Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

It is a bad thing that any man who has the Constitutional right to vote should fail to have his vote received and counted. But I think it is a fair question whether the existence of this condition throughout so large a country, with the prospect that slowly and gradually as the negro improves he will get his rights, be not better than the alternative which must have been his reduction to slavery again, or what is nearly as bad, a race of peons in this country. That is the question into the answer of which so much prejudice enters that it is hardly worth while to reason about it. My opinion is that as the colored man gets land, becomes chaste, frugal, temperate, industrious, veracious, that he will gradually acquire respect, and will attain political equality. Let us not be in a hurry. Evils, if they be evils, which have existed from the foundation of the world, are not to be cured in the lifetime of a single man. The men of the day of reconstruction were controlled by the irresistible logic of events; by a power higher than their own. I could see no alternative then, and I see no alternative now, better than that which was adopted.

CHAPTER XVIII COMMITTEE SERVICE IN THE HOUSE

The career of a Member of either House of Congress is determined, except in rare cases, by his assignment to Committees. In the House that is wholly dependent on the favor of the Speaker. In the Senate those assignments are made by Committees of the two parties, chosen for the purpose, who first agree on the representation to be assigned to each. After the Senator has been assigned to a Committee he remains there unless he himself desire a change, and if the Members older in the service retire he succeeds in the end to the Chairmanship of the Committee. There has been no instance of a departure from this rule, except when there is a change in the political control of the body, and no instance of deposing a Member from a Committee without his consent, except the single and well-known case of Mr. Sumner.

I was always on friendly terms with Mr. Blaine during my entire service of eight years in the House of Representatives. But I owed nothing to any favor of his in the matter of Committee assignments. When I entered the service I was put on the Committee of Education and Labor and on the Committee of Revision of the Laws, both obscure and unimportant. In my second term I served a little while on the Committee on Elections. I was also placed on the Committee of Railroad and Canals. I was made Chairman of a special Committee to visit Louisiana and inquire into the legality of what was called the Kellogg Government and report whether Governor Kellogg or his Democratic rival should be recognized as the lawful Governor of Louisiana. I was afterward placed on the Judiciary Committee, a position of great honor, which I liked very much.

With the exception of the last none of these appointments had any attraction for me. They were all out of the line of my previous experience in life and the service they required of me was disagreeable. I was placed on the Committee on the Judiciary by Mr. Speaker Kerr, a Democrat. Mr. Blaine at this time very earnestly pressed Mr. Martin I. Townsend of New York for the place. I do not conceive that I had any right to complain of Mr. Blaine in this matter. I never made any request of him for any appointment within his gift and he was beset behind and before by the demands of men he was unable to gratify, to many of whom he conceived himself under great obligation. It should be stated too that in Mr. Blaine's time the Members from Massachusetts older in the service than myself had very important places indeed. So it was hardly just to increase the number of important Committee appointments from our State.

But it happened to me by great good fortune that I had an opportunity, of which I was very glad, to accomplish something by reason of my place on each Committee on which I served, which I could not have accomplished without it.

An amusing piece of good fortune happened to me at the beginning of my service. I was placed, as I said, on the Committee on the Revision of the Laws. My law practice had been in the interior of the Commonwealth. So I had little knowledge of United States jurisprudence. I determined in order to fit myself for my new duties to make a careful study of the statutes and law administered in the United States Courts. I took with me to Washington a complete set of the Reports of the Supreme Court of the United States and purchased Abbott's Digest of those decisions, then just published. The first evening after I got settled I spent in reading the opinions of the Supreme Court. I took the Digest beginning with the letter A, reading the abstracts, and then reading the cases referred to. I got as far as Adm and read the cases relating to admiralty practice. The next morning the Speaker announced his Committees and the House adjourned. After the adjournment, Judge Poland, Chairman of the Committee on the Revision of the Laws, called the Committee together and laid before them a letter he had just received from Mr. Justice Miller of the Supreme Court, asking for a change in the law in regard to monitions for summoning defendants in Admiralty. The change had been made necessary by some recent decisions of the Court. The other members of the Committee looked at each other in dismay. None of them was familiar with the question, or knew at all what it was all about. I then stated to them the difficulty, giving them the names of the cases and the volumes where they were found. They were all quite astonished to find a man from the country, of whom probably none of them had ever heard before, having the law of Admiralty at his tongue's end. If the question had related to anything in the Digest under Adr, or anything thereafter, I should have been found probably more ignorant than they were. But Judge Poland took me into high favor, and I found his friendship exceedingly agreeable and valuable. I do not remember that the Committee on the Revision of the Laws had another meeting while I belonged to it.

I was also, as I have said, put on the Committee of Education and Labor. The Bureau of Education had been lately established and the Commissioner appointed. But the office was exceedingly unpopular, not only with the old Democrats and the Strict Constructionists, who insisted on leaving such things to the States, but with a large class of Republicans. A very zealous attack was made on the Bureau, led by Mr. Farnsworth of Illinois, and by Cadwallader C. Washburn, a very able and influential Republican from Wisconsin. The Committee on Appropriations, of which my colleague, Mr. Dawes, was Chairman, reported a provision for abolishing this Bureau. Mr. Dawes, himself, however, dissented. The Republicans on the Committee of Education and Labor took up the cudgels for the Bureau. We beat the Committee of Appropriations. The result of the strife was that the Bureau was put on a firmer footing with a more liberal provision, and it has since been, under General Eaton and Dr. Harris, the accomplished and devoted Commissioners, of very great and valuable service to the country.

That led me to give special study to the matter of National education. I introduced a bill for establishing an education system by National authority in States which failed to do it themselves. Later, I introduced and carried through the House a measure for distributing the proceeds of the public land and sums received from patents and some other special funds, among all the States in aid of the common schools. This bill passed the House, but was lost in the Senate mainly because Senator Morrill of Vermont, a most excellent and influential statesman, insisted that the money should go to the agricultural colleges, in which he took great interest, and not to common schools. Later when I became a member of the Senate I succeeded in getting a like measure twice through the Senate. But it failed in the House. So the two Houses never agreed upon it. But the movement and discussion aroused public attention throughout the country and were of great value.

While I was on that Committee, I think during my second term, there was referred to it a bill to rebuild William and Mary College in Virginia. The principal building of that College had been destroyed by fire. The Union and Rebel forces had fought for possession of it. It had been held by the Union soldiers and a court martial was sitting there when it was attacked by the other side and the Union men driven out, and the insurgents held the building for a few hours. They abandoned it very soon. But before the Union soldiers had got back in force some stragglers set fire to the building. It was totally destroyed.