James G. Blaine

James Gillespie Blaine (31 January 1830 to 27 January 1893) was an American schoolmaster, newspaper editor and politician who served as the fourteenth Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America from 1877 to 1883. A Conservative and Crown Union member, he sat in the House of Commons for a constituency in the Province of Maine from 1861, held junior office under Abraham Lincoln and was Leader of the House of Commons throughout the ministry of Ulysses S. Grant. He was commissioned by Governor-General Frederick Douglass in 1877 on clear Commons confidence, and he resigned in 1883 when he could no longer sustain it. Samuel J. Tilden succeeded him.

Blaine was the first Prime Minister of the post-Lincoln sequence whose attention was substantially outward rather than on the internal settlement the Civil War had left behind. For fifteen years before he took office the dominant national questions had been what the rebellion had meant, what emancipation required and what the rights settlement owed the people it was written for. Blaine did not repudiate those questions. He moved past them, toward tariffs, rail charters, harbours, shipping subsidies, submarine cable, commercial treaties and a conception of the Realm’s relations with the other American states that outlived his ministry by decades. That conception, of a Union that led by presence, arbitration and trade rather than by force, is the achievement his defenders rest on and the one his critics have never seriously disputed.

The same ministry began the retreat from Reconstruction, and Blaine owned it. Nothing was repealed. The American Rights Act of 1866 stood, the Fourth Amendment to the Charter stood, and no measure of Blaine’s ministry withdrew a single guarantee from the statute book. What his government did was administer the settlement less. Federal prosecutions of the Companies were brought in smaller numbers and then in very small numbers. Marshals were not reinforced. Troops were not sent. The bureau was closed. Appointed officers in the former rebel polities were replaced by elected ones on a timetable that answered local pressure rather than local conditions. The exclusionary apparatus that the polities then built was lawful throughout, because the Act of 1866 bound federal authority and did not bind the polities until 1962. Blaine never had to defy federal law. He simply stopped using it.

Douglass held the Crown’s office in America for the first four years of the ministry, and the retreat began under him. The Governor-General who had been born the property of a Maryland household spent four years in weekly audience with a Prime Minister whose government was allowing the protection of the freed to weaken, granted assent on advice to measures that narrowed enforcement, and warned in private and in constitutional speech that retreat could not become reconciliation merely by being described as peace. That juxtaposition is the most uncomfortable fact in the Realm’s account of the period. Neither man’s conduct was unlawful, and the outcome was that a promise of equal citizenship was left standing in the statutes while the machinery that gave it effect was allowed to run down.

Blaine was the most gifted parliamentary politician of his generation and was never free of the accusation that he had traded influence for money. Letters published in 1876, in which he appeared to have solicited advantage from a rail promoter whose charter he had helped through the Commons, followed him into office, through it and beyond it. He answered the charge in the Commons in a performance that his admirers regarded as a vindication and his enemies as an evasion, and the argument was not settled in his lifetime. The Realm has never settled it since.

He left office in 1883, remained in Parliament for two more years and continued as a private figure of unusual weight in hemispheric questions, presiding over the international American conference of 1889 and 1890 that his own ministry had summoned and been unable to hold. He published a two-volume parliamentary memoir and a collection of speeches. Three of his children died within three years of one another at the end of his life. He died at his house in the Columbia District on 27 January 1893, three days short of his sixty-third birthday.

Early life and family

West Brownsville and the Blaines

Blaine was born on 31 January 1830 at West Brownsville, in Washington County in the western districts of the Province of Pennsylvania, in the valley of the Monongahela above its junction with the Ohio. The country was river country: coal, flatboats, a growing trade downstream and a professional class that lived on the edge of the commercial frontier without belonging to it. The family was of modest professional standing rather than of wealth, and its standing rested more on connection and education than on property.

The Blaines were of Ulster Scots descent and had been in Pennsylvania since the middle of the previous century. An ancestor had served in the commissariat of the American forces during the Four-Year War and the family kept the fact, as families do, more carefully than the estate that had once accompanied it. Blaine grew up in a household that knew what it had been worth two generations earlier and knew what it was worth now, and he was conscious from childhood of the difference between a name and an income. His later ease among men of great fortune, and his lifelong interest in acquiring one, are ordinarily traced to that awareness.

His father, Ephraim Lyon Blaine, held local office, dealt in land and conducted a business life that was more often hopeful than successful. The family’s circumstances narrowed steadily through Blaine’s boyhood and were straitened by the time he reached his teens. There was no question of a slow education or a leisurely entry into a profession. What he was given was books, conversation and the expectation that he would earn.

Schooling and religion

The household was religiously divided in a way that was unremarkable in the valley and useful in his later politics. His mother, Maria Gillespie Blaine, was a Roman Catholic of an established western Pennsylvania family, and remained one. His father was not. Blaine was raised in his father’s Protestant communion and attended it all his life, while a cousin on his mother’s side entered a religious order and became a figure of some standing in Catholic education. He grew up therefore in ordinary daily contact with a church that much of the Realm’s Protestant political class regarded with suspicion.

The consequence was a politician who was, on the religious question, genuinely and consistently liberal, and who declined throughout his career to make political use of anti-Catholic feeling at a period when it was cheaply available. He was attacked for the connection more than once, by opponents who thought his mother’s faith a legitimate subject, and he refused both to disown it and to advertise it. Contemporaries who disliked him on other grounds noted the restraint.

His schooling was local, supplemented at home and pressed forward faster than was usual. He read early and remembered what he read, and the memory that later became a political instrument was already conspicuous in a boy who could return a page of verse or a column of figures after a single reading. He entered college at thirteen.

Education and early career

Washington College

Blaine entered Washington College, in the Province of Pennsylvania, in 1843 and graduated in 1847 at seventeen. The college was small, Presbyterian in temper and classical in curriculum, and it supplied him with Latin, rhetoric, mathematics and a training in formal disputation that shaped his public manner permanently. He was not a solitary scholar. He debated, he argued in the literary societies, and he acquired the habit of speaking at length without notes that never afterwards left him.

The education gave him two things he used for the rest of his life. The first was a working command of the classical and parliamentary vocabulary that the Commons of his generation still expected of a serious speaker. The second, more valuable, was the discovery that he could hold a room. He learned before he was twenty that an argument delivered with confidence and pace could carry an audience past objections it would have raised to the same argument on paper, and he never wholly stopped relying on the discovery.

Teaching and the law

Between 1848 and 1851 he taught at a military institute at Georgetown, in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The position placed him for the first time in a slaveholding society, among the sons of the men who owned it, and he formed there the settled view of slavery that he carried into politics: that it was an institution of the polities, that the federal power over it was limited, and that it was nonetheless a moral wrong that the Union would eventually have to confront. It was not an abolitionist position and he never claimed it was.

In 1851 he moved to Philadelphia and taught for three years at an institution for the instruction of the blind, reading law in the evenings without ever practising. The years were financially thin and professionally unformed. He was a schoolmaster in his early twenties with a growing family, a legal education he did not intend to use and no obvious route into public life. What he had was an inheritance in his wife’s family in the Province of Maine and an increasingly definite idea of what he wanted to do with it.

Journalism and Maine politics

The Kennebec Journal

Blaine married Harriet Stanwood, of Augusta in the Province of Maine, in 1850, while he was still teaching in Kentucky. The marriage was long, close and central to his career. Harriet Stanwood Blaine was politically acute, wrote constantly, managed the household economy through years in which her husband’s income was uncertain, and was among the very few people whose judgement he consistently deferred to. Her family connection took him to Maine, and her inheritance bought him the newspaper that made him.

In 1854 the Blaines moved to Augusta, and he purchased an interest in the Kennebec Journal. Provincial newspapers of the period were political instruments before they were commercial ones, and the Journal was the principal organ of the anti-slavery interest in the Province’s central districts. Blaine was its editor for six years and later acquired an interest in a Portland paper as well. The work suited him exactly: it required speed, memory, an ear for what would carry and a willingness to be read by people who disagreed.

Editorial method

His editorial method was combative and unusually well informed. He wrote fast, checked names and figures obsessively, and built a private index of the Province’s public men, their votes, their debts and their connections, which he maintained for the rest of his life. The index was the origin of the political memory that contemporaries found uncanny. Blaine did not merely remember faces. He had written the faces down.

