Men of Our Times. Or, Leading Patriots of the Day

The question was decided as all such cases in those times invariably were decided.

The Judge never undertook even the form of answering the argument; never even adverted to it, but decided directly over it, with a composure worthy of a despotism. It was a decision only equalled by that of the most corrupt judges of the corrupt age of Charles II.

Honest Van Zandt was ruined, "scot and lot," by a fine so heavy that all he had in the world would not pay it, and he died broken-hearted; a solemn warning to all in his day, how they allowed themselves to practise Christian charity in a way disagreeable to the plantation despots.

As for Chase, he was undiscouraged by ill success, and shortly reaffirmed his argument and principles in the case of Driskull vs. Parish. He was at least educating the community; he was laying foundations of resistance on which walls and towers should by-and-by arise. Humanity and religion had already made the abolitionists numerically a large and active body in Ohio. They needed only a leader like Chase, of large organizing brain and solid force of combination, to shape them into a political party of great efficiency. To this end his efforts were henceforth directed. In 1841, he united in a call for an Anti-Slavery Convention in Columbus, and in this convention was organized the Liberty party of Ohio. In 1845 he projected a Southwestern Anti-Slavery Convention.

The ground taken was substantially that to which a bloody, weary experience has brought the whole nation now, to wit: "That whatever is worth preserving in republicanism can be maintained only by uncompromising war against an usurping slave-power, and that all who wish to save the nation must unite in using all constitutional measures for the extinction of slavery in their own States, and the reduction of it to constitutional limits in the United States.

This convention met in Cincinnati, in 1845, and Chase prepared the address, giving the history of slavery thus far, and showing the condition of the Whig and Democratic parties respecting it; and urging the importance of a political combination unequivocally committed to the denationalizing of slavery and the slave power. So vigorous were the tactics of this party, so strongly moving with the great central currents of God's forward providences, that in 1847 Chase was made Governor of Ohio, by the triumph of those very principles which in the outset threatened utter loss to their advocate. In 1847 he attended a second Liberty Convention; and afterwards took part in the Buffalo Convention, the celebrated Buffalo Platform being mainly his work.

In 1849, he was chosen United States Senator from Ohio, and his presence was hailed as a tower of strength to the hard fighting anti-slavery party at Washington. When, directly after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, the Democratic party in Ohio voted for Pierce, knowing him directly committed to its enforcement, Chase withdrew from it, and addressed a letter to B. F. Butler, of New York, recommending the formation of an Independent Democratic party. He prepared a platform for this purpose, which was substantially adopted by the convention of the Independent Democracy of 1852.

And now came on the battle of Kansas and Nebraska. Chase was one of the first to awaken the people to this new danger. He, in conference with the anti-slavery men of Congress, drafted an address to the people to arouse them as to this sudden and appalling conspiracy, which was intended to seize for slavery all the unoccupied land of the United States, and turn the balance of power and numbers forever into the slaveholders' hands. It was a critical moment; there was but little time to spare; but the whole united clergy of New England, of all denominations, Catholic and Protestant, found leisure to send in their solemn protest. When that nefarious bill passed, Chase protested against it on the night of its passage, as, with threats, and oaths, and curses, it was driven through. It seems in the retrospect but a brief passage from that hour of apparent defeat to the hour which beheld Lincoln in the presidential chair and Chase, Secretary of the Treasury. His history in that position has verified the sagacity that placed him there. It has been the success of a large, sound, organizing brain, apt and skillful in any direction in which it should turn its powers. It was the well-known thrift and shrewdness of the Yankee farmer, thrift and shrewdness cultivated in years of stern wrestling with life, coming out at the head of the United States treasury in a most critical hour. No men are better to steer through exigencies than these same Yankee farmers, and it seems the savor of this faculty goes to the second and third generations.

We have said before, that if Chase made sacrifices of tangible and material present values for abstract principles, in his early days, it was not because, as is sometimes the case, he was a man merely of ideas, and destitute of practical faculties. On the contrary, the shrewd, cautious, managing, self-preserving faculties were possessed by him to a degree which caused him to be often spoken of by the familiar proverb, "a man who can make every edge cut." By nature, by descent, by hard and severe training, he was a rigid economist, and a man who might always safely be trusted to make the very most and best of a given amount of property.

It is praise enough to any financier who could take a nation in the sudden and unprepared state ours was, and could carry it along for three or four years through a war of such gigantic expenditure, to say that the country was neither ruined, beggared, nor hopelessly embarrassed, but standing even stronger when he resigned the treasury than when he took it.

His financial management was at first to raise the money needed for the war by loans, until the expenses became so great as to be beyond the capacity of the specie in the country. Then, still adhering to the principle of raising the means for the war within the United States, he introduced the legal tender paper currency, and by providing that it should be a necessary basis for banking operations, he shrewdly placed the whole banking capital of the United States in a position where it must live or die with the country. This not only provided funds, but made every dollar of money act as a direct stimulus to the patriotism of those who supplied it.

On June 30, 1864, Chase resigned his position in the treasury. That Providence which has ordained so many striking and peculiar instances of victory and reward for men who espoused the cause of humanity in its dark hours, had also one for Chase.

Oct. 12, 1864, by the death of Taney, the Chief Justiceship of the United States Supreme Court became vacant, and Lincoln expressed the sense of the whole American people in calling Chase to fill that venerable office.

The young lawyer, who without name or prestige, dared to put in pleas for the poorest of his brethren, when the slave power was highest and haughtiest, and whose pleas were overruled with the most chilling contempt, now by God's providence holds that supreme position on the national bench from which, let us trust, the oppressor and the tyrant have faded away forever!

CHAPTER VI

HENRY WILSON

Lincoln, Chase and Wilson as Illustrations of Democracy – Wilson's Birth and Boyhood – Reads over One Thousand Books in Ten Years – Learns Shoemaking – Earns an Education Twice Over – Forms a Debating Society – Makes Sixty Speeches for Harrison – Enters into Political Life on the Working-Men's Side – Helps to form the Free Soil Party – Chosen United States Senator over Edward Everett – Aristocratic Politics in those Days – Wilson and the Slaveholding Senators – The Character of his Speaking – Full of Facts and Practical Sense – His Usefulness as Chairman of the Military Committee – His "History of the Anti-Slavery Measures in Congress" – The 37th and 38th Congresses – The Summary of Anti-Slavery Legislation from that Book – Other Abolitionist Forces – Contrast of Sentiments of Slavery and of Freedom – Recognition of Hayti and Liberia; Specimen of the Debate – Slave and Free Doctrine on Education – Equality in Washington Street Cars – Pro-Slavery Good Taste – Solon's Ideal of Democracy Reached in America.

It is interesting to notice how, in the recent struggle that has convulsed our country and tried our republican institutions, so many of the men who have held the working oar have been representative men of the people. To a great extent they have been men who have grown up with no other early worldly advantages than those which a democratic republic offers to every citizen born upon her soil. Lincoln from the slave states, and Chase and Henry Wilson in the free, may be called the peculiar sons of Democracy. That hard Spartan mother trained them early on her black broth to her fatigues, and wrestlings, and watchings, and gave them their shields on entering the battle of life with only the Spartan mother's brief – "With this, or upon this."

Native force and Democratic institutions raised Lincoln to the highest seat in the nation, and to no mean seat among the nations of the earth; and the same forces in Massachusetts caused that State, in an hour of critical battle for the great principles of democratic liberty, to choose Henry Wilson, the self-taught, fearless shoemaker's apprentice of Natick, over the head of the gifted and graceful Everett, the darling of foreign courts, the representative of all the sentiments and training which transmitted aristocratic ideas have yet left in Boston and Cambridge. All this was part and parcel of the magnificent drama which has been acting on the stage of this country for the hope and consolation of all who are born to labor and poverty in all nations of the world.

