Cameron remained abroad until time and more exciting events had cast a kindly shadow on his record. He then came home and a few years later was reëlected to the Senate. When the attack was made on his dear friend Sumner, which ended in displacing him from the chairmanship of the Committee on Foreign Relations, which he had held ten years, Cameron retreated to a Committee room, as to a cyclone cellar, where he remained until the deed was done, leaving Trumbull, Schurz, and Wilson to fight the battle for his dear friend. Then he returned and sat down in the chair thus made vacant. He subsequently explained that he did so because his name was the next one to Sumner's on the committee list.[64] FOOTNOTES: [56] E. Corning & Co., of Albany, were dealers in stoves and hardware. [57] House Report no. 2, 37th Congress, 2d Session, p. 390. Cummings reappears in Welles's _Diary_, near the close of Andrew Johnson's Administration, as a favored candidate for the office of Commissioner of Internal Revenue. The report of the Committee on Government Contracts had been forgotten or only vaguely remembered. Welles had a dim recollection that Cummings had a spotted record, and he warned Johnson against him. Seward indorsed him, however; said he was "a capital man for the place--no better could be found." (_Diary of Gideon Wells_, III, 414.) [58] _Cong. Globe_, February, 1862, p. 710. [59] _Cong. Globe_, January. 1862, p. 208. [60] _Cong. Globe_, April, 1862, p. 1841. [61] _Cong. Globe_, February, 1862, p. 712. [62] _Lincoln and Men of War Time_, p. 165. [63] Dawes, _Cong. Globe_, April, 1862, p. 1841. [64] _Congressional Record_, 43d Cong., 1st Sess., p. 3434. CHAPTER XII ARBITRARY ARRESTS The jaunty manner in which Secretary Seward administered the laws respecting the liberty of the citizen in the earlier years of the war is treated by John Hay with a humorous touch under date October 22, 1861: To-day Deputy Marshal came and asked what he should do with process to be served on Porter in contempt business. I took him over to Seward and Seward said: "The President instructs you that the _habeas corpus_ is suspended in this city at present, and forbids you to serve any process upon any officer here." Turning to me: "That is what the President says, is it not, Mr. Hay?" "Precisely his words," I replied; and the thing was done.[65] Prior to the assembling of Congress in July, 1861, the President had given to General Winfield Scott authority in writing to suspend the privilege of the writ of _habeas corpus_ at any point on the line of the movement of troops between Philadelphia and Washington City. Without other authority Seward began to issue orders for the arrest and imprisonment of persons suspected of disloyal acts or designs, not only on the line between Philadelphia and Washington City, but in all parts of the country.