Samuel Steel Blair (December 5, 1821 – December 8, 1890) was a Republican United States Representative from Pennsylvania.
During the American Civil War, he called for increasingly harsh treatment against the southern states which had seceded from the Union, saying: "This rebellion cannot be put down by soft words and lenient measures."
Formative years
Born in Indiana, Pennsylvania on December 5, 1821, Blair was a product of his community's the public schools. He then attended and, in 1838, graduated from Jefferson College, in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania.
After completing further studies in law, and securing admission to the bar in 1845, he began practicing law in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania in 1846.
From 1849 until 1864, he practiced law in Hollidaysburg in partnership with John Dean, who later became a Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice.
Political career
A member of the Republican Party in the United States, Blair was chosen to be a delegate to the 1856 Republican National Convention, and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1858 and 1860. During the Thirty-seventh Congress, Blair was named chairman of the United States House Committee on Private Lands. After unsuccessfully running for reelection in 1862, he resumed the practice of law.
As the American Civil War wore on, Blair urged his colleagues in the federal government to eschew "soft words and lenient measures," and pressed them to adopt a harsher stance against the southern states that were deemed to be "in rebellion." In a lengthy speech before the U.S. House of Representatives on May 22, 1862, Blair said:
"Mr. Speaker, we are divided in opinion about many things connected with the war, there is one purpose, however, in which a majority of this House would seem to be nearly united, and that is that the Government of the United States shall not be curtailed in its extent of territorial jurisdiction by the surrender of one foot of its soil to the southern confederacy. The people will not tolerate a conventional separation of any portion of this Union from the rest. If this is not a part of our fixed policy, if we are not in solid earnest to this extent, not an hour should be lost before sending an ambassador to Richmond to close the war. There was a time when it did appear as if—while the people were to be amused by movements leading to no decisive results—a subtile policy would, after long delay terminate hostilities by the jugglery of a compromise. The gloomy apprehensions of such a disaster were fast seizing upon the public mind; but the recent successes of our arms, on many fields of heroic valor have lifted the burden from the heart of the nation, and set it once more on its way of promise and of hope. The rebellion is to be subdued by the Army, not by concessions to treason; by the earnestness of war, not by the chicane of diplomacy.
... It is impossible for us to be at peace with a power which takes slavery, the stone which our fathers rejected, and defiantly makes it the head of its corner.
The object of this war upon our part is to restore the authority of the Government wherever it has been displaced, to enable the people ultimately to return to State governments in the Union, and to the full enjoyments of all their rightful possessions; except in so far as they may be deprived of them by the shock of war in the effort to subdue the rebellion and prevent its recurrence.
It is vain and foolish to expect or desire the original status of things as it was before the disturbances. We cannot expect the dead to rise from their bloody graves, nor homes once happy to spring up out of their ashes. For the losses of trade, of property of every kind taken, injured, or destroyed, there will be no recompense but in the lessons of wisdom they will teach; and when we see slavery gorged with the blood of the slain, and rioting in the havoc of war ... if the angels shall keep their vigils around about it, so that nothing in all the conflict shall do it harm, then must we, indeed, believe that it is a divine and sacred thing."
Blair went on in this speech to declare, "Slavery is the great primary cause" of the war, adding: