Proceedings & Collections - NSHS - Vol. IV

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SENATOR JOHN M. THAYER.

March 4th, 1867--March 4th, 1871.

   John M. Thayer settled in Omaha, Nebraska, in the fall of 1854, a few months after the territorial organization. He was born in Bellingham, Norfolk County, Massachusetts, January 24, 1820. Possessing a good education and hopeful of the future, with a laudable ambition to succeed, he naturally challenged early attention, gained the confidence of his associates, and found the field of enterprise wide open for occupancy. Belonging to the legal profession. it was not strange that visions of legislative honors should have an enticing influence, and that in 1857, he was found a candidate for congress in a "free for all," before the organization of parties, in a case where four aspirants divided among them 5,600 votes, each receiving 1,000, but Fenner Ferguson having the highest number in the hundreds. Again in 1859 and then in 1860 his name was placed before the Republican nominating convention, but Samuel G. Daily, an original abolition republican, became the nominee and delegate. He was elected to the territorial council of 1860-61, and subsequently to a constitutional convention. In the council he was author of a bill to abolish slavery in Nebraska. In 1867 he entered the United States senate for a term of four years and in 1875 was appointed governor of Wyoming Territory.
   Inasmuch as the entire eastern front of Nebraska was first settled, bordering on the Missouri River, where numerous Indian tribes had originally roamed at will, the peace and quiet, the lives and property of emigrants were often at the mercy of savage marauders.
   So early as May, 1855, we find Gen. John M. Thayer one of a commission to hold a council with the Pawnee chiefs, under appointment of Governor Izard.
   In July of the same year the governor commissioned General Thayer to raise troops and give protection to the settlers against the depredations of the Sioux.

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In the summer of 1859 he led a force against Indians in what was denominated "the Pawnee war," the results of which were reassuring to the emigrants, and a lesson of power and authority to the Indians. An article by Major Dudley in the second volume of Nebraska Historical Society reports contains the following: "One figure, too, stands out prominently in all this history connected with every military affair or expedition, the first brigadier general of the territory, colonel of its first regiment to take the field in defense of the Union; brigadier and brevet major general of United States Volunteers, and then, after the war, United States senator, and now the recently elected governor of our state, John M. Thayer."
While it is neither appropriate nor intended to incorporate a military history of Nebraska with this brief sketch of General Thayer's services, references must necessarily be made to the fact that he was active and persistent in the organization of the First Nebraska Infantry, afterward cavalry, becoming its colonel and leading it in marches and skirmishes prior to its participation in the battle of Fort Donelson, where on the 15th day of February, 1862, it received its first "baptism of fire." As colonel commanding the 2d brigade in General Lew Wallace's division at the battle of Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, known also as Shiloh, he submitted a very minute, comprehensive and accurate report of the participation of his command in that most important and sanguinary contest. After stating the circumstances under which it took position in line of battle on that memorable Sunday night, he gave a graphic description of the steady retreat of the Confederate line from "5 a. m. to 5 p. m.," before the steady advance of the Union army, reinforced by Buell's command. He said, "I cannot speak in terms of too high praise of the officers and soldiers tinder my command. Their conduct was most gallant and brave throughout. They fought with the ardor and zeal of true patriots. It gives me pleasure to speak of the different regiments and their officers. Nobly did the First Nebraska Sustain its reputation, well earned on the field of Donelson. Its progress was onward during the whole day in face of a galling fire of the enemy, moving on

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without flinching, at one time being an hour and a half in front of their battery, receiving and returning fire, its conduct was most excellent." Having in detail mentioned the Twenty-third Indiana and the Fifty-eighth Ohio, surgeons and officers of his staff, he "congratulated the general upon the part his division took, and upon the success which attended all his movements in the memorable battle of Pittsburg Landing." From this time on until in July, 1865, when his active military career closed, he is seen commanding a brigade of Iowa troops and leading a storming party in the battle of Chickasaw Bayou, then in the battle of Arkansas Post where his horse was shot under him, and through the siege of Vicksburg, and appointed "Major General of Volunteers for gallant and distinguished services"; with Sherman in the battle of Jackson, Mississippi, and with General Steel in Arkansas in command of the Army of the Frontier and ending with a command at Helena, on the Mississippi river, and retiring to civil life, brevetted a major general.

MAIDEN SPEECH OF GENERAL THAYER.

The duties of the military and Indian committees were so congenial to Senator Thayer, on account of a long army service and the deep interest his constituents had in the latter, that he was soon before the senate with bills, reports, and incidental remarks. On the 26th of March, 1867, three weeks after his admission to the body, a question was raised by a friend of the California Pacific Railroad as to the progress of the Union Pacific from Omaha westward. Thereupon General Thayer, with accuracy of statement and collected demeanor arrested the attention of the senate.

MR. THAYER: I would not trouble the senate with any remarks on this question except for the fact that this road runs through the entire state which I have the honor in part to represent on this floor, and in justice to the company who have had the building of this road, I feel it my duty to give utterance to a few words. I was surprised yesterday when the resolution was introduced by the honorable senator from California--not that he intended any injustice to the Union Pacific Railroad Company.

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But from my knowledge of the facts, I am compelled to say that even instituting an inquiry on the subject, implying that there is a neglect, does them greater injustice; for I stand here to say that no improvement, in ancient or modern times, was ever prosecuted with such untiring energy, with such tireless force, and with means such as that company has used. Three hundred and five miles of continuous road were built last year, and they were only stopped because it was beyond human energy to prosecute work this winter. Now, sir, this has been the most remarkable winter in the west that that distinguished personage, "the oldest inhabitant," has had any knowledge of. There have been snows such as have never fallen before. They have stopped the progress of all works. But while this company have been stopped they have not been idle. They have been concentrating at the end of this three hundred miles of road an immense amount of material which they are now about to use. They have been gettin (sic) iron out there in immense quantities, and engines and all paraphernalia of a railroad, just as fast as the means of communication have enabled them to do."
In these few remarks his colleagues discerned that the new member from the West had not lost the polish of New England, in assuming the duties of pioneer life.

In a few days thereafter the records show Mr. Thayer engaged in an Indian war discussion, in which he had to arraign the report of a congressional committee, correspondents of the New York Tribune and Boston Journal, and an interview of the chairman of the Indian committee, together with numerous allegations made by senators in debate. With undisputed facts, and invulnerable arguments he met all comers and charges, and then appealed to the sense of the senate in the following compact sentences:

I stand here to say to the senate, speaking in behalf of every class of the community on the border, speaking in behalf of every industrial pursuit, that nothing can be more abhorrent, nothing more dreaded by them than an Indian war. Why, sir, until these hostilities upon the frontier everything was prosperous there; the commerce on the plains had risen to an immense magnitude; we could talk about the commerce of the Plains, as well as you could talk of the commerce of the seas and the lakes.

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These men went out upon the plains and did business in the mountains. You could go in no direction across these wide plains that you did not see long caravans of trains bearing merchandise from all the points of the Missouri to all the territories in the mountains and away to the northwest.
It is the main source of our income; it is the market for our productive industry; and to send it forth to this Nation that we frontiersmen are in for a war to make money, is the most atrocious calumny of the nineteenth century.

Continuing in a more subdued and humorous strain, we have the following:

My dear sir, the very gamblers and thieves which Chicago, and St. Louis, and New York, and Cincinnati, and Boston, and Philadelphia failed to hang dread an Indian war. We have some of that class of people there,--I am sorry for it, but it is because you in the East have not done your duty and hung them. They fled out there to escape but they do not represent the border. My friend from New York (Mr. Conkling) suggests that they do not come from New York. If so, it is because they treat them so kindly there that they do not have to run away. They vote the right way in New York City. [Laughter.]

Senator Morrill of Maine having been very active in the discussion and full of the poetic idea of "Lo, the poor Indian," and deeply anxious that at least some stray rays of civilization's light might dawn upon the far West, received a cordial invitation to visit and be convinced.

I tell him as a friend, frankly, without prejudice, that he would come back with different ideas as to that section of country.
He talks about Christianity and civilization. Why, sir, from whence did the people of the border come? Many came from New England. Men have settled there, whom I have the honor now in part to represent, whom he has heretofore represented on this floor. The people of the border are "bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh." Sir, I have seen a Christian people there coming from their humble cabins, meeting at cross-roads or by-roads in an improvised school-house, and I have seen them there raise the voice of thanksgiving and the song of praise to Almighty God, and worship Him with as much feeling and as much

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sincerity as is manifested by those who worship in the gorgeous temples of your eastern cities.
You will find there an humble Christianity, but it is as pure as that which dwells in the East.

At the conclusion of a long and exhaustive speech, when a senator from Wisconsin offered an amendment for the removal of all Nebraska Indians to the Indian Territory, those who have charged Nebraska's persecution of Indians upon us, were astounded by the senator's concluding periods.

They commenced within six weeks after the settlers have crossed the Missouri River, and settled on lands which had been ceded to the United. States, to steal their cattle, and in the second raid killed two or three. But those days have passed. Since those Indians have been placed upon reservations there has been entire peace and quiet. There is good feeling between the Omahas, the Pawnees and others, even the Sioux, a band engaged in the Minnesota massacre, who are now located in the northern corner of Nebraska. They are on friendly terms with the whites; no collision, no clashing whatever. We do not ask to have those Indians removed.
I tell the senator from Maine that there is a condition of peace and quiet between the people and the peaceable Indians, and you may go among those tribes today and they will point to the white people, the settlers on the border, as their friends. Why, sir, but a few weeks ago some of them fearing an incursion, or a raid of the Sioux, came into Omaha for our protection.

Thus at the end of the fortieth congress, General Thayer had "won his spurs" on themes general to his condition as a western representative.
At the first session of congress after the election of General Grant, Senator Thayer presented Bill No. 1, to repeal the act which had restrained President Johnson from making removals, and for the violation of which he was impeached. Senator Edmunds offered bill No. 2 to amend the same act, and Senator Williams an amendment for its suspension during Grant's term of office. In the house of representatives General Butler, of Massachusetts, also presented a bill for its repeal. Many old senators were loath to see the bill repealed, although they had supported it as only for a temporary purpose.

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   Some feared they might seem to be currying favor with General Grant, and others that they might be supposed to have lost confidence in its utility. But General Thayer "slept upon his arms," as at Shiloh, and kept his war paint bright, and illustrated the maxim: "In peace, friends; enemies in war."
   Many denied that the law refusing to allow a president to remove certain officers, without consent of the senate, was merely directed against Andrew Johnson.
   To this General Thayer replied:

This man Johnson thought proper to abandon those who elevated him to power. He determined to violate, and did violate, all the pledges he had made. He did forswear the principles upon which he was elected, and joined the political enemies who had fought him from the commencement of the Rebellion. Then he undertook to sweep from power and place those who had sustained President Lincoln, and who had sustained the principles upon which Mr. Lincoln's administration went into power. It was then, and not till then, that it occurred to members of this body to originate the tenure of office law. No senator will rise in his place here and assert that he had contemplated such a law as this until the treachery of Andrew Johnson was patent to the world. Therefore I say it was an exceptional law.

To the theory of suspending the law, he paid his compliments in the most direct and positive manner.

I say if the law is just and right as a permanent statute you are wrong in proposing its suspension. My honorable friend from Michigan (Mr. Howard) says it will be the highest compliment that we can pay to President Grant. My friend from Michigan, I know, enjoys a joke.
And then my honorable friend from New York (Mr. Conkling) joined in and said it will be suspended in effect until the end of the next session of congress, and that will leave him a year. If you mean to show confidence in General Grant, why did not the committee, why did not the friends of suspension, substitute the words "the 4th of March, 1873"?

The senator from Missouri (Mr. Schurz) having denounced the distribution of patronage as a curse to a party, met the following retort:
19

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I know it is fashionable to denounce and to decry patronage and the spoils of office; but point me to a senator on this floor who has not sought to exercise the right of dispensing patronage to his political friends and supporters.

When General Grant sent the names of his first cabinet officers to the senate, he included among them A. T. Stewart, merchant prince of New York, who was ineligible, being an importer of merchandise, and therefore could not be secretary of the treasury; and hence his name was withdrawn and the mistake acknowledged. Senator Thayer took the prompt act of submission to law as an evidence of the new president's prompt and faithful enforcement of law in the future, and closed a long and able speech with the following sentence:

In that act of moral courage, of moral power, and of moral grandeur, he appears nobler than when he stood on the ramparts of Vicksburg, its conqueror, or when he received the surrender of the Confederate army of northern Virginia on the Appomattox.

ARLINGTON.

In sight of the National Capitol and south of the Potomac River lies Arlington, once the estate of Washington Park Custis, adopted son of General Washington. General Robert E. Lee, of the Confederacy, having abandoned this venerable homestead, to join the rebellion, it was confiscated in 1863, and 200 acres set apart as a national cemetery in 1864. Within it repose the bodies of 16,000 soldiers, while the bones of 2,111 unknown rest in a granite sarcophagus, 220 feet in diameter and 30 feet deep. On the 13th day of December, 1870, Senator McCreery of Kentucky offered a resolution for the relief of Mrs. Robert E. Lee, looking to a settlement of her claim to Arlington. Fiery discussion became contagious, and it was soon evident that the resolution would not be received. Among those participating in the debate, Senator Thayer took a prominent part. He declared that he was somewhat in doubt while listening to the resolution and the sentiments uttered by the honorable senator from Kentucky, whether to give expression to his feelings, or to vote in silence. He proceeded:

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A stranger in this chamber, for the last hour, would hardly have supposed he was in the American senate. He would rather have imagined that he was in the Confederate congress at Richmond, six years ago, when eulogies were pronounced upon Stonewall Jackson. I had predicted during the last three or four years that the time would come, if the policy of congress was not rigidly carried out and adhered to in the southern states, when the leaders of rebellion would sit in these seats, and encomiums would be pronounced upon their acts. In one respect the day has come sooner than I had anticipated. I listened to him carefully, and not one word did I hear falling from his lips in condemnation of treason.

Mr. McCreery said:

The melancholy tidings of the death of General Thomas, and the accents of sorrow which his surviving friends poured forth the national grief at his irreparable loss, are still fresh in our recollections when we learned that yet another of the great actors in the drama through which we have passed had breathed his last.

To this General Thayer responded:

The linking together of the names of Thomas and Lee was unfortunate. It is true they were associates together in early life. Both educated by the United States to be its protectors when assailed, both took a solemn oath, written down by the angel, that they would forever be its defenders, against foreign or domestic foes. The one--Thomas--nobly, sacredly, grandly kept his oath. He fought for the flag of the Union and was faithful to the end. He has passed away. His name is inscribed on the rolls of immortal renown. The other was faithless to his solemn vow. With perjury in his soul he raised the black standard of treason and through all the scenes and vicissitudes, the dangers and trials and battles of four years, he fought with his best energies and his best efforts to. destroy the Union whose flag he had sworn to defend forever.

It became evident to the senator from Kentucky that he had sown the wind and was reaping a cyclone, and inasmuch as his political and personal friends desired him to withdraw the offensive paper, he would have done so, but the rules of order made it impossible; besides the Nebraska soldier had his guns trained upon it, and was closing his lines, by gradual approaches. He continued:

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The senator from Kentucky had no word of condemnation for this foul, glaring, damning treason. General Lee is held up as a model of virtue and right and truth to the youth of the American Nation. This is what we witness here to-day. The proposition is made, and we are discussing the question of its reception, whether the graves of twenty thousand heroic dead, who died that the Nation might live, shall be opened and their dust gathered up and scattered along the way to be deposited somewhere else, to make way for the widow of the traitor, whose hands were chiefly instrumental in taking the lives of that army of martyrs who sleep on the heights of Arlington. That is the spectacle which we now witness in the senate of the United States, before six years have passed away from the laying down of the arms of the rebellion. The graves of those men who gave their lives that we might sit here today to legislate for the American people, that we might sit here in common with the people of the Union in the enjoyment of the blessings of the Union purchased by their blood and their lives are to be opened; an act of sacrilege is to be committed, in order that this property may be given back to the widow of Lee. Sir, as an American citizen, as a senator of the United States and as a soldier in the war for the Union, I enter my solemn protest against it.

