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Chapter 1: The Desks of the Senate
The Chamber of the United States Senate was a long, cavernous
space–over a hundred feet long. From its upper portion,
from the galleries for citizens and journalists which rimmed
it, it seemed even longer than it was, in part because it
was so gloomy and dim–so dim in 1949, when lights had
not yet been added for television and the only illumination
came from the ceiling almost forty feet above the floor, that
its far end faded away in shadows–and in part because
it was so pallid and bare. Its drab tan damask walls, divided
into panels by tall columns and pilasters and by seven sets
of double doors, were unrelieved by even a single touch of
color–no painting, no mural–or, seemingly, by any
other ornament. Above those walls, in the galleries, were
rows of seats as utilitarian as those of a theater and covered
in a dingy gray, and the features of the twenty white marble
busts of the country’s first twenty vice presidents,
set into niches above the galleries, were shadowy and blurred.
The marble of the pilasters and columns was a dull reddish
gray in the gloom. The only spots of brightness in the Chamber
were the few tangled red and white stripes on the flag that
hung limply from a pole on the presiding officer’s dais,
and the reflection of the ceiling lights on the tops of the
ninety-six mahogany desks arranged in four long half circles
around the well below the dais. From the galleries the low
red-gray marble dais was plain and unimposing, apparently
without decoration. The desks themselves, small and spindly,
seemed more like schoolchildren’s desks than the desks
of senators of the United States, mightiest of republics.
When a person stood on the floor
of the Senate Chamber, however–in the well below the
dais–the dais was, suddenly, not plain at all. Up close,
its marble was a deep, dark red lushly veined with grays and
greens, and set into it, almost invisible from the galleries,
but, up close, richly glinting, were two bronze laurel wreaths,
like the wreaths that the Senate of Rome bestowed on generals
with whom it was pleased, when Rome ruled the known world–and
the Senate ruled Rome. From the well, the columns and pilasters
behind the dais were, suddenly, tall and stately and topped
with scrolls, like the columns of the Roman Senate’s
chamber, the columns before which Cato spoke and Caesar fell,
and above the columns, carved in cream-colored marble, were
eagles, for Rome’s legions marched behind eagles. From
the well, there was, embroidered onto each pale damask panel,
an ornament in the same pale color and all but invisible from
above–a shield–and there were cream-colored marble
shields, and swords and arrows, above the doors. And the doors–those
seven pairs of double doors, each flanked by its tall columns
and pilasters–were tall, too, and their grillwork, hardly
noticeable from above, was intricate and made of beaten bronze,
and it was framed by heavy, squared bronze coils. The vice
presidential busts were, all at once, very high above you;
set into deep, arched niches, flanked by massive bronze sconces,
their marble faces, thoughtful, stern, encircled the Chamber
like a somber evocation of the Republic’s glorious past.
And, rising from the well, there were the desks.
The desks of the Senate rise in four
shallow tiers, one above the other, in a deep half circle.
Small and spindly individually, from the well they blend together
so that with their smooth, burnished mahogany tops reflecting
even the dim lights in the ceiling so far above them, they
form four sweeping, glowing arcs. To stand in the well of
the Senate is to stand among these four long arcs that rise
around and above you, that stretch away from you, gleaming
richly in the gloom: powerful, majestic. To someone standing
in the well, the Chamber, in all its cavernous drabness, is
only a setting for those desks–for those desks, and for
the history that was made at them.
The first forty-eight of those desks–they
are of a simple, federal design–were carved in 1819 to
replace the desks the British had burned five years before.
When, in 1859, the Senate moved into this Chamber, those desks
moved with them, and when, as the Union grew, more desks were
added, they were carved to the same design. And for decades–for
most of the first century of the Republic’s existence,
in fact; for the century in which it was transformed from
a collection of ragged colonies into an empire–much of
its history was hammered out among those desks.
Daniel Webster’s hand rested
on one of those desks when, on January 26, 1830, he rose to
reply again to Robert Hayne.
Every desk in the domed, colonnaded
room that was then the Senate’s Chamber was filled that
day–some not with senators but with spectators, for so
many visitors, not only from Washington but from Baltimore
and New York, had crowded into the Chamber, overflowing the
galleries, that some senators had surrendered their seats
and were standing against the walls or even among the desks–for
the fate of the young nation might hang on that reply. In
the South, chafing under the domination of the North and East,
there was a new word abroad–secession–and the South’s
leading spokesman, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, had,
although he was Vice President of the United States, proposed
a step that would go a long way toward shattering the Union:
that any state unwilling to abide by a law enacted by the
national government could nullify it within its borders. In
an earlier Senate speech that January of 1830, the South,
through the South Carolina Senator Robert Y. Hayne, had proposed
that the West should join the South in an alliance that could
have the most serious implications for the future of the Union.
The specific issue Hayne raised was the price of public lands
in the West: the West wanted the price kept low to attract
settlers from the East and encourage development; the East
wanted the price kept high so its people would stay home,
and continue to provide cheap labor for northern factories.
The East, whose policies had so long ground down the South,
was now, Hayne said, trying to do the same thing to the West,
and the West should unite with the South against it. And the
Senator raised broader issues as well. Why should one section
be taxed to construct a public improvement in another? “What
interest has South Carolina in a canal in Ohio?” And
what if Ohio didn’t want it? Why should the national
government decide such issues? The sovereignty of the individual
states–their rights, their freedom–was being trampled.
The reaction of many western senators to Hayne’s proposal
of an alliance had been ominously favorable; Missouri’s
Thomas Hart Benton asked the South to “stretch forth”
a “protecting arm” against the East. And to Webster’s
first speech in response, Hayne–slight, slender, and
aristocratic in bearing although dressed in a “coarse
homespun suit that he had substituted for the hated broadcloth
manufactured in the North”–had passionately attacked
the North’s “meddling statesmen” and abolitionists,
and had defended slavery, states’ rights, and nullification
in arguments that were considered so unanswerable that the
“white, triumphant face” of a smiling Calhoun, presiding
over the Senate as Vice President, and the toasts in Washington
taverns to Hayne, to the South, and to nullification reflected
the general feeling that the South had won. And then two days
later, on the 26th, Senator Webster of Massachusetts, with
his dark, craggy face, jet-black hair, and jutting black eyebrows–“Black
Dan” Webster, with his deep booming voice that “could
shake the world,” Webster, Emerson’s “great
cannon loaded to the lips”–rose, in blue coat with
bright brass buttons, buff waistcoat, and white cravat, rose
to answer, and, as he spoke, the smile faded from Calhoun’s
face.
He stood erect as he spoke, his left
hand resting on his desk, his voice filling the Chamber, and,
one by one, he examined and demolished Hayne’s arguments.
The claim that a state could decide constitutional questions?
The Constitution, Webster said, is the fundamental law of
a people–of one people–not of states. “We the
People of the United States made this Constitution. . . .
This government came from the people, and is responsible to
them.” “He asks me, ‘What interest has South
Carolina in a canal to the Ohio?’ The answer to that
question expounds the whole diversity of sentiment between
that gentleman and me. . . . According to his doctrine, she
has no interest in it. Accourding to his doctorin, Ohio is
one country, and South Carolina is another country. . . .
I, sir, take a different view of the whole matter. I look
upon Ohio and South Carolina to be parts of one whole–parts
of the same country–and that country is my country. .
. . I come here not to consider that I will do this for one
distinct part of it, and that for another, but . . . to legislate
for the whole.” And finally Webster turned to a higher
idea: the idea–in and of itself–of Union, permanent
and enduring. The concept was, as one historian would note,
“still something of a novelty in 1830. . . . Liberty
was supposed to depend more on the rights of states than on
the powers of the general government.” But to Webster,
the ideas were not two ideas but one.
When my eyes shall be turned for
the last time on the meridian sun, I hope I may see him shining
brightly upon my united, free and happy Country. I hope I
shall not live to see his beams falling upon the dispersed
fragments of the structure of this once glorious Union. I
hope that I may not see the flag of my Country, with its stars
separated or obliterated, torn by commotion, smoking with
the blood of civil war. I hope I may not see the standard
raised of separate State rights, star against star, and stripe
against stripe; but that the flag of the Union may keep its
stars and its stripes corded and bound together in indissoluble
ties. I hope I shall not see written, as its motto, first
Liberty, and then Union. I hope I shall see no such delusion
and deluded motto on the flag of that Country. I hope to see
spread all over it, blazoned in letters of light, and proudly
floating over Land and Sea that other sentiment, dear to my
heart, “Union and Liberty, now and forever, one and inseparable!”
Tears in the crowded Senate gallery;
tears on the crowded Senate floor. “Even Calhoun,”
it was said, “revealed the emotions he tried so hard
to conceal. Love and pride of country–these were things
he could understand, too.” Men and women were weeping
openly as Daniel Webster finished. Among those men were western
senators, ardent nationalists, who had “thrilled to the
patriotic fervor of Webster’s final words.” Those
words crushed the southern hope for an alliance with the West.
They did more. Webster revised the speech before it was published
in pamphlet form, trying to convert the spoken words, “embellished
as they had been by gestures, modulations of voice, and changes
of expression, into words that would be read without these
accompaniments but would leave the reader as thrilled and
awed as the listening audience had been.” He succeeded.
Edition followed edition, and when copies ran out, men and
women passed copies from hand to hand; in Tennessee, it was
said, each copy “has probably been read by as many as
fifty different” persons. “No speech in the English
language, perhaps no speech in modern times, had ever been
as widely diffused and widely read as Webster’s Second
Reply to Hayne,” an historian of the period was to write.
That speech “raised the idea of Union above contract
or expediency and enshrined it in the American heart.”