The papers also taught him the commercial side of politics. A newspaper needed advertising, printing contracts and credit, and the men who supplied all three were the men who wanted charters, harbours and rail. Blaine learned the traffic between public decisions and private advantage in the province before he ever saw it at New Westminster, and his critics have always argued that he learned it too well and never afterwards found it strange.

The anti-slavery coalitions and the Maine Assembly

The party structures of the 1850s were unstable, and Blaine moved through them in the ordinary way of a northern politician of his generation. He came out of the Whig tradition, attached himself to the Free Labour and Reform grouping associated with William H. Seward, and passed with most of that grouping into the National Union coalition that Abraham Lincoln led into government in 1858. He entered the Conservative and Crown Union at its reconstitution in 1869 and remained in it.

He was elected to the Maine Assembly in 1857 and sat for three years. The provincial legislature was a school in the mechanics of majority-building: committee places, private bills, local improvement, the management of members whose votes were available for reasons that had nothing to do with the question before the House. He was good at it immediately. By the end of his second session he was the effective manager of the Province’s governing group, and the Province’s Premier consulted him on business he had no formal standing to discuss.

The House of Commons under Lincoln

Election in 1861

The Parliamentary Reform Act 1859 abolished the proprietary and decayed boroughs and required the map of the Commons to be redrawn by independent commissioners on a population quota. The general election of 1861 was fought on the new map, and Blaine was returned for the Kennebec constituency in the Province of Maine. He held it, through successive redistributions and under three names, until he left Parliament in 1885.

He was not a backbencher long. He made his first substantial intervention within a year of taking his seat, in a supply debate on the naval estimates, and the House noticed him at once. His speeches were not workmanlike. They were theatrical in a precise sense: they made the gallery lean forward. He understood that parliamentary politics is partly performance, and unlike those who understand this and are embarrassed by it, Blaine was not embarrassed. He performed with full commitment and genuine conviction, and the combination was difficult to resist.

The war Parliament and the rights settlement

Blaine’s first years in the Commons were the years of the rebellion. He sat on the government benches through the conscription vote, the emancipation vote and the suspension debates, and he supported the Lincoln ministry on every question of the war’s prosecution. He was not a member of the war Cabinet and took no part in its strategic decisions. What he did was speak, in a chamber whose benches were visibly emptied by the absence of the rebel polities’ members, for the proposition that the Union was a thing worth the cost being incurred.

He voted for the Emancipation Measure of 1865 and for the American Rights Act of 1866. On the Act he took the ministry’s position on the concession that carried it, that the guarantees would run against federal authority and not against the polities, and he defended the concession in debate as the price of getting anything at all. He was one of many who did. The Realm’s later judgement of his ministry rests substantially on the fact that he understood the federal limit of 1866 exactly, having helped to explain it to the Commons, and later governed as though its consequences were nobody’s responsibility.

Manner in debate

Contemporary accounts of Blaine in the Commons are unusually consistent. He spoke without notes, at speed, with a command of names and dates that opponents found unnerving, and with a taste for the sudden personal reply that made his exchanges the best-attended in the chamber. He did not read the House so much as work it, moving between the front bench, the galleries and the reporters with an attention that each of them experienced as personal.

He was also, by every account including friendly ones, a man who fought. His enemies were as intensely engaged as his allies, and he did not produce indifference. The most durable of his parliamentary quarrels, with a member for a New York constituency whose faction of the party regarded him as an adventurer, began in the middle 1860s over a trivial procedural slight and shaped the internal politics of the Conservative and Crown Union for twenty years.

Office under Grant

Leader of the House

Blaine held his first office in 1866 as Financial Secretary to the Treasury in the closing phase of Lincoln’s ministry, a junior post that gave him the departmental estimates and a working knowledge of appropriations that he used for the rest of his career. When Grant formed a government in 1869 he brought Blaine into the Cabinet as Leader of the House of Commons, the minister responsible for the government’s business, its timetable and its majority.

The appointment was made on ability and was not a compliment. Grant’s ministry had a legislative programme of unusual difficulty and no talent for parliamentary management, and Blaine supplied what it lacked. For eight years he arranged the government’s business, held its majority together through the enforcement sessions, and conducted the negotiations with the Lords that carried the ministry’s measures when the upper House was disposed to obstruct them. He was very good at it. The Realm’s parliamentary histories treat the Grant ministry’s legislative record as substantially Blaine’s achievement of process, whatever they think of his own government afterwards.

The enforcement legislation

The work brought him into the centre of the enforcement programme. It was Blaine who found the time for the prosecution measures, who negotiated the appropriations that paid for marshals and federal court sittings in the former rebel polities, and who whipped the votes that sustained the ministry when its own supporters began to weary of the expense. He did this competently and without visible enthusiasm, and both facts are part of his record.

His private correspondence of the period shows him counting the political cost from the beginning. He wrote in 1873 that the enforcement votes were becoming harder every session and that a majority which had to be assembled afresh for each appropriation would not survive a change of leader. The observation was accurate. What it did not contain, then or later, was any proposal for making the settlement cheaper to defend rather than easier to abandon.

The letters of 1876

In the spring of 1876, in Grant’s last full session, a bookkeeper in Boston produced a bundle of letters written by Blaine to a rail promoter whose company had received a federal land grant and a charter for a line running west from Little Rock in the State of Arkansas. The letters showed Blaine soliciting a share in the promoter’s business at a time when the charter was before the Commons and he was in a position to assist it. One of them closed with an instruction to burn it.

Blaine’s response was the most famous parliamentary performance of his life. He obtained the letters, refused to surrender them to the select committee that had been appointed to examine the matter, and then read them aloud to the Commons himself, in an order of his own choosing, with a running commentary on what each was alleged to prove. The House cheered him. The committee reported without reaching a conclusion, and the ministry survived. Whether the performance answered the charge or merely overwhelmed it is a question the Realm has never resolved, and it was still being asked when he formed a government fifteen months later.

Leadership of the Conservative and Crown Union and the succession of 1877

The party after 1869

The Conservative and Crown Union had been reconstituted in 1869 from the Whig organisation and the surviving structure of Lincoln’s National Union coalition. It was in Blaine’s day a party of the tariff, the railways, the currency question and the industrial interest, and its opponents’ charge that it governed for the commercial classes was not one it took much trouble to deny. It also owned a share of the Union’s victory, of emancipation and of the Rights Act, and could not repudiate the settlement without repudiating itself.

The party’s leadership in the 1870s was not chosen by any ballot of the membership, a practice that arrived in the Realm three quarters of a century later. It was settled among the members of the parliamentary party, in rooms, by men who had spent their careers acquiring obligations from one another. Blaine had spent eight years as the government’s business manager. There was no one in the party to whom more members owed a debt.

The contest of 1877

Grant announced his intention to leave the leadership in the early months of 1877. The parliamentary party divided into three groupings: Blaine’s, the faction of his long enemy from New York, which regarded him as unsound in both senses of the word, and a smaller reform interest which distrusted the patronage practices of both. The contest was conducted over several weeks and was decided when the reform interest concluded that it could not carry its own candidate and preferred Blaine’s programme to his rival’s machine.

Rutherford B. Hayes, then Premier of the Commonwealth of Ohio and the most respected reform figure outside the Commons, declined to enter it. He did not seek a national office, did not organise a following and did not permit his name to be used. The refusal was significant twice over. It gave Blaine the leadership without a fight he might have lost, and it preserved Hayes as a figure acceptable across the party’s divisions, which was the reason Blaine recommended him for Government House four years later.

Grant’s resignation and the commission

Grant resigned in 1877 on the completion of his ministry. Governor-General Frederick Douglass commissioned Blaine as Prime Minister once clear Commons confidence had been established. Grant’s support and his military reputation supplied no alternative mandate, and Douglass’s own doubts about the direction of Reconstruction did not authorise him to obstruct an ordinary parliamentary transfer. The forms were exact and were completed within a week.

The transfer passed the government from one Conservative and Crown Union leader to another without an election, and it continued the long Conservative and Crown Union ascendancy that ran, with one interruption, from 1869 to 1903. Blaine took office at forty-seven, with the largest command of parliamentary technique the Commons had seen in a generation and a documents scandal fifteen months old attached to his name.

