party and to himself, he
repeated and accentuated the warning, which he had many times
before given from other points, against the Southern force and
fraud which had crushed out the political power of more than
six million citizens and transferred it by violence to the white
population of the North, thus enabling the Southern white to
exert double the political power of the Northern white, — the
Southern Confederate soldier to have twice the political power
of the Northern Union soldier. These questions he discussed
with slight reference to the present personal defeat, but chiefly
as bearing on the national future, and closed with cordial good
wishes to the successful candidate, especially " that his admin-
istration may overcome the embarrassment which the peculiar
source of its power imposes upon it from the hour of its birth."
The effect was quick and powerful. Men went away not
happy, but cheered and cheerful, and the party throughout the
country took up his words as striking the key-note of future
politics, marking a line of battle for the next campaign. From
all quarters his opinion and advice were sought regarding past
and future, and he gave clear, comprehensive, unimpassioned
analyses of the chief causes of defeat, and the promising paths
to victory, betraying no trace of despondency, no sign of bitter-
ness, showing only the elasticity of his temperament, the buoy-
ancy of his energy, his steadiness, and his strength. The wails
of disappointment were instantly lost in the war-cry for 1888.
Above laments over " the crass stupidity, the malignant credulity
of the campaign " came the call for " the coming man." Even
the chagrined Irish leaders from New York and Brooklyn wrote
while yet their hearts were sore, " You will be renominated and
elected. We are all for you, and with a good committee will

592 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

increase your Irish vote to ninety per cent." " The Irish-Ameri-
cans who voted for Blaine and Logan are being reorganized in
Protection Unions. We all want you in 1888." " I come as
victor, not as vanquished ! The solid Irish-American vote is
shattered and can never again be concentrated by the Demo-
cratic party ! I don't know one man, nor have I even heard
of one, who regrets his support of you in the recent campaign."

It may be interesting now to read that in Honolulu the elec-
tion was held with due formality on November 4th, only those
being allowed to vote who would have voted had they been in
the United States. A committee was appointed to announce
the vote to Mr. Blaine, and reported that " the excitement
throughout the day was intense; Mr. Blaine's majority was
309 ; " adding the hope and prediction that he " would bring
these lands in closer relationships with God's country."

If the party was heartened by Mr. Blaine's sustained and com-
manding attitude, he was equally heartened by the steadfast and
enthusiastic allegiance of the party in defeat. Never was a
nobler brotherhood in American politics than the splendid band
of strong men, from every State in the Union, who stood by him
with unchanging friendship, with unselfish devotion, from begin-
ning to end, — the beginning stretching along a tract of twenty
years, the end always the same, — one premature sad day. The
political ambition and purpose of these men centred in making
Mr. Blaine President of the United States, and each national
convention was to them but a stage in his triumphal march.
Each defeat brought to them the stimulus of victory, because
each struggle left a wider circle under the charm of personality
which was not limited to personal presence, but won the devoted
attachment of thousands who had never seen Mr. Blaine's face
or heard his voice ; because each contest made ever more con-
spicuous and more controlling the fitness of their leader to lead,
not only along the honest and homely if sometimes humdrum
paths of administration, but into the wider ways of national
expansion and elevation.

The defeat of the Republican candidate did not transfer the
American government to Democratic control, Congress still
holding a Republican check upon the Executive. It was ten
years before the Democracy obtained supreme command. The

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 598

two years of exclusively Democratic administration from 1893
to 1895 are the best comment upon Mr. Blaine's prescience and
prophecy in 1884.

The campaign over, the election decided, Mr. Blaine went
back immediately into his library and wrote the second volume
of his " Twenty Years of Congress." Treating of men and
topics nearer our own time, it is, perhaps, of more fresh and
varied interest than the first volume. Its calm, almost severely
philosophic tone, betrays no trace of the storm, the stress, the
partisanship of the period which it delineates, or of that in
which it was written. No sign of interruption or cynicism
appears, while vast stores of memory and extraordinary powers
of arrangement are brought out most fully in the swift and
condensed yet clear treatment of the subject.

After the completion of this work* and in response to an
emphatic demand, he gathered into a volume, " Political Dis-
cussions," papers and speeches, in which he had treated themes
of permanent interest, or important unsettled questions. The
national issues of the war, the great measures of reconstruc-
tion, all the forms in which the money question presents itself,
gold, silver, currency, national debt and national honor, national
tariff and interstate free-trade, the South American policy in
all its phases of reciprocity, arbitration, commercial marine,
and ship-building, the Peace Congress and the revocation
of the Peace Congress, the English policy as shown in the
Halifax award, the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, and the Irish ques-
tions ; the Hawaiian policy, the Chinese policy, the presentation
of Webster in his true and noble attitude as an upholder of
the national sovereignty against the encroachment of State
sovereignty, debates during and after the electoral canvass,
and other important papers, are arranged with regard to their
importance to the future interests and influence of the United
States.

In 1885 the Independents of New York, who had evidenced
as plainly as their modesty permitted that it was they who de-
feated Mr. Blaine, made a bold stroke for proof and power ;
made, in short, a vigorous effort "to drive Blaine out of politics."
A little intimidated by the magnitude of Independent claims,
the Republicans sought to win them to the party ranks, and

594 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

nominated for Governor a man of unexceptionable character,
who had voted against Mr. Blaine in the convention of 1884.
It was forthwith proclaimed that New York had gone over to
" the Mugwumps." Mr. Blaine's friends desired that he be
invited into the canvass. Especially the Irish leaders asked it,
on the solid ground that he was the one man who could accom-
plish the most important object of dividing the Irish vote. But
the Independents would have none of Mr. Blaine. That would
spoil their theorem. Mr. Blaine, they argued, needed only a
change of 600 votes to win. The Mugwumps would give 10,000
votes, and victory was assured. They would not even allow
their candidate to publish Mr. Blaine's congratulatory telegram
on the nomination, or his letter immediately following, offer-
ing assistance. The result was, that the Irish developed
themselves as the real " Independents." The whole " Mug-
wump " party and all their contingent — religious, political,
pictorial, and senatorial, in violent activity — could not bring
their candidate's vote in New York city within 15,000 of Mr.
Blaine's vote, and the " Independent " candidate was over-
whelmingly defeated by his Democratic competitor.

While prosecuting his literary work, Mr. Blaine was constantly
in demand for public occasions. Of such appearance he was
rather chary, but political assistance he gave freely. No weight
of duties or of honors ever lessened the sympathy between his
audience and himself. The pertinence of his facts, the straight-
forwardness of his reasoning, the directness of his address, could
never lose force. He took his hearers into his confidence and
they trusted him to the death. When General Grant died,
Mr. Blaine's voice was first in sounding the long lament. In
Portland he spoke for the Irish cause. He spoke on the labor
question, and as he had sought in the late campaign to draw
discussion up from trivial as well as debasing personalities, and
from sectional strife to the altitude of great policies, so now in
his dignity of tone, in the absence of all petty charge, or even
criticism against the administration, men saw that he would
guide debate away from the small irritations and revenges of
labor, towards a discovery and application of the laws of its
natural evolution.

In the autumn of 1886 he went to Pennsylvania with the

BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 595

double purpose of helping to elect General Beaver to the gov-
ernorship, and visiting his old home. His two younger sons
accompanied him, and various friends joined him at different
points. A private citizen, a defeated candidate, his whole visit
was a royal progress. Wherever he stopped it was " Blaine's
day." Especially as he approached Western Pennsylvania was
his reception unique and thrilling. He was too deeply touched
to speak much of it himself, but the coldest report represents
the homage offered him as a little short of idolatry." Processions
and parades, soldiery, and police marching like soldiery, clubs
from all the surrounding communities, bands of music, — every-
thing that could be done to show honor, the great State brought
to her son. A vast throng of the most respectable and orderly
in the twin cities of Pittsburgh and Alleghany waited upon his
appearance, pressed upon his steps, squeezed the guard against
his carriage and the four white horses wherever they stopped,
and almost lifted the horses of the mounted escort off their feet,
in their eagerness for a glimpse of his face, a grasp of his hand.
" I have been a Whig and a Republican for fifty years," cried an
old man crowded against the carriage wheel. " Such men as
you die in the faith," responded Mr. Blaine. " I am sorry you
lost your vote on me." — "God bless you, I did not lose it —
any more than my sons who died at Gettysburg." " Blaine !
Blaine ! Blaine ! " was the cry along the packed and well-nigh
impassable streets, and the boom of cannon could not drown the
shouts of personal welcome. Where he was to speak, the audi-
ence would wait for no introduction, but cried, " Blaine, Blaine !
Give us Blaine ; " and when he rose, for fully five minutes the
crowd spoke first, ringing out volume upon volume of irrepres-
sible cheers ; but when he did speak, they said his voice was
worth ten thousand men to the soldier candidate. After he
had spoken, the audience climbed upon the platform so irresist-
ibly that to avoid danger the meeting was declared adjourned,
and Mr. Blaine was gradually withdrawn.

Into that crowd dared an old man who had passed his ninetieth
birthday, with eye still bright and step still firm, Hon. John H.
Ewing, who had come up from Washington to make sure that
his beloved nephew should not slip by. But the nephew must
needs pass through Brownsville, by way of Elizabeth, to look at

596 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

his " Savings Bank," as he called his farm there, beneath which
lay his coal mines ; and all along the way he was reviving
memories, pointing out to his sons the old places, recalling inci-
dents and anecdotes of the old time, stopping to speak to the
boys and girls in the school-houses, who returned the compliment
by laying pennies on the rails of the track to be pressed into
souvenirs by the train that carried him away. A little black
baby held up to him for naming, he called Abraham Lincoln,
and at more than one small cottage he alighted to enter and to
greet an infirm old woman too weak to move, who prayed to
take his remembered hand once more.

Brownsville was reached, and Brownsville — I take her own
testimony, using her own words — was " wild, delirious, frantic
with delight. The entire population locked up stores and houses,
and went across the bridge that spans the Monongahela to the
railroad station, to meet its distinguished son. The quiet little
streets never saw such a commotion before. Flags waved
from every window. Every square inch of the narrow side-
walks was filled with the moving inhabitants, who overflowed
into the roadway, and pressed close to horses and carriages.
A running volley of cheers rattled all along the line of march,
and if the impulse had not been resisted by some of the more
decorous citizens, the horses would have been unhitched, and
Mr. Blaine's carriage would have been dragged by eager
hands."

The feet of material progress had trampled into ruins the
house of his birth and the playground of his boyhood, but
the palimpsest was clear to him. Five years before he had
written : " I have nowhere witnessed a more attractive sight
than was familiar to my eyes in boyhood from the old Indian
Hill farm, where I was born, and where my great-grandfather,
the elder Neal Gillespie, settled before the outbreak of the Revo-
lution. The majestic sweep of the Monongahela through the
foot-hills of the Alleghanies, with the chain of mountains but
twenty miles distant in full view, gave an impression of beauty
and sublimity which can never be effaced. ... I shall al-
ways recall with pride that my ancestry and kindred were, and
are, not inconspicuously, connected with its history, and that
on either side of the beautiful river, in Protestant and Catholic

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 597

cemeteries, five generations of my own blood sleep in honored
graves."

The river was there, the beauty of wood and hill and sky.
The graves of father and mother were there, and old friends
still in the living world to welcome him. From Brownsville to
Washington over the National Road, — the same road on which
forty-five years before he used to walk out as far as he dared,
for the glory and the joy of riding home beside the stage-coach
drivers, knowing well which ones would take him up beside
them to that place of honor. But it is a good half-day's drive
to Washington, and the jealous present sometimes thrust in
even upon this thrilling past ; and only the Washington com-
mittee of reception at Pancake interrupted a spirited but entirely
inappropriate debate in Mr. Blaine's carriage upon relations be-
tween Russia and Turkey. At Pancake his happy uncle, head-
ing the committee composed of old college students and the
present college faculty, took him in charge and bore him trium-
phantly home ; and after dinner the young students surrounded
the house and conducted him to the college. There, on the
pillared portico of the only building left from his youthful days,
surrounded by classmates, he was presented by one of them, Mr.
Alexander Wilson, to the new Washington that overspread the
beautiful shaded green slope of the campus. In the evening
Washington took its turn and addressed him at a general recep-
tion in the college building, and later, at another by the Literary
Society, of which he had once been a member. They brought
out the archives for his scrutiny, and he smiled down the pages,
recognizing, " That is Tom Searight's," and " Blaine fined for
non-performance," — for the young man had always shrunk
from the formal debate, and when it was assigned him, nearly
always chose "fine" to "performance," though he was prompt
when the task was a written essay, and entered readily— his
schoolmates say brilliantly — into the miscellaneous debate
which followed the regular performance.

He went to church on Sunday between rows of waiting people,
and on Monday going with his uncle to say good-by to the col-
lege boys in the college proper, the two were presented by the
President: "On my left is the oldest living graduate of
Washington and Jefferson College. On my right is the most

698 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

distinguished graduate." He gave his youthful hearers a talk
full of reminiscences tender or humorous, suggestions practical
and otherwise, which the young fellows were only too ready to
greet with " laughter and cheers," as occasion offered.

" In our preparation here I think we were drilled in reading,
in spelling, in geography, and in English grammar, and I am
sorry to say that a very great many modern college graduates do
not spell with absolute accuracy, could not bound the United
States in each separate State with absolute accuracy, could not
take a blackboard and draw a map of the United States, fix the
latitude and longitude upon it, and bound each State. That is a
very good exercise ; suppose you try it. [Laughter.] Do that on
the blackboard once or twice, and you will never forget it. It is
an exercise in which many of us were expert in this college
thirty-five or forty years ago.

"If you should try me in the text-books of Latin and Greek I
think you would find me deficient. I remember once when we
were being examined in the Agricola of Tacitus, a graduate of
Oxford University, an English rector, was present, and he
turned over to De Morebus Grer manor um and said : 4 Read that.'
A member of the class answered, ' We have not been over it.'
4 But,' said he, c it is Latin.' If you should ask me to read it
at sight to-day I should repeat the excuse ; but I presume every
member of the senior class before me could do it readily."

He closed as he began, with a tribute of gratitude to the school
and the teachers, which was not the mere compliment of pres-
ence, but the often expressed sentiment of his life.

This journey offers but one of many proofs that what was
intended to curse Mr. Blaine altogether blessed him. The
American people refused to be won away from him. They said
he was like the impregnable stone wall that stood higher after
it was overturned than when it was erect. His face was every-
where known, his presence everywhere honored. Ten years be-
fore, when, upon his entering the Supreme Court room, crowded
at one of the sessions of the Electoral Commission, a member of
the counsel had given Mr. Blaine his own chair, Mr. Hoar had
pencilled a note to General Garfield, " Do you suppose there
is any assembly in America that Blaine could enter, however
crowded it was, that somebody would not instantly find a chair

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 599

for him ? " This specialty of attention never failed. The noble-
ness of his face and figure, his distinction and his self-uncon-
sciousness, could not fail to attract attention anywhere. " I
cannot walk with Mr. Blaine," protested a friend in New York :
"it is too conspicuous. All hats are in the air. With the
policemen at the crossings, it is, c Shall I take you across, Mr.
Blaine?'" — and to the policeman at the crossing Mr. Blaine
was as courteous as to the lady at his side. Sometimes more
so, for with his close friends, even women, he would not unfre-
quently fall into a brown study that was blind to beauty and
deaf to music ; and they never misunderstood him, but amused
themselves, perhaps, with signalling his abstraction across the
table till he came back from his remoteness, and vowed that he
had never been away. Friends, it may almost be said, he never
lost. Yet he was not indifferent in friendship, he was simply and
immeasurably magnanimous. He discerned and he prized sin-
cerity, but he was pitiful to temptation. Never, until it was
inevitable, and that was so seldom that it is hardly to be counted,
did he terminate friendly relations. He understood much that
he did not notice. Where there was honest love he remembered
nothing else. Every one who loved him could laugh at him.
His friends, his sons, his smallest child scoffed at his clothes, and
he simply and stoutly defended his clothes. It was de rigeur to
laugh at his hats. Postmaster-General Jewell, rallied one day
on a railroad journey upon the faultlessness of his costume and
his reputed contract with his hatter, said that he had changed
that contract, and now instead sent his hat every week to the
hatter. " And what would happen," asked his wife, " if you
should chance to forget, and not send your hat each week to
be brushed ? " — " Why," said Mr. Jewell, gleefully glancing
at Mr. Blaine sitting opposite, '" it would look just like
Blaine's ! "

But no man could take a real liberty with him. Perhaps no
man ever tried it. Absolutely free from small resentments,
when he came to the parting of the ways, he was inexorable.
No occasion could be availed of to force him into recognizing a
man whom he had determined no longer to know. One who had
lost in his esteem by a course which he was attempting with
partial success to explain was pleased at finding himself not

600 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

repulsed, and said, " Then we part with the same friendly feel-
ing as of old? " — " Certainly not! " was the unexpected reply.

As a woman once photographed him : we " were alone that
stormy evening, daring to amuse ourselves with Hamerton and
his platitudes, when the front door flung open to a man breezy
as the north-east wind that bowled him in — a royal, rollicking,
confident, yet somehow confiding creature who brought the
sweep and swirl of all out-doors in with him, filled the little
drawing-room with the spray vigorously and cheerfully shaken
from the storm-besprent shag of his ulster, and began to con-
gratulate 4 two forlorn women ' on their luck in having him
come down upon them ; ordered an open fire, took up the talk
with the most delightful cordiality, set down one author and
put up another with a word, disposed of a whole argument with
an anecdote, and in a general way, not in the least conscious of
doing anything noticeable or going out of his course, seemed
quite heartily and wholesomely and naturally and adorably to
pervade all space. That adorably shows Mr. Blaine." Sympa-
thetic, sensible, trustworthy, in his companionship with women,
he demanded, elicited, and gave the best, and he received his
reward in friendships enlivening many joys, sustaining in great
sorrows, lasting to the end.

During the autumn and winter of 1886 he interested himself
in selecting a site and building a summer-house at Bar Harbor,
on whose stone portals he inscribed the name that was dearest
to him, — Stan wood.

In the summer of 1887, after the completion of his third
volume, and before beginning any other work, he went abroad
with as large a " town-meeting " as could be mustered, for rest,
and for complete freedom from all complication in the presiden-
tial campaign of 1888. He was in London at the time of the
Queen's jubilee, and he remained there some weeks enjoying
London society. A trained observer wrote: "He could have
been in no real doubt about the disposition of London toward
him after the first half-hour at the Duchess of St. Alban's
party. Everybody wanted to know him. It rained introduc-
tions. Such a face and figure and manner as his of course
attracted attention. The question ran round the room, Who
is he ? It was put to a lady who was supposed to know every

1 1 1

CD)

o
o

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 601

person worth knowing. 4 1 don't know,' was her answer, ' bnt
he is somebody, and I am going to find out.' It does not take
long for intelligence to circulate in a drawing-room. There
certainly were people in that brilliant company to whom Mr.
Blaine's name meant nothing, for it is not by a knowledge of
American politics or personalities that London society, even
then, was preeminently distinguished. But if the name did
not always interest them, the owner of it did. The tall form,
the singular charm of the face, the distinction of manner, the
intellectual power of the face and head, the refinement of both,
the alert composure of the expression, the sedateness of feature
with which the vivacity of the eyes contrasted, and that in-
definable air of being perfectly at home amid a throng of people
whom he had never seen before — alb this was remarked.
. . . He had that cool self-possession and quickness of
vision, and that flexibility of nature which are the conditions
of social success. . . . He captivated people here as he did
people in Washington or in Chicago." " That man burns like
a flame in a crowd," said one who had asked that Mr. Blaine
should be pointed out to him.

Of course he could not know what impression he made, but
he retained impressions and made friendships that were pleasant
and lasting.

In July he went to Kilgraston, of which he says : " ' Kilgras-
ton ' is the castle of Andrew Carnegie. ' Bridge of Earn ' is
the neighboring village. N.B., North Briton, which I am sur-
prised to find so often used instead of Scotland. We left Lon-
don on the 7th of July, stopping three days in Edinburgh to
witness the ovation to Andrew Carnegie in return for his gift
of £ 50,000 for a free library. Senator Frye and wife hap-
pened there, and as Hale and wife were with us we had quite a
home time. I got at last thoroughly fatigued by my ' season in
London,' and I concluded if I were to realize the rest and re-
freshment for which mainly I came to Europe, I must get to the
country, sleep o' nights, and have fresh air in the day. Hence I
am here, within four miles of the city of Perth. The house is
quite literally a ' castle,' — a great stone structure, one hun-
dred and ten feet in length by seventy-five in width, with an
innumerable array of rooms of all possible description. There

602 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

are fifteen or sixteen spare chambers after the family are all
accommodated. July 27. — The life is most charming, and I
have lost even the imagination of illness under its influence. No
two lives could be more in contrast than my London life and
the life here. ... I am taking your receipt of open air at
the rate of fourteen or fifteen hours a day."

From Scotland he paid a short family visit to Ireland, thence
to Homburg for the waters. Then a run to Vienna and Buda-
Pesth and back to Paris, where, on the morning of December
7, President Cleveland's annual message to Congress startled
him with a vision of victory for Republican principles. He
could scarcely credit the meagre reports in the Paris morning
journals, read before he had risen, but they were substantially
correct. The message, leaving matters of departmental admin-
istration and harmonious policies, was a pronunciamento for
free trade by a political novice. The political expert, though
absent from the country, sprang to the opportunity. The
President had neutralized the power of his own party by invit-
ing an issue which it had sedulously sought to avoid. In joy at
seeing the country brought at last to a meeting in the open
field on the question of protection, Mr. Blaine rose from his
bed, took up the challenge, and in an interview with Mr. G.
W. Smalley, the correspondent of the New York Tribune,
laid out the ground on which the contest of 1888 was fought
and won. The weak points of the message were seized, and
their consequences defined, with the touch of authority. Facts
and figures were marshalled at the Hotel Binda as readily, ac-
curately, and effectively as if the reasoner had been arguing in
his own library at Augusta. Some definite paths were outlined,
which were followed to immediate success in the next election,
and some general principles were enunciated whose non-observ-
ance has since then cost the country dear. " No great system of
revenue like our tariff can operate with efficiency and equity
unless the changes of trade be closely watched, and the law
promptly adapted to these changes." " The Democratic party
in power is a standing menace to the industrial prosperity of
the country."

Before night the interview was telegraphed to the Tribune
by Mr. Smalley. The President's message had been delivered

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 603

to Congress on the morning of December 5, printed in the news-
papers of America December 6, of Paris December 7. Mr.
Blaine's reply, which came to be called " Blaine's message,"
appeared in the New York Tribune on the morning of
December 8.

On the Galignani despatches he had prophesied Democratic
defeat, and having done his share to that end, he went out to
meet a dinner engagement that night with great good cheer.
A day or two after, he was at Havre to meet a friend from
America. He visited the artists' studios and bought pictures.
He went to the Chamber of Deputies. He met Clemenceau
and Floquet, the Speaker, and Tirard, the Prime Minister. He
talked with President Carnot, he visited Madame Carnot at the
Elysee, and in the President's box at the* Opera Comique en-
joyed the gayety of the scene and the excellence of the acting.

The Republican party at home seem to have been somewhat
dazed by the President's message. Mr. Blaine's voice was the
first heard, distant, yet prompt, clear, and decided. The people
saw the victory which he pointed out, but they instantly de-
manded that he should lead them to it.

From Paris he went to Switzerland and Italy. He also
watched carefully all the signs of the times. Many have
thought that if he had been at home he would have felt the
popular current setting so strongly towards him that he could
not have resisted. But the current he was most closely
watching, and which seemed to him so important as to be
the deciding one, did not set his way, and, to avoid party con-
fusion and disaster he felt it necessary to speak openly. First,
however, he spoke privately to a few friends. January, 1888,
he wrote from Florence to Mr. Patrick Ford :

I am going to withdraw ray name from the list of candidates for the
Republican nomination. Ever since the result in 1884 I had my mind made
up to run again, if called upon by an undivided and unanimous party, but
not to run if a contest were required to secure my nomination. I did not
take this position from any jrique or pride, but because I thought unanimity
was required to give me the prestige and power for a successful canvass.
I cannot say that I ever expected unanimity, and therefore it is that I
withdraw without surprise, and certainly without regret. I feel, indeed, a
certain sense of relief that my party does not decide to devolve the task
on me.

604 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Sherman is a determined candidate from Ohio, Harrison will be equally
so from Indiana, and Hawley will have the delegation from Connecticut.
Indiana and Connecticut are pivotal States, and the candidate should not
be one that they are unwilling to favor with their support. I know your
friendship sufficiently well to be assured that this announcement will bring
disappointment to you, but I am sure that, on full consideration, you will
approve my position. Having once been nominated and defeated, I cannot
consent to be a " claimant,11 appealing to the party to " try me again.11

Jefferson and Jackson, after good runs the first time, were unanimously
renominated. I came very much nearer victory than either of them in the
first trial, and could not consent to accept a nomination save from a
unanimous party.

All this is, of course, confidential. I certainly shall not put any ex-
planation in my letter of withdrawal, save that the reasons are " personal
to myself.11

I cannot close, my dear Mr. Ford, without saying to you how profoundly
I appreciate your unselfish friendship. The contest of 1884, with many
things that were painful in it, was lightened and relieved by the acquisi-
tion of one such friend as you. Our joint interest in public affairs will, I
am sure, continue. My kindest regard to your brother; my affectionate
salutation to Austin ; my devoted, unchanging friendship for you.

January 25 he addressed the chairman of the Republican
National Committee, Mr. B. F. Jones:

I wish through you to state to the members of the Republican party
that my name will not be jDresented to the national convention called to
assemble in Chicago in June next for the nomination of President and
Vice-President of the United States. I am constrained in this decision by
considerations entirely personal to myself, of which you were advised more
than a year ago. But I cannot make this announcement without giving
expression to my deep sense of gratitude to the many thousands of my
countrymen who have sustained me so long and so cordially with their
feelings, which seemed to go beyond the ordinary political adherence of
fellow-partisans, and to partake somewhat of the nature of personal attach-
ment. For this most generous, loyal friendship I can make no adequate
return, and shall carry the memory of it while life lasts.

He wrote also to Mr. Elkins, giving a slight review of the
political situation as it appeared to him, naming Hon. Benjamin
Harrison, of Indiana, as on the whole the most eligible candi-
date, and giving the reasons why he considered him a good
candidate, and likely to make a good President. This letter
was afterwards spoken of as " nominating General Harrison for
the presidency."

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 605

From Florence to Rome and Naples, and the dead cities ;
then, forsaking railroads, driving along the shores and hills
of Amalfi and Salerno and Vietri ; along Spezia and Sestri
to Genoa and Savon a, and San Remo to Nice, and by rail-
road again to Avignon and Lyons and Paris, — to find that
his letters had not prevailed. As for eliminating himself from
the political problem, he might as well have stayed at home.
Men whose hearts had been set now for a dozen years upon his
presidency, and men who had but just begun to desire it,
were equally engaged in explaining away his words, plead-
ing that they were not determinative, declaring that they
should not be conclusive. He had taken a wide and absorbing
personal part in the canvass of 1884. Now men wrote and
cabled and wrote again that he should not write a letter or
speak a word or spend a dollar or lift a finger. Circumstances
had so changed that it was not necessary. They assured him
that, once at home, he would see and feel the change. All
they asked was that he should not lift a finger against it, but
sit still in Bar Harbor, and see the salvation of the Lord.

His answer was the same. First, as before, he wrote to some
friends privately :

With a heavy heart, for of all the trials of my life, the hardest is to
dissent from the judgment of trusted friends and act contrary to their
wishes and hopes.

But as in this world and in the next every man must, in the end, stand
or fall to himself alone, I must announce to you that I cannot consent to be
a candidate for the presidency.

My Florence letter was, in my own mind, a formal and final with-
drawal from the presidency. It has been accepted as such by thousands of
my best friends. Candidates have come before the people who would not
have been there but for my action. I cannot now stop to take any subse-
quent developments and change of circumstances into account. I must
keep my faith and pledge, as I understand that open faith and implied
pledge to have been given, and by many to have been accepted.

It gives me the deepest pain to write these words — not on my own
account, but because of the disappointment it will bring to my dear and
cherished friends.

Pray do not differ with me ; I act under the pressure of convictions
irresistibly strong. Do not deem me ungrateful or insensible to the devoted
friendship, the intensely cordial support, the affectionate help you have
brought to me.

606 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

On May 17 he wrote from Paris to Mr. Whitelaw Reid, editor
of the New York Tribune, for publication:

Paris, May 17, 1888.

Since my return to Paris from Southern Italy, the 4th inst., I have
learned (what I did not believe) that my name may yet be presented to
the national convention as a candidate for the presidential nomination of
the Republican party. A single phrase of my letter of January 25, from
Florence (which was decisive of everything I had personal power to de-
cide) , has been treated by some of my most valued friends as not absolutely
conclusive in ultimate and possible contingencies. On the other hand,
there are some equally devoted and disinterested persons who have con-
strued my letter, as it should be construed, to be an unconditional withdrawal
of my name from the national convention. They have, in consequence,
given their support to eminent gentlemen who are candidates for the
Chicago nomination, some of whom would not, I am sure, have consented to
assume that position if I had desired to represent the party in the presiden-
tial contest of 1888. If I should now, by speech or by silence, by commission
or omission, permit my name, in any event, to come before the convention,
I should incur the reproach of being uncandid with those who have always
been candid with me. I speak, therefore, because I am not willing to re-
main in a doubtful attitude. I am not willing to be the cause of mislead-
ing a single man among the millions who have given me their suffrage
and their confidence. I am not willing that even one of my faithful support-
ers in the past should think me capable of paltering in a double sense with
my words. Assuming that the presidential nomination could by any possible
chance be offered to me, I could not accept it without leaving in the minds
of thousands of these men the impression that I had not been free from
indirection, and therefore I could not accept it at all. The misrepresenta-
tions of malice have no weight, but the just displeasure of my friends I
could not patiently endure. . . .

James G. Blaine.

From Paris to London, then coaching with Mr. Carnegie for
June weeks through the cathedral towns of eastern England
and Scotland to Cluny, tracking the Roman roads, sleeping in
the rooms of Tudor kings, lunching under yew-trees which
might have been the ones that bothered Caesar, under the oaks
of Burleigh House by Stamford town, on the hills of the great
White Horse or of the Lammermoors, in battle-fields of York
and Lancaster, on the banks of the Tweed, and a little coldly
in the damp of Delnaspidal.

The convention was assembling while Mr. Blaine was exam*

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 607

ining the gold-wire hair of St. Cuthbert in Durham. Mr.
Blaine's elder sons were in attendance to defend their father's
wishes, which, it need hardly be said, were not their own.
" On the opening day," said Mr. Thurston, a delegate, " I rode
to the convention door with Walker and Emmons Blaine ;
both strong, vigorous, splendid men." There was need of a
firm hand, for the bent was all one way. " Boys," said Mr.
Elkins to them in despair, " it must come." " It's no matter
whether Blaine wants the nomination or not : we want him,"
was the popular voice in the convention.

" Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine,
We've had him once,
We'll have him again,"

was the chanted shout outside. " Mr. Blaine has made the issue
for the campaign ; we are going to win on it. If he were here, if
he knew the exact state of things, he would lead us. He must.
No man is big enough to set aside the voice of the Republican
party." It was with difficulty that the convention could be
held from nominating him on Saturday and adjourning, leav-
ing with Mr. Blaine the responsibility of rejecting the nom-
ination.

This pressure was telegraphed to him in Edinburgh, but no
one telegraphed that the " determined candidates " had with-
drawn, and Mr. Blaine could make but the same reply. " To
Boutelle and Manley, Chicago : Earnestly request my friends to
respect my Paris letter ; " and later in the day, as the importu-
nity increased, to the same men, " I think I have a right to ask
my friends to respect my wishes and refrain from voting for
me. Please make this and the former despatch public."

These political allies and devoted friends would have done
anything for Mr. Blaine except disregard his wishes. With
heavy hearts they communicated their unwelcome tidings to the
convention, and in the ruins of the palace at Linlithgow, where
Margaret Tudor had cradled her Stuart son for his stormy throne,
a despatch was brought to him announcing the nomination of
Harrison.

