CHAPTER XVI SOME SOUTHERN SENATORS
Another most delightful Democrat, with whom it was my pleasure to form quite intimate relations, was Senator Howell E. Jackson of Tennessee. He had been in the Confederate service. I think he did not approve Secession, but like most others who dwelt in the South, thought his allegiance primarily due to his State. He was an admirable lawyer, faithful, industrious, clear-headed and learned in the law. He had been a Whig before the war, and, like other Southern Whigs, favored a moderate protective tariff. He was anxious to have the South take her place as a great manufacturing community, for which her natural resources of iron and coal and her great water power gave her such advantages. He was opposed to the Republican measures of Reconstruction and to placing the negro on a political equality with the whites. But he also discountenanced and condemned any lawless violence or fraud.
Senator Jackson was appointed Judge of the United States Circuit Court by President Cleveland. He held that office when a vacancy on the Bench of the Supreme Court came by the death of Justice Lamar. The election of 1892 had resulted in the choice of President Cleveland. The Democrats in the Senate were determined that no Republican who should be nominated by President Harrison should be confirmed, and did not mean, if they could help it, that the place should be filled during the December session. The only way to get such a confirmation would be for the Republican majority to put the question ahead of all other subjects, to go into Executive session every day as soon as the Senate met, and remain there until the judgeship was disposed of. The Democrats must then choose between defeating the Appropriation Bills, and compelling an extra session, which the in-coming Administration would not like. In order to do that, however, the small Republican majority must hold together firmly, and be willing to take the risk of an extra session.
I called on President Harrison and urged upon him the appointment of Judge Jackson. I represented that it was desirable that there should be some Democrats upon the Bench, and that they should be men who had the confidence of their own part of the country and of the country at large; that Judge Jackson was a man of admirable judicial quality; that he had the public confidence in a high degree, and that it would be impossible for the Democratic Party to object to his selection, while it would strengthen the Bench. So I thought that even if we could put one of our men there without difficulty, it would be wise to appoint Jackson.
President Harrison was very unwilling, indeed, to take this view. He answered me at first in his rough impulsive way, and seemed very unwilling even to take the matter into consideration. But after a considerable discussion he asked me to ascertain whether the Republicans would be willing, if he sent in a Republican name, to adopt the course above suggested, and transact no other business until the result was secured, even at the risk of defeating the Appropriation Bills and causing an extra session. I went back to the Senate and consulted a good many Senators. Nearly all of them said they would not agree to such a struggle; that they thought it very undesirable indeed; that the effect would be bad. So it was clear that nothing could be accomplished in that way. I went back to the White House and reported. I got the authority of the gentlemen I had consulted to tell the President what they said. The result was the appointment of Judge Jackson, to the great satisfaction of the country. He was a very industrious and faithful Judge. But his useful life came to an end soon afterward, I suppose largely as the result of overwork in his important and laborious office.
The Attorney-General said of Mr. Justice Jackson: "He was not so much a Senator who had been appointed Judge, as a Judge who had served for a time as a Senator."
I served with Senator Jackson on the Committee on Claims, and on the Committee on the Judiciary. We did not meet often in social life. He rarely came to my room. I do not remember that I ever visited him in his home. But we formed a very cordial and intimate friendship. I have hardly known a nature better fitted, morally or intellectually, for great public trusts, either judicial or political, than his. In the beginning, I think the framers of the Constitution intended the Senate to be a sort of political Supreme Court, in which, as a court of final resort, the great conflicts which had stirred the people, and stirred the Representatives of the people in the lower House, should be decided without heat and without party feeling. It was, I have been told, considered a breach of propriety to allude to party divisions in early debates in the Senate, as it would be now deemed a breach of propriety to allude to such divisions in the Supreme Court of the United States.
Howell E. Jackson had this ancient Senatorial temperament. He never seemed to me to be thinking of either party or section or popular opinion, or of the opinion of other men; but only of public duty.
He never flinched from uttering and maintaining his opinions. He never caressed or cajoled his political antagonists. It is a great tribute to his personal quality that he owed his election as Senator to his political opponents who, when his own party was divided, joined a majority of his party to elect him. He also, as has been said, owed his appointment as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court to the impression which his probity and ability had made on his political opponents. When sick with a fatal illness he left a sick bed to take his place upon the Bench at the call of duty when the Income Tax case was to be decided. There is no doubt that the effort hastened his death. I do not agree with the conclusion to which he came on that great occasion. But the fact that he came to that conclusion is enough to make me feel sure that there were strong reasons for it, which might well convince the clearest understanding, and be reconciled with the most conscientious desire to do right.
No list of the remarkable Senators of my time would be complete which did not contain the name of Senator Vest of Missouri. He was not a very frequent speaker, and never spoke at great length. But his oratoric powers are of a very high order. On some few occasions he has made speeches, always speaking without notes, and I suppose without previous preparation so far as expression and style go, which have very deeply moved the Senate, though made up of men who have been accustomed to oratory and not easily stirred to emotion. Mr. Vest is a brave, sincere, spirited and straightforward man. He has a good many of the prejudices of the old Southern Secessionist. I think those prejudices would long ago have melted away in the sunshine of our day of returning good feeling and affection, but for the fact that his chivalrous nature will not permit him to abandon a cause or an opinion to which he has once adhered, while it is unpopular. He is like some old cavalier who supported the Stuarts, who lived down into the days of the House of Hanover, but still toasted the King over the water.
Among the most interesting characters with whom it has been my fortune to serve is Senator John W. Daniel of Virginia. Our ways of life, and in many particulars our ways of thinking, are far apart. But I have been led to form a great respect for his intellectual qualities, and for his sincere and far- sighted patriotism.
Mr. Daniel came into the Senate in 1887. He had been known as a very eminent lawyer at the Virginia Bar, author of two excellent law books. He had served a single term in the National House of Representatives. He had won a National reputation there by a very beautiful and brilliant speech at the completion of the Washington Monument. There were two notable orations at the time, one by Mr. Daniel and one by Robert C. Winthrop. These gentlemen were selected for the purpose as best representing two sections of the country. Mr. Winthrop was, beyond all question, the fittest man in the North for such a task. I have a special admiration for the spirit and eloquence with which he performed such duties. To my mind no higher praise could be given Mr. Daniel's address than that it is worthy of that company.
I had occasion to look at Mr. Winthrop's address some little time ago, and, opening the volume containing it in the middle, I read a page or two with approval and delight thinking it was Mr. Winthrop's. But I found, on looking back to the beginning that it was Senator Daniel's.
Mr. Daniel speaks too rarely in the Senate. He is always listened to with great attention. He speaks only on important questions, to which he always makes an important contribution. He has the old-fashioned Virginia method of speech, now nearly passed away,—grave, deliberate, with stately periods and sententious phrases, such, I suppose, as were used in the Convention that adopted the Constitution, or in that which framed or revised the Constitution of Virginia.
Mr. Daniel was a Confederate soldier. He is a Virginian to his heart's core. He looks with great alarm on the possibility that the ancient culture and nobility of the South, and the lofty character of the Virginian as he existed in the time of Washington and Marshall and Patrick Henry may be degraded by raising what he thinks an inferior race to social or even political equality.
But he retains no bitterness or hate or desire for revenge by reason of the conflict of the Civil War. He delivered an address before the President of the United States, the Supreme Court, the representatives of foreign Governments, the two Houses of Congress and the Governors of twenty-one States and Territories, on the 12th of December, 1900, on the occasion of the celebration of the Centennial Anniversary of establishing the seat of Government at Washington. That remarkable address was full of wise counsel to his countrymen. Coming from a representative of Virginia, who had borne arms and been badly wounded in the Civil War, it had a double value and significance. Mr. Daniel declared the cheering and hopeful truth that great races are made of a mixture of races, and that the best and bravest blood of the world's great races is mixed in the American. He appealed eloquently to the circumstances which should stir the heart of the whole people to a new and loftier love of country. He pointed out that the differences in forty- five great Commonwealths are not greater than ought to be expected, and indeed not greater than is healthy. He pointed out the National strength, the power of our great Republic stands at the dawn of a new century, with every man under its flag a freeman and ready to defend it. He called upon his countrymen to stand by the Monroe Doctrine, to be ready to defend it, if need be, in arms. He then specially appealed to the people to foster the inventive genius of the country, and repeated Mr. Jefferson's lofty prophecy that in some future day—
"The farthest star in the heavens will bear the name of Washington, and the city he founded be the Capital of the universal Republic."
Isham G. Harris entered the Senate the same day I did. I counted him always among my friends, although we had some sharp passages. I cannot describe him better than by reprinting here what I said of him in the Senate after his death.
"Mr. President, the great career of Senator Harris is well known to his countrymen. He has been for more than a generation a striking and conspicuous figure in our public life. His colleague, his successor, the men of his own political faith, the people of the great State which he served and honored and loved so long, will, each in their own way, portray his character and record their esteem and affection.
"My tribute must be that of a political opponent. So far as I have been able to exert any influence upon the history of my country during the long conflict now happily past, it has been in opposition to him, to the party to which he belonged, to the opinions which he held, I am sure, quite as zealously and conscientiously as I hold my own.
