No one had ever seen that hardened veteran politician, Speaker of the House James G. Blaine, cry. But there he sat, with the tears streaming unashamedly down his cheeks, unable to conceal his emotions from the full view of the House Members and spectators. But few on the floor or in the galleries on that dramatic day in 1874 were paying much attention to Mr. Blaine, and most were making no attempt to hide their own tears. Democrats and Republicans alike, battle-scarred veterans of the Civil War and the violence of politics, sat in somber silence, as they listened to the urgent entreaties of the freshman Congressman from Mississippi. Speaking simply and clearly, without resorting to the customary rhetorical devices, his full, rich voice touched the hearts of every listener with its simple plea for amity and justice between North and South.
All were touched, yes, by his message; but stunned, too, by its impact—for Lucious Lamar of Mississippi was appealing in the name of the South’s most implacable enemy, the Radical Republican who had helped make the Reconstruction Period a black nightmare the South never could forget: Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Charles Sumner—who assailed Daniel Webster as a traitor for seeking to keep the South in the Union—who helped crucify Edmund Ross for his vote against the Congressional mob rule that would have ground the South and the Presidency under its heel—whose own death was hastened by the terrible caning administered to him on the Senate floor years earlier by Congressman Brooks of South Carolina, who thereupon became a Southern hero—Charles Sumner was now dead. And Lucius Lamar, known in the prewar days as one of the most rabid “fire-eaters” ever to come out of the deep South, was standing on the floor of the House and delivering a moving eulogy lamenting his departure!
For Charles Sumner, before he died, Lamar told his hushed audience,
believed that all occasion for strife and distrust between the North and South had passed away. . . . Is not that the common sentiment—or if it is not, ought it not to be—of the great mass of our people, North and South? . . . Shall we not, over the honored remains of . . . this earnest pleader for the exercise of human tenderness and charity, lay aside the concealments which serve only to perpetuate misunderstandings and distrust, and frankly confess that on both sides we most earnestly desire to be one . . . in feeling and in heart? . . . Would that the spirit of the illustrious dead whom we lament today could speak from the grave to both parties to this deplorable discord in tones which should reach each and every heart throughout this broad territory: “My countrymen! know one another, and you will love one another!”
There was an ominous silence—a silence of both meditation and shock. Then a spontaneous burst of applause rolled out from all sides. “My God, what a speech!” said Congressman Lyman Tremaine of New York to “Pig Iron” Kelly of Pennsylvania. “It will ring through the country.”
Few speeches in American political history have had such immediate impact. Overnight it raised Lamar to the first rank in the Congress and in the country; and more importantly it marked a turning point in the relations between North and South. Two weeks after the Sumner eulogy, Carl Schurz of Missouri rose before ten thousand citizens of Boston and hailed Lamar as the prophet of a new day in the relations between North and South. The Boston Globe called Lamar’s speech on Sumner “evidence of the restoration of the Union in the South”; and the Boston Advertiser said it was “the most significant and hopeful utterance that has been heard from the South since the war.”
It was inevitable that some, both North and South, would misunderstand it. Northerners whose political power depended on maintaining the Federal hegemony over the former Confederate states resisted any effort to heal sectional strife. James Blaine, when his tears were dry, was to write of the Sumner eulogy that “it was a mark of positive genius in a Southern representative to pronounce a fervid and discriminating eulogy upon Mr. Sumner, and skillfully interweave with it a defense of that which Mr. Sumner, like John Wesley, believed to be the sum of all villainies.”
Southerners to whom Charles Sumner symbolized the worst of the prewar Abolitionist movement and the postwar reconstruction felt betrayed. Several leading Mississippi newspapers, including the Columbus Democrat, the Canton Mail and the Meridian Mercury, vigorously criticized Lamar, as did many of his old friends, maintaining that he had surrendered Southern principle and honor. To his wife, Lamar wrote:
No one here thinks I lowered the Southern flag, but the Southern press is down on me. . . . Our people have suffered so much, have been betrayed so often by those in whom they had the strongest reason to confide, that it is but natural that they should be suspicious of any word or act of overture to the North by a Southern man. I know for once that I have done her good . . . that I have awakened sympathies where before existed animosities. If she condemns me, while I shall not be indifferent to her disapprobation, I shall not be . . . resentful. I shall be cheered by the thought that I have done a beneficial thing for her. It is time for a public man to try to serve the South, and not to subserve her irritated feelings. . . . I shall serve no other interest than hers, and will calmly and silently retire to private life if her people do not approve me.
Such attacks, however, were in the minority. It was generally recognized, North and South, that the speech which could have been a disaster was in fact a notable triumph. It was obvious that, moved by the strange forces of history and personal destiny, the man and the occasion had met that day in Washington.
Who was the man?
Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar was, in 1874, a “public man.” No petty issues, no political trivia, not even private affairs, were permitted to clutter up his intellect. No partisan, personal or sectional considerations could outweigh his devotion to the national interest and to the truth. He was not only a statesman but also a scholar and one of the few original thinkers of his day. Henry Adams considered him to be one of “the calmest, most reasonable and most amiable men in the United States, and quite unusual in social charm. Above all . . . he had tact and humor.” Henry Watterson, the famous Washington reporter, called him the “most interesting and lovable of men. . . . I rather think that Lamar was the biggest brained of all the men I have met in Washington.” And Senator Hoar once remarked:
The late Matthew Arnold used to say that American public men lacked what he called “distinction.” Nobody would have said that of Mr. Lamar. He would have been a conspicuous personality anywhere, with a character and quality of his own. He was a very interesting and very remarkable and very noble character.
The well-known Washington correspondent, William Preston Johnson, wrote: “The Lamars are Huguenot in origin. The fatal dowry of genius was on that house. All that came forth from it felt its touch, its inspiration, its triumph and some share of its wretchedness.” A roll call in his father’s home was an impressive experience; for Lucius Lamar’s uncles included Mirabeau Bonaparte, whose charge at San Jacinto broke the Mexican line and made him the second President of the Texas Republic; Jefferson Jackson, Thomas Randolph, and Lavoisier LeGrand, indicating in the christener a changing interest from history to politics and from politics to chemistry. But that fatal touch of genius and melancholia had marked his father, who, at thirty-seven, with a notable career in the Georgia Bar before him, in a period of intense depression, kissed his wife and children good-by, walked into his garden and shot himself.
A similar black thread of moodiness and depression ran throughout all of Lamar’s life. Although it never conquered him, his contemporaries observed his self-absorption, his sensitive and, on occasions, morose nature. His youth was on the whole, however, a happy one, on a plantation in the area where Joel Harris was to collect his Uncle Remus and Br’er Rabbit tales. Lamar himself was famous later for his stories of the rural South, as noted by Henry Adams in speaking of how effective a representative of the Confederacy Lamar would have made in London: “London society would have delighted in him; his stories would have won success; his manners would have made him loved; his oratory would have swept every audience.”
Lamar from the beginning under his mother’s direction showed a notable aptitude for study. Many years later he said, “Books! I was surrounded with books. The first book I remember having had put into my hands by my mother was Franklin’s Autobiography.” The second was Rollin’s History, the same History which nine-year-old John Quincy Adams had pondered over many years before. Lamar became well read in diplomacy and the law, but he was also passionately fond of light literature, as several correspondents discovered years later when they assisted Lamar in gathering several books which had accidentally spilled from his official briefcase as he entered the White House for a Cabinet meeting. They were all cheap novels!
Emory College, which Lamar attended, was a hotbed of states’ rights. Its president, a member of the celebrated Longstreet family, was a flaming follower of Calhoun, and his influence over Lamar, always strong, increased when Lamar married his daughter. When Longstreet left Georgia to take over the presidency of the State University at Oxford, Mississippi, Lamar accompanied him to practice law and to teach, and it was while at the university that Lamar was presented with the opportunity which commenced his public career.
