Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 / From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860

by James Gillespie Blaine

In Madison's administration a bill which reached the President during the last ten days of the session failed by accident or inadvertence to receive the President's signature, and did not become a law. Mr. Webster is authority for saying that there was not a single instance prior to the administration of General Jackson in which the President by design omitted to sign a bill and yet did not return it to Congress. "The silent veto," said he, "is the executive adoption of the present administration." There had been instances in which, during a session of Congress, a President, unwilling to approve and yet not prepared to veto a measure, suffered it to become a law by the lapse of the Constitutional period of ten days; but it was an entirely new device, to defeat a bill by permitting the period of less than ten days to expire at the close of the session—defeat it without action, without expression of opinion, without the responsibility which justly attaches to the Executive office. Commenting with great power, at the time, upon the new use of the veto-power in all its forms by President Jackson, Mr. Webster declared its tendency was "to disturb the harmony which ought always to exist between Congress and the Executive, and to turn that which the Constitution intended only as an extraordinary remedy for extraordinary cases, into a common means of making Executive discretion paramount to the discretion of Congress in the enactment of laws." It was literally making the extreme medicine of the Constitution its daily bread.

An example set by so strong a ruler as Jackson, especially in the establishment of a practice so congenial to man's natural love of power, was certain to be followed by other Presidents. It was followed so vigorously indeed that the forty years succeeding Jackson's advent to power presented a strong contrast with the forty years that preceded it. The one began with Washington, the other ended with Andrew Johnson. Mr. Van Buren, though in all respects a lineal heir to the principles of Jackson, did not imitate him in the frequent use of the veto-power. But Mr. Tyler on nine different occasions ran counter to the action of Congress by the interposition of his veto. Mr. Polk resorted to it in three signal instances, but neither General Taylor nor Mr. Fillmore came in conflict with Congress on a single measure. President Pierce almost rivaled General Jackson in the ten vetoes with which he emphasized his own views as distinct from those of Congress. Mr. Buchanan used his arbitrary power on four occasions during his term. Mr. Lincoln permitted one bill to be defeated, as already noted in these pages, by expiration of Congress, and arrested the passage of another by direct use of his veto. President Johnson, who in many features of his career has been suspected of an attempted imitation of Jackson, far surpassed his great prototype in the use of the veto-power, employing it directly in no less than twenty-one instances, besides pocketing at least two bills of public importance. The aggregate number of vetoes, therefore, in the forty years that followed General Jackson's first election exceeded fifty, as against six for the forty years preceding it.

It will not escape observation that the most frequent resort to the veto has been by those Presidents who were chosen by the political organization which has always declared its hostility to Executive power. The Democratic party had its origin and its early growth in the cry against the overshadowing influence of the Presidential office —going so far in their denunciations as to declare that it was aping royalty in its manners and copying monarchy in its prerogatives. The men who made this outcry defeated John Quincy Adams who never used the veto, and installed Jackson who resorted to it on all occasions when his judgment differed from the conclusion of a majority of Congress. Neither Taylor nor Fillmore—both reared in the Whig school —ever attempted to defeat the will of Congress, though each wielded Executive power at a time when questions even more exciting than those of Jackson's era engaged public attention. Mr. Lincoln presents a strong contrast with his predecessors,—Pierce and Buchanan,—illustrating afresh the contradiction that the party declaiming most loudly against Executive power has constantly abused it. Mr. Tyler and Mr. Johnson were both chosen by the opponents of the Democracy, but they were both reared in that school, and both returned to it—exhibiting in their apostasy the readiness with which the Democratic mind turns to the tyranny of the veto.

The success of reconstruction in the South carried with it the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment by the requisite number of States. The result was duly certified by Mr. Seward as Secretary of State, on the twenty-eighth day of July, 1868, and the Amendment was thenceforward a part of the organic law of the nation. It had been carried, from first to last, as a party measure—unanimously supported by the Republicans, unanimously opposed by the Democrats. Its grand and beneficent provisions failed to attract the vote of a single Democratic member in any State Legislature in the whole Union. Wherever the Democrats were in majority the Legislature rejected it, and in every Legislature where the Republicans had control the Democrats in minority voted against it. Not only was this true, but the States of Ohio and New Jersey, which had ratified it in 1866-67 when their Legislatures were Republican, formally voted in 1868, when the Democrats had come into power, to recall their assent to the Amendment and to record their opposition to its adoption. It is very seldom in the history of political issues, even when partisan feeling is most deeply developed, that so absolute a division is found as was recorded upon the question of adopting the Fourteenth Amendment. It has not been easy in succeeding years to comprehend the deep-seated, all-pervading hostility of the Democratic party to this great measure. Even on the Thirteenth Amendment, containing the far more radical proposition to abolish slavery, a few Democrats, moved by philanthropic motives, broke from the restraint of party and honored themselves by recording their votes on the side of humanity and justice; but on the Fourteenth Amendment the line of Democratic hostility in Nation and in State was absolutely unbroken.

It seems incredible that Democrats can be satisfied with the record made by their party on this most grave and important question. Every one of the many objects aimed at in the Fourteenth Amendment is founded upon a basis of justice, of liberty, of an enlarged and enlightened nationality. Its minor provisions might be regarded as temporary in their nature, but its leading provisions are permanent and are essential to the vitality of a true republic. Even those which may be held as temporary deeply affect more than one generation of American citizens, and are of themselves sufficiently important to justify a great struggle for their adoption.

