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Autobiography of Henry Watterson
"Marse Henry"
An Autobiography
By
Henry Watterson
TO MY FRIEND
ALEXANDER KONTA
WITH AFFECTIONATE SALUTATION
"Mansfield,"
1919
A mound of earth a little higher graded:
Perhaps upon a stone a chiselled name:
A dab of printer's ink soon blurred and faded--
And then oblivion--that--that is fame!
--HENRY WATTERSON
Contents
Chapter the First
I Am Born and Begin to Take Notice--John Quincy Adams and Andrew
Jackson--James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce--Jack Dade and "Beau
Hickman"--Old Times in Washington
Chapter the Second
Slavery the Trouble-Maker--Break-Up of the Whig Party and Rise of the
Republican--The Key--Sickle's Tragedy--Brooks and Sumner--Life at
Washington in the Fifties
Chapter the Third
The Inauguration of Lincoln--I Quit Washington and Return to
Tennessee--A Run-a-bout with Forest--Through the Federal Lines and a
Dangerous Adventure--Good Luck at Memphis
Chapter the Fourth
I Go to London--Am Introduced to a Notable Set--Huxley, Spencer, Mill
and Tyndall--Artemus Ward Comes to Town--The Savage Club
Chapter the Fifth
Mark Twain--The Original of Colonel Mulberry Sellers--The "Earl of
Durham"--Some Noctes Ambrosianæ--A Joke on Murat Halstead
Chapter the Sixth
Houston and Wigfall of Texas--Stephen A. Douglas--The Twaddle about
Puritans and Cavaliers--Andrew Johnson and John C. Breckenridge
Chapter the Seventh
An Old Newspaper Rookery--Reactionary Sectionalism in Cincinnati and
Louisville--_The Courier-Journal_
Chapter the Eighth
Feminism and Woman Suffrage--The Adventures in Politics and Society--A
Real Heroine
Chapter the Ninth
Dr. Norvin Green--Joseph Pulitzer--Chester A. Arthur--General
Grant--The Case of Fitz-John Porter
Chapter the Tenth
Of Liars and Lying--Woman Suffrage and Feminism--The Professional
Female--Parties, Politics, and Politicians in America
Chapter the Eleventh
Andrew Johnson--The Liberal Convention in 1872--Carl Schurz--The
"Quadrilateral"--Sam Bowles, Horace White and Murat Halstead--A
Queer Composite of Incongruities
Chapter the Twelfth
The Ideal in Public Life--Politicians, Statesmen and Philosophers--
The Disputed Presidency in 1876--The Persona and Character of Mr.
Tilden--His Election and Exclusion by a Partisan Tribunal
Chapter the Thirteenth
Charles Eames and Charles Sumner-Schurzand Lamar--I Go to Congress--A
Heroic Kentuckian--Stephen Foster and His Songs--Music and Theodore
Thomas
Chapter the Fourteenth
Henry Adams and the Adams Family--John Hay and Frank Mason--The Three
_Mousquetaires_ of Culture--Paris--"The Frenchman"--The South of
France
Chapter the Fifteenth
Still the Gay Capital of France--Its Environs--Walewska and De
Morny--Thackeray in Paris--A _Pension_ Adventure
Chapter the Sixteenth
Monte Carlo--The European Shrine of Sport and Fashion--Apocryphal
Gambling Stories--Leopold, King of the Belgians--An Able and
Picturesque Man of Business
Chapter the Seventeenth
A Parisian _Pension_--The Widow of Walewska--Napoleon's
Daughter-in-Law--The Changeless--A Moral and Orderly City
Chapter the Eighteenth
The Grover Cleveland Period--President Arthur and Mr. Blaine--John
Chamberlin--The Decrees of Destiny
Chapter the Nineteenth
Mr. Cleveland in the White House--Mr. Bayard in the Department of
State--Queer Appointments to Office--The One-Party Power--The End of
North and South Sectionalism
Chapter the Twentieth
The Real Grover Cleveland--Two Clevelands Before and After Marriage--A
Correspondence and a Break of Personal Relations
Chapter the Twenty-First
Stephen Foster, the Song-Writer--A Friend Comes to the Rescu
His Originality--"My Old Kentucky Home" and the "Old Folks at
Home"--General Sherman and "Marching Through Georgia"
Chapter the Twenty-Second
Theodore Roosevelt--His Problematic Character--He Offers Me an
Appointment--His _Bonhomie_ and Chivalry--Proud of His Rebel Kin
Chapter the Twenty-Third
The Actor and the Journalist--The Newspaper and the State--Joseph
Jefferson--His Personal and Artistic Career--Modest Character and
Religious Belief
Chapter the Twenty-Fourth
The Writing of Memoirs--Some Characteristics of Carl Shurz--Sam
Bowles--Horace White and the Mugwumps
Chapter the Twenty-Fifth
Every Trade Has Its Tricks--I Play One on William McKinley--Far Away
Party Politics and Political Issues
Chapter the Twenty-Sixth
A Libel on Mr. Cleveland--His Fondness for Cards--Some Poker
Stories--The "Senate Game"--Tom Ochiltree, Senator Allison and General
Schenck
Chapter the Twenty-Seventh
The Profession of Journalism--Newspapers and Editors in
America--Bennett, Greeley and Raymond--Forney and Dana--The Education
of a Journalist
Chapter the Twenty-Eighth
Bullies and Braggarts--Some Kentucky Illustrations--The Old Galt
House--The Throckmortons--A Famous Sugeon--"Old Hell's Delight"
Chapter the Twenty-Ninth
About Political Conventions, State and National--"Old Ben Butler"--His
Appearance as a Trouble-Maker in the Democratic National Convention of
1892--Tarifa and the Tariff--Spain as a Frightful Example
Chapter the Thirtieth
The Makers of the Republic--Lincoln, Jefferson, Clay and Webster--The
Proposed League of Nations--The Wilsonian Incertitude--The "New
Freedom"
Chapter the Thirty-First
The Age of Miracles--A Story of Franklin Pierce--Simon Suggs
Billy Sunday--Jefferson Davis and Aaron Burr--Certain Constitutional
Shortcomings
Chapter the Thirty-Second
A War Episode--I Meet my Fater--I Marry and Make a Home--The Ups and
Downs of Life Lead to a Happy Old Age
Illustrations
Henry Watterson (About 1908)
Henry Clay--Painted at Ashland by Dodge for The Hon. Andrew Ewing of
Tennessee-The Original Hangs in Mr. Watterson's Library at "Mansfield"
W. P. Hardee, Lieutenant General C.S.A.
John Bell of Tennessee--In 1860 Presidential Candidate "Union Party"--"Bell
and Everett" Ticket
Artemus Ward
General Leonidas Polk--Lieutenant General C.S.A. Killed in Georgia, June
14, 1864--P. E. Bishop of Louisiana
Mr. Watterson's Editorial Staff in 1868 When the Three Daily Newspapers
of Louisville Were United into the _Courier-Journal_. Mr. George D.
Prentice and Mr. Watterson Are in the Center
Abraham Lincoln in 1861. From a Photograph by M. B. Brady
Mrs. Lincoln in 1861
Henry Watterson--Fifty Years Ago
Henry Woodfire Grady--One of Mr. Watterson's "Boys"
Mr. Watterson's Library at "Mansfield"
A Corner of "Mansfield"--Home of Mr. Watterson
Henry Watterson (Photograph Taken in Florida)
Henry Watterson. From a painting by Louis Mark in the Manhattan Club, New
York
"MARSE HENRY"
Chapter the First
I Am Born and Begin to Take Notice--John Quincy Adams and Andrew
Jackson--James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce--Jack Dade and "Beau
Hickman"--Old Times in Washington
I
I am asked to jot down a few autobiographic odds and ends from such data of
record and memory as I may retain. I have been something of a student of
life; an observer of men and women and affairs; an appraiser of their
character, their conduct, and, on occasion, of their motives. Thus, a kind
of instinct, which bred a tendency and grew to a habit, has led me into
many and diverse companies, the lowest not always the meanest.
Circumstance has rather favored than hindered this bent. I was born in a
party camp and grew to manhood on a political battlefield. I have lived
through stirring times and in the thick of events. In a vein colloquial and
reminiscential, not ambitious, let me recall some impressions which these
have left upon the mind of one who long ago reached and turned the corner
of the Scriptural limitation; who, approaching fourscore, does not yet feel
painfully the frost of age beneath the ravage of time's defacing waves.
Assuredly they have not obliterated his sense either of vision or vista.
Mindful of the adjuration of Burns,
Keep something to yourself,
Ye scarcely tell to ony,
I shall yet hold little in reserve, having no state secrets or mysteries of
the soul to reveal.
It is not my purpose to be or to seem oracular. I shall not write after the
manner of Rousseau, whose Confessions had been better honored in the breach
than the observance, and in any event whose sincerity will bear question;
nor have I tales to tell after the manner of Paul Barras, whose Memoirs
have earned him an immortality of infamy. Neither shall I emulate the
grandiose volubility and self-complacent posing of Metternich and
Talleyrand, whose pretentious volumes rest for the most part unopened upon
dusty shelves. I aspire to none of the honors of the historian. It shall be
my aim as far as may be to avoid the garrulity of the raconteur and to
restrain the exaggerations of the ego. But neither fear of the charge of
self-exploitation nor the specter of a modesty oft too obtrusive to be
real shall deter me from a proper freedom of narration, where, though in
the main but a humble chronicler, I must needs appear upon the scene and
speak of myself; for I at least have not always been a dummy and have
sometimes in a way helped to make history.
In my early life--as it were, my salad days--I aspired to becoming what
old Simon Cameron called "one of those damned literary fellows" and Thomas
Carlyle less profanely described as "a leeterary celeebrity." But some
malign fate always sat upon my ambitions in this regard. It was easy to
become The National Gambler in Nast's cartoons, and yet easier The National
Drunkard through the medium of the everlasting mint-julep joke; but the
phantom of the laurel crown would never linger upon my fair young brow.
Though I wrote verses for the early issues of Harper's Weekly--happily no
one can now prove them on me, for even at that jejune period I had the
prudence to use an anonym--the Harpers, luckily for me, declined to publish
a volume of my poems. I went to London, carrying with me "the great
American novel." It was actually accepted by my ever too partial friend,
Alexander Macmillan. But, rest his dear old soul, he died and his
successors refused to see the transcendent merit of that performance, a
view which my own maturing sense of belles-lettres values subsequently came
to verify.
When George Harvey arrived at the front I "'ad 'opes." But, Lord, that
cast-iron man had never any bookish bowels of compassion--or political
either for the matter of that!--so that finally I gave up fiction and
resigned myself to the humble category of the crushed tragi-comedians of
literature, who inevitably drift into journalism.
Thus my destiny has been casual. A great man of letters quite thwarted, I
became a newspaper reporter--a voluminous space writer for the press--now
and again an editor and managing editor--until, when I was nearly thirty
years of age, I hit the Kentucky trail and set up for a journalist. I did
this, however, with a big "J," nursing for a while some faint ambitions
of statesmanship--even office--but in the end discarding everything that
might obstruct my entire freedom, for I came into the world an insurgent,
or, as I have sometimes described myself in the Kentucky vernacular, "a
free nigger and not a slave nigger."
II
Though born in a party camp and grown to manhood on a political battlefield
my earlier years were most seriously influenced by the religious spirit
of the times. We passed to and fro between Washington and the two family
homesteads in Tennessee, which had cradled respectively my father and
mother, Beech Grove in Bedford County, and Spring Hill in Maury County.
Both my grandfathers were devout churchmen of the Presbyterian faith. My
Grandfather Black, indeed, was the son of a Presbyterian clergyman, who
lived, preached and died in Madison County, Kentucky. He was descended, I
am assured, in a straight line from that David Black, of Edinburgh, who, as
Burkle tells us, having declared in a sermon that Elizabeth of England
was a harlot, and her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, little better, went to
prison for it--all honor to his memory.
My Grandfather Watterson was a man of mark in his day. He was decidedly a
constructive--the projector and in part the builder of an important railway
line--an early friend and comrade of General Jackson, who was all too
busy to take office, and, indeed, who throughout his life disdained the
ephemeral honors of public life. The Wattersons had migrated directly from
Virginia to Tennessee.
The two families were prosperous, even wealthy for those days, and my
father had entered public life with plenty of money, and General Jackson
for his sponsor. It was not, however, his ambitions or his career that
interested me--that is, not until I was well into my teens--but the camp
meetings and the revivalist preachers delivering the Word of God with more
or less of ignorant yet often of very eloquent and convincing fervor.
The wave of the great Awakening of 1800 had not yet subsided. Bascom was
still alive. I have heard him preach. The people were filled with
thoughts of heaven and hell, of the immortality of the soul and the life
everlasting, of the Redeemer and the Cross of Calvary. The camp ground
witnessed an annual muster of the adjacent countryside. The revival was
a religious hysteria lasting ten days or two weeks. The sermons were
appeals to the emotions. The songs were the outpourings of the soul in
ecstacy. There was no fanaticism of the death-dealing, proscriptive sort;
nor any conscious cant; simplicity, childlike belief in future rewards and
punishments, the orthodox Gospel the universal rule. There was a good deal
of doughty controversy between the churches, as between the parties; but
love of the Union and the Lord was the bedrock of every confession.
Inevitably an impressionable and imaginative mind opening to such sights
and sounds as it emerged from infancy must have been deeply affected. Until
I was twelve years old the enchantment of religion had complete possession
of my understanding. With the loudest, I could sing all the hymns. Being
early taught in music I began to transpose them into many sorts of rhythmic
movement for the edification of my companions. Their words, aimed directly
at the heart, sank, never to be forgotten, into my memory. To this day I
can repeat the most of them--though not without a break of voice--while too
much dwelling upon them would stir me to a pitch of feeling which a life of
activity in very different walks and ways and a certain self-control I have
been always able to command would scarcely suffice to restrain.
The truth is that I retain the spiritual essentials I learned then and
there. I never had the young man's period of disbelief. There has never
been a time when if the Angel of Death had appeared upon the scene--no
matter how festal--I would not have knelt with adoration and welcome; never
a time on the battlefield or at sea when if the elements had opened to
swallow me I would not have gone down shouting!
Sectarianism in time yielded to universalism. Theology came to seem to my
mind more and more a weapon in the hands of Satan to embroil and divide the
churches. I found in the Sermon on the Mount leading enough for my ethical
guidance, in the life and death of the Man of Galilee inspiration enough to
fulfill my heart's desire; and though I have read a great deal of modern
inquiry--from Renan and Huxley through Newman and Döllinger, embracing
debates before, during and after the English upheaval of the late fifties
and the Ecumenical Council of 1870, including the various raids upon the
Westminster Confession, especially the revision of the Bible, down to
writers like Frederic Harrison and Doctor Campbell--I have found nothing
to shake my childlike faith in the simple rescript of Christ and Him
crucified.
III
From their admission into the Union, the States of Kentucky and
Tennessee have held a relation to the politics of the country somewhat
disproportioned to their population and wealth. As between the two parties
from the Jacksonian era to the War of Sections, each was closely and hotly
contested. If not the birthplace of what was called "stump oratory," in
them that picturesque form of party warfare flourished most and lasted
longest. The "barbecue" was at once a rustic feast and a forum of political
debate. Especially notable was the presidential campaign of 1840, the year
of my birth, "Tippecanoe and Tyler," for the Whig slogan--"Old Hickory" and
"the battle of New Orleans," the Democratic rallying cry--Jackson and Clay,
the adored party chieftains.
I grew up in the one State, and have passed the rest of my life in the
other, cherishing for both a deep affection, and, maybe, over-estimating
their hold upon the public interest. Excepting General Jackson, who was
a fighter and not a talker, their public men, with Henry Clay and Felix
Grundy in the lead, were "stump orators." He who could not relate and
impersonate an anecdote to illustrate and clinch his argument, nor "make
the welkin ring" with the clarion tones of his voice, was politically good
for nothing. James K. Polk and James C. Jones led the van of stump orators
in Tennessee, Ben Hardin, John J. Crittenden and John C. Breckenridge
in Kentucky. Tradition still has stories to tell of their exploits and
prowess, their wit and eloquence, even their commonplace sayings and
doings. They were marked men who never failed to captivate their audiences.
The system of stump oratory had many advantages as a public force and was
both edifying and educational. There were a few conspicuous writers for
the press, such as Ritchie, Greeley and Prentice. But the day of personal
journalism and newspaper influence came later.
I was born at Washington--February 16, 1840--"a bad year for Democrats,"
as my father used to say, adding: "I am afraid the boy will grow up to be a
Whig."
In those primitive days there were only Whigs and Democrats. Men took their
politics, as their liquor, "straight"; and this father of mine was an
undoubting Democrat of the schools of Jefferson and Jackson. He had
succeeded James K. Polk in Congress when the future President was elected
governor of Tennessee; though when nominated he was little beyond the age
required to qualify as a member of the House.
To the end of his long life he appeared to me the embodiment of wisdom,
integrity and courage. And so he was--a man of tremendous force of
character, yet of surpassing sweetness of disposition; singularly
disdainful of office, and indeed of preferment of every sort; a profuse
maker and a prodigal spender of money; who, his needs and recognition
assured, cared nothing at all for what he regarded as the costly glories
of the little great men who rattled round in places often much too big for
them.
Immediately succeeding Mr. Polk, and such a youth in appearance, he
attracted instant attention. His father, my grandfather, allowed him a
larger income than was good for him--seeing that the per diem then paid
Congressmen was altogether insufficient--and during the earlier days of his
sojourn in the national capital he cut a wide swath; his principal yokemate
in the pleasures and dissipations of those times being Franklin Pierce, at
first a representative and then a senator from New Hampshire. Fortunately
for both of them, they were whisked out of Washington by their families in
1843; my father into the diplomatic service and Mr. Pierce to the seclusion
of his New England home. They kept in close touch, however, the one with
the other, and ten years later, in 1853, were back again upon the scene
of their rather conspicuous frivolity, Pierce as President of the United
States, my father, who had preceded him a year or two, as editor of the
Washington Union, the organ of the Administration.
When I was a boy the national capital was still rife with stories of their
escapades. One that I recall had it that on a certain occasion returning
from an excursion late at night my father missed his footing and fell into
the canal that then divided the city, and that Pierce, after many fruitless
efforts, unable to assist him to dry land, exclaimed, "Well, Harvey, I
can't get you out, but I'll get in with you," suiting the action to the
word. And there they were found and rescued by a party of passers, very
well pleased with themselves.
My father's absence in South America extended over two years. My mother's
health, maybe her aversion to a long overseas journey, kept her at home,
and very soon he tired of life abroad without her and came back. A
committee of citizens went on a steamer down the river to meet him, the
wife and child along, of course, and the story was told that, seated on
the paternal knee curiously observant of every detail, the brat suddenly
exclaimed, "Ah ha, pa! Now you've got on your store clothes. But when ma
gets you up at Beech Grove you'll have to lay off your broadcloth and put
on your jeans, like I do."
Being an only child and often an invalid, I was a pet in the family and
many tales were told of my infantile precocity. On one occasion I had a
fight with a little colored boy of my own age and I need not say got the
worst of it. My grandfather, who came up betimes and separated us, said,
"he has blackened your eye and he shall black your boots," thereafter
making me a deed to the lad. We grew up together in the greatest amity
and in due time I gave him his freedom, and again to drop into the
vernacular--"that was the only nigger I ever owned." I should add that in
the "War of Sections" he fell in battle bravely fighting for the freedom of
his race.
It is truth to say that I cannot recall the time when I was not
passionately opposed to slavery, a crank on the subject of personal
liberty, if I am a crank about anything.
IV
In those days a less attractive place than the city of Washington could
hardly be imagined. It was scattered over an ill-paved and half-filled
oblong extending east and west from the Capitol to the White House, and
north and south from the line of the Maryland hills to the Potomac River.
One does not wonder that the early Britishers, led by Tom Moore, made game
of it, for it was both unpromising and unsightly.
Private carriages were not numerous. Hackney coaches had to be especially
ordered. The only public conveyance was a rickety old omnibus which, making
hourly trips, plied its lazy journey between the Navy Yard and Georgetown.
There was a livery stable--Kimball's--having "stalls," as the sleeping
apartments above came to be called, thus literally serving man and
beast. These stalls often lodged very distinguished people. Kimball, the
proprietor, a New Hampshire Democrat of imposing appearance, was one of the
last Washingtonians to wear knee breeches and a ruffled shirt. He was a
great admirer of my father and his place was a resort of my childhood.
One day in the early April of 1852 I was humped in a chair upon one side
of the open entrance reading a book--Mr. Kimball seated on the other side
reading a newspaper--when there came down the street a tall, greasy-looking
person, who as he approached said: "Kimball, I have another letter here
from Frank."
"Well, what does Frank say?"
Then the letter was produced, read and discussed.
It was all about the coming National Democratic Convention and its
prospective nominee for President of the United States, "Frank" seeming to
be a principal. To me it sounded very queer. But I took it all in, and as
soon as I reached home I put it up to my father:
"How comes it," I asked, "that a big old loafer gets a letter from a
candidate for President and talks it over with the keeper of a livery
stable? What have such people to do with such things?"
My father said: "My son, Mr. Kimball is an estimable man. He has been
an important and popular Democrat in New Hampshire. He is not without
influence here. The Frank they talked about is Gen. Franklin Pierce, of New
Hampshire, an old friend and neighbor of Mr. Kimball. General Pierce served
in Congress with me and some of us are thinking that we may nominate him
for President. The 'big old loafer,' as you call him, was Mr. John C.
Rives, a most distinguished and influential Democrat indeed."
Three months later, when the event came to pass, I could tell all about
Gen. Franklin Pierce. His nomination was no surprise to me, though to the
country at large it was almost a shock. He had been nowhere seriously
considered.
In illustration of this a funny incident recurs to me. At Nashville the
night of the nomination a party of Whigs and Democrats had gathered in
front of the principal hotel waiting for the arrival of the news, among
the rest Sam Bugg and Chunky Towles, two local gamblers, both undoubting
Democrats. At length Chunky Towles, worn out, went off to bed. The result
was finally flashed over the wires. The crowd was nonplused. "Who the hell
is Franklin Pierce?" passed from lip to lip.
Sam Bugg knew his political catechism well. He proceeded at length to tell
all about Franklin Pierce, ending with the opinion that he was the man
wanted and would be elected hands down, and he had a thousand dollars to
bet on it.
Then he slipped away to tell his pal.
"Wake up, Chunky," he cried. "We got a candidate--Gen. Franklin Pierce, of
New Hampshire."
"Who the----"
"Chunky," says Sam. "I am ashamed of your ignorance. Gen. Franklin Pierce
is the son of Gen. Benjamin Pierce, of Revolutionary fame. He has served
in both houses of Congress. He declined a seat in Polk's Cabinet. He won
distinction in the Mexican War. He is the very candidate we've been after."
"In that case," says Chunky, "I'll get up." When he reappeared Petway, the
Whig leader of the gathering, who had been deriding the convention, the
candidate and all things else Democratic, exclaimed:
"Here comes Chunky Towles. He's a good Democrat; and I'll bet ten to one he
never heard of Franklin Pierce in his life before."
Chunky Towles was one of the handsomest men of his time. His strong suit
was his unruffled composure and cool self-control. "Mr. Petway," says
he, "you would lose your money, and I won't take advantage of any man's
ignorance. Besides, I never gamble on a certainty. Gen. Franklin Pierce,
sir, is a son of Gen. Benjamin Pierce of Revolutionary memory. He served in
both houses of Congress, sir--refused a seat in Polk's Cabinet, sir--won
distinction in the Mexican War, sir. He has been from the first my choice,
and I've money to bet on his election."
Franklin Pierce had an only son, named Benny, after his grandfather, the
Revolutionary hero. He was of my own age. I was planning the good time we
were going to have in the White House when tidings came that he had been
killed in a railway accident. It was a grievous blow, from which the
stricken mother never recovered. One of the most vivid memories and
altogether the saddest episode of my childhood is that a few weeks later I
was carried up to the Executive Mansion, which, all formality and marble,
seemed cold enough for a mausoleum, where a lady in black took me in her
arms and convulsively held me there, weeping as if her heart would break.
V
Sometimes a fancy, rather vague, comes to me of seeing the soldiers go
off to the Mexican War and of making flags striped with pokeberry
juice--somehow the name of the fruit was mingled with that of the
President--though a visit quite a year before to The Hermitage, which
adjoined the farm of an uncle, to see General Jackson is still uneffaced.
I remember it vividly. The old hero dandled me in his arms, saying "So this
is Harvey's boy," I looking the while in vain for the "hickory," of which I
had heard so much.
On the personal side history owes General Jackson reparation. His
personality needs indeed complete reconstruction in the popular mind, which
misconceives him a rough frontiersman having few or none of the social
graces. In point of fact he came into the world a gentleman, a leader, a
knight-errant who captivated women and dominated men.
I shared when a young man the common belief about him. But there is ample
proof of the error of this. From middle age, though he ever liked a horse
race, he was a regular if not a devout churchman. He did not swear at all,
"by the Eternal" or any other oath. When he reached New Orleans in 1814 to
take command of the army, Governor Claiborne gave him a dinner; and after
he had gone Mrs. Claiborne, who knew European courts and society better
than any other American woman, said to her husband: "Call that man a
backwoodsman? He is the finest gentleman I ever met!"
There is another witness--Mr. Buchanan, afterward President--who tells how
he took a distinguished English lady to the White House when Old Hickory
was President; how he went up to the general's private apartment, where he
found him in a ragged _robe-de-chambre_, smoking his pipe; how, when
he intimated that the President might before coming down slick himself a
bit, he received the half-laughing rebuke: "Buchanan, I once knew a man in
Virginia who made himself independently rich by minding his own business";
how, when he did come down, he was _en règle_; and finally how, after
a half hour of delightful talk, the English lady as they regained the
street broke forth with enthusiasm, using almost the selfsame words of Mrs.
Claiborne: "He is the finest gentleman I ever met in the whole course of my
life."
