I knew S. S. Cox ("Sunset" Cox, as he was called), as a member of the Forty-first Congress. He had served in some previous Congress as a member from Ohio; but when I knew him he was serving as a member from New York.
Cox was an able man, as a speaker, a writer, and a diplomat. He was always listened to with great respect and attention when he addressed the House, but a considerable amount of fun was poked at him after a certain occasion when he had interrupted General Butler a time or two in debate, and the General, finally losing patience, replied to one of his questions with the admonition: "Shoo, fly, don't bodder me!" I was present at the time; the galleries were filled, as they always were in those days; and when General Butler uttered this reproof the whole House, galleries, and floor, was in an uproar, maintaining the confusion for some minutes. When it seemed like subsiding, it would break out again and again, and so it continued for quite a while. When order was finally restored Cox undertook to reply; but he could not do so. He had been so crippled by the response of the audience to Butler's remark that he never recovered from it.
Cox was a splendid man. He always thought in those days that he had not been quite appreciated by his friends in the Democratic party, and they thought the same way; but he was so good-humored, and such a whole-souled man and so fond of wit that he really never did get what he was entitled to.
I was trying to pass a bill which I had prepared for the purpose of prohibiting and wiping out polygamy in Utah. I had reported the bill from the Committee on Territories, and I was doing my best to pass it. For some reason or other (afterwards I learned it was an ulterior reason to help out a friend), General Schenck undertook to defeat the measure, and for this purpose he asked to have it referred to the Committee on Judiciary. This committee probably had jurisdiction over the subject; I did not think so at the time, and believed that such a reference would kill the bill. He seemed to be making some headway with the Republicans, when Cox came over to me from the Democratic side of the House, and proposed that if I would yield to him for five minutes he would help me to pass the bill. I told him to go back to his seat and that I would yield to him directly. When I did Cox took the floor, and to my utter astonishment he denounced the bill as the most outrageous bill that had ever been brought before the House, declaring in the most spirited manner that of course it ought to be referred to the Judiciary Committee, because every one knew that such a reference would kill it.
But he was shrewder than I apprehended at the moment. His talk had the desired effect, for the Republicans who had been following Schneck determined that they would not be responsible for killing the bill; they came back to me, and the measure was passed through the House by a substantial majority.
CHAPTER IX THE IMPEACHMENT OF PRESIDENT JOHNSON 1865
As I look back now over the vista of years that have come and gone, it seems to me that I entered the Lower House of Congress just at the beginning of the most important period in all our history. The great President had been assassinated; the war was over; Andrew Johnson, a Union Democrat, was President of the United States. Reconstruction was the problem which confronted us, how to heal up the Nation's wounds and remake a Union which would endure for all time to come. These were the difficult conditions that had to be dealt with by the Thirty-ninth Congress.
Andrew Johnson was the queerest character that ever occupied the White House, and, with the exception of Lincoln only, he entered it under the most trying and difficult circumstances in all our history; but Lincoln had, what Johnson lacked, the support and confidence of the great Republican party. Johnson was never a Republican, and never pretended to be one. He was a lifelong Democrat, and a slave-holder as well; but he was loyal to the Union, no man living more so. As a Senator from Tennessee, alone of all the Southern Senators he faced his colleagues from the South in denouncing secession as treason. His subsequent phenomenal course in armed opposition to the rebellion brought about his nomination for the Vice-Presidency as a shrewd stroke to secure the support of the War Democrats of the North and the Union men of his State and section.
He came to the Presidency under the cloud of President Lincoln's assassination, when the majority of the North believed that a Southern conspiracy had laid the great President low. The seceding States hated him as a traitor to his own section; the North distrusted him as a Democrat. At first I believe the very radical element of the Republican party in Congress, led by old Ben Wade of Ohio, than whom there was no more unsafe man in either house of Congress, were disposed, if not openly to rejoice, which they dared not do, to see with some secret satisfaction the entrance of Johnson into the White House. It is well known that Wade did say in his first interview with President Johnson, when, as a member of the committee on the conduct of the war, he waited on him, "Johnson, we have faith in you. By the gods, there will be no more trouble in running the Government."
I have already, in another chapter, described the scene which took place in the Senate chamber when Johnson was inducted into office as Vice-President; the exhibition he made of himself at the time of taking the oath of office, in the presence of the President of the United States and the representatives of the Governments of the world. All this, advertised at the time in the opposition press, added to the prejudice against Johnson in the North and made his position more trying and difficult.