Political Recollections / 1840 to 1872

by George Washington Julian

The excitement attending the trial of the President soon subsided, but the Republicans continued anxious about the state of the country. The work of reconstruction was only fairly begun, and its completion was involved in the approaching presidential election. Chase and Seward had lost their standing in the party, and there was no longer any civilian in its ranks whose popularity was especially commanding or at all over-shadowing. Under these circumstances it was quite natural to turn to the army, and to canvass the claims of Gen. Grant. The idea of his nomination was exceedingly distasteful to me. I personally knew him to be intemperate. In politics he was a Democrat. He did not profess to be a Republican, and the only vote he had ever given was cast for James Buchanan in 1856, when the Republican party made its first grand struggle to rescue the Government from the clutches of slavery. Moreover, he had had no training whatever in civil administration, and no one thought of him as a statesman. But the plea of his availability as a military chieftain was urged with great effect, and was made irresistible by the apprehension that if not nominated by the Republicans the Democrats would appropriate him, and make him a formidable instrument of mischief. His nomination, however, was only secured by cautious and timely diplomacy, and potent appeals to his sordidness, in the shape of assurances that he should have the office for a second term. But as the nominee of his party, fairly committed to its principles and measures touching the unsettled questions of reconstruction and suffrage, I saw no other practicable alternative than to give him my support. I was still further reconciled to this by the action of the Democrats in the nomination of Seymour and Blair, and the avowal of the latter in his famous "Brodhead letter," that "we must have a President who will execute the will of the people by trampling in the dust the usurpations of Congress known as the Reconstruction Acts."

In my new Congressional district I was unanimously re-nominated by the Republicans, and entered at once upon the canvass, though scarcely well enough to leave my bed. The issue was doubtful, and my old-time enemies put forth their whole power against me at the election. They were determined, this time, to win, and to make sure of this they embarked in a desperate and shameless scheme of ballot-stuffing in the city of Richmond, which was afterward fully exposed; but in spite of this enterprise of "Ku Klux Republicans," I was elected by a small majority. The result, however, foreshadowed the close of my congressional labors, which followed two years later, just as the XV Constitutional Amendment had made voters of the colored men of the State; but it was only made possible by my failing health, which had unfitted me for active leadership. In my old district I had made myself absolutely invincible. For twenty- one years in succession, that is to say, from the year 1848 to the year 1868, both inclusive, I canvassed that district by townships and neighborhoods annually on the stump. In the beginning, public opinion was overwhelmingly and fiercely against me, but I resolved, at whatever cost, to reconstruct it in conformity with my own earnest convictions. I literally wore myself out in the work, and am perfectly amazed when I recall the amount of it I performed, and the complete abandon of myself to the task. From the beginning to the end of this struggle the politicians of the district were against me, and they were numerous and formidable, and in every contest were reinforced by the politicians of the State. Although the ranks of my supporters were constantly recruited and no man ever had more devoted friends, I was obliged, during all these years, to stand alone as the champion of my cause in debate. I believe no Congressional district in the Union was ever the theatre of so much hard toil by a single man; but although it involved the serious abridgement of health and life, the ruinous neglect of my private affairs, and the sacrifice of many precious friendships, I was not without my reward. I succeeded in my work. Step by step I saw my constituents march up to my position, and the district at last completely disenthralled by the ceaseless and faithful administration of anti-slavery truth. The tables were completely turned. Almost everybody was an Abolitionist, and nobody any longer made a business of swearing that he was not. In canvassing my district it became the regular order of business for a caravan of candidates for minor offices, who were sportively called the "side show," to follow me from point to point, all vying with each other as to which had served longest and most faithfully as my friends. They had always been opposed to slavery, and men who had taken the lead in mobbing Abolitionists in earlier days and gained a livelihood by slave-catching, were now active and zealous leaders in the Republican party. It was a marvelous change. Slavery itself, greatly to the surprise and delight of its enemies, had perished; but it was, after all, only one form of a world-wide evil. The abolition of the chattel slavery of the Southern negro was simply the introduction and prelude to the emancipation of all races from all forms of servitude, and my Congressional record had been a practical illustration of my faith in this truth. The rights of man are sacred, whether trampled down by Southern slave-drivers, the monopolists of the soil, the grinding power of corporate wealth, the legalized robbery of a protective tariff, or the power of concentrated capital in alliance with labor-saving machinery.