At Cluny a short three weeks of stirring out-door life and
pleasant July hearth-fires in the evening, then London, Liverpool,

608 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

and home. It might have been that Mr. Blaine's steady refusal
of the candidacy should have been resented by those who had
so warmly proffered it. But the vision of an intelligent people is
often insight. They discerned instantly, instinctively his high-
heartedness and met it with noble appreciation. From all parts
of the country, in clubs, in delegations, in mass, the people went
to New York to receive him, and gave him such a welcome home
as only free men can give to the man they delight to honor. The
"City of New York," in which he had sailed, was a new ship,
and her arrival was delayed some days. Many were not able
to wait over, but though some were thus disappointed, in the
crowd no one could be missed. Mr. Murat Halstead reported
to the Blaine club of Cincinnati, August 18 :

" I had the honor to be your representative at the reception of
James G. Blaine in New York harbor and city last week, and of
presenting to him your address of welcome. . . . You will
be glad to know that Mr. Blaine's personal appearance contra-
dicts in the most satisfactory way the sinister stories that have
been industriously and continuously circulated about his health.
He is not a man you would think fitted for immediate service
as a rail-splitter or in a railroad iron rolling-mill, but he is
erect, bright, quick, alert, crisp, and sparkling. I have never
seen his eyes shine as they did when he sprang from the
shadow of the British to that of the American flag, clearing a
space of about four feet in doing so. He is a man of singular
combination of strength and delicacy in his physical organiza-
tion, and it is to this rare association of qualities, giving at once
sensitiveness and endurance, that we are indebted for the facul-
ties, the capacities, that make up the man whose influence has
been so remarkable, and whose popularity is a phenomenon.
He is of fine responsive sensibilities. There is nothing on earth
or in the air that does not tell him something. . . . He is like
an instrument of music that a breath moves to melody, and is
in tune for any breeze, and yet he is tenacious, goes on with
patient strength, and wears like steel. There never was a
more delightful family veunion than that of the Blaines on
the " Laura M. Starin," the boat that met the splendid steamer
" City of New York " just as she came in sight of her namesake
city. The three sons had not met their parents and younger

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 609

sisters for fourteen months, and in their tender and joyful
greetings they forgot the surrounding multitude, and heard
not " Home Again " by the band, and the wild acclaim of the
fog-horns. There was soon a rush for the cabin, and there the
president of the Blaine club of New York made an eloquent
address . . . and there never was a more sympathetic audi-
ence than that which crowded the boat. Mr. Blaine's reply
was in conversational tones, and his short sentences were spoken
with the perfect ease and simplicity with which a gentleman
gives his opinion to three or four friends; and each word was
recorded by a score of busy pens, and all civilized men have
read them, for the wires that are now wound about the world
convey daily messages to all the nations, and Mr. Blaine's
words had a meaning for all men." *

They had a delightful meaning to Walker, wild with the long
waiting after long absence, and the completed joy of meeting ;
for in all the commotion his father found space to say, " We
will never be separated again." And they never were.

Mr. Blaine entered upon election work even before going
home, and continued it in Maine till after her State election;
then in the West. At the height of the campaign he wrote :

Ellsworth, Me., Sept. 1, 1888.

My dear Mr. Phelps and my dear Mr. Hitt :

It is reported in the Washington despatches that the Republican mem-
bers of the Foreign Affairs Committee will support the bill giving to
President Cleveland all the power he asks in his message to enable him to
embarrass the commercial intercourse between the Canadian Government
and the United States. From an expression of Mr. Phelps, quoted in the
New York Tribune, I infer that this is to be done on the theory that you
will keep loading President Cleveland with power to right the wrong of
the fisheries, with the confident expectation that he will oblige us by
making no effort, and thus will fall more and more under popular disfavor.
Are you quite sure of your ground ? Pray look at the situation.

The popular tide is at present running heavily against him. The upris-
ing on behalf of protection threatens to distance him in the race. He
seeks for a new issue. He is ashamed to use the powers of retaliation,
which he has neglected for a year and a half. He wishes to discredit
them, to make the people believe that he has never had any proper power
of retaliation in his hands, to convince the people that the Republicans
have been humbugging on the fishery question, and have only given him
the semblance and not the substance of a retaliation measure, and that now

610 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

he asks for a real one, and, of course, if the Republicans sustain his
demands they confirm all his condemnation of their own previous measures,
to the discredit of their entire past. Moreover, it is not to be. doubted that
if he gets the power in his hands, which this new retaliation will give him,
he will use it to the extent of stirring up an apparent row with Canada
and with England, just enough to unsettle the entire Irish vote, certainly
enough to enable the Democratic Irish to reclaim a large proportion of
the eighty thousand Irish who voted the Republican ticket in New York in
1884.

In his present position, the President is open to the keenest of political
weapons — ridicule. I have been on the stump, continuously, since his
message, and can testify that the disapprobation of his position by large
audiences is absolutely unanimous, so far as I can judge. Nor do I mean
by this simply on the part of Republicans. The Democrats are more
embarrassed by his somersault than I could easily describe. If he be left just
where he now is he will be inevitably beaten badly in November. If the
Republicans in Congress approve his position, by giving him the legisla-
tion asked for, his prestige and power before the people will be enor-
mously increased. It will effect thousands of votes in this State if it
should be proved that the Republicans in both Houses of Congress are
ready to respond to the extraordinary demand of the President, and destroy
our railway trade with Canada. If you are not ready to ojDpose the bill
altogether, why not put this amendment : That the new power of retalia-
tion shall not be used until that already granted shall be proved, by trial,
wholly ineffective, and that, in any event, it shall not be used until six
months after notice is given to England of the formal abrogation of the
29th Article of the Treaty of Washington.

I do not suggest these amendments as desirable, but they will be far
better than to support the bill, and as they would certainl}' be rejected by
the Democrats, they might only be offered to fortify the logic of your
position in opposing the main proposition of the President. At the same
time, I think immeasurably the strongest ground is to treat the President's
message as the campaign dodge of a candidate, hard-pressed on an issue
on which he is beaten before the people, all the more disastrously beaten
because he forced the issue himself. I think we have all the weapons in
' our hands for pushing him over the precipice, and if we steadily hold to
the oround that the main issue is protection versus free trade, and that he
has shown himself incompetent to deal with the fishery question and
wholly unwilling to use any instrumentalities in his power to force a
judicious settlement, that he has no right to ask for any other, and that
the whole situation demands that nothing more be done on that question
until after the presidential election, we shall inevitably defeat him. The
fishing season of 1888 has gone by ; there is no pending trouble, and
before the fishing season of 1889 is open the new President, whoever he
may be, will be in position, free from the pressure of an impending
election, ready to act with cool head on the whole question.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 611

Postscript in his own handwriting :

My dear Friends :

If the foregoing has some long, involved sentences, pray remember
that that is the peculiar vice of dictation. But I hope you can sjDell out
my meaning.

I deem the point of inexpressible importance. See Mr. Kasson's con-
currence in my views on next page.

Mr. Hitt and Mr. Phelps were at one with his aim, made no
mistake, and the imdesired bill never matured to legislation.

A journalist of the other party, who was on the Western trip,
says:

" In one sense, all the meetings of that trip were alike, because
at all of them there was the same great outpouring of the
people to see and hear and worship Blaine ; the same adoration
on the part of his followers and admirers, and the same interest
on the part of those who differed with him upon political
principles.

" But it was in Indiana, perhaps, among the Hoosiers, who are
born, raised, and die in an everlasting political maelstrom, that
the most interesting scenes were witnessed, and that Blaine
himself was seen at his truest and heard at his best.

" Whether at Indianapolis, Evansville, Jeffersonville, Green
Castle, Lafayette, or at the historic battle-ground of Tippecanoe,
Blaine astonished his hearers with his knowledge of the history
and resources of each locality. ~It was this display of the
knowledge of their own home affairs that so endeared Blaine to
the common people, and made the inhabitants of each town
believe he had made an especial study of their own home lives
and industries."

The truth is that he always made special studies, caught the
truth in things current, and presented it with a picturesque
brevity that is the soul of wit.

To a great throng he began :

" I have carefully read, this morning, the speech delivered
last night in your city by the Hon. Roger Q. Mills, Chairman of
the Ways and Means Committee, and reputed author of the
' Mills Bill.' And I can confess I was very greatly surprised,
for I found that Mr. Mills was laboring all through his bill to

612 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

persuade his people of Indiana that President Cleveland and the
Democratic Congress had been industriously working for eight
months, just to get five per cent, off the tariff. [Applause.]

" Mr. Mills began his tariff crusade by declaring that protection
was robbery — that is the doctrine of free-trade democracy —
and he comes out to Indiana to tell you that the Republicans
are in favor of forty-seven and one-half per cent, of robbery and
the Democrats are only in favor of forty-two and one-half per
cent. [Applause.] Why, these rascally protectionists have
stolen forty-seven chickens, and we honest Democrats only got
away with forty-two, — forty-two and a half. [Applause.]
Joking aside, gentlemen, it shows that the Democratic party in
Washington, when they had not yet heard from the people,
were eager and anxious to destroy the protective principle, and
now they are tenfold more eager and anxious to prove to the
people of Indiana that they have not destroyed it."

" For three months," says another writer, " I was an inmate
of Mr. Blaine's private car during the memorable campaign of
1884. I never saw such crowds before, nor have I since. Gath-
erings of fifty thousand were common. Hosts of one hundred
thousand were not unusual. Acres upon acres of people would
pack in together and wait with stolid patience for hours simply
to see him. At his presence a cry would go up so wild in its
frenzy of enthusiasm as to be always thrilling."

His speech at the Polo Grounds in September was published in
pamphlet form, and with the Brooklyn and Madison Square Gar-
den addresses was considered decisive as holding the essential Irish
vote which had been already drawn from the Democratic column.

ToM.:

Augusta, July 5, 1882.

. . A good fire is blazing in the sitting-room, but it is utterly inade-
quate to the demands of the occasion, which are met by the native inhabi-
tants with coal-fires in furnaces. . . . Your dear daddy got home
Saturday afternoon in his summer suit, thin shoes with stockings — old
ones at that, and very shambling on the foot, and no gaiters. He called for
woollen socks and thick shoes as he came up the walk, and when he stood
up on his highest soles, the spirit of a man came again into him. He had
travelled with a Pullman blanket wrapped all about him, on the first day of
July, and yet all Augusta is seeking the seashore and the mountain air.
July 22. This blurred paper shows the excitement of your father over

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 613

the game buried cities. Your dearest dad, who is the bright particular star
generally, paled his ineffectual fires, and on the lambent and attenuated
pathway of a steel pen was fain to gaze upon those hidden cities whose
names his ears were not quick enough to catch, so that all my beautiful
" Augusta, Maine," paper I find written over with Shiphard-like tes-
timony to this effect: "Thou art sour, O mediaeval jackass!" — "O
gambolling kitten, there's a rat! O gambolling kitten, catch that rat!"
— u Stop this infernal music ! Open — Hag, Enough ! " I had the pleas-
ure— and it was a pleasure, since it was for him — of packing, before
breakfast, three hampers of lunch for Emmons to take on the "Circe"
with him. . . . We found your father, who always rises to the occa-
sion of an imaginary peril, wisely skipping the real ones, with Mr.
Trescott and Orville in the library, the ex-envoy smoking, of course,
all the gas lighted in that room and the billiard room, all the draughts
quenched, but all three perfectly happy, and not aware of their stifling pur-
gatory till I had moved them into the heaven of the pure air of the parlor,
where they failed to find the thread of their talk, and wandered wretchedly
to and fro. Mem. — Never to disturb people who are unaware of the defects
of the surroundings. Full bowls will not bear moving. If you joggle the
milk the cream will not rise. These are not Poor Richard's, but are worthy
him. ... I had a letter yesterday, written at Venice on the fourth,
which I read to Emmons sitting with me on the porch, and to your father,
sitting in the library. You can imagine the key to which my voice
was pitched, especially as the lounge on which the pater was sitting
brought his deaf ear outside. ... I have been interrupted to listen to
the article on S. A., which the pater is now writing, and which is very
good, both in what it does and does not say.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. John J. Creswell :

Washington, August 1, 1882.

I am just in receipt of your kind note^of the 28th ult., and now derive a
new pleasure from the appointment of Mr. Walker Blaine to the position of
assistant counsel on behalf of the United States, before the Court of Com-
missioners of Alabama Claims, since I know that his selection is a source of
gratification to you.

My intercourse with j^our son since his late arrival in Washington has
been quite intimate, and I am already enabled to assure you, of my own
knowledge, that you need not suffer a moment's anxiety with respect to his
diligence or efficiency. He is fully competent, not only to meet my largest
expectations, and to achieve an honorable success for himself, but, in addi-
tion, to render most important services to the government and the public.

To M.:

August 2, 1882.

You must not think that I cherish any antagonism towards Arthur. I do
not in the least. He is light-weight, and I do not propose to sink the scale

614 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

with a lie to the contrary, — that is all. . . . Our dear Jacky has left us
for the Geneva Award and Washington. I hated to give him up, as he is a
delightful resource to me, and the most happy combination of devotion as
a son, and a well-spring of knowledge as a man. My figure, I see, is
slightly mixed, but never mind.

August 4, 1882.
. . . Your father, after enduring one round day of Augusta, after the
boys — who were great company for him — had gone, spurred himself to
an immense amount of work, with which he loaded the mails of yesterday,
and in the afternoon got away himself to Rye, Hamilton, for a day, and
perhaps Saratoga. . . . And I am the emblem of authority, the court,
the ratio d'etre of the house, the hostess when company chooses to come,
and the mother of my delightful children.

To Mr. Blaine, from Walker :

Washington, August 9, 1882.

I was in to-day for a moment to see Henderson, the Secretary of the Re-
publican Congressional Committee, who seemed not a little annoyed that
he had not received a reply to a letter which he had written to you some
time since, with reference to your taking part in the political campaign.

The California people are extremely anxious that you should go out there,
and a large delegation of citizens of Delaware were in town to-day and
called upon Henderson. They are extremely anxious that you should make
one speech in Delaware. ... I told him that you had done more work
of that character than anybody, and deserved your leisure ; but he was very
solicitous, and I promised him to write you at once, and said I would guar-
antee a reply. Do send me a letter that I can show him, as soon as
possible.

If, in October, you could make one speech in Delaware, and then go to
California and make, say, four speeches, I am sure it would be a great
favor to him. You could go by the Southern Pacific and return the other
way, and you could arrange your speeches so as to have one day or more in
California between each, and be back in a month. The trip would do you
good. They would send you by special car all the way, I am sure, and I
think it would really be a great thing for you to do, as you are now out of
office, and have nothing personally at stake.

To M.:

August 27, 1882.
. . . I found the boys and your father off for a stroll over the Hallo-
well Ledge, from which they came back tired and hungry, and bright.
. . . Walker came Friday afternoon, a good deal disgusted at finding
himself in Augusta, instead of at the Isle of Shoals. . . . However,
by this time he finds that there is good living, and some folk worth

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 615

seeing, even here, and to-morrow he starts out on a speaking tour, and
your father ditto. Can you imagine your father's going to a picnic at
Hammond's Grove ? Yesterday afternoon we went out to K. R.'s shanty
and had tea. Your father was in a boat almost all the time, rowing about
in the most reckless manner. It was perfectly delightful to see him, and
after we had returned, the exercise and the oj^en air making him drowsy,
I covered him with newspapers, and while he slept, played solitaire, with
Walker and Emmons overlooking me.

From Mr. Blaine, to Senator Brown :

. . . It would give me much pleasure to testify the respect I have
always entertained for Mr. Hill's great ability as a senator, and my sincere
friendship for him as a man. Though frequently opposed in debate, our
personal relations were always most kindly, and never for a moment suf-
fered interruption. After I had left the Senate, we had an interchange of
personal courtesies of the most cordial character. * He was a man of great
gifts, patriotic in all his purposes, and capable of doing great good for his
country.

To Mr. Blaine, from Senator Brown :

Atlanta, Georgia, August 28, 1882.
. . . Coming from a political opponent by whom Mr. Hill has been
confronted in Congress again and again, the discussion between the two
being very able and exciting, your letter does great credit to your head and
heart. And I assure you, it is very highly appreciated by me as the friend
of Senator Hill, and by other friends to whom I have exhibited it.

To M.:

Augusta, September 1, 1882.

. Walker is telephoning for a horse to take him to some of the
Monmouths or Pittstons, where he is to convince a willing public that P.
is a great fraud, who should be allowed to play out his farces in private life.
For we are in the very midst of the campaign, and I almost hope you are
so indifferent to politics that you will without interest see that the pater,
having taken the stump, the despatches are once again teeming with his
name. I myself went to Maranacook. Did you not go with us to that
lovely lake ? This day, changing the speakers and the company, was a
reproduction of that. Caroline roasted the same chickens which Emmons
cut up in the same efficient way in the car, and your father bobbed in on us
from Bangor just in season to eat a second breakfast before starting. After
all, there is something very pleasant in the Maine election to me. . . .
Walker speaks every night, but as none of his family has sufficient devotion
to go and hear him, I can give you no estimate of his worth as a public
speaker. I have an inward conviction, however, that he is a good one.
September 3. . . . I do not think that the opportunity now remains

616 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

for me to 2:0 abroad. We must £0 into the new house this winter. Awhile
ago, when I proposed to go to Boston to-morrow with Emmons to look up
my stained-glass windows, you ought to have heard the objections pitted
against me. There was General Harrison, who was to speak here Tuesday
evening, and who is very likely to be the next Republican presidential
nominee — did I hear you sigh ? — and your father would not but have
him entertained in this house for the world, and it would be no entertain-
ment if he and I were both away. And if all this war of words is kindled by a
proposal of one day's absence, what would be thought, felt, and expressed
if I should mention Europe ? . . Election day is to-morrow week,

and as soon as they have voted, your father and Emmons leave for Kansas.
The pater hates it, but Emmons holds him to his promise made in the spring,
to speak at the fair in Topeka, in September. . . . We seem to have
come into the newsjiapers, after quite a lull, your father's presence in the
campaign having waked up large audiences. Walker goes back to Wash-
ington to his work as soon as election is over. Mr. Creswell, his chief, he
likes much, and is quite surprised to find him an industrious, stalwart, and
hard-working commissioner.

From Hon. Benjamin Harrison, to Mr. Blaine :

Portland, Me., September 9, 1882.
As I go to Boston after the meeting to-night the hope of seeing you
again is gone, and as I shall have no opportunity to urge personally my
request that you will make some speeches in Indiana, I write this letter.
We very much need you, and shall be much disappointed if you don't come.
Please present my kind regards to your family, to whose kindness I am in-
debted for the pleasantest recollections of my visit to Maine.

To M. :

Augusta, September 11, 1882.

. This is election day, and the polls are already long enough
closed for me to have had a visit from Mr. Homan, assuring me of the
gains in many towns, and now Walker telephones an enlarged list, and
Joe Manley shouts over the wire, " We shall have a majority of over four
thousand.1' This is cheering news indeed, for even so late as our 3-o'clock
dinner Walker felt great uneasiness. I can quote only Walker, for your
father and Emmons, after detaining the train till they could vote, left this
morning for Kansas. They travel night and day. Your father never
left home more reluctantly in his life of many farewells ; but Emmons held
him to his promise and fairly carried him off.

September 20. . . . The anniversary of the sad da,js at Elberon.
One year ago this morning we were stranded on the hither side of Stamford,
while Arthur was telegraphing your father that he should wait for him in
New York before he proceeded to Elberon. Then came the breakfast at the
Gilsey house, the special train to Elberon with the new President, the recep-

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 617

tion of the living, the still more solemn meeting with the dead, the funeral
services over the poor remnants of the poor body, the journey to Washington,
the marvellous impressiveness of the ceremonies there. . . . How it
makes me feel to go over my evidence, as the old church used to say, and
see how we have fallen from grace. Does it pay to be great and out of
place, better than to be small and in a high place ? Oh, yes, — a thousand
times yes. Better a gem of purest ray serene, than paste in the crown of a
queen.

October 5. You see, don't you, that you are in my own room, which is
warm with sunshine and a wood fire ? None of the cold elegance of a
Parisian bedroom is here, but all is cordiality, and newspapers, and warmth,
and bright talk, and communism, for your father is in bed, and Emmons,
wrapped in blankets, sits in the arm-chair, and Dr. Brickett comes and goes,
and Colonel O. is here, and Fred appears at the door with an old pair of
tongs which he has hunted up in the cellar, and with a duck towards the bed
intimates to me that " he's all right, madame, I telTd 1em so down street"
— for your father was taken ill Sunday at York, and the newspapers have
iterated and reiterated the report till even strong nerves take the alarm.
Emmons drove Jip to Lewiston to the State fair last Wednesday, return-
ing Friday with a dreadful cold which seemed to settle into a malarial
fever, with typhoid tendencies, so that I wrote your father asking him
to come home, and, to my great dismay, got, instead of him, a telegram
saying that he was himself sick, very much in the same way. However,
he got home at 8 last night, in very good condition both in mind and
body — thanks to the kindness of President Phillips, who sent him through
in his private car ; and now after traversing that old gallery about fifty
times, going from one side room to the other, I have got them into the
same room, and under my own wing, and I think they are getting better
every moment.

To M.:

November 2, 1882.
. General McClellan wants to buy the old Washington house.
At first your father utterly refused to entertain the proposition, saying it
would turn him out of house and home for the winter, oblivious apparently,
utterly, of the new house. All day I have been arguing with him to give
up the house now, and let me go on and get a few rooms ready in the
new domain for immediate occupancy. I am afraid of so much unre-
munerative property. One good thing which has come out of the anxiety
and perplexity of the day is that your father, who has been moping miser-
ably for a few days, has roused up and is now cheerful and peart as a par-
tridge, conversing with Emmons.

From Hon. Pierrepont Edwards :

St. Petersburg, November 29, 1882.
. I congratulate you and your husband on the result in Maine,
the only doubtful State saved amid the general wreck, and the only one

618 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

except Illinois where the old Cabinet put forth its strength, and a repre-
sentative. " Arthur,11 said a friend of mine the day that Blaine's resigna-
tion was accepted, " will regret this step, for Blaine is far more important
to Arthur than Arthur is to Blaine.11 Prophetic words ! they are already
history. ... I am disgusted with all that has happened, and await the
fate of the patriotic and loyal party that has been dragged by the strong
arm of presidential patronage to the brink of ruin.

To M. :

New York, December 6, 1882.

. . . You will infer, of course, that I am nere in the interest of the
house. It is so deplorable to have no home, and your father is so anxious
to have a retirement in which he can write, that I am pushing all my pur-
chases with vigor rather than discretion, though I am not reckless.
. Do not feel uneasy about us. Your father said yesterday the
presidency came no more into his calculations, but that his family had
never seemed so dear to him, nor had he ever felt himself so devoted to
them.

From Mr. Blaine, to his daughter in Europe :

Last Day of 1882.

I sit in the front window of the new house looking out on a beautiful
day, with all Washington out in gay attire for Sunday, and inside a happy
family surrounded with the confusion and disorder of boxes, bales, pict-
ures, paint, wall paper, etc. . . . Whenever you find the convent
unendurable, come out ; but the longer you stay, the more you will know.

From G. :

Dupont Circle.

. . . People seem to think Mr. Blaine sits here like a spider spin-
ning a web ; and so he does, but the web is his history, and not politics.

. . . He glories in the gout because it is indisputable. Most of his
ailments are mere fancies, which he gets laughed out of before he is com-
fortably settled down in them. His gout is an inheritance, not an acquire-
ment. Never a man lived more simply. . . .

To M. :

March 4, 1883.

Had your father remained in the Senate instead of going into Garfield's
Cabinet, this day would have completed his first whole term. I have been
talking with him about it, and he says he has not a regret anent his own
decision, that he has now not only no desire for public life, but an absolute
repugnance.

March 12. . . . All these trips of Emmons are always in the inter-
est of railways, and by and by I am sure that he will alight on his feet a
thorough business man. Your father says he is a bull always. Every

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 619

thing he questions. He risks nothing, but this makes him a discreet
counsellor.

You want me to write politically. I do not know what to say, for there
is no situation at present. I know the nomination of '84 is not a snjet
defendu exactly, for we all say whatever is in our minds. Your father is
as little a candidate as though he had succeeded in 76 and '80. The one
thing he perhaps does desire is to be once more Secretary of State.

March 19. . . . That I may disburden my mind of its most press-
ing need, I want you to come home by the first opportunity. It is impos-
sible for me to go over. Your father is opposed to it, and that with me
has always been a sufficient reason. I never can, I never wish to oppose
him, and as we have done nothing but give out money for the last year
ever since we began this house, even the slight additional outlay of a
European trip might inconvenience him. There is nothing seriously out
of joint with the bank account, but this house and land have proved a sort
of sinking-fund which has to be considered. Still, if you could hear that
dear jDater of yours at this moment singing, as he works, you would see
that his soul is not disquieted within him and that yours must not be.
. . . Walker is worth his weight in love and gold, and can be
relied on for a tower of strength in the tight places of dinners and teas.
Last night he invited all the guests, arranged their seats at table, himself
took out the only stranger, and generally stood between me and any
anxiety, in a way which your father, dear and interesting as he has always
been, never knew how to do. Then Jacky is very interesting. . . .
Any difficulty but that of money I could perhaps surmount, but the un-
known, and money is always to me the unknown factor, frightens me.
Your father is writing a book, " Twenty Years of Congress.11 It will
not probably be interesting to you and to me, but think of the many,
many who will want to read and own it.

From V. :

April 9, 1883.

Mr. Blaine went to Judge Strong's Saturday night to see about building
a new Presbyterian Church up here; thinks it is "sort of heathenish11
not to have or attend any church. . . . Quite a number of cyclopedia
volumes came out at dinner — all to throw light on the Westminster
catechism.

Driving with Mr. Blaine I asked him, " If any one should ask you what
was your creed, what shoull you say ?" "I should say it was a general
belief in Christianity, modified by the Presbyterian Blaines on one side
and the Roman Catholic Gillespies on the other.11 — " You don't know any
more about theology than the squirrel running up those trees. Let me
give you your creed. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with — " — " Oh ! I
know that.11 — "Nevermind, listen — with all thy heart and with all thy
soul and with all thy mind and with all thy strength, and the rest. Now
say it over yourself. Say it.11 He repeats it obediently, and after a pause,

620 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

" Well, you don't know the difference between the Democratic platform
of 1856 and 1852," and completes his revenge by rejoicing with the old
Scotchman that I " meddle only with the things o1 God which I cannot
change, rather than with the things o' man where I might do harm.1'
. . Clarence Hale is in Washington on business before Walker's
court ; says the atmosphere of the court is redolent of Walker's praises.

From Mr. Blaine, to M. :

Washington, April 20, 1883.

First as to business. You will receive, a day or two after this reaches
you, an additional credit for something over 5,000 francs, which I hope may
square you off; but if you deem it necessary to go be}Tond that sum, you
will not regard it as an absolute restriction, — though I wish you may find
it sufficient for all your demands, — Worth and worthless. We are over-
joyed at your expected return ; you will come to warm hearts and open
arms, and I persuade myself that, hard in many ways as the long separa-
tion has been to you and to ug, it will, for all your life, be regarded as
time most profitably spent. You will find changes, — my hair a little
whiter. . . . Alice gone from us to a new home of her own, Jacky
given up too much to society and to fashion, Emmons more serious and
thoughtful, but all unchanged in deep affection for you, except that it grows
deeper. We hope to remain in Washington till you come, though it is pos-
sible the heat may grow too intense either for your comfort or ours, in
which event we shall hope for a reunion in the old home house.

To Mr. Blaine, from Col. John Hay:

June 21, 1883.
. . . The book puts you easily and securely in the front rank of
American men of letters.

To Mr. Blaine, from Walker :

Washington, June 30, 1883.

. . . I have also been to see the P. M. General about Mrs. T.
Gresham says he will give you a place if you desire it, but here is the em-
barrassment : They have been obliged to reduce the force in one of the
bureaus recently by twelve (all women and all good clerks). Now, the
Civil Service rules go into effect about the middle of July, and though these
women are all good clerks, yet they could not, perhaps, pass the examina-
tion. If they are not given places before that, they will all lose their places,
reform being absolutely heartless and mercilessly just — or unjust. Mrs.
T. only wants a place for a short time, these other people want it for
bread and butter — their only means of support; and when Gresham ap-
pealed to sympathy, I didn't know what to say. I finally asked him to
leave the matter open for a day, which he said he would do. ... I
am heartily sick and tired of this place-seeking business, and nothing but
sympathy for those for whom I seek could keep me up in it. I would not

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 621

take the bread out of the mouth of a poor woman, and I did not feel like
pushing Gresham, who was really very kind, and who would, I think, have
made the appointment, had I persisted.

ToM.:

Augusta, June 30, 1883.

. . . Your father, who arrived on the "Flying Yankee1' yesterday,
at 7.30, has spent the whole of it on the lawn, and under the apple-trees,
with a billiard cue. He says he has taken more exercise than in the whole
preceding six months. He was very homesick last night, but this morning
highly approves Augusta.

To Walker :

July 10, 1883.

You remember how sweetly your father and Emmons sang its
praises in Washington. Your lonely condition seemed to them of no
account. Well, here I am, with a house in beautiful order, excellent ser-
vants, bright skies, delicious air, and a sun rejoicing to run his race. Here
are your two sisters; but where, oh, where are those nobler spirits who
were so impatient for this elysium ? Emmons, at the first petty tempta-
tion, went off after just one day's enjoyment of his family and friends, and
that same afternoon what did your father — pater nobilis filii nobilis — but
telegraph Payson Tucker to know if the " Flying Yankee " could be stopped
at North Hampton. Of course it could ; when was the descensus not
made fadUs? So at four o'clock behold him with remorseful visage and
many self-reproaches, I own, kissing his womankind in the hall, while the
Augusta House hack waited at the gate. Yes, Walker, the A. H. H., for
we still have no horses, nor do I see why we are likely to have any.
Charlie White, to be sure, has driven a pair around the " Heart" for our
inspection, but when M. said, " Why, Mr. White, you cannot see them with-
out looking over the dasher, can you ? " he coolly gathered up the reins,
remarking only, " They are not mine," and drove off.

From Hon. W. W. Phelps :

Teaneck, near Englewood, Sunday, July 22, 1883.

Dear Mrs. Blaine : Only to hope that you are pretty cool, well and
happy ; only to hope that our M. I. isn't a Catholic ; only to tell you that I
spent Friday night at Elberon and there talked with, inter alios,

Childs,

Cornell .

Each was separate from the other. Said Childs, " Grant thinks your
friend Blaine will be the next President." Said Cornell, " I think your
friend Blaine is sure, if he can keep out of the fight till nearly the end, to
win." Etc., etc. Whence it is plain that at Long Branch, and in the
mouths of Grant and Cornell, our future is assured.

622 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

I do not think so, nor do you. But I thought you would like to know
this incident of my Elberon evening. So I write this, and nothing more,
except that I am

Cordially all of yours.

To Walker :

Augusta, July 28, 1883.

. . . Thursday we had a circus here. In the morning Mons went
down to inspect the grounds. As he was walking about, a flashily dressed
man came from one of the tents, and said, " How do you do, Mr. Blaine.
I had the pleasure of making your acquaintance at the Hot Springs." Of
course Emmons established your identity. I believe Mr. Davis — for it was
the manager himself — credits you with originating his enterprise. At any
rate, he seemed to entertain the liveliest recollection of your agreeability,
and on parting presented your brother with four tickets. As M. had a
little circus party that night, they came in very well.

August 7. ... Only to let you know that this is our Emmons1
twenty-sixth birthday. Your father, in a worse than usual hat, is saun-
tering under the apple-trees, while Emmons looks up Cowper from the
bookcase — Islington and Edmonton being in dispute between his father
and himself, he winning, of course, for your father's taste is not poesy.
. He came from Rye Saturday morning, looking and feeling all
the worse for his attempted flight at gayety. He was pretty blue that
night, but Sunday he got up with spirits attuned to the day, which was
bright, and yesterday, though not quite so peart, he did not go far back, and
this morning he is again in harmony with the outside world.

August 22. . . . Your father once more in love with his book, and
writing assiduously all the morning.

From Walker, to M. :

Washington, October 15, 1883.
. . . I went to-day to look over the Marcy house, and a very cheerful
habitation it appeared. I can't say that I admire the third-story carpets,
which, when new, must have looked like a green nightmare. Age has im-
proved them a little. Moreover, an old man, bent in the middle like a
rusty jack-knife, showed me about, and eyed me suspiciously as though my
name was not what I professed ; but despite carpet and caution, it seemed
to me that it would prove to be a cheerful abiding-place for the season.
Whether the season will prove a gay one or not I do not know. The house-
renting would indicate it, but the elections have played such havoc with
Republican hopes that the g. o. p. will not be very jovial. Did you know
that at a lecture on the Senate which a man named French, who used to be
sergeant-at-arms of that body, gave here the other night the whole audi-
dience rose and cheered when he mentioned father's name ? and General
Beale told me on the way to the farm that he regarded father as the only

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 623

candidate for the Republicans. That's pretty strong from such a Grant
man. But I doubt much whether the Republicans can elect anybody. As
for me, I'm hammering away and being hammered at in my court, day in
and day out, and I get so tired of hearing about cruisers and high seas, that
my mind is in a whirl all the time. To-morrow, for example, I have to
face an attorney who has been talking nonsense all day, and if I express my
conscientious opinion of his logic he will grow very indignant. As he has
a tile loose in the roof, I don't know what he may do. If I don't express
the opinion he will insult me. As it is, I think I'll polish him off with
lavish compliments, which will so please him that he will never see how he
is beaten, — not by the force of argument, but by fact, for he was a fool to
bring his case in the beginning. . . . Don't you be disappointed about
the house. You'll like Lafayette square just as well, and I'm going to devote
myself to making the winter most delightful and agreeable to you. When
is T.'s birthday ? With love to all the family, and with the earnest entreaty
that you will soon come on, for I pine for you.

Devotedly,

Jacky.

