BIOGRAPHY 
 
 JAMES G. ELAINE 
 
 BY 
 
 GAIL HAMILTON 
 
 NORWICH, CONN. 
 
 THE HENRY BILL PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 I 895 
 

 
 Copyright, 1895 
 
 BT 
 THE HENRY BILL PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
 PRESS OF 
 
 ROCKWELL AND CHURCHILL 
 BOSTON 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 I. GALBRAITH . . . . . 1 
 
 TL 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 
 
V CONTENTS. 
 
 APTER 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 
 
 XVI I. YEARS FROM 1882 TO 1888 .... 569 
 
 XVIII. AGAIN SECRETARY OF STATE, 1889 . . . 651 
 
 AT LAST 720 
 
 NOTE. The reader is indebted to Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, 
 who, at the request of Mrs. Elaine, and with the approval of Gail 
 Hamilton, completed Chapter XWIL, and wrote the concluding 
 
 pages of this Biography. 
 
 THE PUBLISHERS. 
 
227718 
 
TO DISCOVER AN UNKNOWN LAW OF HUMAN 
 
 LIFE. 
 
 Intellectual energy, like every other of wMch 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 drawn from 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 hoiv the mind that gave it its wondrous birth was 
 developed, these are our chief concern. EDWIN REED. 
 
I. 
 
 GALBRAITH. 
 
 r MHROUGH 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, witli 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 Presby terianism of John Knox and the 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 011 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 Avhom 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 with 
 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 hud no sooner 
 settled his sons around him than lie 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 Nortli 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 came 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, 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 w^i 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 Andrew 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 reflected 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. 1 
 
 Donegal Presbytery, and was installed at the meeting-house in 
 Svvatara, which then took the name of Derry. Little Deny 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 Derry 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 sora 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 permits, 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 1 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 anc 1 . 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 relief e and aecom- 
 odation to take up ordinary to which your petitioner is likewise requested 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 9 
 
 by the neighborhood for their publick arid 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 ce.rtitie 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. HLAINE. 
 
 himself like a true member of Jie 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 arid 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, and of all the Galbraith and Byers estates no rem 
 nant owns to the name, or blood, or race. 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 
 life s 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. 
 
BIOGRAPUY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 13 
 
 II. 
 
 ELAINE. 
 
 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 KIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 All 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. ELAINE. 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. 
 Alison 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 they 
 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 JANES G. ELAINE. 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 
 
 EPIIKAIM BLAINE. 
 
18 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 lie was made sheriff his 
 father was one of the sureties ; and 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 
 Callender 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 Callender 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 encounter when lie was 
 convoying a train of eighty-one pack-horse loads of goods, sixty- 
 three were destroyed, valued at three thousand pounds. In 
 vain he protested that they were not destined for the hostile 
 Indians, but were for 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. BLAJNE. 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 with 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 lie had himself threaded on horseback the 
 wilderness Avith 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 Elaine 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 thoroiighly 
 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. ELAINE. 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 field 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, lie 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 he continued to be elected and reflected by 
 Congress. 
 
 Colonel Elaine 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. I3LAINE. 
 
 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 lie 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 Elaine 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 Elaine 
 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 Elaine 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 Elaine, 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 bo t at vendue 
 1 chafing dish 
 1 roasting jack 
 
 1 inaliy [mahogany] china table 
 1 chest of drawers 
 1 maliy tea table 
 1 china bowl 
 6 cups & saucers 
 
 at the extraordinary, if one may not say extravagant, price of 
 ,365 5s. 3d. 1 The " 1 mahy tea table," at least, is still in good 
 preservation, and is held in affectionate reverence by his kin. 
 
 a The 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. HLAfNE. 25 
 
 Mrs. Irwin s bill for sugar and coffee is : 
 274 Ibs. of sugar and 112 Ibs. of coffee 702-5-0, at $2.66| per . 
 
 1770, John Cox s bill for a night s lodging and boarding of 
 Colonel Blaine, his servant and two horses, is <64. 
 
 Decem b 17. 1779. Colo Blum D r 
 
 To a Mug of Toddy ......300 
 
 Ruin To Sert 15 
 
 Dinner & Club 400 
 
 Quarts of Corn 1 10 
 
 Supper 300 
 
 Club 976 
 
 2 Bottles of Clarrett 22 10 
 
 Lodging 076 
 
 Rum To Serv 1 10 
 
 Breakfast 300 
 
 Ditto for Ser 250 
 
 Hay 500 
 
 55 5 
 One account is not so surprising as the receipt: 
 
 Ephraim Blaine Esq. bought 
 
 1 Cag old spirits 10 gallons . . . . 5 10 
 Cag 36 
 
 5 13 6 
 
 Reed at same time the contents in full for Michael Gratz 
 
 ALEXK. ABRAHAMS. 
 
 Rec d . 18 th Get 1779 from Eph". Blaine fifty seven thousand Dollars 
 which I promise to replace in two Day 
 
 57,000 Doll 8 ROBERT ALISON 
 
 The first item of an account with Mr. Nichols, but well after 
 the war, is for " Mhde [merchandise] delivered Gen. Wash 
 ington," 78. 
 
 <31 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 Elaine s office, is 
 
26 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 supplemented with a note in Colonel Elaine s own handwriting, 
 whose severity scorches still through the century : 
 
 SIR : Annexed you have a statement of your aect. nearly as it will be 
 settled in the Creditors 1 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 unit, 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. 
 
 Ern. 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 H. RLATNE. 27 
 
 Elaine 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 Hi, I77 .i. 
 
 Busy collecting food will go as far as Winchester in Virginia. Mv 
 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. 
 
 12 th . 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 
 
 16 th . " 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 hang it 
 
 24 th The Acco I have received of Your Salt Provisions being Spoiled 
 distresses me exceedingly. Jt 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 1 st I have had Letters from the Commissary Gen 1 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 Toux -J9 lh 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 coming in 
 very slow have Obliged Congress to delay payment of Large sums 
 want d , 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 our Army at 
 Head Quarters You must therefore wait till Congress have it in their 
 
28 BIOGRAPHY OF JANES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 \ return shall give you every Assistance in my 
 Power, and am with much regard Sir 
 
 Your most Obd 1 . 
 and most 
 
 Hble Serv , 
 
 EPH ELAINE C.G.P 
 
 PETARABAII 1". of May 1780 
 SIR 
 
 I received yours of the 16 th . 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 M r . Darah 
 down to Elk as it will require a few days yet, to compleat my Acc tB 
 Some ace 18 . 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 S r 
 
 Your Obed . Serv*. 
 
 PATRICK EWING 
 COL. 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 t.ho I am loaded with debt and have not had a shilling 
 this two months. 
 
 TO COL. BLAINE. 
 
 SPRINGFIELD 10 August 1780 
 SIR 
 
 I receved yours of 9 today. 1 should long er now have Settled but 
 having a Suit out ditermoned that I brought against a Miller for what you 
 

BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 29 
 
 are pleased to call frond 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 Elaine s duties carried him 
 throughout Pennsylvania, and from New England to the Caro- 
 liuas, 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 Elaine 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. 
 It is pleasant to think of neighborly festivities relieving the 
 
30 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 marched 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 
 
niOUHArilY OF JAMKH (/. ULAINE. 81 
 
 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 ! v 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 un vexed 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 HIOORAPIIY OF JAME8 O. ItLAINE. 
 
 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, Hearing 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 109,4034 Ibs. 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 30 th . 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 
 
OF JAMEK d. 11LAINK. ?> 
 
 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 untill they reach Rutland in Massa 
 chusetts Bav I am now upon my way to Carlisle where T 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 lh 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 returned 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 loyalty to his 
 chief and his cause is occasionally seen. u 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 nuances 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 niOUKAPHY OF JAMES (, . HLALVM. 
 
 TTT. 
 
 COLONEL ELAINE 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 Elaine 
 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 25 th . Nov r . 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 Col. 
 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 M Lyon who goes with me as a Surveyor M r Marshall has 
 o-iven 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 Tower to return before the last of February After I reach 
 the Mduth of sandy River and Explore that Country and locate my lands 
 I will have to ride One hundred & fifty Miles to M r Marshalls Otfice 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. M r 
 Elliot has been gone some days. When he has his business a little settled 
 
11 10(1 It AT II r OF JAMKX (, . 1U,AINK. 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 M r Tate and Rather add to the list as many of 
 the articles are much wanted. Speak to M r Ludhom M r 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 M r . Gren 
 the Waggoner who Brought up part of my goods the sum of fifty pounds, 
 and I forgot to settle with M r . 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 Remmittance 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, splease to present my Compliments to M". Bell and believe me with 
 much Reguard Dear Sir 
 M R 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 cit} r of Pittsburg, by John Perm, Esq., and John Perm, Jr., 
 grandson and great-grandson of William Perm, late proprie 
 taries of Pennsylvania. 
 
 PHILAD A . 26 th Ap l . 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 r . Alexander Blame 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. M r . Blaine has full power 
 and authority to dispose off John Laurnan 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 may 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 
 
><> niodHAPiiy or .IAMKS c. HLAJXK 
 
 We also think your Own prudence will Immediately Aequiese 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 GEN L . IRVINE. 
 
 PHILAD A . 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 groat 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 M r . Pollock has 
 agreed with M r . 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. 
 1 wish I had One Township w r hich 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 informed the 
 Candidates who are in Nomination for Governor, are Gen S . Clair, Gen 1 
 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 below 
 Wheeling, at the Mouth of a Creek Called Captina I wish you could 
 
ELEANOR BLAINE. 
 
r or JAMKS <;. IILAIVK. :>7 
 
 purchase live 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 M r . 
 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 Xew 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 HKHiliAI Hr OF .IAMKS (, . ItLAINK. 
 
 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 Elaine 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 
 Elaine 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 Euchanan being the sheriff, and Ephraim Elaine Avas 
 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 Elaine 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 Elaine, 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. ELAINE. 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 110 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 Elaine 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 M r . 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. ELAINE. 
 
 Two, at least, of these rings remain to-day in the ownership 
 of a granddaughter of the young wife s sister. 
 
 Jn the old graveyard at Carlisle her brief story is told : 
 kt In Memory of Jane Blane, Wife of James Elaine, who died 
 the 15th of April, 1793, 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 Elaine 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 Elaine 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." 
 
 Eut 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. Ent in the extreme West, whiskev was 
 
-JP1 
 
 I 
 
 ROBERT BLAINE. 
 
. BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 15 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 Avas 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 MirHin, Colonel Blame, 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 Elaine 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. Ootr. 1794 
 MR. ROBT. BLAINE. 
 
 Received of John Logan, one Load of Hay for the President s Horses 
 
 JAS. BLAINE. 
 f th . October 1794 
 Pay him three pounds 
 E. BLAINE. 
 
 Tli us the father had only to devote his time to his distin 
 guished guest, who, in turn, made himself thoroughly agreeable, 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 Elaine 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 Elaine inheritance, but the strength 
 of another stock. When Ephraim Elaine 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 al, of twenty acres of land for the use of the 
 Presbyterian church of Tuscarora, he worshipped God, and 
 there he lies buried. Eut Margaret Armstrong, whom he 
 
44 BIOGRAPHY OF JANES 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, witli 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 Kittarming, 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 
 Brandywine 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 say 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 <V. BLAINE. 46 
 
 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 Elaine. 
 
 In less than one month after his son s second marriage, Feb. 
 5, 1795, Colonel Elaine 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 Elaine 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 Elaine, 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 sheriff s receipt-book is a receipt for 
 
nnKiRAriiY OF JAMKH a. HLAINK. 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 Elaine 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 he 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 ItHM. KAf IIY 0/- JAMES <, . HLATHK. 
 
 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 Blame 
 son to my son James Elaine, 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 Avife, 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 arid name, till, in 1850, 
 she passed away at the ripe old age of ninety. 
 
JAMES BLAINE. 
 
r OP JAMKN (f. JiLAINK. 
 
 TV. 
 
 JAMES BLAINE. 
 
 ^ 
 
 ~l ["IS father gone, the old Scotch-Irish rover reappeared in the 
 -* ^- son Avith 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 oil 
 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., he writes : 
 
 CARLISLE 12th April 1802 
 
 By your agreement with my Father you engage to Patent the Land you 
 exchanged with him in Woods * 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 [ 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. Blaiue. 
 
50 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES <!. KLA1NE. 
 
 As an executor of his father s estate he writes from Carlisle 
 in 1804 : 
 
 SlK 
 
 I am much surprised that I have not heard from you respect 8 , 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 Elaine, 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 
 %t Mr. Baldwin also presented a petition of James and Robert 
 Elaine, executors of the last will and testament of their father, 
 Ephraim Elaine, 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. C I 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?" 
 
rilY OF JAMES G. HLAINE. 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 rirst 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. 
 
 15 th . August 1807 
 
 Rec d : from James Blaine eight dollars being 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 itiovhAi iir OF JAMES a. it 
 
 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, 
 011 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 
 
HIOGKAPIIY OF JAMES (!. HLAINE. 53 
 
 fought a tierce 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 Blame, and here his son 
 Ephraim Lyon brought his bride. A letter of 1820, from one 
 of their friends, says playfully, if somewhat incoherently, 
 u 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. Mis 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 BIOGRAPHY 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 on 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 
 natboat 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 Fetters 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 Pounds 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. ELAINE. 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 he 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 ! " 
 
 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. ELAINE. o7 
 
 Lyon bethought himself on the heights of Sewickley, and her 
 he went into the " backwoods v to bring. From the Roman 
 Catholic church at Pittsburg, the Rev. Father Maguire came 
 down 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 ! 
 " I 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 safety 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 reflected 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 loyalty, 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 
 Elaine 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. 
 
 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 freshlv, but the factories of the Economites 
 
60 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 are as deserted as the drawing-rooms of James Elaine, 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 Elaine 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 1205,000. And as James Elaine 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 Elaine and 
 his son wanted the $25,000 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 Elaine 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 Erownsville 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- 
 
MR. ELAINE S MOTHER. 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 IP- 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 
 G-od, 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 we may further seek its actual environment 
 what sun fed it, what deivs 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 (/. BLA1NE. 
 
 V. 
 
 EARLY EDUCATION. 
 
 rpHUS 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 Elaine 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 
 
64 ttTOGKATHY <>/ JAMES U. HLAIVK. 
 
 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 
 inarch 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 
 
HIOGRAPHY OF .IAMKS (!. HLAIXE. 65 
 
 the great road to come her way. Over this road the world 
 rolled past the Elaine 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 Road 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 sucli 
 trouble came, and the President-elect, on his way to his inau 
 guration, alighted and lent his helping hand to the poor off 
 wheel-horse that had failed. Henry Clay, arriving- from the 
 
66 lilOGKAPUY OF JAMES <7. ELAINE. 
 
 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 \vas 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 Avon fame in the Crimean war, 
 and an uncle of Lord Lyons, who was British minister at 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. HLAINE. t>7 
 
 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. Ewing s sister, 
 Mrs. Samuel Denman, a first cousin of Mrs. Blaine. Mr. 
 Denman was a salt manufacturer on Sunday creek, two miles 
 above its mouth. Here the boys 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, blaekberrying, 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 high 
 glee. 
 
 At Greencastle, a village eight miles from Lancaster, they 
 drove bv a street-corner where the Democrats - - the Loco 
 
ti8 RJOGKAPtir OF JAMRS W. hLAINE. 
 
 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 finger 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. They 
 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 
 
BIOGRAPHY Of JAMES (J. HLAIJUE. 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 he sank back in his chair with unaccountable 
 laughter. " 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 word, with- 
 
70 niOGKAHHY OF JAMES G. KLAINE. 
 
 out even so much as looking back. Little Torn, 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. Swing 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. ELAINE. 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. Elaine 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 Avith the more propriety and 
 facility he will execute them. More than ever law-knowledge 
 in the Prothonotary, will now be useful and important, on 
 accpunt of the increased importance of the Court under the 
 new constitution." 
 
 When Ephraim Elaine had come down from Sewickley, 
 Erownsville 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. Elaine laid out the Indian-hill farm into lots sixty feet wide 
 and of varying depth, owing to the abrupt hill-side, from ninety- 
 
7 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 Elaine," 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, u always beautifully dressed," says one, " ah ! Mr. 
 Blaine was a man of ability. I remember yet his courtlv air 
 as he came up the street, his bow so elegant and noticeable, 
 yet nothing Chesterneldian 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, s\yept 
 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. ELAINE. 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. u Ah, gone out, has he ? " said 
 Mr. Gillespie blandly. u 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 arid 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, lie 
 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, ELAINE. 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 Blame 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 na ively: "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 Ceceders 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 settlers 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 u 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. ELAINE. 77 
 
 duced himself as A. B. C., of the "Commonwealth." "I know 
 your 4 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 flocked to his 
 room, bolted the door, and engaged him in such friendly 
 and flattering 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 u Jim Blairie 
 and Tom Ewing," in Lancaster seven years before, " 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/ 1 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 1 remember that old Esquire M. admitted 
 with some amusement : " Why, that young Elaine 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 Elaine 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 
 great brood. On all the youthful tumult her mild eyes looked 
 
Y <>V JAMES U. HLAINE. 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 coin- 
 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 Swing 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 1 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 I 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 KIOGRAPHY OF JAAfES <f. 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 Mayhem 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 1 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. T 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. 
 
 YR. 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 Penn . was graduated Sept r , 29 th , 1847. During the 
 whole period of his connexion with College lie maintained the character of 
 a very punctual, orderly, 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 0V JAMES (!. KLATNE. 81 
 
 literary acquirements, dignity, decision, fidelity, & prudence will not fail 
 to merit the confidence, & approbation of those who may obtain his 
 services. 
 
