Part Three

 

THE TIME AND THE PLACE

The end of the costly military struggle between North and South did not restore peace and unity on the political front. Appomattox had ended the shooting of brother by brother; but it did not halt the political invasions, the economic plundering and the intersectional hatred that still racked a divided land. The bitter animosities on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line which had engulfed Daniel Webster, Thomas Hart Benton and Sam Houston continued unabated for some two decades after the war. Those in the North who sought to bind up the wounds of the nation and treat the South with mercy and fairness—men like President Andrew Johnson, and those Senators who stood by him in his impeachment—were pilloried for their lack of patriotism by those who waved the “bloody shirt.” Those in the South who sought to demonstrate to the nation that the fanatical sectionalism of their region had been forgotten—men like Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar of Mississippi—were attacked by their constituents as deserters to the conquering enemy. When Confederate General Bob Toombs was asked why he did not petition Congress for his pardon, Toombs replied with quiet grandeur: “Pardon for what? I have not yet pardoned the North.”

But gradually, the old conflicts over emancipation and reconstruction faded away, and exploitation of the newly opened West and the trampled South brought new issues and new faces to the Senate. It was no longer the forum for our greatest Constitutional lawyers, for Constitutional issues no longer dominated American public life. Easy money, sudden fortunes, increasingly powerful political machines and blatant corruption transformed much of the nation; and the Senate, as befits a democratic legislative body, accurately represented the nation. Corporation lawyers and political bosses, not constitutional orators, were the spokesmen for this roaring era; although too many of the nation’s talented men found fame and fortune more readily available in the world of high finance and industry, rather than the seemingly dull and unnoticed labors of government. (If Daniel Webster had lived in that age, one editor commented, he would have been “neither in debt nor in the Senate.”) Eleven new states were added quickly as the West was developed; and twenty-two new Senators and a tremendous new chamber detracted from that old distinctive atmosphere. Sectionalism, logrolling and a series of near-fanatical movements—of which the “free silver” movement that embroiled Lamar was only the beginning—plagued Senate deliberations on domestic economic issues. “We are becoming a mere collection of local potato plots and cabbage grounds,” complained one Senator, weary of the constant bickering over local patronage, rivers and harbors projects and tariff-protected industries.

Senators, said William Allen White, represented not only states and regions but “principalities and powers and business”:

One Senator, for instance, represented the Union Pacific Railway System, another the New York Central, still another the insurance interests. . . . Coal and iron owned a coterie . . . cotton had half a dozen Senators. And so it went. . . . It was a plutocratic feudalism . . . eminently respectable. The collar of any great financial interest was worn in pride.

And White related the supposed conversation in which veteran Senator Davis described to a freshman Senator the characteristics of his colleagues in those roaring days as they came down the aisle: “The jackal; the vulture; the sheep-killing dog; the gorilla; the crocodile; the buzzard; the old clucking hen; the dove; the turkey-gobbler.” Then, White wrote, “as the big hulk of a greedy westerner—coarse, devious, insolent—came swinging in heavily, Judge Davis pointed his stubby forefinger at the creature and exclaimed: ‘A wolf, sir; a damned, hungry, skulking, cowardly wolf!’”

Thus by the end of the nineteenth century the Senate had come to very nearly its lowest ebb, in terms of power as well as prestige. The decline in Senatorial power had begun shortly after the end of Grant’s administration. Prior to that time, the Senate, which had humiliated President Johnson and dominated President Grant, had reigned supreme in what was very nearly a parliamentary form of government. Senators even claimed a place at the dinner table above members of the Cabinet (who had previously outranked them at social functions). “If they visited the White House,” George Frisbie Hoar later recalled, “it was to give, not to receive advice.” (Indeed the assertion of power by both Houses was illustrated by the visit of Congressman Anson Burlingame to the House of Commons. When an attendant told him he must leave his seat, inasmuch as that particular gallery was reserved for Peers, an old Peer sitting nearby interposed. “Let him stay, let him stay. He is a Peer in his own country.” “I am a Sovereign in my own country, Sir,” replied the Congressman as he walked out, “and shall lose caste if I associate with Peers.”) But the peak of Congressional power passed as Presidents Hayes, Garfield, Arthur and Cleveland successfully resisted Senatorial attempts to dictate Presidential appointments, and the government returned to the more traditional American system of the Constitution’s checks and balances.

The decline in the Senate’s power, moreover, had been foreshadowed by a rapid decline in prestige even before economic issues had replaced the sectional and Constitutional conflict. British and Canadian diplomats maintained that they had secured approval of the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 by seeing to it that it was “floated through on waves of champagne. . . . If you have got to deal with hogs, what are you to do?” A Cabinet member, possibly recalling this metaphor, impatiently told Henry Adams in 1869, “You can’t use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout.” And in quiet derision Adams, who thought most members of the Senate “more grotesque than ridicule could make them,” had replied, “If a Congressman is a hog, what is a Senator?”

But the Senate, despite its decline in power and public esteem during the second half of the nineteenth century, did not consist entirely of hogs and damned skulking wolves. It still contained men worthy of respect, and men of courage. Of these, Edmund Ross and those who stood with him in the Johnson impeachment trial selflessly sacrificed themselves to save the nation from reckless abuse of legislative power. And Lucius Lamar, by his gentle but firm determination to be a statesman, was instrumental in reuniting the nation in preparation for the new challenges which lay ahead.