YEAMAN, George H. The Study of Government.

Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1871.

Thick 8vo.; rust-color cloth stamped in gilt and blind; lightly scuffed.

First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed, “To His Excellency U.S. Grant President of the U.S. With the author’s compliments.”

During the war, Lincoln famously quipped that he hoped he had God on his side, but that he must have Kentucky. One of the crucial “border states” that had a sizeable secessionist minority, Kentucky, along with Maryland, Missouri and Delaware were pivotal pieces in the deadly chess match between North and South. Lincoln did have Kentucky, and George H. Yeaman (1829-1908), the state’s Unionist representative, along with it. A judge in Davis County before the war, he entered the House in 1861 and stayed until defeated for reelection in 1864. Johnson named him ambassador to Denmark, where he served for five years and composed this massive treatise.

Yeaman’s view of the Government’s powers—or lack of powers—under the Constitution could not have been more different from the radical views of abolitionists like William Whiting. He argued that there was an “unwritten” Constitution that was more important than the 1787 charter. “The right of the people to govern themselves,” Yeamans wrote, “and their capacity to do so, constitute the essence, the sum total, of the American system of government. It is our only real political constitution. All written rules and expressions, from the constitution down to the resolutions of a party platform, are but attempts, more or less successful and permanent, to reach or give expression to public opinion, which is putting into form and effect our system of government…Forms are valuable precisely in proportion as they have been found by experience to accomplish this end, and they are useless, or even obstructions, in proportion as they have been found by experience to fail in accomplishing it.” This was hardly the spirit that lay behind the enactment of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitutions, the 1866 Civil Rights Act, and, for that matter, the discriminatory “black codes” of the Southern states. So it is not surprising that Yeamans thought “some of the most important acts of [the Reconstruction] period, both legislative and executive, are wholly without warrant” since they militated against the “public opinion” of the south. That was the whole point of the postwar amendments, as far as the radical Republicans were concerned; but Yeaman thought the radical agenda of improving the economic and political status of the freedmen had “very naked legal support, and would be in marked and detestable antagonism with modern sentiment upon the subject.”

When Grant nominated his brother-in-law, Michael J. Cramer, to replace Yeamans, the scholar-diplomat vainly implored the new president to keep him on. “I did not seek for this place, or any other in the diplomatic service,” Yeaman wrote. “I accepted it when we were all the friends of Mr. Johnson and Mr. Seward—I was afterwards, in nearly all things, opposed to Mr. Johnson’s home policy….I have been constantly and unreservedly in favor of General Grants [sic] election to the Presidency…I feel mortified by my recall.” His mortification is hard to understand. Grant was exercising one of the oldest “unwritten” rules of politics: to the victors belong the spoils, and to European embassies belong a president’s friends, contributors, and brothers-in-law. There was, of course, nothing personal about it. Grant gave Yeaman a nice recommendation to Roscoe Conkling for a U.S. attorney job in New York. “I entertain a high opinion of Mr. Yeaman’s fitness, in every way,” the President wrote, but Yeaman didn’t get that job either. He eventually landed a position teaching Constitutional law and government at Columbia.