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. Nobody 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 passions 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 Constitution 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 association ended, assurances 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 associates 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 passions 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 pronouncing 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 Associate 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, Massachusetts has never been more powerfully represented in the Senate, not even in the time of Daniel Webster, than by Mr. Hoar."
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:
"It was my misfortune, perhaps my fault, personally never to have known this eminent philanthropist and statesman. The impulse was often strong upon me to go to him and offer him my hand, and my heart with it, and to express to him my thanks for his kind and considerate course toward the people with whom I am identified. If I did not yield to that impulse, it was because the thought occurred that other days were coming in which such a demonstration might be more opportune and less liable to misconstruction. Suddenly and without premonition, a day as come at last to which, for such a purpose, there is no to-morrow. My regret is therefore intensified by the thought that I failed to speak of him out of the fulness of my heart while there was yet time."
That Mr. Lamar well understood what was to be the effect of this wonderful speech upon the whole country is shown by his letter to his wife the next day, in which he says: "I never in all my life opened my lips with a purpose more single to the interests of our Southern people than when I made this speech."
I said of this speech in an article in the North American
Review:
"The eloquent words of Mr. Lamar so touched the hearts of the people of the North that they may fairly be said to have been of themselves an important influence in mitigating the estrangements of a generation."
The following letter explains my absence from the Senate when Judge Lamar's death was announced:
WASHINGTON, D. C., January 29, 1893
My Dear Madam:
I was kept in bed, under the orders of my physician, the day the death of your husband was announced to the Senate. I regret exceedingly that I could not be in my place to express my sense of the great public loss and my warm personal admiration for his great qualities of intellect and of heart. I served with him in the House of Representatives for more than four years, and in the Senate for more than eight years. It was a stormy and exciting time. We differed widely on very grave questions, and this difference was more than once very sharply manifested in public; but the more I knew him, the more satisfied I became of the sincerity of his patriotism, of his profound and far-sighted wisdom, of the deep fountain of tenderness in his affectionate and simple heart, and of his brave and chivalrous quality of soul. I was more than once indebted to him for very great kindness indeed, under circumstances when I do not think he supposed it would ever come to my knowledge.
Some of his judgments on the Supreme Bench are characterized by marvellous beauty and felicity of style. He maintained his place on that great tribunal to the satisfaction of his friends and that admiration of his countrymen, in spite of failing health and of the fact that the best years of his life had been given to other studies than that of the law.
It is a good omen for our country that the friends and disciples of Charles Sumner unite with the people of Mississippi in their reverence for this noble and manly character.
I am faithfully yours,
GEORGE F. HOAR
Mrs. Lamar.