Chapter VIII: The Noontide (3)

“There was a later act—of 1845—which gave to the States the
authority to provide by law for filling vacancies of electors in
these colleges; and Congress has passed no other law on the subject.

“The States having created them, the time of their assemblage having
been fixed by Congress, and their power to fill vacancies having
been regulated by State laws, the colleges are as independent in the
exercise of their functions as is any department of the Government
within its sphere. Being thus equipped, their powers are restrained
by a few simple limitations laid upon them by the Constitution
itself: first, they must vote for a native-born citizen; second, for
a man who has been fourteen years a resident of the United States;
third, at least one of the persons for whom they vote must not be a
citizen of their own State; fourth, the mode of voting and
certifying their returns is prescribed by the Constitution itself.
Within these simple and plain limitations the electoral colleges are
absolutely independent of the States and of Congress.

“One fact in the history of the Constitutional Convention, which I
have not seen noticed in any of the recent debates, illustrates very
clearly how careful our fathers were to preserve these colleges from
the interference of Congress, and to protect their independence by
the bulwarks of the Constitution itself. In the draught of the
electoral system reported September 4, 1787, it was provided that
Congress ‘may determine the time of choosing and assembling of the
electors _and the manner of certifying and transmitting their
votes_.’

“That was the language of the original draught; but our fathers had
determined that the National Legislature should have nothing to do
with the action of the colleges; and the words that gave Congress
the power to prescribe the manner of certifying and transmitting
their votes were stricken out. The instrument itself prescribed the
mode. Thus Congress was wholly expelled from the colleges. The
Constitution swept the ground clear of all intruders, and placed its
own imperial guardianship around the independence of the electoral
colleges by forbidding even Congress to enter the sacred circle. No
Congressman could enter; and, except to fix the day of their
meeting, Congress could not speak to the electors.

“These colleges are none the less sovereign and independent because
they exist only for a day. They meet on the same day in all the
States; they do their work summarily in one day, and dissolve for
ever. There is no power to interfere, no power to recall them, no
power to revise their action. Their work is done; the record is made
up, signed, sealed, and transmitted; and thus the second great act
in the Presidential election is completed. I ought to correct
myself; the second act _is_ the Presidential election. The election
is finished the hour when the electoral colleges have cast their
votes and sealed up the record.

“Still, there is a third step in the process; and it is shorter,
plainer, simpler than the other two. These sealed certificates of
the electoral colleges are forwarded to the President of the Senate,
where they rest under the silence of the seals for more than two
months. The Constitution assumes that the result of the election is
still unknown. But on a day fixed by law, and the only day of all
the days of February on which the law commands Congress to be in
session, the last act in the plan of electing a President is to be
performed.

“How plain and simple are the words that describe this third and
last step. Here they are:

“‘The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the
Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates,
and the votes shall then be counted.’

“Here is no ambiguity. Two words dominate and inspire the clause.
They are the words _open_ and _count_. These words are not shrouded
in the black-letter mysteries of the law. They are plain words,
understood by every man who speaks our mother-tongue, and need no
lexicon or commentary.

“Consider the grand and simple ceremonial by which the third act is
to be completed. On the day fixed by law the two Houses of Congress
are assembled. The President of the Senate, who, by the
Constitution, has been made the custodian of the sealed certificates
from all the electoral colleges, takes his place. The Constitution
requires a ‘person’ and a ‘presence.’ That ‘person’ is the President
of the Senate; and that ‘presence’ is the ‘presence’ of the two
Houses. Then two things are to be _done_. The certificates are to be
opened, and the votes are to be counted. These are not legislative
acts, but clearly and plainly executive acts. I challenge any man to
find anywhere an accepted definition of an executive act that does
not include both these. They can not be tortured into a meaning that
will carry them beyond the boundaries of executive action. And one
of these acts the President of the Senate is peremptorily ordered to
perform. The Constitution commands him to ‘open all the
certificates.’ Certificates of what? Certificates of the votes of
the electoral colleges. Not any certificates that any body may
choose to send, but certificates of electors appointed by the
States. The President of the Senate is presumed to know what are the
States in the Union, who are their officers, and, when he opens the
certificates, he learns from the official record who have been
appointed electors, and he finds their votes.