"We entered the Senate on the same day. He was a Southerner, a Democrat and a Confederate. I was born and bred in New England, a Republican, and an Abolitionist. We rarely spoke in the same debate except on different sides. Yet I have no memory of him that is not tender and affectionate, and there is nothing that I can honestly say of him except words of respect and of honor.
"He was a typical Southerner. He had the virtues and the foibles that belonged to that character in the generation the last of whom are now passing from the stage of public action. He was a man of very simple and very high qualities. He was a man of absolute frankness in public behavior and in private dealing. The thought that was in his heart corresponded absolutely with the utterance of his lips. He had nothing to conceal. I was about to say he was a man without the gift of diplomacy; but he was a man with the gift of the highest diplomacy—directness, simplicity, frankness, courage—qualities which make always their way to their mark and to their goal over all circumlocutions and ambiguities.
"He was a man of brief, clear and compact speech. He would sum up in a few vigorous and ringing sentences the argument to which other men would give hours or days. He had an instinct for the hinge or turning point of a debate.
"He was a man of absolute integrity and steadfastness. What he said, that he would do. Where you left him, there, so long as he lived, you would find him when you came back. He was a man of unflinching courage. He was not afraid of any antagonist, whether in the hall of debate or on the field of battle.
"He was an acknowledged master of parliamentary law, a system upon which not only the convenient procedure of legislative bodies largely depends, but which has close relations to Constitutional Liberty itself. How often a few simple and clear sentences of his have dispersed the clouds and brought order out of confusion in this Chamber.
"His great legislative experience made him invaluable as a servant of his own State, of the country and as a counsellor to his younger associates.
"He was a pleasant man in private intercourse. He had great sense of humor, a gift of portraiture, a good memory. So he brought out of the treasure-house of his varied experience abundant matter for the delight of young and old. There is no man left in the Senate who was better company in hours of recreation.
"His influence will be felt here for a long time. His striking figure will still seem to be hovering about the Senate Chamber, still sitting, still deliberating, still debating.
"Mr. President, it is delightful to think how, during the lives of the men who took part in the great conflict which preceded and followed the Civil War and the greater conflict of the war itself, the old bitterness and estrangements are all gone. Throughout the whole land the word 'countryman' has at last become a title of endearment. The memory of the leaders of that great conflict is preserved as tenderly by the men who fought with them as by the men who followed them. Massachusetts joins with Tennessee in laying a wreath on the tomb of her great soldier, her great Governor, her great Senator. He was faithful to truth as he saw it; to duty as he understood it; to Constitutional Liberty as he conceived it.
"If, as some of us think, he erred, his error was that of a brave man ready to give life and health and hope to the unequal struggle.
To his loved cause he offered, free from stain,
Courage and faith; vain faith and courage vain.
"And, Mr. President, when he returned to his allegiance, he offered to the service of his reunited country the same zeal and devotion he had given to the Confederacy. There was no reserved or half-hearted loyalty. We could have counted on his care for the honor and glory of his country, on his wise and brave counsel, in this hour of anxiety, with an unquestioning confidence. So Massachusetts to-day presses the hand of Tennessee and mourns with her for her great citizen who has departed."
James B. Eustis of Louisiana was of old Massachusetts stock.
His father was graduated at Harvard, and went to New Orleans,
where he acquired great distinction at the bar, and as Chief
Justice of that State. Senator Eustis's great-uncle was General
Eustis, an eminent solider of the Revolutionary War, and afterward
Governor of Massachusetts.
Senator Eustis seemed somewhat indolent, and to take very little interest indeed in what was going on, except on some few occasions when he bore himself in debate with remarkable ability. I think his grave, scholarly style, and his powerful reasoning, the propriety, dignity and moderation with which he dealt with important subjects, made him nearly the finest example of Senatorial behavior I have ever known. He once made a speech in Executive session, on a topic which was suggested suddenly and he could not have anticipated, on the character and history of French diplomacy, which was marvellous alike for his profound and accurate knowledge of the subject and the beauty and grace of his discourse.
I was not intimate with him in Washington. But I met him in Paris, while he was Ambassador there under President Cleveland's Administration. I have delightful memories of his hospitality, especially of one breakfast, where there was but one other guest beside myself, in a beautiful room overlooking the Seine and the Place de la Concorde.
