Autobiography of Seventy Years Part 51

I prepared a Const.i.tutional amendment providing that the inauguration should take place on the last Thursday in April. I have reported this to the Senate several times. It has always pa.s.sed that body with scarcely a dissenting vote, on debate and explanation.

If that had been adopted, if the session were to begin in the middle of November, a week after the November elections-- which could be accomplished by an act of Congress--instead of thirteen weeks, to which the session is now limited, there would be a session of twenty-three or twenty-four weeks. This would give time for the consideration of such legislation as might be needful. It would probably, also, permit the shortening somewhat of the long session, which not infrequently extends to July or August. But the plan has never found much favor in the House. Speaker Reed, when he was in power, said rather contemptuously, that "Congress sits altogether too long as it is. The less we have of Congress, the better."

The public danger is found in the fact that there is no provision in the Const.i.tution for the case where the President-elect dies before inauguration. The provision is:

"In case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the same shall devolve on the Vice-President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice-President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability shall be removed, or a President shall be elected."

Strictly construed, it is only in the case of the death, inability, etc., of a President, that a Vice-President can succeed, or in the case of the death, inability, etc., of the President and Vice-President both, that Congress has power to declare on whom the office shall devolve. It must be a President and Vice-President that die; not merely a President and Vice- President-elect. That his is not an imaginary danger is shown by the fact of the well-known scheme to a.s.sa.s.sinate Lincoln on his way to the seat of the Government, and also by the fact that either the President or the Vice-President has died in office so many times in the recollection of men now living.

President Harrison died during his term; President Taylor died during his term; Vice-President King died during Pierce's term; Vice-President Wilson died during Grant's term; President Garfield died during his term; Vice-President Hendricks died during Cleveland's term; Vice-President Hobart died during McKinley's term, and President McKinley during his own second term. So within sixty years eight of these high officials have died in office; five of them within thirty years; four of them within twenty years.

I have also drawn and repeatedly procured the pa.s.sage through the Senate of an amendment to the Const.i.tution to protect the country against this danger. That also has failed of attention in the House. I suppose it is likely that nothing will be done about the matter until the event shall happen, as is not unlikely, that both President and Vice-President- elect shall become incapacitated between the election and the time for entering upon office.

I was more successful in providing against another situation that might prove quite awkward. In Was.h.i.+ngton's Administration Congress exercised, as far as it could, the power given by the Const.i.tution to provide against the death or disability of both the President and Vice-President, if it should happen after they had entered upon office, as follows:

"In case of removal, death, resignation or inability of both the President and the Vice-President of the United States, the President of the Senate, or, if there is none, then the Speaker of the House, for the time being, shall act as President, until the disability is removed or a President elected."

There is a tradition that when this awkward arrangement was made, the proposition that the Secretary of State should succeed in the case of such vacancy was defeated by the suggestion that Mr. Jefferson had too much power and consequence already.

The arrangement seemed to me clearly objectionable. In the first place the Vice-President, who, it is supposed, has died or become incapable, is the Const.i.tutional President of the Senate. The Senate, under the practice and construction of its power which prevailed down to a very recent period, only elected a President pro tempore when the Vice-President vacated the chair. His office terminated when the Vice-President resumed it, and there was no Const.i.tutional obligation on the Senate to elect a President pro tempore at all. So it was quite uncertain whether there would be a President pro tempore of the Senate at any particular time, especially when the Senate was not in session. There have been two instances where the President of the Senate has refused to vacate the chair, for the reason that he did not desire to have a President pro tempore elected, and thereby have an honor conferred on a member of another party than his own. That happened once in the case of Vice-President Gerry, and again, within my personal knowledge, in the case of Vice-President Arthur.

When he succeeded to the Presidency there was no President of the Senate who would have taken his place if he too had happened to be a.s.sa.s.sinated. So of the Speaker of the House.

For a great many years the first session of a newly-elected House of Representatives has begun in December. There is no Speaker from the previous fourth of March until that time.

Beside, the Senate, whose members hold office for six years and of whom only one-third goes out every two years, is very apt to have a majority whose political opinions are opposed to those which have prevailed in the last Presidential election.

So, if the President and Vice-President both die before taking their seats, the President of the Senate is quite likely to bring into the Executive Office opinions which the people have just rejected in the election.

On the other hand, the Secretary of State is always a member of the party that has prevailed in the last election, and is usually the member of the party, next to the President himself, highest in its confidence. Our Secretaries of State, with rare exceptions, have been among the very ablest public men of the country. Among them have been Timothy Pickering, John Marshall, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Martin Van Buren, Edward Livingston, Louis McLane, John Forsyth, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, James Buchanan, John M. Clayton, Edward Everett, Elihu B. Washburne, Hamilton Fish, William M. Evarts, James G. Blaine, Thomas F. Bayard, John Sherman, and John Hay. These men, with scarcely an exception, have been among the very foremost statesmen of their time.