Henry Wilson, our present United States Senator, was born at Farmington, N. H., Feb. 12, 1818, of very poor parents. At the age of ten he was bound to a farmer till he was twenty-one. Here he had the usual lot of a farm boy – plain, abundant food, coarse clothing, incessant work, and a few weeks' schooling at the district school in winter.

In these ten years of toil, the boy, by twilight, firelight, and on Sundays, had read over one thousand volumes of history, geography, biography and general literature, borrowed from the school libraries and from those of generous individuals.

At twenty-one he was his own master, to begin the world; and in looking over his inventory for starting in life, found only a sound and healthy body, and a mind trained to reflection by solitary thought. He went to Natick, Mass., to learn the trade of a shoemaker, and in working at it two years, he saved enough money to attend the academy at Concord and Wolfsborough, N. H. But the man with whom he had deposited his hard earnings became insolvent; the money he had toiled so long for, vanished; and he was obliged to leave his studies, go back to Natick and make more. Undiscouraged, he resolved still to pursue his object, uniting it with his daily toil. He formed a debating society among the young mechanics of the place; investigated subjects, read, wrote and spoke on all the themes of the day, as the spirit within him gave him utterance. Among his fellow-mechanics, some others were enkindled by his influence, and are now holding high places in the literary and diplomatic world.

In 1840, young Wilson came forward as a public speaker. He engaged in the Harrison election campaign, made sixty speeches in about four months, and was well repaid by his share in the triumph of the party. He was then elected to the Massachusetts Legislature as representative from Natick.

Having entered life on the working man's side, and known by his own experience the working man's trials, temptations and hard struggles, he felt the sacredness of a poor man's labor, and entered public life with a heart to take the part of the toiling and the oppressed.

Of course he was quick to feel that the great question of our time was the question of labor and its rights and rewards. He was quick to feel the "irrepressible conflict," which Seward so happily designated, between the two modes of society existing in America, and to know that they must fight and struggle till one of them throttled and killed the other; and prompt to understand this, he made his early election to live or die on the side of the laboring poor, whose most oppressed type was the African slave.

In the Legislature, he introduced a motion against the extension of slave territory; and in 1845, went with Whittier to Washington with the remonstrance of Massachusetts against the admission of Texas as a slave State.

When the Whig party became inefficient in the cause of liberty through too much deference to the slave power, Henry Wilson, like Charles Sumner, left it, and became one of the most energetic and efficient organizers in forming the Free Soil party of Massachusetts. In its interests, he bought a daily paper in Boston, which for some time he edited with great ability.

Meanwhile, he rose to one step of honor after another, in his adopted State; he became President of the Massachusetts Senate; and at length after a well contested election, was sent to take the place of the accomplished Everett in the United States Senate.

His election was a sturdy triumph of principle. His antagonist had every advantage of birth and breeding, every grace which early leisure, constant culture, and the most persevering, conscientious self-education could afford. He was, in graces of person, manners and mind, the ideal of Massachusetts aristocracy, but he wanted that clear insight into actual events, which early poverty and labor had given to his antagonist. His sympathies in the great labor question of the land were with the graceful and cultivated aristocrats rather than the clumsy, ungainly laborer; and he but professed the feeling of all aristocrats in saying at the outset of his political life, while Wilson was yet a child, that in the event of a servile insurrection, he would be among the first to shoulder a musket to defend the masters.

But the great day of the Lord was at hand. The events which since have unrolled in fire and blood, had begun their inevitable course; and the plain working-man was taken by the hand of Providence towards the high places where he, with other working men, should shape the destiny of the labor question for this age and for all ages.

Wilson went to Washington in the very heat and fervor of that conflict which the gigantic Giddings, with his great body and unflinching courage, said to a friend, was to him a severer trial of human nerve than the facing of cannon and bullets. The slave aristocracy had come down in great wrath, as if knowing that its time was short. The Senate chamber rang with their oaths and curses as they tore and raged like wild beasts against those whom neither their blandishments nor their threats could subdue. Wilson brought there his face of serene good nature, his vigorous, stocky frame, which had never seen ill-health, and in which the nerves were yet an undiscovered region. It was entirely useless to bully, or to threaten, or to cajole that honest, good-humored, immovable man, who stood like a rock in their way, and took all their fury as unconsciously as a rock takes the foam of breaking waves. In every anti-slavery movement he was always foremost, perfectly awake, perfectly well informed, and with that hardy, practical business knowledge of men and things which came from his early education, prepared to work out into actual forms what Sumner gave out as splendid theories.

