Page:The Biographical Dictionary of America, vol. 01.djvu/337

 BLAIXE.

BLAINE.

to the Anglo-American treaty of 1870, which fol- lowed the American idea as opposed to the one held by the English government up to that time, •■ once a subject, always a subject."

From 1869 to 1876 Mr. Blaine, being speaker of the house, seldom took part in debate; one of the conspicuous exceptions to this rule was his vacating his chair to oppose the bill giving Gen- eral Grant the right to pronounce " martial '" law in the southern states and to suspend the habeas corpus act. as measures for the extinction of the famous Ku-klux Klan. Jan. 6, 1876, Mr. Blaine offered an amendment to the Amnesty bill pre- sented to the house by Mr. Randall, Dec. 15, 1876, which amendment read as follows : " Be it enacted, etc. That all persons now under the disabilities imposed by the 14th amendment to the constitution of the United States, with the exception of Jefferson Davis, late president of the so-called Confederate states, shall be relieved of such disabilities on their appearing before any judge of a United States court and taking and subscribing in open court the following oath," etc. The ground he took in the debate which followed was that Mr. Davis was responsible for the cruelties charged against the keepers of the Federal prisoners at Andersonville. He said: '"I only see before me, when his name is pre- sented, a man who, by the wink of his eye, by a wave of his hand, by a nod of his head, could have stopped the atrocities at Andersonville. Some of us had kinsmen there, most of us had friends there, aU of us had countrymen there; and in the name of those kinsmen, friends and countrymen, I here protest, and shall with my vote protest against calling back and crowning with the honors of fuU American citizenship the man who organized that murder." This speech made for Mr. Blaine many implacable enemies and had the effect of rousing much partisan feel- ing. Charges were made that he had received bribes, notably of Union Pacific and Kansas Pacific railroad bonds. Some letters which had fallen into the hands of a clerk named Mulligan written by Mr. Blaine to Warren Fisher of Bos- ton, were the groundwork upon which these charges were framed, and against which Mr. Blaine defended himself ably, and with notable and dramatic effect. In 1876 he was the strongest Republican candidate for nomination as Presi- <lent and lacked only twenty-eight votes of a majority when the supporters of the several other candidates united and gave the favoring balance to Mr. Hayes. Mr. Blaine was elected to the senate in 1876 to fill the unexpired term of Lot M. Morrill, who became secretary of the treasury in President Hayes's cabinet. He at once took an active part in all the current questions before the senate ; he opposed the appointment of

an electoral commission to determine the va- lidity of the presidential election, urging that Congress could not confer upon a commission powers which it did not itself possess. He was strong in his opposition to the Bland silver biU, being in favor of a bimetallic currency and the maintenance of fuU weight in coining silver. His tariff views were firmly defined and were not controlled by party limitations; he favored protection as a necessary measure for the encour- agement of American industries. He did much to promote the shipping industries of the United States, and in 1878 proposed the subsidizing of a line of mail steamers to Brazil, justly contending that French and English commerce had been greatly augmented by the granting of subsidies to various ocean steamship lines. Nor was his voice uncertain in the strife that arose in the senate in 1879 in regard to the presence of United States troops at the polls, and the resistance of the Democrats to the passage of the appropriation bills, when he stigmatized the attempt to with- hold appropriations, as a threat to the executive, as revolutionary. He regarded purity of the ballot as an important factor in the government of the people, b}' the people, and was active in the meas- ures taken to maintain rightful government in Maine, when in 1879 an attempt was made to usurp the functions of the newly elected state officials. Mr. Blaine favored the bill for the exclusion of the Chinese in 1879 on the grounds that their admission menaced the well-being of the native laboring population and would cause the lowering of the standards of wages and of living, for those who obtained a support by unskUled labor, to the level of the Chinese coolie. " For one," he said, " I will never consent by my vote or by my voice to drive the intelligent working-men of America to that competition and that degrada- tion."

Mr. Blaine was again an unsuccessful candi- date for nomination for the presidency in 1880, and was chosen by President Garfield as his sec- retary of state. One of his first acts as secretary was to inspire the calling of a congress of dele- gates from the South American republics, to co- operate with the United States in establishing a system of arbitration looking to the peaceful settlement of all questions arising between the independent nations of the American continents. The primary issue was the cessation of hostilities between Chili and Peru, and the secondary, and by no means least important one. the furthering of the commercial interests and relations of the United States with the various countries. The shooting of President Garfield, and his lingering illness, necessarilj- caused the abeyance of all active measures; his death brought about Mr. Blaine's withdrawal from the cabinet, and this