Some Second Term Precedents

WHEN, on his Pacific coast tour of 1903, Mr. Roosevelt declared, “ I would rather be a whole President for three years and a half than be half a President for seven years and a half ” (the occasion of the remark being a dinner given to him by a Northwestern Senator, and the provocation to the remark being somebody’s assertion of the impossibility for Mr. Roosevelt to get certain delegates unless he did certain things), he gave an intimation that he intended to play an important rôle in the ensuing four years if he remained in office. Assuming that he will be elected in 1904, it is safe to predict that Colonel Roosevelt will be a whole President in his next term whatever he may believe he has been in this one. Moreover, this would be in line with all the examples. Unless an exception be made in the case of Mr. Cleveland, who was independent and aggressive from the beginning, every President who was in office eight years made a larger assertion of authority in the second half of his service than he did in the first half.

Several reasons for this will suggest themselves. The desire to get a second term makes most Presidents cautious about running counter to the wishes of any considerable number of the people or of the leaders of their party. In the second term the President has no expectation of further honors. He has a right to interpret a second election as a mark of the popular confidence in an especial degree, and he will be disposed to take less kindly to any interference in his policy, if he has a policy, by Congress or by the politicians.

Of course these considerations could not have had much weight with the country’s first President. Washington received the unanimous vote of the electoral college at each election. Even for a first term he was averse to accepting office. It was only after earnest persuasion by many of the leading spirits of the country that he allowed the people to give him a second term. Soon afterward he made it known that under no conditions would he accept a third election. Yet Washington’s most important official act was his proclamation, in April, 1793, seven weeks after his second inauguration, by which he held the country neutral in the war then beginning between France and England. A large majority of the people, and practically all of Jefferson’s Republican party, wanted the United States to take the French side. France was then a republic. She had been the United States’ ally in the war for independence a few years earlier. England had been its enemy. A treaty fifteen years earlier, too, with Louis XVI.’s government was interpreted by many persons as pledging the United States to aid France, although the monarchy with which the compact had been made had been swept away in the interval.

Madison, then in the House of Representatives, wrote two months later to Jefferson, the Secretary of State, thus : “ The proclamation was in truth a most unfortunate error. It wounds the national honor by seeming to disregard the stipulated duties to France. It wounds the popular feelings by a seeming indifference to the cause of liberty.” By another element Washington was denounced as a Royalist, who was conspiring to subvert the republic here and set up a monarchy with himself as king. Ten thousand outraged citizens, it was said, in Philadelphia, then the seat of government, threatened to drag him out of his house and make him either resign or declare for France, and that but for the opportune advent of a malignant fever, which seized some of the leaders of the mob, serious trouble would have come.

But with admirable courage and foresight Washington preserved the balance between this noisy pro-French sect and the smaller but socially powerful faction which leaned toward England. His act had consequences which are felt to this day. It announced to the world that the United States had no concern in Europe’s collisions or combinations, but had a set of interests of its own which it would defend against all outside interference. The proclamation of 1793 gave official expression to that spirit which, expanding with the country’s growth, was to assert itself more specifically in Monroe’s hands-off-the-American-continent warning to the Holy Alliance thirty years later.

If anybody had asked Jefferson on what act of his eight years as President he placed most value he undoubtedly would have said his embargo, which came in his second administration, and not his Louisiana purchase in his first term. Contrary, indeed, to what the country is apt to infer in this world’s fair period, Jefferson did not set such a high appraisement on Louisiana’s annexation as he did on other achievements which have been forgotten by most of that small part of his countrymen who ever knew anything about them. “ Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia.” This inscription on his tomb at Monticello, prepared beforehand by himself, makes no reference to the transaction by which the area of the United States was more than doubled, and which we of to-day sometimes say will preserve Jefferson’s memory longer than even his authorship of the Declaration.

But while the Louisiana cession was dictated by Bonaparte, the embargo was of Jefferson’s authorship. By George III.’s orders in council and by Bonaparte’s Berlin and Milan decrees, of 1806—07, which, in Jefferson’s words, transformed England into a “ den of pirates ” and France into a £ den of thieves,” each side, in its life-and-death struggle with the other, captured and confiscated scores of American ships and cargoes. The philanthropic Jefferson retaliated by asking Congress to pass that series of measures collectively called the embargo, ranging from an interdict on trade with the offending countries to a virtually complete prohibition of commerce with the entire world.

No other President ever exercised such hypnotic sway over Congress as Jefferson did in that crisis. Said the Federalist John Quincy Adams, then in the Senate, in advocating the first of Jefferson’s bills: “ The President has recommended this measure on his high responsibility. I would not consider. I would not deliberate. I would act.” This was in the closing days of 1807. The Senate acted by passing, a few hours later, the bill, one of the most disastrous to private interests ever placed on the national statute book, which was also rushed through the House. The object was to protect American sailors, shippers, and shipowners, and to peacefully coerce the belligerents into respect for American rights. This was magnificent, but as Jefferson neglected to prepare for war in case war could not be abolished by his plan, it was not sense. The orders in council and the decrees meant risk for American commerce. The embargo meant ruin or rebellion. America, and not the belligerents, was the chief sufferer. George III. rejoiced at the embargo as a means of crippling American commerce, of which England was jealous. At last, under the menace of a secessionist plot in New England, divulged by Adams to Jefferson early in 1809, in the closing days of Jefferson’s service, the embargo was repealed on March 4, and milder restrictive measures were adopted, under which Bonaparte, in Madison’s days, trapped the United States into a war with England, the thing which the embargo was designed to avert, before adequate preparations had been made for war. Yet Jefferson many years later told William B. Giles that if the embargo had been continued a little longer it “ would have effected its object completely.”

In Madison’s case, of course, those acts which were necessitated or suggested by the war of 1812—15 with England were by far the most important of his eight years in the White House, and almost all were in his second term. The war, indeed, began in the last year of his first term, but it was openly charged in Congress by Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts, Alexander C. Hanson of Maryland, and other Federalists that his renomination and reëlection were made contingent on his acceptance of the war policy which he had opposed up to that time. One of Madison’s political friends, James Fisk of Vermont, very strongly intimated that he was one of the junta of young Democratic congressmen — Calhoun, Crawford, and others being among its members, of whom Clay, the Speaker of the House, was said to be the leading spirit — who coerced Madison into making the change of base. Braced up by a second election Madison, the least warlike of America’s Presidents to this day, coaxed William Eustis to resign as Secretary of War ; forced Paul Hamilton, the Secretary of the Navy, to step down ; put John Armstrong in place of the former, and William Jones in place of the latter ; and afterward induced Armstrong to retire and gave the war office temporarily to Monroe, who already held the state portfolio, and was thus placed in the line of succession to the White House.

In his annual message in December, 1815, in the third year of his second term, Madison urged Congress to adopt a uniform national currency ; suggested the creation of a national bank ; and recommended an increase and improvement in the army and navy, the enlargement of the West Point Academy and the building of branches to it in various parts of the country, the protection to manufactures and the construction of roads and canals at the national expense. Nearly all these things, when proposed at one time and another in previous years, he had fought. All of them, when passed in 1816-17, he approved. Madison in 1791 had joined Jefferson in opposing Hamilton’s first United States Bank. Madison in 1816 signed the bill creating the second United States Bank, based on the principle of Hamilton’s institution, but representing a larger exercise of Federal power. Quincy, the Federalist, witnessing this swing of Madison and other state sovereignty men to the centralization side, was justified in his taunt that there was no longer any need for a Federalist . party, for the Democrats had now outfederalized Federalism.