 October 1 st . 1847. 
 
 DAVID M. CONAUGHY President of 
 
 Washington College Penn. 
 W. P. ALDKICH, Prof. Math, et 
 
 Chern. etc. 
 
 RICHARD H. LEE Prof r , B L P 
 NICH S . MURRAY Prof, of Lang 
 RORT. 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 UlOGHAPllY Ob" JAM titi (V. KLALNK. 
 
 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. Elaine 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 were, 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. HLAINE. 83 
 
 Ewing cousins. Even if this were not so from my 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 (i. BLAINE. 
 
84 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES <V. RLAINE. 
 
 VI. 
 
 FINDING THE ROAD. 
 
 r I iHE 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. 
 
 Pie 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 : 
 
 PAHIS, Oct. 11, /87. 
 MY DEAR MKS. 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 lhat day mines to me afresh as 1 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 JAMEtf W. KLAINE. 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 veiy 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 years 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 " Count ee," 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 havo 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 tho 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 1869. 
 
> BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES W. KLAINti. 
 
 To Mr. J. M. Clark, Dec. :>, 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 weeks. 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 i a cousin of his : his name is T. F. Johnson rather a John- 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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. 4i 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 3 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 well 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 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 form. 1 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, 1 a typographical "error," 1 presume. 
 That summer of the " Ball Alley, 1 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. 
 1 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 it s 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 t think I shall ever look for another, but 
 1 shall return to old Pennsylvania. The longer 1 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 Pennsylvania!!, 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 s 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. ELAINE. 89 
 
 taken place and he now stands forth preeminently conspicuous as "the 
 man of the times. 11 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 1 
 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 aftairs 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 policy 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 11 on 
 account of their " gunpowder popularity." I reckon I must not pursue; 
 this point further, or I will get you raised about " Old Hickory. 11 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. 1 could not help thinking 
 all the time that I was listening to a Pennsylvanian. 1 thought of the 
 night that he recommended you and Nilsy to wash your faces that same 
 night that you stole one of the pillows oft 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 Jas. 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 of 
 the National Road : 
 
90 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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, T 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 ! . . . T 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 (y ur 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 W r atson 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 1 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. ELAINE. 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 a flair 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. Tt is always in one extreme or another. T wish the}- would turn 
 right into it and have a civil war. I presume you were much pleased with 
 Mr. Folk s message. T 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-office report. I read them both with great interest. 
 
 What do you do to amuse yourself away out in the country you have 
 no companions, and I don t see how 3*011 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 1 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 E wing s successor. I suppose he is 
 an able jurist from what I have seen in the " Examiner." 1 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 deatli 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 Avith 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 I 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. ELAINE. 
 
 no little by the addition of three such promising young men as Messrs. 
 Searight, Clark, and Blame. 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 
 will allow me time to stud}-. 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. 
 1 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. ELAINE. 93 
 
 W.M.I., GEORGETOWN, KT., Oct. 25, /48. 
 DEAB 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 Taylors carrying Pennsylvania. Do you think I ll win? Your 
 
 " Pard " 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 
 blueday 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 maneuvering f or 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 great 
 difficulty that the Whigs could carry the State, even with Clay as the 
 nominee, and I have heard intelligent and leading Whigs say that they 
 would vote for him, and that they believed he could outrun any man of 
 either party. I hope they won t nominate him, for if they do the Whigs 
 
94 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 Folk 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. 1 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." 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 \Torn Marshall 1 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 we 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 say 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 Gardes 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 
 
BIOGRAPITY OF JAMES d. 11LAINE. 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. 1 presume freight 
 will be high. By the time you are 1 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" 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. I expect they will finally 
 
 1 Chief of "the subsequent events" was that Mr. Ewing kindly dissuaded him from even 
 applying for a clerkship. 
 
96 HTOGRAl lir OF JAMES C. BLA1NK. 
 
 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: 
 
 ELIZABETH, Christmas Evening, 1852. 
 My HE LOVED SON: 
 
 Yours of the i>2d 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 P 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 
 en JJ 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. Not, 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 happy 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 (1. KLAINE. 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 Stannic. . . . 
 
 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. . . . 
 
 1 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 gladly meet you at any place you may des 
 ignate ; but meet you and the Count I must, or else I shall return to Phila 
 delphia, bitterly disappointed in one of the greatest pleasures anticipated 
 in my visit. 
 
 Where is " Tariff? " I 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. 5, 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 coimtry-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 speaks so mournfully 
 about the probability of its being the last meeting, I 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 " pussevcere," 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 BioGitApnr OF JAMES <v. KLAINE. 
 
 VII. 
 
 MAINE. 
 
 MR. ELAINE 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 world, 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. 
 
KlOGKAPIfV OF JAMES <7. 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 all 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 immediatelv 
 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. 
 Elaine s political tastes. The probability that the State 
 printing would be awarded to the Journal by the winter 
 Legislature was presented as an additional pecuniary induce- 
 
100 HIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. KLAINE. 
 
 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. 
 
niOGKAPIIY OF JAMES O. RLAINE. 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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 Pennsylvania!! 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 O. HLAINE. 
 
 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. Blame 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. ELAINE. 10S 
 
 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 I 
 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 right was hottest, but it made the hottest 
 of the fight 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 with 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. Elaine. 
 
 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. Gushing 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. ELAINE. 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. 
 Elaine 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. Elaine 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 tfc 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. 
 Elaine 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. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. ELAINE. 107 
 
 John li, 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 " Kennebecker," 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, tk 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 a, fact that he wanted must be 
 
108 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 mariner 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. Pinkham 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, 
 
 Mr. Pinkham afterwards became Mr. Elaine s colleague in the Maine House of Represents 
 live*. He WUH an intense Democrat, hut a no less intense admirer of Mr. Blaine. 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. HLAINE. 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 Eminons, 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 Gushing; 
 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. Elaine s father-in- 
 law had cherished for him a special regard and affection which 
 Mr. Elaine 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 Elaine 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 Merrill, 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. Elaine 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 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES 6 f . HLAJNE. Ill 
 
 and accomplishments " of the foe. " Truly, Sir Cottrill, this is 
 an Age of trickery. It doth seem to grow yet 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 t% 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, u 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. 
 
31-J BIOGRAPHY OF JAMKff O. BLAJNJS. 
 
 Thy servant offers this supplication, not that his voice has been 
 bought to party interests, not that he would part with his love for 
 Chrixt, 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 Pennsylvania!!, 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 kt Buchaniers." kt 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 <>F JAM US <!. HI. A INK. 
 
 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. Blame 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. T. Washburn, Jr. : 
 
 WASHINGTON, Feb. 14, 18o6. 
 
 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, 11 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 Xorth 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 thu 
 nine weeks 1 struggle is the strengthening of the direct and indirect opposi<- 
 tion to the Republican party, and that Americanism, as the paramount 
 
114 BJOGRAPHY OF JAMES <1. ELAINE. 
 
 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." Excuse a hurried letter at this time, and please write me often. 
 
 FEBRUARY 26, 56. 
 
 Your letters are received. . . . T presume that no one expects that 
 Seward will be our nominee. The trepidation of our friends has made 
 him weak, 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 only 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. T 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. Elaine inclined to the nomination of 
 Judge McLean, of the Supreme Court, rather than Fremont, 
 " My preference for Judge McLean," he explained to his 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINK. 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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 Elaine 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 875. 
 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 
 
lit) BIOGRAPHY OF JAMKl* (/. HLAINJS. 
 
 on, it is the proud boast of Franklin county that 110 person ever 
 shared with him its political love. 
 
 Another first public speech his editorial partner vouches for 
 and describes. Mr. Elaine 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. Elaine 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 live 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. Elaine s first political speech was in 
 llallowell in the open air. He stood on the top of a high night 
 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." 
 
HKHIHA/ IIY Oh .MJfA rf (J. BLA1NE. 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, wo regret to 
 say, belongs to the most hunker class of Boston Courier Whigs, 
 a set of gentlemen who have about as much sympathy with 
 k Republicanism as they have for the 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. Tf all the Courier Whigs in 
 
118 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES < . KLAINE. 
 
 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 paean of 
 exultation. " No defeat ! " resounded from the hills of Maine. 
 " Such a result from an organization four months old is the 
 assurance of victory to come." 
 
 But politics did not absorb all Mr. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. 
 Elaine 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. Elaine, 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 I bless the name 
 of Blaine I " 
 
120 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Blame 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 }^et, 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. ELAINE. 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. Elaine 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 
 ment 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. Elaine 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. Elaine, of Augusta, of the second part, in 
 Mr. Elaine 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 Elaine as editor of the " Advertiser, 11 
 he (the said Wood) shall pay to him (the said Elaine) 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 Elaine 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. ELAINE. 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 live 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 mav be 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," 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," 1 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 Keniiebec 
 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 of 
 
124 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 
 
 my very numerous cares and my constant, unremitting daily 
 labor. . . . 
 
 I spend about one-half the week in Portland, and the remainder at homo. 
 A large part of my editorial labor is performed here, and as Portland is 
 distant but three hours 1 travel by rail, I can get M long just as well as though 
 I were constantly there . T have thought a good deal about moving there, 
 but hardly think T 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 I 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 T 
 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 Marcli, 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 
 
AT TWENTY-EIGHT. 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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. L am convinced that the concern is profitable, and can be made 
 more so, if a proper 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 t/oit. 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 " 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 witli the fervor of his youthful eloquence ; 
 but he thus early laid in our State the foundation of that respect and 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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. Elaine 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. ELAINE : Permit me to congratulate you on safely reach 
 ing your fortieth natal day. From my heart, I thank God for your life, 
 and for 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 faitlif ul 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 1 owe to you. Your deportment towards me in this city is 
 as cordial and considerate as ever, though I 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 1800, 
 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 
 
mOGRAPIIY OF JAMES (1. KLAINE. 129 
 
 time, but it did not alter his opinion that Mr. Lincoln was the 
 better candidate. 
 
 CHENERY HOUSE, SPRINGFIELD, ILL., 
 
 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 readied 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 Merrill 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 he did not go near Mr. Elaine, 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. Elaine s satisfaction, since it left him free to 
 
130 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES O. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine, 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. Elaine, who was in 
 Washington : 
 
 AUGUSTA, Oct. 30, 1861. 
 
 MY DEAR SIR : 1 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 G. ELAINE. 131 
 
 Your letter of the 24th forbids the State doing anything more than fur 
 nish men, tents, and clothing for the artillery companies, but yours of the 
 J8th 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 everything 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 wood 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, 
 Tf 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, 
 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 
 alry regiment is full, though about one hundred men have not yet come 
 
132 moGEAPirY 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 tine drill for men and 
 horses. Can you get consent? You can t exaggerate this regiment. 
 
 I do want to give Colonel C aldwelPs regiment their arms before they 
 start. Please see what can be done for them where will it go ? 
 
 Maine has not yet received arms from United States averaging with 
 those of other States. Government has furnished not one Maine regiment 
 with rifles. 
 
 Will you see how Colonel Berry is satislied with the arms of his regi 
 ment ? Ask him what I shall do some eight or ten hundred Entield 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 then? 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 live regiments with rifles. 
 
 I would like to have you visit all our Maine camps and report condition, 
 etc. 
 
 Mr. Elaine 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. Blame 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 
 whose 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 O. KLAINE. 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 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 ina 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 Avhile. I am so far out of the circle of my own " kith 
 and kin " that I 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 
 I will sell it back to him for half price, as I have concluded, most probably, 
 to postpone my trip until I can have my passport signed by a Republican 
 Secretary of State, which will be from and after March 4, 1861. 
 
 WASHINGTON CITY, D.C., March 25, 1861. 
 
 MY DEAR WALKER : 1 received your nice little note this morning. I 
 shall long keep it as the first letter written to me by my darling 1 
 
134 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES d. ELAINE. 
 
 The weather here is very warm. There is no snow here. The dust is 
 very thick and blows in my eyes whenever T 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. ... 1 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 band 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 : 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 
 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, 
 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. 
 
 ~\ y|~R. ELAINE 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. (T. 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. ELAINE. 137 
 
 In this T speak what I know. Should yon 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. ELAINE. 
 
 When the propitious time caine, 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 solemnl}* 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 lie 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 witli 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 (V. HLAINE. 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. Elaine, 
 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. Elaine 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 KIOGRAFIIY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 
 I stock of people in the counties of Washington and Cumberland, Penn. 
 
 The problems before Congress at the time of Mr. Blame 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 question 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 C. 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 Helds 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. Me 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^ Me 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 to say that the 
 
142 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 eacb 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 
 
BTOGKAPHY OF JAMKS if. HLAINK. 143 
 
 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 dam-nut, 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 1 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, 1 says the gentleman, rather 
 helplessly. 
 
 ki 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 Pennsylvania!! and his sunny-hearted young 
 compatriot remained mutual admirers and personal friends. 
 
 Many measures which Mr. Elaine 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 
 fanners 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, f 
 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 
 
KlOGRAt llY Ob JAMKS G. HLAINE. 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 
 O f \Var 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 
 iioor 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 puxver for the 
 
140 nioGUAl HY OF .JAMKS (!. 11 LA INK. 
 
 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 1804, 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 w r ould 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 
 