To Mr. Blaine, from Gen. O.O. Howard :

Omaha, Neb., October 16, 1883.
I meant to have written you about some choice despatches you sent me
in 1861-2. I have preserved them and every letter you have written me.
I have taken the liberty of using two or three which concerned myself
and expressed your patriotic kindness. I trust you will have no objection
to this. I want to say, dear friend, that I have always felt a strong attach-
ment to you, and deep gratitude for your kindness to me and mine.

To Mr. Blaine :

Chicago, October 28, 1883.

. . . He had the assurance to ask me the disposition of your mind
towards the presidency, to which I answered that I could not possibly see
how that could be of interest to him who had already advertised to the
world his own convictions on that subject as regarded you personally.
" Oh," said he, "I assure you I am not interviewing you, and anything you
may choose to say I shall regard as confidential." Whereupon I told him
that I had never heard you speak of it, which on after reflection I was
pleased to find was the truth.

From Mr. Blaine :

Washington, April 21, 1884.

. . . What do you think ? Three or four country papers in Massachu-
setts are out for me, including the Salem " Post." They are pitching into
the Boston papers furiously. I am not in the least off my feet ; but you
had better hurry home and preserve the equilibrium in other members of

624 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

the household. I do not think I shall be nominated, but I am disturbing
the calculations of others at an astonishing rate.

But two things in Virginia are worth seeing, — Natural bridge and Hamp-
ton roads. See them quick, and be done with them.

From Mr. Blaine, to General Sherman :

(Confidential)
Strictly and absolutely so.

Washington, D.C., May 25, 1884.

My dear General : This letter requires no answer. After reading it
carefully file it away in your most secret drawer, or give it to the flames.

At the approaching convention in Chicago it is more than possible — it
is indeed not improbable — that you may be nominated for the presidency.
If so you must stand your hand, accept the responsibility, and assume the
duties of the place to which you will surely be chosen if a candidate.
You must not look upon it as the work of the politicians. If it comes to you,
it will come as the ground-swell of popular demand — and you can no
more refuse than you could have refused to obey an order when you were
a lieutenant in the army. If it comes to you at all it will come as a call of
patriotism. It would, in such an event, injure your great fame as much to
decline it as it would for you to seek it. Your historic record, full as it
is, would be rendered still more glorious by such an administration as you
would be able to give the country. Do not say a word in advance of the
convention, no matter who may ask you. You are with your friends, who
will jealously guard your honor.

Do not answer this.

St. Louis, May 28, 1884.
Hon. J. G. Blaine :

My dear Friend : I have received your letter of the 25th ; shall con-
strue it as absolutely confidential, not intimating even to any member of
my family that I have heard from you ; and though you may not expect
an answer, I hope you will not construe one as unwarranted. I have had
a great many letters from all points of the compass to a similar effect, one
or two of which I have answered frankly; but the great mass are un-
answered. I ought not to subject myself to the cheap ridicule of declining
what is not offered, but it is only fair to the many really able men who
rightfully aspire to the high honor of being President of the United States
to let them know that I am not and must not be construed as a rival. In
every man's life there occurs an epoch when he must choose his own career,
and when he may not throw the responsibility, or tamely place his destiny in
the hands of friends. Mine occurred in Louisiana when, in 1801, alone
in the midst of a people blinded by supposed wrongs, I resolved to stand by
the Union as long as a fragment of it survived to which to cling. Since
then, through faction, tempest, war, and peace, my career has been all my

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 625

family and friends could ask. We are now in a good home of our choice,
with reasonable provision for old age, surrounded by kind and admiring
friends, in a community where Catholicism is held in respect and venera-
tion, and where my children will naturally grow up in contact with an
industrious and frugal people. You have known and appreciated Mrs.
Sherman from childhood, have also known each and all the members of my
family, and can understand, without an explanation from me, how their
thoughts and feelings should and ought to influence my action ; but I will
not even throw off' on them the responsibility. I will not, in any event,
entertain or accept a nomination as a candidate for President by the Chicago
Republican convention, or any other convention, for reasons personal to
myself. I claim that the Civil war, in which I simply did a man's fair
share of work, so perfectly accomplished peace, that military men have an
absolute right to rest, and to demand that the men who have been schooled
in the arts and practice of peace shall now do their work equally well.
Any senator can step from his chair at the capitol into the White House,
and fulfil the office of President with more skill and success than a Grant,
Sherman, or Sheridan, who were soldiers by education and nature, who
filled well their office when the country was in danger, but were not
schooled in the practices by which civil communities are, and should be,
governed. I claim that our experience since 1865 demonstrates the truth
of this my proposition. Therefore I say that " patriotism " does not demand
of me what I construe as a sacrifice of judgment, of inclination, and of
self-interest. I have my personal affairs in a state of absolute safety and
comfort. I owe no man a cent, have no expensive habits or tastes, envy
no man his wealth or power, no complications or indirect liabilities, and
would account myself a fool, a madman, an ass, to embark anew, at sixty-
five years of age, in a career that may, at any moment, become tempest-
tossed by the perfidy, the defalcation, the dishonesty, or neglect of any one of
a hundred thousand subordinates utterly unknown to the President of the
United States, not to say the eternal worriment by a vast host of impecu-
nious friends and old military subordinates. Even as it is, I am tortured
by the charitable appeals of poor distressed pensioners, but as President,
these would be multiplied beyond human endurance. I remember well the
experience of Generals Jackson, Harrison, Taylor, Grant, Hayes, and Gar-
field, all elected because of their military services, and am warned, not
encouraged, by their sad experiences. No, — count me out. The civilians
of the U.S. should, and must, buffet with this thankless office, and leave us
old soldiers to enjoy the peace we fought for, and think we earned.

With profound respect,

Your friend,

W. T. Sherman.

To Walker, from V. :

Augusta, June 4, 1881.

. . . There is a great and new feeling; astir in Massachusetts. I
perceived it as soon as I set foot in the State. It manifested itself along

626 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

the route. At Salem quite a crowd had assembled. While I was waiting
at Ipswich, a telegram came from Newburyport saying that the people
were gathering there and begged Mr. Blaine to let them see him. When
we reached Newburyport the station was full, and a voice cried out,
" Come out here, Senator Blaine, and let us show you that you have friends
in Massachusetts." When he appeared there was an outburst of applause.
The Augusta people telegraphed up for permission to give a reception, but
I believe even M. considered that premature. There was a great throng
at the station. You need not be informed that the people here are a little
wild. Your Spartan mother is furbishing her drawing-rooms, however,
with unhurried step, and trying with varying success to keep your father
and M. from coming to blows. M. views his serenity with unconcealed
disgust, and evidently considers that if he would telegraph to Chicago that
his one object in life is the nomination, and that he proposes to slay every
man who opposes it, success would be certain. She is as frank as a
chicken in the exhibition of her wishes. You, I fear, are not sufficiently
rural to take in the full force of that simile. . . . All are well, and in
good spirits, except M., whose spirits depend entirely upon the telegraph
wire. Dear Walker, whatever happens, be the brave and worthy son of
your father, whose magnanimity is never more manifest than on these
great occasions. Never a man was brought to severer tests, and never a
man stood them more tranquilly. But let his family be to him a wall of
strength. He is great, above and beyond all the chances and caprices of
any convention. Heaven give you also strength to be strong, all alone as
you are.

To Mr. Blaine, from General Sherman :

St. Louis, June 7, 1884.
I am told that the proper thing to do is for rival candidates after the con-
test to shake hands, and for the defeated to congratulate the victor. I
will now admit that I was a candidate before the Chicago convention, but
am nevertheless willing to congratulate you on your brilliant success before
the august body, and I honestly wish you success at the election next
November. I also wish the same success to General Logan, who was an
ardent, brave, enthusiastic general under me in many of his most brilliant
achievements. For a time Logan was a bitter enemy of mine in Congress,
reducing my pay and making it impossible for me to live in Washington in
the Grant house presented to me, the taxes of which steadity rose from
$400 a year to $2,250, — a thousand dollars a year more than the rent I
afterwards paid for the house on 15th street. But Logan has spasms of
generosity as well as hatred, and I will be only too happy to aid his canvass
by being a full witness to his really good qualities. He was not with us on
the "march to the sea," but was in nearly all the other campaigns of the
Western armies, and as this " march to the sea" was recited in the con-
vention, and in a biography printed here, I would advise him to correct it
himself before it is tortured to his prejudice by a political enemy.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 627

I thank you cordially for securing the nomination at Chicago, because
spite of all I could do, certain injudicious friends were determined in case
of a " break" to use my name, and I was equally determined to decline it,
certain to give offence to the convention which construed itself the people
of the U.S., whose mandate was the voice of God. I could not regard it
in that light, and therefore I repeat, that your nomination without a
" break " probably saved me from making a mistake which would have
damaged my fame, as you say, as much as the disobedience of a lawful order
when I was a lieutenant in the army. All my family were made happy
last night by the good news, and I assure you that I wish you all honor and
success.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. W. W. Phelps :

Washington, June 9, 1884.

Back here in Massachusetts avenue, clean, in my right mind, but tired
and determined to do no thinking for two or three days, except this: To put
off much booming until we have our Democratic opponent ; to think
Lucian's praise of Caesar as, viz., Nil reputans actum, si quid manaret
agendum ; and so forgetting the past to press forward for the prize, etc.

. . . Reid and Elkins and I never for one moment admitted fatigue
or discouragement to each other. And Tom Piatt, like a little hero, in a
remote parlor upstairs, without any recognition or summons to caucus or
council, organized his forces, paid his own bills, and made victory possible.
He had neither recognition nor promise, but did, in the opinion of all on the
inside, much the most valuable work done ; and that was heroic, for he had
to learn from outside of what was clone by councils where all his enemies
and contemners were running the machine with all its power and galore.

. . . Tell that great lady that I did not spend two minutes away from
the work I went to do. . . . What an ovation I had! Everybody in
person, by letter, by telegram sought me to say, "They were always for
Blaine." Big tears came into good old S.'s eyes as I said, "Mr. S., I
should as soon have thought of my own defection from Mr. Blaine as
yours." And generally I had a delightful debauch of malice and love.
But Fm too tired to tell it all.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. John Roach :

New York, June 12, 1884.

. . . I have carefully watched and studied the policy of the so-called

Independents, and have come to the following conclusion as to its meaning :

It is simply a movement in the interest of free trade, and they attack the

man rather than the platform. By this means they hope to carry their

point. . . . And indeed this is the only weapon left them since their

blunders on the tariff' during this session of Congress.

Regarding your South American policy, — we were producing not only
a great surplus of breads, meat, cotton, oil, etc., but we were rapidly

628 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

producing a large surplus of manufactured articles of all kinds and needed
a foreign market. You were the only man, occupying a prominent position
before the public, who saw that in the near future, with our best resources
and the inventive genius of our people, we should need a market for our
surplus products. This market could not be found in European countries,
where they already produce more than they can sell. You saw it in South
America, and had you been permitted to carry out your plans you would
have succeeded. Yours was not a policy of blood or the destruction of life,
but it was one in the interest of the American farmer, manufacturer, and
mechanic. England, of course, saw this, realized her danger, and influ-
enced the press of New York to torture your jDolicy into a desire for war,
or as likely to result in that. I doubt, however, if any fair-minded man in
this country could see anything wrong in pursuing a policy that would
bring the representative men of South America to our city to discuss a
policy that would, no doubt, be mutually beneficial. England now sees in
the Chicago platform, and in you as its standard-bearer, the handwriting on
the wall, and will leave no stone unturned to defeat you. She sees that
with your election she is likely to lose her hold on the United States
market, and then with your South American policy carried out, the markets
of Brazil, Peru, Chili, River Platte, and others lost to her. Do you wonder
that she is interested ? This accounts largely for those attacks on your
private character and your public policy.

From Hon. H. M. Watts :

Philadelphia, June 23, 1884.

The news of the great event at Chicago has already run around the
globe with electric speed, and your noble husband is now the most con-
spicuous figure on earth. Mankind, at home and abroad, are measuring
his strength and studying his character with a view to their future rela-
tions. It is not, therefore, surprising that the nominee of the great and
heretofore triumphant party should reply to the committee announcing,
" I am impressed, also, I am oppressed, with the labor and responsibility
which attaches to my position."

You may not know why our extensive family in Pennsylvania feel an
especial interest. It carries back our memory to the beginning of this
most eventful century. My earliest impressions are of Middlesex, three
miles east of Carlisle, where the widow of Colonel Blaine resided. She
was the cousin of iny mother, and they stood in the same relation as
grandchildren of Joseph and Ursula Rose. Joseph Rose was an Irish
barrister, and emigrated from Dublin Bar to Lancaster, and was greatly
distinguished for his erudition as a classic scholar and lawyer. Benjamin
West, before his elevation as President of the Royal Academy in London,
was one of his proteges, and he painted several pictures of his daughters,
one of which, of my grandmother, I now possess; and one of Mrs. Postle-
thwaite, now in the possession of the family of the late Dr. Stephen Duncan,
of Natchez. The large brick house in Carlisle, in which my father lived

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 629

and died and in which thirteen children were born, was built by Colonel
Blaine. In the law office of this house were many students who made
their mark in life, . . . within my recollection, a group of such
gentlemen as Henry M. Campbell, Samuel Lyon, Ephraim Blaine, and
others. I have a distinct recollection of Ephraim Blaine, the father of
your distinguished husband. He was the inheritor of the Middlesex
estate and reputed to be rich, and was a dashing beau. He set the fashion
in our country town of driving horses tandem, and my elder brother
imitated him. There was another tie that, perhaps, bound the families.
Your husband's grandfather and ours were officers of the Revolutionary
army, and both Colonel Blaine and Gen. Henry Miller rendered important
military and civil services. I could write a volume of eulogy which
might greatly interest the numerous descendants of these remarkable
familes which to this day are held in grateful remembrance, but whose
glory is lost in the shadow of ages, and, we are happy to say, is now
wholly eclipsed by the rising sun.

To Mr. Blaine, from Emmons :

Cedar Rapids, July 1, 1884.
R. is very anxious you should issue your letter for publication so as to
hit the Saturday morning papers. Says that you will have a Sunday morn-
ing in the country that "alone will be worth the price of admission."
Methinks the point is well taken.

From Hon. W. M. Evarts :

Windsor, Vt., July 4, 1884.

. . . I was at the wedding of Judge Hoar's daughter on the 12th
of June, and was glad to find, as I expected, to be sure, that he was
" solid " for you, and shared my opinions of the great step now, at last,
taken in our politics by the nomination of a political leader as well as a
public man trained in the service of the State. To reach this I have
struggled against the corporate spirit of placemen, the disorganizing in-
lluence of chieftains, the weakness of " favorite sons," and the wretched
policy of impromptu statesmen. Perhaps your attention has been called
to two of the most remarkable political speeches that ever were made.
They are both in " Troilus and Cressida," scarcely the play in which such
eloquence and wisdom were to be looked for. They are both very appli-
cable to our politics. One marks the remediless disaster where the best is
not in the enterprise, and the other shows that the capacity of leadership
will not secure it, unless it be kept in the eyes of men. 1 wish our accom-
plished and consummate scholars would read and digest these speeches.
The papers say you occupy yourself in everything but campaign talk, and
you may find refreshing reading in Ulysses' speech to Agamemnon, Act L,
Scene III., and his other speech to Achilles, Act III., Scene III.

630 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

To Mr. Blaine, from A. H. Walker :

Hartford, July 17, 1884.

. . . Professor Stowe, though now eighty-three years old, and seldom
leaving his house, has already engaged me to take him to the polls next
November to cast one more vote for a Republican President. It will
doubtless be his last. I well remember the old man's ardor when I took
him in my carriage to vote for Garfield. I regret that such time-honored
men as Beecher and Curtis are not with us this year, but Harriet Beecher
Stowe has been far more influential and far more widely honored than both
in the grand history of the Republican party. She has no vote to give, and
her pen is now weary with labor and with age, but I know that her heart
and her prayers will attend the Republican campaign.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. Elliott F. Shephard:

Long Branch, July 21, 1884.
Your admirable letter accepting the nomination for the presidency is to
our Republican forces like the arrival of Sheridan on the field of Win-
chester. . . . The great solid blocks of fact which you present will
not fail to be considered by, nor to greatly influence, the American people.
. . . The Republican is the party of moral ideas. ... It substan-
tially represents the Christian sentiment of the country, and that senti-
ment is the backbone of the nation. The reflective classes understand
this, and want a leader who recognizes it.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. Daniel Dougherty :

Philadelphia, July 21, 1884.

. . . Let me say that while political opinions compel me to vote and
ardently work for the election of Mr. Cleveland, I do this at the sacrifice
of my personal feelings, because I entertain for you a sincere regard.

Citizens need make no apology for differing on the vital issues con-
nected with a presidential struggle, but the campaign should be conducted
with the courtesies of parliamentary debate ; and therefore be assured I
have no sympathy with those who personally attack one of whom as an
American we should all be proud. From my heart I wish you all the good
that can be wished, not wronging the cause I serve.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. A. S. Barnes :

Lake Windermere, Eng., July 23, 1884.
. . . I trust no influence will be so strong as to prevent you from
occupying that high position for which you are so eminently fitted. I was
glad to notice my old pastor, Richard S. Storrs, D.D., had so decidedly
expressed his views on 3rour nomination.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 631

From General Sherman :

St. Louis, October 13, 1884.

I understand there is a possibility of your visiting St. Louis. If so I beg
you to make use of our house, which is spacious, and you know how wel-
come you shall be. I could meet you at the depot, or after the whooping
and yelling, of which you must be tired, you could take refuge with us.

To G.:

Augusta, October 15, 1884.

. . . How do you suppose it seems to me to be called into the library
because Mr. Blaine wants to speak to me, and when I get there to hear
Tom say through the telephone, " Mr. Blaine will be in in a moment, but
Joseph Manley is here!1' Then Joe says, "Mr. Blaine is out speaking
and Walker is with him.,, After a little he came. Last night his second
question was, "Are the plumbers out of the house ? " To-night I asked
him, shall I give Miss A. a C ? Instantly came back, " Do you mean one
hundred?" Yes. "Certainly, with pleasure." — "His clay has been
fatiguing. West Virginia has gone solidly against us. What do the papers
say about Ohio ? " . . . Mr. Blaine is telegraphing this moment. You
must write him to-morrow at South Bend, Ind. He says he has made
thirty speeches and ridden two hundred miles to-day, and has been talking
with me an hour.

To Mr. Blaine, from Rev. Egbert C. Smyth :

Andover, November 3, 1884.
Allow me the pleasure of expressing the profound admiration with which
I have followed you in your journey since you left Augusta. The tact,
variety, and eloquence of your addresses are something wonderful. I
confidently anticipate your election, though not wholly ignorant of the
adverse forces. I anticipate, as well, that your administration will rebuke
your slanderers, and open the eyes of honest men who have been deceived.

To Mr. Blaine, from General Howard :

Omaha, Neb., November 4, 1884.
This is a day of double interest to me. It is Mrs. Howard's birthday,
and it is to be, I trust, the day of your election. Guy and I cannot vote,
but Jamie and Chancey have voted for you already before ten o'clock.
Chancey formed a club of young voters who in marching, talking, drilling,
visiting outside meetings, etc., have done loyal service in this region.
. . . John cannot vote for two years yet. He has done marching and
talking, however, to balance. ... I know that the results will be
manifest before you see these lines. I simply wish to say, whatever be the
issues of the conflict, may God bless and direct you ! Of course mud has
been thrown, but it has not even spotted your garments.

632 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

To Mr. Blaine, from Rev. Cyrus Hamlin :

Middlebury, Vt., November 17, 1884.

. . . I ought not, rjerhaps, for such a trifle to intrude upon your time,
but I will take this opportunity to express my profound grief and disap-
pointment at the results of the election.

The waves of defamation swept harmless by, but the madness and
folly of the Prohibitionists struck their own cause and their country's a fatal
blow. I feel now that in this State admiration accompanies sympathy, and
that in the esteem of all good men you have risen immeasurably above
your opponents and defamers. May Divine Providence still guide your
life to great and noble ends !

From Hon. George F. Hoar :

Worcester, November 20, 1884.

. . . I wish to put on record my sense of the great strength that the
Republican cause derived in the late campaign from its candidate. I do
not think you said a word that any supporter of yours could wish unsaid ;
and your speeches and letter of acceptance were a contribution to the cam-
paign worth all others put together. I thought beforehand, as you know,
that in the existing divisions of the Republican party another candidate
would have been stronger, especially for Massachusetts. But I am now
very strongly inclined to think I was wrong in that opinion, that we should
not have done so well in the country under anybody else.

At any rate, neither you nor those who supported you have anything to
repent of.

From Mr. John G. Whittier :

Danvers, November 28, 1884.

. . . I am awfully vexed by the result of the election. Our candi-
date made such a splendid canvass and would have been triumphantly
chosen over Democrats and Independents, but for the miserable John-
Johns.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. Edward F. Waite :

New York, January 28, 1885.
I have just learned, to my great gratification, that you are an honorary
member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity. It was long a tradition
of the Fraternity that such was the fact, but as the last catalogue, issued
in 1879, did not contain your name, I, in common with others, con-
cluded that the tradition was but a pleasant myth. I remember that we
used to sing, " There's Blaine and Banks and Burnside, Foote, Taylor,
and Burlingame," etc., and we didn't stop singing it that way Avhen we
began to doubt whether we could rightfully claim you ; we took the bene-
fit of the doubt. Mr. Porter says you were elected by the Bowdoin chap-
ter in 1856. It has recently been discovered that Nathaniel Hawthorne
was elected by the same chapter, and that his letter accepting the election

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 633

has long hung upon the wall of the Bowdoin chapter-house. So little
pains was taken by the chapter to make this fact generally known in the
Fraternity that it has but recently come to light, and his son, Mr. Julian
Hawthorne, who was a D K E at Harvard, was not aware of it. Probably the
doubt which has heretofore enshrouded your own election in the Fraternity
at large is due to the same cause. The Bowdoin chapter must be admon-
ished not to hide its candle under a bushel any longer.

From General Sherman :

. Tell Blaine that as a matter of course I have read his first
volume with greedy interest, and that I await still more for his second
volume, which must treat of the " Reconstruction, " wherein lies the germ
of his own failure to be President, the " Solid South,'1 and other kindred
evils, the end of which is not yet. Say to him that I believe in the course
of his studies for his first volume he changed his mind, his estimate of
men, Grant of the number. He used to say that Grant's great success as a
general was the result of accident, but before his judgment crystallized
and became " history," he saw that so many successes in war was a legiti-
mate result of qualities, and not of accident. I think the better of Blaine
for this honest change of opinion. Now, in his second volume his per-
sonal knowledge of the legislation and of the men who produced
it will be simply immortal, if he can be equally frank and illuminative.
His qualities are literary, not administrative. His oration on Gar-
field was worthy of a Pitt. But to be honest, I would not choose Blaine
to command a regiment or frigate in battle. Many an inferior man would
do this better than he. He was at his best as the Speaker of the House,
and his true arena is the Senate of the United States. However, he has
begun the political history of his time, and must finish that before he
begins something new. During the war the armies and navies sub-
dued the Rebellion, Congress aiding, and sometimes meddling. " Inter
arma silent leges " was a maxim before America was discovered.

Congress declared the war, and after should have supplied the means,
and remained silent, but on the theory that it still legislated under the Con-
stitution it undertook, like the French Assembly, "to run the war," till it
grew to such formidable proportions that they, Congress, became ignored.
Then the armies went on from victory to victory till 1865, when the
South, exhausted, humiliated, and defeated lay at the mercy of Congress.
The assassination of Mr. Lincoln and succession of Johnson were the
real cause of the subsequent mistakes, because then Congress assumed all
the dictatorial powers of the government, ignoring Constitution, President,
and the Supreme Court, all coequal in one complicated system. . . .
In 1865-6 the Republicans could have taken into their party four-fifths of
the young men who fought and were mad at Jeff" Davis, Toombs, etc.,
who had betrayed them into Rebellion. . . . But in the end all will
be right. Cleveland will have more than he can carry, must commit faults,
and the Republicans, if wise, may profit by them.

634 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

St. Louis, Mo., September 28, 1885.

Dear Blaine : 1 feel specially honored by the receipt of your kind
letter of the 25th inst., with the first seventeen pages of your second
volume, every word of which I have already read with thrilling interest
and wonderment that in the great mass of events you have been able to
keep a straight course towards the conclusion which we know.

My castle is well guarded against the Demons of the Press, and these
sheets shall see no human, eyes save those of my clerk, who is trustworthy,
and it may be for occasional paragraphs shown to R., whose loyalty to you
cannot be doubted. Each page as received shall be pasted in one of those
convenient letter stubs ready to receive them, and deposited with my
closely guarded "War Records.1'

Since Grant's death I have gone over my files, and find a large mass of
his personal letters and notes, which I will bind in like manner with others,
which will have historic value when men are ready to receive the truth.

. . . I feel a special interest in this your second volume, because I
have honestly doubted whether the Republican party were wise in their
reconstruction measures. I thought and believed in 1865 that this party
might have had for the mere asking the united support of the young Con-
federates, who realized they had been misled by their selfish leaders, but
who went off like a herd of buffaloes to the opposition because the Repub-
licans insisted on investing with political power the recently enfranchised
negro. But I assure you I will give absolute faith to your statement of
facts, causes, and results.

With respect and affection, your friend,

W. T. Sherman.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. Oliver Ames :

Boston, March 16, 1885.

I propose to invite Governor Robinson and his council, heads of depart-
ments, the Legislature, judge of the Supreme Court, and ex-governors of
Massachusetts, our senators and representatives in Congress, and other lead-
ing citizens of Massachusetts, to my house on Tuesday evening, April 11.

I now write to invite you to be present on that occasion as my guest. I
sincerely hope you will come, as I wish to have you meet the leading men of
Massachusetts — from every part of the State — so that they may know you
as I know you. It will do them good, and it will be a good thing for you.

From G. :

Washington, March 22, 1885.

Mr. Hale looked in a minute this morning. Said he went into the Inte-
rior this morning, a room not much larger than this, between thirty and forty
men in it, filling every available nook and corner in it. Mr. Lamar, writing
at his desk, looked up, — " Good God, Hale, I am glad to see you come
here;1' and then in an aside, "What do you think of this?11 They say

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 635

he is the picture of despair — among all those office-seekers, and he a
philosopher.

... To Madame de Struve's musical party invitations were in-
formal. When Mr. Blaine went in, he said to Madame de Struve, " I don't
know that I am invited.1' Said she, instantly, " You were born invited.'"

May 7. . . . There is to be a dinner here Saturday night, and Mr.
Lamar is bidden. His note to Mr. Blaine has just come, and it would cast
a damper over a funeral . He says he can't refuse the kindness that has
asked him, so he is coming ; otherwise he knows he is so broken in heart
and spirit that he thinks it is an imposition for him to come. Strange that
he should have been willing to give up his senatorship, which he might
have for life, for the bother of the Interior Department, which never brings
renown .

To M. :

Augusta, December 4, 1885.

. . . Your father is doing a prodigious work on his book. He read
us last night his chapter on the Fisheries, and then sat down and wrote to
Mrs. H. and Mrs. H., who had written to him.

From Mr. Blaine :

Augusta, December 3, 1885.

My dear Ladies : " Wot a incomprehensible letter." I am as much
bothered as was the younger Weller with all this " he-ing and Ling." Are
you starting out on a joint tour a la Robson and Crane, just to see how funny
you can be, and how easily you can surj)ass the epistolary effort in the twenty-
fourth chapter of Pickwick ? Who would have dreamed of such embarrass-
ment as you inflict ? I could say so many things to either of you alone, and
yet so few things to both of you together. I am in the condition of Josh
Billings' hero, who found it so hard to devote himself lovingly to two
women, and keep up a fair average. Mrs. H., for instance, has not the
slightest idea how profoundly 1 admire Mrs. H., nor would I for the
world let Mrs. H. know the things I have said of Mrs. H. Write me singly,
and, as we said when boys, give a fellow a chance for his white alley. If
each of you will write me, and swear in advance that neither will show the
answer she receives to the other, — then, why then, I will be profoundly
sure to distrust both of you. This is a sort of game that differs from poker :
one pair is better than threes ; and if you ask me how I will constitute the
pair, and get rid of the third, my simple and direct answer is, that I will
drop Mrs. H. and cling to Mrs. H.

With haste and hope.

From Mr. Blaine to Walker:

Augusta, December 6, 1885.

. . . Burt you must settle the point for yourself. Were I situated just
as you are, my mind would incline to Chicago. Wherever you go, I am
sure you have all the elements of success in you. You have ability and

636 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

learning. — I think you have steady application when it is demanded.
Wherever you may go, I am sure that you will acquit yourself well. My
deepest affection will follow you, and the profoundest interest of my life
will centre in you. I only want you to be equal to yourself, to concentrate
your energies and stimulate your ambition, and in the language of Dr.
Johnson, " not permit slight avocations to seduce your attention.11

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. F. D. Grant :

New York, March 6, 1886.
. . . I wish to thank you on my own account for the excellent pict-
ure of my father you have selected as a frontispiece. It is the one my
father selected himself as the picture he wished preserved of him as Presi-
dent. . . . He received the first volume of your " Twenty Years of
Congress,11 and directed me to acknowledge it. He was much pleased
with what you wrote in transmitting the book, and directed me to send
you a copy of his work.

To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. Patrick Ford :

New York, April 10, '86.

. . . The regard I have for you does not consist in shows of civility.
" I have that within me which passeth show.11 My loyalty to you as the
representative of principles and a policy that seem to me to be essential to
the healthy growth and dignity of the Republic is deep and fervid, rooted
in my convictions and sentiments. . . . You are not only my first
choice, but my only choice. Outside of you I have not speculated at all.
No other man in the Republican party, in fact no other possible candidate
in America in either of the parties, has the hold on the Irish vote that you
have, and if the Republican party fail to nominate you in '88, it will in my
judgment have committed the greatest mistake in its history.

I hope and pray that the Republicans will do the right thing at that
time. And for this reason among others: I want to see the "Irish vote"
broken up. I want to see American citizens of the Irish race free — and
they now, thank God, are free — to vote as they individually see fit. This
has been one of the chief aims of my life. I don't believe in race elements
or religious creeds resolving themselves into a " solid vote." I believe it
is bad for the country and bad for the element itself. The first links in
the chain that has held the Irish in bondage to the Democratic party are
now broken — they were struck off in 1884 — and your nomination in 1888
will complete their emancipation. . . . The labor element, by recog-
nizing its just claims and without any demagogic appeals, can, I believe, be
secured to us in 1888. ... I am thinking of taking a run over to Ire-
land in a few weeks, and if I can arrange to go by way of Augusta I shall
do so. In May next it will have been forty years since my father took me,
with the family, from Galway town. I was then a child, a trifle over eight,
and I have not seen the Green Isle since.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE, 637

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. W. D. Washburne :

May 2, 1886.
Several clays ago a snug little package came by express addressed to
Mrs. Washburne, but in my care, and with the curiosity of a man I opened
the package, which proved to be the two handsome volumes of your
" Twenty Years in Congress,1' presented to her with your compliments and
with a very pleasant allusion to the friendship that has existed between
ourselves for a period of more than thirty years. ... As for my-
self, you can rest assured that my friendship for you has never wavered
since I first came to know you in Augusta in 1854, when a green stripling I
left old Bowdoin. I trust this friendship of so long standing may continue
to the end.

From Neal Dow :

Portland, Me., June 5, 1886.

The Boston papers say that I was absent from the City Hall meeting
because I would not be on the same platform with you. I hope it is not
necessary to assure you that there is not a shadow of truth in that. I have
in no way changed my personal relations toward you since I gave my vote
for you most cordially in 1884, believing, as I did, that with you in the
White House the Republican party would recover the confidence and re-
spect of the country which it had most gloriously won. It seems to me now
that the Democratic party is doing its best to ensure for 1888 what barely
failed in 1884.

From Mr. Blaine :

Bar Harbor, June, 1886.

Not one day since my last have I even been off this hill. Here we are, H.,
M., and T. — and myself with carpenters, painters, blacksmiths, plumbers,
cabinet-makers, paper-hangers, seamstresses (strong spell), and I know not
what with us ; we have firm possession of the third floor, and disputing the
second, while chaos and mechanics have absolute sway on the first. But
we fight our way along. I have to be everywhere at once, and have done
more actual physical labor for the past ten days than you ever did in the
whole of your life. . . . Walker leaves this week for Chicago — to be
launched at last on the sea of life.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. J. B. Foraker :

Executive Department, Office of the Governor,

Columbus, September 17, 1886.

Only yesterday I wrote you urging you to accept the invitation of the

Republicans of Chattanooga to address them some time next month, and

now I am in receipt of a letter from the President of the Young Men's

Blaine Club of Cincinnati, insisting that I shall write you urging you to

638 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

accept the invitation, which he informs me they have sent you, to attend
the opening of their new headquarters on the evening of the 30th inst.

This club numbers something like four hundred or five hundred mem-
bers. They are the most active of all the working members of our
party in Hamilton county. You never made a prettier or more credita-
ble little speech than the one you made to them at the Burnet House.
They organized the same evening after you were nominated, as a tempo-
rary club for the purposes of that campaign, and organized as a perma-
nent club the day after you were defeated. . . . Not only will they
but all the other clubs and Republicans of Cincinnati and southern Ohio
greet you and make your stay a pleasant ovation. Accept if you can.

From Mr. Blaine :

Boston, October, 1886.

I had the felicity of NVs company, who dwelt at great length on the great-
ness and grandeur of my character. He intimated that compared with me
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were " small potatoes " — all of which in a car,
and in a loud voice, with many people listening, may be called pleasant
entertainment.

I had a charming visit, everything delightful.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. Geo. H. Pendleton :

American Legation,

Berlin, November 8, 1886.
. . . I am pleased to see you have had such a gratifying tour through
Pennsylvania, for though we have not always been able to agree in politi-
cal opinion and actions, there has never been a time since we met in Con-
gress when I could not offer you the most friendly congratulations on the
manifestation of good-will and appreciation on the part of our countrymen
towards yourself.

From V. :

Augusta, December, '86.

. . . Dr. Webb met Mr. Blaine at the station. He had a little touch
of gout before he left home. He thinks, however, that he did not show it
or walk lame so that any oflie suspected him — though he says when he
came out, it was like walking on your eye-balls. Nor did he sutler much
trouble that night, but the next morning the foot was so swollen and pain-
ful that he could not touch it to the floor. I don't know how he got to the
station, but I think he was carried in a chair to and from the carriage. Dr.
Webb went with him. He telegraphed to Dr. Gordon, of Portland, who met
him at Portland station with hot-water bags and morphine pills, and Mr.
Manley went to Portland to meet him, and the morphine put him to sleep at
once, nor has he got over it yet, but has slept much of the time since. Two
policemen brought him from the carriage here up to his room. . . .

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 639

He is much pleased with his reception. . . . Dr. Webb's introduction
of him was a bit of inspiration — quite spontaneous, Mr. Blaine says. Dr.
Webb asked him how he should introduce him, and Mr. Blaine said, only as
your friend and parishioner, nothing more ; and Dr. Webb took the cue
well. Rev. Heman Lincoln's speech was good, except the little snap at the
end, which Dr. Webb says was in express violation of contract. He
told Mr. Lincoln he was afraid he would get loose, and Lincoln promised
he wouldn't. I don't suppose he thinks he did. Mr. Blaine was greatly
pleased with President Robinson, of Brown. Dr. McKenzie was effusive.
Pity he could not have effused a little a year or two earlier, and led the
ministers instead of following them. When Mr. Manley wanted him to
turn the tide of detraction a little, I remember his reply, that it was so long
since he had known Mr. Blaine, that, etc., — and he did not do it. It is just
as long now, and will never be any shorter. Did Mr. Blaine seem in good
heart? He was pretty low down for two or three clays before he went.
We refused to admit for one moment the possibility of his not going, so
did Mr. Manley, and I don't think even with all his gout he is sorry he
went.

From Dr. Webb :

Boston, December 25, 1886.

Dear Mrs. Blaine : I wish thee and thy " gude mon " a merry Christ-
mas. Is he sorry that he came to Boston ? I am glad as a girl when her
love has been requited. And the club was glad. When they saw a man
(and Blaine is more of a stranger in Boston than anywhere else in the
country) delicate and gentle in appearance, with nothing about him that
seemed to say, " I will exalt my throne above the stars; I will sit also
upon the mount of the congregation ; " a man without a sword on his thigh,
or a concealed dagger in his bosom ; a man that one can honor and trust
and love, — rise right up before them in modesty, grace, and good-
ness, they just broke loose; men swung their hats, and women — God
bless them ! — fluttered their handkerchiefs and half cried with emotions of
gladness.

And now that the enemy has picked the meeting and the speeches all over,
he finds a chance to hatchel Brother Lincoln a little — and that is all.
I answered Brother L.'s letter a day or two since, and told him not to
sleep less, nor write less, nor minimize his hope of heaven because of any-
thing that the critics could say against him. Good man, he had rather
cut off his hand than wound Mr. Blaine. Do you see — if such ubiquity
and power were imputed to an angel in heaven, he would be a marked

character — that the said next morning that Mr. Blaine is going to

Europe next autumn : first, to visit Ireland and stir up the Irish for the
sake of the effect in this country on his candidacy for the presidency ; and
then, second, to visit Germany to stir up the Germans so as to get their
vote, and so, of course, make a dead sure thing of it ?

Compass the world for an office ! To tell them that the man would not

640 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

lift his hand for it, to tell them that he never drew his pen, nor uttered a
wish for the last nomination, is to be thought daft.

I have many congratulations on the success of the evening. I sincerely
hope that Mr. Blaine's coming did not cause his attack, and that before
this he is all right again. Will you tell him for me, that notwithstanding
his captivating address, and urgency of unwritten sermons, the best thing
he ever did was the written eulogy of Garfield ? So !

From G. :

Augusta, January 1, 1887.
. . . Mr. Blaine went to the station with M., and " Toby Candor "
fell foul of him and said he had been instructed to see Mr. Blaine him-
self and find out if the reports at Washington, that he was critically ill,
etc., were true. He said he should report that he had seen Mr. Blaine in
an open sleigh a mile from home at midnight, with the thermometer three
below zero ! which he thought would be answer enough.

To Mr. Blaine, from Walker :

Chicago, February 3, 1887.

I have just received your letter, written on your birthday, and have
deposited the enclosure in the bank. ... I can really look back in
many ways upon the outcome of the election in '84 with pleasure, for
I feel that with the responsibilities of the presidency, added to the necessity
of finishing your book, the work would have been too great. As it was,
the book took more than a year of hard work in the quiet of the country
and of Washington, and will prove as valuable a memorial of your fame
as a successful administration. But for the future I have great hopes and
great ambitions, centred not upon the presidency, but upon your going
back into public life. It seems to be an era of indifference and incom-
petency just now, and I am sure better things must come in the future.

Far more than anything else was I touched by your letter. I have
never been able to imagine any home as jDleasant as the one into which I
was born, and perhaps having lived in it for several years past has made
my present life rather more lonely than it otherwise would be. I am glad
you think of having a home once more in Washington. With greatest
love and pride in the best of fathers.

From V. :

F. wanted to be night watchman at the State House, and got recom-
mendations from Mr. Blaine, all the congressional delegation, and most
of the chief citizens of Augusta, Republican and Democrats. " What the
devil do you apply for watchman for with these names? I should think
you would run for Governor," said the head one of the State House, when
F. presented his paper. On the strength of it, his wife borrowed ten dollars

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 641

of Mrs. Blaine, and F. appeared in a tall silk hat, better than I ever saw
Mr. Blaine wear. Mr. Manley said that after Mr. Blaine gave F. his
letter stating his good points, it was hard to make F. do another thing.
He thought that was enough.

To G. :

Augusta, June 5, 1887.

. . . Blainey ran away yesterday noon just as his dear grandpa was
about sitting down to his last dinner. I galloped, T. galloped, we galloped
all three, and the dear little culprit was found hunting his home in the
Sturgis' yard. " I didn't run away, grandpa ; I didn't go near the track."

Ems, German Lloyd Line, June 14, 1887.
We got off Monday afternoon at three, and as the train swung along
below the Governor's grave, there sitting on the green bank, waving to
us, were Blainey and Jose, and the four girls, — and then and there my
heart broke. That little figure in the Hitt hat, with its red streamers,
waving to his grandma, I shall never see again. Q., and Emmons, and
Walker, and R. came down to the steamship, and saw us pulled out into
the stream, without any attempt at cheerfulness. . . . Mr. Blaine, who
began with a perturbed stomach, a disbelief in his companions in misery,
two overcoats, his old Pennsylvania gloves, and a yellow silk handkerchief
round his neck, a steamer chair, and all the rugs he could persuade his
womankind they did not need, being generally swaddled, and swathed,
and feet put to rest by kindly strangers, is now perambulating the deck
in one summer overcoat, kid gloves stitched with black, and a freedom of
step, which is commonly supposed to belong to the heather, as alert, and
bright-eyed, and gentle as he appeared to Dr. Webb at the Orthodox club
dinner. ... I so approved your Andover article, I brought it along
for Mr. Blaine, and in reading it that first day out, he forgot to remember
his woes and all his home joys. . . .

To Walker:

, London, June 30, 1887.

I am waiting for your father to dress him for Lord Rosebery's dinner.
. . . Yesterday your parents and M. were graciously pleased to be
present at the Queen's garden-party. . . . The beef-eaters told us how
to go through the palace, and after we found ourselves on the terrace —
this was all there was of it — like Niagara. The gardens are pretty as a
dream, and there were thousands of ladies, gayly and beautifully dressed,
and gentlemen by the hundred, in every shade of ugliness. ... It
was not an impressive sight to see all the ladies falling backwards before
this little and old woman, like waves dying on the seashore. That they
should be willing to do it, I found it hard to understand, for the courtesying
amounted to obeisance. Some of the dress was very handsome, and the
jewels; but the tone of the whole thing was gloomy, frigid, and totally
unimaginative. Nothing here has surprised me more than the gloomy

642 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

character of English enjoyment as compared with the gayety of home.
. . . Your father is reading the papers, and breakfasting in our own
sitting-room. . . . After the Rosebery dinner he went last night to a
great art reception.

From Mr. Blaine :

Metropole, June 30, 1887.

It is always the poorest of excuses to say you are so busy you cannot
write, but I have been overwhelmed since I reached London. Invita-
tions have come from all hands like snow-flakes, and I have been up to the
eyes in hospitalities and social engagements. I cannot go into details, but
a few things strike me, — first, that as a rule, the houses, such for instance

as the Duke of and Earl of , are not so large, nor nearly so

elegant, as many houses in Washington, and are immeasurably behind the
great houses of New York.

We were all at the Queen's garden-party at Buckingham Palace yester-
day. It was very fine ; and all England of royalty, nobility, and fashion
were there.

Queen Kapiolani — looks just like old Caroline, the cook — walked with
royalt}T, and gave a shade of color to the procession.

The nobility, civil as they are, . . . fear, hate, dread the influence
of the Republic on their own jDosition and jn'ivileges. I can see that feeling
daily.

I look back homeward with a feeling and longing near akin to home-
sickness, and with a recollection of events that seem too delightful in ret-
rospect ever to have been real. Do you know enough of my feeling to
understand it ? If not, come abroad and see how quickly you will com-
prehend it.

To Walker :

Kilgraston, July 15, 1887.

. . . We came to it Monday, not knowing whither Andrew was
leading us, so stupidly ignorant, in fact, of all the delights, of this House
Beautiful, that your father was almost ready to say he would not come un-
less the Hales did, and I, I confess, as bad, with a difference. And here we
are enjoying, as only pilgrims and sojourners at hotels can enjoy, this oasis
of home life, and day and night I bless the Providence which has set the
solitary in families and moved him to hospitality. Yesterday we returned
from an excursion of two days to Dunfermline. Colonel and Mrs. Hay
are coming to-day to stop over Sunday, a splendid addition to the company.
Your father is getting so much benefit from the open air, in which he
spends his entire day — and think how long the days are in this latitude:
it was half-past eight when we reached home last night, and the sun was
just setting, and we were dining at half-past nine by its waning light
alone, and your father could read the label on the champagne bottle with-
out glasses: that he has discarded woollen socks and gaiters and one
overcoat, and is getting really a color. Also he has danced the hay-

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 643

makers — which is our Virginia reel— on the lawn, and has played skittles.
We breakfast every morning at nine, and as Mr. Carnegie would not sit
down to the table without him, he gets up in good season — a great advan-
tage over that long lying in bed which at home he so much indulges in.

To G.:

Kilgraston, July 18, 1887.
It was on the queen's highway and this morning that Mr. Blaine and I
stopped the mail carrier, and it might have been Henry Hall himself who
unstrapped the pouch, so much as a matter of course did he seem to take
it that Mr. Blaine's peremptory " halt" should be obeyed. . . . Where
were we going ? Nowhere ; that is, I was not, but my other ego was
bound for Kinghorn to do honor to Mr. Carnegie, whom all Scotland is
just now delighting to honor. Mr. and Mrs. Carnegie had gone off on the
coach to Kinghorn, — about thirty-five miles, — but Mr. Blaine against this
long drive had protested so vigorously that he was allowed to go by train,
though he had to give his word to coach back to-morrow. . . . Our
most generous and hospitable host is very peremptory. . . . Mr. and
Mrs. Hale went away yesterday after a week's visit, and Colonel and
Mrs. Hay went this morning, and yesterday the C. P's (five) came.
Mrs. Carnegie poured coffee this morning for sixteen. Scotland is a
beautiful country, and I have enjoyed this oasis of home life in the midst
of hotel life. . . . This beautiful Scotch day, which began in cold and
drizzling clouds, is now, at eleven o'clock, beaming upon us with sunshine
and cool breezes. Our hostess, Mrs. P., Lady C, T., and young P. have
gone into Perth — for what? to buy a piano. So our autocrat of the
breakfast, dinner, and lunch table has decreed. Young P. is a musical
genius, and this old " grand," belonging to the effete nobility, whose
purse is light, suddenly found itself condemned last night, after yielding
up strains of sweetest harmony, I must say, to silence, and it was or-
dered that its successor should be installed in office before the evening; of
another day. Hence Perth, which is four miles off. . . . For instance,
this morning at breakfast the talk had run into the expediency of build-
ing up the navy, when Mr. Blaine was delivered of one of the most inter-
esting and masterly statements of what it was in his mind to secure
through the Garfield administration that I have ever heard even from his
lips. They all came back from Kinghorn in season for a half-past seven
dinner Wednesday, the Carnegies having slept in a room at the castle
once occupied by Mary Stuart, and Mr. Blaine in Cromwell's room. All
the Blaines in Scotland were named by name at the banquet, and for the
first time in that bailiwick women sat down to a public dinner. The P's
have gone over incontinently to the Blaine banner, if that banner shall
ever float again. . . . We think now we may leave for the Trossachs
Monday, coming back here for our luggage. I hate to go out into a cold
world again, but we have not really crossed the water to spend our sum-
mer with Americans. I sometimes ask myself why we came abroad.

644 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Certainly I am not half as happy as I should be at Bar Harbor with
Blainey, and all the others whom I hold dear; but I shall have attained,
when I return, to something, without which I have always thought myself
to have fallen short.

From Mr. Blaine :

London, August 15, '87.

The people of Ireland seemed to me to be a discouraged or even heart-
broken race. I could not, if called upon, fortify this conclusion by facts
and illustrations, but the impression, which is about all a traveller gets,
was all that way. Their cause is, however, progressing in England, not
exactly for the kind of "home rule" which Gladstone enclosed in last
year's bill, but still a substantial and valuable measure of local self-govern-
ment, and which will still leave Ireland represented in the Imperial
Parliament. In America, you know, we never considered any other form
of " home rule" either practicable or desirable. They wished to give me a
great banquet in Dublin, but I felt that to accept would simply be eating
and drinking the substance of the poor. . . . One must come to
Europe to see how much we have at home. I have lost sight of politics.

To Walker :

Brown's Hotel, London.
. . We had too good a time at the Carnegies to enjoy anything
which followed, and when the following was poor Ireland, it was a far
from pleasing week, — saving always our visit to Cork and the Coppinger
family, which was very satisfactory to us, and I hope to them. . . .
This hotel seems much more satisfactory than the Metropole ; but, alas ! we
must quit our haven of rest Monday to go and bathe in Germany. Three
days in London, though, make one sooty enough to render any course of
baths beneficial.

From Mr. Blaine :

Homburg, August 24, '87.

Trevelyan turned back when he saw that Liberal Unionism was Toryism
in disguise, and especially when he saw that Mr. Gladstone was willing to
modify his bill of last year on the points where he had made objections, —
Irish representation in Imperial Parliament and the abandonment of the
scheme of buying out the landlords at the expense, or even possible expense,
of the British taxpayer. Trevelyan felt — so a friend of his told me —
that he would be selling his birthright — as the nephew of his uncle — to
separate from the Liberal party ; and so he is back in triumph and the
beating of drums. There may be an Irish bull in inheriting a birthright
from an uncle, but you know my meaning. This place is gay and inter-
esting, and a splendid health resort. I am so busy getting well and
stronjr that I have no time for trifles.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 645

To Walker :

Homburg, September 1, 1887.

. We are all well, though rather lost, almost every one we know
having completed or cut the cure. The Fricks went yesterday and the
Hales this morning and the Depews this afternoon. Mr. Blaine has been
playing a cold and rheumatism anywhere, preparatory, I think, to the morti-
fying announcement that he was satisfied with a half cure. . . . We
breakfast in our sitting-room, waited on by a German maid, who, when I
complain of the rolls not being fresh, feels them all over with her fingers,
to assure me that they are soft. . . .

September 23. . . . He found the F's, with whom he boarded twenty
years ago, going on at the same old stand and delighted to see him, only it
was the son and daughter instead of the father and mother. They were as
fully posted about him as you and I, and his doctor is the doctor of twenty
years ago.

To Mr. Blaine, from Colonel Hay :

Washington, December 8.

I must thank you for my share of the enjoyment of your counterblast
published in the Tribune to-day. We were all lost in disgust at the
. . . message, and not knowing just what to do with it, when, as we
might have expected, but did not, came from over the sea the clear blast
of the trumpet, declaring battle and bringing the fighting men into well-
ordered ranks. You have given us our platform for next year.

Enjoy yourself and come back to us with your neck clothed in thunder.
We need all the celestial help there is going next year. I can't help
thinking of that awful German line, " Against stupidity the very gods war
un victorious.1' But we must not give up in advance.

From Mr. Blaine, to Hon. J. H. Manley :

Sorrento, Italy, April, 1888.

I beg you will not fail to continue your letters and make them more fre-
quent. They are a great resource to me, away off, fifteen hundred miles from
home. As I write this, Mrs. Blaine is sitting on a balcony from one of our
windows that looks over a precipice three hundred feet high, with the Bay
of Naples below, the city fourteen miles across the bay, directly opposite ;
Vesuvius on the right, with a great volume of smoke issuing from the
crater; the island of Capri and earthquake-shaken Ischia on the left; Pom-
peii distinctly visible with a glass she holds in her hand, and with another
sweep of the glass she can distinctly see the island to which Brutus fled after
the murder of Caesar, and where Cicero visited him in his exile. A little be-
yond, in plainer view with a glass than the State House is from your home,
overlies the city of Puteoli, where St. Paul landed and preached a week on

646 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

his way to Rome. He left his ship there and went overland. I have taken the
glass, and I can easily see the pier where St. Paul put his foot. See the
last chapter of Acts of the Apostles. I have visited all these places again
and again, having been in the neighborhood nearly a month ; and while I
take great pleasure with these associations, I would not give one good look
at Bar Harbor for the whole of it.

Indianapolis, Ind., June 30, 1888.

My dear Mr. Blaine : Your cablegram was so prompt, so generous,
and so stirring that I could not refrain from giving it to the press, which I
did not doubt would be in the line of your wishes. My first thought was
to send you by cable my grateful acknowledgments, but on reflection I
concluded to use the mails, as offering me a medium for a fuller and more
confidential expression of my feelings.

From your most intimate and trusted friends I had the assurance that in
a possible contingency you and they might regard my nomination with
favor. It was only such assurances that made my Indiana friends hope-
ful of success, and only the help of your friends made success possi-
ble. It will give me pleasure always to show my high appreciation of the
efficient and conclusive support your very close friends gave to me in the
convention.

I am now looking forward with great interest to the time when you shall
return and give to the campaign the impetus that only your voice can give
to it. If it suits your plans I would like to have an early visit from you,
and Mrs. Harrison requests that you will bring Mrs. Blaine with you.
You will, of course, know that this implies that during your stay we shall
expect to have a great meeting and a speech from you. Our State conven-
tion meets August 8. I write in haste and amid constant interrujDtions.
Please convey to Mr. Carnegie my thanks for his congratulatory message,
and to your family my very kind regards.

Gratefully and very sincerely yours,

Benj. Harrison.

{Personal.)

Indianapolis, June 30, 1888.
Walker Blaine, Esq., Chicago, III. :

My dear Sir : I want first to thank you for your very kind letter of
congratulation, and for your assurance that my nomination would be very
agreeable to your father. He has personally given me so many evidences
of his confidence that I did not for a moment doubt that he would now
give me his indispensable support in this campaign. His cordial and very
hopeful telegram was a most auspicious beginning, and gave me a hospi-
table reception from his friends. I would have cabled my thanks to him,
but in the hurry here I could not get his address. And, besides, I pre-
ferred a method of communication that would enable me to speak more
fully and more confidentially. Will you be good enough to seal and

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 647

address to him the enclosed letter. I have also enclosed a letter to Mr.
Carnegie, which I will also ask you to address and forward.
I shall be very glad to see you at my house at any time.

Very sincerely yours,

Benj. Harrison.

P.S. — Since writing the above, Mr. Elkins has arrived at my house,
and I have been able to send the letter to your father direct.

To Walker:

Cluny Castle, July 10, 1888.

. . . Your father is perfectly well, in the best of spirits. Think of
it : to-day he has driven in a soaking rain, in an open carriage, sixteen
miles, and I have now just left him after his lunch, — roast lamb, cabbage,
stewed rhubarb and cream, whiskey and water (the great English table-
drink now) , and crackers and cheese, — reading aloud. Tell Emmons 1 will
be sure to have him well-dressed when he visits New York. The conven-
tion made no ruffle, and has left none on the bosom of his content. Not
for worlds would he have the campaign on his hands.

From Mr. Blaine, to Colonel Hay :

Cluny Castle, Kingussie, N.B., July 17, 1888.
. . . " Vidi mullos homines et tenas " since I left home in June of last
year, but I am about to return doubly content with America, and willing
to give bond, if need be, that I shall give stintingly of whatever time I
have in the future to the effete monarchies. I find that every year makes
my own fireside more attractive. The common experience to this effect
still leaves it a novelty to each man as it comes upon him with unexpected
force. ... I have been deeply entertained with each successive chap-
ter of your history. But, heavens ! how you are (in the cause of truth)
uncovering some cruel facts. . . . Facts are fearful things, especially
if they suddenly rise from the grave, where you had vainly imagined them
to be buried beyond hope of resurrection. ... I am anxious to reach
home to see how the political currents are drifting. Newspapers give
little information, when you are beyond touch with the inside and real
movements. It has seemed to me that Harrison has many elements, beside
the one of geography, for a good canvas. It seems truly awful to contem-
plate the possibility of the Democrats securing another lease. I am long-
ing for one good talk with an American who knows something. You are
one of that kind, but as a man grows older, the number grows less.

From Colonel Hay :

August 3, 1888.

. . . I wish it were possible for me to be in New York next week,
and mix my feeble fife with that vast roar of welcome that awaits him.
I fancy he will himself be appalled at the fury of affection and regard

648 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

with which he will be welcomed home. The country has had a year to
think it over, and it concludes that it likes him, and is glad to get him
back.

To Mr. Blaine, from General Harrison :

Indianapolis, Aug. 5, 1888.

I have by the kindness of your son had the opportunity to send you
some oral messages, but I cannot omit to add in writing my cordial greet-
ings to those of the multitude that will have the pleasure denied to me of
meeting you when you land. I feel sure that no circumstance that could
emphasize the affectionate good will of the Republicans of the whole country
will be omitted, and you will not doubt that I feel very much gratified that
it should be so. We would have sent a delegation from Indiana, but our
State convention assembled on the first, and those who would otherwise
have gone were needed here.

Emmons will tell you of the plans I have formed for you, and if they
meet your approval, I will have the pleasure before long of seeing you
again at my home.

From Mr. John G. Whittier :

Centre Harbor, N.H., August 14, 1888.

. I was much disappointed by Mr. Blaine's letter of declination,
but when I see the great heart of the nation warmed and stirred to meet
him, I think he, at least, has lost nothing by his choice of a private station.
This grand ovation is worth more than a dozen presidencies. What you
have seen is only a ripple of the great wave of popular sympathy and
love.

New York, October 1, 1888.

The meeting is said to have numbered forty thousand by competent
judges. Father was greeted with cheer after cheer by the largest audience
he has ever faced. It was a great sight. He went this morning to Tea-
neck with Mr. Phelps and stays overnight. I am glad to have him go,
as it rests him.

New York, November 1, 1888.

. . . Jacky and your father have just started for Connecticut. . . .
After my long, and lonesome, and most uncomfortable ride from Boston,
for every chair in the car was taken, and I was oppressed almost to vertigo
by the air of the car, it was indeed reviving to see Colonel Coppinger,s white
moustache, which I was expecting, and to hear Walker's cheery greeting —
a surprise. Your father looked extremely well and young, and his face
was like that of one of the shining ones.

-£.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 649

New York, November 2, 1888.

. . . Your father and Walker left the hotel at nine in the morning,
so I had a long day before me. . . . Alice took me by the elevated to
Mrs. Sherman's door, where she left me to seek a mass. Mrs. S. has
changed. She has the look which long and endured suffering gives. Still
she kept me ; and when Alice came back, her religious aspirations unsat-
isfied, she made us stay to lunch. E. was there, and Mrs. E., L., and R.,
M's oldest boy, — a great family, you see, and a most delightful one, and the
meal so good. Their dining-room overflows with hospitality. I made
such an appeal to the general and Mrs. Sherman, that R. is going home
with me on a very brief visit. It was very interesting, and no less touching,
to see the abandon of E. to entertain and amuse her mother. After luncheon
I had gone down into the office to see the general — you know he never has
lunch. Word came down that a Mrs. Salisbury, an old Methodist lady,
had called, and that Mrs. Sherman wished the general and Mrs. Blaine
would see her, as it would gratify the poor body. Up went the general, and
I followed. He was very much disgusted as Mrs. Salisbury insisted on
telling her church troubles, which all hinged on the innovation of an organ
into the meeting-house. The general snorted and gave audible vent to his
impatience, which Mrs. Sherman hushed up, and Mrs. Salisbury kept on to
the end of her tale, when the general ran impolitely out of the room. Mrs.
Salisbury was E., and he had never discovered it. Then R. and E. danced
to a little singsong which was very pretty, and afterwards R. played on the
banjo, and she and E. sang old negro melodies, particularly those of old
Shady. The sick mother, the distinction of the family, the motive of the
entertainment, the tenderness and the talent of the two girls, both so young
and pretty, and yet one the mother of four children, made a great impres-
sion on me. . . . The campaigners come back to-night. ... I
wish T. could have seen her father at Hartford. Poor, dear father, if he
only gets home whole, and can be got into trousers unbagged at the knees,
and will feel that he is warm in a cutaway coat, he will look ten years
younger. There is no trouble save in his feelings. " He's all right," but he
loves the confessional and the lay sister (me), why, I do not know, as I
always shrive him out of hand.

November 3. . . . Father stands here overlooking and hurrying
the fireman building the fire, for we have been driving in Central
Park, and now have dinner before us, and your father, alas ! a speech in
Brooklyn. He threatens to go to bed, but he will not. Walker has gone
to Poughkeepsie, where I hope he may cover himself all over with glory.
. . . You would not be very proud of the beloved's clothes, but the
real man is all right. He would not go on to the stand this afternoon, as he
is not a candidate, and thought that place better filled by Morton and
Miller. . . .

November 4. . . . Mr. Blaine made three speeches last night at
Brooklyn, and has come out of the long campaign with more vigor, I think,
than he carried into it.

650 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Augusta, Maine.
Joseph Manley and Mr. Blaine and Walker are under the apple-
trees looking at the sunset, and weighing the campaign in the balance.
Apparently our hero is none the worse and much the better for its wear
and tear. Alice is telling stories in true maternal fashion to Conor in the
sitting-room, while in the distance Blainey, returning from the cemetery
with Aunt Ellen, sends out a cheerful holloa to the philosophers in the
garden.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 651

XVIII.

AGAIN SECRETARY OF STATE, 1889.

TPON the election of Mr. Harrison, as on that of Mr. Gar-
^ field, Mr. Blaine was nominated as Secretary of State by
the Republican party. His appointment seemed to the people a
logical result of the election. His clear call from Paris, rousing
the Republican party to hope and action, his insistent self-renun-
ciation, his prompt entrance into the field immediately upon his
arrival from Europe when the political canvass had been sluggish
and was almost motionless, and his cheerful and ardent advocacy
till it was closed with victory, seemed to demand this appoint-
ment. His designation of Mr. Harrison as the candidate, ex-
pressed more than a year before the meeting of the convention,
and later at the crucial moment, gave a personal phase to the
general desire, while his own wish to carry forward, as Secretary
of State, the great work which had been wantonly arrested was
well known. Opposition to him had not died out, but it had
greatly weakened. Hardly stronger arguments against his ap-
pointment were brought than that he would " seek to dictate,"
and this was offset by Garfield's remembered testimony that
" Blaine gave him less trouble than any other member of his
Cabinet." This appointment was not made so quickly as that
made by Garfield, and there was anxiety and much energetic
correspondence, but on the 17th of January, 1889, the President-
elect wrote him :

[copy.]

Indianapolis, January 17, 1889.
My dear Mr. Blaine : I beg to offer you the position of Secretary of State,
and very sincerely and cordially to request your acceptance of the office.
Hoping to hear favorably from you at your early convenience, I am

Very respectfully and sincerely
Yours,

Benj. Harrison.
To Hon. Jas. G. Blaine,

Washington, D.C.

652 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

[COPY.]

Private.

Indianapolis, January 17, 1889.

My dear Mr. Blaine : I have in a note which you will receive with this
requested your acceptance of the office of Secretary of State. There are
some further and more familiar things, however, which I want to say in
this confidential note. It is quite essential, if such a relation is to be
established between us, that the offer and the acceptance should both be in
a spirit of the most perfect cordiality and confidence. I want to assure you
without reservation that the offer is made in that spirit, and in the sincere
hope that you will find it agreeable to accept it. Our long and friendly
acquaintance gives me the assurance that you would take up the great office
in the same spirit.

We have already a pretty full understanding of each other's views as to
the general policy which should characterize our foreign relations. I am
especially interested in the improvement of our relations with the Central
and South American States. We must win their confidence by deserving
it. It will not come upon demand. Only men of experience, of high
character and of broad views should be sent even to the least important of
these States. In all this I am sure you will be a most willing coadjutor, for
your early suggestions and earnest advocacy have directed public attention
to the subject.

As to our relations with European governments they will, I hope, be easy
of management, and in the main formal. But three distinct questions with
as many of the great powers will require early and discreet attention. I do
not doubt that it would be your inclination as it will be mine to so deal with
these questions as to bring about just and peaceful conclusions. Your
familiarity with the origin and progress of these differences, and indeed
with the whole history of our diplomacy, would, I am sure, give you great
advantage in dealing with them.

I have another general purpose and duty in which I am sure you would
cooperate with the greatest cordiality. It is to preserve harmony in our
party. The continuance of Republican control for a series of presidential
terms is, I think, essential to the right settlement of some very grave ques-
tions. I shall be very solicitous to avoid anything that would promote
dissensions, and very desirous that the civil service shall be placed and
conducted upon that high plane which will recommend our party to the con-
fidence of all the people. This purpose is absolutely disassociated with
any selfish thought or ambition. I will be quite as ready to make proper
concessions as to ask others to do so. Each member of my official family
will have my full confidence and I shall expect his in return. There are
other things which I shall, perhaps, desire to talk with you about, but they
can abide the personal conference which I hope to have with you at your

early convenience.

Very sincerely yours,

Benj. Harrison.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 653

[COPY.]

Washington, D.C., January 21, 1889.

My dear General: I have your valued favor of the 17th hist., tender-
ing to me the appointment of Secretary of State in your Cabinet. The tone
and manner in which you extend the invitation convey to my own feelings
a personal pleasure which far outweighs the public honor. Allow me,
therefore (with my acceptance of your invitation), to return my most sin-
cere thanks for the cordiality and confidence which mark every line of it.
I reciprocate the feeling in fullest measure. It is only by a spirit of con-
fidence at once mutual and perfect that my service in your Cabinet can be
valuable to your administration, agreeable to you, or desirable to myself.

In becoming a member of your Cabinet I can have no motive, near or
remote, inconsistent with the greatest strength and highest interests of your
administration, and of yourself as its official and personal head.

I am glad to find myself in heartiest accord with the principles and poli-
cies which you briefly outline for your administration, and I am especially
pleased with what you say in regard to foreign affairs. The State Depart-
ment was designed in its original constitution to be at all times in close
communication with the President. The Secretary is his certifying officer
even for many things that more nearly concern other departments. The
foreign affairs are in their inception and management exclusively executive,
and nothing decisive can be done in that important field except with the
President's personal knowledge and official approval. So entirely confi-
dential has the relation of the Secretary to the President been held that
questions relating to foreign affairs are brought to the attention of other
members of the Cabinet by the Secretary of State only as directed by the
President.

To hold such a relation, both personal and official, to the Chief Executive

of the nation is in the fullest sense a high honor. I beg you will not doubt

that I deeply appreciate its duties and its responsibilities in their broadest

significance.

I am with greatest respect,

Your friend faithfully,

James G. Blaine.
Gen. Benj. Harrison,

President- Elect of the United States,
Indianapolis.