“The Constitution contemplated the President of the Senate as the
Vice-President of the United States, the elect of all the people.
And to him is confided the great trust, the custodianship of the
only official record of the election of President. What is it to
‘open the certificates’? It would be a narrow and inadequate view of
that word to say that it means only the breaking of the seals. To
open an envelope is not to ‘open the certificates.’ The certificate
is not the paper on which the record is made; it is the record
itself. To open the certificates is not a physical but an
intellectual act. It is to make patent the record; to publish it.
When that is done the election of President and Vice-President is
published. But one thing remains to be done; and here the language
of the Constitution changes from the active to the passive voice,
from the personal to the impersonal. To the trusted custodian of the
votes succeeds the impersonality of arithmetic; the votes have been
made known; there remains only the command of the Constitution:
‘They shall be counted’—that is, the numbers shall be added up.

“No further act is required. The Constitution itself declares the
result:

“‘The person having the greatest number of votes for President
shall be President, if such number be a majority of the whole
number of electors appointed.’

“If no person has such majority, the House of Representatives shall
_immediately_ choose a President; not the House as organized for
legislation, but a new electoral college is created out of the
members of the House, by means of which each State has one vote for
President, and only one.

“To review the ground over which I have traveled: The several acts
that constitute the election of a President may be symbolized by a
pyramid consisting of three massive, separate blocks. The first, the
creation of the electoral college by the States, is the broad base.
It embraces the legislative, the judicial, and the executive powers
of the States. All the departments of the State government and all
the voters of the State coöperate in shaping and perfecting it.

“The action of the electoral colleges forms the second block,
perfect in itself, and independent of the others, superimposed with
exactness upon the first.

“The opening and counting of the votes of the colleges is the little
block that crowns and completes the pyramid.

“Such, Mr. Speaker, was the grand and simple plan by which the
framers of the Constitution empowered all the people, acting under
the laws of the several States, to create special and select
colleges of independent electors to choose a President, who should
be, not the creature of Congress, nor of the States, but the Chief
Magistrate of the whole Nation—the elect of all the people.”

But the Electoral Commission was constituted by law, and Garfield himself chosen unanimously by his party as a member thereof. He accepted, saying: “Since you have appointed me, I will serve. I can act on a committee when I do not believe in its validity.” That fact could not affect the justice of his decisions.

It is impossible to even hint at more than a small portion of the vast field of work which occupied General Garfield during this and the succeeding Congress.

On November 16, 1877, he made a very able speech on the subject of Resumption of Payments; an address which would serve to perpetuate his fame, if he had no other monument.

In the _Atlantic Monthly_ of February, 1876, appeared an article from his pen, entitled “The Currency Conflict.” On June 4, of the same year, he opposed, in an elaborate address, a tariff bill brought in by Mr. Morrison, of Illinois.

June 22, 1876, was to him the “sad occasion dear” of a revival of precious memories. In the preceding December his old friend and fellow-student of Hiram, Miss Booth, had died, and this day in June was appointed there for a memorial address by General Garfield. As at all such times when he spoke, we are struck with a sense of the wonderful delicacy of this man’s nature, which responded so perfectly to every delicate and holy sentiment known to the human heart. His very first words were:

“_Mr. President_: You have called me to a duty at once most sad and
most sacred. At every step of my preparation for its performance, I
have encountered troops of thronging memories that swept across the
field of the last twenty-five years of my life, and so filled my
heart with the lights and shadows of their joy and sorrow that I
have hardly been able to marshal them into order or give them
coherent voice. I have lived over again the life of this place. I
have seen again the groups of young and joyous students, ascending
these green slopes, dwelling for a time on this peaceful height in
happy and workful companionship, and then, with firmer step, and
with more serious and thoughtful faces, marching away to their posts
in the battle of life.

“And still nearer and clearer have come back the memories of that
smaller band of friends, the leaders and guides of those who
encamped on this training-ground. On my journey to this assembly, it
has seemed that they, too, were coming, and that I should once more
meet and greet them. And I have not yet been able to realize that
Almeda Booth will not be with us. After our great loss, how shall we
gather up the fragments of the life we lived in this place? We are
mariners, treading the lonely shore in search of our surviving
comrades and the fragments of our good ship, wrecked by the tempest.
To her, indeed, it is no wreck. She has landed in safety, and
ascended the immortal heights beyond our vision.”

The death of Michael C. Kerr having made necessary the selection of a new Speaker, the Democratic majority in the House elected Samuel J. Randall, and the complimentary vote of the Republicans went to General Garfield. He was also their candidate in the two succeeding Congresses. He had divided the honor of leadership pretty evenly with Mr. Blaine, until, in 1877, the latter gentleman went to the Senate, and left Garfield without a rival. Fourteen years of able and faithful service had done their work grandly for his power and his fame.

On February 12, 1878, Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson, of New York City, presented to Congress that great painting of Carpenter, “Lincoln and Emancipation.” At her request the presentation address was made by General Garfield.