If I were to select the one man of all others with whom I have served in the Senate, who seems to me the most perfect example of the quality and character of the American Senator, I think it would be Edward C. Walthall of Mississippi. I knew him personally very little. I do not now remember that I ever saw him, except in the Capitol, or in the Capitol grounds. I had, I dare say, some pleasant talks with him in the Senate Chamber, or the cloak room. But I remember little of them now. He rarely took part in debate. He was a very modest man. He left to his associates the duty of advocating his and their opinions, unless he was absolutely compelled by some special reason to do it himself. When he did speak the Senate listened to a man of great ability, eloquence and dignity. I once heard him encounter William M. Evarts in debate. Evarts made a prepared speech upon a measure which he had in charge. Walthall's reply must have been unpremeditated and wholly unexpected to him. I think Evarts was in the right and Walthall in the wrong. But the Mississippian certainly got the better of the encounter.
It is a remarkable truth, which impresses itself upon me more and more the longer I live, that men who are perfectly sincere and patriotic may differ from each other on what seem the clearest principles of morals and duty, and yet both sides be conscientious and patriotic. There is hardly a political question among the great questions that have excited the American people for the last half century on which we did not differ from each other. The difference was not only as to the interpretation of the Constitution, and the welfare of the people, but seemed to go down to the very roots of the moral law.
Yet what I have just said about him is without exaggeration. I have the right to believe that he entertained the kindliest and most cordial feeling of regard for me. Not long before he died, President McKinley sent for me to come to the White House. He wished to talk with me about what he should do in dealing with Cuba. He was then holding back the popular feeling, and resisting a demand which manifested itself among Republicans in both Houses of Congress for immediate and vigorous action which would without doubt have brought on the war with Spain without delay. He hoped then that the war might be avoided. I had to go to the Capitol before complying with the President's request, as it was shortly before the time for the session. As I was leaving the Capitol to go to the White House, I met Senator Walthall. He said, "You seem to be going the wrong way this morning," or something like that. I said, "Yes, I am going to see the President." Senator Walthall said; "I wish you would be good enough to say to him from me that he may depend upon the support of the Democrats in the Senate, with only one or two exceptions," whom he named, "to support him in his efforts to avoid war, and to accomplish a peaceful solution of the difficulties in regard to Cuba." I undertook to give the message. And just as we were parting, Senator Walthall turned and said to me that he wished to tell me how highly he regarded me, and how sensible he was, notwithstanding my very strong Northern feeling, of my appreciation of the character of the Southern people, and my desire to do them full justice. He added that he regarded it one of the most pleasant things that had happened to him in life that he had had the pleasure of serving with me. I do not now remember that I ever spoke to him again. He did not come to the Senate Chamber very often afterward. I have thought since that this unwonted expression of deep feeling from a gentleman not wont to wear his heart upon his sleeve toward his political opponent, and a man with whom he so often disagreed, was due to a premonition, of which he was perhaps unconscious, that the end of his life was near, and to the kindly and gentle emotions which in a brave and affectionate heart like his the approach of death is apt to bring.
I could hardly venture to repeat this story, to which there is no other witness than my own, but for some letters in my possession from Mr. Walthall's daughter and friends in which the writers quote even stronger expressions of his regard.
I heard a great deal of him from Senator Lamar, who loved him as a brother, and almost worshipped him as a leader. Senator Lamar told me that he thought Walthall the ablest military genius of the Confederacy, with the exception of Lee, and, I think, of Stonewall Jackson. Indeed, I think he expressed doubt whether either exception could be made. He said that if anything had happened to Lee, Walthall would have succeeded to the chief command of the Confederate forces. General Walthall seemed to me the perfect type of the gentleman in character and speech. He was modest, courteous and eager to be of service to his friends or his country. The description of the young Knight given us by Chaucer, the morning star of English poetry, still abides as the best definition of the gentleman.
Curteis he was, lowly and serviceable.
His colleague, Mr. Williams of Mississippi, after Walthall's death, described the Southern gentleman of our time in a sentence which deserves to stand by the side of Chaucer's:
"The ideal gentleman was always honest; spoke the truth; faced his enemy; fought him, if necessary; never quarrelled with him nor talked about him; rode well; shot well; used chaste and correct English; insulted no man—bore no insult from any; was studiously kind to his inferiors, especially to his slaves; cordial and hospitable to his equals; courteous to his superiors, if he acknowledged any; he scorned a demagogue, but loved his people."
I do not undertake to draw his portraiture. I suppose that whoever does that must describe a great soldier and a great lawyer, as well as a great Senator. I only state what I saw of him in the Senate Chamber. It was said of him by an eminent Republican Senator, his associate on the Committee on Military Affairs, that in dealing with questions which affected the right of Union soldiers, or growing out of service to the Union during the Civil War, no stranger could have discovered on which side of that great war he had ranged himself.