Accession to the premiership

The first Cabinet

Blaine’s first Cabinet was constructed on the arithmetic of the leadership contest rather than on personal preference, and he made no attempt to pretend otherwise. William M. Evarts took the Foreign Office, John Sherman the Exchequer and Charles Devens the office of Attorney-General. James A. Garfield, the ablest of Blaine’s own following in the Commons, succeeded him as Leader of the House. The New York faction was given two departments and the collectorship of the port of New York, which was the most valuable patronage office in the Realm and the price of its acquiescence.

The distribution told the ministry’s story in advance. The commercial and diplomatic departments went to men Blaine intended to work with closely and in practice to direct. The law officers went to men of independent standing whom he left largely alone. The offices that touched the enforcement of the rights settlement in the former rebel polities were filled competently and then not thought about, and the Attorney-General’s department was left to conduct the prosecutions its resources allowed without any instruction from Charter House either to expand them or to stop.

The Speech from the Throne of 1877

The ministry’s first Speech from the Throne, delivered by Douglass in the Lords chamber in Ernest II’s name, is the document historians reach for when they want the outward turn stated in the ministry’s own words. It proposed a commercial treaty programme with the American states, a revision of the tariff schedules, a subsidy for the merchant marine, the survey of harbours on both coasts, a submarine cable to the Caribbean and the encouragement of rail construction into the western territories.

It contained one sentence on the former rebel polities, which recorded that the ordinary institutions of self-government were being restored as conditions permitted, and no sentence at all on the enforcement of the Rights Act. Douglass read it as the Crown’s representative is obliged to read the ministry’s words, and raised the omission in audience the same week. Blaine’s answer, recorded in the Government House papers, was that a Speech is a legislative programme and that enforcement required no legislation because the law already existed. The answer was technically correct and is the earliest clear statement of the method by which the settlement was allowed to lapse.

The outward turn

The doctrine

The governing proposition of Blaine’s ministry was that the Union had spent fifteen years looking at its own interior and could no longer afford to. The argument was made in commercial terms and rested on facts that were not in dispute: the Realm’s industrial output had roughly trebled since 1860, its rail mileage was growing faster than its capacity to finance it, and it was selling into a world whose markets were being organised by other people. A continental economy without ports, shipping, cable, treaties and a settled position among its neighbours was, in Blaine’s formulation, a workshop without a road.

The trade programme was not confined to the hemisphere. Blaine pressed commercial relationships with New Albion, the Kingdom of Ireland, Great Britain, the Confederation of Mexico, the Caribbean ports and the wider Atlantic and Pacific commercial world, and treated the whole of it as one subject rather than as a set of unrelated negotiations.

He carried the argument further than commerce. The Realm, he held, occupied a hemisphere containing a dozen sovereign states with which it shared a geography, a colonial inheritance and a set of problems, and it had no settled relations with any of them beyond the accidental. The proposal was that the United Kingdom of America should become the convening power of the Americas: the state that called the conference, offered the arbitrator, proposed the treaty and paid for the cable. It was a conception genuinely larger than anything that had preceded it and it outlived him.

The objection

The objection was made from the first session and was never satisfactorily answered. The Realm’s interior contained unfinished business of the gravest kind, and every hour of parliamentary time, every appropriation and every ounce of ministerial attention that went to harbours and treaties came from a finite supply. The rights-enforcement members put the case plainly: a government that finds money for a subsidised steamship line to Rio and cannot find it for federal marshals in Alabama has made a choice, whatever it says about the two questions being unrelated.

A second objection came from the agrarian west and the Gulf, and concerned who benefited. Commercial treaties, harbour works and rail charters distributed public advantage to identifiable private parties, and the parties were in general the ministry’s own supporters. Blaine acknowledged the criticism without conceding the argument. His answer, offered more often in private than in public, was that a prosperous Union is a Union capable of sustaining its own principles. His worst response, and the one the record shows most often, was not to notice that the argument required answering at all.

Hemispheric diplomacy

Method and premises

Blaine conducted foreign policy himself, through a Foreign Secretary he respected and largely overrode, and the method was consistent across six years. He preferred treaties of commerce and navigation to alliances, arbitration to mediation and mediation to pressure, and he treated the other American states as sovereign equals whose consent was the object of the exercise. He did not propose a protectorate, a doctrine or a sphere, and he said repeatedly that any arrangement resting on the Realm’s preponderance would be repudiated by its partners the moment the preponderance was tested.

The method had a structural limit that shaped everything he attempted. Under the Realm’s constitution the Prime Minister may commit the Realm’s word and only Parliament may commit its law: no treaty survives without implementing legislation. Blaine signed a large number of commercial instruments and saw a substantial proportion of them die in the Commons, in the Lords or in committee. His hemispheric partners learned, over six years, that an American signature was a proposal rather than a conclusion, and the lesson did lasting damage that his successors had to repair.

Mexico

Relations with the Confederation of Mexico were the hardest and the most important. The two states shared a long frontier, a recent war and a settlement that Mexico regarded as a dismemberment. Blaine’s approach was to separate the territorial question, which he judged closed and Mexico did not, from everything else, and to build commercial and legal machinery that both governments would want to preserve.

The instruments he obtained were modest and durable: a reciprocal commercial convention reducing duties on a defined schedule of goods, a claims commission to settle the outstanding private cases arising from the frontier, a postal convention and an agreement on the pursuit of cattle thieves across the boundary that reserved the sovereignty of both states in explicit terms. The commercial convention failed its implementing legislation in the Commons in 1881 and was carried in amended form in 1882. Mexican ministers noted publicly that they had negotiated twice for one result, and the observation was fair.

New Albion

With New Albion the difficulty was the opposite: the two realms shared a monarch, a language, an open frontier and an economy that was already substantially integrated, and the temptation was to treat the northern realm as an extension rather than a country. Blaine did not entirely resist it. His early despatches assume a community of interest that New Albion’s ministers had not conceded, and the assumption caused genuine offence in Ottawa in the first two years.

He corrected the error, and the correction produced the most successful diplomacy of the ministry. The fisheries convention of 1880, the reciprocal arrangements on inland navigation and the joint boundary survey were negotiated on the explicit footing that the shared Crown created no shared government and that each realm advised its sovereign separately. The formula was Blaine’s and it entered the working vocabulary of the two governments. New Albion’s own constitutional writers have credited his ministry with establishing that the northern realm dealt with New Westminster as a state and not as a department.

The Caribbean and the Spanish question

Cuba was in the last year of the Ten Years’ War when Blaine took office, and it ended in 1878 without independence. The Realm’s position under the Grant ministry had been non-intervention with a standing protest against the conduct of the war, and Blaine maintained it. He declined to recognise the insurgent Republic in Arms, declined the repeated proposals for a purchase of the island from Spain, and pressed the Spanish government continuously on the abolition of slavery in its Caribbean possessions, which followed in the decade after the war.

The larger Caribbean policy was commercial and cautious. Blaine wanted coaling stations, cable landings, harbour rights and reciprocal duties in the British islands and the Spanish ones, and he wanted them by treaty. He did not propose annexation anywhere in the Caribbean and twice refused proposals put to him by members of his own party. Douglass, who had opposed Caribbean expansion in private throughout his tenure and had never made a public campaign of it, recorded that on this question the Prime Minister’s instinct was sounder than his following’s. The island societies of the region, whose successor federation is the modern West Indies Federation, were then British colonies, and Blaine dealt for them with London rather than with Kingston.

The republics of South America

Blaine’s dealings with the South American states were the most ambitious and the least successful part of the programme. He opened permanent legations where the Realm had kept occasional agents, negotiated commercial conventions with the Empire of Brazil, the United Provinces of the River Plate and New Granada, and pressed a general scheme of arbitration treaties by which the American states would agree in advance to submit boundary disputes to a neutral American arbitrator rather than to a European one.

The scheme was serious, was welcomed in several capitals and was destroyed by the War of the Pacific. Chile and the Peru-Bolivian Confederation went to war in 1879 over the nitrate districts of the Atacama, and Blaine attempted to mediate. His mediation failed completely. It failed partly because Chile was winning and had no reason to accept it, partly because the ministry’s instructions to its ministers in Santiago and Lima were inconsistent, and partly because the Realm’s good faith was in question from the outset: American holders of nitrate and guano claims stood to gain very large sums from the settlement Blaine proposed, and at least two of them were known to have had access to him. The accusation was made in the Commons in 1882 and was never proved. It was never disproved either.

