Mr. Kelly. Then I give notice, that if the pending resolution is voted down, I shall hereafter offer the following:
Resolved, That William Aiken, of South Carolina, be, and he is hereby elected Speaker of this House, for the Thirty-fourth Congress.”
The resolution declaring Banks the Speaker was lost by 102 ayes to 115 noes. Then, before Mr. Kelly could obtain the floor to name Mr. Aiken, Williamson R. W. Cobb made his fatal olive-branch speech in favor of Aiken, and Mr. Washburne of Illinois moved to lay “that olive branch on the table.” The House by a vote of 98 to 117 refused to table the resolution. The main question of declaring Aiken Speaker was then put and lost, ayes 103, noes 110. It will be observed that the vote for Aiken was larger than that for Banks. Banks 102 to 115; Aiken 103 to 110. Mr. Kelly would have had the honor of naming the Speaker but for the precipitancy of Mr. W. R. W. Cobb. The plurality rule, a device of doubtful constitutionality, was adopted the next day, February 2d, and Banks was elected. The following was the vote: Banks 103; Aiken 100; Fuller 6; Campbell 4; Wells 1. If Henry Winter Davis and the other five Know-Nothings who voted for Fuller, or even three of them, had supported Mr. Aiken, his election would have taken place. Or if only two of those Know-Nothings, and the two Democratic back-sliders, Hickman and Barclay, had voted for Aiken, the defeat of Banks, and election of the Democratic candidate, in this momentous national contest would have resulted.
“After a prolonged struggle,” says Mr. Blaine in his Twenty Years of Congress, “Nathaniel P. Banks was chosen Speaker over William Aiken. It was a significant circumstance, noted at the time, that the successful candidate came from Massachusetts, and the defeated one from South Carolina. It was a still more ominous fact that Banks was chosen by votes wholly from the free States, and that every vote from the slave States was given to Mr. Aiken, except that of Mr. Cullen of Delaware, and that of Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, who declined to vote for either candidate. It was the first instance in the history of the Government in which a candidate for Speaker had been chosen without support from both sections. It was a distinctive victory of the free States over the consolidated power of the slave States. It marked an epoch.”[28] If William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed were here to explain this “distinctive victory,” as Mr. Blaine calls it, they might, if they were in a confessing mood, call the thing by another name.
It is certain that votes were thrown away on nominal candidates, and some even were given for Mr. Banks which belonged rightfully to Mr. Aiken. The members who cast those votes not only failed to reflect the sentiments of their constituencies, but in some cases openly defied and misrepresented the will of the voters to whom they owed their seats. Why these men betrayed the Democratic party in the memorable parliamentary battle which, as Mr. Blaine says “marked an epoch,” will perhaps forever remain one of the mysteries of the lobby of that eventful Thirty-fourth Congress.
John Kelly, Howard Cobb and others strongly suspected that corrupt appliances were at work.
Mr. Stephens, in a letter to his brother Linton Stephens, February 1st, 1856, said: “But for a faux pas on the part of that fool C——, I think we should have made Aiken Speaker to-day. I had set the programme for it about ten days ago. My plan was this: after the plurality rule should have been adopted (which I had all along believed after a while would be), and two ballots should have been had under it, if the Southern Know-Nothings should not indicate a purpose to go over to Orr to prevent Banks’s election (which I did not much expect them to do), then Aiken was to be put in nomination on the floor, Orr to decline, and let the last vote be between Aiken and Banks. From my knowledge of the House, its present tone and temper, knowledge of Aiken and the estimation he was held in by several of the scatterers, I believed he would beat Banks. This I communicated to a few, and a few only. I gave Cobb, of Georgia, my idea; he was struck with it, and communicated it to a few others. It took finely. I sounded some of the Western Know-Nothings,—Marshall and others,—and found that they could be brought into it. I said nothing of my plan, but simply asked carelessly how Aiken would do. I found that he would do for them. But after his name began to be talked of, he got so popular in the minds of many that C——, a fool, plugged the melon before it was ripe. If we had then been under the pressure of the plurality rule, and the choice between him and Banks, he would have been elected, sure as fate, in my opinion.”[29]
In conversations with the writer of this memoir, and in letters to him on the subject, Mr. Stephens often spoke of Mr. Kelly’s conduct during this first great struggle between the Democratic and Republican parties in the House of Representatives, as truly admirable and patriotic. “Mr. Kelly,” said he, “never hounded on anybody against the South, but was one of the few Northern Democrats who then stood firmly by us, in defense of our Constitutional rights against the assaults of Republicans and Know-Nothings, who had formed an unholy alliance against us.” The present writer has sometimes read, with surprise, attacks on Mr. Kelly in Southern newspapers of respectability and standing, such as the Baltimore Sun and Atlanta Constitution, which only could be ascribed to insufficient information on the part of the writers, or perhaps they unintentionally erred in accepting the scurrilous caricatures of Puck, and other Gerrymanders, for the real John Kelly.