rilY OF JAMKS G. HLAINE. 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: 
 fct 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 they 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. Blame ^tharjvvord which simply spans the 
 unknown and perhaps the unknowable, and which came"affer^ 
 wards to~ be, it^ may~almost be said, appropriated to Mr. J^lameT 1 " 
 ~~~^fo\v~TIght-heartedly he receivedTThe criticisms of the old 
 Pennsylvania!! 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. Elaine 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 words of Mr. Burlingamc arc not inapt. " What precisely is meant by magnetism 
 it might be difficult to define, but it is undoubtedly true that Mr. Burlingame possessed a great 
 reserve of that subtile, forceful, overwhelming power which the word magnetism ia used, to 
 signify." 
 
148 tilOGKAPUY OF JAMES (]. HLAINK. 
 
 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 110,000,000 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. ELAINE. They are not sea-going. 
 
 Mr. PIKE. They were never intended to be sea-going. 
 
 Mr. ELAINE. They will not float. 
 
 Mr. STEVENS. An engineer told me the other day that not 
 one of them would float until $120,000 more had been expended 
 upon each of them. 
 
 Mr. PIKE. The first of them, launched in Eoston 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. ELAINE. --Then the first lost nine inches. 
 
 Mr. PIKE. She did. 
 
 Mr. ELAINE. 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 
 Eritish 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 
 < I noted 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 u very 
 
BIOCfhAPHY or JAMKS d. BLAME. 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. ELAINE. 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 courtesy. 
 
 Presenting a bill for the repeal of the tax on gross receipts 
 and the substitution of a tax on net receipts of boats, Mr. 
 Elaine u occupied his brief time " with facts personally known 
 to himself: "A 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 Eoston in ballast, where, 
 to pay off her crew and meet other expenses, there was a further 
 distribution of $1,176. At Eoston 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 2^ 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 HTOGRAPIIY OP JAMKfi d. JtLAINJS. 
 
 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 : u At the beginning of the war we had 
 -,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. T 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 rlid not imperiously demand the sternest 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 151 
 
 recourse. He upheld the necessary conscription, but he would 
 not make it unnecessarily hard, sharp, inexorable. 
 
 He opposed earnestl} r 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 prescriptive, 
 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. Conkling 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. Blame 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. Elaine presently desired to suggest to the gentleman 
 
152 nroGRAPirv OF JAMES r?. 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 T 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 0. 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 " Oato." Mr. Blaine warned 
 him not to make the bet because he knew the authorship, and 
 that the lines were riot 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 
 l>een 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. ELAINE. 153 
 
 lie 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 the}* 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 
 l>e 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. T 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 tins 
 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."] 1 
 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 T have offered any remarks about him. If he will re 
 member how frequently he has addressed the House, and can 
 <>nlv 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 u 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. 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 157 
 
 IX. 
 
 THE CONKLING-FRY INCIDENT. 
 
 ^HHE 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 Lieu tenant- 
 General by a Senator of the United States." 
 
 The Clerk read as follows : 
 
158 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Conkling 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 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 159 
 
 to know precisely what lias become of the twenty-five million 
 and odd dollars which, under the act of March 13, 1862, went 
 to its credit. 
 
 44 My constituents remember, and other constituencies re- 
 mftmber, 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. 
 
 44 They turned the business of recruiting and drafting into a 
 paradise of coxcombs and thieves. 
 
 44 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, Secretary 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 4 * 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 " : 
 
1GO BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES O. KLAINE. 
 
 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 
 lias 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 iill 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 fighting the bat 
 tles of the country with glory and with joy, the bloodless 
 
mOGRAPIIY OF JAMES G. KLAINE. 101 
 
 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 obloqu}-, 
 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 becometh us to fulfil all 
 righteousness. Such a soldier, so attacked on a field where he 
 could make no defence, Mr. Blame 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 Wai- 
 came to the Military Committee, and among the papers was a 
 letter from Lieutenant-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 OF THE UNITED STATES, 
 
 WASHINGTON, December 14, 1865. 
 
 SIR: Tn reply to your letter of the 13th instant, in reference to deser 
 tions, 1 would make the following remarks : I do not think the present 
 
162 HTOGRAPIir OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 method of recruiting, as curried out, sufficient to fill up the regular array 
 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. ST ANTON, Secretary of War. 
 
 Mr. BLAIXE. 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 Avhich 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. RLAINK. 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 i s 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 1 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. I have 
 
inoGitAPirr OF .TAME* G. ELAINE. 
 
 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." 
 
 44 1 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. Blame 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. 1 suppose the gentleman from 
 New York means nothing of that kind ; I do not know whether 
 he 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 k here or elsewhere he means that he is willing to 
 receive a note outside of the District of Columbia. Well, now, 
 that is veiy cheap, and certainly beneath my notice. I do not 
 believe the gentleman from New York wants to fight a duel; 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. JiLAINE. 165 
 
 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 
 4 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 T am willing to be held responsible 
 at all times and places. Now the phrase 4 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 1 
 denounced, and justly denounced, and which the gentleman 
 had no right to alter at the Globe office. T want members to 
 understand the precise point of my complaint. Though T 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 T was replying to when T quoted a phrase of that 
 kind, the very mild phrase 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 
 
1GG BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. RLAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine 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 " throw back 
 to the gentleman any imputation which he seeks to cast upon 
 me," - which reading showed him to have done exactly what 
 Mr. Elaine said that he had done ! 
 
 So the second day came and went, and on the morning of the 
 third Mr. Elaine 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 forurn 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. ELAINE. I wish further to say that if, on investigation, I 
 had found 1 was in error in the statement I had made touching 
 the member from the Utica district of New York [Mr. Conk- 
 ling] and Provost Marshal-General Fry, I would, mortifying as 
 it would have been, have apologized to the House. Whether 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 : 
 u 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. Colliding, (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 course. 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. JJLAINE. 
 
 insinuation that he u 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, k4 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 has 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 duty. 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. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 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 JANES 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 lie 
 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 T 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 
 lie 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 
 
H TOOK A PHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 171 
 
 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 : 
 
 WAK 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 (1. TiLAINE. 
 
 the progress of your labors, ;ui<l 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, 
 
 0. A. DANA, 
 Assistant Secretary of War. 
 
 Mr. KOSCOE C ONKLING. 
 
 " Now, sir, I find in Brightly \s Digest, Section 46, page 821, 
 that: k 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 T 
 have no doubt he will restore it if convinced he has taken it 
 improperly. 
 
 " Mr. Speaker, all 1 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 
 
BIOGHAPHY OF JAMES G. RLAINE. 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 oftices. Now every one knows that those 
 
174 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 
 
 preliminary authorizations are the tilings 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 .TANKS (f. KLAINE. 175 
 
 also to examine into the statements made by General Fry 
 in his communication to Hon. Mr. Elaine read in the House." 
 The committee met, gave one look at the mass of docu 
 ments which \vere 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. 
 Elaine in offering the letter that the same prison-door \vhich 
 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. Elaine, 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 House adopted the report 
 
176 HfOGRAPHY OF JAMEK G. HLAINE. 
 
 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, 1868, 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 fc life-long feud." But to a feud there 
 must be two parties. On Mr. Elaine 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. Elaine 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 
 
BIOGKAPHY OF JAMES (/. KLATNE. 177 
 
 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 ilt 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. Elaine 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 nioGRAPiiY OF JAM EX a. ULAJNE. 
 
 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. Elaine did not set a high 
 private value on Mr. Coiikling 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. Elaine was not gladly on 
 ill terms with any one, but he was not pressed to a reconcilia 
 tion with Mr. Conkliug by any inward urgency. 
 
 The controversy did not affect Mr. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. 
 Elaine 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. Elaine, 
 there was a visible rudimentary movement of Mr. Conkling s 
 proffering hand towards Mr. Elaine ; 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^o any other 
 person s. " Would you have taken it if he had offered it?" 
 asked a friend of Mr. Elaine 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. 
 
moan ATII Y or JAMKS a. 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. Elaine disembarrassed himself of it 
 once for all, and thus the world remained unvexed of many 
 a storm. Mr. Blame 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 BIOGKAPl-ir OF" JAMES (}. HLAINK. 
 
 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 u 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, u 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 u Conkling rose with his slow undulations like nothing 
 so much as a yellow viper coupled with the accompany ing- 
 venom," and by that time the " crimes," and the u stupidity" 
 were alike merged in " the annoyance which we all suffered 
 under General Fry s legal tyranny," but that u 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. TiLAINE. 181 
 
 nearly as he can without being called to order. . . . Not 
 being called to order, he went on to make that unfortunate 
 observation about 4 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, 4 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. Elaine 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. Elaine, 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. 
 
JilOGliAPHY OF JAMES C. BLAINE. 
 
 X. 
 
 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 
 live 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 Queenstowii 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 ot all the views and information attainable. 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES d. ELAINE. 183 
 
 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. Merrill 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, u 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 Hue roads, talked with its 
 people, seen its splendid country seats. 
 
 " Take the finest finished and ornamented lawn in Brookline, 
 Koxbury, 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 1 have travelled by rail or carriage 011 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 oordiallv received. He said he would send 
 
HfOGKAFTTY 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. 
 
 tk 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 the 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." 
 
 Everywhere the works of art and of architecture receive his 
 
186 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAJNE. 
 
 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 Sadovva. 
 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 rinding 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 " Old Hundred and 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. ELAINE. 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, for 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 LTmperatrice last night I saw John Breck- 
 enridge arid his wife. They sat but a very few boxes from us, 
 
188 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. KLAINE. 
 
 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 ! 
 
 " 1 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. 
 I le bears himself stoically and splendidly." 
 
 The Representative conscience continued to Hatter them that 
 ( ongress 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, 1 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. Mori-ill and myself, and I am satisfied that we 
 acted wisely. We have, at all events, done the best we could 
 witli 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. Merrill went on to Eng 
 land. Witli 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. ELAINE. 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 
 wheii they trusted no one else. For weeks he was the onlv 
 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 4 cabtain, and, last, little 4 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Buiiingame 
 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 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 
 
OF JAMES O. ELAINE. 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, 
 4 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. 4 Does Mr. Black live here ? 4 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, * 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 : 
 
 44 1 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? T mean for yourself and 
 Maggie. It 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, I 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 KTOGJtAPHV OF JAMES (}. HLATNE. 
 
 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 JAM EX G. BLAJNE. 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 by 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, was 
 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 he 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 ti week to the White Sulphur Springs of Vir 
 ginia, and once he even adventured the Hot Springs of Arkan 
 sas. His journeys to his Pennsylvania properties, or on political 
 missions, always seemed like celebrations, so welcome was he to 
 
194 mOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. JILAINJS. 
 
 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. Elaine, 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 lie 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 (7. HLATNE. 1U6 
 
 " . . . 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 army 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 BTOGitAprrr OF JAMEK o. KLAINE. 
 
 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 whicli 
 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. 
 
 " 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 
 
BJOGKAPTfY OF JAUfKS (1. BLAINK. 197 
 
 this country seems to be inclissolubly connected, and just in the 
 degree that we retard the cotton culture we 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 815 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 f 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 
 k4 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. . . . 
 
 "I desire to know, if this doctrine be laid down, how an} r 
 constituency, in the disturbed condition of the Southern States, 
 could ever be sure that they were to have a foothold in this 
 House \)y 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 BTOCRAPJfY OF JAMES G. P.LATNE. 
 
 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 
 ut 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. ELAINE. 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. PLAINS. 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. ELAINE. 
 
 exclusion of the South from West Point. k > 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 : u 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 kk His Royal Highness," and had 
 made inquiry of the Attorney-General if he could turn Con 
 gress out of the House, Mr. Elaine 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 
 
1UOGRAPIIY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 be 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 
 Seriate. The appointing power is vested by the Constitution 
 in the President of the United States. The secretaries aje 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. ELAINE. 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 1 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 tinder 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. HLAJNK. 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. I 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 HIOGRAP1IY 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 
 $43,000,000 cut down to what it was before the war. 
 
 Mr. ELAINE. It was $22,000,000 before the war. 
 
 Mr. WOOD. I wish the gentleman to tell the country why, 
 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. ELAINE. 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 wish 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. ELAINE. There were only nineteen regiments employed, 
 and not a single extra regiment was called into service. 
 
 Mr. FARNS WORTH. I hope the gentleman from Ohio will 
 submit his amendment, so that we may have it printed and 
 before us for our consideration. 
 
 Mr. ELAINE. That consent having been given, the proper 
 place for the amendment will be at the end of the bill. 
 
 Mr. FARNSWORTH. Of course. 
 
 Mr. ELAINE. 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 <V. 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 with 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, 
 $300,000." 
 
 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. 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. KLAINE. 
 
 Mr. ELAINE. 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. 
 
 o 
 
 Mr. Ross. I decline to modify my amendment. 
 Mr. ELAINE. 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. ELAINE. Yes ; but we recruited for only four months 
 in the year. We were reducing the army down to the min 
 imum. Eut 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. ELAINE. 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. ELAINE. 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. ELAINE. 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 
 
BTOCIRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLATNE. 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. LOUGHBIDGE. T 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. ELAINE. 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 
 $10,000,000. I 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 
 $4,000,000. 
 
208 TtrncKAPHY OF JAMES a. KLATNE. 
 
 Mr. LOUGHBIDGE. 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. ELAINE. 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 1 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 I hope the committee will not concur in it. 
 
 Mr. WINDOM. When we come to act on the amendment of 
 
H1O<U:APIIY OF JAMKS G. HLMXK. 209 
 
 the gentleman from Massachusetts we can prevent this kind of 
 corruption. 
 
 Mr. ELAINE. 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 u 
 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. BLAIXE. 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 $60,000 for contingencies of 
 the arm}- there is included $25,000 to be paid to a horse doctor 
 by the name of Dun bar ? 
 
 Mr. ELAINE. The Committee on Appropriations have no 
 knowledge of a horse doctor named Dunbar, or any other horse 
 doctor, being interested in this appropriation. Xothing of the 
 kind came to the knowledge of the committee, and I never heard 
 of it before. It is an appropriation 840,000 less than up to last 
 year has usually been made for that item. 
 
 Mr. WOOD. The Secretary of War has made a contract witli 
 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. ELAINE. 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 1UOGEAPHY OF JAMES d. KLAJNE. 
 
 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. ELAINE. 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. T 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 tne reason why I make the inquiry 
 of the gentleman. 
 
 Mr. BLATNE. Does the gentleman object to that having 
 been done ? 
 
RTOGRAPirr OF JAMES (1. JtLAJNE. 
 
 Mr. KLDRIDGE. 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 lias 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. VAX 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 moGRAPirr OF JAMES a. BLAJNE. 
 
 . . . 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. 1 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 
 I louse 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 
 wa} r 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. BLAIXE. 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. BLAIXE. When the question was up last year there 
 was a very serious trouble between President Johnson and 
 Secretary of War Stan ton, and my svmpathies were with the 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMK8 O. 71LAINE. 218 
 
 Secretary of War, and the provision was made accordingly; 
 and when I moved the amendment last night, T 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, has 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. 
 
 u Third. The election of General Grant had settled the Finan 
 cial question. The American people have deliberately, solemnly, 
 
iJ14 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES (!. ELAINE. 
 
 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 Avith 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. 
 
 u 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 Avhich American 
 nationality and Christian civilization demand." 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 215 
 
 With all Mr. Elaine 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 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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. 
 
 DEAR BLAINE: Well, you have gone and done it in good earnest. 
 What a campaign, what a fight, 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. Elaine : 
 
 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 polite 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. Elaine, 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. Elaine, 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. Dickens 
 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. T 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 partner 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 accepted the version of the story as given 
 by the Chicago papers, I had laid up a heavy charge against him, which E 
 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 die without the sublime satisfaction of 
 readinir niv rcfraxii. 
 
218 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 From Mr. Elaine 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 Edwards 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. 11 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." 
 
 From an Andover Professor to Mr. Blame : 
 
 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 vour son, founded in part 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. Elaine, 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. ELAINE. 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. Blame : 
 
 In that same file of the * Kenne bee 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 thau 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. 1 
 
 JULY 22, 1869. 
 
 llow 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 bo 
 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 fight and gigantic defeat at Bull Run. 
 
 ELIZABETH, PENN., ;>0th July, 1869. 
 
 1 write you from a house of mourning, though my dear mother, with :t 
 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 was in a state of great debility, though not suffering any 
 
220 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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. 11 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, O 
 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 souPs salvation 11 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 hou 
 her mind was unclouded, her heart undaunted, her hope sure, her faitl 
 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. 
 
222 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLA1NE. 
 
 XL 
 
 THE SPEAKER. 
 
 TTPON his election to tlie speakership, Mr. Elaine 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 
 
KTOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. KLAINE. 
 
 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 OAVU gates and did not fear 
 incursion. There was but one imperative and external law of 
 his lif e _ to be in the Speaker s chair at 12 M. As often as 
 possible lie 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. Elaine 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 New York, also a Democrat, was an equally 
 courteous, friendly, and irreproachable neighbor. Opposite lived 
 Secretary 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. Elaine 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 011 I street, that had been 
 given first to General Grant and then to General Sherman; 
 
224 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMK8 (1. HLAJNK. 
 
 and the father, Hon. Thomas Ewing, passed the tranquil even 
 ing of his years find 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. 
 Elaine 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 Avord 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 Ob JA.}fKX (f. ULAINK. 
 
 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 Ernmons 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 Emmoiis 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. 
 Elaine 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 
 
226 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 this 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. BUTLEK. 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 
 
1UOGRAPITY OF JAMES G. JiLAINE. 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. Elaine, 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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 /*/<></ It Aril} o/- JAMKS (1. /tLATNK. 
 
 it was a scandal to many, not only that a prize-fighter should he 
 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 vieAvs, 
 with his wishes, with his Avays 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 widely re 
 proached because on the reassembling of Congress the offen 
 sive member was reappoiiited 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- 
 
OF JAMKS (i. KLAWK. 2* 
 
 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-ttfriff 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. Blame, 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 a 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 the House, the man ceased 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 
 
280 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 Avithout 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- 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 lightness, he disentangled the law and developed the 
 right, and penetrated the consciousness of men. Mr. Holman is 
 reported as saying that Mr. Blairie, 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," u 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 on 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 GARFIELU. 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 SPEAKER, - - 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. I 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 
 which 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. ELAINE. 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. Elaine 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. Elaine was hardly settled in the speakership before the 
 question of the Senatorship was again presented. It had been 
 agitated tAvo 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. Elaine 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 whom 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- of 1870 all the States were back 
 
234 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 sent 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 Avith 
 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. Elaine 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 
 
BIOGEAPHT OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 Elaine, 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." 
 
 %k 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 IUOGRAP1IY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 HLAINE, 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 J T OU to see the public 
 buildings and churches, the Phoenix park, the monument to Daniel 
 O Connell, etc. From Dublin to Kingstown, mouth of Liftey, nine miles ; 
 thence by steamer to Holyhead on the Island of Anglesea. At Holyhead 
 buy a ticket in earty 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 1 ; if not, go next morning, 
 At Birmingham there is nothing to sec except avast succession of factories. 
 From Birmingham go to Warwick, twenty-six miles. Engage a carriage 
 at Warwick station to take you to Kenilworth, 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 Marl borough ; 
 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. ELAINE. 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 Poets 1 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/ 1 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, 11 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 1 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 Spurgeon 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, Emmoiis 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 . , 
 the magnificent, hers. Mons came home at noon fearfully disgusted with 
 his arrangements. He had been put into Cresar, 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 mir, 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^ 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, 
 hubbubly 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. Elihu 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. 
