Autobiography of Seventy Years Part 38

He upheld the good faith of the nation in his veto of the bill to authorize the coinage of the silver dollar of 412-1/2 grains, and to restore its legal tender character in 1879; and in his veto of the bill violating our treaty with China. He grew steadily in public favor with all parties, and with all parts of the country, as his Administration went on. Under his Administration the resumption of specie payments was accomplished; and, in spite of the great difficulties caused by the factional opposition in his own party, he handed down his office to a Republican successor.

The weakness and folly of the charge against the decision of the Electoral Commission, that it was unconst.i.tutional or fraudulent, and the fact that the American people were never impressed by these charges, is shown by the fact that General Garfield, one of the majority who gave that decision, was elected to succeed President Hayes, and that six of the eight members of that majority, now dead, maintained, every one them, throughout their honored and useful lives, the respect and affection of their countrymen, without distinction of party. Certainly there can be found among the great men of that great generation no more pure and brilliant lights than Samuel F. Miller, William Strong, Joseph P. Bradley, Frederick T. Frelinghuysen, Oliver P. Morton and James A. Garfield.

There are two survivors of that majority, Mr. Edmunds and myself. Neither has found that the respect in which his countrymen held him has been diminished by that decision.

President Hayes has been accused of abandoning the reconstruction policy of his party. It has also been said that he showed a want of courage in failing to support the Republican State Governments in Louisiana and South Carolina; that if the votes of those States were cast for him they were cast for Packard and Chamberlain at the elections for Governor held the same day, and that he should have declined the Presidency, or have maintained these Governors in place. But these charges are, at the least, inconsiderate, not the say ignorant. It ought to be said also that President Grant before he left office had determined to do in regard to these State Governments exactly what Hayes afterward did, and that Hayes acted with his full approval. Second, I have the authority of President Garfield for saying that Mr. Blaine had come to the same conclusion. The Monday morning after the electoral count had been completed and the result declared, Blaine had a long talk with Garfield, which Garfield reported to me. He told him that he had made up his mind, if he had been elected, to offer the office of Secretary of State to Mr. Evarts, or, if anything prevented that, to Judge h.o.a.r. He further said that he thought it was time to discontinue maintaining Republican State Governments in office by the National power and that the people of the Southern States must settle their State elections for themselves. Mr. Blaine by his disappointment in the formation of President Hayes's Cabinet was induced to make an attack on him which seems inconsistent with this declaration. But Mr. Blaine soon abandoned this ground, and, so far as I now remember, never afterward advocated interference with the control of the Southern States by National authority.

It seems to me that President Hayes did only what his duty under the Const.i.tution peremptorily demanded of him. I entirely approved his conduct at the time, and, so far as I know and believe, he agreed exactly with the doctrine on which I always myself acted before and since. The power and duty of the President are conferred and limited by the Const.i.tution. The Const.i.tution requires that no appropriation shall be made for the support of the Army for more than two years. In practice the appropriation is never for more than one year. That is for the express purpose, I have always believed, of giving to Congress, especially to the House of Representatives, which must inaugurate all appropriation bills, absolute control over the use of the Army, and the power to determine for what purposes the military power shall be used. At the session before President Hayes's inauguration the Democratic House of Representatives had refused to pa.s.s an Army Bill. The House refused to pa.s.s an Army Bill the next year, except on condition that the soldiers should not be used to support the State Government.

It became necessary to call a special session of Congress in October, 1877, by reason of the failure of the Army Appropriation Bill the winter before. The first chapter of the Statutes of that session, being an act making appropriations for the support of the Army for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1878, and for other purposes, enacts "that none of the money hereby appropriated shall be expended, directly or indirectly, for any use not strictly necessary for, and directly connected with, the military service of the Government; and this restriction shall apply to the use of public animals, forage, and vehicles."

