American politics (non-partisan) from the beginning to date

by Thomas V. Cooper; Hector T. Fenton

Our law-makers are declared to be reeking with corruption or blinded by ambition, and greed and faithlessness are held up to the world as the chief characteristics of our officials. From this painful picture we turn to the history of those who ruled in the earlier and what we call the better days of the Republic, and the contrast sinks us deep in the slough of despair. I am not prepared to say that much of the complaint against the political degeneracy of the times, and the standard of our officials, is not just; but in the face of all that can be charged against the present, I regard it as the very best age this nation has ever known. The despairing accusations made against our public servants are not the peculiar creation of the times in which we live, and the allegation of wide spread demoralization in the body politic, was no more novel in any of the generations of the past than it is now. We say nothing of our rulers that was not said of those whose memory we so sacredly worship. License is one of the chief penalties, indeed the sole defect of liberty, and it has ever asserted its prerogatives with tireless industry. It was as irreverent with Washington as it is with Grant. It racked Jefferson and Jackson, and it pained and scarred Lincoln and Chase, and their compatriots. It criticised the campaigns and the heroes of the revolutionary times, as we criticise the living heroes of our day. It belittled the statesmen of every epoch in our national progress, just as we belittle those who are now the guardians of our free institutions. Perhaps we have more provocation than they had; but if so, they were less charitable, for the tide of ungenerous criticism and distrust has known no cessation. I believe we have had seasons when our political system was more free from blemish than it is now, and that we have had periods when both government and people maintained a higher standard of excellence than we can boast of; but it is equally true that we have, in the past, sounded a depth in the decline of our political administration that the present age can never reach.

You must soon appear in the active struggles for the perpetuity of free government, and some of the sealed chapters of the past are most worthy of your careful study. I would not efface one good inspiration that you have gathered from the lives and deeds of our fathers, whose courage and patriotism have survived their infirmities. Whatever we have from them that is purifying or elevating, is but the truth of history; and when unborn generations shall have succeeded us, no age in all the long century of freedom in the New World, will furnish to them higher standards of heroism and statesmanship than the defamed and unappreciated times in which we live. And when the future statesmen shall turn to history for the most unselfish and enlightened devotion to the Republic, they will pause over the records we have written, and esteem them the brightest in all the annals of man’s best efforts for his race. We can judge of the true standard of our government and people only by a faithful comparison with the true standard of the men and events which have passed away. You find widespread distrust of the success of our political system. It is the favorite theme of every disappointed ambition, and the vanquished of every important struggle are tempted, in the bitterness of defeat, to despair of the government. Would you know whence comes this chronic or spasmodic political despair? If so, you must turn back over the graves of ages, for it is as old as free government. Glance at the better days of which we all have read, and to which modern campaign eloquence is so much indebted. Do not stop with the approved histories of the fathers of the Republic. They tell only of the transcendent wisdom and matchless perfections of those who gave us liberty and ordained government of the people. Go to the inner temple of truth. Seek that which was then hidden from the nation, but which in these days of newspapers and free schools, and steam and lightning, is an open record so that he who runs may read. Gather up the few public journals of a century ago, and the rare personal letters and sacred diaries of the good and wise men whose examples are so earnestly longed for in the degenerate present, and your despair will be softened and your indignation at current events will be tempered, as you learn that our history is steadily repeating itself, and that with all our many faults, we grow better as we progress.

Do you point to the unfaltering courage and countless sacrifices of those who gave us freedom, so deeply crimsoned with their blood? I join you in naming them with reverence, but I must point to their sons, for whom we have not yet ceased to mourn, who equalled them in every manly and patriotic attribute. When wealth and luxury were about us to tempt our people to indifference and ease, the world has no records of heroism which dim the lustre of the achievements we have witnessed in the preservation of the liberty our fathers bequeathed to us. Have corruption and perfidy stained the triumphs of which we boast? So did corruption and perfidy stain the revolutionary “times that tried men’s souls.” Do we question the laurels with which our successful captains have been crowned by a grateful country? So did our forefathers question the just distinction of him who was first in war and first in peace, and he had not a lieutenant who escaped distrust, nor a council of war that was free from unworthy jealousies and strife. Do politicians and even statesmen teach the early destruction of our free institutions? It is the old, old story; “the babbling echo mocks itself.” It distracted the cabinets of Washington and the elder Adams. It was the tireless assailant of Jefferson and Madison. It made the Jackson administration tempestuous. It gave us foreign war under Polk. It was a teeming fountain of discord under Taylor, Pierce and Buchanan. It gave us deadly fraternal conflict under Lincoln. Its dying throes convulsed the nation under Johnson. The promise of peace, soberly accepted from Grant, was the crown of an unbroken column of triumphs over the distrust of every age, that was attacking free government. Do we complain of violent and profligate legislation? Hamilton, the favorite statesman of Washington, was the author of laws, enacted in time of peace, which could not have been enforced in our day even under the necessities and passions of war. And when the judgment of the nation repealed them, he sought to overthrow the popular verdict, because he believed that the government was overthrown. Almost before order began after the political chaos of the revolution, the intensest struggles were made, and the most violent enactments urged, for mere partisan control. Jefferson, the chief apostle of government of the people, did not always cherish supreme faith in his own work. He trembled at the tendencies to monarchy, and feared because of “the dupery of which our countrymen have shown themselves susceptible.” He rescued the infant Republic from the centralization that was the lingering dregs of despotism, and unconsciously sowed the seeds which ripened into States’ rights and nullification under Jackson, and into rebellion under Lincoln. But for the desperate conflict of opposing convictions as to the corner-stone of the new structure, Jefferson would have been more wise and conservative. He was faithful to popular government in the broadest acceptation of the theory. He summed it up in his memorable utterance to his neighbors when he returned from France. He said:—“The will of the majority, the natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man. Perhaps even this may sometimes err, but its errors are honest solitary and short-lived.” Politically speaking, with the patriots and statesmen of the “better days” of the Republic, their confidence in, or distrust of, the government, depended much upon whether Hamilton or Jefferson ruled. Dream of them as we may, they were but men, with the same ambition, the same love of power, the same infirmities, which we regard as the peculiar besetting sins of our times. If you would refresh your store of distrust of all political greatness, study Jefferson through Burr and Hamilton, or Washington and Hamilton through Jefferson, or Jackson through Clay and the second Adams, or Clay and Adams through Jackson and Randolph, and you will think better of the enlightened and liberal age in which you live.

No error is so common among free people as the tendency to depreciate the present and all its agencies and achievements.

We all turn with boundless pride to the Senate of Clay, Webster and Calhoun. In the period of their great conflicts, it was the ablest legislative tribunal the world has ever furnished. Rome and Greece in the zenith of their greatness, never gathered such a galaxy of statesmen. But not until they had passed away did the nation learn to judge them justly. Like the towering oaks when the tempest sweeps over the forest, the storm of faction was fiercest among their crowns, and their struggles of mere ambition, and their infirmities, which have been kindly forgotten, often made the thoughtless or the unfaithful despair of our free institutions. Not one of them escaped detraction or popular reprobation. Not one was exempt from the grave accusation of shaping the destruction of our nationality, and yet not one meditated deliberate wrong to the country on which all reflected so much honor. Calhoun despaired of the Union, because of the irrepressible antagonism of sectional interests, but he cherished the sincerest faith in free institutions. But when the dispassionate historian of the future is brought to the task of recording the most memorable triumphs of our political system, he will pass over the great Senate of the last generation, and picture in their just proportions the grander achievements of the heroes and statesmen who have been created in our own time. If we could draw aside the veil that conceals the future from us, and see how our children will judge the trials and triumphs of the last decade, we would be shamed at our distrust of ourselves and of the instruments we have employed to discharge the noblest duties. Our agents came up from among us. We knew them before they were great, and remembered well their common inheritance of human defects.—They are not greater than were men who had lived before them, but the nation has had none in all the past who could have written their names higher on the scroll of fame. We knew Lincoln as the uncouth Western campaigner and advocate; as a man of jest, untutored in the graces, and unschooled in statesmanship. We know him in the heat and strife of the political contests which made him our President, and our passions and prejudices survived his achievements. If his friends, we were brought face to face with his imperfections, and perhaps complained that he was unequal to impossibilities. If his enemies, we antagonized his policy and magnified his errors. We saw him wrestle with the greed of the place-man, with the ambitious warrior and with the disappointed statesman. We received his great act of Emancipation as a part of the mere political policy of his rule, and judged it by the light of prejudiced partisan convictions.

