There are one hundred and forty-four members, twenty-three of whom are Democrats, and he must use them all. He must select two chairmen for each committee, and choose six or eight others to act with them, putting some of the more valuable men on several committees,—all must be treated with honor and fairness.
What did those one hundred and forty-four men see in James G. Blaine, away back in the stormy, perilous times of 1861, that led them to select him for that high and honorable position? He had not been a citizen of Maine six years, and had been in political life, officially, only two years. It was the man they saw, strong and splendid, just the man for the hour. They felt, instinctively, they could trust him; they knew him to be loyal and true, and capable, by the testimony of all their senses. He was quick and keen, and life itself in all of energy and endeavor; a born leader of men.
He had no wealthy and influential friend by his side, no one to say I have known him from childhood, and can recommend him as worthy of all honor, and all praise. He brought with him simply the name his mother gave him, with no prefix and no affix. He lived in no mansion, rode in no carriage, was attended by no courtiers in livery; he had no returns to make, no promises to give. The whole of him sat before them,—a refined and courteous gentleman, an elegant gentleman.
They could not mistake the powerful combination. They saw and felt its worth, and so the great party which had just come into power in the nation by electing its first president, honors itself by honoring him.
His short-cut words of acceptance are uttered. The senate and the new governor, Israel Washburn, Jr., are informed that the House is organized, and they proceed to business with energy and despatch.
But the great war for the Union is coming. The peace convention called by Virginia amounts to nothing. Mr. Crittenden’s resolutions are futile, though most conventions adopt them in Philadelphia and elsewhere. Southern states are actually seceding.
Mr. Lincoln is choosing and announcing his cabinet, with Seward as his Premier, but treason is rampant in the South, holding high carnival in state capitals, and even in the halls of congress. Mr. Lincoln is on his way to Washington. He reaches Philadelphia on Feb. 22d, at seven o’clock; is escorted to Independence Hall, where Theodore Cuyler, in whose office Mr. Blaine read law, receives him with an address of welcome, to which Mr. Lincoln replied, and “raised the national flag which had been adjusted in true man-of-war style, amid the cheers of a great multitude, and the cheers were repeated until men were hoarse.”
While these patriotic cheers were resounding through the old halls of Independence, the traitorous secretaries of the navy and of war were sending vessels to southern ports and forts. Thirty-three officers, among whom was Albert Sidney Johnson, abandon their regiments of the regular army in Texas, and join the rebels. But Lincoln is inaugurated, and the most pacific measures employed, but all of no avail; determined, desperate men are ruling the destiny of the South.
The South was in no condition of want at this time, but rather in a condition of prosperity, and its proud, haughty spirit seemed rather born of luxury and extravagance.
Mr. Blaine has shown that she had increased in ten years before the war three thousand millions of dollars, and this not from over-valuation of slaves, but from cultivation of the land by new and valuable appliances of agriculture. One state alone,—Georgia,—had increased in wealth three hundred millions of dollars. But South Carolina had commenced in October,—before Mr. Lincoln’s election even,—her correspondence upon the subject of secession. No wonder she was ready in the April following to inaugurate the war of the Rebellion.