On March 5, 1850, the Legislature of the State of Mississippi adopted a series of resolutions instructing the representatives of Mississippi to vote against the admission of California. When Senator Foote disregarded these instructions in a noticeable display of courage, Lamar was prevailed upon by a committee of states’ rights Democrats to debate the Senator upon the latter’s return to Mississippi to run for Governor. Lamar was only twenty-six years of age, new to the state and the political life of his day, and was given only a few hours to prepare for debate against one of the most skilled and aggressive politicians of the times. But his extemporaneous speech, in which he chastised Senator Foote for ignoring the instructions of the Mississippi Legislature (as he himself was to do twenty-eight years later), was a notable success, and at the end of the debate the students of the university “bore him away upon their shoulders.”
His election to Congress as a strong supporter of the doctrines of Calhoun and Jefferson Davis followed. In Congress, while Alexander Stephens, Robert Toombs, and other Southern Unionists were vainly seeking to stem the sectional tide, Lamar was violently pro-Southern. “Others may boast,” he said on the floor of the House, “of their widely extended patriotism, and their enlarged and comprehensive love of this Union. With me, I confess that the promotion of Southern interests is second in importance only to the preservation of Southern honor.” Some years later he said that he never entertained a doubt of the soundness of the Southern system until he found out that slavery could not stand a war. He did not proceed, however, on his course unmindful of its certain end. In a letter he wrote: “Dissolution cannot take place quietly. . . . When the sun of the Union sets it will go down in blood.”
By 1860 he passed, in the words of Henry Adams, “for the worst of the Southern fire-eaters.” Having lost all hope that the South could obtain justice in the Federal Union, he walked out of the Democratic Convention in Charleston with Jefferson Davis, helping to break still another link in the chain of Union. His prewar career reached its climax in 1861 when he drafted the ordinance of secession dissolving Mississippi’s ties with the Union. The wind had been sown; now Lamar and Mississippi were to reap the whirlwind.
On both it fell with equal violence. Certainly many of the trials and much of the agony which dogged the South in the years after the war were due to the loss in the struggle of those who might have been expected to assert the leadership of the region. Control in government had always been narrowly held in the South, compared to the North, and among the ruling families “the spilling of the wine” was especially heavy. Of the thirteen descendants of the first Lamar in America who served in the Confederate Armies with the rank of lieutenant colonel or above, seven perished in the war. Lamar’s youngest brother, supposedly the most brilliant, Jefferson Mirabeau, was killed as he leaped his horse over the enemy’s breastworks at Crampton’s Gap. His cousin John, one of the largest slaveholders in the South, fell near him. Two years later Lamar’s older brother, Thompson Bird, Colonel of the Fifth Florida, was killed in the bloody fighting at Petersburg. Lamar’s two law partners were both killed: Colonel Mott at Williamsburg where Lamar fought at his side, and James Autrey, in the slaughter at Murfreesboro. Symbolic of the dark days that were coming, the shattered office shingle bearing the names of the three partners was found floating in the river.
Lamar’s own military career was ended by an attack of apoplexy, a disease from which he suffered throughout his entire life and which hung over him like death in moments of high excitement. He served nearly all of the remainder of the war as a diplomatic agent for the Confederate Government.
With the end of the war which had blasted all of Lamar’s hopes and illusions, he was under strong pressure to leave the wreck of the past and go to another country. He felt, in the words of his biographer, Wirt Armistead Cate, that he was discredited—a leader who had carried his people into the wilderness from which there had been no return. But he followed Robert Lee’s advice to the leaders of the South to remain and “share the fate of their respective states,” and from 1865 to 1872 Lamar lived quietly in Mississippi teaching and practicing law, as his state passed through the bitter days of its reconstruction.
No state suffered more from carpetbag rule than Mississippi. Adelbert Ames, first Senator and then Governor, was a native of Maine, a son-in-law of the notorious “butcher of New Orleans,” Ben Butler. He admitted before a Congressional committee that only his election to the Senate prompted him to take up his residence in Mississippi. He was chosen Governor by a majority composed of freed slaves and Radical Republicans, sustained and nourished by Federal bayonets. One Cardoza, under indictment for larceny in New York, was placed at the head of the public schools and two former slaves held the offices of Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State. Vast areas of northern Mississippi lay in ruins. Taxes increased to a level fourteen times as high as normal in order to support the extravagances of the reconstruction government and heavy state and national war debts.