Wilson's impression on the Senate was not mainly that of an orator. His speeches were as free from the artifices of rhetoric as those of Lincoln, but they were distinguished for the weight and abundance of the practical information and good sense which they contained. He never spoke on a subject till he had made himself minutely acquainted with it in all its parts, and was accurately familiar with all that belonged to it. Not even John Quincy Adams or Charles Sumner could show a more perfect knowledge of what they were talking about than Henry Wilson. Whatever extraneous stores of knowledge and belles lettres may have been possessed by any of his associates, no man on the floor of the Senate could know more of the United States of America than he; and what was wanting in the graces of the orator, or the refinements of the rhetorician was more than made amends for in the steady, irresistible, strong tread of the honest man, determined to accomplish a worthy purpose.

Wilson succeeded Benton as chairman of the Military Committee of the Senate, and it was fortunate for the country that when the sudden storm of the war broke upon us, so strong a hand held this helm. Gen. Scott said that he did more work in the first three months of the war than had been done in his position before for twenty years; and Secretary Cameron attributed the salvation of Washington in those early days, mainly to Henry Wilson's power of doing the apparently impossible in getting the Northern armies into the field in time to meet the danger.

His recently published account of what Congress has done to destroy slavery, is a history which no man living was better fitted to write. No man could be more minutely acquainted with the facts, more capable of tracing effects to causes, and thus competent to erect this imperishable monument to the honor of his country.

It is meet that the poor, farm-bound apprentice, the shoemaker of Natick, should thus chronicle the great history of the deliverance of labor from disgrace in this democratic nation.

There is something sublime in the history of the movements of the 37th and 38th Congresses of the United States. Perhaps never in any country did an equal number of wise and just men meet together under a more religious sense of their responsibility to God and to mankind. Never had there been a deeper and more religious awe presiding over popular elections than those which sent those men to Congress to man our national ship in the terrors of the most critical passage our stormy world has ever seen. They were the old picked, tried seamen, stout of heart, giants in conscience and moral sense. They were the scarred veterans of long years of battling for the great principles of the Declaration of Independence, men who in old times had come through great battles with the beasts of the slavery Ephesus, and still wore the scars of their teeth. They had seen their president stricken down at their head, and though bleeding inwardly, had closed up their ranks shoulder to shoulder, to go steadily on with the great work for which he died.

These men it was who while the din of arms was resounding through the country, while Washington was one great camp and hospital, and the confusing rumors of wars were coming to it from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south – took up and carried to the end the grandest national moral reform ever accomplished in a given time. Many men of the common sort would have said, "This is no time to be driving at moral reforms. We must drive this war through first, and when we have done this, we will begin to wipe up, and adjust, and put away." So gigantic a war was apology enough to satisfy the consciences of men who looked only to precedents and the rules of ordinary statesmanship, but our Congress was largely made up of men who walked by a higher light, and judged by a higher standard than ever has been given to mere statesmanship before. The spirit of the old Puritans, their unworldly, God-fearing spirit, their steadfast flint-facedness in principle, came to a final and culminating development in these Congresses.

Henry Wilson has written a "History of the Anti-Slavery Measures in Congress," in a brief, clear, compact summary, and made of it a volume which ought to be in every true American library. It is a volume of which every American has just and honest reason to be proud, and to which every Republican the whole world over, should look with hope and trust, as exhibiting the magnificent morality, the dauntless courage, the unwearied faith, hope and charity that are the crown jewels of republics. We should be glad to see this book of Henry Wilson's in every farm house of New England, lying by the family Bible, under the old flag of the Union. The men who carried through these magnificent reforms – THEY ARE OUR JEWELS.

