Autobiography of Seventy Years Part 22

I took with me to Was.h.i.+ngton a complete set of the Reports of the Supreme Court of the United States and purchased Abbott's Digest of those decisions, then just published. The first evening after I got settled I spent in reading the opinions of the Supreme Court. I took the Digest beginning with the letter A, reading the abstracts, and then reading the cases referred to. I got as far as Adm and read the cases relating to admiralty practice. The next morning the Speaker announced his Committees and the House adjourned. After the adjournment, Judge Poland, Chairman of the Committee on the Revision of the Laws, called the Committee together and laid before them a letter he had just received from Mr. Justice Miller of the Supreme Court, asking for a change in the law in regard to monitions for summoning defendants in Admiralty. The change had been made necessary by some recent decisions of the Court.

The other members of the Committee looked at each other in dismay. None of them was familiar with the question, or knew at all what it was all about. I then stated to them the difficulty, giving them the names of the cases and the volumes where they were found. They were all quite astonished to find a man from the country, of whom probably none of them had ever heard before, having the law of Admiralty at his tongue's end.

If the question had related to anything in the Digest under Adr, or anything thereafter, I should have been found probably more ignorant than they were. But Judge Poland took me into high favor, and I found his friends.h.i.+p exceedingly agreeable and valuable. I do not remember that the Committee on the Revision of the Laws had another meeting while I belonged to it.

I was also, as I have said, put on the Committee of Education and Labor. The Bureau of Education had been lately established and the Commissioner appointed. But the office was exceedingly unpopular, not only with the old Democrats and the Strict Constructionists, who insisted on leaving such things to the States, but with a large cla.s.s of Republicans. A very zealous attack was made on the Bureau, led by Mr. Farnsworth of Illinois, and by Cadwallader C. Washburn, a very able and influential Republican from Wisconsin. The Committee on Appropriations, of which my colleague, Mr. Dawes, was Chairman, reported a provision for abolis.h.i.+ng this Bureau. Mr. Dawes, himself, however, dissented. The Republicans on the Committee of Education and Labor took up the cudgels for the Bureau. We beat the Committee of Appropriations. The result of the strife was that the Bureau was put on a firmer footing with a more liberal provision, and it has since been, under General Eaton and Dr. Harris, the accomplished and devoted Commissioners, of very great and valuable service to the country.

That led me to give special study to the matter of National education. I introduced a bill for establis.h.i.+ng an education system by National authority in States which failed to do it themselves. Later, I introduced and carried through the House a measure for distributing the proceeds of the public land and sums received from patents and some other special funds, among all the States in aid of the common schools.

This bill pa.s.sed the House, but was lost in the Senate mainly because Senator Morrill of Vermont, a most excellent and influential statesman, insisted that the money should go to the agricultural colleges, in which he took great interest, and not to common schools. Later when I became a member of the Senate I succeeded in getting a like measure twice through the Senate. But it failed in the House. So the two Houses never agreed upon it. But the movement and discussion aroused public attention throughout the country and were of great value.

While I was on that Committee, I think during my second term, there was referred to it a bill to rebuild William and Mary College in Virginia. The princ.i.p.al building of that College had been destroyed by fire. The Union and Rebel forces had fought for possession of it. It had been held by the Union soldiers and a court martial was sitting there when it was attacked by the other side and the Union men driven out, and the insurgents held the building for a few hours. They abandoned it very soon. But before the Union soldiers had got back in force some stragglers set fire to the building. It was totally destroyed.

William and Mary was the oldest college in the country, except Harvard. It numbered among its children many famous statesmen, including Jefferson, Marshall, Peyton Randolph, and Monroe.

Was.h.i.+ngton was its Chancellor for twelve years. Its graduates loved it ardently. I came to the conclusion that it would tend very much to restore the old affectionate feeling between the States to rebuild this College without inquiring too strictly into the merits of the case, as tested by any strict principle of law. I accordingly reported and advocated a bill for appropriating sixty or seventy thousand dollars to rebuild the College.

Afterward, when on the Committee of Claims in the Senate, I advocated extending the same principle to all colleges, schools and other inst.i.tutions of education and charity destroyed by the operations of the War without regard to the question who was in fault. This policy was, after a good deal of opposition and resistance, successfully carried out.

