kept the House in good humor, and I acknowledge I desire it may meet with your approval....

To-morrow - having secured the previous question by a far better vote than I expected yesterday- the first question will be on the admission of Kansas as a State. I think we shall carry it by a close vote. The next business will be the report of the committee for the expulsion of Brooks. As it takes two thirds to do that, of course we shall fail. The discussion will be exciting. Then the Report of the Kansas Investigating Committee — who will give us many bloody facts-will come up. On the whole, considering the state of the matter we may expect a hot time.

Though there is no evidence that the speech made any stir, for he was not then, nor at any later time numbered among the orators - he lacked the voice, the action, the power of utterance, and the love of forensic combat to make him an ideal speaker or a leader of debate - yet this first speech made everywhere a good impression as a sound, competent, and dignified contribution to the discussion. It accorded with the views of his constituents and reflected the position of the main body of Republicans; possibly it added strength to the support of the bill, which passed the House on the 3d of July by 99 to 97, but was lost in the Senate.

Kansas and slavery were the real issues of the campaign of 1856, and before the close of Congress, which was kept in session until August 30th, the contest was in full swing. The Republicans had nominated Frémont and the Democrats Buchanan. Kansas and the slavery question were the issues, with the threat of disunion in the background. On these issues Morrill was in complete accord with the heart of Vermont which was emphatically Republican, and he returned to his home to find his reëlection assured.

The Presidential election of 1856 was one of the most momentous and excited in our history. The assault on Sumner, the destruction of Lawrence, the spreading and deepening

sense of the terrible possibilities involved in such events as these, gave a tense and anxious interest to the struggle. Southerners repeated on every hand that the election of Frémont meant revolution. Buchanan wrote a friend summarizing many letters he had received from the South: "They say explicitly that the election of Frémont involves the dissolution of the Union, and this immediately." In a similar vein, Governor Wise of Virginia wrote, "If Frémont is elected... this Union will not last one year from November next." When the Republicans resorted to the cry of "Bleeding Kansas," the Democrats taunted them by saying that they were trying to elect their candidate by "shrieks for freedom." The phrase was immediately adopted by the Republicans as a new watchword2 and was widely used. In Vermont there was hardly a contest, but great efforts were put forth to make the Republican majority as impressive as possible. The September elections for Congressmen rolled up a large vote. Morrill was reelected by over 8000.

Morrill's public life may be said properly to begin with his reëlection in 1856. His first term, like all first terms, was a novitiate, a test, a preliminary and experimental period. He had shown industry, and had been assiduous in his attention to the business of the House. Though his appearances on the floor had been few and brief, they had served to give him familiarity with the scene and the mechanism of legislation, to make him known to his fellows and to give them a taste of his quality. It was already clear that he was not to be brushed aside; when he had taken a position he would not lightly yield it. No man maintained the just claims of his State or his constituents with more spirit or firmness. In presenting the claims of two aged veterans, Zadok Thompson and Nathan Launsbury, he showed both tact and per1 Rhodes, II, 209. • Ibid., 220.

sistence, winning over the opponents of the payment by persuasive words. Not even a Southern opponent could continue opposition to paying a small pension to "a poor old man about one hundred years old." In sustaining the claim of the State of Vermont to be reimbursed for the expense of calling out the militia to preserve the neutrality of the country in 1838-39, he showed unyielding firmness. When a member from the South proposed to kill the measure by an amendment, Morrill appealed to the sense of justice of the House. "If any citizens of Vermont are entitled to bounty land under the present laws, certainly I do not think this House will be disposed to deprive them of it by such an amendment as this." And at a later stage in the debate he retorted effectually to his opponent, "Well, Sir, because the Government has delayed the payment of a just debt seventeen or eighteen years, they [the claimants] are not any less entitled to it." He gained the point and the bill passed. Two other issues destined to be important later had his attention. What appears to have been his first appearance in legislation was on February 28, 1856, when he rose in debate to introduce a resolution which contained the germ of his Agricultural College Acts:

That the Committee on Agriculture be and they are hereby requested to inquire into the expediency of establishing a Board of Agriculture under the direction of the Secretary of the Interior; and also of establishing one or more national agricultural schools upon the basis of the naval and military schools, in order that one scholar from each Congressional district, and two from each State at large, may receive a scientific and practical education at the public expense.

The second question touched a more vital and living topic; it was one of the minor issues of the Presidential campaign. This was Mormonism and its polygamous practices. The Republican platform declared it was both the right and the

duty of Congress "to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism— polygamy and slavery"; but polygamy was destined to stir the feelings of the country many years later, even after slavery had ceased to be. The closing paragraph of Morrill's brief remarks suffices to show the temper in which he approached the subject. "There is no purpose," he said, "to interfere with the most absolute freedom of religion, nor to intermeddle with the rights of conscience, but the sole design is to punish gross offenses whether in secular or ecclesiastical garb; to prevent practices which outrage the moral sense of the civilized world, and to reach even those 'who steal the livery of the Court of Heaven to serve the Devil in."" Perhaps he may have felt, as possibly his colleague Senator Edmunds did twenty years later, a certain sense of responsibility to attack and destroy the evils of Mormonism because its prophet and founder Joseph Smith, as well as his successor Brigham Young, was a native of Vermont.

With his reëlection he settled down to the work of a legislator and began that career which was no less notable for its consistency than for its length. Regarding his course from the end rather than the beginning, and seeing how year after year and decade after decade he maintained his interest and sustained his championship for the causes which first engaged his support, observers have been inclined to credit him with prophetic vision and preternatural patience. Perhaps a simpler explanation would be more just. It is hardly likely that Morrill, any more than others of his time, saw the end from the beginning. Nor is it necessary to credit him with extraordinary intellectual powers. What is likely is that, in entering upon public life, Morrill transferred to the larger scene the experience and the motives of the smaller one he had left, projecting into national affairs the habits and principles learned in the village. We shall probably understand

him better, both in his achievements and his limitations, if we think of him as applying to the great affairs of the nation the lessons of his country store, his farm and his house. We shall find him in his tariff theory and practice considering what would be for the best interests of the storekeepers and farmers - first of Vermont, and then of the rest of the country; in his educational programme he nationalized the needs of his own youth and of those similarly circumstanced; in his financial views he was governed by the rules he had applied in his business at Strafford; his policy on national buildings was simply an expansion on a vast scale of his course in building his own modest house in the place of his birth. He was no Webster with imperial pose and eagle eye sweeping his country's history in a great vision; no Clay mastering and guiding men with an instinct for control; no Sumner with a single aim pursued with fanatical devotion. From first to last Morrill was a moderate, believing in progress by gradual steps and distrustful of undue zeal, haste, and all forms of excess. Toward the end of his career, when he was the patriarch of the Senate, some one said of him that he spent more hours in his seat than any other member of the chamber. It was always the same. After his death a writer of a statistical turn of mind counted up his labors and found he had made over a hundred set speeches and had appeared in Congress by speech, resolution, petition, motion, or suggestion, 2477 times.

In spite of the election of Buchanan, which did not wear to his contemporaries the fateful and disastrous aspect that it has for modern historians, the Republicans came back to Congress with some of the spirit of victors. Though they had not won, their candidate had polled 1,341,264 votes and the Democratic success was that of a plurality, not a majority. Republicans looked confidently forward to victory at the next election. In this new spirit of confidence Morrill