The isthmus, the arbitration and the conference

Three further episodes belong to the record. In 1878 the ministry entrusted Rutherford B. Hayes, then Premier of Ohio, with a special impartial arbitration of a boundary dispute involving Paraguay. Hayes acted under a defined commission, examined the record at length and ruled for Paraguay. The award established the Realm’s standing as a supplier of arbitrators, earned lasting Paraguayan gratitude, and did so precisely because the arbitrator was demonstrably not a minister.

In 1881 Blaine opened the isthmian question, seeking the revision of the standing engagement with Great Britain that barred either power from exclusive control of a canal across Central America. He got nowhere. The British government declined to reopen the instrument, the Granadine government declined to prefer an American concession to a European one, and the ministry fell before anything was settled. The canal was built a generation later under a different premier and on different terms.

In the autumn of 1882 Blaine issued invitations to an international American conference at New Westminster, to consider arbitration, commercial reciprocity, customs procedure, weights and measures, and a common silver coinage for hemispheric trade. Eighteen governments were invited and most accepted. Blaine resigned before it met, and Tilden’s incoming ministry withdrew the invitations in 1883 on the ground that the previous government had summoned a conference it had no parliamentary authority to hold. The conference finally met in the winter of 1889 and 1890, under Grover Cleveland’s ministry, with Blaine presiding over it as a private member seven years out of office.

Commerce, rail and shipping

Rail charters and the western lines

Blaine’s ministry chartered federal rail mileage in great quantity and attached notably few conditions to the charters. The programme’s public justification was the organisation of the western territories: a continental federation whose interior could not be reached could not be governed, settled, policed or taxed, and the private capital that would build the lines required land grants, guarantees and a right of way to be worth its while.

The programme’s cost is the standing criticism of the ministry and the criticism is well founded. The land grants were extravagant, the guarantees were poorly drafted, the routes were determined in part by which promoters had parliamentary friends, and the consequences occupied the Realm’s courts and select committees for thirty years. Blaine’s own answer was that the lines were built, that they would not have been built on stricter terms and that the Realm has them still. His successor’s committee work established that a substantial number of the charters could have been obtained for materially less.

Subsidies and the mail contracts

The mail contracts were the ministry’s most exposed flank. Federal payments for the carriage of mails by rail, coastal steamer and ocean packet were the principal instrument by which the government subsidised private carriers, and the contracts were awarded departmentally, with wide discretion and thin published justification. In 1881 an inquiry into the western star route contracts established that a group of contractors had systematically inflated the mileage, frequency and difficulty of routes in the territories and had divided the excess.

The frauds were real, were prosecuted and produced convictions. What they did not produce was a finding against any minister. Blaine’s ministry reformed the departmental procedure after the fact, published the schedules and instituted competitive letting, and its defenders point to the reform as evidence of good faith. Its critics point out that the reform followed the inquiry rather than preceding it, that the department had been warned twice, and that the ministry’s general disposition toward the traffic between public money and private carriers was the condition in which such frauds became possible.

The merchant marine, harbours and ports

The Realm’s ocean-going merchant fleet had declined severely since the war, and its foreign trade was carried substantially in British and German bottoms. Blaine treated this as a strategic weakness rather than a commercial accident, and proposed a general subsidy to American-built and American-registered vessels on defined ocean routes, together with a harbour and river programme covering both coasts and the Gulf.

The harbour programme passed and was popular, because harbour works are distributed and every port town wanted one. The shipping subsidy passed in reduced form in 1880 after two sessions of resistance, chiefly from members who observed that the vessels would be built in a small number of yards owned by a small number of men, several of whom sat in Parliament. The fleet recovered slowly and never to its earlier share. The programme is generally judged to have been sound in conception and captured in execution.

Cable and telegraph

The ministry’s cable policy attracts less attention than its treaties and was arguably more consequential. Blaine held that a Realm whose despatches to its own hemisphere travelled by way of London and Lisbon was not conducting its own foreign policy, and he pressed for direct submarine cable connection to the Caribbean, the isthmus and the South American ports. The first Caribbean landing was completed in 1881 under a concession granted by the ministry to an American company on terms that guaranteed government traffic at a fixed rate.

The terms were criticised then and since as generous. They were also effective: within a decade the Realm’s legations in the American capitals could be instructed in hours rather than weeks, and the diplomacy of the 1890s that Blaine had argued for was practicable in a way that his own had not been. He regarded the cable concessions as the most durable thing his ministry did, and the judgement has worn better than most of his self-assessments.

Tariff, revenue and currency

The protective case

Blaine’s domestic economic programme tied tariff protection to national wages and industrial independence. His argument was that the Union must not leave its factories, workers and strategic supply chains exposed to hostile or unstable foreign markets, and that a duty which preserved an American wage was not a tax on the consumer but a charge for the maintenance of an American standard of living. He made the case in these terms consistently for thirty years and it became the settled doctrine of his party.

Critics answered that tariff politics protect owners more reliably than workers, raise prices for people who cannot avoid them, and build comfortable monopolies under patriotic rhetoric. The agrarian polities made the objection most sharply, since they bought manufactured goods in a protected market and sold grain and cotton in an unprotected one. Blaine acknowledged the criticism without conceding the argument, and the schedules his ministry carried in 1879 raised the average duty on manufactures while reducing it on raw materials that American industry imported.

Reciprocity and the treaty limit

The reciprocity programme was Blaine’s attempt to reconcile protection with the outward turn, and it is the most intellectually interesting part of his economic policy. The proposition was that a high general tariff could be combined with bilateral treaties admitting specified goods from specified American states at reduced rates, in exchange for corresponding admissions. Protection would be preserved against the industrial powers of Europe and relaxed toward the hemisphere.

The programme foundered on the constitution and on his own party. Every reciprocity treaty required implementing legislation, every implementing bill opened the whole schedule to amendment, and the interests protected by the general tariff opposed each particular relaxation with more energy than the exporters supported it. Three of the six conventions Blaine signed were never implemented. The failures taught his successors that the reciprocity method required either a delegated authority Parliament would not grant or a party discipline the tariff question destroyed.

Money and public credit

The currency question ran underneath the whole period and Blaine handled it with deliberate imprecision. The Realm had resumed specie payment shortly before he took office; the silver interest of the western polities pressed for the free coinage of silver at a fixed ratio; the commercial and banking interest of the east regarded the proposal as repudiation. Blaine’s own position was that a bimetallic standard was desirable if it could be established by international agreement and dangerous if the Realm attempted it alone.

The position was intellectually respectable and was also politically convenient, since it allowed him to be heard as sympathetic in Colorado and sound in New York. His ministry carried a limited coinage measure in 1878 and declined free coinage thereafter, and he pressed the international monetary conference route without result. The Realm had no central bank in these years and would not have one until 1913, and the ministry’s management of the public credit consisted of the Exchequer, the Treasury’s balances and the good will of a small number of houses in New York and London.

The retreat from Reconstruction

What was not repealed

The retreat from Reconstruction began with Grant’s departure in 1877 and it began in Blaine’s ministry. There was no bargain, no disputed election and no corrupt settlement of the kind that ends such periods in other constitutional systems, because a parliamentary Realm offers no such mechanism. There was a change of ministry, a change of priorities and a steady, unannounced reduction in the will to prosecute.

Nothing was repealed. The American Rights Act of 1866 stood untouched and was cited constantly. The Fourth Amendment to the Charter, which had entrenched the emancipation of 1865 beyond the reach of an ordinary majority and to which Douglass had granted assent in 1873, stood untouched. The Emancipation Measure stood. The franchise on which the reconstructed polity assemblies had been elected stood. Blaine’s ministry proposed no measure withdrawing a federal guarantee from any person, and none of the measures it did carry can be read as doing so.

What the ministry did instead was administer the settlement less. That is the whole method, and the Realm’s historians state it in those terms because no more elaborate account is required. The instruments of enforcement were statutory, discretionary and expensive, and a government that declined to exercise the discretion or vote the expense could bring them to a stop without altering a syllable of the law.

The prosecutions

Federal prosecution of the organised violence in the former rebel polities had rested, under Grant, on a single legal theory: that a conspiracy to prevent the exercise of a right guaranteed by federal law was a federal offence even where the underlying assault was a matter for the polity. The theory worked. It had produced convictions, broken several county organisations of the Companies entirely and made the years between 1870 and 1876 the freest the rebel polities would see for eighty years.

Under Blaine the prosecutions were brought in smaller numbers and then in very small numbers. The decline was not announced, was not the subject of any Cabinet minute that survives, and was not the result of any instruction from Charter House to the law officers. It was the product of an Attorney-General’s department whose appropriation was not increased, whose district officers understood that the ministry’s attention lay elsewhere, and whose most difficult cases required a commitment of money and time that nobody in the government was pressing them to make. The annual return of federal prosecutions under the enforcement provisions, laid before the Commons each session, records the fall and was not debated.

Marshals and troops

Marshals were not reinforced. The federal marshals’ service was small, was appointed through the federal courts, and had been inadequate to its task even at the height of the enforcement ministry. Grant had supplemented it continuously by appropriation and by pressure. Blaine did neither. Requests from district officers for additional deputies in the upland counties of North Carolina and northern Alabama were received, minuted and not acted on, and the establishment fell in real terms across six years while the population it was supposed to serve grew.

Troops were not sent. The Realm had never established a military government in the former rebel polities, and the decision not to had been deliberate: no martial law, no military courts for civilians, no general in authority over a civil administration. Garrisons remained where garrisons remain anywhere, and troops had been used under Grant to protect polls and courts on the requisition of civil authority. Under Blaine the requisitions were refused or allowed to lapse. The ministry’s stated ground was that the ordinary civil power was sufficient and that the use of soldiers in the internal affairs of a polity was a serious step. Both propositions were defensible in the abstract and neither was tested against what was happening on the ground.

The bureau and the appointed officers

The federal bureau charged with the relief, employment, contracts, land claims, family reunification and legal representation of the formerly enslaved had been wound down through the 1870s. Blaine’s ministry closed it. Its residual functions were transferred to departments that did not perform them, its records were deposited, and the transfer was effected administratively without a bill and without a debate. The bureau had been competent in parts, corrupt in parts and chronically underfunded throughout, and its closure was defended as economy and as the natural end of a temporary institution.

The replacement of appointed officers by elected ones followed the same pattern and was more consequential. The four rebel polities and rebel Virginia had been governed since 1863 by executives appointed federally rather than commissioned on local advice or elected. The return of ordinary practice was gradual, polity by polity, and the conditions were consistent: acceptance of the Emancipation Measure as unalterable, repudiation of the rebel debt, an assembly elected on the post-1866 franchise, and the exclusion from office of men convicted in the treason trials. Blaine’s ministry accelerated the timetable, and it accelerated it in response to local political pressure rather than to any assessment of local conditions. The conditions were satisfied on paper long before they were satisfied in fact, and in several polities they were satisfied on paper by men who had spent the war at Charles Town and had not been indicted.

The federal limit of 1866

None of this required Blaine to defy federal law, and the reason is the concession that carried the Rights Act through the Lords in 1866. The American Rights Act bound the federal government and did not bind the polities. Its guarantees ran against federal authority. A federal officer could not do the things it prohibited and a federal court would strike down a federal statute that offended it. A polity legislature, a polity sheriff, a county registrar or a polity court was not within its scope at all.

The apparatus of exclusion that the former rebel polities built over the following two decades was therefore lawful under the Act throughout. A polity could not repeal the Act and did not try. What a polity could do was legislate its own franchise, appoint its own registrars, run its own polls, constitute its own juries, define its own vagrancy and labour offences, staff its own sheriffs’ offices and decline to prosecute private violence. None of that touched federal authority, and all of it lay within a competence the Charter guaranteed.

The single federal instrument that reached into that space was the enforcement prosecution, and it reached only where the federal government chose to pay for it to reach. Blaine did not have to attack the settlement. He had only to stop using the one part of it that worked. Whether he understood this as clearly as the record suggests is one of the few genuinely open questions about his ministry; he had explained the federal limit to the Commons himself in 1866, and the men who calibrated their conduct to it in the counties understood it as well as any lawyer.

Black officeholding and the polities

Black men had voted and held office in the former rebel polities from the late 1860s, sat in polity assemblies in numbers, and a small number sat in the Commons at New Westminster. Black appointees had held federal office under direct rule, mostly in the second decade and mostly below the first rank. The reversal of the 1880s removed them first, and it began in Blaine’s ministry.

The mechanism was the polity, doing what the polity was entitled to do because the Act did not reach it, and the federal government declining to use the instruments that did. Black officeholders in the reconstructed assemblies lost their seats to franchise legislation, registration practice and organised intimidation in roughly that order of legality. Petitions reached Government House and Charter House continuously, were acknowledged, and produced no change of policy. The ministry’s position was that the internal electoral arrangements of a polity were the polity’s own affair, which was true as a matter of law and was an answer to a question nobody had asked.

The Companies, the organised night-riding associations that had grown out of the disbanded rebel regiments, did not disband in these years. They faded in the following decade, because the work was finished and the polity governments could do it by statute. The years in which they were untouchable were the years in which the federal prosecutions stopped.

The ministry’s defence and the argument against it

Blaine’s own defence was made in the Commons in 1881 and in his memoir afterwards, and it had three parts. The first was that the settlement was law and remained law, that he had repealed nothing and proposed to repeal nothing, and that the Realm’s guarantees stood exactly where Parliament had put them. The second was that the enforcement prosecutions had been an emergency instrument, that fifteen years was long enough for an emergency, and that the ordinary institutions of the polities had to be trusted at some point or the Union would be governing five of its members permanently by exception. The third was that a prosperous Union is a Union capable of sustaining its own principles.

The argument against him was made at the time, by the rights-enforcement members, by Black community leaders, by constitutional lawyers and by the Governor-General in private audience, and it has not been improved upon since. It was that a right which must be litigated afresh in every county is not available to people who cannot pay for litigation; that enforcement agencies unfunded are enforcement agencies abolished, whatever the statute book says; that the polity institutions being trusted were the institutions conducting the exclusion; and that a government which knows all this and calls the result peace has not misunderstood the situation but described it dishonestly.

Blaine’s critics have never argued that he hated the rights settlement, and the evidence does not support the charge. They argue that his enthusiasm for commerce crowded out the maintenance costs of justice, and that the result was the same. Rights advocates in the freed communities called his approach abolition by budget line, a phrase that enters the historical record without anyone being able to attribute it to a single speaker. He did not invent the practice of defunding. He normalised it, which is a different and longer-lasting contribution. Reconstruction ended in 1889, six years after he left office, and nothing announced it.

Immigration and the Act of 1882

The Pacific coast agitation

Agitation against Chinese immigration on the Pacific coast had been building through the 1870s and reached Parliament as a demand for exclusion. It came from labour organisations, from polity governments in the Pacific commonwealths and from members whose seats depended on both, and it was expressed in terms that the Realm’s later literature describes without qualification as racial. The Realm had a subsisting treaty with the Empire of China providing for free movement, and the exclusion demand required either its revision or its breach.

Blaine’s own position was long-standing and was not opportunistic: he had argued for restriction since the early 1870s, on grounds that combined a defensible argument about contract labour with an indefensible one about racial incompatibility, and he had made the second argument in public more than once. It is the least creditable position of his career and it was not forced on him by his party.

The measure and its passage

The ministry negotiated a revision of the treaty permitting the regulation of Chinese labour immigration, and carried the restrictive measure in 1882. Hayes, then in his second year at Government House, accepted that Parliament could regulate entry through general law and pressed Blaine privately on treaty faith, on the narrowness of the scope and on equal protection for people already within the Realm’s jurisdiction. He granted assent on duly tendered advice. He did not threaten refusal or make assent conditional, and no constitutional crisis attended the Act.

The measure’s consequences were severe and fell on communities that had built the western rail the ministry was so proud of. It is treated in the Realm’s modern constitutional literature alongside the retreat from Reconstruction as evidence of the same proposition: that the Act of 1866 protected persons against the federal government in a defined list of ways, and that a Parliament determined to exclude a class of people could do so by general legislation without touching the Act at all. The responsibility is the ministry’s and Parliament’s.

Labour and industrial disorder

The railway strike of 1877

Blaine had been in office a matter of months when a wage reduction on the eastern trunk lines produced a strike that spread along the rail network into a general industrial disorder affecting several polities. Traffic stopped, property was destroyed, and polity authorities in three cases reported that their civil power had failed. Rutherford B. Hayes, as Premier of Ohio, initially expected employers, workers and civil authorities to restore ordinary movement without military involvement, and asked for federal assistance only when local institutions had demonstrably failed.

The ministry supplied narrowly authorised assistance on lawful requisition. The restoration of order carried human costs: deaths, injuries, arrests and the coercive weight of public power deployed inside an industrial dispute. Hayes later rejected both the claim that force had been unnecessary in every circumstance and the easier claim that legality made its consequences morally neutral. Blaine made no such reckoning. He treated the episode as a question of the movement of the mails and the security of federal property, and the ministry’s papers contain no consideration of the wage reduction that had caused it.

The ministry’s settled position

The strike fixed the ministry’s industrial policy for its remaining five years, and the policy was that the government’s interest in a labour dispute was confined to the maintenance of order and the movement of interstate commerce. Blaine offered no arbitration machinery, proposed no inquiry into hours or wages, and resisted the eight-hour measures brought forward by private members in three successive sessions.

The position was consistent with the tariff argument only in one direction. Blaine defended protection as a measure for the American wage and then declined every proposal to make the wage a subject of federal legislation, and the labour members made the contradiction the centre of their case against him. His answer was that the tariff created the conditions in which wages could rise and that the terms on which men worked were a matter for the polities and for contract. The answer was the standard one of his party and it satisfied nobody who had asked the question.

The West, the territories and Indigenous policy

Land, survey and settlement

The organisation of the western territories occupied a great deal of the ministry’s administrative time and produced its least contested legislation. Survey, land offices, territorial courts, mail routes and the machinery by which a territory acquired a legislature and eventually a polity’s status were extended steadily across six years. The ministry’s disposition throughout was to encourage settlement, to sell or grant land quickly and to organise government afterwards.

The consequences were mixed and were understood at the time to be mixed. Rapid disposal produced fraud on a considerable scale in the land offices, particularly in the timber and grazing districts, and the ministry’s own inspectors reported it. It also produced the settled pattern of federal land administration that the Realm still uses, and the extension of ordinary courts and postal service into country that had neither.

Allotment and schooling

Federal policy toward the Indigenous nations in these years rested on allotment and schooling, and Blaine’s ministry advanced both. Allotment carved individual holdings out of communal territory and treated the residue as surplus available for settlement. The schooling programme removed children from their families into institutions where their languages were forbidden and punished. Both were federal policy, made by ministers and voted by Parliament.

The programme was defended by reformers of unquestioned sincerity, including men who believed they were protecting Indigenous people from violence and fraud, and Hayes was among them. The defence does not survive its consequences. The policy divided families, accelerated land loss on an enormous scale and treated cultural survival as an obstacle to citizenship. It ran for generations and was apologised for within the lifetimes of the people it was done to. Blaine’s ministry did not originate it and did not question it, and its treaty administration in the western territories was conducted on the assumption that treaty obligations were an inconvenience to be managed rather than a legal commitment to be kept.

Elections, Parliament and the fall of the ministry

The Commons of 1877 and the dissolution of 1879

Blaine took office in the Commons elected under Grant and governed it for two years. The Parliament was workable but not comfortable: the ministry’s majority included the New York faction, which had been bought rather than persuaded, and a reform interest whose price was administrative respectability. Blaine sought a dissolution in the autumn of 1879, at the point when the tariff schedules had passed and the trade figures were good.

The general election of 1879 returned him with a reduced but sufficient majority. The Conservative and Crown Union held its ground in the industrial northeast, gained in the Gulf and the interior west on the rail and harbour programme, and lost seats in the agrarian polities of the plains on the tariff. Turnout in the former rebel polities fell sharply from the level of the middle 1870s, and the fall was reported to the Commons in the ordinary returns without producing any inquiry into its cause.

The Parliament of 1879 to 1883

The second Parliament was the ministry’s productive one and its most exposed. The shipping subsidy, the cable concession, the Mexican and New Albion conventions, the coinage measure and the immigration Act of 1882 all belong to it. So does the star route inquiry, the failure of the War of the Pacific mediation, the collapse of three reciprocity treaties in committee and the reopening of the letters of 1876 by an opposition that had learned how to use them.

Blaine’s parliamentary management, which had been the wonder of the previous decade, deteriorated visibly through 1882. He was tired, he had begun to suffer the collapses that recurred for the rest of his life, and he had spent eight years of accumulated obligation buying majorities for measures that had not always been worth the price. The reform interest inside his own party had by then largely departed to the new Liberal Federal Democrats, which had been founded in the 1870s out of the anti-corruption movement and had spent five years auditing his ministry from the opposition benches.

The loss of confidence in 1883

The ministry fell in 1883 on supply. The immediate occasion was a rail charter and a set of associated contracts, and the substance was the accumulated case that the government’s commercial programme had become an instrument for the distribution of public advantage to private friends. Enough of Blaine’s own supporters abstained to make his position untenable. He did not wait to be defeated on a formal motion of confidence.

Blaine resigned. Samuel J. Tilden established clear Commons confidence, and Governor-General Hayes commissioned him promptly despite their different party histories, imposing no conditions and asking Blaine to remain in no caretaker capacity. Tilden’s ministry then spent four years auditing the contracts, rail charters and procurement arrangements of the previous six with, in the phrase of the parliamentary histories, no mercy and no theatre. Blaine sat through it from the opposition front bench and answered on the floor for decisions he had taken.

Cabinet and administration

Method

Blaine chaired a Cabinet the way he had managed the Commons: quickly, from memory, with an agenda he carried in his head and a disinclination to have things written down. Ministers found him accessible, decisive and difficult to hold to a decision once he had left the room. Departmental business that interested him, which meant foreign affairs, commerce, rail and the tariff, received an attention that his colleagues in those departments sometimes found oppressive. Business that did not interest him was delegated absolutely.

The delegation is the administrative fact that matters most about his government. The Attorney-General’s department, the land offices and the departments touching the former rebel polities were left to run themselves within their existing appropriations, by a Prime Minister who did not ask them what they were doing and did not tell them to stop. His ministry produced no instruction to abandon enforcement because it produced no instruction about enforcement at all.

Colleagues

Evarts at the Foreign Office was an able lawyer who accepted a subordinate position in the making of policy and conducted its execution with more care than his chief. Sherman at the Exchequer was the ministry’s weight on the currency question and its most respected figure in the commercial world. Devens as Attorney-General was an honest law officer administering a department that was not being given the means to do the part of its work that mattered most. Garfield as Leader of the House was Blaine’s own creation and his most effective defender, and left the front bench in 1882.

The New York faction’s two departments were held throughout by men Blaine neither trusted nor could remove, and the arrangement cost the ministry more in reputation than the votes were worth. The collectorship of the port of New York, which had been part of the same settlement, produced two of the ministry’s minor scandals and one of its two attempts at administrative reform.

Patronage

Blaine was comfortable with patronage as an instrument of coalition management and made no apology for it. Appointments were made for party service, and party service was understood to include financial contribution. He regarded the practice as the ordinary machinery by which a parliamentary majority is held together in a continental federation, and he regarded the reformers’ objection as a species of squeamishness by men who had never had to assemble a majority themselves.

The position was tenable in 1869 and was becoming untenable by 1883. The reform movement that produced the Liberal Federal Democrats had made patronage a national question, the star route frauds had given it a concrete case, and Tilden’s committee work supplied the documentation. The civil service settlement that followed under Tilden was in a real sense a settlement of accounts with the Blaine ministry, and it outlasted the ministry that made it.

The Crown and the Governors-General

Ernest II and the accession of 1878

Blaine took office in the last full year of Ernest II’s reign. The King’s part in the change of ministry had been the same as it had been throughout: he commissioned the head of government once Commons confidence was clear, on the resident Governor-General’s confirmation, and he made no attempt to influence the choice.

Ernest II died on 12 June 1878, after a reign of twenty-seven years that had spanned the Civil War, abolition and the Rights Act. Ernest III succeeded at twenty-eight. Blaine handled the transition with the political smoothness that was his defining talent: the ceremonies were exact, the eulogy for the old reign was generous without being dishonest, and the machinery of government continued without visible interruption. Douglass’s commission required no renewal and the accession created no new channel of royal or British advice. Douglass completed Crown acts under the new King on Blaine’s American advice, and the separation between dynastic continuity and responsible government was preserved.

Blaine also used the accession to define what the new reign would emphasise. His answer was commerce, prestige and the Realm’s place in a world being drawn together by rail, telegraph and steam. Ernest III was younger, less tested and interested in the continental expansion the ministry was already pursuing, and the two established a working relationship that survived the ministry.

Douglass, 1877 to 1881

Douglass held the Crown’s office in America for the first four years of the ministry. He had been commissioned in 1873 on Grant’s advice, had taken the modern oath naming the Crown in right of America, the Charter and the American Rights Act, and understood the Governor-Generalship as a duty to sustain any ministry holding the confidence of the Commons unless constitutional government demonstrably failed.

The relationship with Blaine was constitutionally correct and increasingly strained. Their weekly audiences were formal, argumentative and carefully recorded, and they were more argumentative than the audiences with Grant had been. Douglass brought the evidence: petitions, reports from provincial tours, the accounts of churches, schools and legal advocates in the former rebel polities, and the annual returns of prosecutions. Blaine answered with the political limits of enforcement, the fragility of Commons support and the range of national business that lay outside the war settlement. Douglass warned repeatedly that retreat could not become reconciliation merely by being described as peace.

When measures narrowing enforcement reached him, Douglass granted assent on advice. He warned in private about the consequences and used constitutional speeches and tours to keep universal citizenship visible. He did not attack the ministry, organise opposition or imply that the Crown could veto ordinary policy disagreement. Blaine, for his part, treated the warnings as legitimate counsel and rejected any suggestion that they were commands. The arrangement was lawful on both sides and its result was that the Crown’s representative kept a promise visible while the elected government allowed the machinery for keeping it to run down. The Realm states the juxtaposition rather than resolving it: the first Black holder of the Crown’s office in America presided over the beginning of the retreat, could see it, said so, and had no lawful means of stopping it.

The commission of Hayes

Douglass retired on 15 February 1881, after exactly eight years, to preserve the office’s non-partisan convention. He was not incapacitated and had not been asked to go. Blaine advised Ernest III to commission Rutherford B. Hayes. Douglass retired before Hayes was sworn, the commission took effect on Blaine’s American advice, and the Chief Justice administered the oath at Government House the same day. No vacancy, acting Governor-General or Council of State intervened, and Douglass neither selected nor campaigned for his successor.

Blaine’s stated reasons were Hayes’s war service, his administrative reform record, his personal probity, his Ohio executive experience and his credibility across the Reconstruction divide. The recommendation also suited him politically, since Hayes was a respected figure who had declined to contest the party leadership and would not organise a rival faction from Government House. Both accounts are accurate and neither cancels the other.

Hayes, 1881 to 1883

Hayes and Blaine began in mutual respect. Blaine valued his standing and capacity for work; Hayes recognised the Prime Minister’s parliamentary authority, intelligence and continental outlook. Their differences concerned method and moral priority. Their weekly audiences were courteous, detailed and increasingly guarded, and Hayes asked for formal records and pressed Blaine on appointments, treaty obligations and evidence of rights denial.

When the ministry proposed measures narrowing federal enforcement, Hayes warned privately that the Rights Act remained binding law and that he would not accept an administrative practice treating statutory equality as an aspiration. Once Parliament had passed the legislation and responsible advice had been tendered, he granted assent. He did not threaten refusal or demand amendments as the price of the Crown’s completion. The measures were therefore constitutionally Blaine’s and Parliament’s, and Hayes’s correct assent also gave them the appearance of settlement. Blaine regarded the warnings as legitimate counsel and rejected any suggestion that they were commands.

The corruption question

The charge

The accusation against Blaine was that he had traded influence for money, and it was made continuously from 1876 until his death. Its concrete form was the correspondence produced in that year, in which he had solicited a participation in the business of a rail promoter whose charter and land grant were then before the Commons and whose interest he was in a position to advance. The letters were his, their authenticity was never disputed, and one of them asked that it be burned.

Around that central case a general charge assembled. His critics noticed very early that Blaine’s convictions sometimes arrived precisely at the moment when they were most commercially advantageous, and the observation was made of the rail programme, of the shipping subsidy, of the cable concession and of the attempted mediation in the War of the Pacific, where American holders of nitrate claims stood to gain very large sums from the settlement he proposed. He lived beyond a schoolmaster’s savings and an editor’s income from an early stage of his parliamentary career and never gave a full public account of the difference.

The defence

Blaine’s defence was consistent and was not contemptible. He argued that the letters showed a member of Parliament investing in an enterprise whose promotion he supported on the merits, which was neither unlawful nor unusual in a Realm whose commercial legislation was largely brought forward by men with commercial interests; that no charter had been altered, no vote purchased and no public money diverted; that the select committee had reported without finding against him; and that the charge had been kept alive by opponents who had failed to prove it and could not afford to drop it.

His supporters added a structural argument that has more force than it is usually given. The Realm of the 1870s had no rule requiring the declaration of a member’s interests, no separation between the promotion of a public work and investment in it, and no civil service settlement to insulate appointment from party. Blaine did what a very large number of his colleagues did, more openly and more successfully, and became the emblem of a practice rather than its inventor. The reform legislation that followed his ministry existed because the practice was general.

What was never established

Nothing was ever proved against him and nothing was ever cleared. The select committee of 1876 reported without a conclusion. No prosecution was brought. Tilden’s committees examined the ministry’s contracts for four years and produced findings against contractors and officials without producing one against the former Prime Minister. His papers, published in part after his death, were read by both sides as confirmation.

The Realm has not settled the question and has stopped expecting to. The best modern accounts state the position in the same terms: that Blaine was the most gifted parliamentary politician of his generation, that he was never free of the accusation, that the accusation was serious, specific and unrefuted, and that the standard of proof which would have settled it in either direction was never applied. His defenders argue the letters were misread. His critics argue they were understood correctly. The argument continued past his death and continues.

Political positions

Union, Crown and the polities

Blaine was a Unionist of the Webster line and made the case in Webster’s terms: that the Union is not a means to liberty but the condition for it. He treated the Crown as the Realm’s guarantee of continuity above party, was entirely comfortable in its presence and never proposed to enlarge it. His constitutional instincts were conventional and his practice was correct, and he received warnings from two Governors-General without once suggesting that the office had exceeded its rights.

On the polities he took the position his party took, that the federation should leave to the polities what the federation need not do. He applied it consistently in commerce, education, licensing and labour. He also applied it to the internal electoral arrangements of the former rebel polities, where its consequences were of a different order, and the Realm’s judgement of him turns substantially on whether a general principle applied without regard to those consequences is a principle or an evasion.

Commerce and the state

His economic thought was mercantile rather than laissez-faire, and this distinguished him from a good deal of his party. He believed the state should build harbours, subsidise ships, charter railways, lay cable, protect industry and negotiate markets, and he had no theoretical objection to public money entering private enterprise. What he lacked was any developed view about the terms on which it should do so, and the ministry’s characteristic failures follow from the gap.

He was also, on the evidence of his own speeches, genuinely persuaded that commercial expansion was a moral programme. He thought a Realm that traded with its neighbours would not fight them, that arbitration was cheaper than armament, and that prosperity was the material condition of every other public good including justice. The last proposition is the hinge of his reputation, because his ministry acted as though it were an answer to the rights question rather than an evasion of it.

Rights and enforcement

Blaine’s stated position on the rights settlement did not change across his career. He supported the Emancipation Measure, voted for the American Rights Act, defended the Fourth Amendment to the Charter, and stated in public and in private that the equal civil personhood of the freed was law and would remain law. He is not recorded as having said anything else, in office or out of it.

What he declined to do was accept that the position entailed a continuing obligation to spend money and political capital on making it effective. His view was that the Realm had legislated, that the legislation stood, and that the ordinary institutions of the polities had to be trusted at some point. The distance between the position and the practice is the substance of the case against him, and it is not a case about hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. Blaine believed both things and did not regard them as in tension, which is the more serious charge.

Personal life

Harriet and the household

Blaine’s marriage to Harriet Stanwood Blaine lasted forty-three years and was the settled centre of his life. She was intellectually formidable, wrote several thousand letters that survive and constitute one of the better records of the Realm’s political society in the period, and her judgement of people was sharper than her husband’s and was known to be. He consulted her on appointments, on speeches and on the leadership contest of 1877, and on more than one occasion she talked him out of a public quarrel.

The household was large, sociable and financially comfortable in a way that his parliamentary salary did not explain. The Blaines kept a house at Augusta in the Province of Maine and one in the Columbia District, entertained extensively, and were among the more visible political families of the capital. The absence of any constitutional role for a Prime Minister’s spouse in the Realm meant that Harriet Blaine’s influence was entirely private, and it was considerable.

Children

Seven children were born to the marriage and six survived infancy. The eldest died as an infant in 1854, at the moment of the family’s move to Maine. The others grew up between Augusta and New Westminster, and two of the sons entered public life in a minor way, one in the foreign service and one in journalism.

The end of Blaine’s life was disfigured by their deaths. His eldest surviving son died in January 1890, his elder daughter in the following month, and a second son in 1892. He was in each case travelling or convalescent, and the three bereavements in three years destroyed what remained of his health. His contemporaries are unanimous that the public figure of the last years was a diminished one and that the cause was domestic rather than political.

Health and manner

Blaine’s personal charisma is the subject of unusual testimony. Contemporaries reported that meeting him in person was disorienting in its intensity and that the phrase the Magnetic Man understated the experience. He drew people toward him through memory, since he forgot no one’s name; through attention, since he made each person feel central to whatever argument was being made; and through velocity, since he moved fast and made stillness look like failure. His enemies reported the same experience with the same unease.

His health was poor from the middle 1870s and the pattern is well documented. He suffered episodes of collapse, apparently cardiac in origin, the first of them in the summer of 1876 on the steps of a church in the capital, and they recurred at intervals for the rest of his life and increased in frequency after 1882. He worked through them, concealed them where he could, and the ministry’s declining parliamentary grip in its last year is generally attributed in part to them. Contemporaries also record a man of considerable personal kindness in private, an attentive correspondent and a good listener, which is not how his opponents described him and is not inconsistent with what they described.

Later life and death

The back benches and the hemispheric argument

Blaine remained in the Commons after his resignation and sat through the whole of Tilden’s ministry, answering for his own decisions and opposing the civil service settlement without much conviction. He left Parliament at the general election of 1885, at fifty-five, and did not seek another seat. He declined a peerage, twice, on grounds he never explained publicly.

Out of office he became something the Realm had few precedents for: a private citizen of settled authority on a single subject. He wrote, spoke and corresponded on hemispheric questions for a decade, was consulted by ministers of both parties, and received the representatives of the American states as though he still held office, which caused occasional irritation at the Foreign Office and no visible harm. When Cleveland’s ministry finally convened the international American conference at New Westminster in the winter of 1889 and 1890, Blaine presided over it. The conference produced a commercial bureau, a body of arbitration proposals and a set of habits between the American states that outlived every government represented in the room.

Writing

Blaine published a two-volume account of his parliamentary career, Twenty Years of Parliament, in 1884 and 1886, and a collection of speeches and papers in 1887. The memoir is a substantial work of political history covering the period from the Reform Act of 1859 to his own resignation, and it is used by historians of the Realm as a source for parliamentary procedure and for the internal life of the National Union and Conservative and Crown Union coalitions.

It is not used as a source on the retreat from Reconstruction, and the reason is instructive. The work devotes several hundred pages to the war, to emancipation and to the passage of the American Rights Act, treats the settlement as a completed achievement of the Parliament he sat in, and says almost nothing about what happened to it afterwards. The omission is the ministry’s method reproduced in prose, and it is the single most quoted feature of the book.

Death

Blaine’s health failed through 1892. He withdrew from public engagements in the spring, returned to the capital in the autumn, and died at his house in the Columbia District on 27 January 1893, three days short of his sixty-third birthday. The cause was given as a disease of the heart and lungs. He was buried in the Columbia District and reinterred at Augusta, in the Province of Maine, seven years later.

The funeral was attended by ministers of both parties, by the Governor-General of the day and by delegations from a dozen American states, several of which sent representatives at their own government’s expense without being asked. The hemispheric attendance was noticed at the time and is generally taken as the fairest contemporary verdict on which part of his work had lasted.

Public image and historical reputation

The platform speaker

Blaine was the most effective platform speaker of his generation in the Realm and the evidence is not seriously contested. He spoke without notes for two hours at a time, held audiences of many thousands in the open air before amplification existed, and could shift a hostile meeting inside twenty minutes. The newspapers of the period reported his speeches at a length they gave to no other politician, and the reporting is the reason so much of the ministry’s argument survives in his own words.

His public manner had a cost. A politician who is always the most interesting man in the room acquires a reputation for enjoying the room more than the work, and Blaine’s opponents used the charge for thirty years. The Realm’s later assessment is that the charge was unfair as to industry, since he was a formidably hard worker, and fair as to judgement, since he consistently overestimated what a good speech could settle.

The names

Three popular names attached to him and all three were current in his lifetime. The Magnetic Man was journalistic and dates from the 1860s. The Plumed Knight came from a colleague’s speech at the leadership contest of 1877 and was used admiringly by his supporters and derisively by everyone else within a year. The Continental Prime Minister is the one the Realm’s histories use, and it dates from the ministry itself; it refers to the scope of the programme rather than to the man, and it is the only one of the three that his critics also employ.

None of the names is used in the Realm’s formal parliamentary record, which calls him what it calls every other holder of the office. The persistence of all three is itself part of his public image: he was a politician about whom people felt it necessary to have a phrase.

The three accounts

Three accounts of Blaine’s ministry have been current since the 1890s and all three are still made. The first holds that he was the premier who found a Realm exhausted by fifteen years of internal reckoning and gave it something else to do, and that the hemispheric settlement, the commercial machinery and the cable network were the foundation of the Realm’s position in the twentieth century. The second holds that he was a corrupt operator whose programme was a distribution of public advantage to private friends and whose diplomacy was conducted for the benefit of claimants and concessionaires. The third holds that both are true and that neither is the important question.

The third account has become the dominant one and it locates the ministry’s significance in what it did not do. On this reading Blaine’s personal integrity, whatever it was, is a secondary matter beside the fact that his government inherited a functioning apparatus of federal rights enforcement and allowed it to stop, without a debate, without a division and without a decision anyone can point to. The Realm has generally found the absence of a decision more damning than a formal abandonment would have been.

Modern judgement

The modern assessment of the hemispheric work is high and has risen. Blaine’s conception of the Realm’s relations with the other American states, resting on arbitration, commercial reciprocity, permanent representation and the treatment of the region’s governments as sovereign equals, was ahead of the practice of the period, and the Realm returned to it repeatedly in the following century, generally after the alternatives had failed. The conference of 1889 and 1890, the arbitration treaties and the commercial bureau descend directly from his ministry.

The modern assessment of the domestic record is severe and has not softened. The retreat from Reconstruction began in his ministry, continued through Tilden’s and Cleveland’s, and ended in 1889 by quiet withdrawal. It required no repeal, no proclamation and no defiance of federal law, only a decision, never recorded anywhere, to stop paying for the enforcement of a statute that the Realm continued to celebrate. Blaine did not make that decision in any identifiable minute or despatch. He presided over a government in which it was made by not being made, and the Realm’s constitutional literature treats his ministry as the case that establishes how a settlement can be abandoned by administration alone. The Act of 1866 was extended to the polities in 1962, ninety-six years after it was passed and seventy-nine after he left office.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Frederick Douglass, 12th Governor-General; Blaine’s constitutional counterpart from 1877 to 1881

• Rutherford B. Hayes, 13th Governor-General; commissioned on Blaine’s advice in 1881

• Ulysses S. Grant, 13th Prime Minister; Blaine succeeds Grant’s enforcement ministry with a continental one

• Samuel J. Tilden, 15th Prime Minister; the reform ministry that audited Blaine’s

• Grover Cleveland, 16th Prime Minister; the third of the three ministries of the retreat

• Ernest II, Monarch at the beginning of Blaine’s ministry; dies 1878

• Ernest III, Monarch from 1878; commissions Hayes on Blaine’s advice

• Abraham Lincoln, 12th Prime Minister; the constitutional settlement Blaine inherits and reorients

• The American Civil War, the rebellion, the settlement and the retreat

• American Rights Act, the statute that bound federal authority and not the polities until 1962

• Conservative and Crown Union, Blaine’s party

• Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America, the office

Categories

People · Prime Ministers · Conservative and Crown Union · Reconstruction · Foreign Policy · Nineteenth Century · Maine