Two measures of importance — Florida’s annexation and Missouri’s admission to statehood with its stipulation dividing all the then Western territory between slavery and freedom — are connected with Monroe’s first administration, 1817— 21. Neither in its inception nor in its later stages, however, did Monroe have any influence on the Missouri contest. The only influence of any consequence which he exerted in shaping the Florida annexation treaty with Spain was in placing the country’s western boundary at the Sabine River instead of at the Rio Grande, which Adams, the Secretary of State, urged. This surrender of Texas — which, of course, at that day was only a geographical expression — to Spain was part of the price for which Ferdinand VII. ceded Florida to us. The surrender, moreover, was a concession to Northern sentiment, which objected to a sweeping extension of the slavery area on the west to reinforce that which Florida would contribute on the east.

In at least three important instances in his second term, however, Monroe exerted decisive sway. These were his veto in 1822 of the appropriation for the Cumberland road ; his recognition in that year of Mexico, Colombia, and the rest of the Latin-American states which had broken away from Spain; and his announcement in 1823 of that American continental policy which has borne his name ever since. Though ordinarily as averse as Madison to anything like selfassertion, Monroe, because of the virtually unanimous vote cast for him in 1820, in his second election, only one member of the electoral college being against him, had a right to assume that his countrymen offered him a free hand in the management of the government’s executive affairs. When Jefferson, in his first inaugural, declared, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” he stated metaphorically something which became a physical fact in Monroe’s time.

Monroe’s veto of the Cumberland Road Bill was on the ground that while Congress had the right to appropriate money for internal improvements of a national character, it could not exercise jurisdiction over them, as that measure proposed to do. The barrier thus erected checked the system of road and canal building in the extreme form which it was beginning to take, and the distinction which he set up was observed by Jackson and by some of the other succeeding Democratic Presidents in most instances. His appeal to Congress in 1822 for an appropriation for the support of ministers and consuls in the Central and South American countries, which meant their recognition by the United States, passed that body with virtual unanimity, evoked applause in every community from the Rio Grande down to Cape Horn and up to the Gulf of California, and set the example which was followed soon afterward by the rest of the world. His warning of 1823, which headed off the Holy Alliance in its purpose, or presumed purpose, of dividing the Latin-American nations among its own members and Spain, furnished all the countries of the hemisphere with a new and permanent cause of gratitude to him and to the United States, rounded out that America-for-the-Americans idea which — first voiced by Washington in his neutrality proclamation and in his Farewell Address, and by Jefferson and others in several connections — had been steadily developing in the public consciousness, and definitely proclaimed a policy for the whole continent which has been decisively asserted as recently as in the British-German-Venezuelan case of 1903, and which has made Monroe’s name travel farther throughout the world than that of any other American of any age.

When, shortly after Jackson went to the White House, Joseph Story, of the Supreme Court, wrote that “ though we live under the form of a republic we are in fact under the rule of a single man,” he expressed the view of a large number of persons who, like Story, were not active partisans. But Jackson’s personality was asserted in a far more pronounced way in his second term than it was in his first. In his first term the spoils system was established, and the “Peggy O’Neil war ” was waged, which broke up the Cabinet, sent many Democrats permanently into the opposition, and completed the rupture between Jackson and Calhoun, which placed Van Buren instead of Calhoun in the line of succession to the presidency, and dwarfed the great South Carolinian into a sectional figure. In those four years, also, the United States bank, the nullification, and the French spoliation claims issues came up, though only in a preliminary way. Upon these three measures, the most important of all the questions dealt with during his service, drastic, decisive, and final action came after his second election.

Six weeks after Jackson’s nomination in 1832 for his second term his enemies, the National Republicans, led by Clay, their presidential nominee, and reinforced by Nicholas Biddle, the bank’s president, and by many Democrats, passed the bill to grant an extension of charter to the United States bank, which had the support of a majority of the Democrats of Pennsylvania, a Jackson state, and which had many powerful Democratic champions all over the country. Jackson accepted Clay’s challenge, vetoed the bank bill, coerced most of the bank Democrats into line, and overwhelmingly defeated Clay at the polls.

Immediately after the election, or in December, 1832, South Carolina, under the lead of Hayne (Webster’s antagonist of two years earlier, who had just stepped out of the Senate into the governorship) and Calhoun (who resigned the vice-presidency and entered the Senate to succeed Hayne), having passed a nullification act, to go into operation on February 1, 1833, Jackson issued a proclamation pointing out that nullification assailed the Constitution, and that disunion by armed force was treason ; and he ordered General Scott to have troops ready to enter South Carolina, a naval force meanwhile being sent to Charleston to coöperate with the army. Awed by Jackson’s promptness and vigor, and under cover of Clay’s compromise tariff of 1833, which was passed to placate them, the nullifiers gave way. When France disregarded her treaty promise to pay $5,000,000 for spoliations committed on American vessels by French cruisers in Napoleon’s wars, the first installment of which was due in 1833, Jackson in 1834 urged Congress to pass a law authorizing reprisals on French property. France was enraged at this menace, war for a time seemed imminent between the two countries, but the debt was finally paid, claims which had been vainly pressed for a quarter of a century by Presidents were collected by Jackson, and United States prestige among the nations was greatly heightened.

During all the time that Jackson was fighting Calhoun and the nullifiers at home and Louis Philippe abroad he was waging savage war on Clay, Biddle, and the United States bank. His immense majority in the battle of 1832 on ground of Clay’s own choosing was interpreted by Jackson as the people’s injunction to extirpate the bank, and he started to obey the mandate with his accustomed directness and vigor. Finding McLane, the Secretary of the Treasury, unwilling to take the public funds from the bank, which Congress had declared to be perfectly safe, Jackson sent him to the head of the State Department. Duane, his successor in the Treasury, refused to remove the deposits, and was himself removed, and Taney, who was put in his place, obeyed Jackson’s command, the government moneys being put in what Jackson’s enemies called the “ pet ” banks. On account of his autocracy all the elements of the opposition — National Republicans, Democrats, and AntiMasons — united in a coalition which adopted the Whig name in 1834, and they passed a resolution in that year censuring him for his conduct. After a three years’ fight Benton carried a measure in 1837, shortly before Jackson’s retirement, exonerating him and expunging the censure from the Senate’s journal. Thus, with Clay, Calhoun, Biddle, and all the rest of his foes of all social castes and political sects laid in the dust, Jackson stepped out of office in a blaze of glory.

Except in the case of the treaty of Washington of 1871, under which the Alabama claims were adjusted by arbitration at Geneva a year later, and the long controversy with England amicably settled, the things done by Grant which will be remembered almost all took place in his second term. The completion of reconstruction, in which he did not have a commanding influence; his Santo Domingo annexation project, which failed ; the short-lived Civil Service Act, which, however, was a beginning in a great reform that first took practical shape in Arthur’s days ; and the Liberal Republican schism, by which many prominent personages in his party, some permanently and others temporarily, went over to the opposition, — all belong to his first term.

There was a note of triumph in Grant’s second inaugural, in 1873. After saying that when his first term began the country had not yet recovered from the effects of the civil war, and that therefore he had been opposed to the raising of new questions, he pointed out that through a large part of the term he had “ been the subject of abuse and slander scarcely ever equaled in political history,” and added that the people’s verdict in giving him a new commission he would accept as his “vindication.” This gave him the opportunity, which he quickly embraced, to show his independence and initiative. When, in April, 1874, he vetoed the Greenback Inflation Bill, which had been supported by large numbers of his party in each branch of Congress, among whom were many of his personal friends, which measure was especially strong in his own section, the West; and when he followed this up by personal appeals, orally and by letter, to Conkling, Sherman, Morrill, Edmunds, Hamlin, Jones (of Nevada), and other Republican leaders to take immediate steps to bring the currency back to the specie basis from which it had been separated since the beginning of 1862, he exerted a controlling sway that has told for good in the country’s financial affairs to this day.

Grant here got aid from an unexpected source. In the congressional election in November, 1874, the Democrats, for the first time since the Buchanan canvass of 1856, carried the House of Representatives. A condition as well as a theory thus confronting the Republicans — the necessity for passing their Money Bill between the first Monday in December, 1874, and the 4th of the following March, when they would drop out of control in the House — sent a measure through Congress by a straight party vote, which Grant signed on January 14, 1875, that brought all the country’s currency up to the gold line on January 1, 1879, and it has, in every crisis since then, by the operation of that act, been held up to the gold level. In the latter part of his service he began that relaxation of the harsher features of reconstruction which was followed by Hayes when, a few weeks after entering the White House, he removed the troops from Louisiana and South Carolina. Grant’s presence at the head of affairs during the charges and countercharges of conspiracies and the threats and counterthreats of violence attending the disputed Hayes-Tilden count in the early weeks of 1877 gave his countrymen confidence, and did much to preserve the peace in that crisis.

Asked early in 1885, just before his first inauguration, by Warner of Ohio and other free silverite Democratic congressmen as to his attitude on silver, President Cleveland not only condemned free coinage, but he declared that the country’s financial safety demanded the repeal of the limited Silver Coinage Act then in operation. Thus, at the outset in his career, he placed himself in hostility to a powerful minority, that was soon to become a majority, of his party on an issue ultimately to become dominant. Never before or since in the country’s history was a great political organization in such humor wooed. In his message of 1887, devoted to that subject solely, he assailed the tariff, a question which at that time carried more dynamite than any other issue since slavery during the Kansas territorial fight, except silver in 1896. Cleveland, however, was unfortunate politically in his tariff propaganda. The Mills Bill of 1888, incited by that message, defeated him for reëlection in that year, and the Wilson Bill of 1894 (in his second term), which he liked, was mutilated by Gorman and a few other Democrats in the Senate into the “ party perfidy and party dishonor ” tariff which he denounced, and which he contemptuously refused to sign or veto, letting it become a law through the time limit.

It was in his second term, however, that Cleveland’s courage anti independence were most strikingly displayed. A few days after he reëntered office in 1893 he withdrew the Hawaiian annexation treaty that Harrison had sent to the Senate, and he soon afterward hauled down the American flag in Hawaii, which had been run up shortly before that time, and he attempted to restore the deposed Queen. In 1894 he vetoed the Silver Seigniorage Bill, the bill to “coin a vacuum,” which had received the votes of three fourths of his party in Congress. In 1895 he constrained England to arbitrate her several decades old boundary dispute with Venezuela, and gave the Monroe Doctrine a stronger sanction in the outside world even than’ it received when, in response to a word from Secretary Seward, Louis Napoleon in 1866 took his troops out of Mexico and let the people of that country overthrow Maximilian. But Cleveland’s most valuable public service was when, in the extra session of Congress which he called in 1893, he, by swinging the patronage club, forced enough free silver Democrats over to the support of the small number of gold Democrats and the large majority of the Republicans to repeal the purchase clause of the Sherman law of 1890, and stopped that silver dilution of the currency which had been under way since the passage of the BlandAllison Act over Hayes’s veto in 1878.

Lincoln and McKinley died too early in their second term to show definitely the temper with which they received their countrymen’s renewed vote of confidence. It is safe to assume, however, that had Lincoln lived to serve out his second term the reconstruction scheme would have taken a different form from that into which it shaped itself in the fight between Johnson and the Republican Congress when Johnson attempted to carry out Lincoln’s policy without having any of Lincoln’s tact or any of his influence over the Republican party. Some of McKinley’s words just before his assassination indicated that he would urge, had he lived till Congress met, a less rigorous application of the tariff than that which his party favored then or apparently favors still. If President Roosevelt is elected in 1904 — and the chances are that he will be — he will find himself in very distinguished company should he attempt to make himself a larger force in the government’s affairs than he has been thus far.

Charles M. Harvey.