Proceedings & Collections - NSHS - Vol. IV

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HON. JAMES LAIRD.

March 4th, 1883--March 4th, 1889.

A formal biographical sketch of Mr. Laird is here omitted in order to avoid repetition, since both Mr. Connell, his colleague, and Mr. Laws, his successor, incorporated his personal history in their memorial addresses of him, which immediately follow this article. To eliminate it from their tributes would materially mar their productions. But an extract from the contribution of the Hon. Mr. Cutcheon, the venerable preceptor of his brothers, in connection with the tender words of his comrade, Representative Tarsney, make a valuable introduction.

TRUTH STRANGER THAN FICTION. MR. CUTCHEON, of Michigan: Mr. Speaker, I shall not on this occasion indulge in any extended eulogy of our deceased colleague. When I first entered this hall as a member of this House in December, 1883, one of the first members to greet me was our deceased friend and colleague, James Laird, of Nebraska. Our previous acquaintance had been nominal only. The interest which I took in him and which he took in me had been vicarious rather than personal. When as a young man, in 1859, I left the halls of my alma mater, the University of Michigan, and became principal of a small academy in southern Michigan, I found there two young men by the name of Laird; and before the close of the term there came with them, to attend the closing exercises, a lad, as small almost as the smallest of these pages; who I afterwards found was their brother. I lost sight of him then and never to my knowledge met him again personally until he came to me in this chamber, and introduced himself as the same lad, James Laird. In the meantime the two brothers who had been under my instruction both died in the cause of the Union, as soldiers in the army. This trifling circumstance of our first meeting was the slender thread that bound us; but when we found ourselves a few weeks later in adjacent seats at the same committee table, where we served together continuously, side by side, for six years, this beginning of acquaintanceship ripened into a friendship which lasted as long as life endured. On the

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very first occasion in which I participated on this floor I found my colleague and myself upon opposite sides of the question. I discovered on that occasion the quality of his steel. It was that debate, now historical, in regard to the restoration to the army of General Fitz-John Porter. Mr. Laird had left his home when a mere boy (I think about thirteen years of age), and enlisted in the 16th Michigan Infantry; had gone to the front and become one of that 5th Army Corps which was then under the command of General Porter. So when he found his old chieftain attacked here, with all the enthusiasm of his boyish admiration and love, and with all the vigor and strength of his manhood he came to his defense. I never ceased to admire and respect the chivalry, the earnestness and the enthusiasm of the man. Whenever he participated in debate his methods were earnest, direct and eloquent. There was in his voice the sound of the ring of the sabre; there were in his utterances the rattle of the small arms in battle.
In the committee room we found him always attentive to his duties; always faithful to each trust reposed in him; laborious and careful in the examination of his facts, but when his mind was made up, earnest and pertinacious in the defense of that which he believed to be right.
TWO HEARTS AS ONE. MR. TARSNEY: Mr. Speaker, as I stand here, as it were, over the open grave of James Laird, it is not of the lawyer, the orator or the statesman I am thinking. It is not in any of these characters, though he was great in all, that he is recalled to me. I see him now as the, playmate of my earliest boyhood days, the companion and schoolmate of my riper youth, and the comrade of the years that followed in the field of arms. James Laird was born in the State of New York, but when a mere child his parents removed to Hillsdale County, Michigan, then almost a wilderness. His father was a native of Scotland, a minister of the Presbyterian faith, a man of great intellectual. power and of wonderful eloquence, qualities richly inherited by his son. In that same wilderness, with only the advantages and comforts afforded in a pioneer community, we passed the first years of our lives together in attending the district school. The village academy followed the district school, and then came the war with its tests for separating the gold from the dross of American manhood. In 1862 we both entered the army. In one of the first regiments to leave the State at the beginning of the war each of us had two elder brothers. In this organization I enlisted and

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joined his brothers and my own; he enlisted in another regiment, but we were not separated, for our regiments were assigned to the same division.
Following every battle in which we were engaged, scarcely would the firing cease when he would come with anxious, loving heart to find how fared it with those he loved. Once, sir, for him there was a sad coming; it was on the night that followed that dread day of the 2nd of July at Gettysburg. He came to find a brother dead; a friend he loved missing, and his fate unknown. Sir, the iron of the sorrow of that dread night entered his soul and never departed, but remained a living sorrow to the last day of his life.
ELOQUENT DEFENSE OF FITZ-JOHN PORTER.

   The appearance of Mr. Laird as a speaker before the House of Representatives, sixty days after the commencement of the first session of the 48th Congress, February 1st, 1884, deserves special notice, inasmuch as he was about to vote with the entire party in opposition, and to incur the charge of having failed to sustain his own party, and run the risk of future political discipline.
   For twenty-one years General Fitz-John Porter had suffered under the penalty of a court-martial, and during all that time,. the democratic party had agitated a reversal of the penalty.
   A bill for his restoration to the army and his retirement from active duty being before the House, Mr. Laird defined his position:

Mr. Chairman, believing as I do, that there is no place where the honor of an American soldier should be so safe as in the hands of the Representatives of the whole American people, I desire to say before the vote is cast, that I shall vote first, last, and all the time for the vindication of the honor of General Fitz-John Porter. [Applause.] And let me remark to the gentlemen who seek to bring the menace of future punishment to bear upon the discharge of present duty, that if I knew this act of mine would end my bodily existence, as you say it may end my official one, then still would I do it; and I would thank God that my loyalty to my country, as I understand her honor; that my loyalty to my general, as I understand my duty; that my loyalty to truth as I know it to be, was strong enough to lift my conduct above the possibility of ignominious change to come from cowardly considerations affecting my life or future condition.

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I do this not because I am guided by the judgment of the Schofield board, or the statement of Ulysses S. Grant, for I have not read the one, and have never considered the other. Nor are the convictions that I here hastily express the growth of a day; they are as old as the injustice he has suffered. I do it, because I was with Fitz-John Porter from the siege of Yorktown until the attack of the enemy across the Chickahominy; from that attack to the battle of Hanover Court House, and from that to Mechanicsville, from that to Gaines Mill, and throughout his career except when I was disabled by wounds [Applause]; and I want to say, Mr. Chairman, it is my deliberate judgment, speaking of what I know of Fitz-John Porter, that in all the great battles of the English-speaking race, from Bannockburn to Gettysburg, there has not been made by soldier a record which demonstrates greater loyalty to the cause of his country than that made by Fitz-John Porter. Having seen him on all his battle fields, I believe it can be said of him in action as was said of the soldier of old: "He was swifter than an eagle; he was stronger than a lion; and from the blood of the slain and the fat of the mighty his sword returned not empty."

After handsomely parrying a question which a member propounded, and eulogizing Porter in case of an order to "Charge bayonets," he exclaimed: "Was that the language and conduct of a traitor and a coward? Since the Dutch. king proclaimed that he would tear down the dikes and let in the ocean there has not been a braver speech." Claiming the right of a subordinate officer to some discretion in the enforcement of a superior's orders he concluded in the following strain:

Let the advocates of "no discretion" tell me if their science of war teaches that subordinates, in the face of better knowledge, shall obey murderous orders, and slaughter thousands. and stand guiltless in history?
One word to the gentleman from Indiana. You say that Lincoln approved the sentence of the court-martial with a full knowledge of all the evidence. I deny it. Abraham Lincoln, "So slow to smite, so swift to spare, so great and merciful and just,"--never approved that sentence with a knowledge of the evidence. I love the memory of the dead Lincoln and all who died with him for the greatest cause that ever moved mankind, and I love the honor of the flag and the nation for which they died, and because I do, I vote for the passage of the bill. [Applause.]

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During this session he served upon the committees of pensions: and military affairs; presented twenty bills and joint resolutions; fifteen petitions; made seven reports from the military committee and fifteen from that on pensions; and engaged in fourteen discussions.

RHETORICAL MONUMENT TO THE PIONEER.

During the second session of the 48th Congress, on a bill to relieve settlers from conflict with Railroad Claims, we have:

Mr. Speaker, is it for this the pioneer has fought? Is there no voice that pleads his cause, who bravely holds his way along the front of civilization, laying deep and strong the foundations of a mighty state? From the toil and strife of these men sprang Kansas and Nebraska, the first antislavery states, even as in the olden time sprang the avenging Marius from the "dust and ashes." Thus born into the sisterhood of states, they have bloomed as might two purple flowers rooted in a pool of human blood. We know there is nothing in all the unstoried greatness of this class that of itself alone should speak to the judicial mind, but when laws are passed for their protection it is meet that those who sit upon the softly cushioned seats of advantage should heed those laws in a contest between abstractions (corporations) and such men. The human being is entitled to the benefit of the doubt; by how much more is he entitled to the benefit of the written law!
These settlers read the laws of Congress granting homesteads and pre-emptions to actual settlers; they read the instructions of the Department of the Interior, and they saw that they were within these. They read the platform of the great Republican party which promised them the earth if they would vote the straight ticket, and then they read the platform of the great Democratic party which promised them not only the earth, as the other platform did, but everything over it and under it, and they said, "We are safe; our friends the politicians will take care of us," and they are still strong in their faith; they still hope to "read their title clear" in the light of your promises; they still believe that Congress--this Congress, gentlemen--want to, and will do what is right. And so they come, stripped by legal jugglery of their homes,--your "glorious birth right of the free" of the platforms and preambles,--and holding forth their empty parchments ask you if you talk to them in two languages; they demand that you make good in this foul day the fair weather promises of the laws and

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the decisions of the great heads of departments; they ask that we be big enough to do justice to the poor pre-emptor, homesteader, purchaser, farmer, even as to the great railroad corporations; they ask that we be estopped from taking advantage of our own wrong, and profiting by the deceiving advice and decisions of our troubled agents. They ask this, "these brave sons of earth," and with them join the voices of half a million of Union veterans, robbed also of their rights by the "law's delay." Thousands of pioneers and frontiersmen, men in Nebraska and Kansas, and in all the states and territories west of the Missouri River, whose all was swallowed up in the flames of border savage war, and to whom the Nation, by its settled policy, owes redress, join thousands of others, to whom the Nation justly owes millions, in asking speedy justice.
They ask, and if their most just demands be not answered by fulfillment it will become us all "to look that our walls be strong," for when they shall have roused the sleeping thunder" of public opinion on the question of their rights, there will come a change indeed over the face of things political and then this penal blindness to their rights will cease.
MY COMRADES. Mr. Speaker, these men are my constituents; they are more, my neighbors; they are still more, my comrades, for in the heroic days nearly nine-tenths of them were Union soldiers. This will not prejudice their case with you men of the South, for you were brave, and must be generous and just. Nearly all of those for whom I plead are known to me personally, and accordingly I take a keen and personal interest in their rights and wrongs. I have known them from the "ground up," for I knew them when they lived in the earth, in "dug-outs," and have watched them for years, as they spread the seed and gathered the harvest which was the trust of the armies of laborers of the world. They have fought a brave fight and redeemed the desert of twenty years ago. They are of the class of men that Miller saw when he wrote these lines: "A race of unnamed giants these,
That moved like gods among the trees,
So stern, so stubborn--broad and slow,
With strength of black-maned buffalo,
And each man notable and tall,
A kingly and unconscious Saul,
A sort of sullen Hercules."

They are not mendicants, for when the hell-blasts of the drought and clouds of locusts a few years ago reduced them to starvation they made no sign, and asked no aid of the

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Government, as did those who saw their all devoured by flames in Michigan or swept away by the floods of the Ohio and the Mississippi. They fought their battle alone, and what they ask now they ask not as alms but as justice, and to that answering justice in your conscience I commit their case, only regretting that my condition physically perhaps unfits me to represent them on this floor as they deserve to be represented.
RICHARD IS HIMSELF AGAIN.

During the 49th Congress another opportunity offered for a burst of patriotic eloquence in behalf of promoting and retiring Col. Hunt, a Chief of Artillery, of whom Mr. Laird said:

General Hunt, at the head of your artillery service, at the battle of Gettysburg, so massed his batteries upon Cemetery Ridge, that Pickett's splendid charge broke harmlessly; bloody wave on top of bloody wave, against the foot of Cemetery Ridge, where Hunt's artillery stood. The sagacity of that officer, upon that field, in reserving his ammunition for the Confederate infantry, may have made it possible for the flag of the Union to float in peace above the Capitol to-day.

A pension bill also made applicable the quotation, "Richard is himself again."
Of the fiery attack upon the Commissioner of the General Land Office, during the 49th Congress, and the most annoying documentary reply, resulting in a case of assault, no record need be made, as it was local, temporary and sporadic.

BOLD, DEFIANT, ELOQUENT.

Early in the first session of the 50th Congress a proposition was before the House, to allow a clerk to each member. In its behalf it was argued, that it "would be a measure of economy to the entire people," and would "place every member of the House on an equality," as fifty-four chairmen of committees were already supplied with clerks, and that it would put the poor members on an equal footing with the rich, who were able to pay for clerks out of their own funds, and could thereby be exempt from making the daily, perpetual rounds of the departments, looking up the personal business of their constituents.
Against the proposition was paraded the bugbear of "salary

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grab," and that its defense involved "a defiant course of conduct in reference to public opinion." On the question the member from Nebraska held and uttered decided views.

MR. LAIRD: Mr. Speaker, I have never yet set the fear of political punishment as a guard over my conscience upon the question of the discharge of my duty as between myself and my constituents. I shall not begin to-day, and, if the opportunity offers, I shall vote for the passage of this resolution, because I believe it involves as much as any measure of this kind that can come before the House the question of the efficiency of the Representative. Some of us represent here 64,000 votes, cast for the opposing candidates and for ourselves, involving, by fair political calculation, a population of 250,000 or 300,000 people. Can a man upon whose shoulders these responsibilities are flung, the details of which have been so well described by gentlemen here upon the floor--can such a man evolve from out of the multitude of cares bearing upon him the time and thought to investigate the great appropriation bills which carry three hundred and odd millions of dollars? Can a man so situated find time to investigate the intricacies of the land policy and the laws incident thereto, which govern the western country, from which many of us come, and the vast unappropriated public domain of the Nation? Can a man with all these cares upon his mind and his conscience find time to follow up the action of the great commission which was raised not long ago for the purpose of regulating the infinitely delicate relations between the people and the instruments of commerce which control the carriage of the vast quantities of material that pass continually from the East to the West and from the West to the East? Can he find time to discuss conscientiously and intelligently almost any one of the fifty subjects which for their comprehension might require a year of careful study? There are laid upon him such burdens of detail that he is night and day the yoke-fellow of toil. So heavy is the weight of business pressing upon us that there is not one of the members from the western section of this country who, if his physical system could bear the strain, might not go home to-night and sit down with his stenographer (if he is able to have one) and toil on till midnight or till morning, and in the morning go to the departments and follow out the details of errands there, and then come to his seat here in this House--for what purpose? To echo the intelligent sentiment of the two or three hundred thousand people he, may represent upon the great questions requiring action at the hands of

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Congress? No; to echo the decision formulated in a committee room--in the committee room of the Appropriations Committee, dominated possibly by one man who, under the influence of a habit of thought, has come to rule the committee and rule the country, and rule the millions of money that are poured out by the Government.
I submit, sir, that the question here is one of efficiency; and I conclude as I began: Never yet have I set the fear of future political punishment as a guard over my conscience; and I will not do it to-day.
THE SURPLUS.

On a question for paying a citizen of the South, for army supplies, taken without vouchers delivered, Mr. Laird said:

I was reminded, during the discussion of this question, by the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Warner) of the fact that during the war out of which this claim arises it did not by any means take a dispensation of Providence to get a mule, and wherever there was anything of an eatable nature to be gathered we were there in the midst of it, and it was about so also if it was of a ridable nature.
We hear a great deal said about the surplus in this country; and I take it that when it comes to a question about the payment of an honest claim we are not banded together for the purpose of an increase of that surplus by any means. If the Government of the United States would pay its honest debts, such debts as it allows to remain unpaid until, if a private individual were substituted for the general Government, that private individual would be disgraced and driven from the community--if the Government of the United States would pay the millions it owes to honest claimants representing the French spoliation claims; if it would pay the millions which it owes to men on the frontiers for losses sustained at the hands of predatory Indians; if it would answer as an honest man answers promptly to the claims of the millions of individuals to whom it stands honestly indebted to-day, there would be no surplus in the treasury. I am certainly for the payment of this claim.
PUNGENTLY PLEASANT.

On a bill to establish the Department of Agriculture, Mr. Laird illustrated his ability to say a pertinent thing, pleasantly and briefly.

MR. LAIRD: I am delighted to see so many gentlemen with their sleeves rolled up, ready to do a hard day's work for

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the farmer. The trouble with the farmer, from his standpoint, I fancy, is that he has had his affairs too long in the hands of gentlemen who imagined they were better able to attend to his business than he was himself. I realize, speaking for the section I represent, that it has an extraordinary interest in the fact that seven millions of people who attempt to make a living and get happiness out of the ground are unrepresented in the center of the political power in this country; and that, in defiance of the fact that from the man who shoes your horse to the carpenter who builds your house, to the doctor who cures your ailments and to the preacher who tries to save your soul, the proposition holds true that you deliver over the tools of life into the hands of the men who know best how to use them.
It is a notorious fact that until the passage of the Hatch bill agriculture as a great productive interest has never been represented directly in the councils of the country; had never had a half million dollars bestowed upon it. It is the industry from which flows the daily life of the Nation, and yet anybody who cares to be conversant with the facts knows that it has been treated very differently in this country from what is the case in Russia, Italy, Sweden, France, Germany, and Austria, whose governments pour out millions for the benefit of agriculture and have this department of industry represented in their cabinets.

During a heated discussion in regard to the land office policy of Commissioner Sparks under the administration of Mr. Cleveland, Mr. Laird indulged in a violent excoriation of that official, who had refused to allow him (Laird) to examine the papers in the case of a constituent's suspended entry.
In that connection he paid the following beautiful compliment to the pioneer settlers of Nebraska:

My colleague, Mr. McShane, and myself can speak upon this subject with the authority which comes from personal knowledge.
We have known these men in Nebraska "from the ground up," because we knew them when they lived in the sod house, and have seen them evolve themselves from the sod into the frame house and happy home, and have seen the wild prairie, which science condemned twenty years ago as a desert, pass from the sea of grass in which the bison swam into a great land of schools, churches, colleges, thrift, civilization and wealth. [Applause.]

Though it was contended that, in asking for $100,000 to be

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expended in ferreting out frauds, Mr. Sparks only followed in the wake of the Republican Commissioner McFarland, and that "If any man of this period has established himself in the confidence of the people of this country for rugged integrity and firmness of character, of exalted devotion to the public service, that man is the late Commissioner of the General Land Office," nevertheless the member from Nebraska could not forego the opportunity of a passage at wit and repartee.

POLITICAL SUSPENSION.    MR. LAIRD: Sparks' career began and ended in suspension. After the suspension of all the claims, which order was revoked by the secretary--and the secretary was rewarded by having a place on the woolsack, and he might have had the golden fleece--after suspending the claims he suspended the laws, and after suspending the claims and the laws he was finally suspended, by the gentleman at the head of the Government, himself.
   And now in the estimation of my distinguished friend from Illinois (Mr. Townshend), he is sanctified and glorified, and if so, political death was a good thing for him.
   MR. TOWNSHEND: He was not suspended; he resigned.
   MR. LAIRD: Resigned! Well, perhaps he was resigned, but I doubt it, and if so he had to be.

Near the conclusion of the discussion, which had alternately crowned and decapitated the late commissioner, the speaker found another opportunity for a burst of indignant eloquence, illustrative of the supreme ignorance of the effete East, and the complacent local wisdom of the young and vigorous West.

IMBECILE IGNORANCE. MR. LAIRD: I wish to say a word about this proposition. Mr. Speaker and gentlemen of the House, probably any man who has ever traveled west of the one hundreth (sic) meridian of this country has had a considerable amount of amusement but a larger amount of mortification from the light which has been cast upon this subject by gentlemen like the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. McAdoo). It is a convenient thing to say that the settler, the man who stands on the ground, is a thief, to the end that he may be prejudiced in the minds of gentlemen who know nothing about it; and so accordingly upon that string all the thousands of those who sing of reform are forever playing.

