Part 10 (2/2)

But to return. General Garfield and I walked down the hall together, and being very intimate friends, I used to call him by his first name, as he did me. I said: ”James, if you will keep a level head, you will be nominated for the Presidency by this convention before it is over.” This was a couple of days before he was actually nominated.

He replied: ”No, I think not.”

But as we walked along together discussing the matter, I contended that I was right.

At the end of that memorable struggle between Grant and Blaine, in which the great Republican party refused to accept General Grant, the foremost Republican and soldier of his time, Garfield was nominated.

I remember vividly the form and features of Garfield in that convention. I see him placing Sherman in nomination, probably not realizing at the time that he was nominating himself. I see him taking an active part in all the debates, and as I look back now I do not think I ever saw a man apparently so affected as General Garfield was when it was announced that he was the nominee of the Republican party for the Presidency of the United States. Seemingly he almost utterly collapsed. He sank into his seat, overcome. He was taken out of the convention and to a room in the Grand Pacific, where I met him a very few minutes afterward.

After General Garfield was elected to the Presidency, but before his inauguration, I determined that I would urge upon him the appointment of Mr. Robert T. Lincoln as a member of his cabinet.

I thought then that his selection would not only be an honor to the State, but that the great name of Lincoln, so fresh then in the minds of the people, would materially strengthen General Garfield's administration.

With this purpose in view, I visited Garfield at his home in Mentor.

This journey was an extremely difficult one, owing to the circ.u.mstance that the snow was yet deep on the ground; so I arranged with the conductor to stop at the nearest point to General Garfield's house to let me off, which he did. I walked from the train through banks of snow, and after the hardest kind of a walk, finally reached his house.

I at once told him the mission on which I had come. We had quite a long talk, at the end of which he announced that he would appoint Mr. Lincoln his Secretary of War.

In this connection I desire to say a few words concerning Robert T. Lincoln. He is still living. I have known him from boyhood.

He has the integrity and the character which so distinguished his father, and was marked in his mother's people as well. It is my firm conviction that long ago Robert T. Lincoln could have been President of the United States had he possessed the slightest political aspiration. He has never been ambitious for public office; but, on the contrary, it has always seemed to me that the Presidency was especially repugnant to him, which would be natural, considering the untimely death of his father, if for no other reason. He was almost forced to take an active interest in public affairs, but as soon as he was permitted to do so he retired to private life to engage in large business undertakings, and finally to become the head of the Pullman Company.

It seems strange to me that he should consider the presidency of a private corporation, no matter how great the emoluments, above the Presidency of the greatest of all Republics. How unlike his father! He was a most excellent Secretary of War, and one of General Garfield's cabinet officers whom General Arthur invited to remain in his cabinet, which he did.

Under President Harrison he consented to become Minister to England.

Neither my colleague, Senator Farwell, nor I favored this appointment --not because of any antipathy for Mr. Lincoln, for whom I not only have the highest respect and admiration, but like personally as well; but Mr. Blaine, who was Harrison's Secretary of State, called on me one day and asked me to recommend some first-cla.s.s man from Illinois for the post. After a consultation with my colleague, we determined to recommend an eminent lawyer and cultured gentleman of Chicago, John N. Jewett. We did recommend him, and a.s.sumed that his appointment was a.s.sured; but Harrison--probably to humiliate Mr. Blaine--called Senator Farwell and me to him one day and announced that he had determined to appoint Robert T. Lincoln Minister to England.

Farwell was extremely angry, and wanted to fight the nomination.

However, I counselled moderation. I pointed out that no criticism could be made of Mr. Lincoln, and that since he was my personal friend I could not very well oppose him. So I was glad to favor the appointment, although I was as humiliated as my colleague at the cool manner with which Harrison had snubbed us after Mr. Blaine's overtures.

I recollect very well the telegram which Mr. Lincoln received when he was in Springfield, attending the business of the Pullman Company.

It was from his office in Chicago. It stated that there was a letter there that demanded immediate attention, and asked whether it should be forwarded. He gave instructions to forward it to Springfield. It turned out to be the invitation of General Garfield to enter his cabinet as Secretary of War, and asking an immediate reply. He brought it to me in the Governor's office, where he sat down and wrote his reply accepting General Garfield's invitation.

But to return to General Garfield. He was not a strong executive officer. In the brief period in which he occupied the White House, he did not make a good President, and in my judgment would never have made a good one. He vacillated in the disposition of his patronage. When I visited him while he was yet President-elect, he told me that Mr. Conkling would be with him the next day, and asked my advice as to what he should say to him. It was understood that Conkling was coming to protest against the appointment of Blaine as Secretary of State. My advice was to let Mr. Conkling understand that he would appoint whomsoever he pleased as members of his cabinet; that he would run the office of President without fear or favor; and that he would appoint Mr. Blaine as Secretary of State because he considered him the very man best qualified for that high office. Garfield agreed with me, a.s.serting that I had expressed exactly what he intended saying to Conkling; but if we are believe the stories of Senator Conkling's friends, he made far different promises to Senator Conkling in reference to this as also to other appointments.

But the culmination of the trouble between Garfield and Conkling was the appointment of Robertson as Collector of Customs at the Port of New York. The President took the ground, for his own reasons, that the Collector of Customs of New York was a National office, in which every State had an interest, and was not to be considered as Senatorial patronage. Conkling strenuously contended that it was exclusively Senatorial patronage, and in this he was sustained by precedents.

It so happened that I was in Was.h.i.+ngton when the trouble between Conkling and Garfield was at its height, over the appointment of Robertson. I called to see the President to pay my respects. He asked me if I knew what General Logan would do in reference to the nomination of Mr. Robertson. I told him I did not know, and he asked me if I could find out, and to come to breakfast with him next morning. I did find out that General Logan expected to stand by the President, and I so reported to him next morning.

I bade him good-bye and this was the last time that I ever saw him alive. I attended his funeral at Cleveland, and as I saw his body laid away, I thought of the strange caprice of fate. Was it premonition that made him so sad and castdown--so utterly crushed, as it seemed to me--when he became the Republican candidate for President before that great convention of 1880? Had he not been elected President, he would probably have enjoyed a long, useful, and highly creditable public career. He would have been one of the most distinguished representatives that Ohio ever had in the upper branch of Congress. He was to the most eminent degree fitted for a legislator. In the national halls of Congress his public life had been spent; there he was at home. He was not at all fitted for the position of Chief Executive of the United States. And I say this not in a spirit of hostility, but in the most kindly way, because I loved General Garfield as one of my earliest friends, in those days of long ago, when I served in the Thirty-ninth Congress.

There was no man in the Thirty-ninth Congress with whom I was afterwards so long and intimately a.s.sociated as I was with the late Senator William B. Allison of Iowa, with whom I served in the Senate for a quarter of a century.

Senator Allison was quite a prominent member of the House when I entered Congress, and was serving then as a member of the important Ways and Means Committee. He was regarded as one of the ablest and most influential of the Western members.

From the very earliest time I knew him, Senator Allison was an authority on matters pertaining to finance. While he was in favor of a protective tariff, he was not particularly a high-tariff advocate; he, and the late General Logan who was then in the House, and I worked together on tariff matters, as against the high-tariff advocates, led by General Schenck.

On one occasion we defeated a high-tariff proposition that General Schenck was advocating. He was furious, and rising up in his place, declared:

”I might as well move to lay the bill on the table and to write as its epitaph--'nibbled to death by pismires!'”

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