that you possess decided anti-slavery sentiments and are determined to act up to them, I wish to inquire of you relative to your views upon the subject. On the same day, August 29th, Morrill replied, saying: Your favor of this date is at hand, making inquiry of me touching my anti-slavery sentiments and whether I should adhere to the principles adopted at the mass convention at Montpelier on the 13th of July last. I have not the resolutions at hand which were adopted at the convention on the 13th of July, but my recollection of them is that they were very similar to those adopted by the Whig Convention previously held at Rutland and, of course, might be expected to meet with my acquiescence. I have, however, no hesitation in saying that I am opposed to the admission of any more slave States to the Union and in favor not only of restoring the restrictions of slavery up to the Missouri Compromise line, but also of extending that restriction to territories belonging to the United States. I am in favor of a radical change in the Fugitive Slave Act by which trial by jury should be secured and the right of habeas corpus; and if this shall not be conceded, then I should be for unconditional repeal - leaving the subject to be provided for by the several States, where I think it belongs. It may perhaps be proper that I should also state that I should be in favor of substituting money for the liquor rations in the Navy and for the annihilation of the groggeries in and around the Capitol at Washington. Clear and explicit as Morrill's statement was, it did not suffice for the more zealous Free-Soil partisans, and a bolt occurred. The candidate of the bolters was O. L. Shafter of whom no more is known and he does not reappear in this history. He did, however, imperil Morrill's election, for the Democratic candidate, J. W. D. Parker, made a vigorous canvass, and, as we have already noted, the final vote was extremely close. The official figures were: Parker, Democrat, 5,848; Shafter, Free-Soil, 2,473; Morrill, Whig, 8,380. The election over and the last battle won that the Whig Party of Vermont was ever to wage, there ensued the long interval of fourteen months between decision and action which is so anomalous and futile a part of our political arrangements. Morrill did not take his seat in Congress until the 3d of December, 1855, but the long interim was by no means empty; it was filled, rather, with matters of great moment both to his political and his domestic welfare. The year 1855 was a fateful one in our political history; it saw the organization of the Republican Party and the practical absorption by it of the Whigs, the Free-Soilers, and the anti-slavery Democrats. In the organization of the Vermont Republicans, Morrill had a part, and his gift for conciliation doubtless contributed to the amicable nature of the union which was never broken by schism and knew no more "bolting" candidates. His public career was begun and went forward under good auspices, but his personal and domestic fortunes were not so happy. The year brought him, in fact, two of his greatest bereavements. On the 16th of January, his first-born son, a child in whom the hopes of his parents were centered, died, and left a void which was never quite filled. The second loss was the death of Judge Harris. Through all the earlier part of his life Morrill had looked up to the Judge as a model; with the passage of time, the relation was, if not reversed, at least changed, to the measure that the Judge came to rely increasingly on Morrill's ability and judgment: finally he made his junior his executor. With the death of the Judge, Morrill not only succeeded to his place as the first citizen of the town, but to a position of still wider influence and put another of his early standards of success behind him. A few days before the opening of Congress in December, 1855, Morrill arrived in Washington to begin his work as a legislator. He was not unacquainted with the city. "I came to Washington City," he said afterwards, "a good while before I was in public life here. I was here at least four times in the forties and fifties." He used to tell how, on one of these visits, he had wandered out to the pasture behind the White House, which was then very rural in its setting, to look at the cows, and, finding a farmer-like man, apparently interested in cows like himself, he engaged him in conversation and inquired how one could manage to see the President; to which the stranger replied, "You see him now. I am the President." Apparently it was General Taylor. His living arrangements were simple and easily made. Like most of his Northern associates, he found the boardinghouse both convenient and suitable to his means, and was fortunate in being invited to join a congenial company. As early as October, Senator Foot had written him: We hope to have you of our "Mess" at Mrs. Curtis's on Capitol Hill during the session. The terms for a gentleman alone will be from twelve to sixteen dollars per week according to the size of the room. At the hotels the terms are much higher. We always find a congenial "Mess" at Mrs. Curtis's - comfortable rooms nothing more-fair table and attendance, and as quiet as one may choose to be. I do not know that Fessenden will come here this session, but hope and presume he will. Perhaps Judge Collamer will go there. You will have no occasion to take anything with you except your wardrobe-books are plenty there. We shall be at the Astor House in New York about the 25th Nov. and stop there a few days, and hope to meet you there. Don't fail to be in Washington in season to be at the opening of the session. Every vote on the side of freedom will be needed in the organization. The stage on which Morrill was to act his long and honorable part was not wholly distinguished. The floor of the House to-day presents often enough the aspect of a trade convention or a stock exchange; a recent writer has esti mated the per capita consumption of chewing-tobacco among Congressmen as much higher than the average even for the West and the South: 1 there is a freedom of behavior and a disregard of decorum not customary in any other national legislative body now extant. If this be true to-day, how much more was it true in the ante-bellum days when Morrill first took his seat? Then there were to be seen singular, picturesque, and uncouth types from the frontier, fire-eaters from the South, and pioneers from the West. General Sam. Houston of Texas was there, an old man. "He used to sit in the Senate," said Morrill, in his reminiscences of the period, "whittling a stick." And in another place, "One day I heard Mr. Spinner, afterward appointed Treasurer by President Lincoln, offer to make a wager that there were not less than three hundred loaded pistols in the hall and galleries of the House."2 More than once in the ardor of debate a pistol fell from the pocket of the orator upon the floor of the chamber, and the correspondence of the time presents many a picture of the rowdy and bellicose aspects of the assembly. From the first the meetings of the House were marked by tension and disorder. On January 10th Morrill wrote his wife: Such a scene as we have passed through you can hardly imagine. Mr. Cullen of Delaware, Mr. Bowie of Maryland, and Campbell of Kentucky have been very drunk and others a little drunk. We have kept good-natured, silly and noisy. One man, however, Mr. Sam. Caruthers of Missouri, a Border Ruffian and very clever fellow, made the most eloquent brief speech it has in my life ever been my fortune to hear. Extempore, not long and delivered with a rough physical energy that was absolutely sublime. I told him I only wished he had been on our side. Twenty years later Morrill described the House and its 1 Whiting in Boston Herald, February 27, 1923. members in a paper which he read to his friends and neighbors at Strafford. Counting it a stroke of good fortune to find so substantial a piece of reminiscence from his hand, which not only portrays the men and the scenes in which he moved, but discloses his own mind, I have gladly included several passages from these recollections: I took my seat in the House of Representatives on the first Monday of December, 1855, at the session commencing with the memorable struggle for the election of Speaker which terminated only after nine weeks, and upon the 133d ballot, by the election of Nathaniel P. Banks. Without any legislative experience on my part, never having held any office save once that of Justice of the Peace and once as town auditor, it was with some gratification that among my fellow-members there were others as green and accounted possibly rather bigger fools than myself. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise Act by the previous Congress had operated disastrously upon the Democratic Party in the North, without giving it any additional strength in the South. The opposition at the South had been considerably reinforced by the Know-Nothing Party- a pro-slavery party, but a Union party and at the North Republicans, anti-Nebraska Democrats, and the Know Nothings had almost extinguished the Democracy, as the people were terribly in earnest that slavery should not profit, nor gain any new foothold, by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, nor by any part of the Kansas and Nebraska Bill. The policy of "Northern men and Southern measures" had been repudiated forever. The white men of the North were no longer to be bought and sold. Party feeling on the slavery question was intense and was a wall of separation which kept asunder not only political parties at Washington, but divided society. In the first part of the session the time was mainly spent in fruitless ballotings for Speaker, and in raising disorderly questions of order which the clerk declined to decide for nothing was really in order except the election of a Speaker. Soon the disposition became almost universal to make personal explanations during the roll-call as each name was reached by the clerk, but instead of being personal explanations they usually ended in |