 \ 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. *239 
 
 From Mr. Elaine : 
 
 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. Elaine 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. Elaine : 
 
 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 1 character. I 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 mOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE, 
 
 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 Bisca?/, O ! " 
 
 . . . Wait and go with the Blaines, and we will take a Cunard 
 steamer to Queenstown and we ll "do 1 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 SAvitzerland, 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, Rorrento 
 (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 Csesar, and 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES (/. HLAINK. ^ 
 
 you can see about Joan D Arc, and any other worthy whose real immor 
 tality hangs upon the end of your pen. 
 
 From Mr. Elaine : 
 
 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." 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 clay 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 Stan wood s carnage is at the door, punctual at the 1 P.M. 
 which I 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 Gilfillan 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. Elaine : 
 
 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. Elaine: 
 
 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 really 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 Xews " 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 elan of genius from head to foot, in 
 every tone and turn. 
 
244 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. HLAINE. 
 
 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 1 withdrew from the field "in 
 sullen silence, 11 Mr. Elaine said afterwards. Mrs. Williams talked in 
 earnest, and Mr. Elaine 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. Elaine, 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, I 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. Elaine : 
 
 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. Elaine : 
 
 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., 1 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. JiLAINK. 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 comer points by 
 shavings carefully deported ! 
 
 To Mr. Elaine, 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. T 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. Elaine : 
 
 Town of 
 
 Pittsfield 
 
 Somerset County 
 State of Maine 
 
 United States of America 
 
 Western Hemisphere 
 
 Terrestrial Globe 
 
 Latitude 44 1 North 
 
 Longitude 77 West 
 from Greenwich 
 8J East from 
 Washington 
 8.25 A.M. 
 Tuesday 
 
 Sept. Cth 
 
 A.D. 1870 
 
 Can you tell where and when by the above ? Left home yesterday a 
 little after twelve, and drove here with my pair and my wife. I drove the 
 
24t> 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. Elaine, 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. ELAINE. 247 
 
 From Mr. Elaine 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. Elaine nor 
 Speaker Blaine. You re just Jim Blaine to me, 11 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 Air. Fisher, were Schenck, 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-down 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. He 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. ELAINE. 
 
 drove us to the hotel. This ended Sunday as pleasant a Sunday as I ever 
 spent, and spent in the way which I like. 1 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, 1 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." 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," 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. Elaine 
 
 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, areal 
 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. ELAINE. 249 
 
 WASHINGTON, March 4, 1871. 
 
 Mr. Elaine 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. Elaine 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 1 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. 
 
 It is very warm to-day, and Miss Ripley took us driving this morning, 
 and then to lunch with her, and then H. went to Nettie Chase s wedding. 
 The boys are all to dine at General Sherman s, and Mr. Blaine and I are 
 going to the Thomas concert. H. won t go because she is sure she shall 
 
250 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 1 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 Farns worth 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 ? 
 
 Guy 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 
 
 83 
 
 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 T0 
 
 : : I Z. 
 
 5 
 
 qpA 
 
 Eight per cent., multiply by the number of days and divide by 45 = 
 
 8 . 
 
 O/? A 
 
 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 o f 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, ^r == ~7s~ == ^ 
 
 For reckoning in months at 6 per cent., always remember that each 
 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. Elaine to Walker : 
 
 SARATOGA, N.Y., August 15, 1871. 
 
 The day after you sailed, your mother went home and I 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 week 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 1 started for Washington. f 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, tin- 
 17th of October, and can remain down East, low down, until about Friday 
 morning. T 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 1 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 11 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. ELAINE. 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 arc 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. 
 
 [ 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, 
 so suggested to Mr. Washburn in a note that goes out by this mail, 
 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, Septembers, 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 
 cannor express. Your father is well pleased 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 
 1 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 wel 
 Every ward iii this city is carried by Republicans - a thing which I think 
 
254 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 has hardly ever been before. This city is carried by 239. Other towns 
 have thrown very large votes. Gramp [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 Avas to be, that Augusta, the home of Merrill 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 lie 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 II. 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 key of his strong box missing was fortunate enough to find it, 
 carelessly left on the clock ! At the "Journal v office there w r as proof to 
 correct, cars meantime in. Then there was the bank, and at every corner 
 some one running to stop him. However, he got oft , 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. J1LATNE. 255 
 
 our hearts as yon 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. . . . Grauip hopes to live to vote for Grant next Pres 
 ident. Thinks Mr. Elaine will certainly be the next, but he shall not be 
 here to vote for him ; shall intercede for him in heaven , however. 
 
 From Mr. Elaine 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. BLATNE. 
 
 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. Elaine 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 stormy, 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. Marv 
 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 Beecher 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, Octobers, 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 1 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-townward, 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 
 
JtTOGRAPTTY OF JAMKS O. JiLAJNE. 261 
 
 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. Ilurder s saloon, to come over and 
 have Q. s picture taken. His dress was torn and his boots shabby, but I 
 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. lie 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 Wan-en 
 Fisher and Mr. Hayes, and, to my great surprise, he got home on the 
 four o clock train yesterday afternoon, his beloved Kinglake ("Crimea") 
 still accompanying him. . . . You see, Walker, I write you the most 
 trivial details of our life. I go out but little, and even if 1 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 fireside, 
 
 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 1 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 Hon. E. K. Washbnrn : 
 
 PARIS, October 5, 1871. 
 
 ELAINE: The great question which now agitates all circles in Paris 
 business, social, political, and diplomatic is, whether or not " Blaine is 
 sorry." 
 
 An early and a categorical answer " Yes " or " Xo " would lend to the 
 quiet of Europe. 
 
 To Mr. Blaine from Hon. Horace Greeley : 
 
 NEW YORK, October C, 1871. 
 
 ... I would like to visit Bangor with your crowd, but I am chosen 
 defendant in a libel suit which is to be tried the week of your festival. As 
 I am seldom chosen anything, I feel obliged to accept. 
 
2f>8 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. SLAIN E. 
 
 To Walker : 
 
 AUGUSTA, October 8, 1871. 
 
 . . . 1 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 exo/xjising which you like. 
 I have just been saying to him, " Am 1 not better to thee than ten sons?" 
 " Yes, he says, "and if you were better than twenty, I still want the 
 sons. v I thought he was uneasy about you, but he says he is not. Still, 
 my dear boy, be particular to send oft 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 it 
 would not do for the President to come into Maine and the Speaker not be 
 here to see him. Mr. Merrill gets rid of the whole thing by starting to 
 Kansas to see May to-morrow. 
 
 From Mr. Elaine 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 place, 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 : I 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 I 
 wish I could come, but there is a reason which you can better understand 
 
lilOGPAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 259 
 
 than any man living, and yet which i ought not to submit to a corporate 
 body. Mr. Ewing 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. T 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 porch 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. 
 Til 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 he 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 five 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 
 
200 BJOGRAPHY OF JAJlfES G. fiLAINE. 
 
 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 I 
 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. 
 Tour father told me that he dined at Mr. Hooper s Sunday evening with 
 Agassi/, 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. 
 
 . . . Y r our 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 
 th<; 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 1 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 despatch 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 
 
BIOGKAPIIY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 2G1 
 
 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 lie ate his 
 breakfast. With thankful hearts, we read of your getting to Paris and 
 among friends. Xow 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 Bangor the night before witli 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 post-oilice, so I 
 must say good-night to my dear boy. T long to set; 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, lie sure to write me or 
 him all about it. Do not be afraid, under any circumstances, of giving us 
 vour fullest confidence. When your father was in Bangor he saw a great 
 deal of Rear- Admiral Alden. He sails veiy 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. Blame 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 let 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. Blame s conjecture was right. Walker bad loaned a large Bum, but It waa to a friend 
 aud was duly returned. 
 
262 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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, write me a private note to the 
 Parker House, Boston, marking, "To be called for." As I shall be in 
 Boston every few days in November (D.V.), I shall easily get it without 
 observation. 
 
 Your frankness towards me must be equal to my affection for you. 
 
 From Mr. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 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. lie 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 pra} T ers 
 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 1 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. 
 
-64 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAIXE. 
 
 From Mr. Elaine 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 yon adhere closely to your 
 studies than to do any writing just now. 
 
 Do not study German to the neglect of French. \ 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. O owden, 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 (ouches 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. Ho 
 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 would 
 not permit himself even to wink. When his head was cropped, we had 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 
 came 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 o- for at the window a full half hour before Harry Brown came along, 
 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 Coif ax 
 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 
 "ood 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, I 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 that 
 1 have <nveu full explanation of everything in my former letter. 
 
266 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 From Mr. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 267 
 
 From Mr. Elaine to Walker : 
 
 DECEMBER 15, 1871. 
 
 I have by same mail with yours a letter from Madame Ileidler, 
 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 
 
 O O 
 
 good as new. As good ? A thousand times better in hio 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, 1 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 1 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 
 H. 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 Mons 1 return. 
 
2<38 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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. 
 Elaine 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. Elaine tentatively at its head as candidate 
 for the succession. 
 
 He had disagreed often enough with the President to ho 
 supposed ready for organized opposition. 
 
 In the ensuing campaign it was publicly reported, to offset 
 liis advocacy of President Grant, that he had said, " The only 
 way to have a good, square talk Avith 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 Avas often impatient Avith the President s vieAvs, 
 or lack of vieAvs, and occasionally intolerant of his methods, as 
 might well be with a President who had served his administra 
 tive apprenticeship at the head of the army ; but Mr. Elaine 
 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 war. 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. ELAINE. 269 
 
 Reform was the watchword, investigation the weapon of the 
 new party. Every leader in every governmental department 
 seemed to be set aright 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 success 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 Aririori 
 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 tlu-ough 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. 
 
 O 
 
 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 Avas blown on 
 the fct 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. Elaine, 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. Mr. Simmer, not without reason for his re 
 sentments, forgot his Civil Rights Bill, for which he had persist- 
 
270 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 ently and heroically labored, and publicly and formally joined 
 hands with the men who had secured ite defeat. Mr. Elaine 
 at once wrote him a public letter of remonstrance : 
 
 JULY 31, 1872. 
 
 Your letter of July 29 has created profound pain among your former 
 political friends throughout New England. Your po\ver 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 negro. 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 Grecley. 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 Simmer, 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 case of his election. We 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 Republican 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-Ivlux villain in the South 
 
A PHY OF JAMEti G. KLAINE. 271 
 
 by his slogan about " local self-government," and his inveighing, in Rebel 
 parlance, against " centralization." 
 
 You cannot forget, Mr. Simmer, 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 known as iilibustering. 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 inliuence 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. 1 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 be veiy 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 that Horace Greeley docs not become a Democrat by 
 
272 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINK. 
 
 receiving Democratic votes, proving it by the analogy of your own elec 
 tion to the Senate, is hardly 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 
 luivc wonderful instincts, and when they read your letter they will know 
 that at a crisis in their fate, you deserted them. Charles Sunnier, 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. Sunnier replied, defending his course in the interests 
 of harmony and reconciliation. But Horace Greeley, Apostle of 
 Freedom, Tribune of the People, found Mr. Elaine s letter "pre 
 tentious " and worse ; marvelled that this " superserviceahle 
 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 Elaine 
 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 rapacity " became a battle-cry with 
 men who had fought bravely in the fore-front of the Republican 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES a. BLAINR. 273 
 
 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 u 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 
 tight 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 fiiends. 
 
 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 lie 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 lias consented to stand as the candidate and 
 representative of that party." 
 
 P>ut from the beginning the Greeley party not only recognized 
 in Mr. Blaine a formidable foe, but seemed to regard him with the 
 bitterness due to a recusant, and directed against him its fiercest 
 fire, which was too often a foul fire. The " Tribune " carried the 
 
274 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES (/. KLAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine 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 " magnifi 
 cent opportunity for a generalship wliicli was not forthcoming" 
 while Blaine s forces were " admirably organized with battalions 
 
lUOURAPIIY OF JAMES (?. ELAINE. 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 terrorizatioii 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 ti Mr. Elaine 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 ! 
 
 Blame 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. Blame 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. 
 
 fct The result of the election will show that thousands of people 
 in eveiy 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 : 
 
276 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES <7. BLATNK. 
 
 To THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, Long Branch, New Jersey: 
 We have carried tho 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 t \venty- 
 iive thousand majority in November. 
 
 Mr. Blame himself had a majority in everyone of the twenty- 
 seven towns of his county, six of which were usually Demo 
 cratic. His majority in his district was three thousand five 
 hundred. 
 
 And the campaign poet gayly sang : 
 
 " Greeleyism is from this time ilead : 
 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. Cakes 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 live hundred shares of assessable stock of the 
 Union Pacific Railroad, and two thousand uimssessable shares 
 of the same stock. 
 
 Speaker Elaine is proved to have received allotments valued 
 at 11,625,000, 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 live 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 " New York Tribune," founded and 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. KLAINE. 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, T had not taken my seat in 
 Congress, T had not been elected to Congress, indeed T had not 
 been even nominated for Congress. When the act to which 
 the Tribune refers became a law, T was member of the Maine 
 Legislature and Speaker of the Lower House. T 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 T was a member of the Maine Legislature, 
 T received nearly $ 2,000,000 in stock of a great Erie road cor 
 poration. 
 
 "And now, gentlemen, if T 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 1802, 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 T 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 
 only 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 a card 
 on the eve of the Maine election, saying T had never owned, 
 directly or indirectly, through myself or through another, a 
 single dollar of stock in the Credit Mobilier/ The New 
 
278 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. KLAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine was right in presuming that Mr. Greeley would 
 not consider his denial satisfactory. With evil ingenuity, he 
 argued that Mr. Elaine " might very well contrive to say of 
 moneys received from Oakes Ames, that he never received them 
 from the 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 
 " Elaine s Credit Mobilier Funds," of " the men who bought up 
 Elaine," and of " Mr. Elaine as a poor man in 1862, and in 1872 
 reckoned by kis friends and neighbors in Augusta as a million- 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. KLAINE. 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. Elaine wrote to General Thomas 
 Ewing from Cleveland, Ohio : 
 
 CLEVELAND, OHIO, October 1, 1872. 
 
 I send you herewith copies of the " New York Tribune 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 vou 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, P^astern Division. You 
 and Colonel Stone are thus made sponsors of the charge preferred against 
 me by the "New York Tribune." 
 
 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 1 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. ELAINE, 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 
 Leaven worth, 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 an}* time 
 the remotest interest in the company held by any of your family. The 
 entry of $1,020,000 of stock opposite the name of " Blaine 1 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. 1 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, J 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 EWING, 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 arid trust- 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 281 
 
 worthy. It took u pleasure, therefore, in withdrawing in the 
 promptest and fullest manner the imputations upon Mr. Blaine," 
 regarding his immense wealth from that source, but not those 
 u equally damaging imputations put upon him by Oakes Ames 
 and Colonel McComb. " 
 
 The heaviest gun having thus been spiked, the Credit Mobilier 
 cannonade against Mr. Blaine ceased, except when a few 
 days before the election, in sullen response to Mr. Elaine s 
 " repeating for the thirtieth or fortieth time old jokes about 
 Dundreary," the equally old story of Mr. Blame 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-rive 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. 
 Mis friends and his opponents, many of whom were his 
 warmest admirers, the men who had maligned him arid 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 . ELAINE. 
 
 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 011 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 fioor 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. ELAINE. 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. Elaine 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 hesitation 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. Blain e 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. Elaine, and others, were interested in this railroad. 
 
 Mr. ELAINE. Did you ever say to any one that you 
 thought you had caught the Speaker? 
 
 Mr. STEVENSON. I don t remember. 
 
 Speaker ELAINE. Did you have such a conversation with 
 Senator Stevenson, of Kentucky ? 
 
284 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 Mr. STEVENSON. I don t remember. I had a conversation 
 with him on the subject. 
 
 Speaker ELAINE. 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 BLATNE. 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 Avish 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 JAME$ G. ELAINE. 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 sha res he had be^n living in hope that they would 
 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 Avas 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. HLAINK 
 
 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. Blame found 
 occasion to take the floor to secure a pension for a widow. 
 General Sherman told the story years before Mr. Elaine s death : 
 
 u T 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 c 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 
 
tilOGitAPHY OF JAMES G. liLAINE. 289 
 
 handed me a letter in the familiar handwriting of the venerable 
 Gen. David Hunter, asking me to befriend the bearer. Cast 
 ing my eyes over it I exclaimed, k 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, 4 1 do 
 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 ail 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, I thought I could take 
 care of myself, and never asked for a pension, but now my child 
 calls to me from abroad. Mrs. Wood, I am sure we can easily 
 make up a case under the General Pension Law, which will 
 give you f 30 a month, but it can only date from the time of 
 your formal application. c 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, 4 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. 4 Do you know 
 
290 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 anybody in Congress ? k 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. 
 4 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 wonian. 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 4 Universal 
 Objector, saying : 4 Holman, I have a little matter of great 
 interest which I want to rush through ; please don t " object." 
 What is it? - 4 A special pension for the widow of Surgeon 
 Wood, the daughter of Gen. Zachary Taylor. 4 Is it all 
 right ? c 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 
 
mOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 
 Elaine 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. Elaine s permission, and Mr. Elaine 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, which 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. Elaine s speech, to which General Sherman referred, 
 was brief: U 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 BIOGEAPIIY or JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine, 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, Mi 1 . Elaine 
 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. ELAINE. 293 
 
 and night service had richly earned it, he put and carried the 
 motion, as one member expressed it, " heels over head," 
 and u 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 Avas 
 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. Elaine 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 he is overworked. He is studying assiduously, to be 
 sure. He 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 ie 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. KLAINE. 
 
 physique, 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 " . . . put you on the top shelf of 
 comfort, consideration, and attention while 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 \vith 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. Everything 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. ELAINE. 295 
 
 about German. Shall study very hard on it for the next two months. In 
 French lam 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 lather 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 
 Charles 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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 JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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, * &frod 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 " dreadl ul," 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 paler 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. ELAINE. 297 
 
 to-day already, Mr. Fish once. The most punctilious arrangements are 
 made for the ceremony. As it is the lirst 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." Sunday evening I 
 go to Masonic Temple to assist in another reception of the flaps. Mrs. Fish, 
 wife of Secretary of State ; Mrs. Coif ax, wife of President of Senate ; Mrs. 
 Blaine, wife of Speaker of the House ; and Mrs. Banks, wife of Chairman 
 of Committee of Foreign Aft airs, 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. II. spoke of it to the President afterwards. He said yes, she did 
 better than he, for his knees trembled under him. " What! " said II., " 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 G. ELAINE. 299 
 
 We heard from you Sunday morning, and I yesterday sent the letter to 
 Augusta. Enmioiis 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 wriies 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, 1 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 rcsaying 
 " It s a fraud." 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. 
 Elaine, Paris, April, 1872 : 
 
 Private. 
 
 How is it going on at home ? Can t 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 stay 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 ; Shermy 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. ELAINE. 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. Elaine : 
 
 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 1 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. Elaine 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 ivays. 
 
 To V.: 
 
 AUGUSTA, June 16, 1872. 
 
 Mr. Elaine 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. KLAINE. 
 
 them. The papa took the umbrella, Emmons drove, and Walker fanned, and 
 I only hope they may step far enough heavenward to pay for the earthly 
 trouble for Mons, in harnessing, broke out into a heat which nothino- 
 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. Elaine, 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 garden" 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. ELAINE. 303 
 
 From V.: 
 
 WASHINGTON, 1873. 
 
 How much have you seen of Mr. Elaine s tilt with Mr. Stevenson ? lie 
 came to Mr. Elaine afterwards rather complaining of his treatment. Mr. 
 Elaine told him he did not want to attack him, but he could not help it, 
 Mr. Stevenson brought it on himself. Mr. Stevenson said of course he 
 " could not stand up against a man of Mr. Elaine s talent and courage which 
 was perfectly audacious." He objected that Mr. Elaine had made him appear 
 to swear falsely. "Why, Job," said Mr. Elaine, "that s the very point. 
 Have you just got that through your head?" The committee-room was 
 full, and they say Mr. Elaine went at him shovel and tongs, and carried 
 all before him ; even the Tribune " says the Speaker came oft with flying 
 colors, and the "Herald" quite abuses Stevenson. George W. Curtis, at 
 the Fish dinner, complimented Mr. Elaine very highly, especially upon 
 shining so brightly in the midst of so much darkness. 
 
 From General Sherman : 
 
 WASHINGTON, Feb. 5, 1873. 
 
 DEAR ELAINE : 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 Bristeds, 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. Elaine 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 G. SLAItffi. 
 
 To Mr. Elaine, 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. Elaine : 
 
 WASHINGTON, March 26, 1873. 
 
 I forgot to tell you of a very remarkable coincidence that happened 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." 
 
 Moral. Give all the doubts to Schuyler. 
 
 From President Grant to Mr. Elaine : 
 
 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 
 
SIOGKAPT1Y Of JAMES 0. KLA1NE. 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. Elaine 
