Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

No Senator in debate shall refer offensively to any State of the Union.

I was also for several years a member of the Committee on Woman Suffrage. That Committee used to hear the advocates of Woman Suffrage who liked to have their arguments reported and sent through the mails as public documents under the franking privilege.

Although a very decided advocate of the extension of the right of suffrage to women, I have not thought that it was likely that that would be accomplished by an amendment to the National Constitution, or indeed that it was wise to attempt to do it in that way. The Constitution cannot be amended without the consent of three-fourths of the States. If a majority can be got in three-fourths of the States for such an amendment, their people would be undoubtedly ready to amend their State Constitutions by which, so far as each State is concerned, the object would be accomplished. So it seems hardly worth while to take the trouble of plying Congress with petitions or arguments.

But my longest service upon Committees has been upon the two great Law Committees of the Senate,—the Committee on Privileges and Elections, and the Committee on the Judiciary.

I have been a member of the Committee on Privileges and Elections since March 9, 1877. I was Chairman for more than ten years. I have been a member of the Committee on the Judiciary since December, 1884, and have been its Chairman since December, 1891, except for two years, from March 4, 1893, to March 4, 1895, when the Democrats held the Senate.

While I was Chairman it was of course my duty to represent and defend in debate the action of these Committees on all the important questions referred to them. I have also, by reason of my long service, now more than twenty-six years, on the Committee of Privileges and Elections, been expected to take part in the discussion of all the Election cases, and of all matters affecting the privileges and dignity of the Senate, and of individual Senators. The investigations into alleged outrages at the South, and wrongs connected with them, have been conducted by that Committee. So it has been my fortune to be prominent in nearly all of the matters that have come up in the Senate since I have been a member of it, which have excited angry sectional or political feeling. Matters of finance and revenue and protection, while deeply interesting the people, do not, in general, cause angry feeling on the part of the political leaders. To this remark, the state of mind of our friends, whom we are in the habit of calling Mugwumps, and who like to call themselves Independents, is an exception. They have commonly discussed the profoundest and subtlest questions with an angry and bitter personality which finds its parallel only in the theological treatises of the dark ages. It is lucky for some of us that they have not had the fires of Smithfield or of the Inquisition at their command.

So, at various times in my life, I have been the object of the most savage denunciation, sometimes from the Independent newspapers, sometimes from the Democratic newspapers, especially those in the South, and sometimes from the press of my own party whom I have offended by differing from a majority of my political friends.

But such things are not to be taken too seriously. I have found in general that the men who deliver themselves with most bitterness and fury on political questions are the men who change their minds most easily, and are in general the most placable, and not uncommonly are the most friendly and pleasant men in the world in private intercourse. I account it my great good fortune that, although I have never flinched from uttering whatever I thought, and acting according to my own conviction of public duty, that, as I am approaching four score years, I have, almost without an exception, the good will of my countrymen, certainly if I may trust what they tell me when I meet in private intercourse men from different parts of the country, or what they are saying of me just now in the press. But it is quite possible that I may say or do something before I get through which will change all that. So whether my sunset, which is to come very soon, is to be clear or under a cloud, it is impossible even to guess.

During this period I have taken a leading part in all questions affecting the security of the right of suffrage conferred by the Constitution of the United States on the colored people, of honesty in elections, of questions affecting disputed titles to seats in the Senate, and the extension of suffrage to women.

A very interesting question, now happily almost forgotten, came up at the December session of 1878, and was renewed at the following March session of 1879.