We have now spent three months and a half in this Capitol, not without certain results. We have shown to the people of this nation just what the Democratic party means. The people have been informed as to your objects, ends, and aims. By fraud and violence, by shot-guns and tissue ballots, you hold a present majority in both Houses of Congress, and you have taken an early opportunity to show what you intend to do with that majority thus obtained. You are within sight of the promised land, but like Moses of old we propose to send you up into the mountain to die politically.
Mr. President, we are approaching the end of this extra session, and its record will soon become history. The acts of the Democratic party, as manifested in this Congress, justify me in arraigning it before the loyal people of the United States on the political issues which it has presented, as the enemy of the nation and as the author and abettor of rebellion.
1. I arraign the Democratic party for having resorted to revolutionary measures to carry out its partisan projects, by attempting to coerce the Executive by withholding supplies, and thus accomplishing by starvation the destruction of the government which they had failed to overthrow by arms.
2. I arraign them for having injured the business interests of the country by forcing the present extra session, after liberal compromises were tendered to them prior to the close of the last session.
3. I arraign them for having attempted to throw away the results of the recent war by again elevating State over National Sovereignty. We expended $5,000,000,000 and sacrificed more than 300,000 precious lives to put down this heresy and to perpetuate the national life. They surrendered this heresy at Appomattox, but now they attempt to renew this pretension.
4. I arraign them for having attempted to damage the business interests of the country by forcing silver coin into circulation, of less value than it represents, thus swindling the laboring-man and the producer, by compelling them to accept 85 cents for a dollar, and thus enriching the bullion-owners at the expense of the laborer. Four million dollars a day is paid for labor alone, and by thus attempting to force an 85 cent dollar on the laboring-man you swindle him daily out of $600,000. Twelve hundred million dollars are paid yearly for labor alone, and by thus attempting to force an 85-cent dollar on the laboring-man you swindle him out of $180,000,000 a year. The amount which the producing class would lose is absolutely incalculable.
5. I arraign them for having removed without cause experienced officers and employes of this body, some of whom served and were wounded in the Union army, and for appointing men who had in the rebel army attempted to destroy this government.
6. I arraign them for having instituted a secret and illegitimate tribunal, the edicts of which have been made the supreme governing power of Congress in defiance of the fundamental principles of the constitution. The decrees of this junta are known although its motives are hidden.
7. I arraign them for having held up for public admiration that arch-rebel, Jefferson Davis, declaring that he was inspired by motives as sacred and as noble as animated Washington; and as having rendered services in attempting to destroy the Union which will equal in history Grecian fame and Roman glory. [Laughter on the Democratic side and in portions of the galleries.] You can laugh. The people of the North will make you laugh on the other side of your faces!
8. I arraign them for having undertaken to blot from the statute-book of the nation wise laws, rendered necessary by the war and its results, and insuring "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" to the emancipated freedmen, who are now so bulldozed and ku-kluxed that they are seeking peace in exile, although urged to remain by shot-guns.
9. I arraign them for having attempted to repeal the wise legislation which excludes those who served under the rebel flag from holding commissions in the army and navy of the United States.
10. I arraign them for having introduced a large amount of legislation for the exclusive benefit of the States recently in rebellion, which, if enacted, would bankrupt the national Treasury.
11. I arraign them for having conspired to destroy all that the Republican party has accomplished. Many of them breaking their oaths of allegiance to the United States and pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honors to overthrow this government, they failed, and thus lost all they pledged.
Call a halt. The days of vaporing are over. The loyal North is aroused and their doom is sealed.
I accept the issue on these arraignments distinctly and specifically before the citizens of this great republic. As a Senator of the United States and as a citizen of the United States, I appeal to the people. It is for those citizens to say who is right and who is wrong. I go before that tribunal confident that the Republican party is right and that the Democratic party is wrong.
They have made these issues; not we; and by them they must stand or fall. This is the platform which they have constructed, not only for 1879 but for 1880. They cannot change it, for we will hold them to it. They have made their bed, and we will see to it that they lie thereon.