 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 llth, 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." (>, si sic (/nines! 
 
 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? 
 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 Democratic convention nor as to the reelection. 
 
806 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. 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 Speakcrship. 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 aftiiir, 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 yet 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: " Amonf 
 the assets of Jay Cookc & Co. an item of some $30,000 from lion. 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 18G9, 
 when he purchased his residence on Fifteenth street, in this city. The 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. KLAINE. 307 
 
 mortgage is not mature until 1875. The amount is amply secured by the 
 intrinsic value of the residence." 
 
 From Mr. Elaine to Mr. Wood: 
 
 AUGUSTA, October 31, 1873. 
 
 MY DEAR SIR : T 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. Elaine, 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 pay, 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 YORK, 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 opponents 1 
 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. Elaine 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, I think, were not logical in their treatment and con 
 clusions. They should either have remitted punishment, or expelled you 
 
308 BiOGKAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAlNK. 
 
 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 sharply 
 criticised at the time, as wholly an inconsistent verdict for, as old Mr. 
 Ewing well said, " Porter should have been cleared or shot. 1 1 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 dorft you ever do it again. 1 1 
 
 Second. My whole conclusion in regard to the course of you boys is, that 
 you behaved very foolishly. You tried the impossible game of running with 
 the hare and holding with the hounds." 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 illc? fachrymte. 
 
 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. Elaine : 
 
 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. Elaine, 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 
 
OP .TAMES G. fiLATNE. 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. VLAINE. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 FROM THE SPEAKERSHIP TO THE SENATE. 
 
 FN 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. ELAINE. 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 ($2,140,000,000); 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. ELAINE. 313 
 
 t 
 
 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. ELAINE. 
 
 t 
 
 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 Avork 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. 
 McEnery were both claiming the governorship of the State. 
 Behind the one were the returning board, the administration, 
 and the arm}- ; 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 bayonets. 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 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 u 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. Hlaine 
 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 u 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. ELAINE. 319 
 
 editors were designing to form a party by joining the hard- 
 money Democrats, with Speaker Blaine for a candidate, u 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, im 
 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 u 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 tergiver 
 sation, or caprice, or timidity, was the instantaneous and 
 instinctive application of unchanged and unchanging principle. 
 
320 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. KLAINE. 
 
 Mr. Elaine, 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 witli 
 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 or 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. 321 
 
 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. Blame 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. 
 Hoi man 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 he be trusted to lead, but that a man who can 
 " achieve the unprecedented parliamentary triumph of defeating 
 
322 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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. ELAINE. 323 
 
 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 u 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 lie 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 BIOGRAPHT OF JAMES G. KLAINE. 
 
 " 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 Avhat the Republican party has done in this matter. I wisli 
 to place it there as an imperishable record of liberality, and mag 
 nanimity, arid 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 he 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, 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 325 
 
 deliberately, guiltily, and wilfully, of the gigantic murders and 
 crimes at Andersonville." 
 
 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 brake man 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. ELAINE. 
 
 " 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 fc 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 
 tires, 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 was 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. ELAINE. 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 rules of this House. 
 
 Mr. ELAINE. 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. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. 
 1 1 is as follows : 
 
 RALEIGH, N.C., January 1~2, 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 
 ing 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. ELAINE. 
 
 " 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. BLALNE. 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. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 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 riot 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. Every 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. BLATNE. 
 
 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. Elaine 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 January, 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. Blame 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 eveii-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 lie 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine 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 
 " 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Blame 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 denned 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 $ 64,000, 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 $64,000 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 
 
836 BIOGRAPHY Of JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 164,000 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 
 $64,000 was said to have been negotiated for my benefit, as they 
 confidentially knew. Hearing of this charge some weeks in 
 advance of its publication, T 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, 1876. 
 
 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, 1 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 G, 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 any 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 : 
 
 XEW 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 175,000 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 Avhom 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 Mobilier 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 know 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. ELAINE. 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, 187G. 
 
 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 
 G. 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, Penn. 
 
340 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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. ELAINE, 
 
 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 F moved a 
 committee to investigate the Credit Mobilier charges, and 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 $150,000 to 
 $250,000 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 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 portion of the lands it had received from the general govern 
 ment to aid in the construction of the road about live 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 Avar. 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, paying 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 Avithin the last 
 twelve years. In addition to my investment in the bonds I 
 uitited 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 1874, I 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 any one 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 Avhich 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 riot 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 witli 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 
 
BIOGEAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 110 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 coiild 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 lie 
 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 who 
 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. ELAINE. 347 
 
 The investigation was opened on May 15th. It may be 
 mentioned as indicative of the level of Mr. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. Elaine s name in connection with 
 the 164,000. 
 
 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. Elaine 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. Elaine s name in connection with the 
 $64,000. 
 
 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- 
 well, 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. Elaine claimed that he was entitled to 
 have judgment on the $64,000 bonds. Mr. Lawrence, the only 
 
348 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine, and that 110 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 Elaine votes for every Conkling vote. New Hamp 
 shire had spoken unmistakably for Elaine. The delegations 
 continued to " come in for Elaine." 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. Elaine 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 110 reason appeared for not bringing in the report, and Mr. 
 Elaine 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 Elaine ; 
 there was a spontaneous outburst for him in Missouri, and 
 on June 1st Iowa declared for Elaine. 
 
 There began to be whisperings in the underworld that Mr. 
 Elaine might be implicated in corrupt legislation with the 
 Northern Pacific Railroad. Mr. Elaine 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 Eoston who would show 
 not only that Mr. Elaine was implicated in Northern Pacific 
 bribery, but that he had been the owner of the 164,000 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. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 349 
 
 to be satisfactory to Mr. Blaine. Mr. Mulligan had once been 
 the clerk of Mr. Elaine s brother-in-law, Mr. Jacob Stanwood, 
 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine 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, protested 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. JiLAINE. 351 
 
 When at length Mr. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. Elaine having the letters and 
 papers in his possession is not bound to surrender them. Referring to Mr. 
 Elaine s private aft airs, 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. Elaine to assert his right as an American citizen, and resist any such 
 demand to the last extremity. 
 
 (Signed) J. S. ELACK, 
 
 MATT. PI. 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. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. All 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. BLAIXE. 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 an}" 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 friend 
 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 *o, 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. 855 
 
 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 Avas 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 Avere. I had no 
 sooner got through Avith that, than I was advised that in another 
 part of the Capitol, Avithout the slightest notice in the Avorld 
 being giA r en to me, Avith no monition, no Avarning to me, I Avas 
 being arraigned before a committee knoAvn as the Real Estate 
 Pool Committee, Avhich Avas originally organized to examine 
 into the affairs of the estate of Jay Cooke & Co., and Avhose 
 poAvers were enlarged on the third day of April by the follow 
 ing resolution : 
 
 Whereas, on the 24th day of January, A.D. 1876, the House adopted the 
 following resolution : 
 
356 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. XL A IN E. 
 
 " 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. 1 Therefore, 
 
 Be it resolved, That said committee be further authori/ed 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 purpose said committee shall 
 have the same powers to send for persons and papers as conferred by said 
 oriirinal resolution. 
 
 They began an investigation, which, I am credibly informed, 
 and I think the chairman of that committee Avill 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 will 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. ELAINE. 357 
 
 been known that there are gentlemen in this hall whose feelings 
 Avere 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 circumstances 
 which have been notoriously scattered throughout the United 
 States, and are known to everybody. I have them. I 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. ELAINE. -- Very well. 
 
 Mr. KNOTT. I know you wanted to be made a martyr of. 
 [Laughter.] 
 
 Mr. ELAINE. 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. ELAINE. 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 lie 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 O. ELAINE. 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 witli 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, " Blame 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 Mr. 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Uaseltine, 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. ELAINE. 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. 
 
 u 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. 
 Elaine, 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. Elaine. 
 
 u 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. ELAINE. 
 
 " Wlien 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. 
 
 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 4 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. ELAINE. 
 
 From V. : 
 
 WASHINGTON, April 13, 1874. 
 
 I have just returned from the funeral of Charles Sunnier 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 tcm. announced " The 
 House of Representatives, 11 all the Senators arose. Mr. Blaine and the 
 clerk, Mr. McPherson, headed the procession. Mr. Blaine^ 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, 1 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 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 people, 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. Elaine s sleeve, and 
 whispered, " I ve had a yight 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 w r as 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 scalps 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 
 
 O 
 
 difficulty in distinguishing the women from the men, but, like all the 
 daughters of Eve, I found that they w r ore 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. Elaine s uncle, Hon. Jno. H. Ewing : 
 
 WASHINGTON, PA., August 27, 1874. 
 
 MY DEAR FRIEND AND KINSMAN : Your favor was duly received, en 
 closing draft of one thousand dollars 1 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 yon refer as at all probable. It is no 
 doubt possible, and if it should happen, I am sure no reflection would give 
 me more disquiet than that which makes rne 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. Elaine : 
 
 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 T 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. T 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. Elaine : 
 
 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 you, 
 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 off the 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. 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLA1NE. 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 Elaine. 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. Elaine 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. Elaine slipped it 
 out again, and felt paid for staying. 
 
 WASHINGTON, March 4, 1875. 
 
 We are no longer Speaker. ... It has been an "ovation." Mr. 
 Elaine 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, Eurleigh, 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 spaces 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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 closing 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. 11 Everybody was moved, and the very clerks at the desk wiped 
 their eyes. At the close, there came such a clapping of applause, again 
 and again repeated, and no one stirred from his place except Mr. Elaine, 
 who immediately left the chair; but the applause 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. 11 " Oh ! " he said, "he only lost it to get something 
 higher and better. 11 However, Mr. Blaine is well warned at home to care 
 
 O 
 
 for none of these things ; but it is gratifying to retire from six years 1 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. (Jod bless you !" 
 
 The whole town is ringing with Mr. Blaine s speech and reception. 
 Meeting Mr. Phelps walking, he said he had never seen the English 
 language 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. Tn 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 was 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 tho 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. ELAINE. 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. II. 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 StPte, 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. I said, "But it is Bible." " Is it Bible ? " " I think so. 1 " Won t 
 believe it till I see it." I went for my Concordance. lie 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 twasnt in the original Hebrew 
 as /read the Bible." 
 
 To Mr. Elaine, from Hon. John H. Ewing : 
 
 WASHINGTON, PENN., May 4, 1875. 
 
 I have learned with much pleasure from Dr. Hays that you have agreed 
 to meet with us at our next college commencement on the last of June. I 
 
372 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 
 
 ain 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 young 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. Elaine : 
 
 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. 
 Kuppaner 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. ELAINE. 373 
 
 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. Elaine, 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 will 
 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. Elaine, from Hon. J. II. Ewing : 
 
 WASHINGTON, PENN., 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 oft 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 eacli 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. 
 
BIOGEAPIIY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 you 
 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, ILL., 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. 1 
 
 Mr. Gapen was " born and raised 1 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 E wings 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, VI, 
 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. 
 
 Infandumjubes renovare dolorem, 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. ELAINE. 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 Canard 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. Elaine, 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. ELAINE. 
 
 To Mr. Elaine, from Hon. W. E. Niblack : 
 
 DECEMBER 19, 1875. 
 
 Yon 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, "Elaine 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. Elaine, from Mr. Samuel L. Clemens : 
 
 . . . Now that I have started after this youth, I shall not feel content 
 until 1 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. lie 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. 
 Elaine 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 
 ing Mr. Elaine 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. Elaine 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 Holden s 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 hi* 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 oflish, 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 ballled 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. ELAINE. 
 
 and said, " You know I don t exactly agree with you, but you have been 
 a conquering hero through this whole debate." 
 
 From Hon. J. W. Webb to Mr. Elaine : 
 
 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 tinds 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 1 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 upon 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. ELAINE. 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. 11 But I need not tell you 
 that the so-called " Independent Press, 11 . . . 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. Elaine, 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 gush 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. 11 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 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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. 
 
 Mr 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 arid 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 yrand- 
 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 11 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 employed 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine, 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/ 1 Or you may choose what Senator O. said to Mr. Blaine after 
 wards, " Why, it was a devil of a time! 11 . . . 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 11 ) 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 Elaine delegates, 
 Mr. Elaine 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.E., 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 1 
 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. T 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 Avas 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,"! understand you dined with Mr. Blaine, 
 and that he offered you the English mission." " All ! " said Mr. Curtis, 
 " my price has risen. I thought T 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine, 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. Tf 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 T 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. 
 
 J 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. Blame 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. T 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. ELAINE. 387 
 
 after telegram coming in " solid for Blame." 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 II . 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, 187G. 
 
 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 mental 
 
388 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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! Ainen. 
 
 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. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 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 
 shouldassert 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 
 Elaine 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, 1 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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," 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. 1 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 1 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. ELAINE. 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 O. ELAINE. 
 
 To Mr. Blaine, from Mr. William Or ton : 
 
 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." 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 lie 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. Elaine 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 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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. Haie said Blaine looked very much as if he ivas "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 ; 
 but I have never seen anything so thrilling as this ! " 
 
394 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 THE WORK OF THE REPUBLICAN CONVENTION. 
 
 r I ^HE 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. Elaine 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 t o 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. 
 
1 
 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 
 tierce 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 
 " Elaine ! 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. ELAINE. 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. ELAINE. 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. ELAINE. 
 
 Calmest, coolest, most discerning of all, Mr. Elaine 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. 
 Elaine 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. Elaine had too much work on hand, he 
 had too serious plans in mind, to spend his time in beating the 
 
BIOGRAPHY 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 u 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- 
 f ully, 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 who 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 e very-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, ELAINE. 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 : 4 Sorry we cannot vote for 
 you this time, but we will next, and 4 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. Elaine 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. Blame 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. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Blame, 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. ELAINE. 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. iThe 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. I 
 
 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 
 ing 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. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 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, u 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 110 
 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. ELAINE. 409 
 
 The Supreme Court set up by Mr. Nicholls 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. E. 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 Avho 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 indissolubly 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. ELAINE. 411 
 
 did not belong to Hayes and Wheeler ; that it was a fraud to 
 give it to them. 
 
 Mr. Bayard likened Mr. Elaine s opposition to fire-bells in 
 the night kindling anew the flames of sectional discord. Into 
 Mr. Blame 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. Blame 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 
 cabinet] . 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 my 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. ELAINE. 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. Elaine 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. 
 Elaine 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 
 with " deafening applause." 
 
 WASHINGTON, June 12, 1876. 
 
 Mr. Elaine 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. Elaine replied to it that everything was looking well 
 here, brighter than it had for a month. Mrs. Elaine 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 T. s 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. II. said, 
 " Anything in your eye, father? 1 lie did not answer, and she repeated, 
 " Have you got something in your eye ? " Then lie 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 II. 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 floor. 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," says "A." 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," 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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, lighting 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. lie also said, "Telegraph to Mr. Hale. 11 And when he 
 had taken all he wanted of something, he said, "That ll do, 1 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 mom- 
 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, G 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. ELAINE. 
 
 slanderers and ex-Rebel investigators. The sympathies of the whole 
 country must be with him. 
 
 I never doubted Mr. Blame s peiiect 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, lean 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, 187G. 
 
 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 lie 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 do/en 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. 
 Kmmons 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. ELAINE. 417 
 
 man, and taking all his honor to herself ! Sunday night 1 was awaiting 
 every moment the possibility of a change for the worse. The doctor has 
 stayed every night so far, and Mrs. Elaine 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 imexcited 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." 
 "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, 1 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 Sevvard 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 oft 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, 1 
 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 he got 
 the nomination and election, and it is undoubtedly better for his health ; 
 but 1 do not deny that it is a risk which I would gladly have taken ! 
 
418 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine 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 tor 
 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 \vill 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 
 
RIOGRAP11Y OF JAMES G. HLAINE. 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. Elaine 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, 1 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 Elaine 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, 187G. 
 
 . . . The more I think of the result at Cincinnati (1 don t think 
 very much of it, however), the better am I satisfied. . . . Tell father 
 that I shall be disappointed it he doesn t make me his private secretary 
 for the summer, as I think Tom needs rest, and 1 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. Elaine 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 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 Mr. Elaine 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 (/ranted. 
 
 From Plon. T. Ewing: 
 
 ST. Louis, June oO, 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. Elaine. 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 
 oft so arrogantly, T would have made a minority report on that subject, as 
 I did on the specie resumption law. The reason I did not was that T 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, 1876. 
 
 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?" 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 
 BulFs 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. ELAINE. 421 
 
 convention and shall send away two more to-morrow." B. says that the 
 Saturday before Mr. Elaine 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 says 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 Mat 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., Augusts, 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," 1 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 sony that my dear friend 
 Adams has allowed his name to be used by the Democrats, but he will not 
 have a lar-e 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," 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 a fter he had finished in about ten minutes the crowd 
 began to call for father ; but a little fellow who had been " sp ilin " all 
 day for a chance to speak had to be introduced. He spoke about five 
 minutes and said nothing, and then they yelled " Elaine." 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." 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 Pan, w r here we changed cars, we 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 ealled 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 tine old Irishman who 
 insisted on kissing me. You never saw two people 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 Muncic 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 Xoyes. 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. Iknew 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. Elaine, from John Jay : 
 
 NEW YOKK, 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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, 11 as Garh eld 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, 1 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 Garh eld 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. ELAINE. 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 cle 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. 1 . . . 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. Elaine : 
 
 WASHINGTON, February 16, 1877. 
 
 Walker came early this morning, by night train from New York. We 
 breakfasted together at Wormley s, and he went to the capitol 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 are 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 
 wilf 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. ELAINE. 
 
 From Mr. Elaine : 
 
 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 you ll 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 Avrithed 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 
 nothing will "conciliate the South" but to put the control of the federal 
 crovernment and the destiny of the nation into her hands, as in the days of 
 her oligarchal supremacy. 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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, 11 
 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," 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 may be 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. Elaine : 
 
 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. 
 k . . 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 years. 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. Elaine, 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 
 w r ith it and how much I admire your course. You are sure to be sus 
 tained by the Republican party cu maxsc 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 you 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 avowed acknowledgment that lie 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 
 with 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. ELAINE. 429 
 
 dyeing my hair to look young 1 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, 
 [ 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 1 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." 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," it may interest 
 you to know. . . . You don t know how I desire to get home. I don 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. Elaine : 
 
 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. Elaine s 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. Elaine 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. Elaine s all last summer, and 
 
430 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 
 
 tried to get Blame delegates sent to Cincinnati. So you can see how wild 
 are all the stories about Mr. Elaine 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]. 11 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 T 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. ELAINE. 431 
 
 two Southern States was getting on a good basis, should step in and kick 
 down the ladder by whicli 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 Elaine, 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. " 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, whicli 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. Elaine, 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 BIOGEAPUY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 
 
 XV. 
 
 IN THE SENATE. 
 
 Southern policy adopted by the administration of Pres- 
 ident Hayes was a bitter and lasting disappointment to 
 Mr. Elaine. 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 
 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 of 
 Washington Irving, and to Saratoga. 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 433 
 
 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 inonometallists. He did riot believe 41 2 J grains of silver 
 would make such a dollar. The bill w r as 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine 
 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 lie 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- 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 435 
 
 meiit 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 }^et 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine 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 LTAVS. 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. Laws 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. ELAINE. 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, fc 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 -f 1 a cord stumpage for firewood in a remote gorge 
 in the Rocky Mountains 15,000 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. Elaine was repre 
 sented as " rushing to the defence of timber-thieves," his 
 u clients," " the worst element of societ} r ." He accepted the 
 
438 BIOGRAPHY 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 law 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." 
 
 u 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." 
 
 " 1 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. ELAINE. 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 890,000,000 we take 140,000,000. 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 Avith 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. ELAINE. 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, 4 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, fc 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. 
 Blame 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 4 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. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 443 
 
 beyond counting. Even to themes like the currency, not only 
 complicated but often heavy, he brought a lucidity of statement, 
 11 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. u 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 1878 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 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 : 
 
 " Tn 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. Elaine, 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. ELAINE. 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 ConnelK when he was moving for Repeal, 
 
446 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 that the English Whigs had endured calumny, abuse, popular 
 fury, loss of position, exclusion from Parliament, rather tj^an 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. ELAINE. 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. 
 3 " 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 4 one ragged sergeant and two abreast, as 
 the old song has 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 soldieiy, 
 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 we do not take 
 these laws, Ave 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," lie 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 ! 
 
 " The Bourbons of France busied themselves, after the res 
 toration, in removing every trace of Napoleon s power and 
 grandeur, even chiselling the c 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. ELAINE. 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. Elaine 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 
 tlnTless, 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. Blame 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 laAV 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. Blame 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. 
 
 Elaine 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 
 comedown to the level of the servile labor. . . . The lower 
 strata pull down the upper. The upper never elevate the 
 lower. 
 
 " 1 feel that 1 am pleading the cause of the free American 
 laborer, and of his children, and of his children s children, the 
 cause of 4 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 
 bring forward the general arguments of ignorance, the universal- 
 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. Elaine s voice seemed like that of 
 one crying in the wilderness, and the wilderness only answered 
 hack 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. Elaine 
 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, anil 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 Mi 1 . 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 whenever 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 vote was 
 so openly and minutely reported by the press and accepted by 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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, Avithout their knowl 
 edge or consent, signed to fraudulent returns. Names of 
 
454 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 Avere 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 by 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. 
 
BIOGEAPHY OF JANES G. ELAINE. 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. Elaine 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. Corning 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. 
 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. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 would 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. Elaine 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 Avith 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 doAvn 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. ELAINE. 457 
 
 It will have been seen that Mr. Elaine s methods in the 
 Senate, as in the House, were distinctively his own. Before 
 taking part in debate he had made careful observations. u 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 011 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 u 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 Seriate 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. Elaine 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 cr6wd and be a 
 
458 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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. u 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. Elaine 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 Avere 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. ELAINE. 459 
 
 revenge as opportunity offered. Mr. Blame 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?" 
 
 u 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. Elaine. "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 011 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 
 
4HO BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine 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. Blame 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 lie should be taught to know 
 his place. 
 
 A combination was formed in the Senate to teach him. At 
 least such was the report that flew 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. Elaine 
 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. 
 Elaine to be "put down." 
 
 " I have been often reminded," said Mr. Elaine, " that I was 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 
 bv the decisive word from that other brilliant man of genius, 
 dead ere his prime, Richard Spofford, who was watching the 
 fray, and whom Mr. Elaine presented as qualified and entitled 
 to represent Caleb Gushing 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. ELAINE. 
 
 together in conversation, lie 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." 
 
 kt 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. Mori-ill s proposition to join I will use a legal phrase 
 for the benefit of the Senator from Wisconsin, 4 jine drives 
 as the lumbermen say, for I am arguing this on law points." 
 
 " The blind idea which Mr. Gushing 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. " f 
 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 in 
 this body on a memorable occasion, 4 1 am to be inquired of by 
 the honorable Senator, and not informed. " 
 
 To Mr. Elaine, from Hon. Lot M. Merrill : 
 
 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. ELAINE. 463 
 
 From Mr. Elaine, 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. Elaine : 
 
 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. Roman 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 may ask. Write a line to-night. 
 
 To Mr. Elaine, from Judge (afterwards Secretary) W. II. 
 
 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. Blame 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. ELAINE. 
 
 . . . 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, 
 nobody knew it, but I did not speak to him." " 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 Colliding 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, lie was poor and did not know how to be; that 
 was the reason his wife was not with him here, because he was poor. 
 He lives constantly in fear of brain disease, is like a child, sometimes 
 utterly depressed in spirits. .Mr. Phelps was asked whom he 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 oft* 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 papers, 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 
 thinjj till he opened it in Congress, instantly began their random fire 
 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. Elaine, 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 utterlv dis 
 creditable to England. . . . Sir Edward Thornton dined here Thursday 
 night, also Caleb Gushing, Senator Booth, R. S. and H. P. Spoftbrd, Secre 
 tary Sherman, Stanley Matthews, D., of New York, and W. W. Phelps, Mrs. 
 B., and Mrs. N. Wasn t it a menagerie ? Mr. X. 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/ 1 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 clawl"). for her husband s sake, but she was gracious, 
 went out with Caleb Gushing, 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 table. Mr. (Z.) Chandler 
 says we shall inevitably lose the elections this fall, but sweep the country 
 
466 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES . 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. 1 Mr. Chandler told the Cabinet the way they were 
 going on was like preparing for battle by killing all the officers. 
 
 To Mi 1 . 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 T 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 Garfteld : 
 
 AUGUSTA, ME., July 3, 1878. 
 
 Our State Convention will meet at Portland, Tuesday, 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 hail 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 t> trains both being taken oft* under the new 
 regime. At once 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 oft* 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. " Shall," 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, * By 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, 
 past 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. KLAINE. 
 
 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 uncl imbed 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- 
 baroflf, Mein Fraulein Kastiernittenoff, 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. Klah \varh is mud, 
 and a cannery, a meaner place than Yuena by all odds. Then back to 
 Wrangel, then to Victoria, then to Port Tovvnsend, 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 yon 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. ELAINE. 469 
 
 To Mr. Elaine, 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. Elaine, 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 sarcass 
 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 645 feet in diameter. Xow, 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 speck 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 has, 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. 11LA1NE. 
 
 To Mr. Blame, from Hon. H. S. Footer 
 
 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 [ 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 
 clerical. Some of your old college friends and others inquire for you 
 with great interest, Alex. Wilson among the number. 
 
 To M. : 
 
 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- 
 
 o-ram from saying he would like to spend Sunday with us. Needless 
 
 To say I telegraphed back, -Delighted; 1 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. Merrill s umbrella, which in an evil moment 
 lie 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 1 s 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. . . . 
 
 Auo-ust 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 Ml. Vernon, driving over. 
 
472 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES (7. ELAINE. 
 
 Just before they got away, Mr. Hale turned up, dined with us, and now he 
 has left for Norridgewock. . . . The mail has come bringing us a 
 highly prized letter from Walker and a postal from Emmons. Walker 
 returns thanks for a cheek, 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 1 
 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 aft ect," meaning effect. ... I went to Granite 
 Hall last night to hear Mr. Chandler. lie 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 1 . 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 1 summer one and his own alpaca into Frederick s 
 hands, who speedily, but Avith 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, 11 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, 11 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 <7. ELAINE. 473 
 
 collected the coats, and Millie and Maggie and Tom and Kmmons 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 \vas 
 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 w r ith 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 KIOGRAPJIY Or JAMES G. HLAINE. 
 
 home to find your father still in bed, where he stayed till dinner-time, when 
 he got up and eame down to enact the host in his most delightful manner, 
 carving, talking, making welcome in his own inimitable way, (ill 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 1 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 Hoods descending Emmons returns, 
 bringing Mr. Hale and followed by I)., 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. Bliiiiiu, 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. Blciine, from Mr. Jolm Koiicli : 
 
 NEW YORK, August 20, 1879. 
 
 With all my heart I hope you will succeed in bringing your 
 campaign to a success. Hut I think it is of great importance that you 
 should carry your State. Allow me to suggest something 1 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 1 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 Itio 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 Merchants 1 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. BLALVE. 475 
 
 To Mr. Blaine, from Walker: 
 
 ST. PAUL, MINN., August 30, 1870. 
 
 . . . 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 ( ounty 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 Cllir OF THE OLD ULOCK. 
 
 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." 1 
 
 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. ELAINE. 
 
 it lie does, and how are we going to be enthusiastic over . But T 
 
 breathe not. 
 
 To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. John H. Evving: 
 
 WASHINGTON, September 25, 1870. 
 
 . . . 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. 
 
 . I 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 llth. 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 
 very 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 experimentia docet, and a year from now I shall 
 probably be both wiser and sadder. 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 477 
 
 To V.: 
 
 NEW YORK, November 9, 1879. 
 
 Here 1 am, having a most delightful second visit. Mr. Elaine 
 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 afford 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 1 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 KJOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine, from Emmons (telegram) : 
 
 CHICAGO, January 31, 1880. 
 May you double before you quit. 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 479 
 
 XVT. 
 
 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 malm- 
 gel s, a brave and popular general, was rejected as a delegate in 
 
480 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine 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. Elaine s opponents assumed not only that Grant was 
 the only man whose hold upon the people was strong enough 
 to surmount Mr. Elaine 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. Elaine 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 u 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. ELAINE. 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 fighting 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 lie 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 70." 
 
 March 8. " I want the light made fairly and squarely from 
 this out. If Grant is nominated he is going to be defeated ; 
 if he is defeated we sha ii t regain the Republican ascendency 
 for many, many years. . . . But I wish that forever we 
 might be out of all lights 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 he 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 JAMJSS 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 -f 50, 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 II. 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 wisli the nomination, that lie 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. u 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 he 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 he 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 shadow my life. 1 am so wrought up in his 
 success because of my admiration and love for him, that there 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. KLAINE. 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: u 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 Avith 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 California!! 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 flag, 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 oft* to bed dead 
 sleepy, and is this morning reading the papers witli 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, 1 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 Avas 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 899 
 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 reflected him so entirely as a matter of course 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 485 
 
 that he did not know what personal opposition was or how to 
 handle it. 
 
 If Mr. Elaine 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. Elaine 
 prepared for it by rest at White Sulphur Springs, of which his 
 own account June 22 is : 
 
 "Senator Eooth 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 lie 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. 
 Elaine 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 boen 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. Gariield s nomination Mr. Blame 
 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. The} r 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 
 (larfield 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 
 amon^ 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 
 
BIOGRAPIfY OF JAMES (7. 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 ii. And you will, I think, bo 
 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 aftbrd 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 2(\\ fizzed out. 
 God bless you and preserve you! If I had not the watering-place la/iness 
 full upon me I would write more, but I presume you thank me for making 
 it so brief. 
 
 MENTOR, O., July 21, 1880. 
 
 Mv DEAR BLAINE : Thanks for your good letter of the 4th hist. 
 
 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 oft 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 ; T 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 want 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. 
 
 U 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. RLAINE. 489 
 
 AUGUSTA, ME., October 29, 1880. 
 
 MY DEAR GARFIELD : I have your kind note of inouiry. My health is 
 good; my trouble was like Hancock s tariff issue, " purely local. 11 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. 
 I 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. 
 Elaine 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 please you, even though it reduce our own wages and 
 take the bread from the mouths of our children. 11 
 
 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 Ihis country depends as largely as that of any other 
 class upon the maintenance of the financial and industrial policy repre 
 sented by the Republican party. 
 
490 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 Garfield was elected by a majority which admitted no dis 
 pute, and Mr. Blaine adopted his administration with absorb 
 ing ardor. The cross-tire of letters, notes, and suggestions 
 went on with renewed enthusiasm. Mr. Blame 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 Garrield, " 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 striet 
 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, 1 as Ohio for 
 Hayes in 76 and Sherman in 80. You are the only Ohio man who on pure 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 491 
 
 absolute personal preference could have beaten me in that State either in 76 
 or SO. 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." 
 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 pledged 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, 
 and can 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 term." 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 goods through 
 our territory, the free international use of the Wclland 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. 
 
 [ 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 1 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. ELAINE. 493 
 
 Mrs. Polk saved her husband from the blunder of making Benton 
 Lieutenant-Genoral 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 1 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 ELAINE. Yours of the 10th, 13th, and 15th came duly to 
 hand and were read with great interest. I have been so raided upon 
 that 1 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 1 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, tlie 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. Garn eld, 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 your 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. KLAINE. 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 political 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 I 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, ()., 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-heartednesswith 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. Elaine : 
 
 NEW YORK, December 24, 1880. 
 
 Your Secretary of the Treasury should be taken from the West. This 
 is soi evident that I do not stop to argue. He 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 arc classed and grouped witli 
 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 Elaine. 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 day, 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. 
 
 [ 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- 
 
 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 . 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." . . . 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. SLA INK. 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-natured 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 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 Avould, 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 resolution about coming here, for! want 
 to see you for very many reasons. Still it mav 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 don t 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 1800, coming back to us, perhaps being manufactured beyond 
 our jurisdiction, and shipped here at a profit of twenty-five per cent., 
 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 da} r s 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. ELAINE. 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 suitor 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 fight. 
 
500 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 The Southern member still eludes rne, as Creusa s image eluded ^Eneas. 
 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 s 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 1 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 Logfan (in answer to a recent letter making some sug 
 gestions), and have invited him to visit me. I 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 you 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 JA^fES G. ELAINE. 501 
 
 To General Garfield, from Mr. Elaine : 
 
 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 cariy 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. . . . T think 
 a Western man at the head of the treasury is a sine qua iwn 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, 1 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 vou proclaimed when I saw you in November of non-intervention in 
 all such matters is the only one you can wisely adopt and safely follow. 
 . . . I am afraid there are cunning preparations being made by a small 
 
502 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 time 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, yon 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 tire it. 
 
BLOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 vou 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. AVith 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 we lack and 
 needing what we can supply, commercial treaties would be 
 
MR. BLAINE AT FIFTY-ONE. 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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. V 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. V Mr. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 serious 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. TILAINE. 607 
 
 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 ba 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 caxuss MU. 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 re enforcement, 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 Claytori-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 .TAMER K. BLATNE. 509 
 
 Secretary s familiar acquaintance with British history, from 
 the earliest time to our own, enabled him to use the argumentum 
 ad homine.m 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 tk 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 Nicaragua!! 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-Bui wer 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 JAMKS G. HLAINE. 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 i 
 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 v/ill 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. KLAINE. 
 
 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, how* ever, 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 
 whosr 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 GarfiekTs 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 u 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. RLAINE. 
 
 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, " I 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 T am consider 
 ing all day whether A or B shall be appointed to this or that 
 office. And again, u 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 coining from high or low there is 
 but one answer to give, trtrtt both tides fairly, and in this 
 line you must be as (inn and resolute as if you were fighting 
 Chickamauga over again." Regarding two men Avho found 
 themselves unable to work together, he suggested to the 
 President, "Turn 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 1) have attempted to publicly impeach 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAJNE. 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. u Elaine and I," the President once said, u 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. Elaine 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 to 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. Blame, 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 
 
KIOGTIAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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. 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 O. KLAINE. 
 
 desired all to remain until after the regular meeting of Congress 
 in December. On October 13th Mr. Elaine renewed his resigna 
 tion in a note to the President : 
 
 As Secretary Windonvs 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 day that will prove most desirable and convenient for yourself. I 
