Naming Ingalls for the Senate
He life of C. I. Scofield up to the time
of his conversion is chiefly of interest as having fallen within times of permanent historic import in which he bore a characteristically American part.
The Scofield family is well-born and is traced back for centuries to its English forebears. Indeed, one of the Scofield ancestors fought a duel with that ancestor of the poet Byron who was called “the wicked” Lord Byron. And ina volume noted as Oxford Grants I, now in the Herald’s College, London, is found the following:
“To All and Singuler etc.: Forasmuch as Cuthbert Scofeld of Scofeld in Countie of Lancaster, Esquire, sonne and heire of James Scofeld, well borne and descended of worthy progenitors such as have of longe tyme used and boren armes as apt and significant tokens of their race and gentry,.
“In witnesse whereof, I the said Norroy
Kinge of Armes have heereunto subscribed my name this sixt day of March, in the yere of our Lord God 1582 and in the 25 yere of the reigne of our most gracious souveigne Lady Queen Elizabeth.”
As you enter the doorway of “Greyshingles,” the Scofield home at Douglaston, Long Island, you see on the wall at the right a quaint penand-ink sketch of an old English building, showing moat, and bridge, and heavy oaken door. The Scofield coat of arms is there, and the sketch bears the inscription:
“Scofield Hall, erected 1550, Rochdale, Lancashire, England, from a sketch in Raines MSS., British Museum.”
Thus of Colonial and Revolutionary ancestry, so strongly Puritan that, from Daniel Scofield the immigrant (1639) to and including himself, every man and woman in the chain of descent bore a Bible name — usually chosen from the Old Testament — he was born, very properly for an American boy, in the depths of a Western forest. For the West was in its winning, and the grandfather and father of that woodland baby owned large acres of primeval trees in Lenawee County, Michigan. They had built a dam across the Raisin River and erected a sawmill; but so much was it still a wilderness that little Scofield’s grandmother had to defend her very life against a drunken Indian, and his father’s unerring rifle slew a wild-cat that was bearing to her hungry brood a baby stolen from a frontier crib. Into such a life little Scofield was born.
And then came the first of the dramatic changes of which young Scofield’s life was so full. A removal took the boy of the Michigan settlement to pass, as it turned out, the formative years of his early life in the absolutely contrasted life of middle Tennessee during the last years of the slavery régime — absolutely contrasted, and yet no less intensely and characteristically American. It was among a Whig aristocracy, educated, wealthy (for that time and region), of easy, hospitable life, and of a plain democratic commonalty, honest, truthful, brave; who owned few slaves but tilled the soil in manly independence, keeping in their fat pastures blooded horses and herds of high-bred cattle. It is safe to say that no people ever surpassed these in the great primitive virtues of courage, integrity, and kindliness. Their accomplishments were to ride and shoot, and their intellectual interests were politics and sectarian religion.
The Civil War was the next dramatic chapter in his life. Those years in an atmosphere created by the great personalities of Lee and Jackson furnished an indelible lesson in his training. And then came his removal to St. Louis and his preparation for the profession of law, begun by disciplinary training in a land office, as has been narrated, and hastened by the great lawsuit of his brother-in-law’s family, of which he was asked to take charge.
It became necessary for young Scofield to remove to Kansas, where the land interests involved in the Loisel family lawsuit were situated. Here he was urged to let his name be offered for admission to the bar; he underwent the severe ordeal of those days, being examined by the three lawyers in open court to whom his examination was formally assigned, and also being asked questions, as was the custom, by any judges and members of the bar present. Having passed this stiff examination, he was, when about twenty-six years of age, admitted to the bar.
Then the people of Atchison, Kansas, elected him to the State legislature. After two years of experience as a young legislator, serving as chairman of its Judiciary Committee, he removed to Nemaha County, where the Loisel lawsuits were pending, and here he was again and at once elected to the legislature.
It will be remembered that the long and acrimonious discussion of the attempt to include the Territory of Kansas within the number of States in which slaves might be held had brought into that Territory an unusual number of the ablest young men from both the North and the South — a fact which invested life in the young State with peculiar interest. Every possible issue was discussed down to the final word, though the heat engendered by the slavery discussion had ceased with the ending of the Civil War.
Among the ablest and best-trained of the young men who had been drawn to Kansas by the slavery agitation was John James Ingalls, of Atchison, graduate of Williams College, a natural wit and orator, and with whom young Scofield was associated in the Loisel land case.
Then occurred an event that arrested in a singular degree the attention of the nation.
The senior United States Senator from Kansas, Samuel C. Pomeroy, had become notorious through land-corruption deals. His term in the Senate was expiring, and he was a candidate for re-election. Young Scofield, like some others, was satisfied that Pomeroy was buying votes. A small but earnest anti-Pomeroy element of State legislature men were holding a series of meetings in a hall in the State capital, Topeka. Their leader came to Scofield one afternoon and asked him bluntly where he stood on Pomeroy’s re-election.
“Against Pomeroy,” was the prompt reply.
The anti-Pomeroy man was interested, and said he wanted to talk freely with Scofield. Then he asked the question, “Have you a man to nominate in his place?”’
““Yes,” came the reply again: “John J. Ingalls. But,” added Scofield, “I don’t want to see Ingalls nominated, just to have him defeated.”
At this the anti-Pomeroy man answered earnestly, “I know that Pomeroy will be defeated. Will you, without asking any questions, take my word for this?”