As he passed through these troubled times, Lamar came to understand that the sole hope for the South lay not in pursuing its ancient quarrels with the North but in promoting conciliation and in the development and restitution of normal Federal-state relations and the withdrawal of military rule. This in turn could only be accomplished by making the North comprehend that the South no longer desired—in Lamar’s words—to be the “agitator and agitated pendulum of American politics.” Lamar hoped to make the North realize that the abrogation of the Constitutional guarantees of the people of the South must inevitably affect the liberties of the people of the North. He came to believe that the future happiness of the country could only lie in a spirit of mutual conciliation and cooperation between the people of all sections and all states.
There were two forces in opposition to his policy. On the one hand were those Republican leaders who believed that only by waving the bloody shirt could they maintain their support in the North and East, particularly among the Grand Army of the Republic; and who were convinced by the elections of 1868 that, if the Southern states should once again be controlled by the Democrats, those states—together with their allies in the North—would make the Republicans a permanent minority nationally. On the other hand, there were those in the South who traveled the easy road to influence and popularity through pandering to and exploiting the natural resentment and bitterness of the defeated South against its occupiers.
In contrast, Lamar believed that “the only course I, in common with other Southern representatives have to follow, is to do what we can to allay excitement between the sections and to bring about peace and reconciliation.”
In 1872 he was elected to Congress, and his petition for a pardon from the disabilities imposed on all Confederate officials by the Fourteenth Amendment was granted. Sumner’s death, and the invitation of Representative Hoar of Massachusetts to pronounce the eulogy, furnished the ideal occasion for which Lamar had long waited to hold out the hand of friendship to the North. Everything conspired to insure his success: his prewar reputation as a disunionist, his service as a Confederate official, the fact that Sumner was widely hated in Mississippi and in the South, and his own exceptional skill as an orator. All these factors in his favor were reinforced by his impressive personal appearance—including, in the words of Henry Grady, “that peculiar swarthy complexion, pale but clear; the splendid gray eyes, the high cheekbones; dark brown hair, the firm fixed mouth.” His memorable eulogy of Sumner was Lucius Lamar’s first opportunity to demonstrate a new kind of Southern statesmanship. But it would not be his last.
Mississippians, on the whole, came either to understand and admire the sentiments of the Sumner eulogy, to respect Lamar’s sincerity if they did not admire it, or to forgive him for what they considered to be one serious error of judgment if they were strongly opposed to it. Riding a wave of popularity and the 1876 return to Democratic rule in Mississippi, Lamar was elected by the Legislature to the United States Senate. But even before he moved from the House to the Senate, Lamar again outraged many of his backers by abandoning his party and section on another heated issue.
The Hayes-Tilden Presidential contest of 1876 had been a bitter struggle, apparently culminating in a close electoral-vote victory for the Democrat Tilden. Although Hayes at first accepted his defeat with philosophic resignation, his lieutenants, with the cooperation of the Republican New York Times, converted the apparent certainty of Tilden’s election into doubt by claiming the closely contested states of South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida—and then attempted to convert that doubt into the certainty of Hayes’ election by procuring from the carpetbag governments of those three states doctored election returns. With rumors of violence and military dictatorship rife, Congress determined upon arbitration by a supposedly nonpartisan Electoral Commission—and Lucius Lamar, confident that an objective inquiry would demonstrate the palpable fraud of the Republican case, agreed to this solution to prevent a recurrence of the tragic conflict which had so aged his spirit and broadened his outlook.
But when the Commission, acting wholly along party lines, awarded the disputed states and the election to Hayes with 185 electoral votes to 184 for Tilden, the South was outraged. Four more years of Republican rule meant four more years of Southern bondage and exploitation, four more years before the South could regain her dignity and her rightful place in the nation. Lamar was accused of trading his vote and his section’s honor for a promise of a future position; he was accused of cowardice, of being afraid to stand up for his state when it meant a fight; and he was accused of deserting his people and his party in the very hour when triumph should have been at last rightfully theirs. His enemies, realizing that six years would pass before Senator-elect Lamar would be forced to run for re-election, vowed never to forget that day of perfidy.
But Lucius Lamar, a man of law and honor, could not now repudiate the findings, however shocking, of the Commission he had helped establish. He supported the findings of the Commission because he believed that only force could prevent Hayes’ inaugural and that it would be disastrous to travel that road again. It was better, he believed, for the South—in spite of provocation—to accept defeat on this occasion. He was skillful enough, however, to get Hayes committed to concessions for the South, including the withdrawal of military occupation forces and a return to Home Rule in key states. This genuine service to his state, on an occasion when many Southern politicians were talking of open defiance, was at first largely obscured. But unmoved by the storm of opposition which poured forth from Mississippi, Lamar braced himself in preparation for the most crucial test of his role as a nonsectional, nonpartisan statesman which lay ahead in the Senate.
No other high-ranking Confederate officer had yet entered the Senate. Nor had many Senators forgotten that nearly twenty years earlier Lamar was an extreme sectionalist Congressman, who had resigned his seat to draft the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession. The time was not auspicious for his return. The Republicans were already accusing the Democrats of harboring insurrectionists and traitors; and the Democratic contribution to increased intersectional distrust was a new breed of Southern demagogues, intolerant and vengeful, “sired by Reconstruction out of scalawags.”
As Senator Lamar, ill and fatigued, rested at home throughout much of 1877, a new movement was sweeping the South and West, a movement which would plague the political parties of the nation for a generation to come—“free silver.” The Moses of the silver forces, William Jennings Bryan, had not yet appeared on the scene; but “Silver Dick” Bland, the Democratic Representative from Missouri, was leading the way with his bill for the free coinage of all silver brought to the Mint. Inasmuch as a tremendous spurt in the production of the Western silver mines had caused its value in relation to gold to shrink considerably, the single purpose of the silver forces was clear, simple and appealing—easy, inflationary money.
It was a tremendously popular cause in Mississippi. The panic of 1873 had engulfed the nation into the most terrible depression it had ever suffered, and the already impoverished states of the South were particularly hard hit. Businesses failed by the thousands, unemployment increased and wages were reduced. Farm prices dropped rapidly from their high wartime levels and the farmers of Mississippi—desperate for cash—vowed support of any bill which would raise the price of their commodities, lower the value of their debts, and increase the availability of money. The South foresaw itself in a state of permanent indebtedness to the financial institutions of the East unless easy money could be made available to pay its heavy debts.
Vachel Lindsay’s poem expressed clearly the helplessness and bitterness with which the South and West watched the steadily increasing financial domination of the East:
And all these in their helpless days
By the dour East oppressed,
Mean paternalism
Making their mistakes for them,
Crucifying half the West,
Till the whole Atlantic coast
Seemed a giant spiders’ nest.
Silver suddenly acquired a political appeal as the poor man’s friend—in contrast to gold, the rich man’s money; silver was the money of the prairies and small towns, unlike gold, the money of Wall Street. Silver was going to provide an easy solution to everyone’s problems—falling farm prices, high interest rates, heavy debts and all the rest. Although the Democratic party since the days of Jackson and Benton had been the party of hard money, it rushed to exploit this new and popular issue—and it was naturally assumed that the freshman Democratic Senator from poverty-stricken Mississippi would enthusiastically join the fight.
But Lamar, the learned scholar and professor, approached the issue somewhat differently than his colleagues. Paying but little heed to the demands of his constituents, he exhausted all available treatises on both sides of the controversy. His study convinced him—possibly wrongly—that the only sound position was in support of sound money. The payment of our government’s debts—even to the “bloated bondholders” of Wall Street—in a debased, inflated currency, as the Bland Bill encouraged and the accompanying Matthews Resolution specifically provided, was an ethical wrong and a practical mistake, he felt, certain to embarrass our standing in the eyes of the world, and promoted not as a permanent financial program but as a spurious relief bill to alleviate the nation’s economic distress.
On January 24, 1878, in a courageous and learned address—his first major speech on the Senate floor—Lamar rejected the pleas of Mississippi voters and assailed elaborate rationalizations behind the two silver measures as artificial and exaggerated. And the following day he voted “No” on the Matthews Resolution, in opposition to his colleague from Mississippi, a Negro Republican of exceptional talents elected several years earlier by the old “carpetbag” Legislature.