But the William and Mary College Bill was reported at the time when the pa.s.sions excited by the War were still burning in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of many Republican statesmen. The measure was received with derision. I was hardly allowed to go on with my speech in order, and the ordinary courtesy of a brief extension of time to finish it was refused amid great clamor.

But I got the Bill through the House the next winter. I had a powerful ally in Mr. Perce of Mississippi, a Northern soldier, who had settled in that State after the War. It was not considered in the Senate. The measure was renewed again later in the House. But it was bitterly attacked by Mr. Reed of Maine, afterward Speaker, and defeated. Afterward I succeeded in getting it through the Senate when the Democrats had possession of the House, during the Administration of President Harrison, and it became a law.

I have been a.s.sured by many Southern men that that measure, and the report and speech in which I advocated it, had a very strong and wide influence in restoring good feeling toward the Union in the minds of the people of Virginia. Several of the graduates of William and Mary who afterward became Republicans have a.s.sured me of this with great emphasis. I was much pleased to get the following letter from Governor Henry A. Wise, the eminent Virginia statesman, who was, with two or three exceptions, the most powerful and influential advocate of secession in the South.

RICHMOND VA Feby 13th 1872.

HON MR h.o.a.r OF Ma.s.sTS.

_Honored Sir._

I write for no reason but one of pure feeling of respect-- not even for a reply. I am a visitor of Wm and Mary College --truly of the most venerable of the "Mothers of Thought"

--and have read your excellent appeal to the H. Reps: in her behalf. It was worthy of that Grand old Comth, Ma.s.sts, the elder sister of this once glorious Comth, which hailed her heartily in the Night of Revolution against Tyrrany.

It was worthy of sweet memories--worthy of Letters--it was pious and patriotic. Let me just add a sentence more, to say that if Rebellion and Sectional Hate are to be eradicated-- and I hope they are--_that is the way to do it._ Your speech & the pa.s.sage of such bills, catholic in every sense of love & charity, will do more to heal our Country's wounds than all the caustic of reconstruction which can be applied.

With unaffected grat.i.tude for your Speech, I pray you will not pause upon it, but keep the bill to its pa.s.sage through both Houses of Congress. I know you would if you could see the dest.i.tution of instruction, and the poverty which cant pay for it, on the Consecrated peninsula of Jas Town, York Town, and Williamsburg. Ah! tear down every parapet of War-- cruel War, wanton war call it if you will--but for the Past, for Piety's sake, for Learning and Moral's sake let Old Wm & Mary stand a Beacon Light for the guide of the Future.

Very sincerely Yrs HENRY A. WISE

Governor Wise had a very conspicuous career in the United States House of Representatives. He was a very zealous supporter of the Southern doctrine before the War. He was regarded as a good deal of a fire eater. He was Governor of Virginia when John Brown was executed. But in spite of the horror and indignation that the people of the South felt for John Brown's raid he did full justice to the heroic quality of the man. He declared him "the gamest man" he ever saw.

I served in my second term on the Committee on Elections under the Chairmans.h.i.+p of George W. McCrary. Election cases in the House up to that time were, as they always were in the English House of Commons and as they have been too often in the Senate, determined entirely by party feeling. Whenever there was a plausible reason for making a contest the dominant party in the House almost always awarded the seat to the man of its own side. There is a well-authenticated story of Thaddeus Stevens, that going into the room of the Committee of Elections, of which he was a member, he found a hearing going on. He asked one of his Republican colleagues what was the point in the case. "There is not much point to it" was the answer.

"They are both d.a.m.ned scoundrels." "Well," said Stevens, "which is the Republican d.a.m.ned scoundrel? I want to go for the Republican d.a.m.ned scoundrel."

We had a good many contests. But the Committee determined to settle all the questions before it as they would if they were judges in a court of justice. The powerful influence of Mr. McCrary, the Chairman, aided largely to bring about that result. The Democratic minority soon discovered that we were sincere and in earnest. They met us in a like spirit.

I believe the Committee on Elections during that Congress reported on every case with absolute impartiality, and the House followed their lead. I formed a very pleasant friends.h.i.+p on that Committee with Judge William M. Merrick, a Maryland Democrat, who had made himself very much disliked by the Republican authorities during the War because of his supposed sympathy with Rebellion. I do not think he sympathized with the Rebellion.

But he construed the Const.i.tution very strictly and was opposed to many measures of the Administration. He was nominated by President Cleveland to be Judge of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. The Judiciary Committee of the Senate reported against him, putting their objection on the ground of the conduct imputed to him during the War, and also of his age. He was then sixty-seven years old. I dissented from the Committee, of which I was a member, and I exerted myself with all my might to secure his confirmation, and was successful. He made a most admirable Judge, and my action was abundantly vindicated by the result.

I have taken special satisfaction in two reports which I made for that Committee. I have a right to say that I dealt with the subjects with the same freedom from bias or prejudice with which it would have been my duty to give to the question if I had been sitting on the Bench of the Supreme Court of the United States.

The case of Cessna _vs._ Myers was perhaps the most interesting and important of those in which I made a report for the Committee.

John Cessna had served the State of Pennsylvania for several terms. He was a very popular and eminent Republican member.

According to the returns, Myers, his adversary, had a majority of 14. Cessna showed beyond question, and his antagonist admitted, that more than 14 illegal votes were cast for Myers.

On the other hand Myers claimed that there were many illegal votes cast for Cessna, the evidence of which, so far as appeared, came to his knowledge first when introduced in the case. When the evidence was taken Cessna claimed to have evidence that 328 illegal votes were cast for Myers, and that ten legal votes, cast or offered for him, were rejected. On the other hand the sitting member claimed that there were 341 votes illegally thrown for the contestant, and of those Cessna admitted that 81 had proved to be illegal. So the Committee were obliged to examine by itself the evidence in regard to the right to vote of each of several hundred persons.

The case turned finally on some very interesting questions of the law of domicile. It appeared that a considerable number of persons who were ent.i.tled to vote, if they were resident of the district where they voted, were workmen employed in the construction of a railroad. They had come from outside the district for that purpose alone, and had no purpose of remaining in the district after the railroad should be completed, and meant then to get work wherever they could find it, there or elsewhere. There were also a number of votes cast by students who had gone to college for the purpose of getting an education, having no design to remain there after their studies terminated.

Still another cla.s.s of voters whose right was in dispute, were the paupers abiding in the public almshouse, and maintained in common by a considerable number of towns.h.i.+ps and parishes.

These paupers voted in the district where the almshouse was situated, although it was not the district of their domicile or residence when they were removed to it.

The Committee held in the case of the laborer,--in spite of the very earnest contention to the contrary, that if the laborer elected in good faith when he came into the district to make it his legal residence, it became his legal residence, even if he intended to leave it and get another after his job was done.

We applied a like doctrine to the case of the students, holding that a student of a college, being personally present in any district, had the right if he so desired, to take up his abode there, and make it by his election his legal residence for a fixed and limited time.

The question of the paupers we left undecided, as it turned out that whichever way it were decided, Mr. Cessna had not overcome his opponent's legal majority.

We also decided an Arkansas case where the t.i.tle to his seat of a well known Republican member of Congress was at stake, in favor of his Democratic contestant.

I was somewhat gratified in the midst of a storm of vituperation which I had encountered for some political action of mine, in which I was charged by almost the entire Democratic press of the country with being a bitter partisan to find two Democratic gentlemen who had owed their seats to the impartiality of the Committee on Elections, coming very zealously to the rescue.

I served also from 1873 to 1875 on the Committee on Railroads and Ca.n.a.ls. I have no recollection of doing anything on that Committee, except aiding in reporting a bill for the regulation by National authority of railroads engaged in interstate commerce, in defence of which I made a very elaborate speech. But I was able to secure the pa.s.sage of one very interesting and important measure. James B. Eads, the famous engineer, architect of the great St. Louis bridge, had a plan for opening to commerce the mouth of the Mississippi River by a system of jetties.

He had submitted his plan to the Board of Engineers appointed by the War Department. But he could get no encouragement, and of the twenty members of that Board, only one, General Barnard, the President, looked with any approval upon his scheme. The Board thought that a very long and costly ca.n.a.l was the only method of securing a water-way which would enable ocean steamers to reach New Orleans, and the product of the Mississippi valley to be carried to Europe that way. Captain Eads appeared before the Committee on Railroads and Ca.n.a.ls and urged his scheme in a speech of great interest and ability.

The Committee adjourned for a week. They were to take up the question at the next meeting. The vote was unanimous against Mr. Eads's Bill. When the Committee came out of their room he was waiting outside the door to learn his fate. I saw the look of disappointment and despair on his face when he was told of the vote. I asked him to come with me into another room, which he did. I told him that I was satisfied from what I had heard that his plan was a good one, although I had voted against it with the rest of the Committee. It seemed to me that it would be presumptuous in me, having no special knowledge in such matters, to go against the practically unanimous report of the United States Board of Engineers.

But I said: "Captain Eads, can you not frame a bill, which will provide that you shall not have any money from the Treasury for your work until you have accomplished something. If you deepen the channel of the river a foot that will have done some good. Suppose you provide that when you have deepened the river a certain number of feet you shall have so much of your pay, when it is deepened further so much more, and so on until the work is done." Captain Eads eagerly caught at the plan. He said that he was willing to do it, and that he was perfectly willing that his getting his pay should depend upon the certificate of the engineers of his having accomplished the result. He agreed to have a bill drawn on that principle.

He brought it to me afterward. I went over it very carefully, inserting some additional securities for the Government.

I then took it to the next meeting of the Committee, moved a reconsideration of the vote of the previous week. That was carried by a bare majority of one vote. I then moved the new bill as a subst.i.tute for the old one. It was adopted.

The bill pa.s.sed the House and Senate under which the Eads jetties were constructed and vessels drawing over twenty- eight feet of water pa.s.sed freely up and down to and from New Orleans. The depth before that time, I think, had been twelve feet. Captain Eads afterward sent me a beautifully bound copy of the history of the Eads's jetties with an inscription certifying to the facts I have stated, in his own handwriting.

I told this story afterward at a meeting of the business men of Boston. Mr. Corth.e.l.l who happened to be present made a speech after I got through. He is himself a very eminent water engineer. He said that he was a.s.sociated with Captain Eads at the time and had often heard Captain Eads tell the story.

Captain Eads afterward had a scheme which always seemed to me very feasible for a s.h.i.+p-railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. His project was to construct a railway with a sufficient number of tracks, and to raise s.h.i.+ps of the largest size on the principle applied in locks of ordinary ca.n.a.ls.

He had a contrivance made of stout beams which would hold and support a loaded vessel to which it was adjusted. The beams were to operate something like the keys of a piano, and the whole operation was something like that by which hatters measure and record the shape of a man's head. This plan received the hearty commendation of some very eminent engineers, including Major Reed of England, the highest authority of such subjects, the constructor of the dry docks at Malta. The scheme had a good many supporters in Congress. I think it would have been adopted but for Captain Eads's premature death.

Rather a singular coincidence took place when I was interesting myself in this matter which possibly may be not too trivial to record. One Thanksgiving morning I received by express a beautiful copy of Wordsworth, which I had bought in Boston the day before. Just as I was opening it the morning mail was brought in. I opened the book at random and turned to Wadsworth's poem, "The Highland Broach." My eye caught the following lines:

Lo! s.h.i.+ps from seas by nature barred, Mount along ways by man prepared; Along far stretching vales, whose streams Seek other seas, their canvas gleams, And busy towns grow up on coasts Thronged yesterday by airy ghosts.

I turned by eye from these verses to the mail in which was a copy of a New York ill.u.s.trated journal containing an account of the Eads s.h.i.+p-railway.

The inscription in Eads's "History of the Jetties," above referred to, is as follows:

To Hon. George F. h.o.a.r, who, as a member of the House Committee which matured the Jetty Act, prepared the _first report_ in its favor, this book is presented; with the a.s.surance that his unfaltering support of the enterprise through all its struggles, ent.i.tled him to a prominent place among the statesmen to whom the producers in the Valley of the Mississippi are most largely indebted.

JAS B. EADS Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C., February 1881

I had the pleasure of receiving a telegram from New Orleans shortly after the completion of the jetties saying that a loaded steamer, drawing between twenty-seven and twenty-eight feet of water, had safely pa.s.sed through them to New Orleans.

The Commission appointed by the Government insisted upon having the jetties constructed at the south pa.s.s of the Mississippi River. This Captain Eads strenuously resisted and urged the superiority of the southwest pa.s.s for the purpose. The House when it pa.s.sed the jetty bill adopted Mr. Eads's plan. But the Senate insisted on taking the opinion of the Commission, much to his distress. The Senate was firm, and the House was obliged to yield. I think everybody now agrees that Eads was right, and that the scheme would have been perfectly successful, and would have continued to perform all that was desired of it, if his counsel had been taken. As it is, the jetties have been of great value and well worth their cost. But it will probably be necessary some time to construct a similar work in the southwest pa.s.s.

