880, and again, February 9, 1881, at length,
against the adoption of a joint rule of Congress relating to counting
the electoral vote, which rule, among other things, undertook to
give Congress the right to settle questions that might arise on
objection of a member as to the vote of the electors of a State.
I maintained that, under the Constitution, Congress neither in
joint session nor in separate sessions had the right to decide that
the vote of a State should or should not be counted, or that there
was any power anywhere to reject the vote of any State after it
had been cast and properly certified and returned; that the two
Houses only met, as provided in the Constitution, to witness the
purely ministerial work of the Vice-President in opening and counting
the electoral vote as returned to him. I cited the precedents from
the beginning of the government under the Constitution in support
of my position, excepting only the dangerous one of 1877, growing
out of the Electoral Commission.

I spoke on many other important subjects, especially on the true
rule of apportionment of representation in the House; on election
cases, and parliamentary questions. I was not always in harmony
with my party leaders. I denied the policy of surrendering principle
in any case, even though apparent harmony was, for the time being,
attainable thereby.

At the November election of 1880, James A. Garfield was elected
President, and the Republicans had a bare majority in the House at
the opening of the Forty-seventh Congress over the Democrats and
Greenbackers, but not a majority over all. There were three Mahone
re-Adjusters elected from Virginia. I formed no purpose to become
a candidate for Speaker of the House, until the close of the Forty-
sixth, and then only on the solicitation of leading members of that
Congress who had been elected to the next one.

Shortly after Mr. Garfield was inaugurated President of the United
States, a violent controversy arose over appointments to important
offices in New York, which led to the resignation of Senators
Conkling and Platt. This was followed by President Garfield being
shot (July 2, 1881) by a crazy crank (Guiteau) who, in some way,
conceived that he, through the controversy, was deprived of an
office. In company with General Sherman I saw and had an interview
with Mr. Garfield in his room at the White House the afternoon of
the day he was shot. His appearance then was that of a man f