The reader of these pages cannot fail to discern a marked change in Trumbull's course on Reconstruction about midway of the struggle on that issue. Gideon Welles said, under date January 16, 1867, "He [Trumbull] has changed his principles within a year.[134] The facts are that he agreed with Lincoln's plan of Reconstruction, embodied it in the Louisiana Bill, reported it favorably from the Judiciary Committee, tried to pass it in the closing days of the Thirty-eighth Congress, but was prevented by the filibustering tactics of Sumner. After Johnson became President he adhered to that plan until Johnson vetoed the Freedmen's Bureau and Civil Rights Bills. He then believed that Johnson had betrayed the cause for which the nation had fought through a four years' war and that the freedom of the blacks would be endangered if Johnson were sustained by the loyal states. He accordingly went with his party, but with misgivings, halting now and then, putting blocks in the way of the radicals here and there. He ceased to be the leader of the Senate as he had hitherto been, on this class of questions, and he became a reluctant follower. When Sumner became angry and charged him in 1870 with betrayal of the cause of freedom, he hotly affirmed that he had voted for every measure for the equal rights of the freedmen that Congress had passed, including the three constitutional amendments. The truth was that he had put obstacles in the way of several measures that Sumner deemed indispensable, until it became plain that the Republican party was determined to pass them and that further resistance would be useless. Then he gave his assent to them. This course he pursued until the Anti-Ku-Klux Bill was agreed to, by the Judiciary Committee, in 1871. Against this measure he voted in the committee and in the Senate. He held it to be unconstitutional, and he used against it the same arguments in substance that Bingham had used in the House against the Civil Rights Bill; and both he and Bingham were right. Trumbull did not change his principles, but he made an error in common with his party and he corrected it as soon as he became convinced that it was an error. I am open to the same criticism."
Among interviews with men of note published in the Chicago press concerning the deceased was one with Mr. Joseph Medill, not a friendly critic but a political seer of the first class, who thought that Trumbull might have been President of the United States if he had voted, in the impeachment case, to convict Andrew Johnson.
If he had remained true to his party [said Mr. Medill], Judge Trumbull, I believe, would have died with his name in the roll of Presidents of the United States. I have always thought that he could have been the successor of Grant. He stood so high in the estimation of his party and the nation that nothing was beyond his reach. Grant, of course, came before everybody, but Trumbull was next, a man of great ability, undoubted integrity, and stainless reputation, pure as the driven snow and nearly as cold. He could have been President instead of Hayes, or Garfield, or Harrison.[1]
Following the interview with Mr. Medill is one with Mr. Henry S. Robbins, a member of Trumbull's law firm from 1883 until 1890. Mr. Robbins did not find Trumbull a cold man.
All the time we were together [said Mr. Robbins] I never heard him speak a cross word to a clerk in the office. Among children he was a child again. He and his little grandson, the child of Walter Trumbull, who died several years ago, were inseparable companions when the grandfather was at home. They played together and talked together like two little boys. All the children in the neighborhood where he lived were wont to come to him with their little troubles and always found him one who could enter into fullest sympathy with them. Judge Trumbull had no worldliness. He seemed to practice law as a mission, not as a vocation by which to make money. With his reputation and his ability combined he might have died a millionaire. It always gave him a pang to charge a fee, and when he fixed the charge it was usually about half what a modern lawyer would charge.[1]
Another partner, Mr. William N. Horner, said:
I came here from Belleville where Judge Trumbull formerly lived, and people down there—some of them at least—used to think that he was a cold man. I never found him so. I remember the first day we moved into these offices and while we were getting settled, Judge Trumbull worked harder than any of us. He was more solicitous for our comfort than he was for his own. He was always trying to do something for the comfort of others. He had all the gentleness and sweetness of disposition and patience of a woman.[135]
Mr. C. S. Darrow, who had charge of the Debs case in which Trumbull volunteered his services, said that
the socialistic trend of the venerable statesman's opinions in his later years sprang from his deep sympathies with all unfortunates; that sympathy that made him an anti-slavery Democrat in his early years, and afterwards a Republican. He became convinced that the poor who toil for a living in this world were not getting a fair chance. His heart was with them.[136]
A letter to myself from the widow of Walter Trumbull, who died in 1891, says: