Zachariah Chandler: An Outline Sketch of His Life and Public Services

by Unknown

With diffidence I attempt the task that falls to me. The time is too short to admit even a brief sketch of a life so long in deeds, so eventful in all that makes material for biography; a life full, not only of incidents, but of crises; moreover, I am neither a senator nor a statesman, and feel incompetent to review a career which only the keen eye of one versed in affairs of state can apprehend or appreciate in its full significance; but, if you will indulge me, I will, without conscious partiality or partisanship, calmly give utterance to the unspoken verdict of the common people as to our departed fellow-citizen; and try to hint at least a few of the lessons of a life that suggests some of the secrets of success.

History is the most profitable of all studies, and biography is the key of history. In the lives of men, philosophy teaches us by examples. In the analysis of character, we detect the essential elements of success and discern the causes of failure. Virtue and vice impress us most in concrete forms; and hence even the best of all books enshrines as its priceless jewel the story of the only perfect life.

To draw even the profile of Mr. Chandler's public career the proper limits of this address do not allow. There is material, in the twenty years of his senatorial life, which could be spread through volumes. His advocacy of the great Northwest, whose champion he was; his master-influence, first as a member, and then as the chairman of the Committee of Commerce; his bold, keen dissection of the Harper's Ferry panic; his sagacious organization of the presidential contests; his plain declarations of loyalty to the Union as something which must be maintained at cost both of treasure and of blood; his large practical faculty for administration, made so conspicuous during stormy times; his efficiency as a member of the standing Committee on the Conduct of the War; his exposure of those who were responsible for its failures, and his defense of those who promoted its successes, his marked influence in changing not only the channel of public sentiment, but the current of events; his watchful guardianship of popular interests, political and financial; his intelligence and activity in senatorial debates; his attentive and persistent study of the problem of reconstruction; and his fearless resistance to all Southern aggression and intimidation, are among the salient points of that long and eventful public service, whose scope is too wide to allow at this hour even a hasty survey.

But, happily, it is quite needless that in such a presence I should trace in detail the events of his life; to us he was no stranger; and the mark he has made upon our memory and our history is too deep not to last. His footprints are not left upon treacherous and shifting quicksands; and no wave of oblivion is likely soon to wash them away.

Zachariah Chandler had nearly completed his sixty-sixth year; forty-six years he had been a resident of the City of the Straits. New Hampshire was the State of his nativity: Michigan was, in an emphatic sense, the State of his adoption. In our city his first success was won in mercantile pursuits, where also was the first field for the exhibition of his energy, ability and integrity. Here, as this century passed its meridian hour, he passed the great turning-point in his career; and his large capacities and energies were diverted into a political channel. First, Mayor of the city, then nominated for Governor; when, more than twenty years ago, a successor was sought for Lewis Cass in the Senate, this already marked man became the first representative of the Republican party of this State in that august body at Washington. There, for a period of eighteen years, he sat among the mightiest men of the nation, steadily moving toward the acknowledged leadership of his party, and the inevitable command of public affairs. After three terms in the Senate, his seat was occupied for a short time by another; but, upon the resignation of Mr. Christiancy, he was, with no little enthusiasm, re-elected, and was in the midst of a fourth term, when suddenly he was no more numbered among the living. It may be doubled whether, at this time, any one man, from Maine to Mexico, swayed the popular mind and will with a more potent sceptre than did he; and many confidently believe and affirm that, had death spared him, he would have been lifted by the omnipotent voice and vote of the people to the Presidency of the Republic.

Mr. Chandler took his seat in the Senate in those days of strife when the storm was gathering, which, on the memorable 12th of April, 1861, burst upon our heads, in the first gun fired at Fort Sumter. He entered the Senate chamber, to take the oath of office, in company with some whose names are now either famous or infamous for all time. On the one hand, there was Jefferson Davis; on the other Hannibal Hamlin, Charles Sumner, Benjamin F. Wade and Simon Cameron.

Those were days when history is made fast. Every day throbbed with big issues. Kansas was a battle-ground of freedom; and the awful struggle between State Sovereignty and National Unity was gathering, like a volcano, for its terrible outbreak. The Republican Senator from Michigan took in, at a glance, the situation of affairs. Devoted as he was to the State, whose able advocate and zealous friend he was; earnest and persistent as he was, in promoting the commercial and industrial interests of the lake region; he was yet too much a patriot to forget the whole country; and as the great conflict, which Mr. Seward named "irrepressible," moved steadily on toward its crisis, he armed himself for the encounter and planted his feet upon the rock of unalterable allegiance to the Union; and from that position he never swerved.

Mr. Chandler was a zealous party-man; in the eyes of some he was a partisan, in the strenuous advocacy of some measures; but I believe that when history frames her ultimate, impartial verdict, she will accord to him a candid, conscientious adherence to what he believed to be a fundamental principle, absolutely essential to our national life. He saw the South breathing hot hate toward the North, planning and threatening to rend the Union asunder. To him it was not a question simply of liberty and slavery, of sectional prejudice, of political animosity; but a matter of life or of death. He saw the scimitar of secession raised in the gigantic hand of war—but what was it that it was proposed to cleave in twain at one blow? A living, vital form! the body of a nation, with its one grand framework, its common brain and heart, its network of arteries and veins and nerves. It was not dissection as of a corpse—it was vivisection as of a corpus—that sharp blade, if it fell, would cut through a living form, and leave two quivering, bleeding parts, instead. Divide the nation? Why, the same mountain ranges run down our eastern and western shores; the same great rivers, which are the arteries of our commerce, flow through both sections. Our republic is a unit by the decree of nature, that marked our nation's area and arena by the lines of territorial unity, a unit by the decree of history that records one series of common experiences; and, aside from the decree of nature and of history, it is one by the decree of necessity, for we could not survive the separation. Those were the decisive days, and they showed whose heart was yearning toward the child; and God said, as he saw a unanimous North pleading with Him to arrest the falling sword and spare the living body of a nation's life—"Give her the child, for she is the mother thereof!"

Mr. Chandler has been charged with violent and even vindictive feeling toward what he deemed disloyalty and treason.