It was, therefore, President Hayes's Const.i.tutional duty, in my judgment, to desist from using the military power of the Government on the 30th day of June, 1877, when the fiscal year expired for which there was an appropriation for the support of the Army. In fact he removed the troops a little earlier. But he received a.s.surances from the Democratic leaders-- whether they were made good I will not now undertake to inquire-- that there should be no unlawful force on their part after the removal of the troops. Mr. Hayes was right and wise in securing this stipulation if he could, by freeing these communities from military grasp a few weeks before he would have been compelled to do it at any rate. Obedience to this clear mandate of Const.i.tutional duty was not in the least inconsistent with a faithful and vigorous use of all the other powers which were lodged in his hands by the Const.i.tution for securing the rights of the colored people, or the purity and integrity of National elections. It is true that substantially the same vote elected Packard of Louisiana as that which chose the Hayes electors. But the authority to declare who is the President lawfully chosen, and the Const.i.tutional power to maintain the Governor in his seat by force are lodged in very different hands. The latter can only be used by the National Executive under the circ.u.mstances specially described in the Const.i.tution, and it can never be used by him for any considerable period of time contrary to the will of Congress, and without powers put in his hands by legislation which must originate in the body which represents the people.

The infinite sweetness and tact of his wife contributed greatly to the success of the Administration of President Hayes. She was a woman of great personal beauty. Her kindness of heart knew no difference between the most ill.u.s.trious and the humblest of her guests. She accomplished what would have been impossible to most women, the maintenance of a gracious and delightful hospitality while strictly adhering to her principles of total abstinence, and rigorously excluding all wines and intoxicating liquors from the White House during her administration. The old wine drinkers of Was.h.i.+ngton did not take to the innovation very kindly. But they had to console themselves with a few jests or a little grumbling. The caterer or chef in charge of the State dinners took compa.s.sion on the infirmity of our nature so far as to invent for one of the courses which came about midway of the State dinner, a box made of the frozen skin of an orange. When it was opened you found instead of the orange a punch or sherbet into which as much rum was crowded as it could contain without being altogether liquid. This was known as the life-saving station.

Somebody who met Mr. Evarts just after he had been at a dinner at the White House asked him how it went off. "Excellently,"

was the reply, "the water flowed like champagne."

CHAPTER III CABINET OF PRESIDENT HAYES

There has hardly been a stronger Cabinet since Was.h.i.+ngton than that of President Hayes. Its members worked together in great harmony. All of them, I believe, were thoroughly devoted to the success of the Administration.

The Secretary of State was William M. Evarts. He was my near kinsman and intimate friend. His father died in his early youth. My father was Mr. Evarts's executor, and the son, after his mother broke up housekeeping, came to my father's house in his college vacations as to a home. He studied law at the Harvard Law School, and with Daniel Lord, a very eminent lawyer in New York. One of his early triumphs was his opening of the celebrated Monroe-Edwards case. The eminent counsel to whom the duty had been a.s.signed being prevented from attendance by some accident, Evarts was unexpectedly called upon to take his place. He opened the case with so much eloquence that the audience in the crowded court-room gave him three cheers when he got through.

He rose rapidly to a distinguished place in his profession, and before he died was, I suppose, the foremost advocate in the world, whether in his country or Europe. He was counsel for President Johnson on his impeachment, counsel for the Republican side in support of the t.i.tle of President Hayes before the Electoral Commission; counsel for the United States against Great Britain before the Tribunal at Geneva. He was counsel in the celebrated Lemon case, where the case was settled as to the rights of slave owners to bring their slaves into the free States, and hold them _in transitu_. In all these he was successful. He was counsel also in another trial of almost equal interest and celebrity, the Tilton divorce suit-- in which Henry Ward Beecher was charged with adultery. In this the jury disagreed. But the substantial victory was with Evarts's client.

Mr. Evarts was a man of unfailing equanimity and good nature, never thrown off his balance by any exigency in diplomacy, in political affairs, or in the trial of causes. Any person who has occasion to follow him in his diplomatic discussions will be impressed with the far-sighted wisdom and caution with which he took his positions.

He was always a delightful orator. He rose sometimes to a very lofty eloquence, as witness especially his argument in defence of President Johnson. He had an unfailing wit. You could never challenge him or provoke him to an encounter without making an abundant and sparkling stream gush forth. He never came off second best in an encounter of wits with any man.

He was a man of great generosity, full of sympathy, charity, and kindliness. If his biography shall ever be properly written, it will be as delightful as that of Sheridan or Sidney Smith for its wit, and will be valuable for the narrative of the great public transactions in which he took a part. Especially it will preserve to posterity the portraiture of a great lawyer and advocate of the time before the days of specialists, when the leaders of the American Bar were great lawyers and advocates.

