And yet again do they elect him for a full term of years. And then the royal Garfield, the nation’s loved and honored president, knowing all, and knowing him most intimately for seventeen years or more, takes him into his cabinet, trustingly, and for the nation’s good.
Can victory be grander, or triumph more complete, endorsement more honorable, or vindication more just, or a verdict be more patient, thorough, or exhaustive of evidence! What man in all the land, traduced and vilified just as Washington, Lincoln, and Garfield were, wears prouder badges of endorsement from congress, governor, legislature, senate, and conventions by the score! What man that bears credentials of his character as trophies of higher worth, from judges of sounder mind, and lives more unimpeachable? Answer, ye who can!
XV.
UNITED STATES SENATOR.
IT was generally understood in Maine that the Hon. Lot M. Morrill was serving his last term in the United States senate, and that Mr. Blaine was to be his successor; so that when Mr. Morrill was advanced to the secretaryship of the treasury in General Grant’s cabinet, it occasioned no surprise that Governor Connor appointed Mr. Blaine to the senate in his stead. He was just recovering from the partial sunstroke which felled him to the pavement while on his way to church, on a Sabbath morning, with Miss Abigail Dodge (Gail Hamilton), just prior to the Cincinnati Convention, and soon after his victory over Proctor Knott, during his persecution in the House. Next to the nomination at Cincinnati, nothing of a political nature could have been more grateful to him than this high honor from the governor of his state, in accordance, as the governor himself says, with the expectation of the people. Coming, as it did, at an ill and weary time, it must have greatly refreshed and revived his spirits, to have new and larger evidence of the esteem and endorsement of those to whose interests his life was devoted.
On July 12, 1876, he took his seat as the colleague of Hannibal Hamlin in the senate. He is placed at once as chairman on the committee on rules, and on the committee on appropriations, and on naval affairs, besides on a select committee “on the levees on the Mississippi River.” This, for a senatorial start, was quite honorable to his judgment and ability.
There are many old traditions and customs, which amount to laws, so far as assigning positions of responsibility to new members is concerned, but there is no law which prevents a new member from taking the most advanced position possible by virtue of his wisdom and knowledge, and his ability in debate.
He could not well become entangled in the meshes of an intricate network of rules and regulations, which Butler, in acknowledging Mr. Blaine’s superior knowledge of in the House, had said he knew nothing about,—Blaine knew it all. His position made it necessary that he should, and now he was made chief in this department in the new branch of legislation to which he had succeeded. So he could not be held or hampered by any difficulty of this kind. Moreover, his acquaintance was well-nigh universal among the members, and some of them knew him a little better than they could have wished. He was also familiar with the methods and measures of the senate, having frequently been on joint committees with them during his early terms of service in the lower House, and then the general subjects of appropriations, naval, military, judiciary, manufactures, commerce, foreign affairs, finance, pension affairs, etc., these were the subjects with which he was accustomed to deal during all of his years in congress.