A very large part of the pleasure with which Mr. Blaine
received this appointment was the gratification it gave to his
friends, especially those who had been concerned lest it should
not be made.

Though less intimate friends than Blaine and Garfield had
been, the political opinions of General Harrison and Mr. Blaine

654 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

were in general harmony. In discussing some arrangements
regarding the inauguration, Mr. Harrison wrote Mr. Blaine, " I
am for harmony in little as well as big matters, as you know
already, and other friends will find out."

The President was inaugurated on the 4th of March, 1889,
and Mr. Blaine at once took the oath of office as Secretary of
State, not only with satisfaction, but with buoyant anticipations.

Mr. Hitt was no longer available for Assistant Secretary, he
holding a position in Congress too important to be relinquished,
and Mr. Blaine chose his son Walker for the position. His wide
and subtile comprehension of affairs, his high ideal of politics, his
deep interest in men, his courtesy and suavity of manner, all
attested by his brilliant success in his Garfield secretaryship,
marked him as eminently fit for the position, while his life-long
intimacy and sympathy with his father made him such a helper
as no other man in the world could be. They understood each
other without words, but when words were necessary, Walker
could speak them. Like most fathers it took some experience
to teach Mr. Blaine that his " lads " were men, and held opinions
with a man's independence and tenacity of reasoning. " Walker
is very disrespectful," he murmured one day when Walker had
firmly maintained his ground against his father's position. " Not
at all," was the unflinching reply of his confidant, " I know noth-
ing about the merits of the argument, but you consulted Walker
as a man, and then you treated him in argument as if he were
a five-year-old boy. It is you who Avere disrespectful." He
smiled, rueful but pleased, and when Walker returned, his father
held out a penitent hand : " Walker, I owe you an apology." —
" Not at all, sir, I owe you one ; " but probably neither would
ever have thought of it after the encounter but for the chance
presence of an outsider.

Years of the closest political, diplomatic, and social, as well as
family, companionship had established Walker as his father's
most trusted and competent counselor and agent, to whose skill
he found nothing too complicated or too important to be con-
fided. His winning address, founded on real and ready sym-
pathy, softened the brusqueness of politics, increasing the
pleasure of those who were gratified, and mitigating the disap-
pointment of those who were not.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 655

Unhappily the President felt himself constrained from making
the appointment for the reason that Walker Blaine was the son *
of the Secretary of State. He was willing to appoint him to the
solicitorship of the department, but he could not permit him to
be First Assistant to his father. Mr. Blaine was equally unable
to press the point. He felt that only two courses were possible,
— either to accept the situation without protest or comment, or
to resign. To resign meant to relinquish, probably forever, his
great opportunity, to throw the Republican party into division
and confusion at the beginning of an administration and upon an
issue which he could not explain and which therefore could not
appear other than trivial. Walker, though intensely chagrined,
advised strongly against resignation. He took the solicitorship
because it would keep him near his father, and he continued to
give him all the assistance possible, sometimes he feared to the dis-
advantage of his own office, a result which he sedulously strove
to avoid. Mr. Blaine remained in the State Department, but
he never ceased to feel the blow, and he went crippled all his
remaining days.

The foreign relations of this country upon the accession of
the Republican administration were in a condition that de-
manded the concentration of attention, courage, promptness
and wisdom — a broad outlook in the present, a clear forecast
of the future. They struck every note in the gamut of human
interest from the liberty of man to the traffic in hogs.

Our interests in the Pacific engaged the early and serious
attention of the new administration. Samoa, one of the only
two important island groups in the Pacific not absorbed by
European powers, was in a position which compromised the
dignity of the American government. More than fifty years
ago Commander Wilkes, who afterwards took Mason and Slidell
from the British steamer Trent to the great delight of the
people and of Congress, but to the ultimate official dissatis-
faction of the President, had established an American relation-
ship to these islands by surveying and exploring them and
framing laws for the people. This " moral suzerainty " had
been continued. Citizens of Great Britain and Germany
acquired large interests in Samoa, but the United States stood
always for justice and progress to the Samoan people. During

656 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

President Hayes' . administration, Samoa sent two envoys
hither. One was an American resident, the other the native
Minister of Foreign Affairs who had been educated by the
missionaries in Samoa, and had learned a pure English from
the study of the Bible. The Samoans had been so won by the
kindness and fair dealing of our government that they wished
to secure closer commercial and political relations with the
United States, even to the extent of a protectorate or a cession
of territory. They dreaded the encroachments of Europeans
which threatened to be supported sooner or later by the British
and the German governments. The President and Mr. Evarts,
the Secretary of State, received them favorably. The Navy
Department had long urged a coaling station in the Pacific ;
public opinion had not reached that point, but the envoys
were content to cede their finest harbor, Pago-Pago, for a naval
and coaling station, asking nothing in return but our good-will
and friendly intercourse. Europeans were quicker than Ameri-
cans to perceive the advantage given to Americans, and they
began a series of movements against it. Disturbances were
fomented, if not created, by foreign adventurers. In July, 1881,
a treaty of peace between warring Samoan chiefs was cele-
brated on board the United States steamer Lackawanna in
the presence of Commander Gillis and of the representatives of
the three treaty powers, the United States, Great Britain, and
Germany. A neutral territory was established in and about
Apia, and a government provided which for three and a half
years was acknowledged throughout the islands and was re-
markably successful. Malietoa, the king, and Tamasese, the
vice-king, lived together at Mulinuu and performed their
separate official duties undisturbed. At the end of that time
troubles again arose, not from hostility of the natives, but from
the rivalry of foreign interests and the irregular action of foreign
officials, and Germany claimed paramount interest and influence
in Samoa. On June 1, 1886, Secretary Bayard suggested a
conference at Washington consisting of the British minister,
the German minister, and himself to arrange for the reestablish-
ment of order by the election of a competent native chief by
the Samoans to be upheld by the three powers. The suggestion
was accepted by Germany, but before the conference opened,

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 657

rumors had become rife in Samoa that Germany meant, in case
she should not secure what she wished in the conference, to
take possession of the island, set up Tamasese as king, and
organize a government. Malietoa prepared to defend himself.
Secretary Bayard, in accordance with the British Foreign Office,
instructed Mr. Harold M. Sewall, Consul-General to Samoa, to
keep Malietoa from fighting, on the assurance that the confer-
ence would arrange Samoan affairs for the best interests of
Samoans. The king, who was able and eager to crush the
rebels before the German ships arrived, yielded to Mr. Sewall's
representations "out of his great respect and love for the
government of the United States." Six German war-ships
arrived at Apia. The American flag was hauled down. Tam-
asese was installed under German guns. Malietoa was driven
to the mountains, where his people gathered around him sending
down hourly to Mr. Sewall to learn news from the conference.

The conference was opened at Washington, June, 1887, and
after much discussion on July 26th adjourned for further in-
structions, but no word went from it to help the waiting king.
Instead, Germany without any previous intimation notified the
government of the United States that she had declared war
against " Malietoa personally." Martial law was established by
the German authorities in Samoa. American citizens were sub-
jected to the indignity of minute and offensive police inspection
by the German navy, which demanded Malietoa dead or alive.
To save bloodshed, he surrendered himself and was carried a
prisoner on a German war-ship to the deadly Cameroons.

Startled by the indignation aroused in this country, Germany
proposed a renewal of conference, but in Berlin instead of
Washington. Secretary Bayard accepted the proposition, and
thus affairs stood on the 4th of March. Secretary Blaine in-
stantly renewed the acceptance, but emphasized the fact that it
was the old conference on the old basis, and not a new conference
under the new conditions which had been created by Germany,
but which did not change our obligations to Samoa.

But though the conference was old the conferees were new
blood. Mr. Kasson, who had been minister to Austria, Mr.
George H. Bates, of Delaware, whom the preceding administra-
tion had sent as commissioner to Samoa and who lmd studied

658 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

its history and institutions, and Mr. William Walter Phelps,
were men fortified for the emergency. Mr. Sewall, ex-Consul
to Samoa, accompanied them as secretary. Thus the con-
ference on the American side was furnished with experts, two
of whom had been Democratic office-holders, but were ardently
Republican in their way of conducting their offices. Their
instructions, furnished on April 11, were that the United States
government desired a speedy and amicable solution of all ques-
tions, but would steadily maintain its own full equality of right
and consideration as much for the purpose of fulfilling its obli-
gations to secure to the Samoans the conditions of a healthy,
prosperous and civilized life, as of protecting the rights and
interests of its own citizens. With pointed reference to our
great and growing interests in the Pacific and to the early open-
ing of an Isthmian transit from the Atlantic to the Pacific
(under American protection), all of which required the posses-
sion of a naval station which had been granted in Pago-Pago
by the lawful Samoan authorities, the government firmly de-
clined to "accept even temporary subordination " as inconsistent
with that international consideration and dignity to which the
United States by continental position and expanding interests
must always be entitled. If intervention of the three powers
were absolutely necessary, it must be temporary and avowedly
preparatory to the restoration of autonomy in the islands, and
while it lasted it must be on terms of absolute equality. Ger-
many was to be informed that the President was painfully
apprehensive that the forcible removal of Malietoa, — who was
without doubt the preferred sovereign of the Samoan people, —
and the failure to restore that condition under which alone a
free choice could be made by the Samoans, would not only seri-
ously complicate but possibly endanger a prompt and friendly
solution.

Stress was laid upon the necessity of defending the natives
against the robbery of their lands by greedy foreigners and
against the demoralization of the alcohol trade. The subjec-
tion of American citizens in Samoa to martial law was assumed
to be the rash mistake of German naval officers, and was only
mentioned to avoid misconstruction and to be overlooked as
one of " the trials and indignities to which they ought never to

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 659

have been subjected, and to which, I trust, the result of this
conference will make it certain that they shall never be sub-
jected again."

The negotiations were delicate ; the situation was not without
peril. Once the committee cabled to the Secretary the con-
viction that they must compromise ; that Bismarck was angry,
and that without yielding somewhat they feared everything
would be lost. Mr. Blaine cabled in response that " The
extent of the chancellor's irritability is not the measure of
American rights." He could be irritable himself on occasion,
and he knew for how little it counted. The negotiations were
brought to a happy conclusion. In constant close communication
and entire sympathy with the Secretary, the commissioners by
their skill and patriotism secured the treaty of Berlin. All
thought of war was banished. Malietoa was brought back to
Samoa amid the general rejoicing of his subjects, — a wreck of
his former self, but free, and a king once more. The land-claims
were satisfactorily settled. A gentle and trusting people were
saved from the extermination of abandonment. Our rights to
the finest harbor in the Pacific were confirmed, American citi-
zenship was protected and national honor vindicated.

The Germans grumbled a little that they were forbidden the
desired predominance, and complained that the United States
had the best of it, but wisely consoled themselves that it
might have been worse, and that there was no humiliation in
yielding since no force was exerted, and the long friendship of
the two nations which had withstood all the strain of our inter-
nal troubles remained unbroken.

In England the wholesome moral was openly drawn.

" The United States is becoming the greatest nation of the
world. It is probable that nothing short of actual violence
would now induce any nation to attack her, and the idea of
incurring the enmity of such a power is appalling."

The question of the Seal Fisheries, our most valuable property
in Alaska, became under the Harrison administration very em-
barrassing to England, because on the one side Canada pushed
her pertinacious little claims with the persistence of a spoiled
child regardless of the larger interests of the mother-country
or the international complications which it might cause, and

660 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

because on the other side stood a continent clear-eyed to its own
right, aware of its own power, and bent on maintaining the one
to the full extent of the other.

The immediate question at the time of Mr. Blaine's incum-
bency was the destruction or preservation of the seals. The
United States had come into possession of the sealing grounds
through the purchase of Alaska, and considered herself to have
bought all the rights that Russia owned. The sealing was let
out to companies, and the protection of their property was secured
by regulations as to the time and place of sealing, so that the
increase and even the existence of the herds should not be
sacrificed by indiscriminate slaughter. When Mr. Blaine came
into office, Great Britain had already withdrawn from its
agreement to enter the treaty which Mr. E. J. Phelps had sub-
mitted to Lord Salisbury. Canadian poachers, caring only for
immediate profits to themselves and improvident of the future,
defied the regulations and slaughtered the seals at will, Avith
brutal and destructive recklessness. The United States ordered
the capture and confiscation of their vessels, Canada complained
to Great Britain, and thus the three-cornered contention which
had been dragging along for years moved at a swift pace.
August 24, 1889, the British government reported that it had
heard rumors of seizures in Behring Sea, and desired the United
States government to take stringent measures to prevent them,
reminding Mr. Blaine that Her Majesty's government had re-
ceived very clear assurances from Mr. Bayard, when Secretary of
State, that, pending discussion, no further interference should
take place with British vessels in Behring Sea, that the British
minister would be prepared on his return to Washington in the
autumn to discuss the whole question, and that Her Majesty's
government wished to point out to the United States that a
settlement cannot but be hindered by any measure of force
which might be resorted to by the United States. Mr. Blaine
had the honor to reply on the same day that lie had heard the
same rumors, "probably based on truth ;" that the President
earnestly desired an adjustment of difficulties and believed that
responsibility for delay of such could not properly be charged
to the government of the United States, which learned with
much gratification that Sir Julian Pauncefote would come in

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 661

the autumn prepared to discuss the whole question, and that the
government of the United States would endeavor to be pre-
pared for the discussion, and believed that a prompt adjustment
could be secured on a basis honorable to both countries.

On September 12, the British government, which could endure
Canadian slaughter of American seals more patiently than it
could endure American prevention of such slaughter, asked when
the instructions would be sent to Alaska to prevent the possibility
of the seizure of British ships in Behring Sea. September 14, Mr.
Blaine supposed that Sir Julian Pauncefote's official instruction
to proceed immediately after his arrival in October to a full
discussion of the question removed all necessity of any prelim-
inary correspondence touching its merits, and that, moreover,
instructions sent, even immediately upon the date of the origi-
nal request, August 24, would have failed to reach the vessels
before their proposed departure. October 2, Lord Salisbury
could not admit that any American measures for the protection
of seals could justify the seizure of vessels which were trans-
gressing no rule of international law ; but he admitted, however,
that the matter was of importance, and that an agreement upon
it is even more important, but that he was hindered by objec-
tions raised by the Dominion of Canada. Meanwhile under Mr.
Blaine's pointed inquiries, Mr. Bayard's " very clear assurances "
had faded into " an unofficial assurance." Mr. Blaine inquired
in what way this assurance was " unofficially communicated " to
Her Majesty's government. The British Legation thought it had
been so communicated in a letter by Mr. Bayard to Sir Lionel
West ; but upon further inquiry the legation learned that this
was not the assurance wherewith Lord Salisbury was assured,
but that the assurance which he had in mind was communicated
to himself in London. The assurance thus seemed to remain
not only unofficially, but unclemonstrably communicated.

When Mr. Blaine settled to the work, he took it out of
the trivial details in which it had been entangled, and cleared
up the whole history and philosophy of our rights in Behring
Sea. Sweeping away the obsolete precedents of the English
Foreign Office, he established our. contention on the eternal
principles — national or international — of right, equity, hu-
manity, to be formulated as new conditions require. " The

662 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

Canadian vessels, arrested and detained in the Behring Sea
were engaged in a pursuit that was in itself contra bonos
mores, a pursuit which of necessity involves a serious and per-
manent injury to the rights of the government and people of
the United States. To establish this ground it is not necessary
to argue the question of the extent and nature of the sovereignty
of this government over the waters of the Behring Sea. The
weighty considerations growing out of the acquisition of Alaska,
with all the rights on land and sea inseparably connected there-
with, may be safely left out of view, while the grounds are set
forth on which this government rests its justification." " The
Canadian poachers are not only interfering with American
rights, but are doing violence as well to the rights of the civil-
ized world. Does Her Majesty's government seriously main-
tain that the law of nations is powerless to prevent such violation
of the common rights of man ? Are the supporters of justice in
all nations to be declared incompetent to prevent wrongs so
odious and so destructive? The forcible resistance to which
this government is constrained in the Behring Sea is, in the
President's judgment, demanded not only by the necessity of
defending the traditional and long established rights of the
United States, but also the rights of good government and of
good morals the world over."

This was the head and front of his argument, but he fortified
it from American and English history and with an amplitude of
resources that left nothing to be defended.

January 22, 1890.

It can not be unknown to Her Majesty's government that one of the
most valuable sources of revenue from the Alaskan possessions is the fur-
seal fisheries of the Behring Sea. Those fisheries had been exclusively
controlled by the government of Russia, without interference or without
question, from their original discovery until the cession of Alaska to
the United States in 1867. From 1867 to 1886 the possession in which
Russia had been undisturbed was enjoyed by this government also.
There was no interruption and no intrusion from any source.

This uniform avoidance of all attempts to take fur seal in those waters
had been a constant recognition of the right held and exercised first by
Russia and subsequently by this government. It has also been the
recognition of a fact now held beyond denial or doubt that the taking
of seals in the open sea rapidly leads to their extinction.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 663

The fact had also been demonstrated in a wide sense by the well-nigh
total destruction of all seal fisheries except the one in the Behring Sea,
which the government of the United States is now striving to preserve,
not altogether for the use of the American people, but for the use of the
world at large.

The killing of seals in the open sea involves the destruction of the
female in common with the male. The slaughter of the female seal is
reckoned as an immediate loss of three seals, besides the future loss of
the whole number which the bearing seal may produce in the successive
years of life.

. . . After the acquisition of Alaska the government of the United
States, through ^competent agents working under the direction of the
best experts, gave careful attention to the improvement of the seal
fisheries. .

The entire business was then conducted peacefully, lawfully, and
profitably — profitably to the United States, for the rental was yielding a
moderate interest on the large sum which this government had paid for
Alaska, including the rights now at issue ; profitably to the Alaskan
company, which, under governmental direction and restriction, had given
unwearied pains to the care and development of the fisheries ; profitably
to the Aleuts, who were receiving a fair pecuniary reward for their
labors, and were elevated from semi-savagery to civilization and to the
enjoyment of schools and churches provided for their benefit by the
government of the United States; and, last of all, profitably to a large
body of English laborers who had constant employment and received good
wages.

This, in brief, was the condition of the Alaska fur-seal fisheries down
to the year 1886. The precedents, customs, and rights had been estab-
lished and enjoyed, either by Russia or the United States, for nearly a
century. The two nations were the only powers that owned a foot of
land on the continents that bordered, or on the islands included within,
the Behring waters where the seals resort to breed. Into this peaceful
and secluded field of labor certain Canadian vessels in 1886 asserted
their right to enter, and by their ruthless course to destroy the fish-
eries and with them to destroy also the resulting industries which are so
valuable. The government of the United States at once proceeded to check
this movement, which, unchecked, was sure to do great and irreparable
harm.

It was the cause of unfeigned surprise to the United States that Her
Majesty's government should immediately interfere to defend and en-
courage (surely to encourage by defending) the course of the Canadians
in disturbing an industry which had been carefully developed for more
than ninety years under the flags of Russia and the United States. . .

Whence did the ships of Canada derive the right to do in 1886 that
which they had refrained from doing for more than ninety years ? Upon
what grounds did Her Majesty's government defend in the year 1886 a
course of conduct in the Behring Sea which she had carefully avoided ever

66-4 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

since the discovery of that sea? By what reasoning did Her Majesty's
government conclude that an act may be committed with impunity against
the rights of the United States which had never been attempted against the
same rights when held by the Russian Empire ?

So great has been the injury to the fisheries from the irregular and
destructive slaughter of seals in the open waters of the Behring Sea by
Canadian vessels, that whereas the government had allowed one hundred
thousand to be taken annually for a series of years, it is now compelled to
reduce the number to sixty thousand. If four years of this violation of
natural law and neighbor's rights have reduced the annual slaughter of seal
by 40 per cent., it is easy to see how short a period will be required to
work the total destruction of the fisheries.

The ground upon which Her Majesty's government justifies, or at least
defends, the course of the Canadian vessels, rests upon the fact that they
are committing their acts of destruction on the high seas, viz., more than
three marine miles from the shore-line. It is doubtful whether Her Majesty's
government would abide by this rule if the attempt were made to interfere
with the pearl fisheries of Ceylon, which extend more than twenty miles from
the shore-line and have been enjoyed by England without molestation ever
since their acquisition. So well recognized is the British ownership of
those fisheries, regardless of the limit of the three-mile line, that Her
Majesty's government feels authorized to sell the pearl-fishing right from
year to year to the highest bidder. Nor is it credible that modes of
fishing on the Grand Banks, altogether practicable but highly destructive,
would be justified or even permitted by Great Britain on the plea that
the vicious acts were committed more than three miles from shore.

. . . This government has been ready to concede much in order to
adjust all differences of view, and has, in the judgment of the President,
already proposed a solution not only equitable but generous. Thus far
Her Majesty's government has declined to accept the proposal of the
United States. The President now awaits with deep interest, not unmixed
with solicitude, any proposition for reasonable adjustment which Her
Majesty's government may submit. The forcible resistance to which this
government is constrained in the Behring Sea is, in the President's judg-
ment, demanded not only by the necessity of defending the traditional and
lonof-established rights of the United States, but also the rights of £ood

government and of good morals the world over.

James G. Blaine.

No. 10.

Sir Julian Pauncefote wrote to Mr. Blaine :

Washington, February 10, 1890.
. . . that it might expedite a settlement of the controversy if the tri-
partite negotiation respecting the establishment of a close time for those
fisheries which was commenced in London in 1888, but was suspended
owing to various causes, should be resumed in Washington.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 665

On May 22, 1890, the Marquis of Salisbury replied challeng-
ing Mr. Blaine's three points, that the indiscriminate slaughter
was contra bonos mores, that the United States had been in
undisturbed possession of the seal fisheries, and that such
slaughter tended to the extinction of the seal.

The first argument it was not to be expected that Lord Salis-
bury should discern, and he did not discern it. The third argu-
ment he dismissed with the remark that abundant evidence
could be adduced on the other side, but he did not adduce it.
The second, since " Her Majesty's government cannot but think
that Mr. Blaine has been misinformed as to the history of the
operations in Behring Sea during that period," he attempted to
meet by a rash and random lunge at American history.

Mr. Blaine at once descended upon this tidbit of titular his-
tory, and resolved it into its original atoms.

" Lord Salisbury contends that Mr. John Quincy Adams, when
Secretary of State under President Monroe, protested against
the jurisdiction which Russia claimed over the waters of Behring
Sea. To maintain this position, his lordship cites the words of a
despatch of Mr. Adams, written on July 23, 1823, to Mr. Henry
Middleton, at that time our minister at St. Petersburg. The
alleged declarations and admissions of Mr. Adams in that de-
spatch have been the basis of all the arguments which Her
Majesty's government has submitted against the ownership of
certain properties in the Behring Sea, which the government of
the United States confidently assumes. I quote the portion
of Lord Salisbury's argument which includes the quotation
from Mr. Adams :

" After Russia, at the instance of the Russian- American Fur Company,
claimed in 1821 the pursuits of commerce, whaling, and fishing from
Behring Straits to the 51st degree of north latitude, and not only pro-
hibited all foreign vessels from landing on the coasts and islands of the
above waters, but also prevented them from approaching within 100 miles
thereof, Mr. Quincy Adams wrote as follows to the United States minister
in Russia :

"' The United States can admit no part of these claims; their right of
navigation and fishing is perfect, and has been in constant exercise from
the earliest times throughout the whole extent of the Southern ocean,
subject only to the ordinary exceptions and exclusions of the territorial
jurisdictions."

666 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES 0. BLAINE.

" The quotation which Lord Salisbury makes is unfortunately
a most defective, erroneous, and misleading one. The conclu-
sion is separated from the premise, a comma is turned into a
period, an important qualification as to time is entirely erased
without even a suggestion that it had ever formed part of the
text, and out of eighty-four words, logically and inseparably
connected, thirty-five are dropped from Mr. Adams's paragraph
in Lord Salisbury's quotation. No edition of Mr. Adams's work
gives authority for his lordship's quotation ; while the archives
of this department plainly disclose its many errors. I requote
Lord Salisbury's version of what Mr. Adams said, and in juxta-
position produce Mr. Adams's full text as he wrote it :

" [Lord Salisbury's quotation from Mr. Adams.]

" The United States can admit no part of these claims; their right of
navigation and fishing is perfect, and has been in constant exercise from
the earliest times throughout the whole extent of the Southern ocean,
subject only to the ordinary exceptions and exclusions of the territorial
jurisdictions.

" [Full text of Mr. Adams's paragraph.]

" The United States can admit no part of these claims. Their right of
navigation and of fishing is perfect, and has been in constant exercise from
the earliest times, after the peace of 1783, throughout the whole extent of
the Southern ocean, subject only to the ordinary exceptions and exclusions
of the territorial jurisdictions, which, so far as Russian rights are concerned,
are confined to certain islands north of the fifty -fifth degree of latitude, and
have no existence on the continent of America.

" The words left out of Mr. Adams's paragraph in the despatch
of Lord Salisbury are precisely the words upon which the
government of the United States founds its argument in this
case. Conclusions or inferences resting upon the paragraph,
with the material parts of Mr. Adams's text omitted, are of
course valueless."

Having thus demolished it he proceeded to disintegrate it. He
showed that Lord Salisbury's fragmentary citation and capricious
rendering were absurd and impossible. His disjointed illustra-
tions Mr. Blaine took to pieces and put together right, and,
thus restored, they maintained our contention and not Lord
Salisbury's. Back and forth across those awful seas and straits

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 667

and shores, hand in hand with dead presidents, and the crazed
ghosts of slain emperors and Englishmen weary of life, he led
the novice by slow, definite stages, and showed him that real
knowledge of history and of geography is not superficial but
organic. And having swept past and present, near and far, into
the scope of his argument, he concluded :

" It only remains to say that whatever duty Great Britain
owed to Alaska as a Russfan province, whatever she agreed to do
or to refrain from doing, touching Alaska and the Behring Sea,
was not changed by the mere fact of the transfer of sovereignty
to the United States. It was explicitly declared, in the sixth
article of the treaty by which the territory was ceded by
Russia, that ' the cession hereby made conveys all the rights,
franchises, and privileges now belonging to Russia in the said
territory or dominions and appurtenances thereto.' Neither
by the treaty with Russia of 1825, nor by its renewal in 1843,
nor by its second renewal in 1859, did Great Britain gain any
right to take seals in Behring Sea. In fact, those treaties were
a prohibition upon her which she steadily respected so long as
Alaska was a Russian province. It is for Great Britain now to
show by what law she gained rights in that sea after the transfer
of its sovereignty to the United States.

" During all the time elapsing between the treaty of 1825 and
the cession of Alaska to the United States in 1867, Great
Britain never affirmed the right of her subjects to capture fur
seals in the Behring Sea ; and, as a matter of fact, her subjects
did not, during that long period, attempt to catch seals in the
Behring Sea.

" Lord Salisbury does not attempt to cite the intrusion of a
single British sealer into the Behring Sea until after Alaska
had been transferred to the United States. I am justified,
therefore, in repeating the questions which I addressed to Her
Majesty's government on the 22d of last January, and which
still remain unanswered, viz. :

" Whence did the ships of Canada derive the right to do, in 1886, that
which they had refrained from doing for nearly ninety years?

" Upon what grounds did Her Majesty's government defend, in the year
1886, a course of conduct in the Behring Sea which had been carefully
avoided ever since the discovery of that sea ?

668 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

" By what reasoning did Her Majesty's government conclude that an act
may be committed with impunity against the rights of the United States
which had never been attempted against the same rights when held by the
Russian Empire ? "

On August 2, Lord Salisbury with splendid courage adven-
tured forth again into the icy Behring. Mr. Blaine at once
accepted his challenge.

" Great Britain contends that the phrase ' Pacific Ocean,' as
used in treaties, was intended to include, and does include, the
body of water which is now known as the Behring Sea. The
United States contends that the Behring Sea was not mentioned,
or even referred to in either treaty, and was in no sense included
in the phrase ' Pacific Ocean.' If Great Britain can maintain
her position that the Behring Sea at the time of the treaties with
Russia of 1824 and 1825 was included in the Pacific Ocean, the
government of the United States has no well-grounded com-
plaint against her. If, on the other hand, this government can
prove beyond all doubt that the Behring Sea at the date of the
treaties was understood by the three signatory powers to be a
separate body of water, and was not included in the phrase
4 Pacific Ocean,' then the American case against Great Britain
is complete and undeniable."

Then with the same easy command, the same minute recon-
structive knowledge of the events of those distant days, in-
terests, localities, he marshalled not only facts, but the causes
and consequences of facts he summoned from papers and
magazines of ninety years before, the irrefragable witness oi
maps, scores upon scores ; from dusty archives, — protocols,
protests, preambles, treaties, ukases, bank accounts of old fur
companies. He showed the Monroe Doctrine pushing its strong
young horns into the North-west with the effect of a sauve qui
pent upon the foreign interests crowding and clouding our
North-western horizon. Lord Salisbury's fractional facts were
rounded out and supplied with their true meaning. His most
confident assertions were drawn up only to be disproved in gen-
eral and in particular, and to be disproved by his own evidence.
While repeatedly disclaiming all claims to mare clausum Mr.
Blaine's citations of England's course in assuming ocean control

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 669

for her own purpose and the incisive courtesy of his comment,
touches the very sense of satiric satisfaction. He did not argue
the question of territorial inclusion, but jurisdiction of waters
extending to the farthest point necessary for shore interests.
He did not claim a closed sea, but property rights on the open
sea.

Along the main lines of argument, a thousand minor points
scintillated. After reading at the conference the memorandum
of the Canadian minister, Mr. Blaine coolly remarked that he
doubted whether " any arrangement could be arrived at that
would be satisfactory to Canada. The proposal of the United
States had now been two years before Her Majesty's govern-
ment, and there was nothing further to urge in support of it,"
and put upon England the burden of a counter proposal. In
the face of this withdrawal, the initiative was left to England.
A protest against the action of the United States had been
transmitted to the British minister, who had amiably delayed it
in hope of another and earlier adjustment. When he could no
longer withhold it, Mr. Blaine expressed the President's sur-
prise that such a protest should be authorized by Lord Salis-
bury, who had for a period of six months " without retraction
or qualification, without the suggestion of a doubt or the drop-
ping of a hint, in every form of speech, assented to the necessity
of a close season for the protection of the seals ; " so that " to
have distrusted it would have been to question the good faith
of Lord Salisbury ; " and had at the end of that time suddenly
informed the American government that "nothing could be
done until Canada is heard from."

Lord Salisbury in response " does not recognize the expres-
sions attributed to him. He does not think that he can have
used them, at all events, in the context mentioned," and think-
ing it over a little more, solemnly remembered three weeks
later, that Minister Phelps had said, April 3, 1888, " With a
general election pending, it would be of little use, and indeed
hardly practicable, to conduct any negotiation to its issue before
the election had taken place."

In response Mr. Blaine quoted Mr. Phelps's report to Mr.
Bayard : " Lord Salisbury assents to your proposition to establish
by mutual arrangement between the governments interested a

670 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

close time for fur seals. And be will cause an act to be intro-
duced in Parliament to give effect to tbis arrangement, so soon
as it can be prepared. He will also join tbe United States gov-
ernment in any preventive measures it may be thought best
to adopt by orders issued to the naval vessels of the respective
governments in that region. Mr. Phelps has long been known
in this country as an able lawyer, accurate in the use of words
and discriminating in the statement of facts. The government
of the United States necessarily reposes implicit confidence in
the literal correctness of the despatch above quoted." Regard-
ing the election remark he summed up the details of disproof:
" I am justified, therefore, in assuming that Lord Salisbury can-
not recur to the remark of Mr. Phelps as one of the reasons for
breaking off the negotiation, because the negotiation was in
actual progress for more than four months after the remark was
made, and Mr. Phelps himself took large part in it. Upon this
recital of facts I am unable to recall, or in any way to qualify, the
statement which I made in my note of June 4th, to the effect
that Lord Salisbury 'abruptly closed the negotiation because
the Canadian government objected, and that he assigned no
other reason whatever.' "

A letter of Hon. E. J. Phelps throws a little light upon Lord
Salisbury's mental confusion.

Burlington, Vt., July 28, 1890.

I have read with interest and satisfaction your despatches on the Behring-
Sea question, and congratulate you on the great success with which you
have maintained the argument.

Lord Salisbury, in his allusion to my remark that a treaty could not be
concluded by the late administration pending a presidential election (with
a hostile Senate), has fallen into an error. I did say so, but it was at a
different time, and in reference to a different subject — the fisheries.

It never occurred to me to think, nor to say, that there would have been
the least difficulty in respect to the ratification by the Senate of a convention
so simple and so plainly necessary, as was that for establishing a close
season for the protection of the seal. His lordship and I had agreed upon
the propriety of it. The Russian government, through their ambassador
in London, had warmly concurred. A draft had been prepared at Lord
Salisbury's request which was not objected to, and I expected its imme-
diate adoption. The opposition of Canada alone prevented it. Lord Salis-
bury hoped to overcome it. I repeatedly pressed the matter, until I became
satisfied it was of no use ; not because England objected, but because it

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 671

could not obtain the assent of the Canadian government. Then I wrote
the letter to my government, which you have read, advising decided meas-
ures, which appeared to me to be justified. Lord Salisbury is quite mis-
taken in supposing that I ever suggested any doubt of the prompt ratification
of this proposed convention by the Senate. Or that the least delay in the
negotiation took place on that account.

As to the fishery question, my views* were very different. I was op-
posed, for the reason quoted by Lord Salisbury, to the attempt to make a
treaty under the circumstances. I had made much progress in arranging
a modus Vivendi to be carried out by mutual instructions by the two govern-
ments, under which harmonious relations could be maintained for the time
being and pending mature negotiations, and after the election, I believed a
treaty could be perfected and ratified. The original proposal for commis-
sioners was mine, and contemplated only the appointment of practical men
to arrange the details of the modus. It was afterwards deemed best by my
government to elevate the commissioners into plenipotentiaries, and to
attempt a treaty. And to this effort I of course gave the best assistance
in my power.

The result was what I had expected. The treaty, though in my judg-
ment an excellent one, was lost by a party vote.

Lord Salisbury has in his recollections confounded the conversations
upon two very different subjects.

England showed extraordinary agility in slipping from one
position after another like a seal off a rock. Some thought she
was trying to weary the patience of the administration. Some
said plainly she meant to cheat ; at least to the extent of
giving every Canadian poacher the longest possible opportunity
before assenting to any modus vivendi. Mr. Blaine did not be-
lieve in the necessity of any war on the subject. March 6, 1891,
he sent a note to the President :

If we get up a war-cry and send naval vessels to Behring Sea it will
reelect Lord Salisbury. England always sustains an administration with
the prospect of war pending. Lord Salisbury would dissolve Parliament
instantly if we made a demonstration of war. On the other side I am not
sure — or rather I am sure — that war would prove of no advantage to you.
New York and Massachusetts are steadily against war with England unless
the last point of honor requires it. Again, I think you will bitterly disap-
point Lord Salisbury by keeping quiet. We would have all the fuss and
there would be no war after all. Not a man in a million believes we
should ultimately have war.

But he did believe that continued national irritation and fer-
ment might produce war, which no one intends, and he was

672 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

desirous to have the source of irritation removed. It Avas not
until February 29, 1892, that a Treaty of Arbitration was ratified.
Up to January he had believed that the matter would be ad-
justed between himself and Lord Salisbury, and need never
be brought to trial before the Court of Arbitration. It was,
however, so brought, and the arguments presented by the
ablest lawyers in the country were those which Mr. Blaine
had advanced at the outset contra bonos mores. They stood
on the same high ground of reason, humanity, civilization,
that the laws of society involve our claim of property ; that
international law is not an eternal and unchangeable deposit,
but forms its own precedents and springs from new occasions.

Men who had not been partisans of Mr. Blaine were fain to
admit that he had " brought together, in masterly arrangement,
every possible reason based on law, humanity, expediency, or
right of which the case admitted. We have looked in vain
through the arguments of counsel for any point of which the
germ, at least, was not contained in his diplomatic correspond-
ence."

The court in session, and its individual members privately,
treated Mr. Blaine's contention with profound respect. That a
man not a lawyer should have made, on a legal and international
question, so able a legal argument, betraying by no sign that he
was not a lawyer, was commented on as extraordinary by the
foreigners as well as by the Americans in court.

The decision of the court was entirely illogical and satis-
factory. It decided that this county had no property right in
the seal which could follow it into the sea to protect it there ;
and immediately recognized the right by making ample regula-
tions for its protection. Our minister in London, Mr. Phelps,
would have accepted much less than the Court of Arbitration
gave, and if the seal is not protected the fault is not of the
court but of our own government in not enforcing the regula-
tions prescribed by the court.

Where there was no spirit of aggression Mr. Blaine was
easy to be entreated. On the 14th of March, 1891, the mob in
New Orleans attacked and murdered persons who had been
tried and acquitted in the courts, but were still in the prisons,
under the protection of the authorities. Among them were

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 673

three Italians, said to be still subjects of the King of Italy.
The Italian minister appealed immediately to the government,
and the Secretary of State assured him that the affair should be
most thoroughly investigated. Mr. Blaine at once addressed
the Governor of Louisiana expressing the President's regrets and
his hope that the governor would aid the President in defending
the Italians who might still be in peril, and in bringing to jus-
tice those who had broken the law. The offence was one
especially odious to Mr. Blaine. With no technical federal
responsibility, with a structural weakness in the Constitution
which no dexterity can remedy, he felt that it was better in-
stantly to make reparation and let the world forget as soon as
possible that such a thing had happened. He remembered,
moreover, that Italy was to appoint one of the Paris Behring-Sea
arbitrators, and he thought it bad policy to let the matter drift.
The Italian government did not readily understand our inter-
nal relations, and saw in the necessary constitutional processes
only a disposition to delay and defeat justice. Premier Rudini
on March 24 instructed the Italian minister with some asperity
that public opinion in Italy was justly impatient, and if concrete
provisions were not at once taken, the Italian minister would be
recalled from a country where he was unable to obtain justice.
Mr. Blaine could appreciate the Italian misunderstanding and
irritation, and neither gave way to it or resented it. If he took
advantage of it to divert public attention from the deplorable
central fact to the incidental misunderstanding, we sorely needed
such diversion. With complimentary reference, he regretted
Baron Fava's departure, and endeavored to remove the mistake
which had caused it by explaining in detail the constitutional
inter-action of our State and Federal governments ; that the
latter was unable to give the desired assurance of punishment
because it had not jurisdiction, and if it had, it could not give
such assurance in advance of investigation or trial. It had dis-
tinctly recognized the principle of indemnity to those who may
have been wronged by violation of treaty rights, and had
promised investigation. Beyond this it could not go, and it also
felt obliged to add that " in a matter of such gravity the govern-
ment of the United States would not permit itself to be unduly
hurried ; nor will it make answer to any demand until everv

674 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

fact essential to a correct judgment shall have been fully ascer-
tained through legal authority." And if he dwelt more on our
constitutional obligations than on our constitutional defects, it
was only his duty in addressing another nation.

But conscious of the weakness of our own case, trusting the
friendship of Italy, furthered by pleasant social intercourse with
the Italian legation, he wanted nothing so much as to pay and
be done with it. When it became evident that the Italian
government understood that it had acted hastily, had perhaps
translated carelessly, had certainly rendered incorrectly, and
would be glad to withdraw, the Secretary was ready to consider
the incident closed. The President was not disposed to give
them too much help in a necessary retreat. But with a friendly
nation like Italy, signifying its willingness to receive a proffered
indemnity of money for the families of the victims, in return
for which it would send a very cordial note that would put us
right before the world, and before Italy, Mr. Blaine thought we
could not accept soon enough, with or without an Italian minis-
ter at Washington. Urging the President to a settlement, he
wrote in March, 1892 :

They have been fully notified at Rome that we would make indemnity
and we can wait their time in sending a minister. ... I would have
completed the matter in the course of twenty-four hours. ... It can
only be done in Italy by making a positive statement, without any " ifs " or
" ands" about it, that we recognize the principle of indemnity in this case,
and will pay Italy on the arrival of the minister. It is apparent to me that
this is far more embarrassing than to pay the money here and have nothing
said about it. I do not think we want to have a document in the hands of
the government of Italy saying that we have recognized the principle of
indemnity in this case. Such a paper would embarrass us in many cases
yet to arise. It strikes me that this would be bad policy, and it can be
easily avoided.

You had the impression that the language in your message was sufficient
to satisfy Italy, and to have her send a minister here. But four months
have passed by and no minister is here yet. We have waited eleven months,
during which period our minister (Mr. Porter) has been passing his time
in Indianapolis drawing $12,000 a year from the Treasury. I believe he
will continue in the same position for months to come, on the basis you
have adopted, unless you are willing to give a pledge that the money shall
be paid ; and I do not think you will do this.

I submit these facts for your consideration, feeling assured that they are
entitled to early and earnest attention.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 675

They received both, and the cordial understanding of the two
countries was, it is hoped, completely restored. A similar ex-
citement in Chile Mr. Blaine, in the same manner, thought only
of composing. On the 16th of October, 1891, some sailors on
shore in Valparaiso, from the " Baltimore," were attacked by a
mob; two were killed and several wounded. The country
was somewhat excited. The United. States uniform had been
attacked, and where it is a question of insult to the flag there
can be but one opinion. Mr. Blaine was disposed from every
motive to take a moderate view of the situation. The old
troubles between Chile and Peru had not ceased, — there was
armed and successful insurrection. Our right of asylum had
been disputed. Every disturbance was not only made the most
of, but was exaggerated by malicious libels issuing from the
British clubs in Santiago against our minister, Mr. Egan. Mr.
Blaine would waive no hair's breadth of the right of asylum, and
the President refused even to consider the question whether
asylum had properly been given until the privileges of the lega-
tion were restored, considering that it would be negotiating
under duress ; but towards a country rent by internal wars, Mr.
Blaine believed that every consideration should be shown. He
could not learn that there was any official wrong intent. He
thought the affair was in the nature of a street scrimmage between
sailors and landsmen aggravated by an inflamed state of public
feeling, especially by strong suspicion that the American flag
had been used to shelter the foes of Chile, but without govern-
ment instigation or countenance. He thought Chile was too
small and our country too large to permit a fierce attitude
towards our neighbor even when offending. There could be no
glory in any victory of force ; and he was exceedingly desirous
to win the friendly cooperation and confidence of Chile, not to
compel her submission.

He demanded for the Baltimore's sailors open trial and
proper representation; but he could not magnify a brawl into a
battle. The " row " began, according to the statement of our
own people, by a Chilean sailor spitting into the face of one
of our men, and this was naturally followed by a knock-down.
It was with difficulty that such a circumstance could take on
continental dimensions. When the Chilean minister in Wash-

676 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

ington had been too communicative and demonstrative, the
Secretary of State sent for him privately and made him under-
stand that he was not free to give out paragraphs to our papers,
but should refer to our State Department ; but he received his
explanations with candor and sympathy. Even in the earliest
heat he found Chilean despatches " temperate for Chile," and
saw, some thought too readily, a disposition in Chile to apolo-
gize. " The very fact that the Chileans offer these communica-
tions is in effect an apology."

A curious circumstance in view of past reports regarding Mr.
Blaine's hostility to Chile, and of the recognized fact that the
Latin Americans are born diplomats, was that communication
was privately and indirectly made to Mr. Blaine that the
troubles could be peacefully adjusted if the diplomacy could be
conducted with the Secretary, and also that Chile was willing
to accept the arbitration of Brazil. Thus, although she was the
only country in the Pan-American conference which refused to
vote for settlement of differences by arbitration, she was the
first country to propose to take advantage of it. Happily there
was no need of mediation. Chile offered ample apology, and
the President and the Secretary of State were equally cordial
in its acceptance. Mr. Blaine wrote :

17 Madison Place, Washington, January 29, 1892.

My dear Mr. President : I herewith send you a draft of a note to
Chile. It may seem to you too cordial, but I believe it to be in the highest
sense expedient. I have relied on Chile's good sense for reparation, and I
believe we will get it more easily that way than by arbitration.

When we made the settlement with the Spaniards in the Virginius affair
— a very aggravated case — Ave took $2,500 apiece for the sailors, thus set-
ting a price. We followed the same example when we made reparation
for the Chinese who were murdered. You remember that I proposed the
same for the Italians who were murdered at New Orleans, so that the real
money value we would recover would be small. We can afford to be very
generous in our language and thus make a friend of Chile, if that is pos-
sible. At all events we can afford to venture $5,000 on it, and that is all
we will £et for the two sailors.

Yours very sincerely,

James G. Blaine.
And the President replied the same day :

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 677

I had, as I promised you this morning, outlined what I thought would
be a suitable response, and have now adapted it to your note, a good part
of which you will see is incorporated. What I have said, I think you will
agree, has rather enlarged than diminished the expressions of cordiality.

The ignoble abandonment of the Peace Congress by President
Arthur had brought about so full an explanation of its charac-
ter and purposes that it had a persistent life after death. In
Mr. Blaine's " Political Discussions " men had not failed to
observe that long before he entered Congress he had clearly
enunciated the principle that " prosperity built upon the calam-
ities of other nations has a most insecure foundation." That
a prosperity built upon the prosperity of other nations is the
most secure and stable was seen to be but its correlative.
While neither- party took it up warmly, neither party was
willing entirely to abandon it, because of a manifest growing
belief in the policy. The Republican President who had slain
it put forth a feeble hand towards resuscitation, and the suc-
ceeding Democratic President approved a bill passed by Con-
gress in its favor. But it was a languid movement by men
who did not fully comprehend it. Not until by the mutations
of politics the matter was again relegated to Mr. Blaine, did its
spirit return into it. The idea of the brotherhood of nations
which lies always, if dormant, in the human heart, and had
blindly stirred for generations in the South and in the North,
through his insight took on, with enthusiastic cordiality on one
side and an equally enthusiastic welcome on the other, the form
and breath of life, as the Congress of all the Americas.

On October 2, 1889, in the diplomatic room of the State De-
partment, Mr. Blaine had the pleasure of welcoming the dele-
gates whose assembling marked a new epoch in the history of
the Western world.

" Gentlemen of the International American Conference :
Speaking for the Government of the United States, I bid you
welcome to this Capital. Speaking for the people of the United
States, I bid you welcome to every section and to every State
of the Union. You come in response to an invitation extended
by the President on the special authorization of Congress.
Your presence here is no ordinary event. It signifies much to

678 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

the people of all America to-day. It may signify far more in
the days to come. No Conference of nations has ever assembled
to consider the welfare of territorial possessions so vast and to
contemplate the possibilities of a future so great and so inspir-
ing. Those now sitting within these walls are empowered to
speak for nations whose borders are on both the great oceans,
whose northern limits are touched by the Arctic waters for a
thousand miles beyond the Straits of Behring, and whose south-
ern extension furnishes human habitations farther below the
equator than is elsewhere possible on the globe.

" The aggregate territorial extent of the nations here repre-
sented falls but little short of 12,000,000 of square miles —
more than three times the area of all Europe, and but little less
than one-fourth part of the globe ; while in respect to the power
of producing the articles which are essential to human life, and
those which minister to life's luxury, they constitute even a
larger proportion of the entire world. These great possessions
to-day have an aggregate population approaching 120,000,000,
but if peopled as densely as the average of Europe, the total
number would exceed 1,000,000,000. While considerations of
this character must inspire Americans, both South and North,
with the liveliest anticipations of future grandeur and power,
they must also impress them with a sense of the gravest re-
sponsibility touching the character and development of their
respective nationalities.

" The delegates I am addressing can do much to establish
permanent relations of confidence, respect, and friendship be-
tween the nations which they represent. They can show to the
world an honorable, peaceful conference of eighteen independ-
ent American Powers, in which all shall meet together on terms
of absolute equality ; a conference in which there can be no
attempt to coerce a single delegate against his own conception
of the interests of his nation ; a conference which will permit
no secret understanding on any subject, but will frankly pub-
lish to the world all its conclusions; a conference which will
tolerate no spirit of conquest, but will aim to cultivate an
American sympathy as broad as botli continents; a conference
which will form no selfish alliance against the older nations
from which we are proud to claim inheritance ; a conference,

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 679

in fine, which will seek nothing, propose nothing, endure noth-
ing that is not, in the general sense of all the delegates, timely
and wise and peaceful.

u And yet we cannot be expected to forget that our common
fate has made us inhabitants of the two continents which, at
the close of four centuries, are still regarded beyond the seas
as the new world. Like situations beget like sympathies and
impose like duties. We meet in firm belief that the nations of
America ought to be and can be more helpful, each to the
other, than they now are, and that each will find advantages
and profit from an enlarged intercourse with the others.

" We believe that we should be drawn together more closely
by the nlghways of the seas, and that at no distant day the rail-
way systems of the North and South will meet upon the isth-
mus and connect by laud routes the political and commercial
capitals of all America.

" We believe that hearty co-operation, based on hearty confi-
dence, will save all American states from the burdens and evils
which have long and cruelly afflicted the older nations of the
world.

" We believe that a spirit of justice, of common and equal
interest between the American states, will leave no room for
an artificial balance of power like unto that which has led to
wars abroad and drenched Europe in blood.

" We believe that friendship, avowed with candor and main-
tained with good faith, will remove from American states the
necessity of guarding boundary lines between themselves with
fortifications and military force.

" We believe that standing armies, beyond those which are
needful for public order and the safety of internal administra-
tion, should be unknown on both the American continents.

uWe believe that friendship and not force, the spirit of just
law and not the violence of the mob, should be the recognized
rule of administration between American nations and in Ameri-
can nations.

" To these subjects, and those which are cognate thereto, the
attention of this Conference is earnestly and cordially invited by
the Government of the United States. It will be a great gain
when we shall acquire that common confidence on which all

680 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

international friendship must rest. It will be a greater gain
when we shall be able to draw the people of all American nations
into close acquaintance with each other, an end to be facilitated
by more frequent and more rapid intercommunication. It will
be the greatest gain when the personal and commercial relations
of the American states, South and North, shall be so developed
and so regulated that each shall acquire the highest possible
advantage from the enlightened and enlarged intercourse of all.
" Before the Conference shall formally enter upon the discus-
sion of the subjects to be submitted to it I am instructed by the
President to invite all the delegates to be the guests of the Gov-
ernment of the United States during a proposed visit to various
sections of the country, with the double view of showing to our
friends from abroad the condition of the United States, and of
giving to our people in their homes the privilege and pleasure
of extending the warm welcome of Americans to Americans."

The Congress, escorted by Mr. W. E. Curtis, representing the
State Department, was received and entertained by the leading
Chambers of Commerce, and everywhere with abounding wel-
come. On the 18th of November it reassembled in Washing-
ton and began its deliberations, Mr. Blaine was elected its
president, and through its twenty weeks of existence received
from it every honor which personal respect, affection, and con-
fidence could give. It was not possible for him to preside over
all its deliberations, but whenever its affairs became too involved,
he was sent for, and all differences were quickly adjusted. He
never forgot that they were guests and not a Congress of Amer-
ican citizens elected by opposing parties ; that they were stran-
gers of another race who were to be made acquainted with our
ways of thought and speech and life, and in some cases even of
language, and to whom the hard hitting arguments of the hall
of the House of Representatives were not appropriate. Great
topics of international consequence were introduced and ably
and fully discussed by the convention. Many important meas-
ures were recommended. The Bureau of American Republics
became a permanent branch of the State Department and a true
intelligence office regarding the Western hemisphere. Regular
lines of steam navigation between the principal ports of North

WALKER BLAINE.

«.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 681

and South America, surveys for railroad systems and inter-
national banks were recommended ; and most important of all,
partial treaties of reciprocity, and arbitration instead of war, as
the true mode of settling difficulties.

Mr. Blaine's gratification in the fact and the work of the
conference was represented in this closing address, April 19,
1890.

" Gentlemen : I withhold for a moment the word of final
adjournment, in order that I may express to you the profound
satisfaction with which the Government of the United States
regards the work that has been accomplished by the Interna-
tional American Conference. The importance of the subjects
which have claimed your attention, the comprehensive intelli-
gence and watchful patriotism which you have brought to their
discussion, must challenge the confidence and secure the admi-
ration of the governments and peoples whom you represent;
while that larger patriotism which constitutes the fraternity of
nations has received from you an impulse such as the world has
not before seen.

" The extent and value of all that has been worthily achieved
by your Conference cannot be measured to-day. We stand too
near it. Time will define and heighten the estimate of your
work; experience will confirm our present faith ; final results
will be your vindication and your triumph.

" If, in this closing hour, the conference had but one deed to
celebrate, we should dare call the world's attention to the delib-
erate, confident, solemn dedication of two great continents to
Peace and to the prosperity which has Peace for its foundation.
We hold up this new Magna Charta, which abolishes war and
substitutes Arbitration between the American Republics, as the
first and great fruit of the International American Conference.
That noblest of Americans, the aged poet and philanthropist
Whittier, is the first to send his salutation and his benediction,
declaring : ' If in the spirit of peace the American Conference
agrees upon a rule of Arbitration which shall make war in this
hemisphere well-nigh impossible, its session will prove one of
the most important events in the history of the world.'

" May I express to you, gentlemen, my deep appreciation of

682 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

the honor you did me in calling me to preside over your delib-
erations! Your kindness has been unceasing, and for your
words of approval I offer you my sincerest gratitude.

" Invoking the blessing of Almighty God upon the patriotic
and fraternal work which has been here begun for the good of
mankind, I now declare the International American Conference
adjourned without day."

Without agreeing on all points, and with the fullest expres-
sion of individual opinion, the conference had responded to every
friendly sentiment and with touching sympathy, and had been
interested in every measure looking to closer communication
even where they had disputed or rejected details. The loving-
cup which they presented to Mr. Blaine seemed no mere per-
functory tribute, but a token of affectionate remembrance as
significant as beautiful, ever bearing witness in its three-fold
fellowship, of recognition by the three Americas of his great part
in procuring the congress, of his impartiality in its presidency,
and of their personal regard and esteem for him as its author
and president.

There was no delay on the part of Mr. Blaine in advancing
the work. He wrote a letter to the President, submitting the

7 o

report of the conference in favor of reciprocity, accompanying
it with powerful argument recommending it to the nation. This
letter the President transmitted to Congress in a special message
on the 19th of June, but the work was of surprising difficulty.
As ever, the masses of the people seemed to assimilate his idea
more readily than did those who are called their leaders. His
hardest battle was not with the rank and file, but with Congress.
Under the very eyes of the conference considering the subject
of reciprocity in trade and closely watching the action of Congress
on the tariff, Congress had removed duties on South American
products without receiving any concessions in return, thus taking
away from the Secretary the very element of exchange. Chile
and the Argentine Republic, which in accepting the invitation
had expressed the liveliest interest in the question of interchange,
saw the House of Representatives increasing the duty on the
only things Chile and the Argentines had to bring, and thus
found themselves without any motive to reciprocity. Before the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 683

tariff bill was even framed in committee, Mr. Blaine labored
to convince the committee that it would be wise to leave
to the President the treaty-making power for the advan-
tageous arrangements of reciprocal trade. He protested that
they were throwing away the most promising opportunity for
increasing our exports of breads tuffs and other provisions, to
the enormous advantage of the great agricultural sections.

He watched every detail. Any morning a Member might
receive a swift note from the Department of State.

Washington, April 10, 1890.

Dear Mr. McKinley : It is a great mistake to take hides from the free
list, where they have been for so many years.

It is a slap in the face to the South Americans with whom we are trying
to enlarge our trade. It will benefit the farmer by adding five to eight
per cent, to the price of his children's shoes.

It will yield a profit to the butcher only — the last man that needs it.
The movement is injudicious from beginning to end — in every form and
phase.

Pray stop it before it sees light. Such movements as this for protec-
tion will protect the Republican party into a speedy retirement.

Very hastily,

James G. Blaine.
Hon. William McKinley,

Chairman Ways and Means.

Singly and in committee, in House and Senate, he pressed
every consideration for an amendment of the bill so that the
opportunity of securing the admission of our surplus flour,
wheat, butter, and cheese, should not be thrown away by admit-
ting sugar free without receiving any concession in return.
Some legislators were largely opposed to any principle of
reciprocity in the tariff bill, or even to its incorporation into
the revenue laws of the country. Others favored it in a modi-
fied and general way with fluctuating faith, but without direct
opposition. Others were against it, many unwilling to retain
the duty on sugar even for a short time. They declared that the
people demanded and expected free sugar, and that until they
saw some tangible good result from reciprocity they would
not consent to be further burdened by this duty. Mr. Blaine
was also in favor of free sugar, but his plan gave free sugar as

684: BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

surely, if not as quickly, as the plan of Congress, with the dif-
ference that for every $100,000,000 consumed by our people on
the one plan, we should market $100,000,000 of the products
of American farms and factories, which under the other plan
would not be marketed at all. By day and by night, in his
own house and before the committee, by voice and pen, he ap-
pealed to the House and Senate, to the President and the people,
with argument of figures, with storm and stress, he protested
against such a sacrifice.

In his letter to the President he gave in abundant detail the
advantages accruing ; showed, for instance, that a single cargo
of the Mail Steamship Company was composed of articles from
thirty-six different States and Territories, and ever reiterated
that the meditated increase of new markets would be impossible,
if Congress gave away the duty on sugar which the conference
was willing to pay for.

Fifteen of the seventeen republics with which we have been in confer-
ence have indicated, by the votes of their representatives in the Inter-
national American Conference, and by other methods which it is not
necessary to define, their desire to enter upon reciprocal commercial
relations with the United States ; the remaining two express equal will-
ingness, could they be assured that their advances would be favorably
considered.

To escape the delay and uncertainty of treaties, it has been suggested
that a practicable and prompt mode of testing the question was to submit
an amendment to the pending tariff bill, authorizing the President to
declare the ports of the United States free to all the products of any
nation of the American hemisphere upon which no export duties are im-
posed, whenever and so long as such nation shall admit to its ports free
of all national, provincial (State), municipal, and other taxes our flour,
corn-meal and other breadstuff, preserved meats, fish, vegetables and
fruits, cotton-seed oil, rice and other provisions, including all articles of
food, lumber, furniture and other articles of wood, agricultural imple-
ments and machinery, mining and mechanical machinery, structural steel
and iron, steel rails, locomotives, railway cars and supplies, street cars,
and refined petroleum. I mention these particular articles because they
have been most frequently referred to as those with which a valuable ex-
change could be readily effected. The list could no doubt be profitably
enlarged by a careful investigation of the needs and advantages of both
the home and foreign markets.

The opinion was general among the foreign delegates that the legis-
lation herein referred to would lead to the opening of new and profitable
markets for the products of which we have so large a surplus, and thus

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 685

invigorate every branch of agricultural and mechanical industry. Of
course the exchanges involved in these propositions would be rendered
impossible if Congress, in its wisdom, should repeal the duty on sugar by
direct legislation, instead of allowing the same object to be attained by
the reciprocal arrangement suggested.

Iii the Senate committee rooms he made what the journals
of the day head-lined as a terrific attack on the ruinous
policy whose vehemence could not be concealed from public
knowledge, and which arrested the notice that unwarmed argu-
ment escaped. It has been said that no speech in modern times
has been fraught with such results as followed its delivery. He
declared that the repeal of the sugar duty would be the most
inexcusable piece of folly the Republican party was ever guilty
of ; that he would give two years of his life for two hours in the
Senate when the sugar schedule was under discussion. " Pass
this bill, and in 1892 there will not be a man in all the party so
beggared as to accept your nomination for the presidency."

There even went forth a report that he was over-earnest with
his Solons and that he brought his clenched fist down on the bill
lying before him with a vigor that sent his hat rebounding
from the table. Certainly it rebounded across the country.
" Blaine had smashed his hat on the McKinley Bill," and people
who did not usually trouble themselves as to what Congress
was doing in committee, began to look towards Washington.

He did not antagonize the bill in and of itself ; but he
thought it was bad policy, ill-timed and disturbing, and in
relation to reciprocity, disastrous. He feared that it would be
looked upon as an increase of duties in time of peace, not only
without cause, but against the tendency of the public mind
towards a lowering of duties. He accepted all that was good in
the tariff, but he would supplement it — and save it — with
reciprocity.

Individual supporters in Congress he found, but the legisla-
tive heart was hardened. He went to Bar Harbor, but the battle
did not lag. He met the cry that reciprocity was the abandon-
ment of protection with the explanation that reciprocity simply
" widens the field of protection " — could only exist under the
system of protection. The object of protection is to equalize
conditions between Americans and their foreign competitors,

686 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

but not to give one class of Americans superior advantages over
another class. When this equality of conditions is secured, all
that protection is meant to do has been done, and all beyond
that is producing inequality of conditions at home. He put
himself in communication with business men, millers' associa-
tions in Minnesota, grain dealers in Maine. He appealed from
the committee rooms to the court of the people. He wrote to
Mr. Frye, for all the world to read on July 11 :

It would certainly be a very extraordinary policy on the part of our
government, just at this time, to open our market without charge of duty
to the enormous crops of sugar raised in the two Spanish islands. Cuba
and Porto Rico furnish the United States with nearly or quite one-half of
the sugar which we consume, and we are far larger consumers than any
other nation in the world. To give a free market to this immense product
of the Spanish plantations at the moment Spain is excluding the products
of American farms from her market would be a policy as unprecedented as
it would be unwise. . . . The charge against the protective policy
which has injured it most is that its benefits go wholly to the manufacturer
and the capitalist, and not at all to the fanner. You and I well know that
this is not true, but still it is the most plausible and therefore the most
hurtful argument made by the free trader. Here is an opportunity where
the farmer may be benefited — primarily, undeniably, richly benefited.
Here is an opportunity for a Republican Congress to open the markets of
forty million of people to the products of American farms. Shall we seize
the opportunity or shall we throw it away ?

I do not doubt that in many respects the tariff bill pending in the Senate
is a just measure, and that most of its provisions are in accordance with the
wise policy of protection. But there is not a section or a line in the entire
bill that will open a market for another bushel of wheat or another barrel
of pork. If sugar is now placed on the free list without exacting impor-
tant trade concessions in return, we shall close the door for a profitable
reciprocity against ourselves. I think you will find some valuable hints on
this subject in the President's brief message of June 19, with as much
practical wisdom as was ever stated in so short a space.

Our foreign market for breadstuff's grows narrower. Great Britain is
exerting every nerve to secure her bread supplies from India, and the rapid
expansion of the wheat area in Russia gives us a powerful competitor in
the markets of Europe. It becomes us therefore to use every opportunity
for the extension of our market on both of the American continents. With
nearly one hundred million dollars' worth of sugar seeking our market
every year, we shall prove ourselves most unskilled legislators if we do
not secure a large field for the sale and consumption of our breadstuff's and
provisions. The late conference of American republics proved the exist-
ence of a common desire for closer relations. Our Congress should take

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 687

up the work where the International Conference left it. Our field of com-
mercial development and progress lies south of us.

These rapid and repeated blows told. The people always
listened to him, listened for him, and they began to find out
what was going on. The voice of the farmer and the manufact-
urer was heard. Stubborn Congressmen began to waver and
the half-hearted to gather courage. July 17, six days after Mr.
Blaine's first letter to Mr. Frye, the President wrote hopefully :

I have been thinking over the sugar question and have a suggestion to
offer. When I get it tested at the Treasury Department, I will send it to
you for your opinion. Things have gone so far that I do not think we can
avoid free sugar, but if my plan will stand criticism, as I believe it will, we
can still hold the string in our hands. I am in negotiations for reciprocity.

July 29 Mr. J. W. Foster despaired of the Ways and Means,
and thought " the only hope there is is in the influence of the
sentiment of the party in the country which is strongly with Mr.
Blaine." By August 9 it was reported that all Republicans on
Finance Committee of the Senate except one, favor some sort of
reciprocity, and the President was working with Ways and Means
to bring them in. August 11 a rabid opponent of reciprocity on
Ways and Means admitted that " Blaine's plan had run like a
prairie fire all over my district." Others complained that Mr.
Blaine had " destroyed whatever advantage the Republicans
might have gained from the Tariff Bill and made its passage by
the Senate unimportant. People had gone crazy on it." By
August 23 it was discovered that " three out of four Republi-
cans were in hearty accord against the obnoxious bill which yet
was forced through the House against the judgment of the
majority and in the teeth of the protest of the country, and the
only salvation is to throw open the gates to commerce exten-
sion." " Since the publication and consequent agitation of the
plan proposed by Secretary Blaine, the proposition has grown
in public favor to such an extent that some legislation will
probably be enacted." By September 1, one of the stubborn
opponents on the Committee on Finance from Wisconsin de-
clared that reciprocity had come to be a popular craze and the
committee would have to go with it. The Iowa papers warned

688 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINM.

their representative on the Ways and Means that before he voted
against reciprocity he "better come home and see the folks. The
mails are too slow and the telegraph wire is too small to convey
to him a proper idea of Iowa sentiment on that question." The
Produce Exchanges, Boards of Trade, Chambers of Commerce,
were set in motion, and resolutions began to pour in. In
Nebraska they talked with great concentration. At a political
convention a speaker attacked Mr. Blaine's motives in the
movement, whereupon every other man in the convention stood
on his chair and yelled " Blaine " for twenty minutes, till the
unhappy speaker left not only the platform, but the hall.

" The people out West have all gone crazy on the subject,"
cried one Independent in Congress, and protested that he
would never consent to the proposed amendment of the Tariff
Bill. It was a dramatic exhibition of the magnetic man. It
was a move to keep himself before the people. He was posing
as a friend of the farmer and manufacturer, as the apostle of a
new doctrine in politics. There the remnant that would not
join the procession and offer up incense to Blaine began to con-
sent to modify and amend the bill, " for political reasons ; the
people had gone so crazy over the idea that if it were rejected
and hard times came on, every fool in the country would lay it
to the failure of Congress to adopt Blaine's suggestions." They
did " not believe there was anything in it, — all buncombe, —
but the tide was sweeping that way and Congress must go
with it." Mr. Blaine spoke in Waterville, and the speech was
issued as a pamphlet which men asked for by the hundred.
"I read with interest and gratification your very strong, clear
speech at Waterville," wrote the President, " and on the whole I
think the temper and disposition of our people both in Senate
and House better than it was a few weeks ago." Cresson, Sep-
tember 10, he wrote : " The result of your Maine election was
very gratifying and is already giving courage to our people in
other States. . . . You will have noticed that the Reci-
procity Amendment passed the Senate with only two Republican
votes in the negative. The House Committee will, I think,
readily accept it, if the difference as to free sugar can be
adjusted."

