Pine to Potomac

by E. K. Cressey

The political effect of these victories was just what Mr. Lincoln had predicted. “With reverses in the field,” he said, “the case is doubtful at the polls; but with victory in the field, the election will take care of itself.”

And then came the civil victories,—Maine and Vermont in September (and Mr. Blaine was still chairman of the Republican State Central Committee in Maine, and had to plan the entire campaign, secure speakers, etc., etc.); then in October, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, wheeled into line, and “registered in advance the edict of the people in regard to the presidency.”

Mr. Blaine had usually to remain in his own state each summer after the adjournment of congress, until after the election, and they had one each year, which occurred the second Monday in September, and as this would come from the eighth to the twelfth of the month it gave him from fifty to sixty days for campaign-work in other states, which, during presidential years, was fully and heartily improved. He was greatly sought for, and would draw immense audiences, and kindle an enthusiasm which would blaze and burn, and smoulder, and then blaze forth again. His offer of a thousand dollars a line for anything that he has written the past year, expressing in any way a desire for the nomination, is proof that his nomination is but the result of the old smouldering fires of almost boundless and unquenchable enthusiasm blazing forth anew. These fires that are burning now have been kindled for ten or twenty years, and they have been chiefly lighted during these fifty or sixty days intervening between September elections in Maine and the October and November elections in other states. While others might go to the mountains or sea-shore to rest and rust, he would breathe for two or three days, and respond to some of the numerous calls for help where the brunt of battle was heaviest, or the enemy seemed strong and desperate.

He was always a hard hitter, and never played at politics. It was business with him, and war. He would wring the neck of a political heresy with all the gusto an old Scotch Covenanter would experience in hounding to the death a religious heresy. There is such a thing as political truth and political virtue to him. It is not fancy and foible, chimera and dream, phantasm and fable, but granite truth, and principle rock-like and firm as adamant.

Something was fought for in the war, and that something has been worth preserving, and is to-day.

It is Liberty in purest form and on grandest scale this world has ever known; the life of all prosperity, the very spirit of peace, the inspiration of all development, the law of all growth, and the harbinger of hope’s brightest anticipations.

And so Mr. Blaine has done his great, best work, not simply in the light of glowing idols, but in the glow of great victories achieved, and the substance of great realities enjoyed, in a mental and moral realization; and a country broad, and grand, and free; its great cities, rivers, forests, lakes, its ocean, mountains, prairies, plains, and all its five and fifty million people, to him a joy.

He takes it in and calls it ours,—the fair inheritance of a people free,—for we inherit one another too, in all that constitutes society, community, city, and country.

We said he hit hard, struck out to win. It is true. Each man before him must squirm or cheer. There were no lookers on; he had no idle issues, but live ones; personal, and things of destiny.

When in Ohio once with Congressman Bingham,—and he did not go that far from home for nothing,—he got up a little political hail-storm for the special benefit of the Democrats present. Such a storm is usually produced by two dark clouds coming together, heavily charged with the double extract of electricity and other substances. He brought one of those clouds with him and manufactured the other one on the spot out of materials in the audience.