On a final vote to grant leave to introduce the resolution leave was denied, there being four in the affirmative and fifty-four in the negative. There was no evidence, however, that the three voting with Mr. McCreery approved of his resolution. Being a member of the military committee the Nebraska senator was always on the alert as to the rights and honors of soldiers.
Hearing that the attorney general had given an opinion that the states would have to agree to continue the national cemeteries within their limits and might demand pay for the ground, he offered a resolution of inquiry, and said:

I have been led to believe, and I still believe, that those who fell fighting for our national existence earned a full and unqualified title to the resting places where their bodies sleep. If they are to be disturbed on the refusal of the legislatures to give their consent, I desire to know it; or rather, I will say, I am opposed to asking the consent of any legislature or anybody else to secure the undisturbed possession of the soil inclosed within those cemeteries.

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They died in the defense of their country, and their resting places are hallowed spots. Sir, I am ready, for one, to say that if need be we will fight through another war to hold forever sacred the graves where our heroes sleep.

On the question involving the reconstruction of Virginia and Georgia, the senator indulged in a discussion covering the whole ground of secession and constitutional restoration of democratic and republican records diagnosing the disease and prescribing the political remedies. Notwithstanding all the two states had done in responding to the demands of congress, he desired further indemnity for the past and greater security for the future.
For congress he had words of eulogy, and for her champions garlands of perpetual renown.

For the first time in our history it struck down the prop of despotism, the doctrine of caste of race, or color, and declares the broad, philosophical, supremely just, and only true republican principle--the complete equality of all men in the possession of all civil and political rights. It invested a race with the order of citizenship, it invested a race with the rights of manhood. By its command that race, bowed down with the wrongs of centuries, stood forth erect under the broad panoply of eternal right.

So much was the republican party divided upon questions at issue and the democrats silent that the General said:

I have remarked that a portion of the members of this body, those who belong to the opposite political faith, have remained entirely silent. They seem to be as serene and composed as a summer's morning, or, to be still more poetic, as calm and unruffled as the waters of a moon-lit lake.

Turning upon his witty friend from Nevada, he said:

Mr. Nye described with affecting pathos the hardships inflicted upon this long-suffering, patiently waiting state of Virginia. She has waited till her locks are wet with the dews of night. Sir, let me say to that honorable senator, there are many people in Virginia today who are tired of waiting, waiting for that protection which this great government of the United States has vouchsafed to every citizen who respects its authority and obeys its command.

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After a twenty years' calm, war having "smoothed his wrinkled front," and the sulphur of battle been replaced by the odor of flowers, and the great generals of the past having answered to roll call of death, and the rival orators of reconstruction just waiting to join the silent procession, all efforts to portray the stormy past by mutilated extracts must be as unsatisfactory as an attempt to represent the pantheon of old by a single block of Roman marble. The closing speech upon Georgia was worthy of the place and occasion.

The fruits of this legislation will reach on through the ages. Our task will be ended, our mission will be fulfilled, only when every other citizen of every state, of every hamlet within our wide border, be he poor or rich, be he humble or exalted, be he white or black, and of every religion and opinion, and of every nationality, and every color or doctrine, shall be in the full and equal possession and enjoyment of every blessing which a beneficent government can bestow. Then we may witness the ushering in of the reign of universal justice, of universal liberty, and of universal law. These shall be the crowning glories of the Nation. Then shall every citizen, wherever he may dwell between the oceans, feel and know that he is indeed and in truth a child of the great Republic. Then may all exultingly exclaim, "This is my country; this is my nation."