I do not think Evarts's capacity as a diplomatist is known.

Perhaps it never will be thoroughly understood. The work of a Secretary of State in dealing with foreign countries is performed in the highest confidence and does not ordinary come to light until interest in the transaction to which it relates has grown cold. Evarts conducted some very delicate negotiations, including that in regard to the Fortune's Bay matter, with much skill. He was careful never, for the sake of present success, to commit the country to any doctrine which might be inconvenient in the remote future.

I think Evarts failed to appreciate his own political strength.

He was in the early part of his life devoted to Mr. Webster, for whom he had great reverence, and later to Mr. Seward.

He sometimes, I think, failed to take wholly serious views of political conditions, so far as they affected him personally.

I do not think he ever knew the hold he had upon the respect of the country, or upon the affection of the men with whom he was brought into intimate a.s.sociation in public life, and at the Bar. He was very fond of his friends, cla.s.smates and kindred, and of his college.

After the defeat of the Republican Party in 1884 he was chosen Senator from the State of New York. He had been candidate for the Senate in 1861, to succeed Mr. Seward. His compet.i.tor was Horace Greeley. Some of Mr. Evarts's friends thought that the old supporters of Mr. Seward, and perhaps Mr. Seward himself, did not stand by him as the unfailing and powerful support of Seward would have led men to expect. But when he came into public life in 1885, and took his seat as a Senator from the great State of New York, men looked to him to be the great leader in restoring the broken ranks of the Republican Party. I think it would have been easy to make him the Republican candidate, and to elect him to the Presidency in 1888, if he had been willing to take that position himself. But he did not in the Senate, or in the counsels of the party, take or attempt to take the leaders.h.i.+p for which he was fitted.

He was invited in the spring or early summer of 1885 to address a political club in Boston. The whole country listened eagerly to see what counsel the great Senator and the great Const.i.tutional lawyer, and great orator, had to give to his party a.s.sociates and to the people in that momentous time. But he contented himself with making a bright and witty speech. The club was known as the Middles.e.x Club, though it had its meetings in Boston. He gave a humorous description of the feelings of the Middles.e.x man when he went over to Boston, and those of the Boston man when he went over to Middles.e.x; and told one or two stories of his early days in Boston, where he was born.

That was all. I felt as I listened as though a pail of ice- water had been poured down my spine.

But modesty and disinterestedness are qualities that are so infrequent among public men that we may well pardon this bright and delightful genius for that fault.

In the last years of his service in the Senate he had a very serious affliction of the eyes, which rendered it impossible for him to use them for reading or study, or to recognize by sight any but the most familiar human figures. He bore the calamity with unfailing cheerfulness. I believe it was caused by overwork in the preparation of a case. The first I knew of it, he asked me to meet him at Concord, where he was about to make a visit. He told me what had happened, and that his physicians in Was.h.i.+ngton and New York thought there was a possibility that they congestion of the veins surrounding the optic nerve might be absorbed. But they thought the case very doubtful, and advised him to go to Europe for the benefit of the journey, and for the possible advantage of advice there. He wanted me to undertake the duties devolving on him in the Committee of which he was Chairman, and to attend to some other public matters in his absence. His physician in Paris told him there was not the slightest hope. He thought that the darkness would certainly, though gradually, shut down upon him. He received this sentence with composure.

But he said that he had long wished to see Raphael's famous Virgin at Dresden, and that he would go to Dresden to see it before the night set in. This he did. So the faces of the beautiful Virgin and the awful children were, I have no doubt, a great consolation to him in his darkened hours.

John Sherman was Secretary of the Treasury. I sat next to him in the Senate for several years. I came to know him quite intimately. I suppose few men knew him more intimately, although I fancy he did not give his inmost confidence to anybody, unless to his brother the General, or to a few persons of his own family or household. I paid the following tribute to him the day after his death:

"It is rarely more than once or twice in a generation that a great figure pa.s.ses from the earth who seems the very embodiment of the character and temper of his time. Such men are not always those who have held the highest places or been famous for great genius or even enjoyed great popularity. They rather are men who represent the limitations as well as the accomplishments of the people around them. They know what the people will bear. They utter the best thought which their countrymen in their time are able to reach. They are by no means mere thermometers. They do not rise and fall with the temperature about them. But they are powerful and prevailing forces, with a sound judgment and practical common sense that understands just how high the people can be lifted, and where the man who is looking not chiefly at the future but largely to see what is the best thing that can be done in the present should desist from unavailing effort. Such a man was John Sherman, for whom the open grave is now waiting at Mansfield. For nearly fifty years he has been a conspicuous figure and a great leader in the party which has controlled the Government.

Of course, in a republic it can be claimed for no man that he controlled the course of history. And also, of course, it is not possible while the events are fresh to a.s.sign to any one man accurately his due share in the credit for what is done, especially in legislative bodies, where matters are settled in secret council often before the debate begins and almost always before the vote is taken.

"But there are some things we can say of Mr. Sherman without fear of challenge now and without fear of any record that may hereafter leap to light.

"He filled always the highest places. He sat at the seat of power. His countrymen always listened for his voice and frequently listened for his voice more eagerly than for that of any other man. He became a Republican leader almost immediately after he took his seat in the House of Representatives in 1855. He was candidate for Speaker before the war, at the time when the Republican Party achieved its first distinct and unequivocal national success, unless we except the election of General Banks, who had himself been elected partly by Know- Nothing votes. Mr. Sherman failed of an election. But the contest left him the single preeminent figure in the House of Representatives--a preeminence which he maintained in his long service in the Senate, in the Treasury, and down to within a few years of his death.

"He was a man of inflexible honesty, inflexible courage, inflexible love of country. He was never a man of great eloquence, or greatly marked by that indefinable quality called genius. But in him sound judgment and common sense, better than genius, better than eloquence, always prevailed, and sometimes seemed to rise to sublimity which genius never attains. His inflexible courage and his clear vision manifested themselves in the very darkest period of our history, when hope seemed at times to have gone out in every other heart.

There is a letter in his Memoirs, written April 12, 1861, which, as I remember the gloom and blackness of that time, seems to me one of the sublimest utterances in our history.

The letter was written to his brother William, afterward the General, who had been offered a place in the War Department, which Mr. Chase urged him to accept, saying that he would be virtually Secretary of War. The offer must have been a dazzling temptation to the young soldier who had left his profession and was engaged in civil duties as an instructor, I think, in a college somewhere. But John earnestly dissuades his brother from accepting it, urges him to take a position in the field, and foretells his great military success. He then adds the following prediction as to the future of the country. It was written at midnight at the darkest single hour of our history:

"'Let me now record a prediction. Whatever you may think of the signs of the times, the Government will rise from the strife greater, stronger and more prosperous than ever. It will display every energy and military power. The men who have confidence in it, and do their full duty by it, may reap whatever there is of honor and profit in public life, while those who look on merely as spectators in the storm will fail to discharge the highest duty of a citizen, and suffer accordingly in public estimation.'

"Mr. Sherman's great fame and the t.i.tle to his countrymen's remembrance which will most distinguish him from other men of his time, will rest upon his service as a financier. He bowed a little to the popular storm in the time of fiat money.

Perhaps if he had not bowed a little he would have been uprooted, and the party which would have paid our national debt in fiat money would have succeeded. But ever since that time he has been an oak and not a willow. The resumption of specie payments and the establishment of the gold standard, the two great financial achievements of our time, are largely due to his powerful, persistent and most effective advocacy.

"It is a little singular that two great measures that are called by his name are measures, one of which he disapproved, and with the other of which he had nothing to do. I mean the bill for the purchase of silver, known as the Sherman Law, and the bill in regard to trusts, known as the Sherman Anti-Trust Law. The former was adopted against his protest, by a committee of conference, although he gave it a reluctant and disgusted support at the end. It was, in my judgment, necessary to save the credit of the country at the time, and a great improvement on the law it supplanted.

"The other, known as the Sherman Anti-Trust Bill, I suppose he introduced by request. I doubt very much whether he read it. If he did, I do not think he ever understood it. It was totally reconstructed in the Judiciary Committee."

Mr. Sherman was delightful company. He had a fund of pleasant anecdote always coming up fresh and full of interest from the stores of long experience.

