Your last speeches, especially the two on the funding bill and protection to American citizens abroad, have given in so much pleasure; they are so high-toned and truly human in the elevated sense, and honorable, of that kind of honor which nothing can tarnish,—that I want to make an opportunity for thanking you for my part of the good I trust they may do in every direction.Dixon, late senator from Connecticut, wrote to Sumner concerning his resistance to the retaliation bill: ‘It is a noble and brave utterance. You never lack the nerve to say what you think right in the face of present apparent unpopularity. If I have differed from you, it has not been without pain.’ Roscoe Conkling of New York entered the Senate March 4, 1867. He had on well known occasions turned the House into a bear-garden, finally provoking Mr. Blaine to speak of his ‘cheap swagger,’ his ‘haughty disdain, his grandiloquent swell, his majestic, super-eminent, overpowering turkey-gobbler strut.’1 His subsequent quarrels with three Presidents (Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur), his melodramatic resignation as senator, and his abortive effort to obtain a re-election, have given him a place in the history of the times out of proportion to any record of his public work.2 His career was marked by a jealsousy of associates who had rendered meritorious service or gained a position in the public esteem unattainable by himself. He had no respect for age or high service or the common feelings of men. The more sensitive they were to reproach or insult, the more they felt bound by the limitations of decent speech,—the more his nature prompted him to say offensive things of them. He was not happy without some one at hand whom he could make uncomfortable. The condition of good-fellowship with him was that one should pay court to him and minister to his arrogance. Rather than encounter his insolence, his associates generally were inclined to let him have his way. But his party grew
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Agassiz, referring in a letter, July 21, 1868, to talks with Sumner at Washington on the progress of culture in the United States, which he wished to renew, said:—
1 Debate, April 24, 25, and 30, 1866. Congressional Globe, pp. 2152. 2180, 2299. Mr. Blaine in his speech refers to want of courage shown by Conkling in the Thirty-seventh Congress. It is not known to what occasion the reference is made; but it may have been to a scene in the lobby of the house and at his seat, when Conkling received, without reply, from E. B. Washburne a severe imputation on his honor. Conkling's expeditious retreat from Narragansett Pier is of a later date than that of this chapter.
2 For an estimate of Conklings character as a public man, see New York Times, Jan. 18, 1879, and New York Nation, Jan. 23, 1879.
Cambridge, MA. Press of John Wilson and Son. 1877.
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