During the winter preceding the inauguration of the President I was besieged by place-hunters more than ever before. They thronged about me constantly, while I generally wrote from twenty to thirty letters per day in response to inquiries about appointments from my district. The squabbles over post-office appointments were by far the most vexatious and unmanageable. They were singularly fierce, and I found it wholly impossible to avoid making enemies of men who had supported me with zeal. I was tormented for months about the post-office of a single small town in Franklin county, where the rival parties pounced upon each other like cannibals, and divided the whole community into two hostile camps. I was obliged to give my days and nights to this wretched business, and often received only curses for the sincerest endeavors to do what I believed was right. The experience became absolutely sickening, and could not be otherwise than seriously damaging to me politically. Such matters were wholly foreign to the business of legislation, and I wrote a very earnest letter to Mr. Jenckes, of Rhode Island, heartily commending his measure proposed in the preceding Congress for the reform of our Civil Service, and for which, as the real pioneer of this movement, he deserves a monument.

It was on the eighth of December, 1868, that I submitted a proposed amendment to the Constitution, declaring that "the right of suffrage in the United States shall be based upon citizenship, and shall be regulated by Congress"; and that "all citizens of the United States, whether native or naturalized, shall enjoy this right equally, without any distinction or discrimination whatever founded on race, color, or sex." This was prior to the ratification of the XV Amendment, and I so numbered the proposition; but on further reflection I preferred an amendment in the exact form of the fifteenth, and early in the next Congress I submitted it, being the first proposition offered for a sixteenth amendment to the Constitution. My opinions about woman suffrage, however, date much farther back. The subject was first brought to my attention in a brief chapter on the "political non-existence of woman," in Miss Martineau's book on "Society in America," which I read in 1847. She there pithily states the substance of all that has since been said respecting the logic of woman's right to the ballot, and finding myself unable to answer it, I accepted it. On recently referring to this chapter I find myself more impressed by its force than when I first read it. "The most principled Democratic writers on Government," she said, "have on this subject sunk into fallacies as disgraceful as any advocate of despotism has adduced. In fact, they have thus sunk, from being, for the moment, advocates of despotism. Jefferson in America, and James Mill at home, subside, for the occasion, to the level of the Emperor of Russia's catechism for the young Poles." This she makes unanswerably clear; but my interest in the slavery question was awakened about the same time. I regarded it as the previous question, and as less abstract and far more immediately important and absorbing than that of suffrage for woman. For the sake of the negro I accepted Mr. Lincoln's philosophy of "one war at a time," though always ready to show my hand; but when this was fairly out of the way, I was prepared to enlist actively in the next grand movement in behalf of the sacredness and equality of human rights.

CHAPTER XV. GRANT AND GREELEY. The new Cabinet—Seeds of party disaffection—Trip to California— Party degeneracy—The liberal Republican movement—Re-nomination of Grant—The Cincinnati convention—Perplexities of the situation —The canvass for Greeley—Its bitterness—Its peculiar features— The defeat—The vindication of Liberals—Visit to Chase and Sumner —Death of Greeley.

The inaugural speech of Gen. Grant was a feeble performance, and very unsatisfactory to his friends. When he announced his Cabinet, disappointment was universal among Republicans, and was greatly increased when he asked Congress to relieve A. T. Stewart, his nominee for Secretary of the Treasury, from the disability wisely imposed by the Act of Congress of 1789, forbidding the appointment to that position of any one engaged "in carrying on the business of trade or commerce." Senator Sherman at once introduced a bill to repeal this enactment, but Mr. Sumner vigorously opposed the measure, and the President soon afterward sent a message to the Senate asking leave to withdraw his request as to Mr. Stewart. It was doubtless the prompt and decided stand taken by Mr. Sumner in this matter which laid the foundation for the President's personal hostility to him, which so remarkably developed itself during the following years. The seeds of a party feud were thus planted, and as the Administration continued to show its hand, bore witness to a vigorous growth.

In June of this year I made a trip to California in search of health, which I had lost through overwork, and was now paying the penalty in a very distressing form of insomnia. I took one of the first through trains to the Pacific, and on reaching the State, I found sight-seeing and travel so irresistible a temptation, that I lost the rest and quiet I so absolutely needed. I was constantly on the wing; and I encountered at every point, the "settler," who was anxious to talk over the land squabbles of the State, with which I had had much to do in Congress, but now needed for a season to forget. I found that the half had not been told me respecting the ravages of land-grabbing under the Swamp Land Act of 1850, and the mal-administration of Mexican and Spanish grants. I was full of the subject, and was obliged, also, to give particular attention to the pre-emption of J. M. Hutchings, in the Yosemite Valley, for the protection of which I had reported a bill which was then pending; and I came near losing my life in the valley through the fatigue I suffered in reaching it. After a stay of over two months in California, and a trip by steamer to Oregon and Washington Territory, I returned home early in September, but in no better health than when I left; and a like experience attended a journey to Minnesota soon afterward, where I was captured by leading railroad men who belabored me over the land-grant to the St. Croix and Bayfield railroad, the revival of which I had aided in defeating at the previous session of Congress.