FOOTNOTES:
[41] The Michigan Republicans have done well. Their platform has about it the clear ring of honest conviction, undulled by any half-hearted and halting compromise. So lucid and courageous an enunciation of the financial creed of the Republican party has certainly not been made this year, nor has the irreconcilable hostility of the party to all forms of tampering with public credit and national honor been so resolutely and judiciously stated as by the Detroit Convention.—New York Times, June 14, 1878.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE CAMPAIGN OF 1879—MR. CHANDLER'S LAST DAYS—DEATH AND FUNERAL.
The closing hours of the Forty-fifth Congress and the extra session of the Forty-sixth may be said to have revealed Mr. Chandler to the country. While he had been well known he had not been truly known. He then became a central figure in the public attention. His utterances were universally discussed, and with discussion came a juster appreciation of the man. The people at last saw him as he was, the possessor of strong common-sense, a cool and indefatigable worker, a sagacious and fearless leader, a man who had never sacrificed principle to policy, who had never compromised with crimes against liberty or the nation's honor, whose most malignant enemies had not accused him of being influenced by corrupt motives, and one gifted with the rare capacity of saying the right thing at the right time in terse, impromptu sentences, in epigrams which became political mottoes.
The campaign of 1879 followed closely upon the mid-summer adjournment of Congress, and invitations to address the people came to Mr. Chandler from a score of States. No public speaker was in more urgent demand, or aroused a keener interest. The popular gatherings, which, during the summer and fall, greeted his every appearance from the shores of the Great Lakes to the Atlantic seaboard, amounted to a genuine ovation. His first address was delivered before the Republican State Convention of Wisconsin, at Madison, on July 23. In August he made six speeches in Maine to immense mass meetings. In September he visited Ohio, and spoke at Sandusky, Toledo, Warren, Cleveland, and other important points. His audiences in that State were uniformly large, and his Warren speech was delivered in the afternoon to an enormous crowd, one of the greatest ever called together upon such an occasion in the Western Reserve. He was greatly pleased by an invitation, which came to him at about this time, from Senator G. F. Hoar, to visit Massachusetts in October. It was unexpected, and he had believed that the Republican leaders in the Bay State were inclined to look upon him with distrust. He accepted it promptly, and spoke to enthusiastic audiences in Boston, Worcester, Lynn and Lowell. Some brief remarks made at a dinner of the Middlesex Club, in which he urged the national importance of the pending contest, were especially useful in stimulating Republican activity and directing it into proper channels. He next addressed meetings in New York at Flushing, Albany, Troy, Potsdam, Lowville and Buffalo, amid increasing public interest. On returning home from that State in the last days of October, he revisited Wisconsin, and spoke to great crowds at Milwaukee, Oshkosh and Janesville, returning to Chicago, where, on the evening of October 31st, he made the last address of his life.
The striking evidences of his hold upon the popular confidence, which manifested themselves during the summer and fall of 1879, led to the frequent mention of Mr. Chandler as a possible presidential candidate in 1880. His friends in his own State were eager to formally present his name to the National Convention, and the Republican press of Michigan united in earnestly advocating such a course. This movement also manifested strength in other States, and steadily increased in importance up to the hour of his death. Although Mr. Chandler was not insensible to this growing sentiment, little or nothing was done by him to promote it; he favored the renomination of General Grant, and the presidential ambition he rated as the most fatal malady to which public men are subject.[42] To one friend, who spoke of the popular feeling and his own desire in this matter, Mr. Chandler replied: "You may vaccinate me with the presidency and scratch it deep, but it won't take." To another he said: "No! no! Men recover from the small-pox, cholera and yellow fever, but never from the presidential fever. I hope I will never get it." The movement in that direction, which his death so abruptly checked, was spontaneous and sincere, and that it was growing in strength was undoubted. What limit that growth might have reached and with what result can only be conjectured.