A Few Washington Sketches — In the Senate

Senator Lyman Trumbull (IL) was Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In 1871, he and Senator Carl Schurz had created a tempest in a teapot by charging that the government violated its neutrality toward Prussia by selling small arms to France during the previous year’s Franco-Prussian War. Senator Conkling, Grant’s close friend and ally, put that issue to rest after a Senate investigation. Nast ridiculed Trumbull via Shakespeare’s Macbeth.