Praise for Senator Lamar’s masterly and statesmanlike analysis of the issue emanated from many parts of the country, but from Mississippi came little but condemnation. On January 30, the State Legislature adopted a Memorial omitting all mention of Lamar but—in an obvious and deliberate slap—congratulating and thanking his colleague (to whom the white Democratic legislators normally were bitterly opposed) for voting the opposite way and thus reflecting “the sentiment and will of his constituents.” The Memorial deeply hurt Lamar, and he was little consoled by a letter from his close friend, the Speaker of the Mississippi House, who termed it “a damned outrage” but explained:
The people are under a pressure of hard times and scarcity of money, and their representatives felt bound to strike at something which might give relief, the how or wherefore very few of them could explain.
But the Legislature was not through. On February 4, a resolution was passed by both Houses instructing Lamar to vote for the Bland Silver Bill, and to use his efforts as spokesman for Mississippi to secure its passage.
Lamar was deeply troubled by this action. He knew that the right of binding Legislative instructions had firm roots in the South. But writing to his wife about the demands of the Legislature that had appointed him, he confided, “I cannot do it; I had rather quit politics forever.” He attempted to explain at length to a friend in the Legislature that he recognized the right of that body to express its opinions upon questions of Federal policy, and the obligation of a Senator to abide by those expressions whenever he was doubtful as to what his course should be. But in this particular case, he insisted, “their wishes are directly in conflict with the convictions of my whole life; and had I voted [on the Matthews Resolution] as directed, I should have cast my first vote against my conscience.”
If [a Senator] allows himself to be governed by the opinions of his friends at home, however devoted he may be to them or they to him, he throws away all the rich results of a previous preparation and study, and simply becomes a commonplace exponent of those popular sentiments which may change in a few days. . . . Such a course will dwarf any man’s statesmanship and his vote would be simply considered as an echo of current opinion, not the result of mature deliberations.
Moreover, consistent with the courageous philosophy that had governed his return to public life, Lamar was determined not to back down merely because his section was contrary minded. He would not purchase the respect of the North for himself and his section by a calculated and cringing course; but having decided, on the merits, that the bill was wrong, he was anxious to demonstrate to the nation that statesmanship was not dead in the South nor was the South desirous of repudiating national obligations and honor. He felt that on this issue it was of particular importance that the South should not follow a narrow sectional course of action. For years it had been argued that Southern Democrats would seek to abrogate the obligations that the United States Government had incurred during the Civil War and for which the South felt no responsibility. Lamar alone among the Southern Democrats opposed the “free silver” movement, except for Senator Ben Hill of Georgia, who said that while he had done his best during the war to make the Union bondholder who purchased a dollar bond at sixty cents lose the sixty cents he had given, he was now for repaying him the dollar he was promised.
One week later, the Bland Silver Bill came before the Senate for a final vote. As the debate neared its end, Senator Lamar rose unexpectedly to his feet. No notes were in his hand, for he was one of the most brilliant extemporaneous speakers ever to sit in the Senate. (“The pen is an extinguisher upon my mind,” he said, “and a torture to my nerves.”) Instead he held an official document which bore the great seal of the State of Mississippi, and this he dispatched by page to the desk. With apologies to his colleagues, Senator Lamar explained that, although he had already expressed his views on the Silver Bill, he had “one other duty to perform; a very painful one, but one which is nonetheless clear.” He then asked that the resolutions which he had sent to the desk be read.
The Senate was first astonished and then attentively silent as the Clerk droned the express will of the Mississippi Legislature that its Senators vote for the Bland Silver Bill. As the Clerk completed the instructions, all eyes turned toward Lamar, no one certain what to expect. As the reporter for the Washington Capitol described it:
Remembering the embarrassing position of this gentleman with respect to the pending bill, every Senator immediately gave his attention, and the Chamber became as silent as the tomb.