Several of them have been Presidents of the United States, and a good many more of them have been prominent candidates for the Presidency. On the other hand, the list of Presidents of the Senate contains few names of any considerable distinction.

Another objection to the arrangement was the fact that the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House might be changed at the will of the body that elected them. So the acting President might be displaced at the will of a political body. There is a good deal of reason, also, for claiming that if Congress declare that the officer shall act as President, he must discharge the duties of his office and the duties of the President at the same time, a burden which would be very hard for one man to support. Accordingly I drew and introduced the existing law, which reads as follows:

_"Be it enacted, etc.,_ That in case of removal, death, resignation or inability of both the President and Vice-President of the United States, the Secretary of State, or if there be none, or in case of his removal, death, resignation or inability, then the Secretary of the Treasury, or if there be none, or in the case of his removal, death, resignation or inability, then the Secretary of War, or if there be none, or in case of his removal, death, resignation or inability, then the Attorney-General, or if there be none, or in case of his removal, death, resignation or inability, then the Secretary of the Interior, shall act as President until the disability of the President or Vice-President is removed or a President shall be elected:

"_Provided,_ That whenever the powers and duties of the office of President of the United States shall devolve upon any of the person named herein, if Congress be not then in session, or if it would not meet in accordance with law within twenty days thereafter, it shall be the duty of the person upon whom said powers and duties shall devolve to issue a proclamation convening Congress in extraordinary session, giving twenty days' notice of time of meeting.

"Sec. 2. That the preceding section shall only be held to describe and apply to such officers as shall have been appointed by the advice and consent of the Senate to the offices therein named, and such as are eligible to the office of President under the Const.i.tution, and not under impeachment by the House of Representatives of the United States at the time the powers and duties of the office shall devolve upon them respectively.

"Sec. 3. That sections one hundred and forty-six, one hundred and forty-seven, one hundred and forty-eight, one hundred and forty-nine and one hundred and fifty of the Revised Statutes are hereby repealed. (_January_ 19, 1886)."

There was some objection to it at first. It was resisted very strenuously to the end by Senator Edmunds. But after full discussion it pa.s.sed the Senate with few dissenting votes.

In the House Mr. Reed, afterward Speaker, appealed without success to the political feeling of his a.s.sociates, demanding to know if they would rather have Mr. Bayard, who was then Secretary of State, than John Sherman, who then happened to be President of the Senate, for President of the United States.

But the House, also, by a large majority, pa.s.sed the measure.

CHAPTER XV PRESIDENT CLEVELAND'S JUDGES

I earnestly supported William B. Hornblower against the opposition of Senator Hill, when he was nominated by Mr. Cleveland for Judge of the Supreme Court of the United States. I was then on the Judiciary Committee. I made very careful inquiry, and had reason to believe that the best lawyers in New York thought highly of him. Judge Gray told me that Mr. Hornblower had argued a case in the Court not long before, and that as the Judges walked out Judge Blatchford said to him: "I hope you have as good a man in your Circuit to succeed you, when the time comes, as we have in ours in Mr. Hornblower to succeed me."

I did not, however, support Mr. Wheeler H. Peckham. The newspapers circulated the story extensively that--to use the phrase of one of them--I "led the opposition." That was not true. I expected to vote for Mr. Peckham until just before the vote was taken. I had communicated my expectation to support him to Senator Vilas, who had charge of the case. I thought before the vote was taken it was my duty to tell him I had changed my mind. So I went round to his seat and told him. n.o.body else knew my purpose till I voted.

I had no political sympathy with Senator Hill, still less with the claim often imputed to the Senate by writers of newspapers, but of which I have never seen the slightest evidence, that Senators have the right to dictate such appointments.

But I thought Mr. Cleveland ought not to have made such an appointment without consulting Mr. Hill, who was a lawyer of eminence and knew the sentiment of the majority of the Democratic Party. Mr. Cleveland had nominated in succession two persons to an office which ought to be absolutely non- partisan, who belonged to a very small company of men devoted to his personal fortunes, who had bitterly attacked Mr. Hill.

I should not, however, have deemed this objection sufficient to justify a vote against Mr. Peckham, but for the fact that I became satisfied he was a man of strong prejudices, with little of the judicial temper or quality about him, and quite likely to break down under the strain of heavy responsibility.

I urged Mr. Vilas to ask President Cleveland to send in the name of Mr. Hornblower again, having some hope that the Senate would reconsider its action in his case. But President Cleveland solved the difficulty quite skilfully by sending in the name of Senator White of Louisiana, a most admirable gentleman and Judge, and afterward, when there came another vacancy, that of Rufus W. Peckham of New York, both of whom were confirmed, I believe, without an objection.

I just referred to Senator William F. Vilas, of Wisconsin.

I should like to put on record my great esteem for his character as a man, and the excellence of his service as a Senator.

He was on the Judiciary Committee while I was Chairman, and also for a time when his party had the majority. He was industrious, wise, conservative, courteous, and fair, a most admirable lawyer, full of public spirit, well acquainted with the mechanism of the Government, and doing always much more than his full share of the work of the Committee and of the Senate. I hope the country may have again the benefit of his great ability in some department of the public service.

Chief Justice Fuller said with singular felicity:

"Mr. Justice Lamar always underrated himself. This tendency plainly sprung from a vivid imagination. With him the splendid pa.s.sions attendant upon youth never faded into the light of common day, but they kept before him as an ideal, the impossibility of whose realization, as borne in upon him from time to time, opposed him with a sense of failure. Yet the conscientiousness of his work was not lessened, nor was the acuteness of his intellect obscured by these natural causes of his discontent; nor did a certain Oriental dreaminess of the temperament ever allure him to abandon the effort to accomplish something that would last after his lips were dumb."

Matthew Arnold says in one of his essays that Americans lack distinction. I have a huge liking for Matthew Arnold. He had a wonderful intellectual vision. I do not mean to say that his three lectures on translating Homer are the greatest literary work of our time. But I think, on the whole, that I should rather have the pair of intellectual eyes which can see Homer as he saw him, than any other mental quality I can think of. But Mr. Arnold has never seemed to me to be fortunate in his judgment about Americans. He allows this quality of distinction to Grant, but denies it, for all the world, to Abraham Lincoln. The trouble with Mr. Arnold is that he never travelled in the United States, when on this side the Atlantic. He spent his time with a few friends who had little love for things American. He visited a great city or two, but never made himself acquainted with the American people.

He never knew the sources of our power, or the spirit of our people.

Yet there is a good deal of truth in what he says of the Americans of our time. It is still more true of the Englishmen of our time. The newspaper, and the telegraph, and the telephone, and the constant dissemination of news, the public library and the common school and college mix up all together and tend to make us, with some rare and delightful exceptions, eminently commonplace. Certainly the men who are sent to Congress do not escape this wearying quality. I know men who have been in public office for more than a generation, who have had enormous power and responsibility, to whom the country is indebted for safety and happiness, who never said a foolish thing, and rarely ever when they had the chance failed to do a wise one, who are utterly commonplace. You could not read the story of their public career without going to sleep. They never said anything worth quoting, and never did anything that any other equally good and sensible man would not have done in their place. I have a huge respect for them. I can never myself attain to their excellence.

Yet I would as lief spend my life as an omnibus horse as live theirs.

But we have occasionally some delightful exceptions. It so happens that some of the best, most attractive men I have known, were from the South. They are men who stood by the Southern people through thick and thin during the Rebellion, and in resisting every attempt on the part of the victorious Northern majority to raise the colored people to a political equality. They have all of them, I believe, been Free Traders.

In general they have opposed the construction of the Const.i.tution which has prevailed in New England and throughout the North, and in which I have myself always believed.

I have never had much personal intimacy with any of them.

I have had some vigorous conflicts with one or two of them.

Yet I have had from each before our a.s.sociation ended, a.s.surances of their warm personal regard. One of them, perhaps, on the whole, the most conspicuous, is Lucius Q. C. Lamar. His very name, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus, indicates that his father must have looked for his example for his son to follow far away from the American life about him.

Lamar was one of the most delightful of men. His English style, both in conversation and in public speaking, was fresh and original, well adapted to keep his hearers expectant and alert, and to express the delicate and subtle shades of meaning that were required for the service of his delicate and subtle thought.

He had taken the part of the South with great zeal. He told me shortly before he left the Senate that he thought it was a great misfortune for the world that the Southern cause had been lost. He stood by his people, as he liked to call them, in their defeat and in their calamity without flinching or reservation. While he would, I am sure, have done nothing himself not scrupulously honorable, and while there was nothing in his nature of cruelty, still less of brutality, yet he did not stop to inquire into matters of right and wrong when a Southerner had got into trouble, by reason of anything a white Democrat had done in conflict with the National authority.

Yet Mr. Lamar desired most sincerely the reconciliation of the sections, that the age-long strife should come to an end and be forgotten, and that the whole South should share the prosperity and wealth and refinement and contentment, which submission to the new order of things would bring.

He was a far-sighted man. He was not misled by temporary excitement or by deference to the majority of his political friends who were less far-sighted than he, into any mistakes.