October 1 the Tariff Bill with the reciprocity clause became a

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 689

law. It was not so wholly gracious in form as Mr. Blaine
would have chosen. It had a slight flavor of retaliation, at
variance with that sentiment to which he had appealed in the
conference, and to which only he wished to appeal in the
nation — that sentiment of good-will and common benefit to
which our Southern neighbors so readily respond, from which
reciprocity springs, and which caused it to be said that what-
ever an intercontinental railroad might do for humanity, the
desire and project of it would do more.

For immediate political effect the Tariff Bill had unhappily
yielded too late to the sweet reasonableness of reciprocity. The
elections were on before the people felt sure that the Tariff
Reciprocity fight was off. What they were sure of was that
" Blaine had smashed his hat on the McKinley Bill." A Re-
publican majority of thirty-four in the House of Representa-
tives had become a Democratic majority of one hundred and
forty-eight. Nine Republican States had elected Democratic
governors.

". . . How glad lam," wrote Mr. Whittier, "that Mr.
Blaine stands out clear of the wreck of the Republican part}r
at the last election. He is stronger than ever. I was convinced
in the outset that the Tariff Bill was a great blunder. We have
had quite too much of that."

Nov. 8, 1890, Mr. Blaine wrote to a friend : " I confess I do
not look forward with confidence to the fate of the Republican
party. The power was in their hands after the victory of 1888,
but patrimony has been wasted as a spendthrift throws away
his fortune."

But the Tariff Bill was law, with a reciprocity clause, which,
if not everything that could be desired, was yet a good working
clause, and it was assiduously Avorked.

On the 5th of February, 1891, Mr. Blaine had the happiness
to see a proclamation by the President of a convention between
the United States and Brazil agreed upon by Secretary Blaine
and Sefior Mendonca, for securing reciprocal trade between the
two countries — a measure which was considered and character-
ized as the most important step in the commercial development
of the country that had been taken in many years. The scope
of the treaty was so large as to reach the remotest corner of

690 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

the country in its stimulus of the export trade. It was es-
pecially gratifying to conclude the arrangement with Senor
Mendonca, who had long deplored that " The two great nations
of America live as two great strangers, instead of two great
friends with common interests, supplying to each other almost
all they need to import." On May 19, 1889, from Rio de
Janeiro, he had hoped for " a treaty made under the views of the
United States Senate, just when Congress will have on hand
the tariff subject, to do good and rapid work, and change the
commercial condition of our relations, improve them, increase
them. . . . The idea is very popular in Brazil where a few
Conservatives, afraid of the great Republic, are the only
opponents."

The work was not so rapid as Senor Mendonca hoped, but it
was as good — so good that free-traders made especial efforts to
belittle it, and Englishmen sent from Brazil to the English
press mendacious and brutal abuse of both governments, but
could not check the tide. The Brazilian treaty was followed
by others both in South America and in Europe and in the
islands of the sea. The barrel of pork and the barrel of flour
were a thousandfold realized to the farmer. Germany with
her beet sugar as a basis, Cuba and Porto Rico and Spain were
all ripe for a skilful reciprocity. Mr. Reid in France, Mr.
Phelps in Germany, Mr. Foster in Spain, Mr. Grant in Austria,
pushed hard and well with the administration, and though the
fight for the American hog was long and sometimes direct
and ugly, and sometimes indirect and with deadly civility, the
barriers against him were at length taken down, and he walked
into the markets of Europe, sanitary, free, and profitable.
Ultimately some twenty treaties of reciprocity were negotiated,
while the Louisiana sugar interests, on the border-land of sugar
produce and therefore always endangered, were protected by a
bounty law, so that without disaster to any, the statistics of
success were innumerable, and Mr. Blaine saw not only the
clear and definite beginning, but the orderly and beneficent
development of his policy of peace, of mutual benefit, of prac-
tical human brotherhood.

Europe heard the " triumphant shouts of victory coming from
the United States, our transatlantic rival. To-day," said

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 691

the Frankfort Zeitung, December 10, 1891, the leading com-
mercial paper of Germany, " let us look at the American
policy of commercial negotiations and compare it with the
system introduced by Bismarck. . . . The commercial
ideas of the American Secretary of State, Mr. Blaine's, are
entirely original. They are contained in Article 3 of the
famous McKinley Tariff. . . . This article was inserted by
Mr. Blaine, a friendly opponent of Mr. McKinley, and has in
the latest commercial negotiations proven its eminent wisdom
most brilliantly. . . . Mr. Blaine's idea has secured for the
United States treaties with Brazil, Cuba, and with others of
the South American States, and thus brings Mr. Blaine's great
Pan-American scheme nearer realization. . . . Mr. Blaine's
idea has already forced Germany, Denmark, Austria, and France
to repeal their prohibitions of American meat, and Italy is on
the point of doing the same. But the documents we reprint
to-day constitute Blaine's masterpiece. The Central European
tariff union has been rendered ineffective with reference to the
United States. The German tariff on agricultural product was
to be reduced only in favor of Italy and Austria, and to be re-
tained against Russia and America because the latter nations
do not enjoy ' the most favored nations' privileges.'
Mr. Blaine, however, has completely upset these calculations,
and made the new tariff on agricultural products apply to the
United States as well. . . . These reductions will greatly
reduce the cost of provisions and food, and the victory of the
United States is therefore the victory of the poor man."

And it was asserted, not by partisans but by critics, that this
victory of the poor man glittering in the magic word ''reciproc-
ity " embracing his " Pan-American plan of commercial union, at
first in 1881, coupled with the arbitrament of the United States
in South American disputes and the building of an Andean
railway, was the most comprehensive scheme of statesmanship
propounded in this hemisphere," and that it was gained by no
fanfaronade of costly commissioners and deputations, but was
based upon " the most accurate knowledge of the needs and
jesources of the South American republics ever possessed by an
American statesman," and was obtained "by employing and
developing the trained instincts of business."

692 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

It would be impracticable to give even a list of the subjects
which engaged Mr. Blaine's attention and action during those
busy years. Whether it were a nation, a project, a man or a
woman, from ready and apparently inexhaustible resources, he
derived an opinion, overflowed with information, despatched
business. Asked, with other absent members of the Cabinet, for a
written opinion regarding an extra session of Congress, he wrote
the President, from Bar Harbor, August 25, 1889 :

. . . It must also be remembered that there is a superstitions feeling in
the public mind against extra sessions. The extra session of 1797 was the
first step in the ruin of John Adams's administration and the ultimate ex-
tinction of the Federal party. Madison, who ought to have been a strong
President, left the record of being a weak one, and the result was largely
ascribed to the two extra sessions which he insisted on calling, against the
better judgment of the war party, then headed by Henry Clay. Yan
Buren began his administration, in 1837, with an extra session and
stumbled on to the end, which was his political destruction. Tyler's
defection and break-down and the fatal wound of the Whig party
dated, in the popular mind, from the extra session of 1841, which was
called by your grandfather.

I do not desire to detain you with a political history, but I doubt if from
the foundation of the government any solid advantage has ever been gained
from an extra session except in two instances : that in 1803 which Jefferson
called to provide the money for the Louisiana purchase, and that of July 4,
1861, when Lincoln was preparing for the suppression of the Rebellion.

Writing to the President from Bar Harbor, August 10, 1891,
he said :

In regard to the purchase of the Danish colonies, St. George and St.
Lucia, my prepossessions are all against it until we are by fate in posses-
sion of the larger West Indies. They are very small, of no great com-
mercial value, and in case of war would require us to defend them, and to
defend them at a great cost. At the same time they lack strategic value.
They are destined to become ours, but among the last of the West Indies
that would be taken.

I think there are only three places that are of value enough to be taken
that are not continental. One is Hawaii, and the others are Cuba and
Porto Rico. Cuba and Porto Rico are not imminent and will not be for a
generation. Hawaii may come up for decision at any unexpected hour,
and I hope we shall be prepared to decide it in the affirmative.

On September 2, 1891, he wrote the President :

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 69

I make reply to your enclosure about Mackey's projected cable to San
Domingo. In an unguarded moment, or one in which the government of
Brazil failed to appreciate the importance of the question, a Frenchman
was given the exclusive right to land cables from the United States, for the
paltry sum of $75,000. He began 1,200 miles above Rio at Para, and laid
a cable to San Domingo. It is simply a cable beginning at Para and end-
ing in the West Indies, and requires a land service of $1.95 a word from
Para to Rio — vastly more expensive than the European line.

It would be an immense help to this cable to get into the United States,
and John Mackey wishes to lay one to San Domingo, and though the ex-
tensions do not join, despatches may be handed from one office to the other.
This is a mere pretence of not being an extension of the Para line. The
reason I am opposed to granting it is that it gives no through route to
Brazil, and does not essentially increase our telegraphic facilities, for we
already have a cable through the West Indies via Florida and Cuba. But
Mackey's projected line will insure the West India line permanently, and
prevent a direct line from New York to Rio, because it will absorb the
local business which a direct line would have at special points that it must
touch. We greatly need a line to Rio direct, and I do not believe the
Frenchman can permanently hold his privilege. When he gives it up will
be our time, and we would be working against ourselves to give away all
the local business in advance to Mackey. We have at present a Brazilian
service via England and France, at 85 francs per word. Whereas, the pro-
jected line to Brazil, by Mackey's cable, to San Domingo, would cost as
much as or more than $3.00 a word, the land service alone being, as I have
stated, $1.95. This in brief is the ground I took during your absence on
the Pacific coast. I am satisfied it is correct, and it will be seriously com-
promising the country to contribute to the monopoly of Mackey and the
Frenchman. Our policy has always been not to allow the landing of a line
which was not connected freely with other lines. Therefore the pretence
is made of a division at San Domingo, and Mackey assumes to have an
independent line, avoiding by a ruse that inhibition. I wish you would not
touch the thing until I can see you in person.

September 5, the President replied that he would " of course
hold the whole matter over until we can consider it together."

The company failing to carry the point with the Secretary of
State took the matter before a committee of Congress, where
Mr. Blaine also appeared and argued the question with such
force and fire that his position was adopted by the committee
without a dissenting vote.

On September 23, 1891, Mr. Blaine wrote the President :

It is of the highest possible importance in my view that there be no
treaty of reciprocity (with Canada) .

694 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

They will aim at natural products, to get all the products of the farm
on us in exchange for Heaven knows what. They certainly will not give
us manufactured articles, as that will interfere with their own and break
down their tariff. This might be pushed by our friends against the natural
products, but I would not put the subject to risk by saying we will take
the tariff if you will throw in the manufactures, because when the Liberals
come into power they will agree to that.

I would cut the whole thing up by the roots, and I think J. W. Foster, an
Eastern Republican, say of Pennsylvania, and a Western Democrat among
the farmers, would be a safe commission to leave the subject to.

I think it would be one of the worst things among the farmers in a polit-
ical point of view we could do, and we cannot afford to lose a vote now
until after the presidential election. They have got it into their heads that
we did something for them in the McKinley tariff, and giving away natural
jDroducts by reciprocity would end the whole matter. It would be con-
sidered a betrayal of the agricultural interests. The fact is we do not
want any intercourse with Canada except through the medium of a tariff,
and she will find that she has a hard row to hoe and will ultimately, I
believe, seek admission to the Union.

The poor showing that Canada made in the late census was a revelation
to the Canadians themselves, and if we do not grant them reciprocity they
will make a poorer showing ten years hence. We are tending to have the
great majority of the farmers with us. Let us encourage them by every
means we can use and not discourage them by anything. We will break
the alliance before six months if we steadily maintain this policy.

Very sincerely yours,
(Signed) James G. Blaine.

A woman whose cause he upheld through prolonged compli-
cations in foreign companies said that his questions gave her
confidence, though often she did not see their bearings till re-
vealed by developments months afterwards, and when her cause
was triumphing over painfully prolonged and bitter contention
she found grief keener than joy, because he who had done so much
to bring about her triumph was not here to witness it.

The condemnation of an American woman, Mrs. May brick,
by an English court of law came in the summer of 1889. The
President supposed her guilty, she being condemned according
to the forms of law in a constitutionally governed land. Mr.
Blaine, no doubt, would have believed the same, but that his
son, confined to his room by an accident, had amused his en-
forced leisure by reading the trial in the English daily papers.
When he had completed the judge's charge, he threw down

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 695

the paper exclaiming, "That judge ought to be impeached, and
if he were in this country he would be." Naturally Mr.
Blaine lent himself gladly to the effort of Mrs. Maybrick's
family for a rehearing or release. After Walker's death the
cause took on an added interest. In consultation with high
legal English counsel, he took extraordinary personal measures
for her relief, but always within the strict limits of interna-
tional courtesy, never assuming authority or presuming inter-
ference. The President gave full countenance to his measures,
and Mrs. Harrison, with the President's consent and coope-
ration, signed a petition for the release of the prisoner — a
prisoner pronounced by the Lord Chief Justice of England
wrongfully convicted and wrongfully detained.

The interposition was not successful. The English govern-
ment could not force the American Secretary of State into
yielding England supremacy of the seas or of the markets of
the world, but they could keep in prison, against the protest of
their own Chief Justice and without investigation, an Ameri-
can woman whom Mr. Blaine desired to release to her mother
and to her infant children, and they did. She remains in prison
to this day.

All these, and a thousand other important matters, personal
and national, whose records pile the shelves of the State Depart-
ment, Mr. Blaine prosecuted with undiminished energy, but with
an aching heart.

When he established himself in Washington a second time as
Secretary of State, he leased and afterwards bought the Rodgers
house on Lafayette square — an old-fashioned structure standing
four-square to the sunshine, fronting the beautiful park and
opening wide windows to the Treasury columns, to the White
House curves, to the Potomac, and the green hills beyond. It
was an airy, sunny, ample, and delightful home. Perhaps never
in his life was he happier, more radiant with satisfaction, than
when, with all his family around him, he opened that house to
his friends in the winter of 1889-90.

On January 10, Walker leaving a friend's house, met his
mother entering, joined her, reentered, made the visit and drove
home with her, went to his own room, lay down upon his bed,
and never left it except as he was carried from room to room to

696 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

assuage the mortal restlessness of pneumonia. On Wednesday,
January 15, he died.

The day after the funeral Mr. Blaine sent for Mr. Hitt, who
answered the summons with dread. To his surprise he found
Mr. Blaine calmly waiting to read to him for consultation one
of his most important Behring-sea despatches, which he was
then preparing. Presently Mr. Hitt took a certain exception.
Mr. Blaine looked at him steadfastly a moment, then threw down
the paper, " One week ago to-day, Walker made to me that same
criticism. When I came home from his funeral yesterday, I
wanted to lie down and die. I knew there was nothing to save
me but work, and I took up this."

His daughter, Alice, had been far from well, but she came
home with her husband and two little boys to attend her
brother's funeral. On the evening of the 29th of January,
while the Pan-American Conference was in the drawing-
room, her father was hurriedly summoned to her room where
she was feared to be dying. She rallied, and her husband, who
had started for his military post, returned in season to receive
her last sigh, but no smile of recognition. She died on the 2d
of February. No hush fell on the beloved names and no for-
bidding aspect was permitted to grief. Sunshine and the dear
faces of friends were not for one moment banished. Emmons,
broken with his own loss, stood guard over his father and
brought the double solace of his happy home as often as possible
to the desolated house ; but the world was changed.

As Mr. Blaine went on in his work from strength to strength
his friends gathered about him with the old hope, the old pur-
pose of flinging his name to the front; but he could no longer
bear it. It was not simply that he was unwilling, — he could
not tolerate the thought.

The popular determination that Mr. Blaine should be the
next President was proof against every form of opposition. It
involved no censure of the President, and was coupled with ap-
proval of his administration. It was the culmination of a move-
ment that had been growing for twenty years and now saw
itself on the eve of triumph. It could not be created by the
National Republican Committee, but it was ascertained and
urged upon Mr. Blaine by that committee whose authority and

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 697

whose reputation depend upon the accuracy with which it dis-
covers and the skill with which it enforces public opinion.

The results of the researches of the committee throughout
the United States may be summed up in one composite para-
graph from hundreds, perhaps thousands, of reports.

There is widespread and deep-seated dissatisfaction in the
West. Any Republican candidate who cannot carry the West-
ern States cannot be elected. We must have a national standard-
bearer whose name would arouse the old-time enthusiasm. He
must in and of himself represent something. He must be the
embodiment of some great principle in American politics.
President Harrison, if nominated, could not be elected. If
he is renominated, the party will be defeated. It is impossi-
ble for him to carry Ohio, Indiana, Illinois. As the time for
the convention approaches, Mr. Harrison will see the wishes
of the Republicans, and he cannot help but advise his own
retirement. It is idle to talk about the wise and patriotic
administration the President has given us, as to which there is
no controversy, so long as the fact remains that he has no hold
on the affections of the people. The people want Mr. Blaine,
and he owes it as a duty to his party and his country to let
the people have their way about it. If he will take the
nomination he can have it without asking for it, and he can
be both nominated and elected with a whirl. If he is nom-
inated, no more attention need be paid to Ohio. At the
Convention of League Clubs in Cincinnati at least seven out
of every ten delegates and Republicans were for Blaine. He
can take Illinois from any man, and he is more popular in Indi-
ana than Harrison. Nineteen counties visited in New York are
unanimous and enthusiastic for Blaine, and unless he himself
prevents it, he will have all the country delegates from Michi-
gan. Kansas has but one man, and that is Blaine. Blaine is the
choice of ninety-nine out of a hundred of the Republicans of
California. At a conference in Chicago of forty-two leading
men from Ohio to Nebraska representing nine States, every man
was for Blaine, and reported the tide to be irresistible, and Blaine
himself could not stop it. He is the only man that can carry
Wisconsin. The sentiment in the North-west is overwhelmingly
for him. The feeling is stronger and more earnest than ever

698 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

before. This is esj)ecially true of the younger element of the
party, as well as among those who have hitherto opposed him.
Added to his dash and brilliancy is the well-grounded belief that
he is the ablest and safest American citizen we have in public
life. Reciprocity will bring back to us the farmers of this
great North-west. The feeling of a very large portion of
Western Republicans is, " It looks like Blaine and victory ;
if not, then Harrison and defeat." Blaine can have the
nomination by acclamation if he will allow it. He is the only
man the Republicans can surely elect. Harrison is the only
man who cannot be elected at all. Blaine has the entire
credit of the reciprocity argument, and it meets with favor
everywhere. It will bring back to us some of the Mug-
wumps, and give us many Democrats who are business men.
Catholics desire to see the Burchard blunder corrected. His
course in the State Department has absolutely contradicted
the lies about his intentions when Garfield was President.
The sentiment of New York is overwhelmingly for Blaine.
There are two Blaine Irishmen for every one in 1884. The
Chile business has exploded the " Jingo " accusation. The
State Department's magnificent administration has slain the
slanders of 1884. The renunciation of 1888 has killed the cry
of personal ambition. The reciprocity and the Pan-American
Congress will conciliate many, will stir enthusiasm, and appeal
to the imagination.

A leading Republican of New York wrote on August
24, 1891 :

The stalwarts of this State, who were disaffected- towards you in 1884,
except the few who went over permanently to the Democracy, will be not
only your loyal but your ardent friends if you are nominated in 1892.

On January 15, 1892, the chairman of the Republican National
Committee wrote to Mr. Blaine :

It must be very gratifying to you to see Europe, which always gives
praise grudgingly, plainly conceding the superior scope of your statesman-
ship.

All the Republican business men are attributing prosperity and large
business very largely to Republican legislation, and to the developments
of reciprocity, etc. . . . The business world . . . will make the

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAItfE. 6$9

political world recognize it. I base all our chances for success on this one
great fact, and on the growing popularity of reciprocity, which will bring
new markets for the American farmer, enlarged trade for American
merchants, increased employment for American labor, and good for every
class.

As you represented this in the creation, so will the people look to you
only for the enlargement of it as it shall develop, and for protecting it
against the counteracting legislation with which other countries will try
to overthrow it. The Germans who were weak as to you in 184 are now
the strongest advocates of reciprocity, and they are coming back to you by
the tens of thousands, and you are to-day the most popular man with this
element. I could give you scores of other good reasons ; but I want you
to think over these very powerful and sufficient reasons which I have here
enumerated.

Yery truly yours,

J. S. Clarkson.

P.S. You are the only man, too, who can draw from the Farmers1
Alliance the necessary votes to keep the party in power in the North-western
States.

Another prominent Republican wrote Mr. Blaine, January 30,

1892:

I have a letter from General Clarkson to-day in which he says he had
been over the same ground with you that he and I went over in your room,
but that while you are feeling well in health and spirits you are inclined
the same way as then. Is it not possible to change your views on this ? li
so we will all join in the prayer that it may come to pass.

I was down in Alabama and Florida last week, and find through all that
country administration men are at work for delegates to the next national
convention. A common feeling pervades the whole of that country, that
black and white all want you. Of course I have very many friends there
and elsewhere, but I state to you the one sentiment is, that all desire you,
not especially in antagonism to President Harrison, but simply a wish of
the people, that what you have so fairly earned should come to you.

Notwithstanding this, and in full view and recognition of it,
Mr. Blaine wrote as follows :

Washington, February 6, 1892.
Hon. J. S. Clarkson, Chairman of the Republican National Committee:

My dear Sir : I am not a candidate for the Presidency, and my name
will not go before the Republican National Convention for the nomination.
I make this announcement in due season.

To those who have tendered me their support I owe sincere thanks, and
am most grateful for their confidence. They will, I am sure, make earnest

700 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAWW.

effort in the approaching contest, which is rendered specially important lrv
reason of the industrial and financial policies of the government beino-
at stake. The popular decision on these issues is of great moment and
will be of far-reaching consequence.

Very sincerely yours,

James G. Blaine.

A fortnight afterward, Mr. Blaine in declining an invitation
wrote :

17 Madison Place, Washington, February 20, 1892.
Gen. Russell A. Alger, Detroit, Michigan :

My dear Sir: I regret that I cannot be present at your club meeting
on the 22d. Official engagements forbid. But I cannot refrain from send-
ing a word of good cheer on the prospects of the Republican party. On
all leading measures relating to the industrial and financial interests of the
people we are strong and growing stronger. On the contrary, our oppo-
nents are weak and growing weaker. They are divided ; we are united.
If we do not win it is our fault. We shall be justly censurable, if with
such great issues involved every Republican does not feel that he is ap-
pealed to personally, and that victory in the election depends on him.

Very sincerely yours,

James G. Blaine.

But the movement went on like the irresistible force of
natural phenomena. Probably it had never stopped. It was
checked by Mr. Blaine in 1888, but only for the time. Each
achievement as Secretary of State increased its momentum.
Great hope had been cherished of a cleavage of the party from
him on the McKinley bill, but Mr. McKinley himself had been
one of the earliest converts to reciprocity, and Mr. Blaine had
given especial help to Mr. McKinley in his election, and now
reciprocity which the builders had rejected had become the
head of the corner. Political argument and personal attack
having thus failed, the opposition to him centred on the ques-
tion of health. To this his traits and his experience lent some
countenance. His worst vice was a mind hospitabty inclined
to illness. It must be admitted that a drug and a doctor had
irresistible, even hereditary, charms for him. In his intense
life perhaps it may be pardoned him if he loved the shelter and
seclusion of illness. His most skilful treatment was a judicious
admixture of badinage and nursing. Mr. Hale used to say

EMMONS BLAINE.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 70l

that all that saved his life in a long brisk walk with Mr. Blaine
was the latter's pausing till Mr. Hale should come up, to ask
" Hale, how do I look? "

In spite of the badinage, there must have been some occult
cause. His splendidly sound physical organization had never
been weakened by dissipation. He indulged sparingly in wine,
used tobacco in no form, and could outwork all his private sec-
retaries, although they were loyal to him with an unselfish de-
votion. But although work seemed never to ^veary him, never
prevented sleep or was followed by reaction, seemed not work,
not ploughing up details, but the realization of a vision and there-
fore a gratification and not an exhaustion, there was with all his
strength a delicacy of organization that could not with impunity
be violated. Slander and abuse never ceased to be a shock, the
impact of something foreign to his nature. By what process who
shall say, but once surely, giving no outward sign till the catas-
trophe came, every physical and mental power, even to con-
sciousness, went down under it. Use bred the man to habit,
and this never occurred again — but it may well be that the
strongest outposts were never wholly renewed. An hereditary
gout was subdued largely by natural correct living, but even
suppressed gout has its revenges. A peculiar debility, to which,
especially in his later years, he was subject, appeared — in short,
fever, sometimes slight, sometimes severe, sometimes alternating
with chills, always without apparent adequate cause, followed
by general prostration, local weakness, and slow tedious re-
covery. The two severest attacks were in Milan in 1888, and
in New York in 1891. The latter was after an intense and pro-
longed — one might also say fierce — work in enforcing his
reciprocity theory upon an unwilling Congress ; but the other
was in the midst of a long holiday. Neither was attended as
was the first with collapse, and only the second by even the
slight delirium of fever ; but probably after each attack he
never wholly recovered the lost ground, although his work would
not bear such witness, and he certainly never recovered, if he
ever possessed, confidence in his own health. This fact added
itself as a ready and real reason against anything to which he
felt himself disinclined. After his illness in New York, May,
1891, he returned to Maine, where he remained until October,

702 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

receiving the kindest consideration from the President, who never
urged work upon him, but always desired his consultation and
cooperation.

With a whole presidential campaign turning upon the state
of his health, Mr. Blaine received more than poetic justice for
whatever sanitary weaknesses he may have yielded to. He was
at intervals of a few days supplied by the press with pulse, tem-
perature, appetite, color, gait, smile, and the corresponding
sensation, and only a sense of humor saved him from extreme
annoyance. " Good morning, Mr. Secretary," said one of a
group of reporters at the door of the State Department ; " par-
ticularly glad to see you. If you had not appeared to-day, we
were going to give you a typhoid fever." " I know nothing
about my health," he said to an inquirer, " until I read the New
York papers."

On a visit to New York in the winter of 1892, he indulged in
the little jest of admitting all reporters who called, and all at
once, — between twenty and thirty. " I am just as you see me,
no better, no worse."

Mr. Frye called upon him about two months before the con-
vention. " You an invalid ? I never saw a woman look hand-
somer. Pink lips, white face, bright eyes, sitting up. I'd keep
sick if I were you, and send for everybody to come and see me.
Now you can take back that letter. You can trust me. You
know there have been times when I was for your nomination,
and times when I was against it. This I think is your time.
You can be nominated and elected. Even Massachusetts is all
for you. You need not mind the campaign. We don't want
anything of you in the campaign. Go to England if you want
to." But he could not be moved.

When Mr. Hitt was leaving, shortly before the convention, he
had occasion to call on Mr. Blaine. He put both hands on Mr.
Hitt's shoulders and said to him earnestly, "Don't involve your
future."

The Canadian Welland Canal Commissioners were in the
State Department, and he was sparkling with the exhilaration of
the interview. " My doctors tell me to work, and I feel this
morning equal to doing anything. I have been hacking those
fellows in there for two hours with great delight/' And Mr.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 703

Foster said it was wonderful how he ran them down, " so quickly
I could hardly keep track of him myself sometimes. He would
put a question and follow it out till they were all wound up."

He occupied himself too at this time with plans for the Inter-
national Silver Conference, a work requiring much skill and
delicate negotiation.

The pressure gained force and volume. " Whoever, in my
judgment," wrote a prominent politician, on April 4, 1892, " is
elected President on the Republican ticket this year will be
a man who can get the Farmers Alliance and the Knights
of Labor vote. Whoever cannot get that vote ought not to
be nominated, because his election is not sure. You are the
only Republican leader who can command this support. Both
the Knights and the Alliances are anxious for your nomination,
and will support you, if nominated. If any other Republican
is put at the head of our ticket, there will probably be a third
ticket, and the election may be thrown into the House of Rep-
resentatives.

"Your friends, who are legion, do not feel like offending you
by crowding the nomination upon you, in spite of and in dis-
regard of your inclination and wishes. But if it were believed
that you would stand it, nothing even now can prevent your
nomination. In other words, James G. Blaine, and he only, can
prevent his being the next President."

This, and the following letter, under date of May 28, 1892,
from a gentleman who had been a delegate from New York to
the Republican Convention of 1884, and again in 1888, urging
the importance of Mr. Blaine's accepting the nomination, are
but two specimens of innumerable letters received at this time,
while the personal pressure from day to day was enormous.

" The people here are unanimous for him. Until the past few
days there has been a quiet pervading the ranks of the Repub-
lican party amounting almost to indifference. ... I do
not think there has ever been a time when Mr. Blaine was as
strong with the people as to-day, and if Cleveland is the nomi-
nee of the Democratic party I believe there are thousands of
Democrats in this State who would support Blaine. Two or
three of the Hill leaders have so stated to me. . . .

" Since the papers have again begun to discuss the possibility

704 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

of his candidacy, the people are wide-awake and enthusiastic.
The rank and file of the people are all for him. ... A
gentleman who represents prominent manufacturing works
of Dunkirk, and who travels all over the country and meets
laboring men in similar institutions, informed him that it was
surprising the number of Republican workingmen who declared
they would not vote for Harrison if nominated. I do not believe
that he could possibly carry this State, and I feel confident that
Mr. Blaine would carry it easily, and they would not steal the
State from him a second time either."

Here the pen fell from the fingers thus far guided by a great
brain, a faithful heart, and an inflexible conscience.

A humbler and less skilful hand merely puts together the
notes and memoranda left upon the writer's desk.

H. P. S.

Mr. Blaine had now accomplished the great purposes which
led him to accept the post of Secretary of State. In a little
over three years he had settled a larger number of important
questions, and to the national advantage, than had been settled
in all the years since the close of the Civil war. Much of
the work had been done with vivid enjoyment ; but the greater
part of it under a cloud of sorrow. There was no longer any
especial reason for remaining in public office. His position had
grown unique. He had passed through the slander-belt and
come out in the clear light as the greatest American, the great-
est statesman, of his day ; for if the effort of Bismarck — the
only man of far-reaching policy to mention with him — had
been to centralize the German States, it was to despotism ; but
Mr. Blaine's effort had been to centralize all the Americas to
freedom. Suffering a continual apprehension regarding his
health, he had also been subjected to a fatiguing strain of
harassment and vexation. His sympathetic nature made him
keenly responsive to the atmosphere surrounding him ; and at
last, entirely exhausted with the absence of cordiality and with

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 705

the daily friction in his official relations, he resigned his
portfolio.

Department of State,

Washington, D.C., June 4.

To the President :

I respectfully beg leave to submit my resignation of the office of Secre-
tary of State of the United States, to which I was appointed by you on
March 5, 1889.

The condition of public business in the Department of State justifies me
in requesting that my resignation may be accepted immediately.

I have the honor to be, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

(Signed) James G. Blaine.

To this the President briefly and curtly replied, accepting
the resignation.

u Mr. Blaine has done right," said Mr. Whittier, who in his
younger days and before his fame as a poet was so wide, was
known to be a sagacious politician. "In his position I would
have done the same."

On the 7th of June Mr. Blaine left Washington for Bar Har-
bor, staying a few days in Boston on the way. The news of
his resignation flashed over the country like an electric signal.
Now, his friends declared, he is at liberty again, and he belongs
to us. The urgency to use his name, which more than any
other name stood for all the ideals of the life of the Republican
party, the name of a leader commanding enthusiasm, of a man
followed by multitudes with self-forgetful fervor, the name of a
man who was a living force, vitalizing other men, became irre-
sistible.

For himself, even under this urgency, he was indifferent.
He was too thoroughly tired and grieved to be interested. His
resignation had no relation to anything whatever but rest.
Time, however, had narrowed to such a point that it was neces-
sary to think and act precipitately ; and so urged, so assured, and
knowing a measure of his own power and popularity and the
depression and danger of the party, he had not the heart at first
to refuse as positively as before the salvation prayed for. He
may have remembered his old feeling when he once said, " I
would like to give this country one administration. I could do
ito It would be an era that she would be proud of." But he

706 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

twice telegraphed during the session to the convention at Min-
neapolis that his name should not be brought forward. As well
try to extinguish a prairie fire by telegraph. It required an
army of office-holders to tread out that fire.

An extract from the speech of Senator Wolcott, of Colorado,
a delegate to the national convention in Minneapolis, 1892, page
54 of Official Proceedings, contains the following : " I hold in
my hand, Mr. Chairman, a list of one hundred and thirty odd
office-holders, who are delegates to this convention, nine-tenths
of whom live in States where there is a hopeless Democratic
majority. The trouble in this committee as to these delegates
comes not alone from these men, but it comes from a pressure
of between two and three thousand government office-holders,
who swarm the corridors of the hotels, and fill these galleries,
and haunt the delegates, who ought to be in Washington and
elsewhere attending to their business." This was never refuted.

