A speech of such vigor of opinion was not without marked effect. There was a disposition among the less radical Republicans to rate it as imprudent, and there were some attempts at rebuking Mr. Chandler for being so outspoken. He received these criticisms good-humoredly, but felt confident of his position and constantly defended it. The effect of his demonstration on the Democratic side was marked; the new Senator from Michigan surprised his political opponents by the directness and force of his attack, but won from them the respect always accorded to boldness and candor. Mr. Chandler also showed spirit on little as well as great occasions. In the latter part of the following April, the Democrats attempted to coerce the Republicans into voting upon the same bill for the admission of Kansas. Without any ill-temper, but with no lack of earnestness, Mr. Chandler arose, and said: "I understand gentlemen on the other side to say that no adjournment shall take place until this question is disposed of. If that is their determination I can assure them that no adjournment will take place until the 7th of June. When I say that no adjournment will take place until that time, I mean what I say. I propose to take a recess until 9 o'clock, and I advise gentlemen to bid farewell to their families for thirty days at least."
In 1858 fuel was added to the anti-slavery flame by the Dred Scott decision, in which the majority of the Judges of the Supreme Court affirmed, that as a matter of history the negroes at the time of the formation of the constitution "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect," that as a principle of law neither emancipated slaves nor the emancipated descendants of slaves were entitled to claim the rights and privileges which the constitution provides for and secures to citizens of the United States, and that under a correct constitutional construction acts excluding slavery from the territories were without validity. This utterance was rendered especially obnoxious by the fact that the court, while leaving Dred Scott in slavery on the ground that the United States tribunals had no jurisdiction in his case, practically asserted jurisdiction for the purpose of deciding (outside of the real issues of the trial as limited by its own finding) that Congress could not exclude slavery from the territories. In reference to this decision Mr. Chandler said in the Senate on the 17th of February, 1859:
What did General Jackson do when the Supreme Court declared the United States Bank constitutional? Did he bow in deference to the opinion of the court? No, ... he said he would construe the constitution for himself, that he was sworn to do it. I shall do the same thing. I have sworn to support the Constitution of the United States, and I have sworn to support it as the fathers made it and not as the Supreme Court have altered it. And I never will swear allegiance to that.
In October, 1859, "Old John Brown" made his memorable attempt to liberate the enslaved negroes of the South by the descent upon Harper's Ferry. The rashness of his unaided attack on a giant wrong is protected from ridicule by a heroism worthy of Thermopylæ and by a death which Sidney's last hours did not surpass in moral grandeur. Mr. Chandler, with deep respect for Brown's motives and the unique simplicity of his character, was earnest in condemnation of his methods and of the utter foolhardiness of his effort. Congress was not in session when Brown seized Harper's Ferry and convulsed Virginia with fright, and Mr. Chandler was not in Washington. When Congress did meet in December, Brown had just been hanged, and the excitement was still feverish. A Senate committee, consisting of Mason of Virginia, Jefferson Davis, Fitch of Indiana, Democrats, and Collamer and Doolittle, Republicans, was at once appointed to investigate the raid, and while the resolution providing for it was under consideration Mr. Chandler made one of his telling speeches. In it he thus ridiculed "the reign of terror" at the South:
Senators ask us why we have no sympathy with Virginia in this instance. Sir, we do not understand this case at all. What are the facts? Seventeen white men and five unwilling negroes surround and capture a town of 2,000 people, with a United States armory, any quantity of arms and ammunition, and with 300 men employed in it—as I am informed, employed in it under a civil officer—and hold it for two days. These I understand to be the facts, and you ask, Why have we not sympathy? We do not understand any such case as that. The Senator from Mississippi (Mr. Brown) asks, What would we say if North Carolina and Virginia were to attack the armory at Springfield? I do not know what is the population of Springfield, but I will guarantee if any seventeen or twenty-two of the Generals ... of the States of Virginia and North Carolina were to attack Springfield, if there was not a man within five miles of there, the women would bind them in thirty minutes and would not ask sympathy and the matter would not be deemed of sufficient importance to ask for a committee of investigation on the part of the corporation. Why, sir, Governor Wise compared the people of Harper's Ferry to sheep, as the public press state. That is a libel on the sheep. For I never saw a flock of fifty or a hundred sheep in my life that had not a belligerent ram among them. We do not understand any such panic as this. If seventeen or one hundred men were to attack a town of the size of Harper's Ferry anywhere throughout the region with which I am acquainted, they would simply be put in jail in thirty minutes, and then they would be tried for their crimes and they would be punished and there would be no row made about it.
The pointed passage of the speech was the one in which he thanked a Southern Governor for demonstrating so conspicuously that treason was a crime punishable by death. He said,
I am in favor of the resolution because the first execution for treason that has ever occurred in the United States has just taken place. John Brown has been executed as a traitor in the State of Virginia, and I want it to go upon the records of the Senate in the most solemn manner to be held up as a warning to traitors, come they from the North, South, East or West. Dare to raise your impious hands against this government, its constitution and its laws—and you hang!... Threats have been made year after year for the last thirty years, that if certain events happen this Union will be dissolved. It is no small matter to dissolve this Union. It means a bloody revolution or it means a halter. It means the successful overturn of this government or it means the fate of John Brown, and I want that to go solemnly on the record of this Senate!
These were the speeches of a man untried in public life and still in the early years of his first Congressional term. The Senate which he thus addressed listened also to Charles Sumner's magnificent philippics—blows "struck with the club of Hercules entwined with flowers," to the philosophic eloquence of Seward in his moral prime, to Wade's sturdy fearlessness of speech, to the wit of Hale, and to the vigorous oratory of Fessenden. But no man measured more accurately than Zachariah Chandler the political forces of that day, no man branded the hatching treason with his blunt precision and homely power, and no man asserted with more boldness the courage and the purpose of the North. In that hour resolute words were useful in themselves; but the lapse of twenty years has shown that Mr. Chandler was then as clear-sighted as he was intrepid in spirit and plain in speech.
This unsparing denunciation of treason to plotting traitors was not without personal peril. Mr. Chandler became a Senator at a time when the South had unleashed its brutality at Washington and regarded resistance to its demands as justifying violence and insult. Horace Greeley, while visiting Washington, was assaulted and injured in the Capitol grounds by Rust of Arkansas, on account of some criticisms in the Tribune on Congressional action. Preston Brooks committed (on the 22d of May, 1856) his assault on Charles Sumner in the Senate chamber, a crime which was publicly upheld by Toombs, Slidell, Davis and other Southern leaders, and which led South Carolina to unanimously re-elect the ruffian to the House when he resigned after the adoption of a vote of censure. Henry Wilson's denunciation of this attack upon his colleague as "brutal, murderous, and cowardly" was followed by a challenge from Brooks, to which he responded by arming himself and by a note declaring that while he repudiated the duelling code he "religiously believed in the right of self-defense in the broadest sense." John Woodruff, a Connecticut Representative, having stigmatized Brooks's act as a "mean achievement of cowardice," was tendered a duelling challenge which he declined to receive. Anson Burlingame pursued another course. Of the assault on the Massachusetts Senator, he said: "I denounce it in the name of the constitution it violates. I denounce it in the name of the sovereignty of Massachusetts, which was stricken down by the blow. I denounce it in the name of humanity. I denounce it in the name of civilization, which it outraged. I denounce it in the name of that fair play which bullies and prize-fighters respect." To this the response was a challenge from Brooks, which Mr. Burlingame accepted, and, selecting Canada as the spot for the meeting, had the satisfaction of seeing the representative of South Carolina chivalry refuse to abide by the code he had himself invoked. William McKee Dunn, of Indiana, was challenged by Rust, of Arkansas, for words spoken in the House, and, naming "rifles at sixty paces" as the weapons, learned that such was not the "satisfaction" desired by Southern "gentlemen." Owen Lovejoy denounced the crimes of slavery in front of the Speaker's desk in the House, with the fists of angry Southerners shaking in his face, and amid their yells and threats. Potter, of Wisconsin, cooled off the hot blood of Roger A. Pryor by accepting his duelling challenge and selecting bowie-knives as the weapons. Amid all this there was much chronic servility among Northern members to Southern insolence, which gave pungent force to Thaddeus Stevens's sarcasm (uttered during the prolonged contest over the Speakership of the Thirty-sixth Congress) that he could not blame the South for trying intimidation, for they had "tried it fifty times and fifty times, and had always found weak and recreant tremblers in the North." Mr. Chandler entered the Senate with the firm resolution that he would not be bullied, that he would not submit to bluster, and that if occasion came he would fight without hesitation. His decision did not spring from love of quarrel or mere passion, but was the fruit of mature reflection and was based upon a clear purpose. He saw that the Southerners in Congress vapored and threatened for effect; that they believed that Northern men would not fight, and that they would be permitted to offer unlimited insults without arousing resentment. The public sentiment of the North was against duelling or fisticuffs, and the Southerners supposed—and sincerely—that this was the result of cowardice and not of conscience. This condition of opinion was of decided assistance to the conspirators who were plotting disunion at the South, and the stigma of pusillanimity was the source of no little practical weakness with the North. Under these circumstances Mr. Chandler fully determined—as did Mr. Wade, Mr. Hamlin, Mr. Cameron, and one or two other Senators—that if occasion offered, so that justice should be clearly upon his side, he would fight. This was a deliberate purpose, not reached through any admiration for fighting men, nor through belief in force as a method of argument, but from a conviction that the moral effect of such a demonstration of the personal courage of Northern representatives would be of service to the nation. Mr. Chandler knew himself to be physically capable of meeting almost any assailant; he prepared himself for a collision by muscular exercise and the practice of marksmanship, and, while he did not seek, he made no effort to avoid, an encounter.
On February 5, 1858, there was a personal altercation in the House of Representatives between Galusha A. Grow, of Pennsylvania, afterward Speaker, and Lawrence M. Keitt, of South Carolina, who was killed in battle, during the rebellion, at the head of a Confederate brigade. Mr. Harris of Illinois, an Anti-Nebraska Democrat, had offered a resolution for the appointment of a committee to ascertain by an investigation whether the Lecompton constitution was the work in any just sense of the people of Kansas. Coming from such a source, the resolution would have received a majority of votes in the House, but its opponents resorted to parliamentary stratagem to prevent its passage, "filibustering" for several hours. Amid the attending excitement there was a very heated colloquy between Grow and Keitt, which ended in blows on both sides, Keitt being the first to strike. Grow resisted, and a general melee followed which was participated in by many members. The affair was afterward adjusted, and both apologized to the House but without apologizing to each other. This occurrence impressed Mr. Chandler deeply, and, as soon as he heard of it, he went to the Hall of Representatives, and assured Mr. Grow of his approval and his readiness to render any desired aid. It was the first outbreak of the kind which came within his personal observation, and confirmed him in his belief that it was the duty of the Northern minority to resist all encroachments upon their personal and official rights. Not long afterward a colloquy occurred in the Senate between Simon Cameron and Senator Green of Missouri, in which the lie was given, and only the prompt interference of Vice-President Breckenridge, who was in the chair, prevented a personal altercation. The Democrats were insisting upon a vote upon the bill to admit Kansas under the Lecompton constitution, while the Republicans were endeavoring to secure longer time for debate. It was about 4 o'clock in the morning when the offensive words were exchanged. Vice-President Breckenridge at once rapped with his gavel, and commanded both Green and Cameron to take their seats. After order had been restored, Senator Green continued his remarks, and, referring to Cameron, said: "I will not use a harsh word now; it will be out of order. But if I get out of this Senate chamber I shall use a harsh word in his (Cameron's) teeth, for there no rule of order will correct me.... As to any question of veracity between that Senator and myself, in five minutes after the Senate adjourns we can settle it." Mr. Cameron's reply was: "I desire to say, if these remarks are intended as a threat, they have no effect upon me." The debate was continued at length, but a small group of Senators was soon after seen in earnest conference in a cloak-room. It was composed of Senators Chandler, Cameron, Wade and Broderick, and the result of the consultation was, that by the advice of his friends Mr. Cameron armed himself, and prepared for self-defense in case he was attacked by Green. The Senate remained in continuous session for over eighteen hours, and for some time after the quarrel. Meanwhile Mr. Green's passion cooled, and the expected collision did not take place (explanations were ultimately made by both in the Senate chamber). But when the Senate adjourned, Mr. Chandler accompanied Mr. Cameron to his lodgings, as a measure of precaution. Out of this affair grew a formal agreement between Mr. Chandler, Mr. Cameron and Mr. Wade, which was reduced to writing, and sealed with the understanding that its contents should not be made public until after the death of all the signers. His copy of this historic document is still among Mr. Chandlers papers, but it will not be made public while Mr. Cameron lives. Of its purport one,[10] who knew intimately the men and the circumstances and motives of this act, has written: