90 



ELAINE, JAMES GILLESPIE. 



nounced the finding of private letters to Fisher 

 and Mulligan, fully sustaining their fresh 

 charges in regard to the Northern Pacific Rail- 

 road. The committee called upon Mr. Blaine 

 for the letters, and in reply he produced the 

 opinion of two lawyers a Democrat and a Re- 

 publican to the effect that the manuscripts 

 were personal property, and could not be re- 

 quired. This raised a cry of concealment, and 

 once more the matter became too serious to pass 

 unnoticed. Again, rising in his place, he an- 

 nounced that, with all due respect to the House, 

 he denied their assumption of right to demand his 

 private correspondence, but added : " Thank Al- 

 mighty God, I am not ashamed to show them. 

 There they are. There is the very original pack- 

 age. And with some sense of humiliation, with 

 a mortification that I do not pretend to conceal, 

 with a sense of outrage which I think any man 

 in my position would feel, I invite the confidence 

 of forty-four millions of my countrymen while I 

 read those letters from this desk." 



He then read the letters, which had been 

 picked from a correspondence of over fifteen 

 years. After he had laid bare the confidential 

 details of business embarrassments, which not 

 once, with their proper context, were of a nature 

 to incriminate him, he said : " The man did his 

 worst, the very worst, he could out of the most 

 intimate business correspondence of my life. I 

 ask, gentlemen, if any of you and I ask it with 

 some feeling can stand a severer scrutiny of, or 

 a more rigid investigation into, your private cor- 

 respondence ? " After the reading was finished 

 he turned to Mr. Knott, chairman of the Judi- 

 ciary Committee, and said : 



" Has the gentleman from Kentucky received a 

 dispatch from Caldwell ? " [Mr. Caldwell, who was 

 abroad, was the only person who had perfect knowl- 

 edge of the matter, ana both parties had been seeking 

 his address.] 



" I will explain that directly," said Mr. Knott. 



" I want a categorical answer." 



" I have received a dispatch purporting to be from 

 Mr. Caldwell." 



"You did?" 



" How did you know I got it 1 " queried Mr. Knott. 



" When did you get it ? " was the response. " I 

 want the gentleman from Kentucky to answer when 

 he got it." 



" Answer my question first." 



" I never heard of it until yesterday." 



" How did you hear it ? " 



" I heard you got a dispatch last Thursday morn- 

 ing at ei^ht o'clock from Josiah Caldwell, completely 

 and absolutely exonerating me from this charge. You 

 have suppressed it ! " 



Then followed one of the most extraordinary 

 scenes of excitement ever witnessed in the House. 

 Mr. Elaine's accusers used every means known to 

 parliamentarians to prevent the carrying of his 

 motion that the dispatch be brought out and 

 filed with the rest of the papers ; but so often did 

 Mr. Blaine sweep away their work that at last 

 one member rose 'to inquire whether this was the 

 American Congress or a school in which they 

 were pupils of the schoolmaster from Maine. 

 The final result was a negative acquittal of Mr. 

 Blaine. 



This took place in June, 1876, and a few days 

 later the Republican Convention met in Cincin- 

 nati to nominate a candidate for President. On 

 the llth, the Sunday preceding the convention, 



Mr. Blaine fell unconscious upon the steps of the 

 church of which he and his family were regular 

 attendants ; for two days he lay apparently be- 

 tween life and death, and the convention was 

 thrown into confusion by the conflict of feeling 

 thereby created. The illness has been popularly 

 attributed to sunstroke. How far that, or the 

 Mulligan and other scandals had influence, it is 

 impossible to say, but the record of the conven- 

 tion reads : First ballot, Elaine, 285 ; Morton, 

 124; Bristow, 113; Conkling, 99: Hayes, 61; 

 Hartranft, 58; Jewell, 11; Wheeler, 3. Har- 

 tranft's was the solid vote of Pennsylvania ; 

 Hayes's that of Ohio : Conkling's that of New 

 York, save one ; Morton's vote was from the 

 South and Indiana; Bristow's from nineteen 

 States and one Territory ; Elaine's from twenty- 

 eight States and seven Territories. On the sec- 

 ond ballot Blaine had made a gain of 11. On the 

 fifth ballot Michigan's vote was cast for Hayes. 

 On the sixth it stood: Blaine, 308; Hayes, 113. 

 The other candidates retired, and on the seventh 

 the ballot stood : Hayes, 384; Blaine, 351 ; Bris- 

 tow, 21. These were turned over to Hayes, and 

 his nomination was then declared unanimous. 



On the resignation of Senator Morrill, in order 

 to accept the Secretaryship of the Treasury un- 

 der President Hayes, Mr. Blaine was chosen to 

 fill out his unexpired term in the Senate, and he 

 was re-elected for the following term. In com- 

 mon with a majority of Republicans, Mr. Blaine 

 had opposed the formation of the electoral com- 

 mission for the settlement of the Hayes and Til- 

 dbn dispute, on the ground that Congress did not 

 possess the power that it proposed to confer on 

 the commission. Later, after that commission 

 had resulted in the inauguration of Mr. Hayes, 

 Mr. Blaine opposed his Southern policy because, 

 as he claimed, the title of the governors whom 

 Mr. Hayes removed rested upon the same returns 

 as his own. 



While still in the House, Mr. Blaine had made 

 an exhaustive argument against an irredeemable 

 paper currency, and in the Senate he took strong 

 ground against the deterioration of the silver 

 coinage. In the opening of a speech he said : 



If there was any one principle that was rooted 'and 

 grounded in the minds of our earlier statesmen, it was 

 the evil of paper money ; and no candid man of any 

 party can read the Constitution of the United States 

 and not be convinced that its framers intended to 

 protect and defend our people from the manifold per- 

 ils of an irredeemable currency. Nathaniel Macon, 

 one of the purest and best of American statesmen, 

 himself a soldier of the Eevolution and a member of 

 Congress continuously during the administration of 

 our first six Presidents, embracing in all a period of 

 nearly forty years, expressed the whole truth when 

 he declared in the Senate that "this was a hard- 

 money government, founded by hard-money men, 

 who had themselves seen and felt the evil of paper 

 money, and meant to save their posterity from it." 



In 1878, Mr. Blaine advocated the establish- 

 ment of a line of mail steamers to Brazil. The 

 whole subject of American shipbuilding and 

 commerce was one to which he devoted special 

 energy, and he introduced two amendments fa- 

 voring naval retrenchment in the interests of a 

 merchant marine. He said in part : 



From 1846-'71 the Congress of the United States 

 passed 91 acts for promoting the building of railroads. 

 There has not been much legislation since 1871- 



