Part 43 (1/2)
2. The maintenance by that authority of the political and personal rights of all citizens, of all races and cla.s.ses.
As I have said, he interpreted the Const.i.tution in a manner which he thought would best promote these objects. He had little respect for subtilties or refinements or scruples that stood in the way.
He was for going straight to his object. When the Hayes and Tilden contest was up, he was for having the President of the United States put Hayes and Wheeler in power by using all the National forces, military and other, that might be needful. He was a member of the Committee that framed the bill for the Electoral Commission, but refused to give it his support.
I made a very pleasant acquaintance with him during the sessions of that Committee. I suppose it was due to his kindly influence that I was put upon the Committee of Privileges and Elections, of which he was Chairman, when I entered the Senate. But he died in the following summer, so I never had an opportunity to know him better. He was a great party leader. He had in this respect no superior in his time, save Lincoln alone.
It was never my good fortune to be intimate with Zachariah Chandler. But I had a good opportunity for observing him and knowing him well. I met him in 1854, at the Convention held in Buffalo to concert measures for protecting and promoting Free State immigration to Kansas. He was the leading spirit of that Convention, full of wisdom, energy and courage. He was then widely known throughout the country as an enterprising and successful man of business. When I went into the House of Representatives, in 1869, Mr. Chandler was already a veteran in public life. He had organized and led the political forces which overthrew Lewis Ca.s.s and the old Democratic Party, not only in Michigan but in the Northwest. He had been in the Senate twelve years. Those twelve years had been crowded with history. The close of the Administration of Buchanan, the disruption of the Democratic Party at Charleston, the election and inauguration of Lincoln, the putting down of the Rebellion, the organizing, directing and disbanding of great armies, the great amendments to the Const.i.tution, and the contest with Andrew Johnson, had been accomplished. The reconstruction of the rebellious States, the payment of the public debt, keeping the national faith under great temptation, reconciliation and the processes of legislation and administration under the restraints which belonged to peace, were well under way. In all these Chandler bore a large part, and a part wise, honest, powerful and on the righteous side. I knew him afterward in the Department of the Interior. He was, in my judgment, the ablest administrative officer without an exception who has been in any executive department during my public life. His st.u.r.dy honesty, his sound, rapid, almost instinctive judgment, his tact, his business sense, his love of justice were felt in every fibre and branch of the great Interior Department, then including eight great bureaus each almost important enough to be a Department by itself.
The humblest clerk who complained of injustice was sure to be listened to by the head of that great Department, who, with his quick sympathy and sound judgment, would make it certain that right would be done.
Chandler has little respect for the refinements of speech or for literary polish. He could not endure Mr. Sumner's piling precedent upon precedent and quotation upon quotation, and disliked his lofty and somewhat pompous rhetoric. He used sometimes to leave his seat and make known his disgust in the cloak room, or in the rear of the desks, to visitors who happened to be in the Senate Chamber. But he was strong as a rock, true as steel, fearless and brave, honest and incorruptible.
He had a vigorous good sense. He saw through all the foolish sophistries with which the defenders of fiat money, or debased currency, sought to defend their schemes. He had no mercy for treason or rebellion or secession. He was a native of New Hamps.h.i.+re. He had the opinions of New England, combined with the directness and sincerity and energy of the West.
He had a very large influence in making the State of Michigan another New England.
He was a sincere, open-hearted, large-hearted and affectionate man. He was the last man in the world of whom it would be proper to speak as a member of an intrigue or cabal. His strategy was a straightforward, downright blow. His stroke was an Abdiel stroke,
This greeting on thy impious crest receive.
His eloquence was simple, rugged, direct, strong. He had but a scanty vocabulary. It contained no word for treason but ”treason.” He described a lie by a word of three letters.
The character of his speech was that which Plutarch ascribes to Demosthenes. He was strongly stirred by simple and great emotions--love of country, love of freedom, love of justice, love of honesty. He hated cant and affectation.
I believe he was fond of some good literature, but he was very impatient of Mr. Sumner's load of ornament and quotation.
He had little respect for fine phrases or for fine sentiment or the delicacies of a refined literature. He was rough and plain-spoken. I do not think he would ever have learned to care much for Tennyson or Browning. But the Psalms of David would have moved him.
I suppose he was not much of a civil service reformer. He expected to rule Michigan, and while he would have never bought or bribed an antagonist by giving him an office, he would have expected to fill the public offices, so far as he had his way, by men who were of his way of thinking. He was much shocked and disgusted when Judge h.o.a.r wanted to inquire further concerning a man whom he had recommended for the office of Judge of the Circuit Court. The Judge said something about asking Reuben Rice, a friend he highly respected who had lived long in Michigan. Chandler spoke of it afterward and said: ”When Jake Howard and I recommended a man, the Attorney- General wanted to ask a little railroad fellow what he thought of him.”
He joined with Conkling and Carpenter and Edmunds in their opposition to the confirmation of Judge h.o.a.r. He came to know the Judge better afterward and declared that he himself had made a mistake.
He was a strong pillar of public faith, public liberty, and of the Union. He had great faults. But without the aid of the men whom he could influence and who honored him, and to whom his great faults were as great virtues, the Union never would have been saved, or slavery abolished, or the faith kept. I hold it one of the chief proofs of the kindness of divine Providence to the American people in a time of very great peril that their leaders were so different in character.
They are all dead now--Sumner and Fessenden and Seward and Wilson and Chase and Stanton and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan and Chandler,--a circle in which Lincoln s.h.i.+nes as a diamond in its setting. Not one of them could have been spared.
It is proper that I should add that I have known very well a good many of the most eminent citizens of Michigan. This list includes Governor and Senator Henry P. Baldwin, and Judge Christiancy, who displaced Chandler in the Senate. I have frequently heard them speak of Mr. Chandler. Without an exception I believe they held him in profound esteem and honor. They were proud of him as the most eminent citizen of their State which has been prolific of strong men, speaking of him as we do of Sumner or Webster.
Mr. Chandler was a remarkable example of what I have often noticed, how thoroughly the people come to know the true character of a public man, even when the press of the whole country unite to decry him. I suppose there was not a paper in New England, Republican or Democratic, that spoke kindly of Zach.
Chandler for many years. He was disliked by the Democratic press for his unyielding Republicanism. He was disliked by the Republican press that supported Charles Sumner, for his opposition to him. He was represented as a coa.r.s.e, ignorant and unscrupulous man. In the campaign of 1880 I sent him a telegram, asking him to visit me in Ma.s.sachusetts and make a few speeches in our campaign. I added: ”You will be received with unbounded respect and honor.” The telegram was an astonishment and revelation to the old man. He had no idea that the people of New England had that opinion of him. Governor Baldwin told me that he happened to be pa.s.sing Chandler's house just as he received my message. Chandler knocked on the window for the Governor to come in. He had the telegram in his hand when the Governor entered, and exclaimed: ”Look at that; read that; and I did not graduate at Harvard College either.” His colleague, Senator Ferry, alludes to his gratification at the receipt of this message, in his obituary delivered in the Senate.
He spoke in Worcester and Boston and Lowell, and in one or two other places. His pa.s.sage through the State was a triumphal march. He was received as I had predicted. In Worcester we had no hall large enough to hold the crowds that thronged to see him, and were compelled to have the meeting in the skating-rink. Chandler went back to Michigan full of satisfaction with his reception. I think he would have been among the most formidable candidates for the Presidency at the next election, but for his sudden death. If he had been nominated, he would undoubtedly have been elected. But, a short time after, he was one morning found dead in his bed at Chicago.
In his death a great and salutary force was subtracted from the public life of the country, and especially from the public life of the great State to whose history he had contributed so large and n.o.ble a part.
I have found among some old notes a few sentences with which I presented him to a mighty audience in my own city:
”Worcester is here in person to-night to give a welcome from the heart of Ma.s.sachusetts to the Senator of Michigan. If our guest had nothing of his own to recommend him, it would be enough to stir the blood of Ma.s.sachusetts that he represents that honored State, another New England in her interests and in her opinions. With her vast forests, her people share with Maine, our own great frontier State, those vast lumber interests, for which it has been our own policy to demand protection. Daughter of three mighty lakes, she takes a large share in our vast inland commerce. Her people are brave, prosperous and free. They have iron in their soil, and iron in their blood. Great as is her wealth and her material interest, she shares with Ma.s.sachusetts the honor of being among the foremost of American States in educational conditions. Ma.s.sachusetts is proud to--
Claim kindred there, and have the claim allowed.
”But our guest brings to us more than a representative t.i.tle to our regard. The memory of some of us goes back to the time when, all over the great free Northwest, the people seemed to have forgotten to what they owed their own prosperity.
The Northwest had been the gift of Freedom to the Republic on her birthday. In each of her million homes dwells Liberty, a perpetual guest. But yet that people in Illinois and Michigan and Indiana and Ohio seemed for a time to have forgotten their own history, and to be unworthy of their fair and mighty heritage.
They had been the trusted and st.u.r.dy allies of the slave power in the great contest for the possession of the vast territory between the Mississippi and the Pacific. The old leaders, Douglas in Illinois and Ca.s.s in Michigan, who ruled those States with an almost despotic power, sought to win the favor of the South for their aspirations for the Presidency by espousing the doctrine of squatter sovereignty, under which the invaders from the slave States hard by, without even becoming residents in good faith, might fix forever the character of that fair domain. At that time a young knight, a figure of manly courage and manly strength, came forward to challenge General Ca.s.s to a struggle for the supremacy in Michigan. It was our guest of this evening. As you all know, the young champion vanquished the veteran warrior in a trial by battle for the freedom of the Continent. I met him at Buffalo in 1854, in the height of the conflict, at a gathering of a few gentlemen to concert measures for sustaining, aiding and arming the Free State immigrants in Kansas. He was the leader and the life of the company. Many of those immigrants had gone from Worcester County, where the Emigrants' Aid Society was first devised by Edward Hale and organized by Eli Thayer. I met him again when I went to Was.h.i.+ngton in 1869. I found him among the foremost of the leaders of the Senate. He had gone through the great period of the Civil War, and the period before the Civil War. He had stood by Lincoln in that time of trouble.