I liked General Arthur very much. I had met him once or twice before. I went with my staff to attend the Yorktown celebration, and I may remark here that it was the first and only time during my service of six years as Governor on which my whole military staff accompanied me. We stopped in Washington to pay our respects to the President. It was soon after the assassination of General Garfield, and Arthur had not yet moved into the White House. He was living in the old Butler place just south of the Capitol, and I called on him there and presented the members of my staff to him. The President was exceedingly polite, as he always was, and was quite interested, having been a staff officer himself, by appointment of Governor Morgan of New York. We were all very much impressed with the dignity of the occasion and the kindly attention the President showed us.
General Arthur had taken considerable interest in New York politics and belonged to the Conkling faction. He came into the office of President under the most trying circumstances. The party was almost torn asunder by factional troubles in New York and elsewhere. Blaine, the bitter enemy of Conkling, had been made the Secretary of State; Garfield had made some appointments very obnoxious to Conkling—among them the Collector of the Port of New York—and, generally, conditions were very unsatisfactory. Arthur entered the office bent on restoring harmonious conditions in the party, as far as he could. He did not allow himself to be controlled by any faction, but seemed animated by one desire, and that was to give a good administration and unite the party.
He was a man of great sense of propriety and dignity, believing more thoroughly in the observance of the etiquette which should surround a President than any other occupant of the White House whom I have known. He was very popular with those who came into contact with him, and especially was he popular with the members of the House and Senate. I have always thought that he should have been accorded the honor of a nomination for President in 1884; as a matter of fact most of the Republican Senators agreed with me, and many of us went to the National Convention at Chicago, determined to nominate him; but we soon found there was no chance, and that the nomination would go to Blaine.
President Arthur was very kind to me in the way of patronage. He not only recognized my endorsement for Federal offices in my State, but gave me a number of appointments outside. One of the first of these was the appointment of Judge Zane as Territorial Judge of Utah. President Arthur showed his confidence in me by appointing Judge Zane, without any endorsement, excepting a statement of his qualifications, written by me on a scrap of paper in the Executive Office. The Senate Committee on the Judiciary called on the President for the endorsements of Judge Zane, and Senator Edmunds was quite disgusted when the President could send him only this little slip of paper written by me, which was all the President had when he made the appointment. Senator Edmunds hesitated to recommend his confirmation. There was no question about Judge Zane's qualifications. He had been a circuit judge in our State for many years. I saw Senator Teller, whom I knew, and who knew something of Judge Zane, and asked him to help us, as he could do, being then Secretary of the Interior. On one occasion I spoke to Teller about Judge Zane, and purposely spoke so loud that Senator Edmunds could hear me. I said, among other things, there had not been a man nominated for Territorial Judge in the country who was better qualified for the position. Judge Zane's nomination was soon reported from the committee and confirmed. He made a great record on the Bench and did much to break up the practice of polygamy. He is still living, a resident of Salt Lake City, Utah.
I entered the Senate at a very uninteresting period in our history. The excitement and bitterness caused by the Civil War and Reconstruction had subsided. It was what I would term a period of industrial development, and there were no great measures before Congress. The men who then composed the membership of the Senate were honest and patriotic, trying to do their duty as best they could, but there was no great commanding figure. The days of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun had passed; the great men of the Civil War period were gone. Stevens, Sumner, Chase of the Reconstruction era, had all passed away.
Among the leaders at the beginning of the Forty-eighth Congress were Senators Aldrich and Anthony, of Rhode Island; Edmunds and Morrill, of Vermont; Sherman and Pendleton, of Ohio; Sewell, of New Jersey; Don Cameron, of Pennsylvania; Platt and Hawley, of Connecticut; Harrison, of Indiana; Dawes and Hoar, of Massachusetts; Allison, of Iowa; Ingalls, of Kansas; Hale and Frye, of Maine; Sawyer, of Wisconsin; Van Wyck and Manderson, of Nebraska; all on the Republican side. There were a number of quite prominent Democrats—Bayard, of Delaware; Voorhees, of Indiana; Morgan, of Alabama; Ransom and Vance, of North Carolina; Butler and Hampton, of South Carolina; Beck, of Kentucky; Lamar and George, of Mississippi; and Cockrell and Vest, of Missouri.
The Senate was controlled by the Republicans, there being forty Republican and thirty-six Democratic Senators; and Senator George F. Edmunds, of Vermont, was chosen President pro tempore. In the House the Democrats had the majority, and John G. Carlisle was chosen Speaker.
Senator Edmunds is still living, and he has been for many years regarded as one of the foremost lawyers of the American bar. I know that in the Senate when I entered it, he was ranked as its leading lawyer. He was chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary of the Senate and, with Senator Thurman, of Ohio, dominated that committee. I became very intimately acquainted with him. He was dignified in his conversation and deportment, and I never knew him to say a vicious thing in debate.
I believe I had considerable influence with Senator Edmunds. He always seemed to have a prejudice against appropriations for the Rock Island (Illinois) Arsenal. He had never visited Rock Island, but he seemed to think that the money spent there was more or less wasted, and he was disposed to oppose appropriations for its maintenance. One day we were considering an appropriation bill carrying several items in favor of Rock Island, and I anticipated Senator Edmunds' objections. Sitting beside him, I asked him not to oppose these items. I told him that I did not think he was doing right by such a course. He asked me where they were in the bill and I showed them to him without saying a word. Just before we reached them I observed him rising from his seat and leaving the chamber. He remained away until the items were passed, then he returned, and the subject was never mentioned between us afterwards.
Senator Edmunds resigned before his last term expired. There were two reasons for his resignation, the principal one being the illness of his only daughter; but in addition, he had come to feel that the Senate was becoming less and less desirable each year, and began to lose interest in it. He did not like the rough-and-tumble methods of debate of a number of Western Senators who were coming to take a more prominent place in the Senate. On one occasion Senator Plumb, of Kansas, attacked Senator Edmunds most violently, and without any particular reason.