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   So, then, the man who stands at the bottom and has nothing furnished him but the pluck of a human being, and the earth and air and water which God gives to all of us, is a thief! The next man who comes in for the condemnation of the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. McAdoo), and others like him, who know nothing of what they are talking about, is the "cattle monopolist," and the next scoundrel in the West is the "syndicate," whatever that may be. So that here we are crucified like thieves upon the cross, only there is one-more than tradition tells us there were on that occasion. They hold us up to ignominy before the world, and the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Weaver), who ought to be bound to these pioneers of the West by sympathy for the labors and hardships they have undergone, comes in here and takes part in holding them up to obloquy.
   MR. WEAVER: The thieves on the cross were different, because they repented, but you do not. [Laughter.]
   MR. LAIRD: We do not repent, for the righteous are not called to repentance. We are not here to give you judgment by confession, like a band of criminals and cowards.
   MR. WEAVER: What is the matter with you? [Laughter.]
   MR. LAIRD: Nothing. "I am all right"; only I do not propose to be labeled a thief by every demagogue that mistakes notoriety for reputation. These gentlemen talk about the cattlemen. Is there any man on this floor who is ignorant of the fact that it takes thirty-four acres of this land, which you are talking of splitting up into rods, feet and inches, to graze one steer for a year? Gentlemen talk about the cattlemen entering into a conspiracy to get land enough to raise a thousand head of cattle on. Why every one who knows anything about it knows that the minute they have got to buy the land, that minute they move off. If by holding 160 acres they can hold grazing ground for a thousand head, they hold it, but when they have to buy the land they move elsewhere. Now where do these men come from that I am defending here, and that gentlemen on the other side are holding up to obloquy? They come from Texas and Missouri. They are Democrats, and they do not spend their time invoking blessings upon your heads. If there is any man here who does not know that the cattle business now and always has been impossible where the owner of the herd had to own the land on which it ranged, then your ignorance amounts to imbecility.
   Again, gentlemen talk about fences, and draw a fancy picture with which to harrow up the fears of those who are ignorant of the whole matter. I have been inside those in

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closures, and what have I found to be the verdict of the homesteader? He says, "Great God! let the fences alone. They furnish me a sure pasturage for my little bunch of cattle so that I know where they are, but if the fences are torn down I shall not know where they range, and I can not afford to herd them." Misfortune has in many cases robbed the cattle men of 75 per cent of their herds, and at least half of that loss is due to the fact that they have dammed up the flight of the cattle toward the south when the cold blasts of the north come down upon them, by wire fences. Run a 20 mile fence across a trail so as to cut off the flight of the cattle, and what happens? They die and are piled up by the thousands at the barrier. And long before the proclamation of the Executive the cattle men were willing to take down the fences and get rid of them.
Now as to the question presented by the amendment, if there is anything to be done, let it be the reservation of every permanent water course, and not the proposition of the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. Weaver), because that is entirely useless.

The way out of these land complications was finally found, after the President's proclamation that the range fences on government lands should be demolished by the army, and the Secretary of the Interior had repealed the commissioner's orders of suspension.
During the 50th Congress Mr. Laird was an active member of the military committee, and in the matter of an appropriation made the following fling at the committee on appropriations:

That is an unfortunate condition in which the country is a participant to this unfortunate extent, that out of this confusion of authority and of jurisdiction, unequaled since the philological miracle of the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel, the country gets absolutely nothing. We have here the old story which has been often told, and better told than I can tell it, of waiting upon the committee on appropriations. That is a committee certainly toward which I entertain no ill-will. I have profound respect for the gentleman who presides over its deliberations as one of the cleanest, squarest, manliest, bravest men in the public service, and I have a somewhat mitigated affection for the balance of the committee. [Laughter.] It is shaded some what, but it is not discolored. It is kindly and wholesome, if not always happy. [Laughter.]