Page:Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs (Volume One).djvu/29

Rh But the House preferred articles that did not allege an indictable offence and the Senate sustained them by a vote of thirty-five to eighteen, one less than the number necessary for conviction. On April 22 and 23, 1868, Mr. Boutwell, on behalf of the managers, addressed the Senate, delivering one of the strongest and ablest arguments on record, and thus completing, as a lawyer, the most exhaustive labor he ever attempted. He was a member of the Committee of Fifteen which reported the Fourteenth Amendment, and while serving on the committee on the judiciary he reported and carried through the House the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

In 1873 Mr. Boutwell was chosen United States Senator from Massachusetts to fill the unexpired term of Hon. Henry Wilson, who had been elected Vice-President. He continued in the Senate until 1877, when he was appointed by President Hayes, through Gen. Charles Devens, then Attorney-General, commissioner to revise the statutes of the United States. That great work was completed and the volume was published in the autumn of 1878. Some idea of the labor involved in this undertaking may be gained from the index, which contains over 25,000 references. In 1878 Mr. Boutwell returned to Boston and resumed the practice of law. In 1880 William M. Evarts, then Secretary of State, and President Hayes, asked him to accept the position of counsel and agent for the United States before a Board of International Arbitrators created by a treaty ratified in June, 1880, between the United States and France, for the settlement of claims against each government by citizens of the other government. The claims of French citizens, 726 in number, arose from the operations of the Union armies in the South, principally in