A massive but lonely figure on the Senate floor, Lucius Lamar spoke in a quiet yet powerful voice, a voice which “grew tremulous with emotion, as his body fairly shook with agitation”:
Mr. President: Between these resolutions and my convictions there is a great gulf. I cannot pass it. . . . Upon the youth of my state whom it has been my privilege to assist in education I have always endeavored to impress the belief that truth was better than falsehood, honesty better than policy, courage better than cowardice. Today my lessons confront me. Today I must be true or false, honest or cunning, faithful or unfaithful to my people. Even in this hour of their legislative displeasure and disapprobation, I cannot vote as these resolutions direct.
My reasons for my vote shall be given to my people. Then it will be for them to determine if adherence to my honest convictions has disqualified me from representing them; whether a difference of opinion upon a difficult and complicated subject to which I have given patient, long-continued, conscientious study, to which I have brought entire honesty and singleness of purpose, and upon which I have spent whatever ability God has given me, is now to separate us; . . . but be their present decision what it may, I know that the time is not far distant when they will recognize my action today as wise and just; and, armed with honest convictions of my duty, I shall calmly await the results, believing in the utterance of a great American that “truth is omnipotent, and public justice certain.”
Senators on both sides of the bill immediately crowded about his desk to commend his courage. Lamar knew that his speech and vote could not prevent passage of the Bland Bill by a tremendous margin, and its subsequent enactment over the veto of President Hayes. Yet his intentional and stunningly courageous disobedience to the will of his constituents was not wholly in vain. Throughout the North the speech was highly praised. Distrust toward the South, and suspicion of its attitude toward the national debt and national credit, diminished. Harper’s Weekly, pointing out that Lamar voted in opposition to “the strong and general public feeling of his state,” concluded:
No Senator has shown himself more worthy of universal respect than Mr. Lamar; for none has stood more manfully by his principles, in the face of the most authoritative remonstrance from his state. . . . The Democratic Senator from Mississippi has shown the manly courage which becomes an American statesman.
The Nation editorialized that the brief speech of Lucius Lamar in explanation of his disregard for the instructions of his state, “for manliness, dignity and pathos has never been surpassed in Congress. His vote will probably cost him his seat.”
This prediction seemed certain of fulfillment. The assault upon the Senator in Mississippi was instantaneous and vigorous. He had turned his back on his people and his section. In the words of one political orator, he had “made such haste to join the ranks of the enemy that he went stumbling over the graves of his fallen comrades.” His old friend Jefferson Davis hurt him deeply by publicly condemning Lamar’s disregard of the Legislature’s instructions as an attack upon “the foundation of our political system” and the long-standing practice of the Southern Democratic party. To refuse either to obey or to resign the office, so that his constituents “might select someone else who might truly represent them,” was to deny, said Davis, that the people had the requisite amount of intelligence to govern! (Lamar was hard hit by the attitude of his former chieftain, but it is illuminating to note that a few days later, when Senator Hoar sought to deny Davis the Mexican War Pension to which he was by law entitled, it was Lamar who spoke for the Confederate leader in a memorable and dramatic defense:
Sir, it required no courage to do that; . . . the gentleman, I believe, takes rank among the Christian statesmen. He might have learned a better lesson from the pages of mythology. When Prometheus was bound to the rock, it was not an eagle, it was a vulture that buried his beak in the tortured vitals of the victim.
According to a contemporary account, as Lamar hissed out, “it was a vulture,” his right arm straightened out and the index finger pointed directly at Hoar.)
All agreed that Lamar was politically dead after one term, and the only question was who would succeed him. Lamar loved Mississippi, and its criticism depressed him deeply. He wrote his wife that he wished he was in a financial position to vacate his office without doing his family injustice:
This world is a miserable one to me except in its connection with you. . . . I get a great many complimentary letters from the North, very few from Mississippi. . . . Can it be true that the South will condemn the disinterested love of those who, perceiving her real interests, offer their unarmored breasts as barriers against the invasion of error? . . . It is indeed a heavy cross to lay upon the heart of a public man to have to take a stand which causes the love and confidence of his constituents to flow away from him.
But like his famous uncle, Mirabeau Lamar of Texas, and other members of his family, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar was not afraid of overwhelming odds. Admittedly he had violated the instructions of the Legislature, he said. “I will appeal to the sovereign people, the masters of the legislature who undertake to instruct me.”
With this declaration, Senator Lamar launched successive tours of Mississippi. Speaking to thousands of people in crowded halls and open fields, Lamar stated frankly that he was well aware that he had not pleased his constituents; that he was equally well aware that the easier path was to exploit that sectional cause to which he had always been devoted; but that it was his intention to help create a feeling of confidence and mutuality between North and South by voting in the national interest without regard to sectional pressures.
For three or four hours at a time, his passionate and imaginative oratory held spellbound the crowds that came to jeer. “He spoke like the mountain torrent,” as several observers later described it, “sweeping away the boulders in the stream that attempted to oppose his course.”
But Lamar did not employ oratorical tricks to sway emotions while dodging issues. On the contrary, his speeches were a learned explanation of his position, setting forth the Constitutional history of the Senate and its relationship to the state legislatures, and the statements and examples of Burke, and of Calhoun, Webster, and other famous Senators who had disagreed with Legislative instructions: “Better to follow the example of the illustrious men whose names have been given than to abandon altogether judgment and conviction in deference to popular clamor.”
At each meeting he told of an incident which he swore had occurred during the war. Lamar, in the company of other prominent military and civilian officers of the Confederacy, was on board a blockade runner making for Savannah harbor. Although the high-ranking officers after consultation had decided it was safe to go ahead, Lamar related, the Captain had sent Sailor Billy Summers to the top mast to look for Yankee gunboats in the harbor, and Billy said he had seen ten. That distinguished array of officers knew where the Yankee fleet was, and it was not in Savannah; and they told the Captain that Billy was wrong and the ship must proceed ahead. The Captain refused, insisting that while the officers knew a great deal more about military affairs, Billy Summers on the top mast with a powerful glass had a much better opportunity to judge the immediate situation at hand.
It later developed that Billy was right, Lamar said, and if they had gone ahead they would have all been captured. And like Sailor Billy Summers, he did not claim to be wiser than the Mississippi Legislature. But he did believe that he was in a better position as a Member of the United States Senate to judge what was best for the interests of his constituents.
Thus it is, my countrymen, you have sent me to the topmost mast, and I tell you what I see. If you say I must come down, I will obey without a murmur, for you cannot make me lie to you; but if you return me, I can only say that I will be true to love of country, truth, and God. . . . I have always thought that the first duty of a public man in a Republic founded upon the sovereignty of the people is a frank and sincere expression of his opinions to his constituents. I prize the confidence of the people of Mississippi, but I never made popularity the standard of my action. I profoundly respect public opinion, but I believe that there is in conscious rectitude of purpose a sustaining power which will support a man of ordinary firmness under any circumstances whatever.
His tour was tremendously successful. “Men who were so hostile that they could hardly be persuaded to hear him at all would mount upon the benches and tables, swinging their hats, and huzzaing until hoarse.” Others departed in silence, weighing the significance of his words. When he spoke in Yazoo County, the stronghold of his opposition, the Yazoo City Herald reported that like “the lion at bay,” he “conquered the prejudices of hundreds who had been led to believe that his views on certain points were better adapted to the latitude of New England than to that of Mississippi.” And shortly thereafter, the Yazoo Democratic County Convention adopted a resolution that their legislators should “vote for him and work for him, first, last, and all the time, as the choice of this people for United States Senator.”
It is heartening to note that the people of Mississippi continued their support of him, in spite of the fact that on three important occasions—in his eulogy of Charles Sumner, in his support of the Electoral Commission which brought about the election of the Republican Hayes and in his exception to their strongly felt stand for free silver—Lamar had stood against their immediate wishes. The voters responded to the sincerity and courage which he had shown; and they continued to give him their support and affection throughout the remainder of his political life. He was re-elected to the Senate by an overwhelming majority, later to become Chairman of the Senate Democratic Caucus, then Secretary of the Interior and finally Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. At no time did he, who has properly been termed the most gifted statesman given by the South to the nation from the close of the Civil War to the turn of the century, ever veer from the deep conviction he had expressed while under bitter attack in 1878:
The liberty of this country and its great interests will never be secure if its public men become mere menials to do the biddings of their constituents instead of being representatives in the true sense of the word, looking to the lasting prosperity and future interests of the whole country.