Mr. Banks appointed the standing Committees of the House in the interest of the ultra wing of the Republican party, of which William H. Seward and Joshua R. Giddings were the leaders. M. Seward was at length at the head of a great organization, with the immense power of the popular branch of Congress at his back, and no other man in American politics ever made more of his opportunities. Five years before he had been rudely jostled from his dream of ambition by the death of President Taylor, to whose friendship for him he was indebted for his elevation to leadership in the Whig party in 1849. That event had been rendered possible in consequence of the disastrous feuds in the Democratic party of New York in 1848. While Hunkers and Barnburners fought, the Whigs captured the Legislature of New York, by which a Senator in Congress was to be chosen. Mr. Seward was elected Senator. His political sagacity soon enabled him to grasp the situation. Deeming it certain that whoever might control the Administration patronage, whether Senator or not, would control the politics of New York, he went to Washington, and paid assiduous court to that dashing Virginian, William Ballard Preston, Secretary of the Navy, to whom President Taylor was more attached than to any other member of his Cabinet. As a charmer Mr. Seward had few equals. He was addicted to aphorisms, and studied bon mots with the diligence of Sheridan. His affectation of philosophy was set off by good manners and easy address. He had been a school-master in Georgia, and had at his command a fund of South-of-Potomac reminiscences, saws, and anecdotes. In the company of William Ballard Preston he was never so happy as when expatiating over the types, and modes, and fascinations of Southern society. The Tazewells, Randolphs, Gastons, Lowndes, Calhouns, Crawfords, Forsyths, Lumpkins, and other famous Cavaliers, were all names familiar on Mr. Seward’s lips as household words. It did not take him long to win Preston, and that gentleman soon addressed himself to the task of winning over the President to the side of Mr. Seward. But Vice-President Fillmore was Seward’s bitterest enemy, and Taylor’s confidence was of slower growth than Preston’s. Fierce sectional passions upon the subject of slavery were already raging between the North and South, and the old hero of Buena Vista desired to allay those passions, and render his Administration the era of pacification. Pledges were finally exacted and given, James Watson Webb representing Mr. Seward, and Secretary Preston representing the President, and the patronage of the Administration in New York was placed at Mr. Seward’s disposal; in consideration of which that wily diplomat entered into engagements to take no part in the Senate of the United States in the Abolition agitation, but to pursue a policy of conciliation and compromise at Washington. He had been elected Senator to succeed a Democrat. Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and John J. Crittenden, and the other leading Whigs in the Senate and House, were friends of Mr. Fillmore, and unalterably opposed to Seward’s recognition by Taylor, upon any terms, as leader of the Administration party in New York. Angry controversies took place in Administration circles. A breach occurred between the President and Vice-President, and their social relations were broken off. Preston had acquired complete personal ascendency over Taylor, and the old soldier became a violent partisan of Mr. Seward. The Senator from New York was now recognized as the real leader of the Whig party, and wielded the Administration lash with exasperating indifference to the powerful men arrayed on the side of Mr. Fillmore. Alienations took place between life-long friends, and many of the great Whig statesmen were not even on speaking terms. The Whig party was rent in twain.
Mr. Blaine has recently discussed some of the political events of this period of American history, in his valuable work “Twenty Years of Congress,” but in assigning causes for the destruction of the Whig party, he has strangely overlooked this portentous quarrel, provoked by Seward, which was the underlying cause,—the causa causans,—of the dissolution and utter extinction of that celebrated party.