His important speeches during this Congress were even more numerous than usual; especially in the special session held in the spring and summer of 1879. One of the best was that of February 19, 1878, on the “Policy of Pacification, and the Prosecutions in Louisiana.” At this time there were two serious political storms brewing in the air. First, there were divisions in the Republican party, and an alienation of some of its leaders from President Hayes; second, the Democratic party, with its cries of “fraud,” concerning the last election, and its Potter Committee, and its prosecutions against the members of the Louisiana Returning Board, was trying to destroy the people’s confidence in the Government as then constituted. The latter quarrel no doubt was the salvation of the party concerned in the former. Its members rallied and united. Garfield was leader and chief promoter of Republican harmony, as well as the strongest bulwark against the enemy.

This speech of February 19 contains the following pithy paragraph, descriptive of the way in which the nation had passed through the transformations of war:

“There was, first, the military stage—the period of force, of open
and bloody war—in which gentlemen of high character and honor met on
the field, and decided by the power of the strongest the questions
involved in the high court of war. That period passed, but did not
leave us on the calm level of peace. It brought us to the period of
transition, in which the elements of war and peace were mingled
together in strange and anarchic confusion. It was a period of civil
and military elements combined. All through that semi-military
period the administration of General Grant had, of necessity, to
conduct the country. His administration was not all civil, it was
not all military; it was necessarily a combination of both; and out
of that combination came many of the strange and anomalous
situations which always follow such a war.”

Again:

“Our great military chieftain, who brought the war to a successful
conclusion, had command as chief executive during eight years of
turbulent, difficult, and eventful administration. He saw his
administration drawing to a close, and his successor elected—who,
studying the question, came to the conclusion that the epoch had
arrived, the hour had struck, when it was possible to declare that
the semi-military period was ended, and the era of peace methods, of
civil processes, should be fully inaugurated. With that spirit, and
at the beginning of this third era, Rutherford B. Hayes came into
the Presidency. I ought to say that, in my judgment, more than any
other public man we have known, the present head of the
administration is an optimist. He looks on the best side of things.
He is hopeful for the future, and prefers to look upon the bright
side rather than upon the dark and sinister side of human nature.
His faith is larger than the faith of most of us; and with his faith
and hope he has gone to the very verge of the Constitution in
offering both hands of fellowship and all the olive-branches of
peace to bring back good feeling, and achieve the real pacification
to this country.”

After this came a brief protest against the Bland Silver Bill, February 28, 1878. On March 6, 1878, he delivered his “New Scheme of American Finance,” being in answer to a personal attack of William D. Kelley, the great protective tariff advocate, of Pennsylvania. Other addresses were, “The Army and the Public Peace,” May 21, 1878; reply to Mr. Tucker on the “Tariff,” June 4, 1878; “Honest Money,” a speech delivered at Boston, in Faneuil Hall, September 10, 1878; “Suspension and Resumption of Specie Payments,” at Chicago, January 2, 1879, before the Honest Money League of the North-west; in memory of Joseph Henry, January 16,1879; “Relation of Government to Science,” February 11, 1879; in memory of the late Hon. Gustave Schleicher, February 17, 1879; and a very interesting speech of February 26, 1879, about the “Sugar Tariff.”

When March 3,1879, came, the Forty-Fifth Congress went out with much of its important business undone; two of the great appropriation bills had not passed on account of political difficulties. The Democrats attempted to force assent to some of their schemes by tacking their propositions to the Appropriation bill. But this measure the Republicans resisted to the last. And so it happened that in March, 1879, President Hayes was obliged to call an extra session. But here the old fight was renewed, and a long “dead lock” followed.

Throughout this struggle, Garfield was the central figure in the front rank of his party in the House. Scarcely had Congress assembled when the old Army Bill was reported. Then, in Committee of the Whole, the old “rider” was moved as an amendment. The Chair decided this amendment in order, whereupon there was great indignation on the Republican side, and a remarkable debate ensued. Garfield made his principal protest while things were in this situation, on March 29, 1879, in a speech entitled “Revolution in Congress.”

Throughout this special session the fierce heat of political conflict grew more intense every day, like the sun whose burning rays beat down upon the Capitol. On April 4, Garfield spoke again on the subject which had occupied his attention six days before. April 26, he spoke on the passage of the Legislative Appropriation Bill; May 17, against unlimited coinage of silver; June 19, on the Judicial Appropriation Bill; June 21, concerning a proposed survey of the Mississippi River, in the course of which he said:

“But for myself, I believe that one of the grandest of our material
national interests—one that is national in the largest material
sense of that word—is the Mississippi River and its navigable
tributaries. It is the most gigantic single natural feature of our
continent, far transcending the glory of the ancient Nile or of any
other river on the earth. The statesmanship of America must grapple
the problem of this mighty stream. It is too vast for any State to
handle; too much for any authority less than that of the nation
itself to manage. And I believe the time will come when the
liberal-minded statesmanship of this country will devise a wise and
comprehensive system, that will harness the powers of this great
river to the material interests of America, so that not only all the
people who live on its banks and the banks of its confluents, but
all the citizens of the Republic, whether dwellers in the central
valley or on the slope of either ocean, will recognize the
importance of preserving and perfecting this great natural and
material bond of national union between the North and the South—a
bond to be so strengthened by commerce and intercourse that it can
never be severed.”

Thus refreshed by something more liberal than the recent discussions in which he had been engaged, Garfield soon resumed the struggle, and on June 27, 1879, gave the Democratic party and the South a regular broadside on “State Sovereignty.”

The Special Session of 1879 came to an end on July 1st. At its beginning the dominant power in the House loudly proclaimed its intention to push its measures through at all hazards. The appropriation bills, with their obnoxious “riders,” were passed; the President vetoed them. It then became a question of revolution or yielding. There was no revolution! Every dollar called for by the Government was voted, except the pay of the United States marshals, who overcame the difficulty by paying their own expenses, trusting a future session of Congress to repay them.

According to his custom, General Garfield spoke often during the Ohio campaign of 1879; a good specimen of his stump speeches is the one at Cleveland, on October 11th, of this year. At the Andersonville Reunion, held in Toledo, Ohio, on October 3d, he had been present and addressed the throng of Union soldiers and ex-prisoners who met there.

During the regular sessions of the Forty-Sixth Congress his activity was undiminished. In his speech of March 17, during the discussion of a bill to pay the United States marshals for the year ending June 30, 1880, we find such sterling utterances as these:

“Mr. Chairman: When I took my seat as a member of this House, I took
it with all the responsibilities which the place brought upon me;
and among others was my duty to keep the obligations of the law.
Where the law speaks in mandatory terms to every body else and then
to me, I should deem it cowardly and dishonorable if I should skulk
behind my legislative privilege for the purpose of disobeying and
breaking the supreme law of the land.

“The issue now made is somewhat different from that of the last
session, but, in my judgment, it is not less significant and
dangerous. I would gladly waive any party advantage which this
controversy might give for the sake of that calm and settled peace
which would reign in this Hall if we all obeyed the law. But if the
leaders on the other side are still determined to rush upon their
fate by forcing upon the country this last issue—that because the
Democratic party happen not to like a law they will not obey
it—because they happen not to approve of the spirit and character of
a law they will not let it be executed—I say to gentlemen on the
other side, if you are determined to make such an issue, it is high
time that the American people should know it.

“Here is the volume of our laws. More sacred than the twelve tables
of Rome, this rock of the law rises in monumental grandeur alike
above the people and the President, above the courts, above
Congress, commanding everywhere reverence and obedience to its
supreme authority. Yet the dominant party in this House virtually
declares that ‘any part of this volume that we do not like and can
not repeal we will disobey. We have tried to repeal these election
laws; we have failed because we had not the constitutional power to
destroy them; the Constitution says they shall stand in their
authority and power; but we, the Democratic party, in defiance of
the Constitution, declare that if we can not destroy them outright
by the repeal, they shall be left to crumble into ruin by wanton and
lawless neglect.’

“Mr. Chairman, by far the most formidable danger that threatens the
Republic to-day is the spirit of law-breaking which shows itself in
many turbulent and alarming manifestations. The people of the
Pacific Coast, after two years of wrestling with the spirit of
communism in the city of San Francisco, have finally grappled with
this lawless spirit, and the leader of it was yesterday sentenced to
penal servitude as a violator of the law. But what can we say to
Denis Kearney and his associates if to-day we announce ourselves the
foremost law-breakers of the country and set an example to all the
turbulent and vicious elements of disorder to follow us?

“I ask, gentlemen, whether this is a time when it is safe to
disregard and weaken the authority of law. In all quarters the civil
society of this country is becoming honeycombed through and through
by disintegrating forces—in some States by the violation of
contracts and the repudiation of debts; in others by open resistance
and defiance; in still others by the reckless overturning of
constitutions and letting the ‘red fool fury of the Seine’ run riot
among our people and build its blazing altars to the strange gods of
ruin and misrule. All these things are shaking the good order of
society and threatening the foundations of our Government and our
peace. In a time like this, more than ever before, this country
needs a body of lawgivers clothed and in their right minds, who have
laid their hands upon the altar of the law as its defenders, not its
destroyers.”

April 5, 1880, General Garfield made a trenchant argument against a pet measure of the greenback apostle, Mr. Weaver. Five days afterward occurred a debate between Garfield and McMahon, also of Ohio, on the pending Appropriation bill.

On May first he made a personal explanation, defending his committee action in regard to the so-called wood-pulp monopoly. This pulp is obtained from soft wood and used in the manufacture of paper. The newspapers everywhere were calling for a removal of the duty on this their great necessity. Garfield stood out for a ten per cent. tariff, as a protection to our manufacturers from the Canadian manufacturers, who had no royalties to pay, and therefore could have undersold us. In this speech Garfield met the charge of being a monopoly supporter, and vindicated his policy on the disputed question.

Turning aside from this well-fought field where Garfield had so long stood, as a great representative of all that is good in the recent legislative history of our country, it is time to view the new honors which were now preparing for him.

On the fourteenth of January, 1880, the Ohio Legislature elected James A. Garfield to the United States Senate, to succeed Mr. Thurman, whose term was to expire in the following March. So thoroughly had Garfield recovered from the wave of scandal which a few years earlier had swept over but could not overwhelm him, that he was the unanimous choice of his party; and the Democratic minority itself cordially united to make his election unanimous. All this came entirely without solicitation from him for such an honor.

At an informal reception held in the Capitol at Columbus, the evening after his election, General Garfield was called upon for a speech. In response, he made a brief and appropriate address. The following is an extract therefrom:

“FELLOW-CITIZENS:—I should be a great deal more than a man, or a
great deal less than a man, if I were not extremely gratified by
this mark of your kindness you have shown me in recent days. I did
not expect any such meeting as this. I knew there was a greeting
awaiting me, but I did not expect so cordial, generous, and general
a greeting, without distinction of party, without distinction of
interests, as I have received here to-night. And you will allow me
in a moment or two to speak of the memories this chamber awakens.

“I recognize the importance of the place to which you have elected
me, and I should be base if I did not also recognize the great man
whom you have elected me to succeed. I say for him, Ohio has had few
larger-minded, broader-minded men in the records of our history than
that of Allen G. Thurman. Differing widely from him as I have done
in politics, and do, I recognize him as a man high in character and
great in intellect; and I take this occasion to refer to what I have
never before referred to in public—that many years ago, in the storm
of party fighting, when the air was filled with all sorts of
missiles aimed at the character and reputation of public men, when
it was even for his party interest to join the general clamor
against me and my associates, Senator Thurman said in public, in the
campaign, on the stump,—where men are as likely to say unkind things
as at any place in the world,—a most generous and earnest word of
defense and kindness for me, which I shall never forget as long as I
live. I say, moreover, that the flowers that bloom over the garden
wall of party politics are the sweetest and most fragrant that bloom
in the gardens of this world; and where we can early pluck them and
enjoy their fragrance, it is manly and delightful to do so.

“And now, gentlemen of the General Assembly, without distinction of
party, I recognize this tribute and compliment made to me to-night.
Whatever my own course may be in the future, a large share of the
inspiration of my future public life will be drawn from this
occasion and these surroundings, and I shall feel anew the sense of
obligation that I owe to the State of Ohio. Let me venture to point
a single sentence in regard to that work. During the twenty years
that I have been in public life, almost eighteen of it in the
Congress of the United States, I have tried to do one thing. Whether
I was mistaken or otherwise, it has been the plan of my life to
follow my convictions at whatever personal cost to myself. I have
represented for many years a district in Congress whose approbation
I greatly desired; but though it may seem, perhaps, a little
egotistical to say it, I yet desired still more the approbation of
one person, and his name is Garfield. He is the only man that I am
compelled to sleep with, and eat with, and live with, and die with;
and if I could not have his approbation, I should have bad
companionship. And in this larger constituency which has called me
to represent them now, I can only do what is true to my best self,
applying the same rules. And if I should be so unfortunate as to
lose the confidence of this larger constituency, I must do what
every other fair-minded man has to do—carry his political life in
his hand and take the consequences. But I must follow what seems to
me to be the only safe rule of my life; and with that view of the
case, and with that much personal reference, I leave the subject.

“Thanking you again, fellow-citizens, members of the General
Assembly, Republicans and Democrats—all, party man as I am,—thanking
you both for what you have done and for this cordial and manly
greeting, I bid you good-night.”