Pine to Potomac

by E. K. Cressey

Two others had failed to secure the adoption of an amendment to the bill for the establishment of national banks, to the effect that interest should be uniform when not fixed by state law, and though it had been voted on and defeated before; though its form had been changed, yet seeing the wisdom of it, and having the courage of his conviction, he moved it again, and made a short, ringing speech of not over fifteen minutes, and it was carried by a vote of sixty-nine to thirty-one. Such power to control legislation so soon after entering congress, clearly reveals the influence already gained.

Shortly after this, when the committee on the penitentiary in the District of Columbia reported a bill appropriating two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the purpose, he was ready to oppose. He had been one of the chairmen of the prison committee in the Maine legislature, had been on a committee or commission appointed by the governor to visit prisons elsewhere and gain full information concerning them, having, with his customary energy and thoroughness, visited seventeen, and found they were being run at great expense to the several states, and so he opposed the bill, as prisoners were being kept safely in prisons already established, and, as he said, the proposed amount would only start the work and make many hundred thousands a necessity.

Whatever the question of national or state importance that came before the House, he had made himself familiar with it. And so we find him speaking on the revenue, conscription, and currency bills; legislative appropriation and tariff bills; the Fugitive Slave Law and the civil appropriation bills, beside the bill relating to Pennsylvania war-expenses. The terrible battle of Gettysburgh had been fought the summer before, and the state heavily involved, and the effort was to have her re-imbursed.

Mr. Blaine was heartily on the side of the administration and the war, supporting the various measures of prosecution and relief as against the opposition, with all the power in him. But it was not a blind support. It must be wise, intelligent, and discriminating, to put him in the fullest action, and bring on what might so soon be termed accustomed triumph.

But there came a day on the twenty-first of June, and during the first session of his first congress,—the thirty-eighth,—that a bill came into the House embodying a report from James B. Fry provost-marshal general, endorsed definitely by Edwin M. Stanton, secretary of war, and concurred in by Abraham Lincoln, proclaiming the conscription act a failure. The bill had come from the committee on military affairs, through their chairman. The exact point in the bill that had proved objectionable, and which they desired expunged, was what is known as the three hundred dollar clause, enabling any drafted man by the payment of the above sum to procure a substitute, and so be relieved himself. This very feature of the bill Mr. Blaine had incorporated as his first amendment offered in congress, and enforced by a vigorous speech, which carried it through, and now a repeal of it would compel any business man in the country, if drafted, to go at once, provided only he was fit for military service. This would take the best physician, with the largest practice, in the greatest city of the Union.

“Such a conscription,” said Mr. Blaine, “was never resorted to but once, even in the French Empire, under the absolutism of the First Napoleon; and for the congress of the United States to attempt its enforcement upon their constituents is to ignore the best principles of republican representative government.”

Remarkable as it may seem, and specially so in view of the fact that he had but fifteen minutes granted him to speak, his motion prevailed by a vote of one hundred to fifty. Such men as Boutwell, Brooks, Dawes, McDowell, Edward H. Rollins, Schofield, Wadsworth, and Wheeler, stood with him. Mr. Stanton’s idea was that by forcing into the field a great army of soldiers the war might be speedily terminated. But freemen cannot be dealt with as slaves. There is a vast difference between the purely military and the truly civil view of a question.

A few days after the same bill was up again, for further repairs, when we get a fine view of Mr. Blaine. It was Saturday afternoon, June 25, 1864. Mr. Mallory, of Kentucky, was making a long speech against the feature of the bill that provided for enlisting the negro, when he observed Mr. Blaine watching him. He said,—

“My friend from Maine (Mr. Blaine), who seems to be listening so attentively, lived in Kentucky once, and knows the negro and his attributes, and he knows, if he will tell you what he knows, that they won’t fight.”

Mr. Blaine: “From a residence of five years in Kentucky, I came to the conclusion from what I saw of the negroes, that there was a good deal of fight in them.”