I returned to Washington in December, but physically unfit for labor, spending most of the session in New York under the care of a physician. I deeply regretted this, for the railway lobby was in Washington in full force, as it was during the closing session of the Forty-first Congress, when I was equally unfit for business. I was not, however, without consolation. Under the popular reaction against the Land-grant system which I had done my part to create, the huge pile of land bills on the Speaker's table failed, save the Texas Pacific project, which was carried by the most questionable methods, and against such a general protest as clearly indicated the end of this policy. A vote of nearly two to one was carried in the House in favor of a bill reported by the Land Committee defining swamp and overflowed lands, and guarding against the enormous swindles that had disgraced the Land Department and afflicted honest settlers. A like vote was secured in favor of the bill to prevent the further disposition of the public lands save under the pre-emption and homestead laws, for which I had labored for years. Many thousands of acres had been saved from the clutches of monopolists by attaching to several important grants the condition that the lands should be sold only to actual settlers, in quantities not exceeding a quarter section, and for not more than two dollars and fifty cents per acre. A very important reform, already referred to, had been made in our Indian treaty policy, by which lands relinquished by any tribe would henceforth fall under the operation of our land laws, instead of being sold in a body to some corporation or individual monopolist. The Southern Homestead law had dedicated to actual settlement millions of acres of the public domain in the land States of the South, while the Homestead Act of 1862 was splendidly vindicating the wisdom of its policy. Congress had declared forfeited and open to settlement a large grant of lands in Louisiana for non-compliance with the conditions on which it was made, and the public domain had been saved from frightful spoilation by the fortunate defeat of a scheme of land bounties that would completely have overturned the policy of the pre-emption and homestead laws, while practically mocking the claims of the soldiers. The opportunity, now and then, to strangle a legislative monster like this, or to further the passage of beneficent and far-reaching measures, is one of the real compensations of public life.

The final ratification of the Fifteenth Constitutional Amendment, which was declared in force on the thirtieth of March, 1870, perfectly consummated the mission of the Republican party, and left its members untrammeled in dealing with new questions. In fact, the Republican movement in the beginning was a political combination, rather than a party. Its action was inspired less by a creed than an object, and that object was to dedicate our National Territories to freedom, and denationalize slavery. Aside from this object, the members of the combination were hopelessly divided. The organization was created to deal with this single question, and would not have existed without it. It was now regarded by many as a spent political force, although it had received a momentum which threatened to outlast its mission; and if it did not keep the promise made in its platform of 1868, to reform the corruptions of the preceding Administration, and at the same time manfully wrestle with the new problems of the time, it was morally certain to degenerate into a faction, led by base men, and held together by artful appeals to the memories of the past. Our tariff legislation called for a thorough revision. Our Civil Service was becoming a system of political prostitution. Roguery and plunder, born of the multiplied temptations which the war furnished, had stealthily crept into the management of public affairs, and claimed immunity from the right of search. What the country needed was not a stricter enforcement of party discipline, not military methods and the fostering of sectional hate, but oblivion of the past, and an earnest, intelligent, and catholic endeavor to grapple with the questions of practical administration.

But this, in the very nature of the case, was not to be expected. The men who agreed to stand together in 1856, on a question which was now out of the way, and had postponed their differences on current party questions for that purpose, were comparatively unfitted for the task of civil administration in a time of peace. They had had no preparatory training, and the engrossing struggle through which they had passed had, in fact, disqualified them for the work. While the issues of the war were retreating into the past the mercenary element of Republicanism had gradually secured the ascendancy, and completely appropriated the President. The mischiefs of war had crept into the conduct of civil affairs, and a thorough schooling of the party in the use of power had familiarized it with military ideas and habits, and committed it to loose and indefensible opinions respecting the powers of the General Government. The management of the Civil Service was an utter mockery of political decency, while the animosities engendered by the war were nursed and coddled as the appointed means of uniting the party and covering up its misdeeds. The demand for reform, as often as made, was instantly rebuked, and the men who uttered it branded as enemies of the party and sympathizers with treason. It is needless to go into details; but such was the drift of general demoralization that the chief founders and pre-eminent representatives of the party, Chase, Seward, Sumner and Greeley were obliged to desert it more than a year before the end of Gen. Grant's first administration, as the only means of maintaining their honor and self-respect. My Congressional term expired a little after Grant and Babcock had inaugurated the San Domingo project, and Sumner had been degraded from the Chairmanship of the Committee on Foreign Affairs to make room for Simon Cameron. The "irrepressible conflict" had just begun to develop itself between the element of honesty and reform in the party, and the corrupt leadership which sought to make merchandise of its good name, and hide its sins under the mantle of its past achievements.