BURROWS OF MICHIGAN

AND THE

REPUBLICAN PARTY

THE

HE life history of Julius Cæsar Burrows is so closely interwoven with that of the Republican Party that the one can never be told without embracing the chief events of the other. From its earliest days down to 1912 he played some part, small or great, in nearly every important movement for which the Party stands accredited, and for thirty years he was one of its chief spokesmen in expounding its principles on the stump or in Congress. While never

a leader in the same sense as was Blaine, Garfield, Reed, or McKinley, he ranked with these National characters in ability and statesmanship, and beyond them in his constructive usefulness to his Party.

"Under the oaks of Jackson," said John Hay, in his famous Golden Anniversary oration, "the 6th of July, 1854, a Party was brought into being and baptized which ever since has answered the purpose

of its existence with fewer follies and failures and more magnificent achievements than ordinarily fall to the lot of any institution of mortal origin.”

Burrows was in his eighteenth year when this historic event occurred, a student in the Grand River Institute at Austinburg, Ashtabula County, Ohio. He had been born into an environment of outspoken devotion to the cause of freedom; he had been brought up on the diet of abolition, asking no greater entertainment than to listen to his father's impassioned discussions of the great political questions of the day; he had found ample opportunity to watch the great contests of Parties and to hear the debates between their leaders, and the newly formed Republican Party included him among those zealous young men of the North who joined it heart and soul, pledging their very lives to the prevention of further encroachment of the principle of slavery. The promulgation of the new political creed and the birth of the new political organization seemed to young Burrows nothing less than a summons to a crusade of righteousness, into which he threw himself with the fiery impetuosity of youth, and with an intensity of unwavering devotion which abided with him throughout his long political career. "It was

at that happy stage in the development of an institution," says Thayer, when "its ideals, unsullied yet

by selfish desires, justified the enthusiasm of its supporters. Its principles had the compulsion of religion; and rightly so, because they aimed at carrying out in the sphere of public life the behests of private conscience." 1

We may not all agree with the theory that the Republican Party "has answered the purpose of its existence with fewer follies and failures and more magnificent achievements than ordinarily fall to the lot of any institution of mortal origin," but no statement could better express the conviction which possessed Burrows from his earliest association with it. He was conscious of its weaknesses; but these he would have explained away as due to individual shortcomings rather than to Party error. To him the Republican Party as an institution could do no wrong. When influential members cast discredit upon it he regarded them as traitors to their country; for was it not the Republican Party which had preserved the Union, and which had repaired the one weak link in the chain forged by the founders of the Republic by abolishing the traffic in human flesh?

We ourselves are too far removed from the day when Burrows' political convictions were irrevocably cast to appreciate how deeply the iron entered into the souls of men at that period. This generation 1 Thayer: "The Life of John Hay," volume I, page 82.

has fortunately never known and the past generation has been glad to forget the condition of actual hatred which then existed between the Republicans and the Southern Democrats and their Northern sympathizers. Parties in those days meant something more than a difference in opinion regarding Protection and Free Trade. The Republicans, direct successors of the old Whig Party, looked upon themselves as representatives of righteousness, and considered their opponents as agents of the Devil in their disloyalty to the Union, in their tenacious insistence that the institution of slavery was justifiable, and in their determination to disrupt the Republic if necessary to accomplish their purposes. The Democrats, on the other hand, refused to recognize the religious aspect of the cause espoused by the Republicans, and could see in their efforts to restrain and later to destroy an established institution nothing but unconstitutional aggression, and an affront to be resented and rebuked.

The birth of the Republican Party in 1854 crystallized the conflict between conscientiously formed but diametrically opposed judgments which had for years seethed within the breasts of thinking men, unsatisfied by the long era of compromise, and which when later brought to the surface could be settled only by the clash of arms. "The Republican Party,"

Hay said in the oration already quoted, "sprang directly from an aroused and indignant National conscience. Questions of finance, of political economy, of orderly administration, passed out of sight for the moment, to be taken up and dealt with later on; but in 1854 the question that brought the thinking men together was whether there should be a limit to the aggressions of slavery, and in 1861 that solemn inquiry turned to one still more portentous,-should the Nation live or die? The humblest old Republican in America has the right to be proud that in the days of his youth, in the presence of these momentous questions, he judged right, and if he is sleeping in his honored grave his children may justly be glad of his decision."

No doubt ever existed in Burrows' mind that his decision was rightly made. The disappointment he experienced in the fact that he was too young to vote for Frémont, the first Presidential candidate of the new Party, found expression in his active participation in the campaign, during which he made his earliest political speeches; and the defeat of his favorite only emphasized in his mind the necessity for further and greater effort to bring success to the ideals for which his Party stood. Four years later the Republicans nominated Lincoln as their standardbearer. The ardor with which the young men of the