But how will those of the future judge him? When the hatreds which attached to his public acts have passed into forgetfulness; when his infirmities shall have been buried in oblivion, and when all his master monuments shall stand out in bold relief, made stainless by the generous offices of time, his name will be linked with devotion wherever liberty has a worshipper. And it will be measurably so of those who were his faithful co-laborers. It will be forgotten that they were at times weak, discordant, irresolute men when they had to confront problems the solution of which had no precedents in the world’s history. It will not be conspicuous in the future records of those great events, that the most learned and experienced member of his cabinet would have accepted peace by any supportable compromise, and that one of the most trusted of his constitutional advisers would have assented to peaceable dismemberment to escape internecine war. Few will ever know that our eminent Minister of War was one of those who was least hopeful of the preservation of the unity of the States, when armed secession made its first trial of strength with the administration. It will not be recorded how the surrender of Sumter was gravely discussed to postpone the presence of actual hostilities, and how the midsummer madness of rebellion made weakness and discord give way to might and harmony, by the first gun that sent its unprovoked messenger of death against the flag and defenders of the Union. It will not be remembered that faction ran riot in the highest places, and that the struggle for the throne embittered cabinet councils and estranged eminent statesmen, even when the artillery of the enemy thundered within sound of the Capital.

It will not be declared how great captains toyed with armies and decimated them upon the deadly altar of ambition, and how blighted hopes of preferment made jangled strife and fruitless campaigns. Nor will the insidious treason that wounded the cause of free government in the home of its friends, blot the future pages of our history in the just proportions in which the living felt and knew it. It will be told that in the hour of greatest peril, the administration was criticised, and the constitution and laws expounded, with supreme ability and boldness, while the meaner struggles of the cowardly and faithless will be effaced with the passions of the times that created them. And it is best that these defects of greatness should slumber with mortality. Not only the heroes and rulers, but the philanthropists as well, of all nations and ages, have had no exemption from the frailties which are colossal when in actual view. That we have been no better than we have seen ourselves, does not prove that we are a degenerate people. On the contrary, it teaches how much of good and great achievement may be hoped for with all the imperfections we see about us. In our unexampled struggle, when faction, and corruption, and faithlessness had done their worst, a regenerated nationality, saved to perfected justice, liberty and law, was the rich fruits of the patriotic efforts of the people and their trusted but fallible leaders. There is the ineffaceable record we have written for history, and it will be pointed to as the sublimest tribute the world has given to the theory of self-government. The many grievous errors and bitter jealousies of the conflict which weakened and endangered the cause; the venality that grew in hideous strength, while higher and holier cares gave it safety; the incompetency that grasped place on the tidal waves of devotion to country, and the widespread political evils which still linger as sorrowful legacies among us, will in the fulness of time be healed and forgotten, and only the grand consummation will be memorable. This generous judgment of the virtue and intelligence of the people, that corrects the varying efforts and successes of political prostitution; that pardons the defects of those who are faithful in purpose, and without which the greatest deeds would go down to posterity scarred and deformed, is the glass through which all must read of the noblest triumphs of men.

Our Republic stands alone in the whole records of civil government. In its theory, in its complete organization, and in its administration, it is wholly exceptional. We talk thoughtlessly of the overthrow of the old Republics, and the weak or disappointed turn to history for the evidence of our destruction. It is true that Republics which have been mighty among the powers of the earth have crumbled into hopeless decay, and that the shifting sands of time have left desolate places where once were omnipotence and grandeur. Rome made her almost boundless conquests under the banner of the Republic, and a sister Republic was her rival in greatness and splendor. They are traced obscurely on the pages of history as governments of the people. Rome became mistress of the world. Her triumphal arches of costliest art recorded her many victories. Her temples of surpassing elegance, her colossal and exquisite statues of her chieftains, her imposing columns dedicated to her invincible soldiery, and her apparently rapid progress toward a beneficent civilization, give the story of the devotion and heroism of her citizens. But Rome never was a free representative government. What is called her Republic was but a series of surging plebeian and patrician revolutions, of Tribunes, Consuls and Dictators, with seasons of marvelous prowess under the desperate lead of as marvelous ambition. The tranquillity, the safety, and the inspiration of a government of liberty and law, are not to be found in all the thousand years of Roman greatness. The lust of empire was the ruling passion in the ancient Republics. Hannibal reflected the supreme sentiment of Carthage when he bowed at the altar and swore eternal hostility to Rome; and Cato, the Censor, as faithfully spoke for Rome when he declared to an approving Senate—“Carthago delenda!” Such was the mission of what history hands down to us as the great free governments of the ancients. Despotism was the forerunner of corruption, and the proudest eras they knew were but hastening them to inevitable destruction.

The imperial purple soon followed in Rome, as a debauched people were prepared to accept in form what they had long accepted with the mockery of freedom. Rulers and subjects, noble and ignoble, church and state, made common cause to precipitate her decay. At last the columns of the barbarian clouded her valleys. The rude hosts of Attila, the “Scourge of God,” swarmed upon her, and their battle-axes smote the demoralized warriors of the tottering empire. The Goth and the Vandal jostled each other from the degraded sceptre they had conquered, and Rome was left widowed in her ruins. And Carthage!—she too had reared a great government by spoliation, and called it a Republic. It was the creation of ambition and conquest. Her great chieftain swept over the Pyrenees and the Alps with his victorious legions, and even made the gates of the Eternal City tremble before the impetuous advance of the Carthaginians. But Carthage never was free until the cormorant and the bittern possessed it, and the God of nations had “stretched out upon it the line of confusion and the stones of emptiness.” Conqueror and conquered are blotted from the list of the nations of the earth. We read of the Grecian Republic; but it was a libel upon free government. Her so-called free institutions consisted of a loose, discordant confederation of independent States, where despotism ruled in the name of liberty. Sparta has made romance pale before the achievements of her sons, but her triumphs were not of peace, nor were they for free government. Athens abolished royalty more than a thousand years before the Christian era, and made Athenian history most thrilling and instructive, but her citizens were strangers to freedom. The most sanguinary wars with sister States, domestic convulsions almost without cessation, and the grinding oppression of caste, were the chief offerings of the government to its subjects. Solon restored her laws to some measure of justice, only to be cast aside for the usurper. Greece yet has a name among the nations of the world, but her sceptre for which the mightiest once warred to enslave her people under the banner of the Republic, has long since been unfelt in shaping the destiny of mankind. Thus did Rome and Carthage and Greece fade from the zenith of distinction and power, before constitutional government of the people had been born among men. To-day there is not an established sister Republic that equals our single Commonwealth in population. Spain, France and Mexico have in turn worshiped Emperors, Kings, Dictators and popular Presidents. Yesterday they were reckoned Republics. What they have been made to-day, or what they will be made to-morrow, is uncertain and unimportant. They are not now, and never have been, Republics save in name, and never can be free governments until their people are transformed into law-creating and law-abiding communities. With them monarchy is a refuge from the license they miscall liberty, and despotism is peace. Switzerland is called a Republic. She points to her acknowledged independence four hundred years ago, but not until the middle of the present century did the Republic of the Alps find tranquillity in a constitutional government that inaugurated the liberty of law. Away on a rugged mountain-top in Italy, is the only Republic that has maintained popular government among the States of Europe. For more than fourteen hundred years a handful of isolated people, the followers of a Dalmatian hermit priest, have given the world an example of unsullied freedom. Through all the mutations, and revolutions, and relinings of the maps of Europe, the little territory of San Marino has been sacredly respected. Her less than ten thousand people have prospered without interruption; and civil commotions and foreign disputes or conflicts have been unknown among them. She has had no wealth to tempt the spoiler; no commerce or teeming valleys to invite conquest; no wars to breed dictators; no surplus revenues to corrupt her officials; and in patient and frugal industry her citizens have enjoyed the national felicity of having no history. They have had no trials and no triumphs, and have made civilization better only by the banner of peace they have worshipped through all the convulsions and bloody strife of many centuries.

The world has but one Republic that has illustrated constitutional freedom in all its beneficence, power and grandeur, and that is our own priceless inheritance. As a government, our Republic has alone been capable of, and faithful to, representative free institutions, with equal rights, equal justice, and equal laws for every condition of our fellows. All the nations of the past furnish no history that can logically repeat itself in our advancement or decline. Created through the severest trials and sacrifices; maintained through foreign and civil war with unexampled devotion; faithful to law as the offspring and safety of liberty; progressive in all that ennobles our peaceful industry, and cherishing enlightened and liberal Christian civilization as the trust and pride of our citizens, for our government of the people, none but itself can be its parallel.