He was wise, brave, strong, patriotic, honest, faithful, simple-hearted, sincere. He had little fondness for trifling and little sense of humor. Many good stories are told of his serious expostulation with persons who had made some jesting statement in his hearing which he received with immense gravity. I am ashamed to confess that I used to play upon this trait of his after a fas.h.i.+on which I think annoyed him a little, and which he must have regarded as exceedingly frivolous.

He used occasionally to ask me to go to ride with him. One hot summer afternoon Mr. Sherman said: "Let us go over and see the new electric railroad," to which I agreed. That was then a great curiosity. It was perhaps the first street railroad, certainly the first one in Was.h.i.+ngton which had electricity for motive power. Mr. Sherman told his driver to be careful.

He said the horses were very much terrified by the electric cars. I said: "I suppose they are like the labor reformers.

They see contrivances for doing without their labor, and they get very angry and manifest displeasure." Mr. Sherman pondered for a moment or two, and then said with great seriousness: "Mr. h.o.a.r, the horse is a very intelligent animal, but it really does not seem to me that he can reason as far as that."

I told the General of it afterward, who was full of fun, and asked him if he really believed his brother thought I made the remark seriously; to which he replied that he had no doubt of it; that John never had the slightest conception of a jest.

At another time, one very hot summer day, Mr. Sherman said: "h.o.a.r, I think I shall go take a ride; I am rather tired.

When a vote comes up, will you announce that I am paired with my colleague?" I called out to Senator Rollins of New Hamps.h.i.+re, who sat a little way off, and who kept the record of pairs for the Republican side: "Rollins, there will be no vote this afternoon, except one on a funeral resolution in honor of Mr. Allen of Missouri. Will you kindly announce that Mr.

Sherman is paired with his colleague?" Mr. Sherman got up in great haste and went over to Mr. Rollins, and said: "Mr.

Rollins, Mr. h.o.a.r entirely misunderstood me. I never should think of announcing a pair on a funeral resolution."

Mr. Sherman was not an eloquent man, except on some few occasions, when his simple statement without ornament or pa.s.sion rose to the highest eloquence by reason of the impressiveness of his fact or of his reasoning. His memory failed in his last years, and the effect of age on his other faculties became apparent when he undertook to deal with new and complicated subjects. But he was clear to the last when his great subject of finance was under consideration. One of the most admirable examples of his power, also one of the most admirable examples of American campaign speaking, is his statement of the financial issue between the two parties at the beginning of the campaign of 1896. It struck the key-note. The other Republican speakers only followed it.

He took great satisfaction in his New England ancestry. He frequently spoke with great pleasure of a visit made by him and the General, some twelve or fifteen years ago, I think, to Woodbury, Connecticut, where his ancestors dwelt. He took a special pride in the character of his father, one of the Ohio pioneers, from whom, I judge from his account, both his ill.u.s.trious sons derived in large measure their sterling quality.

He was a far-away kinsman of my own, a relations.h.i.+p of which it may well be believed I am highly proud, and of which both General Sherman and Senator Sherman were kind enough frequently to speak.

For me his death ended an intimate friends.h.i.+p of nearly twenty- five years, during many of which we sat side by side in the Senate Chamber and enjoyed much unreserved social intercourse in long rides and walks. Among the great characters which American has given to mankind these two famous brothers, so different, yet so like in their earnest love of country, their independence and courage, their devotion to duty, will ever hold a high place.

George W. McCrary had been an eminent member of the House of Representatives, where he had the confidence of both parties.

He was a protege of Judge Miller, with whom he studied law.

His chief ambition, however, was for judicial service. He was much disappointed when it was found desirable that he should take the Department of War instead of the Department of Justice to which President Hayes originally intended to invite him. He very gladly accepted the offer of a seat on the Bench of the United States Circuit Court. He filled that office with great credit, and it is highly probable would have been promoted to the Supreme Court of the United States, but for his untimely death.

He was the originator of the method of solution of the dispute as to the t.i.tle to the Presidency in 1876. It ought to be said, however, that it was done in full consultation with Mr. Blaine. I was then quite intimate with both of them, and a member of the Committee in the House who reported the plan. On the seventh day of December, 1876, at the beginning of the winter session, after the election, Mr. McCrary offered the following resolution. It was adopted.