Mr. Blaine's name was presented to the convention with
ringing eloquence ; but Mr. Harrison received a majority of the
votes of the delegates, very nearly one-half of his votes being
thrown by delegates from the Southern and other States where
there was already a " hopeless Democratic majority."

When the vote on a preliminary point had been given, fore-
casting the vote on the nomination, Mr. Blaine, then in Boston,
saw that his supporters were overpowered, and requesting a
member of his family to take the telegrams, he retired early
and was asleep at once and soundly.

The result of the balloting in the convention, under the cir-
cumstances, was not a surprise to Mr. Blaine. His only regret
was that his name had been used at all; having been used, a
larger vote would have been flattering, but he received the an-
nouncement with no apparent emotion and no outward sign
beyond the sad smile which spoke of his consciousness of misap-
prehension and misrepresentation. He was in reality profoundly
indifferent. Before leaving for Bar Harbor he gave to the
" Boston Journal," for publication, a summons to his followers,
and the trumpet-call at Roncesvalles did not ring truer.

The resolution, energy, and persistence which marked the proceedings
of the convention at Minneapolis will, if turned against the common foe,
win the election in November. All minor differences should be merged in

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 707

the duty of every Republican to do all in his power to elect the ticket this
day nominated by the National Republican Convention.

(Signed) James G. Blaine.

If Mr. Blaine himself experienced no disappointment, the
disappointment of his friends throughout the country was
extreme. Yet there are few men fearless or reckless enough to
throw off the yoke of party discipline ; nor would any have
received from him the slightest encouragement to do so. But
the Republican campaign opened without interest and ended
with defeat.

All events of a public nature were, however, presently lost in
the darkness of another great affliction. On the 18th of June,
Emmons, Mr. Blaine's elder surviving son, died suddenly after
an illness of a few days, at his home in Chicago. Every effort
had been made to reach his father with an intimation of his
threatening' condition, but it had been impossible to open
telegraphic communication, and the blow fell like a thunder-
bolt out of clear sky. The attachment between father and
son had always been very close, and since the death of Walker
the bond had become doubly tender, Emmons striving in every
way to fill his brother's place and his own too. Never had a
father more reason to mourn a son, not only in the loss of his
devotion and support, but in the loss of his noble and beautiful
personality. The tragedy was the deeper that he was taken
still in his early manhood, with all men his friends, from the
midst of more than common success and usefulness, and from
a home where his happiness with wife and child was complete.
It was a dark and dreadful journey the father and mother took
to bury their dead.

It could not even be a consolation to know that the heart of
the whole nation without reserve melted in pity. The Demo-
cratic convention, then in session, paused in its work, and passed
a resolution extending its cordial sympathy. And it was in
the softening of all asperity that a few weeks later during a
Democratic meeting in the auditorium at Chicago, a speaker
incidentally mentioning the name of Mr. Blaine, the whole vast
audience rose with long and uncontrollable applause. When he
could be heard, the speaker exclaimed, " Blaine seems to have

708 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

more friends here than he had at Minneapolis ! " and a voice
from the crowd replied amid renewed cheers, " We are all his
friends here ! ,: All his friends, indeed ! For even outside and
beyond the feeling regarding his continued bereavement, was
the sentiment that Mr. Blaine had become the ideal representa-
tive of the love of country ; for in the House, in the Senate, in
the State Department, a generation of men had seen him defend
Democratic measures and use Democratic agents whenever he
approved the one, or thought the country could be best served
by the other, and they had largely ceased to think of him as a
Republican or a Democrat, — rather as an intense American.

But although with his warmly human temperament, Mr.
Blaine could not but be touched by the expressions of sorrow
that came to him from every side, those expressions did not
lift the inner gloom where the stricken father sat among
his broken idols, turning only the more tenderly to those that
were left him, — a gloom which not all the splendor 'of sea and
sky at Stanwood could lighten.

Still even through his grief he could hear the call of his
country ; and on September 3, 1892, he published a letter naming
the three issues on which he thought the campaign should be
fought — tariff, reciprocity, and a sound currency. He spoke of
the great advantages already gained and yet to be gained from
the McKinley tariff with reciprocity engrafted on it.

"What would have been the result to the United States if
every article, before it was put on the free list, had been made
the subject of inquiry to see what we would get in exchange
for it?

" We omitted to do so for many years, and that neglect has
cost the government advantages in trade which would have
amounted to tens of millions of dollars. This is the whole of
the reciprocity scheme. It is very plain and very simple."

In a few racy sentences he turned the guns of Jefferson upon
the Jeffersonian Democrats. " Towards the close of Jefferson's
administration the revenue from the tariff on imports produced
a considerable surplus, and the question was what should be
done, — should the tariff be reduced or should this surplus be
maintained ? Jefferson pointedly asked, c Shall we suppress the
imposts and give that advantage to foreign over domestic maiiu-

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 709

facturers ■? ' For himself he recommended that ' the imposts be
maintained,' and that the surplus created should be appropriated
to the improvement of roads, canals, rivers, and education. If
the Constitution did not give sufficient power to warrant these
appropriations Jefferson went so far as to recommend that it be
amended. This presents the strongest condition of affairs upon
which a protective tariff can be justified, and Jefferson did not
hesitate to recommend it. The Democrats of the present day,
it is needless to say, are the direct opponents of the policy thus
outlined and adhered to by Jefferson." He concluded with a
lucid statement of the evils of the State bank system.

" With all its calamities, the war brought us one great blessing,
a national currency. There are many who will say that it was
worth the cost of the war to bring about so auspicious a result
to capital and labor. Prior to the war we had the worst cur-
rency system of any enlightened nation in the world. The
State banks, with some exceptions, were thoroughly irresponsible.
They existed by thousands throughout the United States.
Whenever one of them failed, the result was a large loss and
great distress among the people. No one was responsible for
their bills, and they were generally found in the pockets of the
laboring man, to whom they were a total loss without any re-
demption whatever. Of the State banks it was often and truly
said that their debts were the measure of their profits. They
have caused an aggregate loss of hundreds of millions of dollars
among the poor. Since the close of the war all this is different.
Every paper dollar that circulates among the people has the
United States behind it as a guarantor. All the banks that
exist are under the control of the national government, and if
they fail as financial institutions, the government has taken care
that their bills should be paid by securities deposited in govern-
ment vaults. Under these circumstances it is a matter for
extraordinary surprise that the Democratic convention should
deliberately pass resolutions for the revival of State banks. The
palpable effect of this policy, if carried out, would be to cheat
the poor man out of his daily bread. If State banks be adopted
and their circulation attain a large issue, no device could be
more deadly for the deception and despoilment of all the com-
mercial and laboring classes. ... I have heard the argument

710 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

adduced that we would keep the money at home if State banks
were instituted. But we should keep it at home because it
would be so worthless that nobody would take it abroad. Were
the system of State banks revived, we would again have dis-
counts at the State lines, large charges for drafts on financial
centres, and general suspicion of every bill offered in payment,
with a liquidation every few years that would be a destructive
loss to the innocent holders of bills and a corresponding profit
to the parties owning the banks."

This letter was a strong document, and afforded material on
which to fight a whole campaign. It was followed, towards the
middle of . October, by a powerful speech at Ophir Farm, the
residence of Mr. Whitelaw Reid, before an audience of all
sorts and conditions of men, assembled on the lawn. Here
again Mr. Blaine showed his store and command of facts and
figures :

" The opponents of the Republican party always represent
New York as a commercial city and not a manufacturing one,
and yet the product of the manufacturers of this city alone is
1700,000,000. Anything that would cripple that great interest
would cripple the metropolis seriously and to a very hurtful
extent. More men in New York get their living from pursuits
protected by the tariff than from any other source. I know
New York is the centre of our commerce, the great entrepot of
our trade ; but all the men engaged in commercial affairs in and
about New York are smaller in number than the men engaged
in manufactures."

The speech, which was entirely spontaneous, closed with a
word to the Irish voters :

" This year it is one of the mysteries of politics that a ques-
tion which interests England so supremely, which is canvassed
almost as much in London as it is in New York, should have
the Irish votes of Great Britain. If the Irish voters were solidly
for protection, they could defy all the machinations of the
Democratic party for free trade, and throw their influence on
the side of the home market of America against the side of the
foreign market of England.

" I know this appeal has been frequently made to the Irish
voters, but I make it with emphasis now, for I am unwilling to

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 711

believe that, with light and knowledge before them, they will
deliberately be on the side of their former oppressors."

Before the date of this speech Mr. Blaine had prepared an
article for the November number of the "North American Re-
view," upon " The Presidential Election of 1892," a very calm
and clear paper, distinguished by the magnanimity of its treat-
ment of Mr. Harrison. In these pages were given certain
valuable statistics concerning the advantages of the reciprocity
established so largely by his own endeavor.

" But it is in the island of Cuba that reciprocity has done the
most ; and no footfall of a Democratic campaigner ever disturbs
the silence which hangs over Cuba when reciprocity is under
censure. No Democratic objector asks the millers of the country
who send flour to Cuba what have been the results. Statistics
in the State Department show that for the first half of 1892 we
sent 337,000 barrels of flour to Cuba, making for the whole year
674,000 barrels. During the same period of 1891 we sent only
14,000 barrels, or an average for the year of 28,000 barrels.
Considering the small quantity we had previously sent, and that
the duty was $5.75 a barrel, amounting to nearly the value of
the flour delivered in Cuba, and operating, except under pecul-
iar conditions, as a prohibition, the sagacity of Democratic
silence must be conceded! A trade of $4,000,000 in flour,
where we had not more than $175,000, is not a bad showing for
the first year of reciprocity.

" For the year ending August 31 our total exports to Cuba
were $19,700,000, and for the same period the preceding year
they were $11,900,000, an increase, it will be observed, of 65
per cent. Another year will show still greater gains. This
large increase of exports can be made more strikingly significant
by a presentation of facts which must convince the most scepti-
cal that it is due entirely to reciprocity. An examination of
treasury statistics will show that the annual amount of exports
from the United States to Cuba during the fifteen years from
1877 to 1891 did not greatly vary ; and the average for the
whole period was 11,700,000 per annum. The exports for 1891
were slightly higher, therefore, than this average. The increase
of $8,000,000 in 1892 represents, therefore, not only a gain of 65
per cent, over the year 1891, but a gain of 67 per cent, over the

712 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

average annual amount of exports for a period of fifteen years
previous. Moreover, of this gain of 18,000,000 nearly $4,000,-
000, as I have before said, were in flour ; and nearly $2,000,000
more were in bacon, pork, and the various articles which are
classed under the head of ' provisions.' Three-fourths of the
increased exports to Cuba were, therefore, the products of the
farm. The same is true, in equal or greater ratio, of the in-
crease caused by reciprocal treaties with the islands and coun-
tries of America, and particularly by the treaties made with
European countries."

If these utterances had not all of the enthusiasm, the swing
and vigor of former days, they were yet marvellous productions
for a man on the springs of whose life-currents had already
been placed the seal of death, whose heart was half broken with
sorrow, and whose wise forecast told him that the defeat of his
party was a foregone conclusion. There was no excitement
whatever about the election. After the results were known
Mr. Clarkson said openly that the Republican party had met
defeat chiefly because for eighteen years the majority had been
denied, repressed, and overruled from the one man whose lead-
ership it enthusiastically preferred. He affirmed that during
the whole period, at least seventy and at times eighty and
ninety per cent, of the party had desired Mr. Blaine, that every
nomination had been negative except his, and that the same
" remnant " which defeated his nominations had defeated him
at the polls. This may have been the partial estimate of a
friend. But when the lists were closed, Mr. Harrison was
more than 40,000 behind his own vote in New York four years
before, and 7,000 in his own State of Indiana. In spite of
125,000 Republican votes in six new States he lost 265,000 on
the popular vote.

Later in October Mr. Blaine's family joined him in New
York, and it was perhaps not without some inner premonition
of the immediate future that he saw the Monument dominate
the landscape with its lance of light, and the white cloud of the
Capitol dome soar above the spot where he had fought his
gallant fights and won his noble victories, as he approached
Washington for the last time.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 71 3

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. W. W. Phelps :

Berlin, October 15, 1889.

I wonder if you and Mrs. Blaine know what a gem that was — tht\
speech which so delighted me that I had to telegraph you ?

This morning my New York papers came and I have the scene in the
diplomatic parlor, even to the shears with which you called to order. It
was a good send-off. Last night I was at the first royal party. Count
Bismarck sought me out, in fine spirits : " I was looking for you. I wanted
to tell you the good news. I have a despatch from Washington. Mr.
Blaine has instructed your consul, too, that Malietoa is to be recognized
and made the king. So the three consuls have the same instructions, and
that settles it. 1 knew your Mr. Blaine would find some way to fix it
right."

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. W. W. Phelps :

Berlin, December, 1889.

I hope the Pan-American Congress is producing as good an impression
at home, and doing as good work for us, as foreigners think it is. They
have had great dislike and suspicion of it from the start, and were dazed
by the opening speech, so masterly, so persuasive, and yet without a single
peg on which they could hang a complaint, or a flaw into which they could
thrust a sneer. I took great delight and felt great pride in that speech.

As it looks to us here, the Brazilian revolution ought to help the purposes
of the Congress, and give profound stimulus to the desire for closer con-
nection and greater cooperation between kindred republics. It also has
startled people over here, but they are ready with explanations. They say
that the emperor was too good and unworldly, that he perhaps wished the
Republic himself, and that if not, he was certainly unwilling to lift a hand
to defend the existing order. Some of them profess to believe that in a
few years Brazil will break up into a number of petty, rival States, that
public obligations will be repudiated, and that the best part of the country
will either become a German colony in an independent German State, or a
new State in the Argentine Confederation. Of course, this is not the talk
of French Republicans, but it is the talk one hears in diplomatic circles,
and among reactionary French.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. Jno. A. J. Creswell :

Washington, D.C., January 17, 1890.
I wish I could say something to lighten the crushing affliction which
the unexpected death of your oldest son has brought upon you ; but at
such a crisis we all know how powerless are words, though charged to
the full with sympathy, to alleviate the sorrow of a stricken soul.

714 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

My intimate acquaintance with your son, formed during our association
as joint counsel for three years and a half before the Court of Alabama
claims, enables me to appreciate justly the proud satisfaction with which
you regarded him. He was, without doubt, one of the most promising
and efficient young lawyers whom I have ever met. So untiring was his
industry, so keen and exhausting his research, so sound and clear his appli-
cation of facts and principles, and so ready and discriminating his power
of delineation and expression, that he would surely have attained, had
he lived, to the highest honors of his profession, by right of established
merit. But to these gifts and attainments there were added in him a bear-
ing so gracious, a personality so attractive, and a manhood so true, noble,
and complete that he seemed constituted to fill a father's breast with the
strongest affection and the brightest aspirations.

Alas ! alas ! how trifling and evanescent is the best estate of this our
life ! When death has robbed us of our beloved, there are no more faith-
ful guides for the sorrowing than Memory and Hope ; and to them I com-
mend you, if you would find a genuine consolation.

No. 75 West 71st Street, New York,

Sunday, February 2, 1890.

Dear Blaine : On learning that your Alice had died this morning, I
telegraphed messages of sympathy and inquiry. I cannot manifest my
profound respect for you and your sorely afflicted family by coming to
Washington as I should, but my Lizzie will come, and I know that Alice
loved her as a friend and sister. I also know that Alice reposed in her a
confidence of the purest nature, and found here in our home a welcome
second only to that of her father's roof.

To-morrow, Monday, I must assist in the inaugural ceremonies of the
installation of Hon. Seth Low, as President of Columbia College. The
next day, Tuesday, is promised from early morning to midnight to the
ceremonies designed by the Bar Association of the United States to honor
the Supreme Court; indeed the whole week is parcelled out almost by
hours to some public occasion, and I am often warned that I am very near
the limit of years promised to man on earth of "three-score and ten,11 and
that I must not presume on apparent strength, but put on the brakes for
the steep grade at the end.

You are ten years my junior, and yet I feel concerned about you person-
ally, lest you allow the sad afflictions which have recently befallen your
family to unnerve you, and unfit you for the high office you hold. No man
in America better comprehends the questions which concern the people of
this continent than you ; no man is better qualified to give them expression.
Stand to the helm in fair weather and foul. Ships are rarely wrecked in
stormy seas like Cape Horn, because the captain and crew take ample pre-
cautions, but in fair weather by carrying too much sail, or by neglect.

Same of the ship of State. Wo are now on the high tide of honor and
prosperity with a fair wind, but carrying too much sail. Now is the time

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 715

for you to stand by your post of duty. Walker and Alice are lost to you,
but a large family and troops of friends remain.

What would you have thought of me in 1863, when my Willie died at
Memphis, had I faltered in the great movement then begun, which resulted
in the end of war in America ?

This may be all superfluous, but I know that you will construe me aright
as one of your oldest friends, who is as proud of James G. Blaine as his
warmest panegyrists. I confess to little faith in words, but if you will
ever indicate how I can manifest my sincerity by acts I believe you will
receive prompt response.

Affectionately your friend,

W. T. Sherman.

To Mr. Blaine :

Amesbury, March 3, 1890.

Dear Friend: I read with more satisfaction than I can express thy
noble address at the opening of the International American Congress. It
seemed to me the herald of a new era of " Peace on earth and good will to
men." If, in the spirit of that address, the conference agrees upon a rule
of arbitration which shall make war on this hemisphere well-nigh impos-
sible, its session will prove one of the most important events in the world's
history, and I would rather be in thy place as its president than in that of
the President of the United States. The whole world will honor the states-
man who lifts from it the intolerable burden of war.

This letter would have been written before had I not hesitated to intrude
on the great sorrow of thy late bereavement. I join with all in sympathy,
but I can see that thee must feel as the English nobleman did when con-
doled with on the loss of his son, and would not exchange the memory of
the dead for any living son in Christendom.

I am very truly thy friend,

John G. Whittier.

To Mr. Patrick Ford:

Stanwood, Bar Harbor, Me., September 23, 1890.

My dear Mr. Ford : I have no doubt that you consider me a negligent
correspondent. I have no plea in defence save that I have been in sad and
sorrowful mood since my afflictions of the past winter. My oldest son and
my oldest daughter were taken from before my eyes as it were in a
moment, and I was left to the soreness of deep grief. Walker was to me
as my right hand. He was as affectionate and as dutiful as a young child
— and able enough and wise enough to be my most trusted adviser. He
was my constant companion, and beside being a son he was my most inti-
mate and my most constant friend.

My daughter's loss rent my heart; she was a dear child — child always
to me though she had two children herself. She had with great devotion
and piety connected herself with the Catholic Church, and. left behind two

716 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

interesting boys who, according to her wishes, shall be brought up in their
mother's faith.

I ought not to rehearse these sad facts, but I give you a thought of what
is constantly in my thoughts — I can find relief only in earnest and con-
stant work, and so I devote myself constantly to the severest tasks of my
office. I want you to understand that nothing in my mind permits the
thought of neglecting you. I look upon you as one of the truest and most
sincere friends I have. I trust you regard me in the same light.

I see a great sorrow impending over Ireland. Would to God the island
might be free and prosperous ! But I need only implore freedom, for
prosperity would surely follow.

If I had not so often been disappointed in my prophecies concerning
Ireland I would say that her oppressors had gone mad. The arrest of
Dillon and O'Brien seems to be the rioters1 wantonness of power. What in
God's name will be the end ?

If you raise some money for the poor people who may need bread I shall
want to throw in my mite. Being at the head of our foreign affairs I
must of course be personally quiet in all my expressions, but I have deep
sympathy with those who are staring famine in the face, and I wish simply
as a Christian man to help those that are in need, but of course I do not
want a trumpet blown about it.

Always, my dear Mr. Ford,

Your friend,

James G. Blaine.

To Mr. Blaine, from Rev. R. S. Storrs :

Brooklyn, February 11, 1891.
. I beg you to accept my tribute of admiration for the clearness,
vigor, and commanding power with which you have presented what 1
cannot but accept as the just view of the grave questions under discussion.
It will certainly take rank among the ablest, I trust among the most con-
trolling State papers which our records have to show. As an American
citizen, I am proud to be so worthily and brilliantly represented in the
correspondence with Great Britain.

Washington, April 15, 1891.
. . . Your father got off this morning — a steamer trunk, his large
bag, two overcoats, and four books. The boys drove with him to the Navy
Yard, and I enclose his letter sent back with them. Please bring it. He
may be gone a week. The British Minister had been notified when T's
telegram arrived, and what is of much more consequence Mr. Lincoln has
been written to, to bring to Lord Salisbury's attention the case of Mrs.
Maybrick — whom the larger part of the American people think to be in-
nocent of the crime, the punishment for which is slowly killing her. I
had yesterday a letter from her mother imploring me to use my influence
with your father in her behalf. She is only twenty-seven years old and of
a delicate physique.

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. lit

Washington, April 19, 1891.

. . . The State Department is overrunning with business of conse-
quence, and your daddy dearest is winning j:>raise in unexpected quarters.

. . . Your father will not be on at the " Tribune " anniversary. He
is up to his ears in work. . . . Conor sidled up to me last night while
I was reading the " Star,11 and asked me in an awe-struck whisper, what
was the news from New Orleans.

To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. Seth Low :

New York, April 27, 1891.
. . . May I avail myself of this opportunity to express my admi-
ration for the letters on the Italian question which have lately proceeded
from your pen ? They have been good reading for all Americans,

From Mr. Blaine :

Washington.

. . . Have had a hard day. Diplomatic day at State Department and
did not reach lunch till 2.20, and yet I reached the Pan-American and pre-
sided from 3.15 till nearly six, and then rode up to Speaker Randall's to
inquire about him. He is insensible and very low. . . . Mr. Carnegie
is here to remain till the Pan-American winds up, say middle or last of
next week. We are getting on rapidly and well. I think the entire record
will be admirable and lasting in good results.

To Mr. Blaine, from Rev. O. B. Cheney :

Lewiston, December 10, 1891.
I am seventy-five years old to-day, and as the hours of the day pass,
please allow me to take a half of one of them to write you. I recall the
year you came to Augusta — your interest in my work at an early date, and
mine in yours. . . . The hope given me that my work would be a
success because of your frankness in expressing that desire. I thank you
for the one thousand dollars you gave me in Washington some years since,
and for the one thousand dollars you gave the dear college here.
Now, it would seem weak in me to claim that I have done anything for you
worthy of mention — for you, the greatest statesman in the world. All 1
claim is that I have been a true friend of yours, and as such have been able
at times to speak a good word in your behalf as one who knows you as
neighbor knows neighbor. ... I went through the West last fall.
There is but one opinion there, and that is that you must be the Republican
candidate for President. With you we can win. Without you, there is
much doubt. The Lord give you health, strength, and a right decision.

718 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

From V.:

Washington, June 6, 1892.

. . . Let not your heart be troubled. The God of this world is so
determined to do things his own way that I have greatly ceased to be
troubled if they are not my way. In the first place, the realization of
your desires is not certain enough to demand your anxieties, and if it
were certain your anxieties will do no good and are not demanded. Tf
you and I, and he and his, had been pushing forward the nomination,
planning for it, urging him to plan for it — we should have done very
unwisely and would have no right to fall back on God-fate — the hidden
force — the unseen Ruler. But we did nothing of the sort. You may
have desired it, but the state of things has come about of itself, so far as
we are concerned. Your father has kept his health well to the fore front.
As he said to the reporters, "I am just as you see me, no better, no
worse." He has told everybody of his unwillingness, his inability, and
the reply has been that they would rather have him dead than any one else
alive. Now, his health is in the hands of God, and if it fails, it is God
who does it — in that arrangement of things in the world which we do
not make. So about the nomination itself — he did not want it. He never
lifted a finger for it — he hated it. Now that the game is on, of course he
would be glad to win, but we are such puppets outside of our own little
string that I am not anxious. We are puppets with sensibilities, and
therefore I think the string will be gradually lengthened, and the play
has dignity, but because this one stage is a small one, let not your heart
be troubled.

What I want now is that he shall go on and win ; but if I had the order-
ing of events I would have had him in long ago, when he was young,
strong, fresh, and could have given himself with all his force to the work.
I would not have frittered away his strength in fighting beasts at Ephesus,
— snakes, hyenas, and such small deer, — but in conquering real political
forces for humanity. It seemed otherwise to God. It seemed best to God
that the greatest political genius, the surest political insight, the sweetest
human nature, the simplest human heart, delicacy and strength and sim-
plicity combined, should, for years, be flung against fierce coarseness and
selfishness and falseness. It seems to me a waste of material, but God is
so much greater than I that I have to suppose He knows what he is at. I
frankly confess I do not, but I will not pay Him so fulsome and foolish a
tribute as to pretend I do. I believe He is wise because I see many things
that imply wisdom, the marvellous invention of the family, for instance,
and that the worlds swing around so beautifully and so regularly, but I
don't see it in this. I am light-hearted because I believe in God, not be-
cause I can see through Him. If there were no more in a granted prayer
than its curse, God would be pretty mean ; but that is imj^ossible — so we
must look behind. God is not mean, He is friendly, only I should think
He might show Himself a little clearer. Well, dear, your father seems
very well, a little gouty to-day in his toe, but not much. He is calm;

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 719

last Wednesday and Thursday he was in the depths for the situation into
which he had been pushed. Since then he has been more like himself.
Q. is here. Your mother tranquil. None of us over confident of the nom-
ination. I am hopeful because it is my temperament ; confident in God, but
trying to keep my religion to myself lest it exasperate other folk, as noth-
ing to the purpose. And it is nothing to the purpose you have in hand, but
very much to your own comfort if you can embrace the purpose of God.

Understand, if we get the nomination, I don't think your father any more
likely to lose his health than if we don't. Likewise with the presidency.
He may be ill, but they will in no wise be cause and effect, judging from
the past. His worst illness was his first when he was in the prime of life.
His best work has all been done since then. He has too much life in him
to lay himself on the shelf for its lack. He is justified before God to my
view in using it " as men use common things with more behind." If I
seem to talk God a good deal, it is because He is the background of all my
own living; and thinking-.

From Prof. James E. Welling :

Washington, June 11, 1892.
The outcome of the Minneapolis convention defeated my aspirations
and disappointed my hopes. It could not defeat any "aspiration11 of
Mr. Blaine, for never did mortal man put the aspirations of ambition so
pertinaciously behind him as Mr. Blaine when, four years ago, he re-
nounced the presidency, and when, a few months ago, he turned his back
on it again.

Bar Harbor, June 12, 1892.
It is one o'clock and the watchman cries " All is well ! " I being* the
watchman, also the vis-a-vis, the tete-a-tete, the pis alter, the eye-glasses, —
he has broken his, — and the encourager and defender of the faith ; not like
Henry VIII. falsely so called, but a true believer in the faith that all things
work together for our salvation. Well, we had a most comfortable jour-
ney— at 10 to bed — Portsmouth — at 12 a voice from the opposite section
calls, " Mother.11 I reply, " Reid is nominated,11 that is all. From Bruns-
wick to Bangor I know nothing" nor does he. At Bangor we have sent in
by our butler a cup of coffee and crackers. After two hours1 delay we leave
Bangor, but it is now only 7. "Before we reach Ellsworth I am up. He
only when we reach the ferry. The " Sappho " takes us around the glorious
bay much more so than Saturday morning, and at 10 we are at Bar Harbor.
We stop at Western Union and send off telegrams to A., M., and Whitelaw
Reid. At the house is home. Jose on the lawn, and a sea and sky trium-
phant. . . . How can one be petty when he sits beneath a canopy not
of the creation's making, and looks on the sea which has outlasted all that
we have of knowledge, communing with one's own heart, not head ?
Whitelaw Reid's answer came back in two hours, tender and affectionate,
I think Mr. Blaine's to him had relieved an anxiety.

720 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

AT LAST.

A T the door of the chamber of death the world pauses and
-^*- treads lightly. There were three weeks of brightness
and cheer, a lifting of the cloud, in the balmy Indian summer
weather that he so enjoyed; pleasant walks and drives in the
sunshine, and twilights beside the wood fires, and talk of
Southern California for the winter. Never was Mr. Blaine
gentler, more genial, more sympathetic, more interested in
affairs ; never did one see in him more vividly that swift instinc-
tive comprehension and that delicate imaginative sensitiveness
which were so chief a charm. On the Sunday before election
he attended the Church of the Covenant, taking communion
there, and walking home across the square with the President,
who gave him much-needed reassurances concerning the prob-
abilities of the election. Old friends and neighbors were in
and out. A child's voice made the air sweet. Those whom he
loved the most dearly were with him. " No one could be more
wise and kind and loving than W. to Mr. Blaine," wrote
one who was in the household. " He played to him and walked
with him, and was attentive and deferential and companionable
and natural, not servile or afraid of him. He is a genius him-
self, and so appreciated genius and was not overawed by it."

All things seemed to have mellowed and softened with the
mellowing year. Abuse had become praise ; foes had become
friends. Those who had once wronged him were now his
lovers. That he grew weaker during these pleasant days was
hardly perceptible in the subdued joyousness of his manner, that
soft brilliancy which Homer calls the " blaze of excellence that
neighbors death." Those about him were already realizing to
the full the meaning of the words written later concerning this
marvellous organism that had both the force and the fineness of
the sunbeam, the prescience born of sensitiveness, the flashing
intelligence that was at once intuition and judgment.

BIOGBAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 721

" His susceptibility to influences ; the acuteness of his senses ;
his far, clear sight; his high enjoyment of taste and hearing and
smell and touch, of all that was fair and fragrant, beautiful,
joyous, and musical, — was a make-up of refinement, and hence
life to him was sweeter and brighter and more costly than to
the average man. The landscape glowed for him with unusual
lights. He saw on the sea and in the sky, in surrounding life
and the currents of human history, that which only the extraor-
dinarily gifted can see."

And suddenly the frost fell. He had been driving one day
with his younger daughter, and coming home he lay down to
rest. The next day he did not rise, and the high temperature,
the extreme languor, were alarming. It was soon apparent that
organic disease had been subtly at work and the whole system
was undermined. A wave of sorrow spread wide and far when
it was known. He was understood at last ; and there seemed to
surge up an all but universal regret for this man every fibre of
whose great being had been inwrought with belief in the high
future of his native land, every act of whose public career had
been in the service of her best and broadest life, every drop of
whose blood was warm with his devotion to her. Friends came
from every quarter begging to do what they might. A messen-
ger was sent by the authorities of one of the great Roman
Catholic centres offering with delicate and considerate kind-
ness the last offices of his mother's church ; Mr. Blaine recog-
nized the messenger and kindly and decidedly declined his
services. Letters and tokens of affection poured in in untold
number. " What a life he has lived ! " one friend wrote.
" How full and complete ! And yet what grief has he not
borne ? No man ever breathed who was sweeter, truer, tenderer,
nobler than he. How men have loved and worshipped him ! ':

Through it all Mr. Blaine was perfectly himself. Books
were read to him at first, and the newspapers every day till
near the last. But his strength steadily declined. He slum-
bered lightly the greater part of the time, but was perfectly
conscious when aroused. " Father," said his wife, bending over
him, " did you know it was Mr. Gladstone's birthday?" lie
looked up with his swift smile and answered, " That is so.
Gladstone is eighty-three to-day."

722 BIOGEAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE.

" Mr. Blame's pulse had been so low and so fluctuating that
it seemed life must ebb. He spoke very little, but when C. H.
said this morning, ' You had a hard night, didn't you?' he
spoke up cheerily, 4 No, I didn't.' When I went in it was
almost as great a surprise as life from the dead. I had thought
he must be so nearly gone that it would be painful to see him.
On the contrary he lay there calmly, easily, with warm touch,
soft color, bright eyes, not even looking emaciated, and as I
went up to him he stretched out his hand to me with a firm
grasp. It is an infinite comfort to feel he does not suffer. To
have had these last weeks with Mr. Blaine ! He is so gentle
and loving and sweet ; like a little child, yet fully intelligent.
. His great vitality seems to enchain the spirit. His ill-
ness is almost as exceptional as his nature and his life."

Surrounded by his family, and conscious to the end, of all
their tender offices, he lay with resignation and without agita-
tion. And in the full sunshine of the morning of the 27th of
January the light slowly receded from the splendid eyes, and
the great soul was gone.

As one looked at the dead man before his burial, lying on a
woven mat of roses, the very waste and overflow of love, still
with such evidence of mighty manhood in repose, it was not
possible to understand the purposes that chose to darken that
great, sweet, strong power of life just as it reached the top of
its meridian where it could throw more light and warmth than
ever before.

"Ah, Launcelot, thou were the head of all Christen
knights. and now, i dare say, there thou liest, thou were
never matched of earthly knight's hand ; and thou were the
courteoust knight that ever beare shield; and thou were
the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrad horse; and
thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved
woman ; and thou were the kindest man that ever struck with
sword; and thou were the goodliest person that ever came
among press of knights ; and thou was the meekest man and
the gentlest that ever sate in hall among ladies ; and thou
were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put
speare in rest."

LIBRARY OF
WELLESLEY COLLEGE

BEQUEST OF
Ella Smith Elbert '88

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