When there was an attempt to break faith in regard to what was called the Wheeler compromise in the Democratic House, Mr. Lamar interposed and prevented it. Just after the count under the Electoral Commission had been completed, there was a very dangerous movement to delay action on the returns from Vermont, which would have prevented the completion of the work before the 4th of March. Mr. Lamar put forth all his powerful influence among his Democratic a.s.sociates on the floor of the House, and saved the peace of the country. He knew very well that the cause of the South, as he would have called it, and the cause of the Democratic Party itself, would not be promoted by a new civil convulsion, still less by any breach of faith.

He voted against the free coinage of silver in spite of the fact that the people of his State earnestly favored it, and against the express instructions of its Legislature. In 1874, at a time when the pa.s.sions of the Civil War seemed to blaze higher, and the angry conflict between the sections seemed to blaze higher even than during the war itself, he astonished and shocked the people of the South by p.r.o.nouncing a tender and affectionate eulogy on Charles Sumner. He testified to Sumner's high moral qualities, to his intense love of liberty, to his magnanimity, and to his incapacity for a personal animosity, and regretted that he had restrained the impulse which had been strong on him to go to Mr. Sumner and offer him his hand and his heart with it. It would have been almost impossible for any other man who had done either of these things to go back to Mississippi and live. But it never shook for a moment the love for Lamar of a people who knew so well his love for them.

Afterward Mr. Lamar was made an a.s.sociate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. I voted against him--in which I made a mistake--not because I doubted his eminent integrity and ability, but because I thought that he had little professional experience and no judicial experience, and that his health-- he was then beginning to show signs of the disease which ended his life shortly after--was not sufficient for undertaking the great study and the labor which the new office would require.

He was not long on the Bench, and was not greatly distinguished as a Judge. But he wrote a few opinions which showed his great intellectual capacity for dealing with the most complicated legal questions, especially such are apt to arise in patent cases.

He was a delightful man in ordinary conversation. He had an infinite wit and great sense of humor. He used to tell delightful stories of queer characters and events that had come within his own observation. My relations to him for a good while were entirely antagonistic. We had some very sharp controversies. He would never tolerate any expression, in his presence, of disrespect to Jefferson Davis. He would always meet the statement that Mr. Davis was a traitor with a vigorous denial. When I made a motion excepting Jefferson Davis from the benefit of the bill to pension the soldiers of the Mexican War, Mr. Lamar compared him to Prometheus, and me to the vulture preying upon his liver. He was the last person from whom I should have expected an expression of compliment, or even of kindness in those days. Yet when the question of my reelection was pending in 1883 and the correspondent of a newspaper which was among my most unrelenting and unscrupulous opponents thought he might get some material which would help him in his attacks, called upon Mr. Lamar in the Democratic cloak room, and asked him what he thought of me, Mr. Lamar replied in language which seems almost ridiculous to quote, and which was inspired only by his indignation at the attempt to use him for such a purpose: "Sir, Ma.s.sachusetts has never been more powerfully represented in the Senate, not even in the time of Daniel Webster, than by Mr. h.o.a.r."

It was with feeling of great pleasure that in 1886 I saw Harvard confer her highest honor on this delightful Mississippian.

He was, in his time, I think, the ablest representative, certainly among the ablest, of the opinions opposed to mine.

He had a delightful and original literary quality which, if the lines of his life had been cast amid other scenes than the tempest of a great Revolution and Civil War, might have made him a dreamer like Montaigne; and a chivalrous quality that might have made him a companion of Athos and D'Artagnan.

His eulogy on Calhoun, with whom in general he sympathized, was a masterpiece of eloquence, but his eulogy on Charles Sumner, which probably no other man in the South could have uttered without political death, was greater still. It was a good omen for the country. At the moment he uttered it, I suppose Charles Sumner was hated throughout the South with an intensity which in this day of reconciliation it is almost impossible to conceive. Yet Mr. Lamar in his place in the House of Representatives dared to utter these sentences:

"Charles Sumner was born with an instinctive love of freedom, and was educated from his earliest infancy to the belief that freedom is the natural and indefeasible right of every intelligent being having the outward form of man. In him, in fact, this creed seems to have been something more than a doctrine imbibed from teachers, or a result of education. To him it was a grand intuitive truth, inscribed in blazing letters upon the tablet of his inner consciousness, to deny which would have been for him to deny that he himself existed. And along with the all-controlling love of freedom he possessed a moral sensibility keenly intense and vivid, a conscientiousness which would never permit him to swerve by the breadth of a hair from what he pictured to himself as the path of duty. Thus were combined in him the characteristics which have in all ages given to religion her martyrs, and to patriotism her self-sacrificing heroes."

After speaking of the kindness of Mr. Sumner to the South, and his spirit of magnanimity, he added: