Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs Volume I Part 18

"What, then, will be our position? The way ought to be open for the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln; but there are those who demand a compromise as a step necessary and preliminary to that event. I do not now speak of the demand made upon States, in their sovereign capacity, to repeal certain laws, concerning personal liberty, alleged to be unconst.i.tutional. . . .

"The compromises of which I speak are the various propositions, which proceed upon the idea that the election by the people of a President of the Republic, in const.i.tutional ways and by const.i.tutional means only, shall not be consummated by his peaceful inauguration, unless the character of the government is fundamentally changed previously, or pledges given that such changes shall be permitted. I see no great evidence that these demands are to be acceded to; but I see that the demands themselves attack the fundamental principles of republican liberty. If disappointed men, be they few or many, be they conspirators and traitors, or misguided zealots merely, can interpret their will, and arrest or divert or contravene the public judgment, const.i.tutionally expressed, then our government is no longer one of laws, but a government of men."

XXII AS SECRETARY OF THE Ma.s.sACHUSETTS BOARD OF EDUCATION

In the early autumn of 1855 the Board of Education elected me to the office of secretary of the board. The position was offered to Mr.

George B. Emerson, who declined to accept it for the reason that he was unwilling to perform the necessary labor. My predecessor was Barnas Sears, who resigned to accept the presidency of Brown University. I made no effort to secure the appointment; indeed, I was doubtful as to the wisdom of accepting it. I had been a member of the board for several years, and I had had a limited acquaintance with Mr.

Mann during his term of office. Mr. Mann had had a brilliant career.

He entered upon his duties at a time when the public schools of Ma.s.sachusetts were in a low condition, and under his administration there had been a revival of interest, whose force is felt, I imagine, to this day. He attacked the customs and ridiculed the prejudices of the people, made war upon the practice of corporal punishment, engaged in a controversy with the Boston schoolmasters, and in the end he either achieved a victory whenever a stand was made against him, or he laid the foundation of ultimate success.

Dr. Sears was a man of peace. He was a carefully educated scholar and progressive in his ideas, but he relied upon quiet labor and carefully prepared arguments. He was at the head of the school system for the long period of thirteen years, and in that time great progress was made. He supplemented Mr. Mann by a steady and st.u.r.dy effort to establish permanently the reforms which Mr. Mann had inaugurated. One obnoxious relic of the ancient ways remained--the district system. In 1840 Governor Morton had called the school districts of the State, "Little Democracies." They were in fact little nurseries of selfishness and intrigue. In the selection of teachers, in the erection and repairs of school houses, and even in the business of furnishing the firewood, there were little intrigues and arrangements by which interested parties secured the appointment of a son or daughter to the place of teacher, or a contract for wood or work. The election of the committee not infrequently turned upon the interest of some influential citizens.

The great evil was the inefficiency of the teachers. Even in cases where the committeeman was left free to act, he was usually incapable of forming a safe opinion as to the quality of teachers. To be sure the examination and approval of candidates were left to the superintending committee, but most frequently the examination was deferred to a time only one or two days prior to the day when the school was to be commenced and the committee would too often yield to the temptation to keep the candidate even though the qualifications were unsatisfactory. The contest with the district system fell upon me, and during my administration the system was abolished. The end was not accomplished without vigorous opposition.

The citizens of the town of Mansfield took the field and under a memorial to the Legislature they appeared before the Committee on Education. The hearings were public in the hall of the House of Representatives. They made personal attacks upon me--among other things alleging that my traveling expenses were greater than the law allowed. This charge was met successfully by an opinion that had been given by Attorney-General Clifford. I changed the defence to an attack upon the promoters of the movement, and they retreated after a contest of several days; one of the party admitting that they were wrong in their views and wrong in their actions. For the most part, they were well intentioned persons, but not informed, or rather they were misinformed upon the subject of education. They were unimportant in numbers, but for a time they strewed the State with handbills, placards and newspaper articles. They ill.u.s.trated one half of the fable of the frog and the ox.

In my five years of service I made more than three hundred addresses upon educational topics. In that service I visited most of the cities and towns, met the citizens individually and in ma.s.ses, visited the factories and shops, and thus I became well acquainted with the habits of the people, their industries and modes of life. In each year I held twelve teachers' inst.i.tutes and each inst.i.tute continued five days in session. A portion of each day was given to criticisms, during which time the teachers of the inst.i.tute and the lecturers were freely criticised by cards sent to the chair without the names of the critics.

Hence there was the greatest freedom, and no one on the platform was allowed to escape. It is an unusual thing to find a speaker, even of the highest culture, who can speak an hour without violating the rules of p.r.o.nunciation, or showing himself negligent in some important particular. The teachers of the teachers gained daily by these critical exercises.

Among the lecturers and teachers were some men of admitted eminence.

Aga.s.siz was with me about two years as lecturer in Natural History.

His skill in drawing upon the blackboard while he went on with his oral explanation was a constant marvel. He was not a miser in matter of knowledge more than in money. Of his vast stores of knowledge he gave freely to all. Any member of a cla.s.s could get from him all that he knew upon any topic in his department. When he was ignorant he never hesitated to say: "I don't know." He was very chary of conjectures in science. Indeed, I cannot recall an instance of that sort. He chose to investigate and to wait. In all his ways he was artless. He was a well built man with a ma.s.sive head and an intelligent face. His presence inspired confidence.

a.s.sociated with him by nativity and ties of friendship, was Professor Guyot. Professor Guyot taught physical geography, and previous to 1855 he had wrought a change in public opinion in regard to the method of introducing the science to children. All the then recent text-books omitted physical geography, or reserved it for a brief chapter at the close of the work. Guyot changed the course of study. His motto was this: "We must first consider this earth as one grand individual."

On this foundation he built his system. Morse, the father of the inventor of the system of telegraphic communication, was the author of a geography published in the eighteenth century, and he commenced with physical geography. His successors, c.u.mmings, Worcester, and others abandoned that scientific arrangement and introduced the learners to political and descriptive geography. Moreover, their teaching of physical geography was devoted to definitions to be learned by rote.

Many of the text-books in use in the schools were framed upon similar erroneous ideas. The first sentence in Murray's Grammar was a definition of the science, and was in fact, the conclusion deduced from a full knowledge of the subject.

George B. Emerson, who was one of our teachers, gave a great impetus to the art of teaching grammar. He discarded books, and beginning with an object, as a bell or an orange, he would give a child at the age of twelve years a very good knowledge of the science in six lessons of an hour each. Dr. Lowell Mason was a teacher in the inst.i.tutes during my entire period of service, although he offered to retire on account of age. He was an excellent teacher, and in the art practically, perhaps, the best of all. Professor William Russell was the teacher of elocution. His recitations were good, as were his criticisms on language, but as a teacher, he had not a high rank. After the retirement of Professor Aga.s.siz, I employed Sanborn Tenney, a young man of great industry and enthusiasm. He had in him the promise of a great career in natural science, but he died prematurely in the State of Michigan while upon a lecturing tour. From first to last I had the benefit of a good corps of teachers with a single exception. In drawing I inherited from Dr. Sears a young man of English parentage.

His statements were so extraordinary often, that I lost confidence in him. One day he wandered from his subject and indulged himself in denunciations of the English aristocracy. He closed with this remark: "Although I belong to the haristocracy, I 'ate 'em!" At the end of the autumn term, I dismissed him.

During my service as Secretary, I made the acquaintance of several persons whom I should not otherwise have known. Among them were President Hopkins of Williams College, President Hitchc.o.c.k of Amherst College, and President Felton of Harvard College. Hopkins might properly be termed a wise man. He resembled President Walker who for several years presided over Harvard. Felton was a genial man, of sufficient learning for his office, and exceedingly popular with the students and with the public. It was during his administration that I was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, through his influence, and the influence of the professors at the College.

I resigned the office of Secretary, January 1, 1861, with the purpose of resuming the practice of law. During my term of office, I prepared five annual reports, the last of which, the twenty-fourth in the Series, was devoted to an a.n.a.lysis of the school laws with a history of the educational and reformatory inst.i.tutions of the State. I also published a volume of educational papers, which had a considerable sale, especially in the State of Ohio, where a copy was ordered for each school library.

XXIII PHI BETA KAPPA ADDRESS AT CAMBRIDGE

About ten days before the 18th of June, 1861, Judge h.o.a.r called at my office and invited me to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Cambridge on the 18th of the month. Although I had but little time for preparation, I accepted the invitation upon the understanding, or rather upon his request, that I was to deal with the questions then agitating the country. Among my hearers was the venerable Josiah Quincy, formerly President of the College. My address was so radical that the timid condemned it, and even Republican papers deprecated the violence of my language--they then living in the delusion that concessions, mild words and att.i.tudes of humility could save the Union.

Mr. Quincy was not of those. He gave to my address unqualified support, and I had no doubt that the majority of my audience sympathized with my views. There were, however, copperheads, and peace-men at any price, and gradually there appeared a more troublesome cla.s.s of men who professed to be for the prosecution of the war, but criticized and condemned all the means employed. They were the hypocrites in politics--a cla.s.s of men who affect virtue, and who tolerate and protect vice in government.

My address was called "The Conspiracy--Its Purpose and Power," and as far as I know, it was the first time that emanc.i.p.ation was demanded publicly, as a means of ending the war and saving the nation. The demand was made in a qualified form, but I renewed it in the December following in an address that I delivered before the Emanc.i.p.ation League. This address gave rise to similar or even to severer criticisms from the same cla.s.ses. They were never a majority in Ma.s.sachusetts, but they had sufficient power to impair the strength of the state, and in 1862 under the style of the People's Party, they endangered the election of Governor Andrew.

These criticisms made no impression upon me, for my confidence was unbounded that emanc.i.p.ation was inevitable and I was willing to wait for an improved public opinion.

I quote a portion of my remarks at Cambridge, which gave rise to criticism in some quarters, and provoked hostility among those whose sympathies were with the South:

"The settlers at Jamestown and Plymouth did not merely found towns or counties or colonies, or States even; they also founded a great nation, and upon the idea of its unity.

"Their colonial charters extended from sea to sea. Their origin, their language, their laws, their civilization, their ideas, and now their history, const.i.tute us one nation. In the geological structure of this continent, Nature seems to have prepared it for the occupation of a single people. I cannot doubt, then, that continental unity is the great, the supreme law of our public life.

"A division such as is sought and demanded by those who carry on this war would do violence to our traditions, to our history, to those ideas that our people South and North have entertained for more than two centuries, and to the laws of Nature herself. An agreement such as is desired by the discontented would only intensify our alienations, embitter the strife, and protract the war upon subordinate and insignificant issues. Separation does not settle one difficulty at present existing in the country; while it furnishes occasion, and necessity even, for other controversies and wars, as long as the line of division remains.

"Nor can we doubt, that when, by division, you abandon the Union, acknowledge the Const.i.tution to be a failure, the contest would be carried on regardless of State sovereignty, and finally end in the subjugation of all to one idea, and one system in government. Whatever may stand or fall, whatever may survive or perish, the region between the Atlantic and the Rocky Mountains, between the great lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, is destined to be and to continue under one form of government. . . ."

I advanced a step further in December, as will be seen from the extracts from my speech on Emanc.i.p.ation:

"I say, then, it is a necessity that this war be closed speedily. By blockade it cannot be; by battle it may be; but we risk the result upon the uncertainty whether the great general of this continent is with them or with us. I come, then, to emanc.i.p.ation. Not first,--although I shall not hesitate to say, before I close, that as a matter of justice to the slave, there should be emanc.i.p.ation,--but not first do I ask my countrymen to proclaim emanc.i.p.ation to the slaves in justice to them, but as a matter of necessity to ourselves; for, unless it be by accident, we are not to come out of this contest as one nation, except by emanc.i.p.ation. And first, emanc.i.p.ation in South Carolina. Not confiscation of the property of rebels; that is inadequate longer to meet the emergency. It might have done in March or April or May, or possibly in July; but, in December, or January of the coming year, confiscation of the property of the rebels is inadequate to meet the exigency in which the country is placed. You must, if you do anything, proclaim at the head of the armies of the republic, on the soil of South Carolina, FREEDOM,--and then enforce the proclamation as far and fast as you have an opportunity; and you will have opportunity more speedily then than you will if you attempt to invade South Carolina without emanc.i.p.ating her slaves. Unsettle the foundations of society in South Carolina; do you hear the rumbling? Not we, not we, are responsible for what happens in South Carolina between the slaves and their masters. Our business is to save the Union; to re-establish the authority of the Union over the rebels in South Carolina; and, if between the masters and their slaves collisions arise, the responsibility is upon those masters who, forgetting their allegiance to the Government, lent themselves to this foul conspiracy, and thus have been involved in ruin. As a warning, let South Carolina be the first of the States of the Republic in which emanc.i.p.ation to the enslaved is proclaimed."

I left home for Washington on the Monday following the Sunday when the first battle of Bull Run was fought. When near New Haven, the conductor brought me a copy of a press despatch which gave an account of the engagement and indicated or stated that the rebels had been successful. On the seat behind me were two men who expressed their gratification to each other, when they read the despatch over my shoulder. When I had a fair view of them, I formed the opinion that they were Southern men returning South to take part in the conflict.

It is difficult to comprehend the control which the States' Rights doctrine had over the Southern mind. In my conversations with General Scott the influence which the course pursued by Virginia exercised over him was apparent. Those conversations left upon me the impression that he had debated with himself as to the course he ought to pursue.

Attachment to Virginia was the sole excuse which Lee offered in his letter to his sister which contained a declaration that there was no just cause for secession.

In July, 1861, Washington was comparatively defenceless. Mr. Lincoln was calm, but I met others who were quite hopeless of the result.

My speech upon Emanc.i.p.ation in December, 1861, led to a request from the publishers of the _Continental Magazine_ for an article upon the subject. It appeared in February, 1862, and in that article I set forth the necessity of immediate emanc.i.p.ation as a war measure, and by virtue of the war power, under the t.i.tle, "Our Danger, and Its Cause." Rapid changes were then taking place in public opinion, and in Ma.s.sachusetts the tide was strong in favor of vigorous action. It was arrested temporarily in the summer of 1862, by the untoward events of the war, and the "People's Party" became formidable for a brief season.

One of the peculiar circ.u.mstance of the contest was the acceptance by General Devens of the post of candidate for Governor by the People's Party. General Devens was then in the army, and with considerable experience he had shown the qualities of a good soldier. But he was not a Republican. In other days he had been a Webster Whig, and as marshal of the district of Ma.s.sachusetts he had charge officially of the return of the negro Sims to slavery.

This act had brought down upon him criticisms, quite like maledictions, from the Anti-Slavery Party. By these criticisms he had been embittered, and although he was hearty in support of the war, he had not then reached a point in his experience when he could realize that the only efficient way of supporting the war was to support the Republican Party.

At a later period he identified himself with the Republican Party, and as a Republican he filled with honor a place upon the bench of the Supreme Court of Ma.s.sachusetts, and upon the election of President Hayes, he was made Attorney-General of the United States. That office he filled with tact, urbanity, and reasonable ability. He belonged to a cla.s.s of orators of which Ma.s.sachusetts has furnished a considerable number--Mr. Everett was the chief. His disciples or followers included Hillard, Burlingame, Bullock, Devens, Long, and some others of lesser note. The style of these men was attractive, sometimes ornate, but lacking in the force which leaves an indelible impression upon the hearer.

XXIV THE PEACE CONVENTION OF 1861

In the month of January, 1861, the State of Virginia invited the States to send delegates to a congress or convention to be held in the city of Washington. The call implied that the Union was a confederation of States as distinguished from an independent and supreme and sovereign government, set up and maintained by the people of the whole country, except as the States were made the servants of the nation for certain specified purposes. There was hesitation on the part of Ma.s.sachusetts, and some of the States of the North declined to respond to the call.

After delay, Governor Andrew appointed John Z. Goodrich, Charles Allen, George S. Boutwell, T. P. Chandler, F. B. Crowninshield, J. M. Forbes, and Richard P. Waters as commissioners to the convention.

The meeting was held on the 6th of February in Willard's Hall, in the city of Washington. The door upon the street was closed, and the delegates were admitted from Willard's Hotel through a side door, cut for the purpose. The entrance was guarded by a messenger, and only members were admitted. There were no reporters, but Mr. Chittenden, of Vermont, made notes from which he prepared a volume that was published, but not until several years after the congress had ceased to exist. A few of the members furnished him with reports of their speeches, but not always in the language used at the time of delivery. My memory of what was said by Mr. Chase and Mr. Frelinghuysen did not correspond with the Chittenden Report. As the Convention had been in session several days when the Ma.s.sachusetts delegation appeared, we were a.s.signed to seats that were remote from the chair.

The convention was composed of three cla.s.ses of men. Secessionists, led by John Tyler, the president of the convention, Seddon of Virginia, and Davis and Ruffin of North Carolina; border State men from Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Kentucky, who had faith in differing degrees that the Union might be saved, and war averted; and radical men who had no faith that anything could be done by which the Union could be saved, except through war. Soon after my arrival in Washington, I called on a Sunday upon Mr. Seddon. We had a free conversation. He said:

"It is of no use for us to attempt to deceive each other. You have one form of civilization, and we have another. You think yours is the best for you, and we think that ours is the best for us. But our culture is exhausting, and we must have new lands. One part of your people say that Congress shall exclude slavery from the territories, and another set of men say that it will be excluded by natural laws. Under either theory, somebody must go, and if we can't go with our slaves, we must go without them and our country will be given up to the negroes."

With the system of slavery, and in the absence of knowledge of the value of manufactured fertilizers, this was not an unreasonable view.

Looking forward a hundred years and a.s.suming the continued existence of slavery, there was no conclusive solution of the problem presented by Mr. Seddon. But he did not seem to consider that he was warring against nature as well as against the Union in his attempt to extend the area of slavery. His efforts, had they been successful, could only have postponed the crisis for a period not definite, but surely not of long duration. When the Confederacy was formed, Mr. Seddon became Secretary of War, and when the war was over, I recognized his friendship by securing the removal of his disabilities under the Fourteenth Amendment. Of the Secessionists, Mr. Seddon was the leading man upon the floor of the convention. It was manifest that he did not wish to secure the return of the seceded States. On one point he was anxious, and he did not attempt to disguise his purpose.

He sought to secure from the convention, or if not from the convention, from the delegates from the Republican States, an a.s.surance that in no event should there be war. One of the errors, indeed, the greatest error, was the failure of the Northern delegates to a.s.sert that in no event should the Union be dissolved except through the success of the South in arms. As far as I remember, this was not a.s.serted by any one except myself.

Many expressed their fear of war and urged the convention to agree to some plan of settlement as the only means of averting war. Mr.

Stockton, of New Jersey, went so far as to a.s.sert that in case of war the North would raise a regiment to aid the South as often as one was raised to a.s.sail it. Mr. Chase's remarks on the floor of the convention indicated a disposition to allow the South to go without resistance on our part, and in a conversation that I had with him as we walked one evening on Pennsylvania Avenue, toward Georgetown, he said:

"The thing to be done is to let the South go."

The interest of the convention centred upon the Committee of Thirteen, of which Mr. Guthrie was chairman. While the Committee of Thirteen was considering what should be done, Mr. John Z. Goodrich said that he had called upon Mr. Seward, and that Mr. Seward expressed a wish to see me.

I had not the personal acquaintance of Mr. Seward, and Mr. Goodrich offered to take me to Mr. Seward's house. We called in the evening.

His conversation and bearing were different from the conversation and bearing of most of the public men of the time. He spoke as though the subject of conversation was the chance of a client and the means of bringing him safely out of his perils. He spoke of the speech he had made in the Senate and said: