James G. Blaine was a congressman (1863-1876), senator
(1876-1881), secretary of state (1881; 1889-1892), and the
Republican presidential nominee in 1884. As a congressman in
1866, his proposal on apportionment
of seats in the U. S. House
of Representatives became the foundation for Section Two of the
Fourteenth Amendment. It penalizes a state that denies voting
rights to any adult male citizen by proportionally reducing the
state’s population base used in calculating congressional
seats.
Blaine was born on January 31, 1830, at Indian Hill Farm,
near West Brownville, in Washington County, Pennsylvania, to
Maria Gillespie Blaine and Ephraim Blaine, one of the state’s
largest landowners. Blaine was educated for several years in
Lancaster, Ohio, then entered Washington and Jefferson College
(Washington, Pennsylvania) in 1843, graduating in 1847, at the
age of seventeen, near the top of his class. After graduation,
he was a schoolteacher at Western Military Institute (Kentucky)
before moving to Philadelphia where he taught at the
Pennsylvania Institute for the Blind and studied law in his
spare time. In June 1850, he exchanged wedding vows in secret
with Harriet Stanwood. They remarried in March 1851 because of
the questionable legality of the first marriage ceremony.
In 1854, Blaine moved to his wife’s hometown of Augusta,
Maine. He edited the Kennebec Journal and Portland
Advertiser, and was one of the founders of the Republican
Party in his adopted state. He was elected to the lower house
of the state legislature, serving from 1859-1862, the latter two
years as speaker of the house. By that time, Blaine was solidly
positioned as a major player in Republican state politics. He
was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives in 1863 and
served until 1876. He became an expert parliamentarian and was
elected to three terms as House speaker (1869-1875).
During his tenure in Congress, Blaine backed most of the
Radical Reconstruction agenda and favored the impeachment of
President Andrew Johnson. On economic issues like tariff and
monetary policies he took centrist positions. He became the
leader of the moderate wing of the Republican Party, called the
“Half-Breeds,” standing in opposition to both the conservative,
pro-Grant “Stalwarts,” led by his bitter rival, Senator Roscoe
Conkling of New York, and the liberal faction, represented by
Senator Carl Schurz and Harper’s Weekly editor
George William Curtis.
In 1876, Blaine was the leading presidential candidate going
into the Republican National Convention, but his chances were
undermined by revelations in the “Mulligan Letters” which
allegedly implicated him in graft involving railroad companies.
Still, he led on the first six ballots, and it was only on the
seventh that a stop-Blaine movement came together to nominate a
compromise candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes. At the convention,
the nickname “Plumed Knight” was bestowed on Blaine in a rousing
nominating speech by Robert Ingersoll. The term was a
compliment to Blaine’s legislative skill and patriotism, as “a
man who has preserved in Congress what our soldiers won upon the
field.” In the 1884 election, however, cartoonist Thomas Nast
would use the epithet to mercilessly taunt Blaine.
Shortly after the convention, on July 10, 1876, Blaine
resigned his congressional seat to accept appointment as Maine’s
junior U.S. senator upon the retirement of Lot Morrill. Blaine
was then elected in his own right and served until 1881. In the
Senate, he chaired the Committee on Rules and the Committee on
Civil Service and Retrenchment.
In 1880, a third-term boom made former president Ulysses S.
Grant the front-runner for the Republican presidential
nomination, while opponents of Grant backed Blaine or Senator
John Sherman of Ohio. The convention deadlocked for
thirty-three ballots as none of the three candidates could win
the requisite number of votes. On the 34th ballot,
momentum started for a compromise candidate, Representative
James Garfield, and culminated in his nomination. As a loyal
party-man, Blaine endorsed and worked hard to elect Garfield.
The new president rewarded him with the cabinet post of
secretary of state.
On March 5, 1881, Blaine resigned the U.S. Senate to assume
his new position. After Garfield’s assassination, though,
Blaine stayed on only briefly in the administration of President
Chester Arthur, resigning in December 1881. In his brief tenure
as secretary of state, he called for a Pan-American conference
and advocated U.S. control of an anticipated inter-oceanic canal
crossing Central America (eventually fulfilled by the Panama
Canal). Upon his retirement, he began writing memoirs of his
public life, published in two volumes (1884 and 1886) as
Twenty Years in Congress.
In 1884, Blaine was the leading contender for the Republican
presidential nomination. Former Civil War general William
Tecumseh Sherman was a popular alternative, but he refused to
have his name placed in nomination. Blaine was nominated on the
fourth ballot over incumbent President Chester Arthur, who had
alienated conservatives without gaining the support of
reformers. Because of Blaine’s alleged corruption, opposition
to civil service reform, and reckless foreign policy views, an
influential group of independent Republicans (called “Mugwumps”)
broke with their party and supported Democratic nominee Grover
Cleveland. The tumultuous campaign ended in Cleveland narrowly
defeating Blaine. After the election, Blaine returned to finish
the second volume of his memoirs, and in 1887 toured Europe,
where he was received by several heads of state.
In 1888, Blaine was again considered the front-runner for the
Republican presidential nomination. However, he declined to
enter the race, believing that another acrimonious convention
would damage whomever the Republicans nominated. He still
received a few scattered votes. He had worked behind the scenes
to nominate Benjamin Harrison, and when Harrison became
president in 1889, he appointed Blaine to his previous position
as secretary of state. In 1889-1890, Blaine chaired the first
Pan-American Conference and advocated reciprocal tariff
agreements between Latin America and the United States. In
1892, he resigned his cabinet post to seek the Republican
presidential nominee against Harrison. The president, though,
was renominated on the first ballot, with Blaine and William
McKinley in a near-tie for a distant second place.
James G. Blaine died in Washington, D. C., on January 27,
1893, and was interred at Oak Hill Cemetery. In 1920, his
remains were transferred to Blaine Memorial Park in Augusta,
Maine.
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