It made the Union, as Ralph Waldo Emerson would put it, “part
of the religion of this people.” And the only change
Webster made in those ringing last nine words was to reverse
“Union” and “Liberty,” so they read: “Liberty
and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” Those
words would be memorized by generations of schoolchildren,
they would be chiseled in marble on walls and monuments–those
words, spoken among those desks, in the Senate.
The long struggle of the colonies
that were now become states against a King and the King’s
representatives–the royal governors and proprietary officials
in each colony–had made the colonists distrust and fear
the possibilities for tyranny inherent in executive authority.
And so, in creating the new nation, its Founding Fathers,
the framers of its Constitution, gave its legislature or Congress
not only its own powers, specified and sweeping, powers of
the purse (“To lay and collect Taxes . . . To borrow
Money on the credit of the United States . . . To coin Money”)
and powers of the sword (“To declare War, grant Letters
of Marque and Reprisal . . . To raise and support Armies .
. . To provide and maintain a Navy . . .”) but also powers
designed to make the Congress independent of the President
and to restrain and act as a check on his authority: power
to approve his appointments, even the appointments he made
within his own Administration, even appointments he made to
his own Cabinet; power to remove his appointees through impeachment–to
remove him through impeachment, should it prove necessary;
power to override his vetoes of their Acts. And the most potent
of these restraining powers the Framers gave to the Senate.
While the House of Representatives was given the “sole
power of Impeachment,” the Senate was given the “sole
power to try all Impeachments” (“And no person shall
be convicted without the Concurrence of Two Thirds of the
Members present”). The House could accuse; only the Senate
could judge, only the Senate convict. The power to approve
presidential appointments was given to the Senate alone; a
President could nominate and appoint ambassadors, Supreme
Court justices, and all other officers of the United States,
but only “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate.”
Determined to deny the President the prerogative most European
monarchs enjoyed of declaring war, the Framers gave that power
to Congress as a whole, to House as well as Senate, but the
legislative portion of the power of ending war by treaties,
of preventing war by treaties–the power to do everything
that can be done by treaties between nations–was vested
in the Senate alone; while most European rulers could enter
into a treaty on their own authority, an American President
could make one only “by and with the Advice and Consent
of the Senate, provided two thirds of the Senators present
concur.” As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was to write:
The Founding Fathers appear to have
envisaged the treaty- making process as a genuine exercise
in concurrent authority, in which the President and Senate
would collaborate at all stages. . . . One third plus one
of the senators . . . retained the power of life and death
over the treaties.
Nor was it only the power of the
executive of which the Framers were wary. These creators of
a government of the people feared not only the people’s
rulers but the people themselves, the people in their numbers,
the people in their passions, what the Founding Father Edmund
Randolph called “the turbulence and follies of democracy.”
The Framers of the Constitution feared
the people’s power because they were, many of them, members
of what in America constituted an aristocracy, an aristocracy
of the educated, the well-born, and the well-to-do, and they
mistrusted those who were not educated or well-born or well-to-do.
More specifically, they feared the people’s power because,
possessing, and esteeming, property, they wanted the rights
of property protected against those who did not possess it.
In the notes he made for a speech in the Constitutional Convention,
James Madison wrote of the “real or supposed difference
of interests” between “the rich and poor”–“those
who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly
sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings”–and
of the fact that over the ages to come the latter would come
to outnumber the former. “According to the equal laws
of suffrage, the power will slide into the hands of the latter,”
he noted. “Symptoms, of a leveling spirit, as we have
understood, have sufficiently appeared in certain quarters
to give notice of the future danger.” But the Framers
feared the people’s power also because they hated tyranny,
and they knew there could be a tyranny of the people as well
as the tyranny of a King, particularly in a system designed
so that, in many ways, the majority ruled. “Liberty may
be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses
of power,” Madison wrote. These abuses were more likely
because the emotions of men in the mass ran high and fast,
they were “liable to err . . . from fickleness and passion,”
and “the major interest might under sudden impulses be
tempted to commit injustice on the minority.”
So the Framers wanted to check and
restrain not only the people’s rulers, but the people;
they wanted to erect what Madison called “a necessary
fence” against the majority will. To create such a fence,
they decided that the Congress would have not one house but
two, and that while the lower house would be designed to reflect
the popular will, that would not be the purpose of the upper
house. How, Madison asked, is “the future danger”–the
danger of “a leveling spirit”–“to be guarded
against on republican principles? How is the danger in all
cases of interested coalitions to oppress the minority to
be guarded against? Among other means by the establishment
of a body in the government sufficiently respectable for its
wisdom and virtue, to aid on such emergencies, the preponderance
of justice by throwing its weight into that scale.” This
body, Madison said, was to be the Senate. Summarizing in the
Constitutional Convention the ends that would be served by
this proposed upper house of Congress, Madison said they were
“first to protect the people against their rulers; secondly
to protect the people against the transient impressions into
which they themselves might be led.”
Excerpted from
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
by Robert A. Caro
Copyright© 2002 by Robert A. Caro.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House,
Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced
or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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