James G. Blaine: The Mulligan Letters and Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion

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James G. Blaine was born in Pennsylvania in 1830 to a Whig father and an Irish Catholic mother, in a home where the daughters were raised Catholic and the sons Presbyterian. After teaching in Kentucky, where he met his wife Harriet, he moved to Maine in 1853, bought the Kennebec Journal with borrowed money, and used it to promote the new Republican Party. He rose to Speaker of the Maine House, entered the U.S. House in 1862 and became Speaker in 1869, backing the gold standard against greenbacks. In 1875 he proposed the Blaine Amendment to bar public funds from religious schools, a measure aimed at Catholic parochial schools.

In 1876, as the Republican frontrunner, he faced charges that the Union Pacific had paid him $64,000 for worthless Little Rock and Fort Smith railroad bonds. When Boston clerk James Mulligan testified that he held letters on the deals, Blaine took them from him in a hotel room and read selected passages on the House floor. Robert G. Ingersoll nominated him as the Plumed Knight, but Rutherford B. Hayes won the nomination. In 1880 Blaine threw his delegates to James A. Garfield, who named him Secretary of State; weeks after Blaine rebuffed office seeker Charles Guiteau, Guiteau shot Garfield at a Washington train station on July 2, 1881, with Blaine at his side. He lost the 1884 race to Grover Cleveland by about a thousand votes in New York after a supporter called Democrats the party of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.

• Democratic crowds chanted about the continental liar from the state of Maine, ending with burn this letter.
• Reform Republicans known as Mugwumps backed Cleveland because of the railroad scandal.
• Back as Secretary of State under Benjamin Harrison, he hosted the first International Conference of American States in 1890.
• His old newspaper colleague John L. Stevens, U.S. minister to Hawaii, aligned with sugar planters in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.
• After two sailors from the USS Baltimore died in a mob attack in Valparaiso, the administration forced Chile to pay reparations.