Scofield thought it over for a moment, and said he would. He wired to Ingalls to come over to the capital, which was done by engaging a special train to bring him. Immediately upon his arrival he and Scofield conferred together. Scofield laid the facts as fully before his older friend as he could. Ingalls was impressed, and after earnest conference he asked the younger man, ‘“‘ What do you advise?”
“You ought to do it,” came the reply.
Ingalls said frankly that he did not believe his election was possible under the circumstances; but he was ready to follow the counsel of his friends; and he authorized him to say that he, Ingalls, would accept the anti-Pomeroy nomination.
The anti-Pomeroy leader had told Scofield that their group were going to remain in session through the night preceding the election, not leaving the hall, and even having their breakfasts brought in, in order to see the matter through. At one o’clock in the morning Scofield entered the hall where they were meeting, with Mr. Ingalls on his arm. Ingalls, a fine-looking, tall, slender man, then made a powerful address for clean politics in Kansas. The entire group had their breakfast together, and went over in a body to the House of Representatives.
The Pomeroy cohort had already assembled. A little later the senators marched in. The Lieutenant-Governor, as was the custom, presided.
Mr. Pomeroy was nominated to succeed himself as Senator of the United States; in a speecn in which his “great services” to the State of Kansas were fully rehearsed.
Then Senator York, the leader of the anti-Pomeroy forces, rose to his feet, deathly white. Scofield looked at him, and was afraid he would not be able even to use his voice, so overcome by emotion did he seem. But in a moment, to the utter amazement of all who heard him, he said: “Mr. President, I rise to second the nomination of S. C. Pomeroy.” [Representative Scofield was not then a converted man, and he decided then and there that after the meeting he would take the senator outside and thrash him.] “But,’’ went on Senator York, reaching to his hip pocket, and drawing out a large bundle of something, “not to a seat in the United States Senate, but to a cell in the Kansas State Penitentiary at Leavenworth.” He then called to his side one of the boy pages of the legislature, and continued: “Mr. President, I am sending you by the innocent hand of this boy seven thousand dollars in greenbacks that were handed me last night by S. C. Pomeroy for my vote.”
The bundle of money was carried up to the desk of the Lieutenant-Governor, and there, in the presence of all, it was laid in plain sight upon a book. There was a silence like death over the entire hall of representatives.
In that strange silence Scofield rose and nominated John J. Ingalls to the United States Senate. Member after member rose to second the nomination.
The Lieutenant-Governor, his face tense with excitement, asked if there were any other nominations. None was offered. And then an amazing thing happened. The vote was taken; and every vote cast was for John J. Ingalls. Even the man who had nominated Pomeroy voted for Ingalls! And many another legislator there, with Pomeroy’s money in his pocket, dared not do otherwise than repudiate his man and come out in the solid vote for decency and honesty.
There was another dead silence, as the presiding officer rose and, in a shaking voice, said: “Every ballot has been cast for John J. Ingalls. I hereby declare him duly elected Senator from Kansas for the United States.”
There were shouts of “Ingalls! Ingalls
“Mr. Scofield, do you know where Mr. Ingalls is?”’ asked the Lieutenant-Governor. “Can you produce him?”
“I think I can, sir,” answered young Scofield,
(9?
“if the house will continue in session for twenty minutes.”
He disappeared, and in five minutes he was back with Mr. Ingalls. Dazed by the suddenness and utter unexpectedness of the event, Mr. Ingalls made a brief address of acceptance of the nomination, amid the cheers of senators and legislators. And for eighteen years from that time Ingalls served in the United States Senate, through successive re-elections.
It is not surprising that General Grant, then President of the United States for his second term, appointed C. I. Scofield United States Attorney for the District of Kansas. That included not only the entire State of Kansas, but also what is now much of Oklahoma — then Indian Territory. The young legislator was the youngest United States attorney at that time in the United States — scarcely thirty years old. And the office that he held was particularly important, because the United States was then removing the roving Indians of the plains to fixed reservations, which meant unusual work for the District Attorney’s office.
Among other things that the Government instructed United States District Attorney
Scofield to do was to stop certain men who were taking whisky into Indian Territory and selling it to the Indians. Scofield secured an escort of cavalry and went after these men. He would have been shot down instantly by them if they could have done this. But he rounded up some of the worst men in this law-breaking liquor business, and brought them back to Leavenworth.
At the trial, necessarily most of the District Attorney’s witnesses were Indians — and Indians who could not speak a word of English. It was a strange scene that went on in the court-room, as an uncouth-looking half-breed interpreted for the Indians. But the case proceeded, the defence for the liquor men trying in vain to break down the testimony of the Indians, and the Indians themselves made a favorable impression by their evident honesty, and respect, and reverence for the Great Spirit when the question of the nature of an oath came up, and it ended by the conviction of the liquor men.
When, later in the day, Scofield went to the lodgings where he had had his Indian witnesses entertained, he found the leading one, a stately chief named ‘‘Powder Face,” squatting on a bed. As the District Attorney entered the room, the Indian quickly raised his left hand high over his head, with his right hand patted his heart, and smiled — and a smile is a very rare thing to see on the face of an Indian. What it meant was, “I love you.” And the interpreter explained to Scofield, “Powder Face would die for you now, after making that sign. It is a pledge of eternal friendship.”