Mr. Wilson gives in his book a condensed summary of the debates in the House relative to each step of the reform. For the most part it is a record of noble, Christian, unworldly patriotic sentiment – a sort of ideal statesmanship becoming real in tangible good deeds.

Every day some new den in the Augean stable was exposed and opened up to daylight, and the cleansing baptism of liberty applied. There was some fluttering and screaming of owls and bats, and now and then the poor old dilapidated dragon of slavery gave a bootless hiss, but nobody minded it. It was a whole-hearted, clean, pure, noble time in Congress, when those walls, so long defiled with the brawls, the mingled profanity and obscenity of slaveholders and slavebreeders, now rang only to manly sentiments and cleanly, noble, Christian resolves, such as make the heart strong to hear. We quote from the close of Mr. Wilson's book the summary of what was done by these Congresses in the way of reform legislation.

"As the Union armies advanced into the rebel States, slaves, inspired by the hope of personal freedom, flocked to their encampments, claiming protection against rebel masters, and offering to work and fight for the flag whose stars for the first time gleamed upon their vision with the radiance of liberty. Rebel masters and rebel-sympathizing masters sought the encampments of the loyal forces, demanding the surrender of the escaped fugitives; and they were often delivered up by officers of the armies. To weaken the power of the insurgents, to strengthen the loyal forces, and assert the claims of humanity, the 37th Congress enacted an article of war, dismissing from the service officers guilty of surrendering these fugitives.

Three thousand persons were held as slaves in the District of Columbia, over which the nation exercised exclusive jurisdiction; the 37th Congress made these three thousand bondmen freemen, and made slaveholding in the capital of the nation for evermore impossible.

"Laws and ordinances existed in the national capital that pressed with merciless rigor upon the colored people: the 37th Congress enacted that colored persons should be tried for the same offences, in the same manner, and be subject to the same punishments, as white persons; thus abrogating the 'black code.'

"Colored persons in the capital of this Christian nation were denied the right to testify in the judicial tribunals; thus placing their property, their liberties, and their lives, in the power of unjust and wicked men; the 37th Congress enacted that persons should not be excluded as witnesses in the courts of the District on account of color.

"In the capital of the nation, colored persons were taxed to support schools from which their own children were excluded; and no public schools were provided for the instruction of more than four thousand youth; the 38th Congress provided by law that public schools should be established for colored children, and that the same rate of appropriations for colored schools should be made as are made for schools for the education of white children.

"The railways chartered by Congress, excluded from their cars colored persons, without the authority of law; Congress enacted that there should be no exclusion from any car on account of color.

"Into the territories of the United States, – one-third of the surface of the country, – the slaveholding class claimed the right to take and hold their slaves under the protection of law; the 37th Congress prohibited slavery for ever in all the existing territory, and in all territory which may hereafter be acquired; thus stamping freedom for all, for ever, upon the public domain.

"As the war progressed, it became more clearly apparent that the rebels hoped to win the Border slave States; that rebel sympathizers in those States hoped to join the rebel States; and that emancipation in loyal States would bring repose to them, and weaken the power of the Rebellion; the 37th Congress, on the recommendation of the President, by the passage of a joint resolution, pledged the faith of the nation to aid loyal States to emancipate the slaves therein.

"The hoe and spade of the rebel slave were hardly less potent for the Rebellion than the rifle and bayonet of the rebel soldier. Slaves sowed and reaped for the rebels, enabling the rebel leaders to fill the wasting ranks of their armies, and feed them. To weaken the military forces and the power of the Rebellion, the 37th Congress decreed that all slaves of persons giving aid and comfort to the Rebellion, escaping from such persons, and taking refuge within the lines of the army; all slaves captured from such persons, or deserted by them; all slaves of such persons, being within any place occupied by rebel forces, and afterwards occupied by the forces of the United States, – shall be captives of war, and shall be for ever free of their servitude, and not again held as slaves.