The Writings of Carl Schurz/To George F. Hoar, August 22d, 1884
TO GEORGE F. HOAR
Senator: In the newspapers I find a letter addressed by you to a friend, the principal object of which seems to be to discredit some of the statements made by me in a speech recently delivered at Brooklyn. You will pardon me for pointing out to you some serious mistakes into which your zeal for your friend Mr. Blaine seems to have betrayed you. Among them the following are the most important:
1. On June 29, 1869, Mr. Blaine, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, wrote to Mr. W. Fisher, Jr., thanking him for having admitted him (Speaker Blaine) to a participation in “the new railroad enterprise,” the Little Rock road, and expressing a strong desire to have Mr. Caldwell also “dispose of a share of his interest" to him (Speaker Blaine), adding that he felt he would “not prove a deadhead in the enterprise,” and “saw various channels in which he knew he could make himself useful.” Mr. Caldwell hesitated to comply with Speaker Blaine's wish. Thereupon, Mr. Blaine, three months afterward, on October 4th, wrote Mr. Fisher two letters, in which he related quite circumstantially how he (Speaker Blaine) had, without knowing it, and in a correct way, done the Little Rock road and Mr. Caldwell a great favor by an exercise of his power as Speaker. At the same time he reiterated his “anxious” request for the share of Mr. Caldwell's interest in the enterprise spoken of three months before, suggesting to Mr. Fisher to tell Mr. Caldwell about the “favor.”
The question is what Speaker Blaine meant when he said that he would not be a deadhead in the enterprise, and that he saw various channels in which he knew he could make himself useful; and also what the object was of the letters of October 4th. You say Speaker Blaine meant simply that he was acquainted with many capitalists, and had peculiar facilities for placing bonds. Does it not occur to you that, if Mr. Elaine had meant this, it would have been the most natural thing for him to say so? But he did not say so. He did say something else. I expressed the opinion that Speaker Elaine meant to point to the exercise of his official power as the channel of his usefulness. I think this, for the simple reason that this was the thing, and the only thing, he did point at in two letters written on one day, requesting that Mr. Caldwell be told of it, and at the same time repeating his urgent demand for a share in Mr. Caldwell's interest. On which side do we find the evidence, the only evidence there is—on yours or on mine?
2. You say this was, after all, a very innocent matter, for “it is one of the most gratifying things in life to a man charged with legislative duties to encounter a person to whom he has fairly rendered a service,” and to mention it to him, and that it is the “acme of uncharitableness” to see anything wrong in it. Very well. Let me adopt one of your illustrations. You meet an old soldier and say: “My old friend, I have worked to get you your pension, and did get it for you. It has given me great pleasure.” This is virtuous and pleasant. But how would it be if you said: “My old friend, I got your pension for you, and now I want twenty per cent. of it”? When the Speaker says to a railroad man: “I rendered you and your road in a perfectly proper way a great favor, and I am glad I did it,” that is one thing. But when the Speaker says to a railroad man: “I did you such and such a service by the exercise of my power, and now I want you to give me a valuable interest in your enterprise; I know I am not going to be a deadhead in it, and I see various channels in which I can be useful”—is not that quite another thing? But that is just what Mr. Blaine did.
3. You say it is not true that when Mr. Blaine read the Mulligan letters in the House the order in which he read them tended to create the least difficulty in understanding them. What is the fact? He read those of October 4th first, and then one of July 2d, and then the one of June 29th, which contained the “deadhead” and the “channels of usefulness,” thus just reversing the order of time and connection. Did he put the cart before the horse to make the thing intelligible?
4. You say that the charge of falsehood as to Mr. Blaine's solemn declaration before the House that the Little Rock road derived all its value from the State of Arkansas, and not from Congress, is unfounded. What are the facts? That Mr. Blaine made that statement with reference, to use his own words, “to the question of propriety involved in a Member of Congress holding an investment of this kind,” you cannot deny. The object of the statement confessedly was to convey the impression that the House, over which Speaker Blaine presided, had no power over that land-grant road or its interests and values, and that his owning or his asking for an interest in it while he was Speaker was a proper and harmless thing. Now, Mr. Blaine knew perfectly well that the original grants were made nominally to States, but really for specific lines. So in this case. The original Act of February, 1853, granted land to Arkansas and Mississippi “to aid in the construction of a railroad from a point upon the Mississippi river opposite the mouth of the Ohio river, via Little Rock, to the Texas boundary, near Fulton, in Arkansas, with branches to Fort Smith and the Mississippi river.” Mr. Blaine knew further that the very bill referred to in his two letters of October 4th, by promoting the passage of which he had done Mr. Caldwell “a great favor,” was “an act to extend the time for the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railway Company to complete the first section of twenty miles of said road,” thus keeping the land grant for the benefit of that road alive by Congressional action beyond the time originally conditioned. He knew further that in addition to this, Congress had in 1872 passed an act relieving the Little Rock road of certain restrictions concerning the sale of granted lands which had been imposed in 1869. And now I ask you, Senator, whether in the face of all these acts of Congressional legislation, Mr. Blaine's solemn statement before the House of Representatives, by which he tried to whitewash himself—that “the company derived its life franchise and value wholly from the State,” and that “the Little Rock road derived all that it had from the State of Arkansas, and not from Congress” and that the company was “amenable and answerable to the State and not in any sense to Congress,” was anything else than a deliberate, unblushing untruth, known by him to be such?
You also deny that when Mr. Blaine, on the same solemn occasion, declared he had never received any Fort Smith bonds, “except at precisely the same rate that others paid,” he said what was not true. Again, what are the facts? Mr. Blaine's words before the House of Representatives were these:
In common with hundreds of other people in New England and other parts of the country, I bought some of these bonds—not a very large amount—paying for them at precisely the same rates that others paid. I never heard, and do not believe, that the Little Rock Company ever parted with a bond to any person except at the regular price fixed for their sale. Instead of receiving bonds of the Little Rock and Fort Smith road as a gratuity, I never had one except at the regular market price.
When Mr. Blaine said this to the House of Representatives on April 24, 1876, before the Mulligan papers became public, he knew, but the public did then not know, that he had received large quantities of bonds upon the following contract:
Whereas, I have this day entered into agreements with A. & P. Coburn, and sundry other parties resident in Maine, to deliver to them certain specified amounts of the common stock, preferred stock and first-mortage bonds of the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad Company, upon said parties paying to me the aggregate sum of $130,000, which several agreements are witnessed by J. G. Blaine, and delivered to said parties by said Blaine:
Now, this agreement witnesses, that upon the due fulfilment of the several contracts referred to, by the payment of the $130,000, and for other valuable considerations, the receipt of which is acknowledged, I hereby agree to deliver to J. G. Blaine or order, as the same come into my hands as assignee of the contract for building the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad the following securities, namely: Of the land bonds, 7 per cents., $130,000; of the first-mortgage bonds, gold, 6's, $32,500. And these $130,000 of land bonds and $32,500 of first-mortgage bonds thus agreed to be delivered to said Blaine are over and above the securities agreed to be delivered by Warren Fisher, Jr., assignee, to the parties making the contracts, which parties with the several amounts to be paid by each and the securities to be received by each, are named in a memorandum on the next page of this sheet.
And it is further agreed that, in the event of any one of said parties failing to pay the amount stipulated, then the amount of securities to be delivered to said Blaine under this agreement shall be reduced in the same proportion that the deficit of payment bears to the aggregate amount agreed to be paid.
That this contract was carried out appears from a memorandum in Mr. Blaine's own handwriting produced by Mr. Mulligan before the Investigating Committee in Mr. Blaine's presence without a word of objection from him as to its correctness. And in the face of this contract, and of the fact that large quantities of Little Rock bonds went to Mr. Elaine, according to the memorandum, without any payment on his part, as a gratuity or commission for Little Rock securities passing to A. & P. Coburn and other parties from Mr. Fisher, Mr. Blaine had the hardihood to say that the “Little Rock Company never parted with a bond to any one except at the regular price fixed for their sale,” and that he himself “never had one except at the regular market price.” In both these cases Mr. Blaine evidently said what was not true; he knew it to be untrue when he said it, and he said it with the obvious intent to deceive the House of Representatives and the “44,000,000 of his countrymen” whom Mr. Blaine “took into his confidence.” How do you call this? I know how you would have called it before Mr. Blaine's nomination, but that nomination seems to have had a strangely confusing effect upon party men's notions as to public morals. To call it “brilliant audacity in the handling of truth,” may suit the vocabulary of the modern era better.
5. You say that I lay too much stress upon Mr. Blaine's energetic protest against “the prying into his private affairs”; that I forget the circumstances; that Mr. Blaine was then a candidate for the Presidency; that the inquiry was instituted by his Democratic opponents, etc. Do you mean to suggest that a public man in high station, whose official integrity is seriously questioned, should accept and facilitate investigation only by his party friends? You will certainly not deny that Mr. Blaine had strong friends upon that committee. But a public man of a high sense of honor, rather than submit to continued suspicion, will invite investigation by his opponents, not try to baffle it. Feeling himself innocent, he will throw wide open the doors of knowledge, the wider the better. He will not fear the appearance of suspicious circumstances, for he will be ready and eager to explain them. He will not increase and justify suspicion by concealment. Only the guilty will rest under suspicion, because he fears exposure and conviction. The character of the things Mr. Blaine succeeded in covering up we are left to infer from the character of those which came out against his remonstrance. You think George Washington would have raved with anger if his “private correspondence” had been inquired into by a committee of Tories? Neither you nor I know how that would have been. But of one thing I am very sure—in Washington's “private correspondence” nothing would have been found in the remotest degree resembling the Mulligan letters.
6. You say that Mr. Blaine's offenses have not been “condoned,” but that he has been “triumphantly acquitted”; that this has been done by the governor and the legislature of Maine sending him to the Senate, by his appointment to the Cabinet and by his nomination for the Presidency. Let us see. Did these events in the least change the facts in Mr. Blaine's record? Can it be said after these events that Mr. Blaine did not write the Mulligan letters, that he did not make the false statements before the House, that he did not protest and struggle against inquiry into what he called his “private business”? Of course not. Did they change in any sense the character of those facts? Certainly not. What, then, did they effect? They showed only that some people, when they bestowed public honors upon Mr. Blaine, either did not know these facts or chose to overlook them for party reasons, or regarded them as compatible with the standard according to which, in their opinion, public honors should be bestowed. But does this relieve other people of their duty as citizens to form a conscientious judgment upon these same things, and to vote accordingly? I wonder whether you would apply your triumphant-acquittal rule with equal readiness to other cases. I am informed that your opinion of General Butler has long been quite unfavorable. General Butler was elected to the governorship of Massachusetts two years ago. He has been nominated for the Presidency by Greenbackers and Anti-monopolists. Did that change in any way the facts constituting his record? Did it change your opinion of those facts? Were that election and these nominations, in your opinion, a “triumphant acquittal”? The mere statement of the proposition is sufficient to show the absurdity of it.
As to Mr. Blaine's case, the generality of American citizens are now for the first time called upon to declare whether his public record is regarded by them as compatible with the standard according to which the American people are willing to bestow the highest honor and trust in this Republic. If the American people declare that it is, then our public men, great and small, will have learned that they may work in their “various channels of usefulness” to make themselves rich, with the same spirit of enterprise and the same brilliant audacity in the handling of facts which they will have been taught to admire in the model set up for them without fear of endangering their preferment in the highest places. What the consequent effects of this upon the future of the Republic are likely to be, I have endeavored to set forth in my Brooklyn speech. Of the effect which Mr. Blaine's mere nomination has already produced, your way of defending him furnishes, I regret to say, an instructive example.
7. You are greatly mistaken when you “take it for granted that what Mr. Schurz has not said in this speech against the personal honesty of Mr. Blaine is not worth saying.” There are many more facts in Mr. Blaine's record which just begin to form the subject of popular discussion, and which may in a most urgent manner call for your attention before the end of this campaign. I confined myself carefully to a few representative points which rested upon Mr. Blaine's own letters, speeches and oral testimony alone. Neither can I accept the compliment that my Brooklyn speech is an unusual exhibition of “clear and skillful statement.” Whatever strength that speech possesses consists simply in the circumstance that it is the sober truth, plainly spoken. And just there is your trouble.