During my first term in the House on the Committee on Education and Labor I had the important duty of investigating the conduct of the Freedman's Bureau and other charges made against General Oliver O. Howard. I wrote nearly the whole of the report, all of it containing the arguments of the Committee, and the summing up of the evidence. A few pa.s.sages are by the Chairman, Mr. Arnell. The Freedman's Bureau was established to aid the colored people who had been suddenly emanc.i.p.ated by President Lincoln's Proclamation, to attain a condition where they could get their living in comfort, and their children could be educated. General Howard, a very eminent officer in the Civil War, afterward at the head of the Army, was a man singularly fitted for this duty. He was profoundly religious, absolutely incorruptible, a man of very kind heart, not afraid to break out new paths, apt to succeed in all his undertakings, a lover of Liberty and thoroughly devoted to his work. The resources at his command were the unclaimed pay of the negro soldiers and some other sums specially granted from the Treasury. But the work was one entirely different from anything which had been accomplished by government agency in the country before.

He purchased tracts of land, which were divided into building lots, which were sold to the colored people. Money was advanced to them to build houses, the Freedman's Bureau taking a mortgage as security. The Bureau endowed Howard University, of which General Howard was made President. A large Congregational Church was built in Was.h.i.+ngton with moneys advanced by the Bureau, the religious society giving its bonds at seven per cent. for which the structure was ample security. General Howard had incurred the bitter animosity not only of the enemies of the negro race, who disliked the whole object for which the Bureau was founded, but of other persons whom he had offended.

I believe in no instance was there any loss to the Government, or to the fund in his charge. He was able to establish in comfortable homes, and to educate and to provide work for many thousand freedmen who had flocked to Was.h.i.+ngton during the disturbed period immediately following emanc.i.p.ation. After a thorough investigation, where the prosecution was conducted by Fernando Wood, a very distinguished and able Representative from New York, formerly Mayor of the City, General Howard was completely exonerated by the report of the majority of the Committee. The report was accepted by the House.

In 1873 I visited Louisiana, as Chairman of a special committee raised for the purpose of inquiring into the conditions there, and ascertaining which of two rival State governments was the lawful one. The investigation disclosed a terrible story of murder, brutality and crime. I made the report, signed also by Mr. Wheeler, afterward Vice-President, and Mr. Frye, now Senator and President pro tempore of the Senate. It told the dreadful story of these things with absolute truth and fidelity. It is not worth while to revive these memories now. But at the same time I endeavored to do full justice to the better qualities of the Southern people and to explain how it happened that men otherwise so honorable and brave and humane could be led by the pa.s.sions of a political warfare and race prejudice to commit such offences. Mr. Lamar, of Mississippi, one of the most brilliant and able statesmen of his time, sought an interview with me after the report went in and thanked me for what I had said of the Southern people, and told me that "I was the first Northern man who seemed to be capable of doing them justice." What he thought will be found also stated by him.

In a speech made before a Democratic meeting in the spring of 1875, Mr. Lamar said ("Life of Lamar," p. 221);

"Well, the character of that last Committee--especially of its Chairman, Mr. George F. h.o.a.r--was such as to lead to no expectation that there would be any indulgence shown to the people of the South, or any very harsh criticisms of his own party. By inheritance, by training, by political a.s.sociation, he was intensely anti-Southern. His manners toward Southern men, so bitter are his feelings, are often cold and reserved; and nothing but his instinct and refinement as a gentleman, which he is in every respect, saved him from sometimes being supercilious; acute in intellect, cultured, trained to the highest expression of his powers, quick in his resentments and combative in temperament, we certainly expected no quarter from his hands. But beneath all this there were genuine truth and manhood in h.o.a.r that lifted him above the sordid feeling of malignant pa.s.sion. He went, then, to that country, and he made a report; and, while there is much in it that saddened my heart, while there is much which I say is unwise and unjust in his observations, there are some things, fellow citizens, which you people of the North should hark to bear in mind, while you are coming to your conclusions with reference to the relations which you intend to sustain to the prostrate people of my section. Here, fellow citizens, is what Mr.