 intended to say this to you yesterday, but from pressure of other things 
 forcrot 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 Von 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 l,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 1 between Great Britain and the United States, in the trust 
 
 O 
 
 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. ELAINE. 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. Pie 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 Avidow 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. ELAINE. 
 
 of peace, but on the especial interests of the 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 Elaine. 
 
 Unhappily before they reached their destination Mr. Elaine 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 Elaine 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 Elaine 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 
 meant to plunge the country into war, that the Peace Congress 
 had been convoked without President Arthur s knowledge, that 
 Messrs. Trescott and Walker Elaine 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. Elaine, was "safe." 
 
 Mr. Elaine was more than ever impatient at the malign petti 
 ness of the men and the measures employed to overthrow him, 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 (mote Mr. Frelinghuysen s 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 
 otfend some European powers if we should hold in the United States a 
 Congress of "selected nationalities 1 of America. This is certainly a 
 new position for the United States, and one which I earnestly beg you 
 Avill 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 \ve 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 will" 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 tin; Euro 
 pean world. Nor can I see, Mr. President, how European Governments 
 should feel "jealousy and ill will" 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 will " 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 war 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 <7. KLAINti. 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. 
 Elaine s policy more firmly in the minds, and devotion to hi-^ 
 self more deeply in the hearts of the American people. 
 
 In this storm of detraction and of misapprehension, Mr. 
 Elaine 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 McKinley 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 iny 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 man" and so did. ... 1 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 1 felt more regrets for them. Then for Governor Dennison to adopt 
 the tail of Conkl ing s machine and force it on the convention, Frye should 
 have had that ; but no, they 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 1 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 friends and the State will need you in the 
 future. But 7 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 1 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. 
 
BTOGEAPITY OF .TAMER C. ELAINE. 525 
 
 The country as well as the Republican party owes you a debt of grati 
 tude which can never be fully repaid, but 1 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. Blaiiie, 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. ... 1 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. Blame, from Mr. Robeson : 
 
 CAMDEN, October 9, 1880. 
 
 I hear you are doing great work in Indiana and Ohio. But as every 
 State arid place you go through on your return will be trying to hold you, 
 you must not forget your 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 ovjer 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. T was never a more stalwart 
 Republican than I am now, and most earnestly wishing success to Mr. 
 
52fi BTOffRAnrr OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 
 Mons 1 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 thev 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 my 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 lawyers 1 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 pi eased 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 lc roi est mort 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 I 
 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 T 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 JAMK8 G. ELAINE. 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 thino- more. The way in which Maine has come back for Garfield 
 
528 mOGRAPllY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 T 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 hail 
 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 m} T office and am feeling some encouragement 
 about success. The clients and the fees do not pour in very rapidly, it is 
 true, but T shall not be discouraged, as 1 have only been in the office two 
 days. 
 
 . . . Yesterday I went lo 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, f 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 yet 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 GarficM 
 
PHY OF JAMES G. KLAINE. 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 
 might 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 
 vicing with 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 kno\v 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 vou were seriously entertaining (ieneral 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 
 ne\v work you may possibly not like, but there will be the compen 
 sation of greater 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 JAM EX G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 friends 1 
 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 tilings 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 tilings. 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. You never can sell one, and you never will 
 like one if 1 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 cheek for about 
 $125, I should send it back with the warmest kind of an endorsement. 
 As you said to Jacky apropos of Christmas, " Think on these things." 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 531 
 
 To Mr. Elaine, 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 Virginias." 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, asMons is in town, having arrived this morning, 
 and though he has been at work, and I have been busy .luring most of the day, 
 still 1 have greatly enjoyed what little I have seen of him. ... He 
 looks as well and "as handsome as ever, and that s saying enough. . 
 Ts 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. Elaine, from Walker : 
 
 ST. PAUL, January 27, 1881. 
 
 From what I 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 3 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 
 partv s future. I would venture two suggestions for what they are worth. 
 
532 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 T can already see father 
 furtively putting new prescriptions in his pocket and preparing himself for 
 another conflict with modern drugs. Don t let them be alone together for 
 a moment. . . . Business is dull to-day. Not a soul has 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 I 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 111:1:1 knows how to be. 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 533 
 
 To Mr. Elaine, from Hon. Schuyler Colfax : 
 
 SOUTH BEND, March 5, 1881. 
 
 After your stormy years of public life in our stormy era, with 
 "lance 11 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. Elaine, 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 H 
 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 readino- the despatches; for all the news there was for hours was 
 contained in the telegrams to the Secretary of State. Poor emperor - 
 doomed to his death at last. I think ho must be enrolled among the 
 
 OO 
 
 martyrs. 
 
 March 18. Tuesday your father and I assisted at the requiem mas 
 the czar. I had never anticipated going into black for any of the European 
 sovereigns, but with Mrs. Kale s assistance I did ! She was here when 1 
 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 
 expenditure to the limits of your father s purse. 
 
534 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 Elaine s health. I cannot do good work with " the half of my 
 surviving soul" 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 Conkling s 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-Conklirig 
 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, lie 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. 11 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 o 1 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 conlidcnce. 
 
 From Mr. W. \V. L helps : 
 
 Didn t Mr. Blaine save me from folly, with his peremptory 
 "Decidedly no 11 ? 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. 1 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. 11 Y r ou 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 BIOGEAPHY OF JAMES r;. ELAINE. 
 
 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 filled, we shall be ready to leave, though 1 
 have many misgivings as to the boy I leave behind me, or asGarfield 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 procuring 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. 1 They are a pair 
 of Jamies . . . after which Augusta, and summer and freedom and out 
 of doors. 
 
 From Mr. Blainc : 
 
 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 power 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 writing 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 Chuddah 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. 1 
 
 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. ELAINE. 
 
 From Mr. Blaine, to Mr. T. B. Searight: 
 
 DEPARTMENT OF STATE, WASHINGTON, June 28, 1881. 
 MY DEAR FRIEND: The "maple molasses 11 came to hand and revived 
 memories of boyhood days and recalled many most pleasant associations 
 with you. The flavor recalled the Fulton House and * Joe" and George 
 Driver and the "Squires 11 most vividly. Every time 1 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 mirayc 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 witli 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, 11 and the college full of good fellows, and 
 the seminary crowded with pretty, good girls, and the dances at CaldwelFs 
 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 1, 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. 11 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 1 thought I should die ; and 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 539 
 
 when they brought him into his chamber ami 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." 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. Gartield came, frail, fatigued, 
 desperate, but linn 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. Garh eld 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 President s 
 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 
 yesterdav, 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. Elaine 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 
 iti 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 
 er s 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 1 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 1 am obliged to content myself 
 with a mere formality, when 1 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 pleasant 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 JANES G. ELAINE. 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. Blame : 
 
 WASHINGTON, July 14. 
 
 . Garfield, T 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. 
 
 To M. : 
 
 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. ELAINE. 
 
 To M. : 
 
 July 28. You can tell Mr. Iloman 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 fathers 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 
 Adams 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 g6od 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 public 
 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. BLA1NE. 543 
 
 To M.: 
 
 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. Elaine, 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, 1 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 llth 
 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 unusual 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 T am sure 
 before morning 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 G. 
 
 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. Garneld : 
 
 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. Elaine, 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 go back to Washington with us, but Jackey 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 going on all 
 around me. Walker did splendidly in New York; made a most telling 
 speech at the dinner. 
 
546 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. KLAINE. 
 
 To M. : 
 
 November 25. . . . Walker leaves next week. Mr. Trescott with him. 
 They will be away the entire winter. Walker is both pleased 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. Ilitt, 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 1 
 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 th*e satisfaction it 
 ought. 
 
 December?. . . . Will you please cultivate a plain hand ? This morn 
 ing s mail, coming before T 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. F 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. Frelinghuysen : 
 
 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 (!. HLAINK. 547 
 
 possession of the office, 1 will of course adjust my concluding matters to 
 your convenience. It 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. 
 
 ToM.: 
 
 WASHINGTON, December 13, 1881. 
 
 Frelinghuysen s 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 afi ect 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 the rest of the crowd at the van till Guiteau sprang 
 
548 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. SLAIN E. 
 
 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 we dined at the British Legaticn. 
 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. Frelinglnrysen 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. 1 
 
 From Walker: 
 
 ON BOARD " LACKAWANNA," 
 
 PANAMA, December 13, 1881. 
 
 On Sunday morning as I w r as 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 JAMKS (1. KLAINE. 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 no\v 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 Avork, 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 1C, 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. 11 
 
 Mr. Frelinghuysen has expressed 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 KioGRAnir OF JAMES a. KLAINE. 
 
 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 II. II. offer of an 
 $1,800 place. lie 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, Avhich 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 line ; 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 16, 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 Times" 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 nattered 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 vour 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 department 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- 
 Held, 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 nourished, 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, 1 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 lo 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 Avere 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 at 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. J 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 apply 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 
 line Fortunatus purse Avhich 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. 1 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. ELAINE. 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 arc. 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." Only on the publication 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 AVard s 
 dinner in New Y ork 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 ? Y. our 
 father saw the President yesterday morning and had a courteous interview 
 with him. What he, the pater, may do hereafter I 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 BionnArjrv OF JAMES G. KLAINE. 
 
 been treated with indignity, and tliat the whole thing is simply a deter 
 mination to break him down. 
 
 February 2 ..... Jacky was very wise when lie foresaw that this 
 dynasty might not settle itself into the saddle without an impulse to ride 
 down your father. When you wrote advising a conflict 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 
 policy 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. I 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, 1 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, I have no 
 opinions; individually I may have, but ifs 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. ELAINE. 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. 
 
 Tu Mr. Blaine, from Hun. 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," 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," 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. Gushing, number 266, November 
 o, 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 
 
558 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES C. RLAINE. 
 
 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." Accordingly I asked your father if he would go to the B s to 
 a party given to the Fs. " Most decidedly not," Jie 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. 
 Blame walking, met the President driving, and said the President s hat 
 went up high- "No higher than yours, I hope?" I said severely, and he 
 said, " No, indeed/ 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. ELAINE. 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 other day, he exclaimed, * Crushed by a eulo 
 gist/ All the time I am writing, imagine the careful criticism of language 
 going on " the true prerogatives of his high office," 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 satis fied. C. has gone over and over it, winnowing 
 
558 BIOGRAPffY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 job" 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, who 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 fathers past, 
 that this attack does him anything but good. 
 
 From Mrs. Garfiekl : 
 
 CLEVELAND, O., February 28, 1882. 
 
 Mr. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. 
 Ey 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, " 
 have lost my life," and while I wait, my thoughts will go back to the life 
 that was with me once. 11 . . . 
 
 What of M. p Is she happy and contented so far from you ? With your 
 children so scattered, your heart cannot be wholly free from pain. 
 
 To Mr. Blame, 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 FazewelTs 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. RLA1NE. 
 
 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 / 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 nothing 
 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 assuranc.es 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, 
 and 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 Roman, 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. (Jarlield 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. ... 1 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. JtLAlNE. 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. ( . 
 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 r 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 Kal- 
 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. 
 . Of 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. : 
 
 MARCH 24, 1882. 
 
 . . . Your father talking in the far corner of the dining-room in the 
 window, with Mr. Parsons, on business plans. . . . Here enters Fagiu 
 
562 It LOG R A PHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 
 
 with the morning " Tribune," and Mr. Parsons at once loses all that was 
 
 left of his listener. 1 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 ; anil 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. 11 ... 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- 
 lied, 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- 
 lield, 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 
 Hurl but 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 off, 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 confidence. 
 
niOGRAPHY Or JAMES G. HLA1NE. 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 Ihe 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 writing 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. AVm. 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 P^uropean 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. "Oh, mother, mother 
 Blaine ! " he said, " I have so much to do, I know not which way to turn. 
 Good ! " said I. " Yes/ 1 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. 
 lie 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. I am so pleased for him. . . . 
 Jacky we look for on Thursday. 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. KLA1NE. 565 
 
 June 4. ... Your father comes forward " to my sincerest and 
 best critic, 11 yes, I say, the best left, "the best always, you are 
 much more difficult to satisfy than A." 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 Walker, 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." 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 s. 
 
 June 19. . . . Walker is awfully interesting and of Emmons too 
 much cannot be said, but I spare you the impossible. 
 
 Augusta, June 29. ... 1 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 an( j 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- 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. 11 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. Elaine, 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 I have left an enemy, or indeed 
 any but a friend, behind me. in the lesser places, and they have certainly 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAIXE. 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 aftect 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. .lackey 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 Burns 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. Pcre et Jils ct 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 KIOGRAPIIY OF -/VOftf.S G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 might 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. Elaine, from Hun. 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 people 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. Blame, 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. 
 
OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 560 
 
 XVII. 
 
 YKAKS 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. Elaine 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 Caesar s journeys and 
 surveying his battle-fields in Europe, he had confessed historic 
 doubts regarding the Ciesarean 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 (7. ELAINE. 
 
 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 Aveather, 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 lie 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 kt 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 Elaine 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 
 
KIOGRAPI1Y OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 571 
 
 porter. What did you promise him ? - * 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 
 liini 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, Avho 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-affectioned 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. ELAINE. 
 
 Elaine 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, hut 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 he 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. ELAINE. 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. Elaine, 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 pa3an. 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. Elaine s house in spontaneous good-will, added a 
 touch of romance to the general satisfaction. 
 
 Mr. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Blame 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 witli 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. Blame 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. ELAINE. 575 
 
 London papers openly hailed the nomination of Mr. Cleveland 
 by the Democratic party as a result the most satisfactory they 
 could desire. Mr. Elaine 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 lias 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. J! LA INK 
 
 in the British campaign for Cleveland, but preferred to oppose 
 protection, under the watchword of u spoils," in the ranks of 
 civil service reform. " People of importance " in Boston 
 promptly organized a u 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 Blame. 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 believe 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 were 
 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 wide-spreading among 
 the coal-miners in Illinois, another was brooding sullenly over 
 Ohio. Strife between the Typographical Union and the Repul>- 
 lican " New York Tribune " resisted all efforts at accommodation. 
 Upon the crest of these waves Gen. Benjamin F. Butler rode 
 Avith his wonted glee and with 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 
 was he u hippodroming through the West and smashing around 
 in Pennsylvania strong Blaine sections ? " If he meant to 
 defeat Blaine, why 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 u 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. BLA1NE. 579 
 
 addressed, often connecting some local or personal interest with 
 the national questions, thus giving individual application and 
 character to eacli 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 Avealth 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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, lie 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. ELAINE. 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 coming for you, Mr. Elaine." " 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 he be living, 
 but if he is, I beg to make my acknowledgments to him, 
 
582 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. HLAINE. 
 
 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 
 Elaine 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-live 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. Blame s return to New York he found a dinner 
 arranged for him at Delmonico s, which he regretted as an unwise 
 political measure, but which furnished him the occasion for a 
 wise, strong word, thanking the u 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 
 $6,000,000,000 of manufactures annually produced in the United 
 States, this Empire State furnishes one-fifth 11,200,000,000 ; 
 of which this Empire City produces 1500,000,000 ; " that impor 
 tant as the foreign trade is, representing the enormous sum of 
 11,500,000,000 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. ELAINE. 583 
 
 annually exceed 120,000,000,000;" reminding them that ti 
 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 Avere 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 coming 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. Blame s " magnificent audacity and genius," it was 
 estimated that from fifty to seventy per cent, of the total Irish 
 
584 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 vote iii New York would go to Mr. Blame, 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. Elaine s favor on account of this policy finds daily fuller 
 and fuller expression." It seemed Mr. Blame 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 Blame 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 
 
BIOGKAPRY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 whatever but 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. ELAINE. 
 
 knowledge of him as only a pastor can gain. ... I have been 
 very near to Mr. Elaine, 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 4 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. 
 Elaine 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. 
 Elaine, 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. ELAINE. 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. Elaine. 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 arid 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. ELAINE. 
 
 the all-imporfcant candidate, and as the utterance of Mr. Blaine, 
 was posted on the streets and distributed from churches. In 
 New Haven, on November first, lie 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. ELAINE. 589 
 
 every Northern State to the Republicans. As it was, leaving 
 out the protested vote of the cities of New York and Brooklyn, 
 Mr. Elaine 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 prol)- 
 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. Blame 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 }^ou 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. Elaine President of the United States, and each national 
 convention was to them but a stage in his triumphal march. 
 Eacli 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. Elaine 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 Democrac} 7 - obtained supreme command. The 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. KLAINE. 593 
 
 two years of exclusively Democratic administration from 1893 
 to 1895 are the best comment upon Mr. Elaine s prescience and 
 prophecy in 1884. 
 
 The campaign over, the election decided, Mr. Elaine went 
 hack immediately into his library and wrote the second volume 
 of his u 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-Eulwer 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. Elaine, made a bold stroke for proof and power ; 
 made, in short, a vigorous effort 4k to drive Elaine 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. ELAINE. 
 
 nominated for Governor a man of unexceptionable character, 
 who had voted against Mr. Elaine in the convention of 1884. 
 It was forthwith proclaimed that New York had gone over to 
 " the Mugwumps." Mr. Elaine 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. Elaine. That would 
 spoil their theorem. Mr. Elaine, they argued, needed only a 
 change of 600 votes to win. The Mugwumps would give 10,000 
 votes, and victory was assured. They Avould not even allow 
 their candidate to publish Mr. Elaine 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. 
 Elaine s vote, and the " Independent " candidate was over 
 whelmingly defeated by his Democratic competitor. 
 
 While prosecuting his literary work, Mr. Elaine 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. Elaine 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 1880 he went to Pennsylvania with the 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 595 
 
 doable 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 " Elaine 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 u 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. RLAINE. 
 
 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 u 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. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 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 " Blame 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 u 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 
 
598 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 Avere 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 G-ermanorum and said : Read that. 
 A member of the class answered, We have not been over it. 
 But, said he, 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, witli 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. Elaine 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. Elaine his own chair, Mr. Hoar had 
 pencilled a note to General Garfield, " Do you suppose there 
 is any assembly in America that Elaine 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. Elaine," 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. 
 Elaine? and to the policeman at the crossing Mr. Elaine 
 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. Elaine sitting opposite, " it would look just like 
 Elaine s ! " 
 
 Eut 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 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 wij,h 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. Elaine." 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 lie 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 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 601 
 
 person worth knowing. 4 I don t know, was her answer, but 
 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 all 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. Elaine 
 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 substantiallv 
 correct. The message, leaving matters of departmental admin 
 istration and harmonious policies, was a proiiunciamento 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. ELAINE. 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 u Elaine 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. Elaine 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 goin to withdraw my 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 pique 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 \vithout regret. I feel, indeed, a 
 certain seme of relief that my party does not decide to devolve the task 
 on me. 
 
604 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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." 
 
 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 presented 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. ELAINE. 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 bean 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. 
 Elaine 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 Elaine ; 
 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 Elaine wants the nomination or not: we want him," 
 was the popular voice in the convention. 
 
 * Elaine, Elaine, James G. Elaine, 
 We ve had him once, 
 We ll have him again," 
 
 was the chanted shout outside. " Mr. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. Elaine could make but the same reply. u To 
 Eoutelle 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. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 
 
 and home. It might have been that Mr. Elaine 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. Elaine 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 reunion 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 
 
IHOGRAPIIY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 609 
 
 sisters for fourteen months, and in their tender and joyful 
 greetings they forgot the surrounding multitude, and heard 
 not " Home Again " by the hand, 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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 witli 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 oppose 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 certainly 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 ground 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. ELAINE. 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 spell 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 undesired 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 affaire 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 
 4 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. I! LA INK 
 
 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. Elaine s private car during the memorable campaign of 
 1884. I never saAv 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. 
 
 To M. : 
 
 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 lie 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 
 
HIOGRAPIIY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 eftec"t : "Thou art sour, O mediaeval jackass!" "() 
 gambolling kitten, there s a rat! O gambolling kitten, catch that rat! 11 
 " 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. Elaine, 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 your 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 1 do not propose to sink the scale 
 
614 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 with a lie to the contrary, that is all. . . . Our dear Jacky lias left us 
 for the Geneva Award and Washington. I hated to give him up, as lie 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 open 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 veiy midst of the campaign, and 1 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 go abroad. We must go 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 lor 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 newspapers, 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 vert/ 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. Iloman, 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. 11 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 days 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. ELAINE. 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, madanie, I tell d em 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. Pierrepoiit 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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^ 
 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. ELAINE. 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 sujet 
 dtfcmlu 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 sufticient 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 pater 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." 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. Elaine went to Judge Strong s Saturday night to see about building 
 a new Presbyterian Church up here; thinks it is "sort of heathenish 1 
 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 shouJI 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." " You don t know any 
 more about theology than the squirrel running up those trees. Let me 
 give you yo^ir creed. Thou shall love the Lord thy God with " Oh ! I 
 know that." "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." He repeats it obediently, and after a pause, 
 
620 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 " 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 o 1 God which I cannot 
 change, rather than with the things o man where I might do harm." 
 . 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. Elaine, 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 beyond 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 us, 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. Elaine, 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. Elaine, 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 coula keep me up in it. I would not 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 Yankee 1 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/actVis? 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 Elaine will be the next President." Said Cornell, " I think your 
 friend Elaine 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. 11 Of 
 course Ernmons 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 Emmons 1 
 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 fathers 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 
 forme, 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 oft* 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine, 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. BI.AINE : 
 
 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 1861, 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 
 
RIOGEAPI1Y OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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 oft 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 fail- 
 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 oftice 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, 1884. 
 
 . . . 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. 11 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, 
 witli 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 \v6uld 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. Ske is as frank as a 
 chicken in the exhibition of her wishes. You, I fear, are net 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 steadily 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, 11 but was in nearly all the other campaigns of the 
 Western armies, and as this "march to the sea 11 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. Elaine, 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, vise., Nil reputans actum, si quid manure t 
 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 Platt, 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. 
 lie 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 done 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. 11 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. 11 And generally I had a delightful debauch of malice and love. 
 But I m 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 tarift 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 policy 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 my 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 lather lived 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 629 
 
 and died and in which thirteen children were born, was built by Colonel 
 Blame. 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 
 u 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- 
 iluence of chieftains, the weakness of " favorite sons, v 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 1 speech to Agamemnon, Act I., 
 Scene III., and his other speech to Achilles, Act III., Scene III. 
 
630 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 To Mr. Blame, 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 wrongTing 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 your nomination. 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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!" Then Joe says, "Mr. Blaine is out speaking 
 and Walker is with him. 11 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 day 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, hid. He says he has t 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 : 
 
 AN DOVER, 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. ELAINE. 
 
 To Mr. Blaine, from Rev. Cyrus Hamlin : 
 
 MIDDLEBURY, Vt., November 17, 1884. 
 
 . I ought not, perhaps, 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. ELAINE. 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 
 jit 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, 11 wherein lies the germ 
 of his own failure to be President, the " Solid South, 11 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, 1 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 
 arm a 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 : I 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 11., 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." 
 
 Since Grant s deatli 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 (-oil- 
 federates, who realized they had been misled by their selfish leaders, but 
 who went oft like a herd of buflfaloes 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 14. 
 
 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?" 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- 
 Ibrmal. When Mr. Blaine went in, he said to Madame de Struve, " I don t 
 know that I am invited. 11 Said she, instantly, " You were born invited. 1 
 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 lie 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. II. and Mrs. II., 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 I-ing." 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 surpass 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 tilings 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 ivhite 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. 
 
 . . . But 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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." 
 
 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. Elaine, 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." 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, ELAINE. 637 
 
 To Mr. Elaine, from Hon. W. I). Washburne : 
 
 MAY 2, 1886. 
 
 Several days 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, 11 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 fioor, 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 
 
688 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 Unmet 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 : 
 
 UOSTON, October, 1886. 
 
 I had the felicity of N. s 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. Elaine, from Hon. Geo. H. Pendleton : 
 
 AMERICAN LEGATION, 
 
 UERLIN, 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. Ulaine 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 one suspected him though he says when he 
 came out, it was like walking on your eye-balls. Nor did he suffer 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. ELAINE. 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 days 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. Elaine 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. Elaine went to the station with M., and "Toby Candor" 
 fell foul of him and said he had been instructed to see Mr. Elaine him 
 self and lind out if the reports at Washington, that he was critically ill, 
 etc., were true. He said he should report that he had seen Mr. Elaine 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. Blame, 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 pleasant 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. Elaine, 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 strengtli of it, his wife borrowed ten dollars 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 641 
 
 of Mrs. Elaine, 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine : 
 
 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 line ; and all England of royalty, nobility, and fashion 
 were there. 
 
 Queen Kapiolani looks just like old Caroline, the cook walked with 
 royalty, 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 position and privileges. 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 lie 
 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. KLAINE. 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 oft 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 (live) 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 oft . . . . 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 Garh eld administration that I have ever heard even from his 
 
 O 
 
 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 
 Blarney, and all the others whom I hold dear; but I shall have attained, 
 when L 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 
 strong 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- 
 i ying 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 
 unvictorious." 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 Cresar, 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine 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 interruptions. 
 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. 
 
 ( Perso?i(i,l.) 
 
 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. ELAINE. 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 rullle, and has left none on the bosom of his content. Not 
 for worlds would he have the campaign on his hands. 
 
 From Mr. Elaine, 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 1 
 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 
 
648 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 
 
 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. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 649 
 
 NEW YORK, November 2, 1888. 
 
 . Your father and Walker left the hotel at nine in the morn in" 1 , 
 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., I,., 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 Amit Ellen, sends out a cheerful holloa to the philosophers in the 
 garden. 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 651 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 AGAIN SECRETARY OF STATE, 1889. 
 
 TTPON 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. J 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. ELAINE. 653 
 
 [COPY,] 
 
 WASHINGTON, D.C., January 21, 1889. 
 
 MY DEAR GENERAL: I have your valued favor of the 17th inst., 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. BEXJ. 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. ELAINE. 
 
 were in general harmony. In discussing some arrangements 
 regarding the inauguration, Mr. Harrison wrote Mr. Elaine, " 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. Blame 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 were 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 Elaine 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 lie 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 tk 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 \vhich 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. ELAINE. 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. Se wall 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 had studied 
 
658 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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. ELAINE. 659 
 
 have been subjected, and to which, I trust, the result of this 
 conference will make it certain that they shall never be sul>- 
 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 lie 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 
 
6GO 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. Elaine 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, with 
 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 he 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. ELAINE. 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 1 ^ 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 u 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 undemonstrably 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. u The 
 
662 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 anc^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 noj 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 lights of man ? Are the supporters of justice in 
 all nations to be declared incompetent to prevent wrongs so 
 odious and^Ro destructive? The forcible, resistance to which 
 this government is constrained in the Behring Sea"fs, 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. RLAINE. f>f>3 
 
 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 Euglisl^ 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 Jto 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 
 
664 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 
 long-established rights of the United States, but also the rights of good 
 government and of good morals the world over. 
 
 JAMES G. BLAINE. 
 
 No. 10. 
 Sir Julian Pauncefote wrote to Mr. Blame : 
 
 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. BLATNE. f)f>5 
 
 On May 22, 1890, the Marquis of Salisbury replied challeng 
 ing Mr. Blame 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. 
 
 44 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 G. ELAINE. 
 
 "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, 
 arc 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 Russian 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? 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 " 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 4 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, r 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. ELAINE. 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, hut 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. ELAINE. 
 
 close time for fur seals. And he will cause an act to be intro 
 duced in Parliament to give effect to this arrangement, so soon 
 as it can be prepared. He will also join the 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 
 
lilOGRAPHY 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 wore 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 eftbrt 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. Elaine did not be 
 lieve in the necessity of any war on the subject. March 0, 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 prospecfof 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 lie was 
 
672 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 desirous to have the source of irritation removed. It was 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. Elaine 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 country 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. ELAINE. 073 
 
 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 every 
 
674 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 witli 
 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 
 " amis" 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. 
 
KIOGRAPI1Y OF JAMES G. KLAINE. 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. B 
 
 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. 
 Elaine 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 Avere 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. Jt 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 we 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 get for the two sailors. 
 
 Yours very sincerely, 
 
 JAMES G. BLAINE. 
 
 And the President replied the same day : 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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. Elaine s u 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. KLAINE. 
 
 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 both 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. ELAINE. 679 
 
 iii 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. 
 
 " 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 highways 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 land 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. 
 
 " We 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. BLAINJE. 
 
 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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 Mayna 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 lu s benediction, 
 declaring: c 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 1UOGEAPIIY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 1 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 1 witness in its three-fold 
 
 O O 
 
 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 
 report of tl*e 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 witli 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 (7. KLAINE. 
 
 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 breadstuff s 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. ELAINE. 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. 
 
 Ill 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 Scions 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. 
 " Elaine 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 farmer. 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. ELAINE. 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. 
 Elaine 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. 
 Elaine." 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 " Elaine s plan had run like a 
 prairie fire all over my district." Others complained that Mr. 
 Elaine 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 Elaine, 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 " Elaine " 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 
 
 O 
 
 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 Blame 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. KLA1NE. 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 UK; 
 nation that sentiment of good-will and common l>enefit 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 McKinlev 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 party 
 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 worked. 
 
 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 Seilor 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 
 
090 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 Avithout 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 a. HLAINE. 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. Elaine, 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 4 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 victoiy 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 
 lesources 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. Elaine 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 superstitious 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. Van 
 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 ; 
 
BIOGRAPFFY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 693 
 
 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 8.1 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. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 
 products 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. 
 Elaine, 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. ELAINE. 695 
 
 the paper exclaiming, "That judge ought to be impeached, and 
 if he were in this country he would be." Naturally Mr. 
 Elaine 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. Elaine 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. Elaine 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 Kodgers 
 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. ELAINE. 
 
 assuage the mortal restlessness of pneumonia. On Wednesday, 
 January 15, lie died. 
 
 The day after the funeral Mr. Elaine 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. 607 
 
 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 
 011 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 
 
098 BIOGRAPHY OF JANES G. BLAINE. 
 
 before. This is especially 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 wlio 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. ELAINE. 699 
 
 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 willtry 
 to overthrow it. The Germans who were weak as to you in 84 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. 
 
 Very truly yours, 
 
 J. S. CLARKSON. 
 
 P.S. You are the only man, too, who can draw from the Farmers 
 Alliance the necessary votes to keep the party in power in the North-western 
 States. 
 
 Another prominent Republican wrote Mr. Elaine, 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? If 
 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 
 
TOO BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. BLAINE. 
 
 effort in the approaching contest, which is rendered specially important by 
 reason of the industrial and financial policies of the government being 
 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. Elaine 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. McKiiiley 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 hospitably 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. 
 
JtlOGRAPIIY OF JAMES G. RLAINK. 701 
 
 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 
 44 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 weary 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine 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 Avith 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 Avhen 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. Elaine. 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. ELAINE. 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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 riot believe 
 that he could possibly carry this State, and I feel confident that 
 Mr. Blame 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. Blame 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 110 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. Elaine 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 oince of Secre 
 tary of State of the United States, to which 1 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. 
 
 " Mr. Elaine 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 
 
 6 
 
 have done the same." 
 
 On the 7th of June Mr. Elaine left Washington for Ear 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 
 folniwed 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 
 it. It would be an era that she would be proud of." Eut he 
 
706 BIOGEAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine 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. Elaine, then in Eoston, 
 saw that his supporters Avere 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. Elaine. 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. Eefore 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. ELAINE. 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. ELAINE. 
 
 If Mr. Elaine 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. ELAINE. 
 
 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. Elaine 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 Stan wood 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 P 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, Shall we suppress the 
 imposts and give that advantage to foreign over domestic maiiu- 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. 11LAINE. 709 
 
 facturers ? For himself he recommended that k 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 Avere 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 tke 
 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. Elaine 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 
 $700,000,000. 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 O. 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. Elaine 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 837,000 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 14,000,000 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. BLA1NE. 
 
 average annual amount of exports for a period of fifteen years 
 previous. Moreover, of this gain of $8,000,000 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 4 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. Elaine, 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. Elaine 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. 713 
 
 To Mr. Blaine, from Hon. W. \V. Phelps : 
 
 
 
 BERLIN, October 15, 1889. 
 
 I wonder if you and Mrs. Blaine know what a gem that was thh 
 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-oft*. 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. AV. 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. Oreswell : 
 
 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 tritling 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 71sx 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 T 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," 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. We 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. Elaine : 
 
 AMESBURY, March 3, 18 JO. 
 
 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. WIIITTIER. 
 
 To Mr. Patrick Ford: 
 
 STAN WOOD, 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, anJ left behind two 
 
716 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 
 
 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 rioters 1 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. ELAINE. 
 
 To Mr. Elaine, from Rev. K. 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 
 l>ag, 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. ELAINE. 717 
 
 WASHINGTON, April 19, 1891. 
 
 . . . The State Department is overrunning with business of conse 
 quence, and your daddy dearest is winning praise 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," 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. KLAINE. 
 
 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 w T e 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 lie 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 impossible 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; 
 
lUOGKArilY OF JAMES 0. HLAJNE. 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 (lod, 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. 1 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 "aspiration 11 of 
 Mr. Elaine, for never did mortal man put the aspirations of ambition so 
 pertinaciously behind him as Mr. Blaine when, four years ago, lie re 
 nounced the presidency, and when, a few months ago, he turned his back 
 on it again. 
 
 BAR HARBOR, June 12, 1892. 
 
 Tt is one o clock and the watchman cries "All is well!" I being the 
 watchman, also the vis-b-vis, the tcte-a-tcte, 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 tilings 
 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 hours delay we leave 
 Bangor, but it is now only 7. Before we reach Ellsworth I am up. He 
 onlywhen 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 JAMEti G. ELAINE. 
 
 AT LAST. 
 
 A r r 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. Elaine," wrote 
 one who was in the household. u He played to him and walked 
 with him, and was attentive and deferential and companionable 
 and natural, not servile or afraid of him. lie 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. 
 
lid 
 
BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. ELAINE. 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, 
 low full and complete! And yet what grief has he not 
 : >oriie ? No man ever breathed who was sweeter, truer, tenderer, 
 iobler 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 everyday till 
 n.-p- 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?" He 
 looked up with his swift smile and answered, "That is so. 
 Gladstone is eighty-three to-day." 
 
722 BIOGRAPHY OF JAMES G. JiLAlNE. 
 
 u Mr. Blaine 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, 4 You had a hard night, didn t you? lie 
 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 lie 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. Elaine ! 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 BE A RE 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. 11 
 
--sasss- 
 
fli 
 
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 335 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA UBRARY