It was certainly of inestimable concern to the honor of the country that those who had shed their blood and those who had given their treasure for its defense, should have their claims upon the national justice placed beyond the whim, or the caprice, or the malice of an accidental majority in Congress. Nor would it have been wise to leave open to those who in the conflict of arms had lost their slaves, the temptation to besiege Congress and the Legislatures of their States for compensation. Such an opportunity would have been a menace to the public credit, and would have proved a constant source of corruption. The Republican therefore said, "We shall incorporate the right of the soldier to repayment, in the very Constitution of the Republic; and shall in the same solemn manner decree that as slavery instigated the drawing of the sword against the life of the nation, and justly perished by the sword, its assumed value shall not be placed upon the free people of the United States as a mortgage whose payment may be exacted from their property and their toil." Against these just provisions, which in their nature are limited as to time, the Democrats in Congress and in every Legislature of the Union recorded an absolutely unanimous vote.

Another provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, temporary in its application, indeed necessarily limited to the existing generation, was demanded by the Republicans. The great mass of those engaged in the Rebellion were pardoned the moment their arms were laid down. But the leaders who, in official position before the war, had solemnly sworn to support the Constitution, were held to be far more guilty than the multitude who followed them. They deliberately rebelled against a government to which, on their consciences and on their oaths, they had given their personal pledge of fidelity. The Republicans did not propose to visit even these chief offenders with pains and penalties; but they resolved to place in the Constitution a prohibition upon their holding office under the National government until after two-thirds of both branches of Congress, satisfied of their good intentions, should remove their disabilities. The Democrats unanimously voted against even this mild discipline to those who precipitated the desperate war, thereby declaring their willingness, if not their desire, that the most guilty should fare as well as the innocent; that for example Mr. Toombs might resume his seat as a senator from Georgia, Mr. Breckinridge as a senator from Kentucky, Mr. Benjamin as a senator from Louisiana, Mr. Jefferson Davis as a senator from Mississippi.

Still another provision of the Amendment which might prove temporary in its application, or might prove permanent, as the South should decide, was that relating to representation in Congress. On this point the Republicans held, as has been so often repeated, that the negro should not be included in the basis of representation until he was admitted to suffrage. There is such absolute justice and fair dealing in this proposition, that no reply which deserves to be called an argument has ever been made to it. The original provision in the Constitution by which three-fifths of the slaves were enumerated in the basis of representation, agreed to originally as a compromise in connection with the subject of direct taxation, had lost its relevancy by reason of emancipation as decreed in the Thirteenth Amendment. The question now before Congress was therefore a new one. It affected the rights of States and the equality of citizens. To concede four and a half millions of negroes to the basis of Southern representation, and at the same time to confine the suffrage to the whites, was not merely a harsh injustice to the colored race, but it was an insulting discrimination against Northern white men. It gave, as was well said at the time, a far greater influence in National affairs to the vote of the Confederate solider in the South than to the vote of the Union soldier in the North. In Congressional districts where the colored race constituted one-half of the total population (and in many instances the proportion was even larger), the vote of one white man offset the vote of two in a Northern district where suffrage was impartial. This ratio of influence went into the Electoral College, and gave to the white men of South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana double the power of that enjoyed by white men in New York, Illinois and California. The loss of Representatives to the Northern States, or more properly speaking the gain to the Southern States on existing numbers, would be nearly one-eighth of the entire House, and fully one-quarter of those likely to occupy seats on the Democratic side of the chamber. In the Electoral College, the loss to the North and the gain to the South would be nearly in the same ratio. In the rapid increase of the negro race the offensive discrimination against the North would be continually enlarging in its proportions. The corrective provision in the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to prevent this grave injustice both to the negro and to the white man—but every Democrat in Congress and in the State Legislatures voted against it through all the stages of its enactment and its ratification, and thereby expressed a willingness to give an unfair advantage to the Southern white man, and to establish an unfair discrimination against the Northern white man.

Important and essential as are the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment just cited, indispensable as they have proved in the system of Southern Reconstruction, they are relatively of small consequence when compared with that great provision which is for all time:—that provision which establishes American citizenship upon a permanent foundation, which gives to the humblest man in the Republic ample protection against any abridgment of his privileges and immunities by State law, which secures to him and his descendants the equal protection of the law in all that relates to his life, his liberty, and his property. The first section of the Constitutional amendment which includes these invaluable provisions is in fact a new charter of liberty to the citizens of the United States; is the utter destruction of the pestilent heresy of State-rights, which constantly menaced the prosperity and even the existence of the Republic; and is the formal bestowment of Nationality upon the wise Federal system which was the outgrowth of our successful Revolution against Great Britain.

Before the adoption of this Amendment citizenship of the United States was inferred from citizenship of some one of the States, for there was nothing in the Constitution defining or even implying National citizenship as distinct from its origination in or derivation from a State. It was declared in Article IV, Section 2, of the Federal Constitution, that "Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States;" but nothing was better known than that this provision was a dead letter from its very origin. A colored man who was a citizen of a Northern State was certain to be placed under the surveillance of the police if he ventured south of the Potomac or the Ohio, destined probably to be sold into slavery under State law, or permitted as a special favor to return at once to his home. A foreign-born citizen, with his certificate of naturalization in his possession, had prior to the war no guarantee or protection against any form of discrimination or indignity, or even persecution, to which State law might subject him, as has been painfully demonstrated at least twice in our history. But this rank injustice and this hurtful inequality were removed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Its opening section settled all conflicts and contradiction on this question by a comprehensive declaration which defined National citizenship and gave to it precedence of the citizenship of a State. "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they reside." These pregnant words distinctly reversed the origin and character of American citizenship. Instead of a man being a citizen of the United States because he was a citizen of one of the States, he was now made a citizen of any State in which he might choose to reside, because he was antecedently a citizen of the United States.