Master of the Senate (7 page)

And then, in the trial of Samuel Chase, that tide reached the Senate.

During the week-long trial, attended by foreign ambassadors and high federal officials while, before the row of thirty-four senators, Chase and his attorneys, among the most distinguished in the nation, sat in one box, the impeachment’s “managers” from the House in another, a lot of words were spoken—the testimony filled over six hundred pages in the
Annals of Congress
, forerunner of the
Congressional Record
—and some went to the point. One of Chase’s attorneys, Robert Goodloe Harper, appealed for sympathy for the “aged patriot” who after years of service to his country “is arraigned as an offender…. Placed at the bar of the court, after having sat with honor for sixteen years on the bench, he is doomed to hear the most opprobrious epithets applied to his name, by those whose predecessors were accustomed to look up at him with admiration and respect…. His footsteps are hunted from place to place, to find indiscretions, which may be exaggerated into crimes.” But Harper also appealed to principle, telling the senators that impeachment should not be employed against a judge, or any official, just because he held opinions contrary to those of the party in power. “Justice, ’tho it may be an inconvenient restraint on our power, while we are strong, is the only rampart behind which we can find protection when we become weak,” he said. That principle was of course the one that had been so prominent in motivating the Founding Fathers to create a Senate—that the rights of a minority must be protected against the tyranny of the majority—and that principle was reaffirmed, not just by Federalist senators but by Republican senators, and not by just a handful of Republican senators, either. One Federalist, Uriah Tracy of Connecticut, ill with pneumonia, left his bed and was carried to his seat because Chase’s supporters believed that every vote would be needed. They were wrong—as was shown by the very first vote cast by a Republican senator on the first article of impeachment. The vote, by Stephen Bradley of Vermont, was “Not guilty.” So were the votes of ten other Republicans; the final tally on the first article was 18 to 16 against conviction. For two hours each article of impeachment was read separately, and each senator then voted, and on each count enough Republicans voted “not guilty” to prevent a conviction. Despite the power of a President (all during the trial, senators had filed into the White House for dinner and private conversation), and despite the pressure of a party, and the roar of public opinion (and their own anger at Chase’s partisan words, drummed into their ears over and
over that week by the House prosecutors), on not one of the counts were the Republicans able to muster the necessary twenty-three votes.

The man who presided over the trial understood the historic significance of the scene that had been acted out before him. At the time he was presiding, Vice President Burr was under indictment for fatally wounding Alexander Hamilton, and three days after the trial, he would leave Washington for the Southwest, where he would shortly become embroiled in the shadowy intrigues that would becloud his memory. But the Senate seemed to bring out the best in him; attempting before the trial to ensure Burr’s loyalty to the Republican cause, President Jefferson, who had once called him “a crooked gun, or other perverted machine,” offered two of Burr’s relatives and one of his intimate friends choice governmental posts, but even Federalist senators acknowledged the dignity and impartiality with which the Vice President conducted the trial; because of his fairness, one Federalist said, “I could almost forgive Burr for any less crime than the blood of Hamilton.” And Burr ended his time in the Senate with a speech that restated the great ideal on which the body had been founded. The assault on the independence of the judiciary by a powerful President backed by the power of public opinion—and the refusal of the Senate to bow to those powers—were “fresh in his mind” when he spoke (amid, as an historian of Congress has written, “a stillness among both friend and foe”). “This House,” Aaron Burr said, “is a sanctuary; a citadel of law, of order, and of liberty; and it is here—it is here, in this exalted refuge; here if anywhere, will resistance be made to the storms of political phrensy and the silent arts of corruption….” A senator who served almost two centuries later—Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who loved the Senate so much that he wrote a four-volume history of it—would invoke the trial of Samuel Chase as an example of all that the Senate could be, saying that “The Senate exercised in that fine moment of drama the kind of independence, impartiality, fairness and courage that, from time to time over the years, it has brought to bear on the great issues of the country.” In the trial of Samuel Chase, the principle had been proven. The Senate had been created to be independent, to stand against the tyranny of presidential power and the tides of public opinion.

It had stood.

T
HE
S
ENATE
C
HAMBER
gutted by British troops was restored in 1819. Located in the Capitol’s central section, it was a rather small, semi-circular room. Slender, fluted, gilded columns formed a loggia along the curved wall and supported a narrow gallery, like a theater balcony, with a delicate gilt balustrade. Walls unbroken by recesses and a low-vaulted, domed ceiling made the acoustics excellent, so the Chamber was, as an historian of Congress has written, “ideal for the ringing voices of eloquent men.” And the deep, rich crimson and gold of its carpet and draperies, and of the sweeping canopy, surmounted by a great golden shield of the Republic and a broad-winged gilded
eagle, above the presiding officer’s dais, made it an ornate, dramatic background for the forty-eight new mahogany desks—each with its silver-mounted inkwell and small bottle of blotting sand, each with a low-backed mahogany and red leather armchair—that were arranged in four rising arcs.

And for forty years after 1819, among those desks (at which senators studied reports and wrote speeches and letters, since most senators did not have offices of their own), the senators of the United States grappled—as, once, the senators of ancient Rome had grappled—with the concerns of expanding empire: should the borders of the young republic be extended west of the Mississippi, and if so how far west—to the Great Plains, or even further, to the mighty mountain chain of the West and the shore of the great ocean beyond? (Many senators considered this last suggestion ridiculous. When, in 1824, there was a proposal for the erection of a fort on the Pacific shore of the Oregon Territory, Mahlon Dickerson of New Jersey said there was no realistic possibility that Oregon, separated from the United States by virtually impassable deserts and mountains, could ever become a state; even if its congressmen managed to cover twenty miles a day, he pointed out, they would need 350 days to get to Washington and back. Benton of Missouri rose at his desk to reply angrily that “Within a century from this day, population, greater than that of the present United States, will exist on the West side of the Rocky Mountains,” but the proposal was defeated.) Among those desks was debated peace and war: whether, once it was decided twenty-five years after the Columbia River Fort was debated that Oregon was worth settling after all, to go to war with England over it (“54–40 or fight!”); whether to march against Mexico or instead negotiate for sovereignty over California and Texas and the vast arid stretches of the Southwest. It was at one of those desks that the first senator from newly annexed Texas, Sam Houston, who usually sat silently, dressed in sombrero and a waistcoat of panther hide with its hair still on, whittling away at small pine sticks, finally rose during a debate on the legal technicalities of the issue to tell the Senate bluntly that Texas was already at war with Mexico and that the United States, in annexing Texas, had inherited that war. Among those desks was debated the great questions involved in the settlement of the vast new territories of the West: would their land go to speculators or to brave and enterprising individual families?—it was in the Senate that Benton proposed the Homestead Act that made him “the father of the cheap land system”; would it be the federal government or the new states and territories who would pay for the roads and canals that would knit them together? And, of course, it was among those desks that, for these forty years, was debated the great problem that overshadowed all questions about the new territories and states: whether they should be slave or free? It was not only Webster’s reply to Hayne that preserved the Union; among those desks, the desks of the Senate, men fought to save it for forty years.

The forty years—1819 to 1859—after the Senate moved back into its elegant domed Chamber would be called the Senate’s “Golden Age.”

In part, the phrase was inspired by the hue of the Chamber itself, by the
immense gold eagle atop the dais, by the radiance of the great chandelier, by the gallery’s gilt columns and balustrade. In part, it was inspired by the debates that took place in that Chamber, by oratory as brilliant as the surroundings, and by the men who participated in those debates, particularly the shining figures of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun—the “Great Triumvirate.” And in part those four decades were the Senate’s Golden Age because it was the period in which the Senate came closest to living up to the greatness that the Framers had envisioned for it. During those forty years the Senate held center stage in the great arena of American history, becoming the focus and balance wheel of government—while, true to the principles on which it had been founded and which Washington so pithily summarized to Jefferson, it “cooled” passions, tried to reconcile the unreconcilable. For some decades after the founding of the Republic, the House of Representatives had overshadowed the Senate; Webster and Clay had been members of the lower house then. But now, as the population of the new nation expanded, the House expanded with it—by 1820, it had 213 members and its membership grew faster and faster with each census—and became too unwieldy: rules had to be adopted that inhibited the role of debate, and sheer size worked against calm consideration of delicate issues. And, beginning in 1819, when the Senate twice stood fast against inflammatory House measures and then, in 1820, forged the territorial division known as the Missouri Compromise, it was in the Senate, now the true deliberative body that the Framers had envisioned, that were enacted the great compromises that, for forty years, pulled the Union back from the edge of abyss.

It was at one of those desks that Calhoun sat in 1833 after his return to Washington—a Washington buzzing with whispers that President Andrew Jackson had sworn to hang him if he returned. When Hayne had debated Webster in 1830, he had been speaking for Calhoun, then Vice President, and, as presiding officer of the Senate, not permitted to speak there; Hayne was defending Calhoun’s doctrine of the ultimate sovereignty of the individual states, of a state’s right to nullify a federal law if it felt the law exceeded the power granted to the federal government by the Constitution; and if the government insisted on enforcing the law, to secede. Now, in 1833, Calhoun was a senator, and spoke for himself. Jackson was still proposing a tariff bill the South considered onerous and unconstitutional, and was sending to the Senate a Force bill, authorizing enforcement of the tariff by military force. The South Carolina Legislature authorized the use of the militia to resist; Calhoun continued to publish papers reaffirming the constitutionality of nullification; and Jackson warned that “Disunion by armed force is treason.” “Within three weeks, sir,” the enraged President told a South Carolina delegation—within three weeks after the first blow is struck—“I will place fifty thousand troops in your state.” Calhoun had resigned the vice presidency, and Hayne had resigned his Senate seat, so that Calhoun, named by the South Carolina Legislature to succeed him, could present the South’s case himself, and the South’s greatest
orator was seated at his desk, grimly taking notes, as Jackson’s message requesting passage of the Force bill was read.

On the day Calhoun was to deliver his major speech against the measure, there was a heavy snowfall, but carriages jammed the Capitol plaza, carrying people who had come to hear John C. Calhoun speak. While the verbiage of other leading orators of the day was flowery, Calhoun’s was “stripped bare”—down to the bones of a remorseless logic. His sentences were often long and involved, as was the intricate process of his reasoning, and he spoke so fast that journalists considered him the most difficult man to report in the Congress. But, he was a gaunt, unforgettable figure, his eyes burning in a pale face, his great mass of hair rising like a lion’s mane, his voice ringing metallically in every corner of the Chamber. “The commanding eye, the grim earnestness of manner, the utter integrity of sentiment held the galleries in anxious attention,” as one historian wrote. “His voice was harsh, his gestures stiff, like the motions of a pump handle. There was no ease, flexibility, grace or charm in his manner; yet there was something that riveted your attention as with hooks of steel.” As he rose now, the galleries could see how much the fifty-year-old South Carolinian had aged in a few months as he saw his beloved South being forced to the brink. The blazing eyes were sunk deep in his head, the furrows in his cheeks had become gashes, the lion’s mane was gray now. To his opponents, the gaunt figure looked like “the arch traitor … like Satan in Paradise.” To others, he was “a great patriot with his back against the wall, battling fiercely in defense of violated liberties.” Consumed with his feelings, he paced back and forth between the desks “like a caged lion.” The Force bill, he said, exhibited “the impious spectacle of this Government, the creature of the States, making war against the power to which it owes its existence…. We made no such government. South Carolina sanctioned no such government.” The Force bill, he said, “enables him [Jackson] to subject every man in the United States … to martial law … and under the penalty of court-martial to compel him to imbrue his hand in his brother’s blood.”

The Senator from South Carolina paced as he spoke. The Senator from Massachusetts stood immobile beside his desk—as he had done three years before, again wearing his blue coat with the brass buttons and his stiff cravat—as again, in another great speech, he defended the Constitution as the overriding law. The Senator from Kentucky strolled among the desks—as casually as if they had been props in a theater.