Pine to Potomac

by E. K. Cressey

Six days after he rose to oppose the views of the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in appropriating seven hundred thousand dollars to pay a Pennsylvania claim only six months old, when claims filed eighteen months before by the state of Maine were unpaid. It was a claim for enlisting, arming, and organizing troops to guard the navy-yard and coast at Kittery and Portsmouth when cruisers endangered them.

On April 21st Mr. Blaine presented his first bill, having reference to this same subject of war-claims of the state against the nation, the subject having remained in an unsettled condition. His bill is a model of excellence, providing for a commission of three, appointed by the president, to receive, examine, and endorse state claims, etc., against the general government, and order the payment of the same, after a specified time fixed in the future, so heavy were the drafts then upon the national treasury. He supported the measure with a speech of great breadth of view and comprehensiveness of statement, occupying ten columns of the Congressional Globe. Mr. Hamilton’s refunding measure, after the war of the Revolution, was used in argument, and also the adoption of similar measures after the war with England in 1812 to ’15, and also the Mexican war.

He was replied to by Mr. Dawes of Massachusetts, and a general debate ensued. He had now fairly entered upon his congressional career, and seems to have come with a bound into a position that numbered him at once with the leading members. He was easily at the head of his delegation; he commanded the attention of the House, which some members never do. He was recognized, assented to, opposed in person and particulars, co-operated with, and in various ways was it manifest that he had gained in a session what never comes to many members.

We find his resolutions and amendments passing; his points of order sustained. He is referred to on over fifty pages of the Congressional Globe, in remarks, resolutions, amendments, bills, etc. He has something to say on all great measures of importance that come before the House. He shows himself at home upon all the questions receiving attention, and watches the drift of proceedings with close and careful eye, and shows an abiding interest in all that is going on. The matter in hand seems ever to be just the matter in his mind. He is from the start a “working-member.” There are members who are not classed as working-members. They listen and look on; work does not agree with them; they do not like it. They have an equal chance with all the others, but they are afraid to speak out; to take a position and defend it.

Intelligence is an important factor in such a man, and it is hardly wise or best for a man, although he is a member, to “speak out in meeting” unless he surely has something to say and knows how to say it, and can really get it off, and to the point. Men may go into battle by regiments, brigades, corps, and divisions, and no man flinch; but they do not act that way on the floor of congress. It is worse than a battle-field in some respects; takes courage of a different type. They must go in alone, and fire away, with several hundred keen eyes upon them. They will quale and tremble, falter and trip in a little sentence, and stand there, pale and blanched with fear, while the same one might mount a horse and charge into hottest battle, midst fearful carnage, with the tinge of highest courage mantling cheek and brow.

In his eloquent eulogy of Mr. Garfield, Mr. Blaine says: “There is no test of a man’s ability in any department of public life more severe than service in the House of Representatives. There is no place where so little deference is paid to reputation previously acquired, or to eminence won outside; no place where so little consideration is shown for the feelings or failures of beginners. What a man gains in the House, he gains by sheer force of his own character, and if he loses and falls back he must expect no mercy, and will receive no sympathy. It is a field in which the survival of the strongest is the recognized rule, and where no pretense can deceive, and no glamour can mislead. The real man is discovered, his worth is impartially weighed, and his rank is irreversibly decreed.”

A long and strong experience had convinced him of the deep, historic truth of this utterance. The challenge seemed constantly to be, “What are you doing here?” The waves dashed high, and the undertow was dreadful. One can easily read between the lines the battle Mr. Blaine had with himself at his first rising in the House, which was simply to read in evidence on the pending discussion a few sentences from the report of the secretary of the treasury, he was met by a slight rebuff from old General Schenk of Ohio, to the effect that the matter was irrelevant.

He was not Mr. Speaker any more, and felt the newness of his situation, but he belonged there, and he proposed to whip and win, and so he sets himself to work to draft a bill, and works, and watches his opportunity for four months, and not until December 21st is lost in April 21st does just his opportunity come; but when it came he showed by a speech of nearly two hours in length, full of hard, solid facts, arguments forged with something of the weight and power of thunderbolts, bristling with statistics, and fairly boiling with his richest and most fervid eloquence, that he knew his rights, and knowing, dared maintain them. And it was in discussing this same bill on which he and Schenk had spoken, and which had kept afloat, or anchored in the House in various forms of bill, resolve, or amendment, that he won his spurs in this splendid speech. He did not let it come to final passage until he had shown his power of relevancy, and convinced the General from Ohio that men were not elected speakers up in Maine until they could fairly discriminate between tweedle de and tweedle dum.

Meantime, what he said of Garfield is true of him: “He stepped to the front with the confidence of one who belonged there.”

Nineteen of those who sat with Mr. Blaine when he first took his place in the House, have been chosen United States senators since then. Many served well as governors, and many in the foreign service of their country. “But among them all, none grew more rapidly; none more firmly,” are his words of that other one, but they are just as true of himself. His early course in congress was marked by great courage and persistency.