The stormy and brilliant session was drawing to a close. The speaker had achieved the great triumph of the winter. Others had made grand and effective speeches. It could scarcely be otherwise. Soldiers were encamped about the city; camp-fires were burning; martial music was filling the air; Colonel Nickerson had marched his Fourteenth Regiment of Maine Volunteers through Augusta, and had come to a “parade rest” on Water Street; troops were coming and troops were going; the papers were filled with news from every quarter, containing even Jeff. Davis’ message to the rebel congress. All was life and animation. Events were hastening to the emancipation of the slave. It was the demand of the hour. From soldier in the field, citizen in the home and place of business, and from resolute, far-seeing statesmen in congressional halls, came the imperative call to “free and arm the slaves!”
Will the negro fight? was a question gravely discussed over the North. Fred. Douglas, the colored orator of that time, was asked it by the president of Rochester University, and the keen-eyed man replied,
“I am only half a negro, and I know I’d fight.”
“Well,” said the genial and scholarly president, Martin B. Anderson, with a merry twinkle in his eye, “if half a negro would fight, Mr. Douglas, what would a whole one do?”
After a session of seventy-eight days, in which “the public business had been completed with all possible promptness,” the legislature adjourned. “During the past two years,” the record says, “with the same presiding officers in the senate and House,—Hon. John H. Goodenow, of Alfred, in the senate, and Hon. James G. Blaine, of Augusta, in the House,—there has not been a single appeal from their decisions.”
It is also said that the high character of the legislature of 1862 stands unrivalled in Maine, in members of legislative experience, men of practical business talent, men learned and ready in debate, men wise in political action and patriotic in purpose. Surely it were an honor to stand at the head of such a body of men.
Very soon the Third Congressional Convention would be held to nominate the successor to A. P. Morrill. The three counties embraced in the district,—Kennebec, Somerset, and Lincoln,—sent to the legislature six senators and twenty-eight representatives.
The district is an extensive one, embracing seventy-five towns, and extending from the Atlantic to the Canada line, inhabited by an intelligent and influential body of freemen, deeply interested in the welfare of the country, and devoted to the principles and purposes of the administration of Abraham Lincoln. The unqualified and emphatic declination of Mr. Morrill to be a candidate for re-election, rendered it necessary to take a new man for the position.
“The superior ability and high qualifications of Hon. James G. Blaine drew toward him the spontaneous and almost unanimous support of the friends of the national administration in the district.”
At two o’clock on Friday afternoon of July 11, 1862, the ballot was taken, and only one was needed. Whole number of votes, one hundred and eighty-one; Hon. James G. Blaine had one hundred and seventy-four; W. R. Flint, five; scattering, two.