VI
The Presidential campaign of 1848--and the concurrent return of the Mexican
soldiers--seems but yesterday. We were in Nashville, where the camp fires
of the two parties burned fiercely day and night, Tennessee a debatable,
even a pivotal state. I was an enthusiastic politician on the Cass and
Butler side, and was correspondingly disappointed when the election went
against us for Taylor and Fillmore, though a little mollified when, on his
way to Washington, General Taylor grasping his old comrade, my grandfather,
by the hand, called him "Billy," and paternally stroked my curls.
Though the next winter we passed in Washington I never saw him in the White
House. He died in July, 1850, and was succeeded by Millard Fillmore. It is
common to speak of Old Rough and Ready as an ignoramus. I don't think this.
He may not have been very courtly, but he was a gentleman.
Later in life I came to know Millard Fillmore well and to esteem him
highly. Once he told me that Daniel Webster had said to him: "Fillmore, I
like Clay--I like Clay very much--but he rides rough, sir; damned rough!"
I was fond of going to the Capitol and of playing amateur page in the
House, of which my father had been a member and where he had many friends,
though I was never officially a page. There was in particular a little old
bald-headed gentleman who was good to me and would put his arm about me and
stroll with me across the rotunda to the Library of Congress and get
me books to read. I was not so young as not to know that he was an
ex-President of the United States, and to realize the meaning of it. He had
been the oldest member of the House when my father was the youngest. He was
John Quincy Adams. By chance I was on the floor of the House when he fell
in his place, and followed the excited and tearful throng when they bore
him into the Speaker's Room, kneeling by the side of the sofa with an
improvised fan and crying as if my heart would break.
One day in the spring of 1851 my father took me to a little hotel on
Pennsylvania Avenue near the Capitol and into a stuffy room, where a snuffy
old man wearing an ill-fitting wig was busying himself over a pile of
documents. He turned about and was very hearty.
"Aha, you've brought the boy," said he.
And my father said: "My son, you wanted to see General Cass, and here he
is."
My enthusiasm over the Cass and Butler campaign had not subsided.
Inevitably General Cass was to me the greatest of heroes. My father had
been and always remained his close friend. Later along we dwelt together at
Willard's Hotel, my mother a chaperon for Miss Belle Cass, afterward Madame
Von Limbourg, and I came into familiar intercourse with the family.
The general made me something of a pet and never ceased to be a hero to me.
I still think he was one of the foremost statesmen of his time and treasure
a birthday present he made me when I was just entering my teens.
The hour I passed with him that afternoon I shall never forget.
As we were about taking our leave my father said: "Well, my son, you have
seen General Cass; what do you think of him?"
And the general patting me affectionately on the head laughingly said: "He
thinks he has seen a pretty good-looking old fogy--that is what he thinks!"
VII
There flourished in the village life of Washington two old blokes--no
other word can properly describe them--Jack Dade, who signed himself "the
Honorable John W. Dade, of Virginia;" and Beau Hickman, who hailed from
nowhere and acquired the pseudonym through sheer impudence. In one way and
another they lived by their wits, the one all dignity, the other all cheek.
Hickman fell very early in his career of sponge and beggar, but Dade lived
long and died in office--indeed, toward the close an office was actually
created for him.
Dade had been a schoolmate of John Tyler--so intimate they were that at
college they were called "the two Jacks"--and when the death of Harrison
made Tyler President, the "off Jack," as he dubbed himself, went up to the
White House and said: "Jack Tyler, you've had luck and I haven't. You must
do something for me and do it quick. I'm hard up and I want an office."
"You old reprobate," said Tyler, "what office on earth do you think you are
fit to fill?"
"Well," said Dade, "I have heard them talking round here of a place they
call a sine-cu-ree--big pay and no work--and if there is one of them left
and lying about loose I think I could fill it to a T."
"All right," said the President good naturedly, "I'll see what can be done.
Come up to-morrow."
The next day "Col. John W. Dade, of Virginia," was appointed keeper of
the Federal prison of the District of Columbia. He assumed his post with
_empressement_, called the prisoners before him and made them an
address.
"Ladies and gentlemen," said he; "I have been chosen by my friend, the
President of the United States, as superintendent of this eleemosynary
institution. It is my intention to treat you all as a Virginia gentleman
should treat a body of American ladies and gentlemen gathered here from all
parts of our beloved Union, and I shall expect the same consideration
in return. Otherwise I will turn you all out upon the cold mercies of a
heartless world and you will have to work for your living."
There came to Congress from Alabama a roistering blade by the name of
McConnell. He was something of a wit. During his brief sojourn in the
national capital he made a noisy record for himself as an all-round,
all-night man about town, a dare-devil and a spendthrift. His first
encounter with Col. John W. Dade, of Virginia, used to be one of the
standard local jokes. Colonel Dade was seated in the barroom of Brown's
Hotel early one morning, waiting for someone to come in and invite him to
drink.
Presently McConnell arrived. It was his custom when he entered a saloon to
ask the entire roomful, no matter how many, "to come up and licker," and,
of course, he invited the solitary stranger.
When the glasses were filled Dade pompously said: "With whom have I the
honor of drinking?"
"My name," answered McConnell, "is Felix Grundy McConnell, begad! I am a
member of Congress from Alabama. My mother is a justice of the peace, my
aunt keeps a livery stable, and my grandmother commanded a company in the
Revolution and fit the British, gol darn their souls!"
Dade pushed his glass aside.
"Sir," said he, "I am a man of high aspirations and peregrinations and can
have nothing to do with such low-down scopangers as yourself. Good morning,
sir!"
It may be presumed that both spoke in jest, because they became inseparable
companions and the best of friends.
McConnell had a tragic ending. In James K. Polk's diary I find two entries
under the dates, respectively, of September 8 and September 10, 1846. The
first of these reads as follows: "Hon. Felix G. McConnell, a representative
in Congress from Alabama called. He looked very badly and as though he had
just recovered from a fit of intoxication. He was sober, but was pale, his
countenance haggard and his system nervous. He applied to me to borrow one
hundred dollars and said he would return it to me in ten days.
"Though I had no idea that he would do so I had a sympathy for him even in
his dissipation. I had known him in his youth and had not the moral courage
to refuse. I gave him the one hundred dollars in gold and took his note.
His hand was so tremulous that he could scarcely write his name to the note
legibly. I think it probable that he will never pay me. He informed me he
was detained at Washington attending to some business in the Indian Office.
I supposed he had returned home at the adjournment of Congress until he
called to-day. I doubt whether he has any business in Washington, but fear
he has been detained by dissipation."
The second of Mr. Polk's entries is a corollary of the first and reads:
"About dark this evening I learned from Mr. Voorhies, who is acting as my
private secretary during the absence of J. Knox Walker, that Hon. Felix
G. McConnell, a representative in Congress from the state of Alabama,
had committed suicide this afternoon at the St. Charles Hotel, where he
boarded. On Tuesday last Mr. McConnell called on me and I loaned him one
hundred dollars. [See this diary of that day.] I learn that but a short
time before the horrid deed was committed he was in the barroom of the St.
Charles Hotel handling gold pieces and stating that he had received them
from me, and that he loaned thirty-five dollars of them to the barkeeper,
that shortly afterward he had attempted to write something, but what I have
not learned, but he had not written much when he said he would go to his
room.
"In the course of the morning I learn he went into the city and paid a
hackman a small amount which he owed him. He had locked his room door,
and when found he was stretched out on his back with his hands extended,
weltering in his blood. He had three wounds in the abdomen and his throat
was cut. A hawkbill knife was found near him. A jury of inquest was held
and found a verdict that he had destroyed himself. It was a melancholy
instance of the effects of intemperance. Mr. McConnell when a youth resided
at Fayetteville in my congressional district. Shortly after he grew up to
manhood he was at my instance appointed postmaster of that town. He was a
true Democrat and a sincere friend of mine.
"His family in Tennessee are highly respectable and quite numerous. The
information as to the manner and particulars of his death I learned from
Mr. Voorhies, who reported it to me as he had heard it in the streets. Mr.
McConnell removed from Tennessee to Alabama some years ago, and I learn he
has left a wife and three or four children."
Poor Felix Grundy McConnell! At a school in Tennessee he was a roommate of
my father, who related that one night Felix awakened with a scream from a
bad dream he had, the dream being that he had cut his own throat.
"Old Jack Dade," as he was always called, lived on, from hand to mouth, I
dare say--for he lost his job as keeper of the district prison--yet never
wholly out-at-heel, scrupulously neat in his person no matter how seedy the
attire. On the completion of the new wings of the Capitol and the removal
of the House to its more commodious quarters he was made custodian of the
old Hall of Representatives, a post he held until he died.
VIII
Between the idiot and the man of sense, the lunatic and the man of genius,
there are degrees--streaks--of idiocy and lunacy. How many expectant
politicians elected to Congress have entered Washington all hope, eager to
dare and do, to come away broken in health, fame and fortune, happy to get
back home--sometimes unable to get away, to linger on in obscurity and
poverty to a squalid and wretched old age.
I have lived long enough to have known many such: Senators who have filled
the galleries when they rose to speak; House heroes living while they could
on borrowed money, then hanging about the hotels begging for money to buy
drink.
There was a famous statesman and orator who came to this at last, of whom
the typical and characteristic story was told that the holder of a claim
against the Government, who dared not approach so great a man with so much
as the intimation of a bribe, undertook by argument to interest him in the
merit of the case.
The great man listened and replied: "I have noticed you scattering your
means round here pretty freely but you haven't said 'turkey' to me."
Surprised but glad and unabashed the claimant said "I was coming to that,"
produced a thousand-dollar bank roll and entered into an understanding as
to what was to be done next day, when the bill was due on the calendar.
The great man took the money, repaired to a gambling house, had an
extraordinary run of luck, won heavily, and playing all night, forgetting
about his engagement, went to bed at daylight, not appearing in the House
at all. The bill was called, and there being nobody to represent it, under
the rule it went over and to the bottom of the calendar, killed for that
session at least.
The day after the claimant met his recreant attorney on the avenue face to
face and took him to task for his delinquency.
"Ah, yes," said the great man, "you are the little rascal who tried to
bribe me the other day. Here is your dirty money. Take it and be off with
you. I was just seeing how far you would go."
The comment made by those who best knew the great man was that if instead
of winning in the gambling house he had lost he would have been up betimes
at his place in the House, and doing his utmost to pass the claimant's bill
and obtain a second fee.
Another memory of those days has to do with music. This was the coming of
Jenny Lind to America. It seemed an event. When she reached Washington Mr.
Barnum asked at the office of my father's newspaper for a smart lad to sell
the programs of the concert--a new thing in artistic showmanry. "I don't
want a paper carrier, or a newsboy," said he, "but a young gentleman, three
or four young gentlemen." I was sent to him. We readily agreed upon the
commission to be received--five cents on each twenty-five cent program--the
oldest of old men do not forget such transactions. But, as an extra
percentage for "organizing the force," I demanded a concert seat. Choice
seats were going at a fabulous figure and Barnum at first demurred. But
I told him I was a musical student, stood my ground, and, perhaps seeing
something unusual in the eager spirit of a little boy, he gave in and the
bargain was struck.
Two of my pals became my assistants. But my sales beat both of them hollow.
Before the concert began I had sold my programs and was in my seat. I
recall that my money profit was something over five dollars.
The bell-like tones of the Jenny Lind voice in "Home, Sweet Home," and "The
Last Rose of Summer" still come back to me, but too long after for me to
make, or imagine, comparisons between it and the vocalism of Grisi, Sontag
and Parepa-Rosa.
Meeting Mr. Barnum at Madison Square Garden in New York, when he was
running one of his entertainments there, I told him the story, and we had a
hearty laugh, both of us very much pleased, he very much surprised to find
in me a former employee.
One of my earliest yearnings was for a home. I cannot recall the time when
I was not sick and tired of our migrations between Washington City and the
two grand-paternal homesteads in Tennessee. The travel counted for much of
my aversion to the nomadic life we led. The stage-coach is happier in the
contemplation than in the actuality. Even when the railways arrived there
were no sleeping cars, the time of transit three or four days and nights.
In the earlier journeys it had been ten or twelve days.
Chapter the Second
Slavery the Trouble-Maker--Break-Up of the Whig Party and Rise of the
Republican--The Key--Sickle's Tragedy--Brooks and Sumner--Life at
Washington in the Fifties
I
Whether the War of Sections--as it should be called, because, except in
Eastern Tennessee and in three of the Border States, Maryland, Kentucky
and Missouri, it was nowise a civil war--could have been averted must ever
remain a question of useless speculation. In recognizing the institution of
African slavery, with no provision for its ultimate removal, the Federal
Union set out embodying the seeds of certain trouble. The wiser heads of
the Constitutional Convention perceived this plainly enough; its dissonance
to the logic of their movement; on the sentimental side its repugnancy; on
the practical side its doubtful economy; and but for the tobacco growers
and the cotton planters it had gone by the board. The North soon found
slave labor unprofitable and rid itself of slavery. Thus, restricted to the
South, it came to represent in the Southern mind a "right" which the South
was bound to defend.
Mr. Slidell told me in Paris that Louis Napoleon had once said to him in
answer to his urgency for the recognition of the Southern Confederacy: "I
have talked the matter over with Lord Palmerston and we are both of the
opinion that as long as African slavery exists at the South, France and
England cannot recognize the Confederacy. They do not demand its instant
abolition. But if you put it in course of abatement and final abolishment
through a term of years--I do not care how many--we can intervene to some
purpose. As matters stand we dare not go before a European congress with
such a proposition."
Mr. Slidell passed it up to Richmond. Mr. Davis passed it on to the
generals in the field. The response he received on every hand was the
statement that it would disorganize and disband the Confederate Armies.
Yet we are told, and it is doubtless true, that scarcely one Confederate
soldier in ten actually owned a slave.
Thus do imaginings become theories, and theories resolve themselves
into claims; and interests, however mistaken, rise to the dignity of
prerogatives.
II
The fathers had rather a hazy view of the future. I was witness to the
decline and fall of the old Whig Party and the rise of the Republican
Party. There was a brief lull in sectional excitement after the Compromise
Measures of 1850, but the overwhelming defeat of the Whigs in 1852 and the
dominancy of Mr. Jefferson Davis in the cabinet of Mr. Pierce brought the
agitation back again. Mr. Davis was a follower of Mr. Calhoun--though it
may be doubted whether Mr. Calhoun would ever have been willing to go to
the length of secession--and Mr. Pierce being by temperament a Southerner
as well as in opinions a pro-slavery Democrat, his Administration
fell under the spell of the ultra Southern wing of the party. The
Kansas-Nebraska Bill was originaly harmless enough, but the repeal of the
Missouri Compromise, which on Mr. Davis' insistence was made a part of it,
let slip the dogs of war.
In Stephen A. Douglas was found an able and pliant instrument. Like Clay,
Webster and Calhoun before him, Judge Douglas had the presidential bee in
his bonnet. He thought the South would, as it could, nominate and elect him
President.
Personally he was a most lovable man--rather too convivial--and for a
while in 1852 it looked as though he might be the Democratic nominee. His
candidacy was premature, his backers overconfident and indiscreet.
"I like Douglas and am for him," said Buck Stone, a member of Congress and
delegate to the National Democratic Convention from Kentucky, "though
I consider him a good deal of a damn fool." Pressed for a reason he
continued; "Why, think of a man wanting to be President at forty years of
age, and obliged to behave himself for the rest of his life! I wouldn't
take the job on any such terms."
The proposed repeal of the Missouri Compromise opened up the slavery debate
anew and gave it increased vitality. Hell literally broke loose among the
political elements. The issues which had divided Whigs and Democrats went
to the rear, while this one paramount issue took possession of the stage.
It was welcomed by the extremists of both sections, a very godsend to the
beaten politicians led by Mr. Seward. Rampant sectionalism was at first
kept a little in the background. There were on either side concealments and
reserves. Many patriotic men put the Union above slavery or antislavery.
But the two sets of rival extremists had their will at last, and in seven
short years deepened and embittered the contention to the degree that
disunion and war seemed, certainly proved, the only way out of it.
The extravagance of the debates of those years amazes the modern reader.
Occasionally when I have occasion to recur to them I am myself nonplussed,
for they did not sound so terrible at the time. My father was a leader
of the Union wing of the Democratic Party--headed in 1860 the Douglas
presidential ticket in Tennessee--and remained a Unionist during the War of
Sections. He broke away from Pierce and retired from the editorship of the
Washington Union upon the issue of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise,
to which he was opposed, refusing the appointment of Governor of Oregon,
with which the President sought to placate him, though it meant his return
to the Senate of the United States in a year or two, when he and Oregon's
delegate in Congress, Gen. Joseph Lane--the Lane of the Breckenridge and
Lane ticket of 1860--had brought the territory of Oregon in as a state.
I have often thought just where I would have come in and what might have
happened to me if he had accepted the appointment and I had grown
to manhood on the Pacific Coast. As it was I attended a school in
Philadelphia--the Protestant Episcopal Academy--came home to Tennessee
in 1856, and after a season with private tutors found myself back in the
national capital in 1858.
It was then that I began to nurse some ambitions of my own. I was going to
be a great man of letters. I was going to write histories and dramas and
romances and poetry. But as I had set up for myself I felt in honor bound
meanwhile to earn my own living.
III
I take it that the early steps of every man to get a footing may be of
interest when fairly told. I sought work in New York with indifferent
success. Mr. Raymond of the Times, hearing me play the piano at which from
childhood I had received careful instruction, gave me a job as "musical
critic" during the absence of Mr. Seymour, the regular critic. I must have
done my work acceptably, since I was not fired. It included a report of the
debut of my boy-and-girl companion, Adelina Patti, when she made her first
appearance in opera at the Academy of Music. But, as the saying is, I did
not "catch on." There might be a more promising opening in Washington, and
thither I repaired.
The Daily States had been established there by John P. Heiss, who with
Thomas Ritchie had years before established the Washington Union. Roger A.
Pryor was its nominal editor. But he soon took himself home to his beloved
Virginia and came to Congress, and the editorial writing on the States was
being done by Col. A. Dudley Mann, later along Confederate commissioner to
France, preceding Mr. Slidell.
Colonel Mann wished to work incognito. I was taken on as a kind of
go-between and, as I may say, figurehead, on the strength of being my
father's son and a very self-confident young gentleman, and began to get my
newspaper education in point of fact as a kind of fetch-and-carry for
Major Heiss. He was a practical newspaper man who had started the Union at
Nashville as well as the Union at Washington and the Crescent--maybe it was
the Delta--at New Orleans; and for the rudiments of newspaper work I could
scarcely have had a better teacher.
Back of Colonel Mann as a leader writer on the States was a remarkable
woman. She was Mrs. Jane Casneau, the wife of Gen. George Casneau, of
Texas, who had a claim before Congress. Though she was unknown to fame,
Thomas A. Benton used to say that she had more to do with making and ending
the Mexican War than anybody else.
Somewhere in the early thirties she had gone with her newly wedded husband,
an adventurous Yankee by the name of Storm, to the Rio Grande and started
a settlement they called Eagle Pass. Storm died, the Texas outbreak began,
and the young widow was driven back to San Antonio, where she met and
married Casneau, one of Houston's lieutenants, like herself a New Yorker.
She was sent by Polk with Pillow and Trist to the City of Mexico and
actually wrote the final treaty. It was she who dubbed William Walker
"the little gray-eyed man of destiny," and put the nickname "Old Fuss and
Feathers" on General Scott, whom she heartily disliked.
[Illustration: Henry Clay--Painted at Ashland by Dodge for the Hon. Andrew
Ewing of Tennessee--The Original Hangs in Mr. Watterson's Library at
"Mansfield"]
A braver, more intellectual woman never lived. She must have been a beauty
in her youth; was still very comely at fifty; but a born insurrecto and
a terror with her pen. God made and equipped her for a filibuster. She
possessed infinite knowledge of Spanish-American affairs, looked like a
Spanish woman, and wrote and spoke the Spanish language fluently. Her
obsession was the bringing of Central America into the Federal Union. But
she was not without literary aspirations and had some literary friends.
Among these was Mrs. Southworth, the novelist, who had a lovely home in
Georgetown, and, whatever may be said of her works and articles, was a
lovely woman. She used to take me to visit this lady. With Major Heiss she
divided my newspaper education, her part of it being the writing part.
Whatever I may have attained in that line I largely owe to her. She took
great pains with me and mothered me in the absence of my own mother, who
had long been her very dear friend. To get rid of her, or rather her pen,
Mr. Buchanan gave General Casneau, when the Douglas schism was breaking
out, a Central American mission, and she and he were lost by shipwreck on
their way to this post, somewhere in Caribbean waters.
My immediate yokemate on the States was John Savage, "Jack," as he was
commonly called; a brilliant Irishman, who with Devin Reilley and John
Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher, his intimates, and Joseph Brennan, his
brother-in-law, made a pretty good Irishman of me. They were '48 men, with
literary gifts of one sort and another, who certainly helped me along with
my writing, but, as matters fell out, did not go far enough to influence my
character, for they were a wild lot, full of taking enthusiasm and juvenile
decrepitude of judgment, ripe for adventures and ready for any enterprise
that promised fun and fighting.
Between John Savage and Mrs. Casneau I had the constant spur of
commendation and assistance as well as affection. I passed all my spare
time in the Library of Congress and knew its arrangements at least as well
as Mr. Meehan, the librarian, and Robert Kearon, the assistant, much to the
surprise of Mr. Spofford, who in 1861 succeeded Mr. Meehan as librarian.
Not long after my return to Washington Col. John W. Forney picked me up,
and I was employed in addition to my not very arduous duties on the States
to write occasional letters from Washington to the Philadelphia Press.
Good fortune like ill fortune rarely comes singly. Without anybody's
interposition I was appointed to a clerkship, a real "sinecure," in the
Interior Department by Jacob Thompson, the secretary, my father's old
colleague in Congress. When the troubles of 1860-61 rose I was literally
doing "a land-office business," with money galore and to spare. Somehow, I
don't know how, I contrived to spend it, though I had no vices, and worked
like a hired man upon my literary hopes and newspaper obligations.
Life in Washington under these conditions was delightful. I did not know
how my heart was wrapped up in it until I had to part from it. My father
stood high in public esteem. My mother was a leader in society. All doors
were open to me. I had many friends. Going back to Tennessee in the
midsummer of 1861, via Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, there happened a railway
break and a halt of several hours at a village on the Ohio. I strolled
down to the river and sat myself upon the brink, almost despairing--nigh
heartbroken--when I began to feel an irresistible fascination about the
swift-flowing stream. I leaped to my feet and ran away; and that is the
only thought of suicide that I can recall.
IV
Mrs. Clay, of Alabama, in her "Belle of the Fifties" has given a graphic
picture of life in the national capital during the administrations of
Pierce and Buchanan. The South was very much in the saddle. Pierce, as I
have said, was Southern in temperament, and Buchanan, who to those he did
not like or approve had, as Arnold Harris said, "a winning way of making
himself hateful," was an aristocrat under Southern and feminine influence.
I was fond of Mr. Pierce, but I could never endure Mr. Buchanan. His very
voice gave offense to me. Directed by a periodical publication to make a
sketch of him to accompany an engraving, I did my best on it.
Jacob Thompson, the Secretary of the Interior, said to me: "Now, Henry,
here's your chance for a foreign appointment."
I now know that my writing was clumsy enough and my attempt to play the
courtier clumsier still. Nevertheless, as a friend of my father and mother
"Old Buck" might have been a little more considerate than he was with a
lad trying to please and do him honor. I came away from the White House my
_amour propre_ wounded, and though I had not far to go went straight
into the Douglas camp.
Taking nearly sixty years to think it over I have reached the conclusion
that Mr. Buchanan was the victim of both personal and historic injustice.
With secession in sight his one aim was to get out of the White House
before the scrap began. He was of course on terms of intimacy with all the
secession leaders, especially Mr. Slidell, of Louisiana, like himself
a Northerner by birth, and Mr. Mason, a thick-skulled, ruffle-shirted
Virginian. It was not in him or in Mr. Pierce, with their antecedents and
associations, to be uncompromising Federalists. There was no clear law to
go on. Moderate men were in a muck of doubt just what to do. With Horace
Greeley Mr. Buchanan was ready to say "Let the erring sisters go." This
indeed was the extent of Mr. Pierce's pacifism during the War of Sections.
A new party risen upon the remains of the Whig Party--the Republican
Party--was at the door and coming into power. Lifelong pro-slavery
Democrats could not look on with equanimity, still less with complaisance,
and doubtless Pierce and Buchanan to the end of their days thought less
of the Republicans than of the Confederates. As a consequence Republican
writers have given quarter to neither of them.
It will not do to go too deeply into the account of those days. The times
were out of joint. I knew of two Confederate generals who first tried for
commissions in the Union Army; gallant and good fellows too; but they are
both dead and their secret shall die with me. I knew likewise a famous
Union general who was about to resign his commission in the army to go with
the South but was prevented by his wife, a Northern woman, who had obtained
of Mr. Lincoln a brigadier's commission.
V
In 1858 a wonderful affair came to pass. It was Mrs. Senator Gwin's fancy
dress ball, written of, talked of, far and wide. I did not get to attend
this. My costume was prepared--a Spanish cavalier, Mrs. Casneau's
doing--when I fell ill and had with bitter disappointment to read about
it next day in the papers. I was living at Willard's Hotel, and one of my
volunteer nurses was Mrs. Daniel E. Sickles, a pretty young thing who was
soon to become the victim of a murder and world scandal. Her husband was a
member of the House from New York, and during his frequent absences I used
to take her to dinner. Mr. Sickles had been Mr. Buchanan's Secretary of
Legation in London, and both she and he were at home in the White House.
She was an innocent child. She never knew what she was doing, and when a
year later Sickles, having killed her seducer--a handsome, unscrupulous
fellow who understood how to take advantage of a husband's neglect--forgave
her and brought her home in the face of much obloquy, in my heart of hearts
I did homage to his courage and generosity, for she was then as he and I
both knew a dying woman. She did die but a few months later. He was by no
means a politician after my fancy or approval, but to the end of his days I
was his friend and could never bring myself to join in the repeated public
outcries against him.
Early in the fifties Willard's Hotel became a kind of headquarters for the
two political extremes. During a long time their social intercourse
was unrestrained--often joyous. They were too far apart, figuratively
speaking, to come to blows. Truth to say, their aims were after all not
so far apart. They played to one another's lead. Many a time have I seen
Keitt, of South Carolina, and Burlingame, of Massachusetts, hobnob in the
liveliest manner and most public places.
It is certainly true that Brooks was not himself when he attacked Sumner.
The Northern radicals were wont to say, "Let the South go," the more
profane among them interjecting "to hell!" The Secessionists liked to prod
the New Englanders with what the South was going to do when they got to
Boston. None of them really meant it--not even Toombs when he talked about
calling the muster roll of his slaves beneath Bunker Hill Monument; nor
Hammond, the son of a New England schoolmaster, when he spoke of the
"mudsills of the North," meaning to illustrate what he was saying by the
underpinning of a house built on marshy ground, and not the Northern work
people.
Toombs, who was a rich man, not quite impoverished by the war, banished
himself in Europe for a number of years. At length he came home, and
passing the White House at Washington he called and sent his card to the
President. General Grant, the most genial and generous of men, had him come
directly up.
[Illustration: W. P. Hardee, Lieutenant General C.S.A.]
"Mr. President," said Toombs, "in my European migrations I have made it a
rule when arriving in a city to call first and pay my respects to the Chief
of Police."
The result was a most agreeable hour and an invitation to dinner. Not
long after this at the hospitable board of a Confederate general, then an
American senator, Toombs began to prod Lamar about his speech in the House
upon the occasion of the death of Charles Sumner. Lamar was not quick to
quarrel, though when aroused a man of devilish temper and courage. The
subject had become distasteful to him. He was growing obviously restive
under Toombs' banter. The ladies of the household apprehending what was
coming left the table.
Then Lamar broke forth. He put Toombs' visit to Grant, "crawling at the
seat of power," against his eulogy of a dead enemy. I have never heard
such a scoring from one man to another. It was magisterial in its dignity,
deadly in its diction. Nothing short of a duel could have settled it in the
olden time. But when Lamar, white with rage, had finished, Toombs without a
ruffle said, "Lamar, you surprise me," and the host, with the rest of
us, took it as a signal to rise from table and rejoin the ladies in the
drawing-room. Of course nothing came of it.
Toombs was as much a humorist as an extremist. I have ridden with him under
fire and heard him crack jokes with Minié balls flying uncomfortably about.
Some one spoke kindly of him to old Ben Wade. "Yes, yes," said Wade; "I
never did believe in the doctrine of total depravity."
But I am running ahead in advance of events.
VI
There came in 1853 to the Thirty-third Congress a youngish, dapper and
graceful man notable as the only Democrat in the Massachusetts delegation.
It was said that he had been a dancing master, his wife a work girl. They
brought with them a baby in arms with the wife's sister for its nurse--a
mis-step which was quickly corrected. I cannot now tell just how I came to
be very intimate with them except that they lived at Willard's Hotel. His
name had a pretty sound to it--Nathaniel Prentiss Banks.
A schoolmate of mine and myself, greatly to the mirth of those about us,
undertook Mr. Banks' career. We were going to elect him Speaker of the
next House and then President of the United States. This was particularly
laughable to my mother and Mrs. Linn Boyd, the wife of the contemporary
Speaker, who had very solid presidential aspirations of his own.
The suggestion perhaps originated with Mrs. Banks, to whom we two were
ardently devoted. I have not seen her since those days, more than sixty
years ago. But her beauty, which then charmed me, still lingers in my
memory--a gentle, sweet creature who made much of us boys--and two years
later when Mr. Banks was actually elected Speaker I was greatly elated and
took some of the credit to myself. Twenty years afterwards General Banks
and I had our seats close together in the Forty-fourth Congress, and he did
not recall me at all or the episode of 1853. Nevertheless I warmed to him,
and when during Cleveland's first term he came to me with a hard-luck story
I was glad to throw myself into the breach. He had been a Speaker of the
House, a general in the field and a Governor of Massachusetts, but was a
faded old man, very commonplace, and except for the little post he held
under Government pitiably helpless.
Colonel George Walton was one of my father's intimates and an imposing
and familiar figure about Washington. He was the son of a signer of the
Declaration of Independence, a distinction in those days, had been mayor of
Mobile and was an unending raconteur. To my childish mind he appeared to
know everything that ever had been or ever would be. He would tell me
stories by the hour and send me to buy him lottery tickets. I afterward
learned that that form of gambling was his mania. I also learned that many
of his stories were apocryphal or very highly colored.
One of these stories especially took me. It related how when he was on a
yachting cruise in the Gulf of Mexico the boat was overhauled by pirates,
and how he being the likeliest of the company was tied up and whipped to
make him disgorge, or tell where the treasure was.
"Colonel Walton," said I, "did the whipping hurt you much?"
"Sir," he replied, as if I were a grown-up, "they whipped me until I was
perfectly disgusted."
An old lady in Philadelphia, whilst I was at school, heard me mention
Colonel Walton--a most distinguished, religious old lady--and said to me,
"Henry, my son, you should be ashamed to speak of that old villain
or confess that you ever knew him," proceeding to give me his awful,
blood-curdling history.
It was mainly a figment of her fancy and prejudice, and I repeated it
to Colonel Walton the next time I went to the hotel where he was then
living--I have since learned, with a lady not his wife, though he was then
three score and ten--and he cried, "That old hag! Good Lord! Don't they
ever die!"
Seeing every day the most distinguished public men of the country, and with
many of them brought into direct acquaintance by the easy intercourse of
hotel life, destroyed any reverence I might have acquired for official
station. Familiarity may not always breed contempt, but it is a veritable
eye opener. To me no divinity hedged the brow of a senator. I knew the
White House too well to be impressed by its architectural grandeur without
and rather bizarre furnishments within.
VII
I have declaimed not a little in my time about the ignoble trade of
politics, the collective dishonesty of parties and the vulgarities of
the self-exploiting professional office hunters. Parties are parties.
Professional politics and politicians are probably neither worse nor
better--barring their pretensions--than other lines of human endeavor. The
play actor must be agreeable on the stage of the playhouse; the politician
on the highways and the hustings, which constitute his playhouse--all the
world a stage--neither to be seriously blamed for the dissimulation which,
being an asset, becomes, as it were, a second nature.
The men who between 1850 and 1861 might have saved the Union and averted
the War of Sections were on either side professional politicians, with here
and there an unselfish, far-seeing, patriotic man, whose admonitions were
not heeded by the people ranging on opposing sides of party lines. The two
most potential of the party leaders were Mr. Davis and Mr. Seward. The
South might have seen and known that the one hope of the institution of
slavery lay in the Union. However it ended, disunion led to abolition. The
world--the whole trend of modern thought--was set against slavery. But
politics, based on party feeling, is a game of blindman's buff. And
then--here I show myself a son of Scotland--there is a destiny. "What is to
be," says the predestinarian Mother Goose, "will be, though it never come
to pass."
That was surely the logic of the irrepressible conflict--only it did come
to pass--and for four years millions of people, the most homogeneous,
practical and intelligent, fought to a finish a fight over a quiddity; both
devoted to liberty, order and law, neither seeking any real change in the
character of its organic contract.
Human nature remains ever the same. These days are very like those days. We
have had fifty years of a restored Union. The sectional fires have quite
gone out. Yet behold the schemes of revolution claiming the regenerative.
Most of them call themselves the "uplift!"
Let us agree at once that all government is more or less a failure; society
as fraudulent as the satirists describe it; yet, when we turn to the
uplift--particularly the professional uplift--what do we find but the same
old tunes, hypocrisy and empiricism posing as "friends of the people,"
preaching the pussy gospel of "sweetness and light?"
"Words, words, words," says Hamlet. Even as veteran writers for the press
have come through disheartening experience to a realizing sense of the
futility of printer's ink must our academic pundits begin to suspect the
futility of art and letters. Words however cleverly writ on paper are after
all but words. "In a nation of blind men," we are told, "the one-eyed man
is king." In a nation of undiscriminating voters the noise of the agitator
is apt to drown the voice of the statesman. We have been teaching everybody
to read, nobody to think; and as a consequence--the rule of numbers the
law of the land, partyism in the saddle--legislation, state and Federal,
becomes largely a matter of riding to hounds and horns. All this, which was
true in the fifties, is true to-day.
Under the pretense of "liberalizing" the Government the politicians are
sacrificing its organic character to whimsical experimentation; its checks
and balances wisely designed to promote and protect liberty are being
loosened by schemes of reform more or less visionary; while nowhere do we
find intelligence enlightened by experience, and conviction supported by
self-control, interposing to save the representative system of the
Constitution from the onward march of the proletariat.
One cynic tells us that "A statesman is a politician who is dead," and
another cynic varies the epigram to read "A politician out of a job."
Patriotism cries "God give us men," but the parties say "Give us votes
and offices," and Congress proceeds to create a commission. Thus
responsibilities are shirked and places are multiplied.
Assuming, since many do, that the life of nations is mortal even as is the
life of man--in all things of growth and decline assimilating--has not our
world reached the top of the acclivity, and pausing for a moment may it not
be about to take the downward course into another abyss of collapse and
oblivion?
The miracles of electricity the last word of science, what is left for
man to do? With wireless telegraphy, the airplane and the automobile
annihilating time and space, what else? Turning from the material to the
ethical it seems of the very nature of the human species to meddle and
muddle. On every hand we see the organization of societies for making men
and women over again according to certain fantastic images existing in
the minds of the promoters. "_Mon Dieu_!" exclaimed the visiting
Frenchman. "Fifty religions and only one soup!" Since then both the soups
and the religions have multiplied until there is scarce a culinary or moral
conception which has not some sect or club to represent it. The uplift is
the keynote of these.
Chapter the Third
The Inauguration of Lincoln--I Quit Washington and Return to
Tennessee--A Run-a-bout with Forest--Through the Federal Lines and a
Dangerous Adventure--Good Luck at Memphis
I
It may have been Louis the Fifteenth, or it may have been Madame de
Pompadour, who said, "After me the deluge;" but whichever it was, very much
that thought was in Mr. Buchanan's mind in 1861 as the time for his exit
from the White House approached. At the North there had been a political
ground-swell; at the South, secession, half accomplished by the Gulf
States, yawned in the Border States. Curiously enough, very few believed
that war was imminent.
As a reporter for the States I met Mr. Lincoln immediately on his arrival
in Washington. He came in unexpectedly ahead of the hour announced, to
escape, as was given out, a well-laid plan to assassinate him as he passed
through Baltimore. I did not believe at the time, and I do not believe now,
that there was any real ground for this apprehension.
All through that winter there had been a deal of wild talk. One story had
it that Mr. Buchanan was to be kidnapped and made off with so that Vice
President Breckenridge might succeed and, acting as _de facto_
President, throw the country into confusion and revolution, defeating the
inauguration of Lincoln and the coming in of the Republicans. It was a
figment of drink and fancy. There was never any such scheme. If there had
been Breckenridge would not have consented to be party to it. He was a man
of unusual mental as well as personal dignity and both temperamentally and
intellectually a thorough conservative.
I had been engaged by Mr. L.A. Gobright, the agent of what became later the
Associated Press, to help with the report of the inauguration ceremonies
the 4th of March, 1861, and in the discharge of this duty I kept as close
to Mr. Lincoln as I could get, following after him from the senate chamber
to the east portico of the capitol and standing by his side whilst he
delivered his inaugural address.
Perhaps I shall not be deemed prolix if I dwell with some particularity
upon an occasion so historic. I had first encountered the newly elected
President the afternoon of the day in the early morning of which he had
arrived in Washington. It was a Saturday, I think. He came to the capitol
under the escort of Mr. Seward, and among the rest I was presented to him.
His appearance did not impress me as fantastically as it had impressed some
others. I was familiar with the Western type, and whilst Mr. Lincoln was
not an Adonis, even after prairie ideals, there was about him a dignity
that commanded respect.
I met him again the next Monday forenoon in his apartment at Willard's
Hotel as he was preparing to start to his inauguration, and was struck by
his unaffected kindness, for I came with a matter requiring his attention.
This was, in point of fact, to get from him a copy of the inauguration
speech for the Associated Press. I turned it over to Ben Perley Poore, who,
like myself, was assisting Mr. Gobright. The President that was about to
be seemed entirely self-possessed; not a sign of nervousness, and very
obliging. As I have said, I accompanied the cortège that passed from the
senate chamber to the east portico. When Mr. Lincoln removed his hat to
face the vast throng in front and below, I extended my hand to take it,
but Judge Douglas, just behind me, reached over my outstretched arm and
received it, holding it during the delivery of the address. I stood just
near enough the speaker's elbow not to obstruct any gestures he might make,
though he made but few; and then I began to get a suspicion of the power of
the man.
He delivered that inaugural address as if he had been delivering inaugural
addresses all his life. Firm, resonant, earnest, it announced the coming of
a man, of a leader of men; and in its tone and style the gentlemen whom he
had invited to become members of his political family--each of whom thought
himself a bigger man than his chief--might have heard the voice and seen
the hand of one born to rule. Whether they did or not, they very soon
ascertained the fact. From the hour Abraham Lincoln crossed the threshold
of the White House to the hour he went thence to his death, there was not
a moment when he did not dominate the political and military situation and
his official subordinates. The idea that he was overtopped at any time by
anybody is contradicted by all that actually happened.
I was a young Democrat and of course not in sympathy with Mr. Lincoln or
his opinions. Judge Douglas, however, had taken the edge off my hostility.
He had said to me upon his return in triumph to Washington after the famous
Illinois campaign of 1868: "Lincoln is a good man; in fact, a great man,
and by far the ablest debater I have ever met," and now the newcomer began
to verify this opinion both in his private conversation and in his public
attitude.
II
I had been an undoubting Union boy. Neither then nor afterward could I be
fairly classified as a Secessionist. Circumstance rather than conviction or
predilection threw me into the Confederate service, and, being in, I went
through with it.
The secession leaders I held in distrust; especially Yancey, Mason,
Slidell, Benjamin and Iverson, Jefferson Davis and Isham G. Harris were not
favorites of mine. Later along I came into familiar association with
most of them, and relations were established which may be described as
confidential and affectionate. Lamar and I were brought together oddly
enough in 1869 by Carl Schurz, and thenceforward we were the most devoted
friends. Harris and I fell together in 1862 in the field, first with
Forrest and later with Johnston and Hood, and we remained as brothers to
the end, when he closed a great career in the upper house of Congress, and
by Republican votes, though he was a Democrat, as president of the Senate.
He continued in the Governorship of Tennessee through the war. He at no
time lost touch with the Tennessee troops, and though not always in the
field, never missed a forward movement. In the early spring of 1864, just
before the famous Johnston-Sherman campaign opened, General Johnston asked
him to go around among the boys and "stir 'em up a bit." The Governor
invited me to ride with him. Together we visited every sector in the army.
Threading the woods of North Georgia on this round, if I heard it once I
heard it fifty times shouted from a distant clearing: "Here comes Gov-ner
Harris, fellows; g'wine to be a fight." His appearance at the front had
always preceded and been long ago taken as a signal for battle.
[Illustration: John Bell of Tennessee--In 1860 Presidential Candidate
"Union Party"--"Bell and Everett" Ticket.]
My being a Washington correspondent of the Philadelphia Press and having
lived since childhood at Willard's Hotel, where the Camerons also lived,
will furnish the key to my becoming an actual and active rebel. A few days
after the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln, Colonel Forney came to my quarters
and, having passed the time of day, said: "The Secretary of War wishes you
to be at the department to-morrow morning as near nine o'clock as you can
make it."
"What does he want, Colonel Forney?" I asked.
"He is going to offer you the position of private secretary to the
Secretary of War, with the rank of lieutenant colonel, and I am very
desirous that you accept it."
He went away leaving me rather upset. I did not sleep very soundly that
night. "So," I argued to myself, "it has come to this, that Forney and
Cameron, lifelong enemies, have made friends and are going to rob the
Government--one clerk of the House, the other Secretary of War--and I, a
mutual choice, am to be the confidential middle man." I still had a home in
Tennessee and I rose from my bed, resolved to go there.
I did not keep the proposed appointment for next day. As soon as I could
make arrangements I quitted Washington and went to Tennessee, still
unchanged in my preconceptions. I may add, since they were verified by
events, that I have not modified them from that day to this.
I could not wholly believe with either extreme. I had perpetrated no wrong,
but in my small way had done my best for the Union and against secession. I
would go back to my books and my literary ambitions and let the storm blow
over. It could not last very long; the odds against the South were too
great. Vain hope! As well expect a chip on the surface of the ocean to lie
quiet as a lad of twenty-one in those days to keep out of one or the other
camp. On reaching home I found myself alone. The boys were all gone to the
front. The girls were--well, they were all crazy. My native country was
about to be invaded. Propinquity. Sympathy. So, casting opinions to the
winds in I went on feeling. And that is how I became a rebel, a case of
"first endure and then embrace," because I soon got to be a pretty good
rebel and went the limit, changing my coat as it were, though not my better
judgment, for with a gray jacket on my back and ready to do or die, I
retained my belief that secession was treason, that disunion was the height
of folly and that the South was bound to go down in the unequal strife.
I think now, as an academic proposition, that, in the doctrine of
secession, the secession leaders had a debatable, if not a logical case;
but I also think that if the Gulf States had been allowed to go out by
tacit consent they would very soon have been back again seeking readmission
to the Union.
Man proposes and God disposes. The ways of Deity to man are indeed past
finding out. Why, the long and dreadful struggle of a kindred people, the
awful bloodshed and havoc of four weary years, leaving us at the close
measurably where we were at the beginning, is one of the mysteries which
should prove to us that there is a world hereafter, since no great creative
principle could produce one with so dire, with so short a span and nothing
beyond.
III
The change of parties wrought by the presidential election of 1860
and completed by the coming in of the Republicans in 1861 was indeed
revolutionary. When Mr. Lincoln had finished his inaugural address and
the crowd on the east portico began to disperse, I reentered the rotunda
between Mr. Reverdy Johnson, of Maryland, and Mr. John Bell, of Tennessee,
two old friends of my family, and for a little we sat upon a bench, they
discussing the speech we had just heard.
Both were sure there would be no war. All would be well, they thought, each
speaking kindly of Mr. Lincoln. They were among the most eminent men of the
time, I a boy of twenty-one; but to me war seemed a certainty. Recalling
the episode, I have often realized how the intuitions of youth outwit the
wisdom and baffle the experience of age.
I at once resigned my snug sinecure in the Interior Department and, closing
my accounts of every sort, was presently ready to turn my back upon
Washington and seek adventures elsewhere.
They met me halfway and came in plenty. I tried staff duty with General
Polk, who was making an expedition into Western Kentucky. In a few weeks
illness drove me into Nashville, where I passed the next winter in
desultory newspaper work. Then Nashville fell, and, as I was making my way
out of town afoot and trudging the Murfreesboro pike, Forrest, with his
squadron just escaped from Fort Donelson, came thundering by, and I leaped
into an empty saddle. A few days later Forrest, promoted to brigadier
general, attached me to his staff, and the next six months it was mainly
guerilla service, very much to my liking. But Fate, if not Nature, had
decided that I was a better writer than fighter, and the Bank of Tennessee
having bought a newspaper outfit at Chattanooga, I was sent there to edit
The Rebel--my own naming--established as the organ of the Tennessee state
government. I made it the organ of the army.
It is not the purpose of these pages to retell the well-known story of the
war. My life became a series of ups and downs--mainly downs--the word being
from day to day to fire and fall back; in the Johnston-Sherman campaign, I
served as chief of scouts; then as an aid to General Hood through the siege
of Atlanta, sharing the beginning of the chapter of disasters that befell
that gallant soldier and his army. I was spared the last and worst of these
by a curious piece of special duty, taking me elsewhere, to which I was
assigned in the autumn of 1864 by the Confederate government.
This involved a foreign journey. It was no less than to go to England to
sell to English buyers some hundred thousand bales of designated cotton to
be thus rescued from spoliation, acting under the supervision and indeed
the orders of the Confederate fiscal agency at Liverpool.
Of course I was ripe for this; but it proved a bigger job than I had
conceived or dreamed. The initial step was to get out of the country. But
how? That was the question. To run the blockade had been easy enough a
few months earlier. All our ports were now sealed by Federal cruisers and
gunboats. There was nothing for it but to slip through the North and to get
either a New York or a Canadian boat. This involved chances and disguises.
IV
In West Tennessee, not far from Memphis, lived an aunt of mine. Thither I
repaired. My plan was to get on a Mississippi steamer calling at one of
the landings for wood. This proved impracticable. I wandered many days and
nights, rather ill mounted, in search of some kind--any kind--of exit,
when one afternoon, quite worn out, I sat by a log heap in a comfortable
farmhouse. It seemed that I was at the end of my tether; I did not know
what to do.
Presently there was an arrival--a brisk gentleman right out of Memphis,
which I then learned was only ten miles distant--bringing with him a
morning paper. In this I saw appended to various army orders the name of
"N.B. Dana, General Commanding."
That set me to thinking. Was not Dana the name of a certain captain, a
stepson of Congressman Peaslee, of New Hampshire, who had lived with us at
Willard's Hotel--and were there not two children, Charley and Mamie, and a
dear little mother, and--I had been listening to the talk of the newcomer.
He was a licensed cotton buyer with a pass to come and go at will through
the lines, and was returning next day.
"I want to get into Memphis--I am a nephew of Mrs. General Dana. Can you
take me in?" I said to this person.
After some hesitation he consented to try, it being agreed that my mount
and outfit should be his if he got me through; no trade if he failed.
Clearly the way ahead was brightening. I soon ascertained that I was with
friends, loyal Confederates. Then I told them who I was, and all became
excitement for the next day's adventure.
We drove down to the Federal outpost. Crenshaw--that was the name of the
cotton buyer--showed his pass to the officer in command, who then turned to
me. "Captain," I said, "I have no pass, but I am a nephew of Mrs. General
Dana. Can you not pass me in without a pass?" He was very polite. It was a
chain picket, he said; his orders were very strict, and so on.
"Well," I said, "suppose I were a member of your own command and were run
in here by guerillas. What do you think would it be your duty to do?"
"In that case," he answered, "I should send you to headquarters with a
guard."
"Good!" said I. "Can't you send me to headquarters with a guard?"
He thought a moment. Then he called a cavalryman from the outpost.
"Britton," he said, "show this gentleman in to General Dana's
headquarters."
Crenshaw lashed his horse and away we went. "That boy thinks he is a guide,
not a guard," said he. "You are all right. We can easily get rid of him."
This proved true. We stopped by a saloon and bought a bottle of whisky.
When we reached headquarters the lad said, "Do you gentlemen want me any
more?" We did not. Then we gave him the bottle of whisky and he disappeared
round the corner. "Now you are safe," said Crenshaw. "Make tracks."
But as I turned away and out of sight I began to consider the situation.
Suppose that picket on the outpost reported to the provost marshal general
that he had passed a relative of Mrs. Dana? What then? Provost guard.
Drumhead court-martial. Shot at daylight. It seemed best to play out the
hand as I had dealt it. After all, I could make a case if I faced it out.
The guard at the door refused me access to General Dana. Driven by a nearby
hackman to the General's residence, and, boldly asking for Mrs. Dana, I
was more successful. I introduced myself as a teacher of music seeking
to return to my friends in the North, working in a word about the old
Washington days, not forgetting "Charley" and "Mamie." The dear little
woman was heartily responsive. Both were there, including a pretty girl
from Philadelphia, and she called them down. "Here is your old friend,
Henry Waterman," she joyfully exclaimed. Then guests began to arrive. It
was a reception evening. My hope fell. Some one would surely recognize me.
Presently a gentleman entered, and Mrs. Dana said: "Colonel Meehan, this is
my particular friend, Henry Waterman, who has been teaching music out in
the country, and wants to go up the river. You will give him a pass, I am
sure." It was the provost marshal, who answered, "certainly." Now was my
time for disappearing. But Mrs. Dana would not listen to this. General Dana
would never forgive her if she let me go. Besides, there was to be a supper
and a dance. I sat down again very much disconcerted. The situation was
becoming awkward. Then Mrs. Dana spoke. "You say you have been teaching
music. What is your instrument?" Saved! "The piano," I answered. The girls
escorted me to the rear drawing-room. It was a new Steinway Grand, just
set up, and I played for my life. If the black bombazine covering my gray
uniform did not break, all would be well. I was having a delightfully good
time, the girls on either hand, when Mrs. Dana, still enthusiastic, ran
in and said, "General Dana is here. Remembers you perfectly. Come and see
him."
He stood by a table, tall, sardonic, and as I approached he put out his
hand and said: "You have grown a bit, Henry, my boy, since I saw you last.
How did you leave my friend Forrest?"
I was about making some awkward reply, when, the room already filling up,
he said:
"We have some friends for supper. I am glad you are here. Mamie, my
daughter, take Mr. Watterson to the table!"
Lord! That supper! Canvasback! Terrapin! Champagne! The general had seated
me at his right. Somewhere toward the close those expressive gray eyes
looked at me keenly, and across his wine glass he said:
"I think I understand this. You want to get up the river. You want to see
your mother. Have you money enough to carry you through? If you have not
don't hesitate, for whatever you need I will gladly let you have."
I thanked him. I had quite enough. All was well. We had more music and some
dancing. At a late hour he called the provost marshal.
"Meehan," said he, "take this dangerous young rebel round to the hotel,
register him as Smith, Brown, or something, and send him with a pass up the
river by the first steamer." I was in luck, was I not?
But I made no impression on those girls. Many years after, meeting Mamie
Dana, as the wife of an army officer at Fortress Monroe, I related the
Memphis incident. She did not in the least recall it.
V
I had one other adventure during the war that may be worth telling. It was
in 1862. Forrest took it into his inexperienced fighting head to make a
cavalry attack upon a Federal stockade, and, repulsed with considerable
loss, the command had to disperse--there were not more than two hundred of
us--in order to escape capture by the newly-arrived reinforcements that
swarmed about. We were to rendezvous later at a certain point. Having some
time to spare, and being near the family homestead at Beech Grove, I put in
there.
It was midnight when I reached my destination. I had been erroneously
informed that the Union Army was on the retreat--quite gone from the
neighborhood; and next day, believing the coast was clear, I donned a
summer suit and with a neighbor boy who had been wounded at Shiloh and
invalided home, rode over to visit some young ladies. We had scarcely been
welcomed and were taking a glass of wine when, looking across the lawn, we
saw that the place was being surrounded by a body of blue-coats. The story
of their departure had been a mistake. They were not all gone.
There was no chance of escape. We were placed in a hollow square and
marched across country into camp. Before we got there I had ascertained
that they were Indianians, and I was further led rightly to surmise what we
called in 1860 Douglas Democrats.
My companion, a husky fellow, who looked and was every inch a soldier, was
first questioned by the colonel in command. His examination was brief. He
said he was as good a rebel as lived, that he was only waiting for his
wound to heal to get back into the Confederate Army, and that if they
wanted to hang him for a spy to go ahead.
I was aghast. It was not he that was in danger of hanging, but myself, a
soldier in citizen's apparel within the enemy's lines. The colonel turned
to me. With what I took for a sneer he said:
"I suppose you are a good Union man?" This offered me a chance.
"That depends upon what you call a good Union man," I answered. "I used to
be a very good Union man--a Douglas Democrat--and I am not conscious of
having changed my political opinions."
That softened him and we had an old-fashioned, friendly talk about the
situation, in which I kept the Douglas Democratic end of it well to the
fore. He, too, had been a Douglas Democrat. I soon saw that it was my
companion and not myself whom they were after. Presently Colonel Shook,
that being the commandant's name, went into the adjacent stockade and
the boys about began to be hearty and sympathetic. I made them a regular
Douglas Democratic speech. They brought some "red licker" and I asked for
some sugar for a toddy, not failing to cite the familiar Sut Lovingood
saying that "there were about seventeen round the door who said they'd
take sugar in their'n." The drink warmed me to my work, making me quicker,
if not bolder, in invention. Then the colonel not reappearing as soon as I
hoped he would, for all along my fear was the wires, I went to him.
"Colonel Shook," I said, "you need not bother about this friend of mine. He
has no real idea of returning to the Confederate service. He is teaching
school over here at Beech Grove and engaged to be married to one of
the--girls. If you carry him off a prisoner he will be exchanged back into
the fighting line, and we make nothing by it. There is a hot luncheon
waiting for us at the ----'s. Leave him to me and I will be answerable."
Then I left him.
Directly he came out and said: "I may be doing wrong, and don't feel
entirely sure of my ground, but I am going to let you gentlemen go."
We thanked him and made off amid the cheery good-bys of the assembled
blue-coats.
No lunch for us. We got to our horses, rode away, and that night I was at
our rendezvous to tell the tale to those of my comrades who had arrived
before me.
Colonel Shook and I met after the war at a Grand Army reunion where I was
billed to speak and to which he introduced me, relating the incident
and saying, among other things: "I do believe that when he told me near
Wartrace that day twenty years ago that he was a good Union man he told at
least half the truth."
Chapter the Fourth
I Go to London--Am Introduced to a Notable Set--Huxley, Spencer, Mill
and Tyndall--Artemus Ward Comes to Town--The Savage Club
I
The fall of Atlanta after a siege of nearly two months was, in the opinion
of thoughtful people, the sure precursor of the fall of the doomed
Confederacy. I had an affectionate regard for General Hood, but it was my
belief that neither he nor any other soldier could save the day, and
being out of commission and having no mind for what I conceived aimless
campaigning through another winter--especially an advance into Tennessee
upon Nashville--I wrote to an old friend of mine, who owned the Montgomery
Mail, asking for a job. He answered that if I would come right along and
take the editorship of the paper he would make me a present of half of
it--a proposal so opportune and tempting that forty-eight hours later saw
me in the capital of Alabama.
I was accompanied by my fidus Achates, Albert Roberts. The morning after
our arrival, by chance I came across a printed line which advertised a room
and board for two "single gentlemen," with the curious affix for those
times, "references will be given and required." This latter caught me.
When I rang the visitors' bell of a pretty dwelling upon one of the nearby
streets a distinguished gentleman in uniform came to the door, and,
acquainted with my business, he said, "Ah, that is an affair of my wife,"
and invited me within.
He was obviously English. Presently there appeared a beautiful lady,
likewise English and as obviously a gentlewoman, and an hour later my
friend Roberts and I moved in. The incident proved in many ways fateful.
The military gentleman proved to be Doctor Scott, the post surgeon. He
was, when we came to know him, the most interesting of men, a son of that
Captain Scott who commanded Byron's flagship at Missolonghi in 1823; had
as a lad attended the poet and he in his last illness and been in at the
death, seeing the club foot when the body was prepared for burial. His
wife was adorable. There were two girls and two boys. To make a long story
short, Albert Roberts married one of the daughters, his brother the other;
the lads growing up to be successful and distinguished men--one a naval
admiral, the other a railway president. When, just after the war, I was
going abroad, Mrs. Scott said: "I have a brother living in London to whom
I will be glad to give you a letter."
II
Upon the deck of the steamer bound from New York to London direct, as
we, my wife and I newly married, were taking a last look at the receding
American shore, there appeared a gentleman who seemed by the cut of his jib
startlingly French. We had under our escort a French governess returning to
Paris. In a twinkle she and this gentleman had struck up an acquaintance,
and much to my displeasure she introduced him to me as "Monsieur Mahoney."
I was somewhat mollified when later we were made acquainted with Madame
Mahoney.
I was not at all preconceived in his favor, nor did Monsieur Mahoney, upon
nearer approach, conciliate my simple taste. In person, manners and apparel
he was quite beyond me. Mrs. Mahoney, however, as we soon called her, was a
dear, whole-souled, traveled, unaffected New England woman. But Monsieur!
Lord! There was no holding him at arm's length. He brooked not resistance.
I was wearing a full beard. He said it would never do, carried me perforce
below, and cut it as I have worn it ever since. The day before we were to
dock he took me aside and said:
"Mee young friend"--he had a brogue which thirty years in Algiers, where he
had been consul, and a dozen in Paris as a gentleman of leisure, had not
wholly spoiled--"Mee young friend, I observe that you are shy of strangers,
but my wife and I have taken a shine to you and the 'Princess'," as he
called Mrs. Watterson, "and if you will allow us, we can be of some sarvis
to you when we get to town."
Certainly there was no help for it. I was too ill of the long crossing to
oppose him. At Blackwall we took the High Level for Fenchurch Street, at
Fenchurch Street a cab for the West End--Mr. Mahoney bossing the job--and
finally, in most comfortable and inexpensive lodgings, we were settled in
Jermyn Street. The Mahoneys were visiting Lady Elmore, widow of a famous
surgeon and mother of the President of the Royal Academy. Thus we were
introduced to quite a distinguished artistic set.
It was great. It was glorious. At last we were in London--the dream of my
literary ambitions. I have since lived much in this wondrous city and in
many parts of it between Hyde Park Corner, the heart of May Fair, to the
east end of Bloomsbury under the very sound of Bow Bells. All the way as
it were from Tyburn Tree that was, and the Marble Arch that is, to Charing
Cross and the Hay Market. This were not to mention casual sojourns along
Piccadilly and the Strand.
In childhood I was obsessed by the immensity, the atmosphere and the
mystery of London. Its nomenclature embedded itself in my fancy; Hounsditch
and Shoreditch, Billingsgate and Blackfriars; Bishopgate, within, and
Bishopgate, without; Threadneedle Street and Wapping-Old-Stairs; the Inns
of Court where Jarndyce struggled with Jarndyce, and the taverns where the
Mark Tapleys, the Captain Costigans and the Dolly Vardens consorted.
Alike in winter fog and summer haze, I grew to know and love it, and those
that may be called its dramatis personae, especially its tatterdemalions,
the long procession led by Jack Sheppard, Dick Turpin and Jonathan Wild
the Great. Inevitably I sought their haunts--and they were not all gone in
those days; the Bull-and-Gate in Holborn, whither Mr. Tom Jones repaired on
his arrival in town, and the White Hart Tavern, where Mr. Pickwick fell in
with Mr. Sam Weller; the regions about Leicester Fields and Russell Square
sacred to the memory of Captain Booth and the lovely Amelia and Becky
Sharp; where Garrick drank tea with Dr. Johnson and Henry Esmond tippled
with Sir Richard Steele. There was yet a Pump Court, and many places along
Oxford Street where Mantalini and De Quincy loitered: and Covent Garden and
Drury Lane. Evans' Coffee House, or shall I say the Cave of Harmony, and
The Cock and the Cheshire Cheese were near at hand for refreshment in the
agreeable society of Daniel Defoe and Joseph Addison, with Oliver Goldsmith
and Dick Swiveller and Colonel Newcome to clink ghostly glasses amid the
punch fumes and tobacco smoke. In short I knew London when it was still Old
London--the knowledge of Temple Bar and Cheapside--before the vandal horde
of progress and the pickaxe of the builder had got in their nefarious work.
III
Not long after we began our sojourn in London, I recurred--by chance, I am
ashamed to say--to Mrs. Scott's letter of introduction to her brother. The
address read "Mr. Thomas H. Huxley, School of Mines, Jermyn Street." Why,
it was but two or three blocks away, and being so near I called, not
knowing just who Mr. Thomas H. Huxley might be.
I was conducted to a dark, stuffy little room. The gentleman who met me was
exceedingly handsome and very agreeable. He greeted me cordially and we
had some talk about his relatives in America. Of course my wife and I were
invited at once to dinner. I was a little perplexed. There was no one to
tell me about Huxley, or in what way he might be connected with the School
of Mines.
It was a good dinner. There sat at table a gentleman by the name of Tyndall
and another by the name of Mill--of neither I had ever heard--but there was
still another of the name of Spencer, whom I fancied must be a literary
man, for I recalled having reviewed a clever book on Education some four
years agone by a writer of that name; a certain Herbert Spencer, whom I
rightly judged might he be.
The dinner, I repeat, was a very good dinner indeed--the Huxleys, I took
it, must be well to do--the company agreeable; a bit pragmatic, however,
I thought. The gentleman by the name of Spencer said he loved music and
wished to hear Mrs. Watterson sing, especially Longfellow's Rainy Day, and
left the others of us--Huxley, Mill, Tyndall and myself--at table. Finding
them a little off on the Irish question as well as American affairs, I
set them right as to both with much particularity and a great deal of
satisfaction to myself.
Whatever Huxley's occupation, it turned out that he had at least one
book-publishing acquaintance, Mr. Alexander Macmillan, to whom he
introduced me next day, for I had brought with me a novel--the great
American romance--too good to be wasted on New York, Philadelphia or
Boston, but to appear simultaneously in England and the United States,
to be translated, of course, into French, Italian and German. This was
actually accepted. It was held for final revision.
We were to pass the winter in Italy. An event, however, called me suddenly
home. Politics and journalism knocked literature sky high, and the
novel--it was entitled "One Story's Good Till Another Is Told"--was laid by
and quite forgotten. Some twenty years later, at a moment when I was being
lashed from one end of the line to the other, my wife said:
"Let us drop the nasty politics and get back to literature." She had
preserved the old manuscript, two thousand pages of it.
"Fetch it," I said.
She brought it with effulgent pride. Heavens! The stuff it was! Not a
gleam, never a radiance. I had been teaching myself to write--I had been
writing for the English market--perpendicular! The Lord has surely been
good to me. If the "boys" had ever got a peep at that novel, I had been
lost indeed!
IV
Yea, verily we were in London. Presently Artemus Ward and "the show"
arrived in town. He took a lodging over an apothecary's just across the way
from Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, where he was to lecture. We had been the
best of friends, were near of an age, and only round-the-corner apart we
became from the first inseparable. I introduced him to the distinguished
scientific set into which chance had thrown me, and he introduced me to a
very different set that made a revel of life at the Savage Club.
I find by reference to some notes jotted down at the time that the last I
saw of him was the evening of the 21st of December, 1866. He had dined with
my wife and myself, and, accompanied by Arthur Sketchley, who had dropped
in after dinner, he bade us good-by and went for his nightly grind, as
he called it. We were booked to take our departure the next morning.
His condition was pitiable. He was too feeble to walk alone, and was
continually struggling to breathe freely. His surgeon had forbidden the use
of wine or liquor of any sort. Instead he drank quantities of water, eating
little and taking no exercise at all. Nevertheless, he stuck to his lecture
and contrived to keep up appearances before the crowds that flocked to hear
him, and even in London his critical state of health was not suspected.
Early in September, when I had parted from him to go to Paris, I left him
methodically and industriously arranging for his début. He had brought some
letters, mainly to newspaper people, and was already making progress toward
what might be called the interior circles of the press, which are so
essential to the success of a newcomer in London. Charles Reade and Andrew
Haliday became zealous friends. It was to the latter that he owed his
introduction to the Savage Club. Here he soon made himself at home. His
manners, even his voice, were half English, albeit he possessed a
most engaging disposition--a ready tact and keen discernment, very
un-English,--and these won him an efficient corps of claquers and backers
throughout the newspapers and periodicals of the metropolis. Thus his
success was assured from the first.
The raw November evening when he opened at Egyptian Hall the room was
crowded with an audience of literary men and women, great and small, from
Swinburne and Edmund Yates to the trumpeters and reporters of the morning
papers. The next day most of these contained glowing accounts. The Times
was silent, but four days later The Thunderer, seeing how the wind blew,
came out with a column of eulogy, and from this onward, each evening proved
a kind of ovation. Seats were engaged for a week in advance. Up and down
Piccadilly, from St. James Church to St. James Street, carriages bearing
the first arms in the kingdom were parked night after night; and the
evening of the 21st of December, six weeks after, there was no falling off.
The success was complete. As to an American, London had never seen the
like.
All this while the poor author of the sport was slowly dying. The demands
upon his animal spirits at the Savage Club, the bodily fatigue of "getting
himself up to it," the "damnable iteration" of the lecture itself, wore him
out. George, his valet, whom he had brought from America, had finally to
lift him about his bedroom like a child. His quarters in Picadilly, as I
have said, were just opposite the Hall, but he could not go backward and
forward without assistance. It was painful in the extreme to see the man
who was undergoing tortures behind the curtain step lightly before the
audience amid a burst of merriment, and for more than an hour sustain the
part of jester, tossing his cap and jingling his bells, a painted death's
head, for he had to rouge his face to hide the pallor.
His buoyancy forsook him. He was occasionally nervous and fretful. The fog,
he declared, felt like a winding sheet, enwrapping and strangling him. At
one of his entertainments he made a grim, serio-comic allusion to this.
"But," cried he as he came off the stage, "that was not a hit, was it? The
English are scary about death. I'll have to cut it out."
He had become a contributor to Punch, a lucky rather than smart business
stroke, for it was not of his own initiation. He did not continue his
contributions after he began to appear before the public, and the
discontinuance was made the occasion of some ill-natured remarks in certain
American papers, which very much wounded him. They were largely circulated
and credited at the time, the charge being that Messrs. Bradbury and Evans,
the publishers of the English charivari, had broken with him because the
English would not have him. The truth is that their original proposal was
made to him, not by him to them, the price named being fifteen guineas a
letter. He asked permission to duplicate the arrangement with some New York
periodical, so as to secure an American copyright. This they refused. I
read the correspondence at the time. "Our aim," they said, "in making
the engagement, had reference to our own circulation in the United States,
which exceeds twenty-seven thousand weekly."
I suggested to Artemus that he enter his book, "Artemus Ward in London,"
in advance, and he did write to Oakey Hall, his New York lawyer, to
that effect. Before he received an answer from Hall he got Carleton's
advertisement announcing the book. Considering this a piratical design on
the part of Carleton, he addressed that enterprising publisher a savage
letter, but the matter was ultimately cleared up to his satisfaction, for
he said just before we parted: "It was all a mistake about Carleton. I did
him an injustice and mean to ask his pardon. He has behaved very handsomely
to me." Then the letters reappeared in Punch.
V
Whatever may be thought of them on this side of the Atlantic, their success
in England was undeniable. They were more talked about than any current
literary matter; never a club gathering or dinner party at which they were
not discussed. There did seem something both audacious and grotesque in
this ruthless Yankee poking in among the revered antiquities of Britain, so
that the beef-eating British themselves could not restrain their laughter.
They took his jokes in excellent part. The letters on the Tower and Chawsir
were palpable hits, and it was generally agreed that Punch had contained
nothing better since the days of Yellow-plush. This opinion was not
confined to the man in the street. It was shared by the high-brows of the
reviews and the appreciative of society, and gained Artemus the entrée
wherever he cared to go.
Invitations pursued him and he was even elected to two or three fashionable
clubs. But he had a preference for those which were less conventional. His
admission to the Garrick, which had been at first "laid over," affords an
example of London club fastidiousness. The gentleman who proposed him used
his pseudonym, Artemus Ward, instead of his own name, Charles F. Browne. I
had the pleasure of introducing him to Mr. Alexander Macmillan, the famous
book publisher of Oxford and Cambridge, a leading member of the Garrick. We
dined together at the Garrick clubhouse, when the matter was brought up and
explained. The result was that Charles F. Browne was elected at the next
meeting, where Artemus Ward, had been made to stand aside.
Before Christmas, Artemus received invitations from distinguished people,
nobility and gentry as well as men of letters, to spend the week-end with
them. But he declined them all. He needed his vacation, he said, for rest.
He had neither the strength nor the spirit for the season.
Yet was he delighted with the English people and with English life. His was
one of those receptive natures which enjoy whatever is wholesome and sunny.
In spite of his bodily pain, he entertained a lively hope of coming out of
it in the spring, and did not realize his true condition. He merely
said, "I have overworked myself, and must lay by or I shall break down
altogether." He meant to remain in London as long as his welcome lasted,
and when he perceived a falling off in his audience, would close his season
and go to the continent. His receipts averaged about three hundred dollars
a night, whilst his expenses were not fifty dollars. "This, mind you," he
used to say, "is in very hard cash, an article altogether superior to that
of my friend Charles Reade."
[Illustration: Artemas Ward]
His idea was to set aside out of his earnings enough to make him
independent, and then to give up "this mountebank business," as he
called it. He had a great respect for scholarly culture and personal
respectability, and thought that if he could get time and health he might
do something "in the genteel comedy line." He had a humorous novel in view,
and a series of more aspiring comic essays than any he had attempted.
Often he alluded to the opening for an American magazine, "not quite so
highfalutin as the Atlantic nor so popular as Harper's." His mind was
beginning to soar above the showman and merrymaker. His manners had always
been captivating. Except for the nervous worry of ill-health, he was the
kind-hearted, unaffected Artemus of old, loving as a girl and liberal as a
prince. He once showed me his daybook in which were noted down over five
hundred dollars lent out in small sums to indigent Americans.
"Why," said I, "you will never get half of it back."
"Of course not," he said, "but do you think I can afford to have a lot of
loose fellows black-guarding me at home because I wouldn't let them have a
sovereign or so over here?"
There was no lack of independence, however, about him. The benefit which he
gave Mrs. Jefferson Davis in New Orleans, which was denounced at the North
as toadying to the Rebels, proceeded from a wholly different motive. He
took a kindly interest in the case because it was represented to him as one
of suffering, and knew very well at the time that his bounty would meet
with detraction.
He used to relate with gusto an interview he once had with Murat Halstead,
who had printed a tart paragraph about him. He went into the office of the
Cincinnati editor, and began in his usual jocose way to ask for the needful
correction. Halstead resented the proffered familiarity, when Artemus told
him flatly, suddenly changing front, that he "didn't care a d--n for the
Commercial, and the whole establishment might go to hell." Next day the
paper appeared with a handsome amende, and the two became excellent
friends. "I have no doubt," said Artemus, "that if I had whined or begged,
I should have disgusted Halstead, and he would have put it to me tighter.
As it was, he concluded that I was not a sneak, and treated me like a
gentleman."
Artemus received many tempting offers from book publishers in London.
Several of the Annuals for 1866-67 contain sketches, some of them
anonymous, written by him, for all of which he was well paid. He wrote for
Fun--the editor of which, Mr. Tom Hood, son of the great humorist, was an
intimate friend--as well as for Punch; his contributions to the former
being printed without his signature. If he had been permitted to remain
until the close of his season, he would have earned enough, with what he
had already, to attain the independence which was his aim and hope. His
best friends in London were Charles Reade, Tom Hood, Tom Robertson, the
dramatist, Charles Mathews, the comedian, Tom Taylor and Arthur Sketchley.
He did not meet Mr. Dickens, though Mr. Andrew Haliday, Dickens' familiar,
was also his intimate. He was much persecuted by lion hunters, and
therefore had to keep his lodgings something of a mystery.
So little is known of Artemus Ward that some biographic particulars may not
in this connection be out of place or lacking in interest.
Charles F. Browne was born at Waterford, Maine, the 15th of July, 1833.
His father was a state senator, a probate judge, and at one time a wealthy
citizen; but at his death, when his famous son was yet a lad, left his
family little or no property. Charles apprenticed himself to a printer, and
served out his time, first in Springfield and then in Boston. In the latter
city he made the acquaintance of Shilaber, Ben Perley Poore, Halpine, and
others, and tried his hand as a "sketchist" for a volume edited by Mrs.
Partington. His early effusions bore the signature of "Chub." From the Hub
he emigrated to the West. At Toledo, Ohio, he worked as a "typo" and later
as a "local" on a Toledo newspaper. Then he went to Cleveland, where as
city editor of the Plain Dealer he began the peculiar vein from which still
later he worked so successfully.
The soubriquet "Artemus Ward," was not taken from the Revolutionary
general. It was suggested by an actual personality. In an adjoining town
to Cleveland there was a snake charmer who called himself Artemus Ward,
an ignorant witling or half-wit, the laughing stock of the countryside.
Browne's first communication over the signature of Artemus Ward purported
to emanate from this person, and it succeeded so well that he kept it up.
He widened the conception as he progressed. It was not long before his
sketches began to be copied and he became a newspaper favorite. He remained
in Cleveland from 1857 to 1860, when he was called to New York to take the
editorship of a venture called Vanity Fair. This died soon after. But
he did not die with it. A year later, in the fall of 1861, he made his
appearance as a lecturer at New London, and met with encouragement. Then he
set out _en tour_, returned to the metropolis, hired a hall and opened
with "the show." Thence onward all went well.
The first money he made was applied to the purchase of the old family
homestead in Maine, which he presented to his mother. The payments on this
being completed, he bought himself a little nest on the Hudson, meaning,
as he said, to settle down and perhaps to marry. But his dreams were not
destined to be fulfilled.
Thus, at the outset of a career from which much was to be expected, a man,
possessed of rare and original qualities of head and heart, sank out of the
sphere in which at that time he was the most prominent figure. There was
then no Mark Twain or Bret Harte. His rivals were such humorists as
Orpheus C. Kerr, Nasby, Asa Hartz, The Fat Contributor, John Happy, Mrs.
Partington, Bill Arp and the like, who are now mostly forgotten.
Artemus Ward wrote little, but he made good and left his mark. Along with
the queer John Phoenix his writings survived the deluge that followed them.
He poured out the wine of life in a limpid stream. It may be fairly said
that he did much to give permanency and respectability to the style
of literature of which he was at once a brilliant illustrator and
illustration. His was a short life indeed, though a merry one, and a sad
death. In a strange land, yet surrounded by admiring friends, about to
reach the coveted independence he had looked forward to so long, he sank to
rest, his dust mingling with that of the great Thomas Hood, alongside of
whom he was laid in Kensal Green.
Chapter the Fifth
Mark Twain--The Original of Colonel Mulberry Sellers--The "Earl of
Durham"--Some Noctes Ambrosianæ--A Joke on Murat Halstead
I
Mark Twain came down to the footlights long after Artemus Ward had passed
from the scene; but as an American humorist with whom during half a century
I was closely intimate and round whom many of my London experiences
revolve, it may be apropos to speak of him next after his elder. There was
not lacking a certain likeness between them.
Samuel L. Clemens and I were connected by a domestic tie, though before
either of us were born the two families on the maternal side had been
neighbors and friends. An uncle of his married an aunt of mine--the
children of this marriage cousins in common to us--albeit, this apart, we
were life-time cronies. He always contended that we were "bloodkin."
Notwithstanding that when Mark Twain appeared east of the Alleghanies and
north of the Blue Ridge he showed the weather-beating of the west, the
bizarre alike of the pilot house and the mining camp very much in evidence,
he came of decent people on both sides of the house. The Clemens and
the Lamptons were of good old English stock. Toward the middle of the
eighteenth century three younger scions of the Manor of Durham migrated
from the County of Durham to Virginia and thence branched out into
Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri.
His mother was the loveliest old aristocrat with a taking drawl, a drawl
that was high-bred and patrician, not rustic and plebeian, which her famous
son inherited. All the women of that ilk were gentlewomen. The literary and
artistic instinct which attained its fruition in him had percolated through
the veins of a long line of silent singers, of poets and painters, unborn
to the world of expression till he arrived upon the scene.
These joint cousins of ours embraced an exceedingly large, varied and
picturesque assortment. Their idiosyncrasies were a constant source of
amusement to us. Just after the successful production of his play, The
Gilded Age, and the uproarious hit of the comedian, Raymond, in the leading
role, I received a letter from him in which he told me he had made in
Colonel Mulberry Sellers a close study of one of these kinsmen and thought
he had drawn him to the life. "But for the love o' God," he said, "don't
whisper it, for he would never understand or forgive me, if he did not
thrash me on sight."
The pathos of the part, and not its comic aspects, had most impressed him.
He designed and wrote it for Edwin Booth. From the first and always he
was disgusted by the Raymond portrayal. Except for its popularity and
money-making, he would have withdrawn it from the stage as, in a fit of
pique, Raymond himself did while it was still packing the theaters.
The original Sellers had partly brought him up and had been very good to
him. A second Don Quixote in appearance and not unlike the knight of La
Mancha in character, it would have been safe for nobody to laugh at James
Lampton, or by the slightest intimation, look or gesture to treat him with
inconsideration, or any proposal of his, however preposterous, with levity.
He once came to visit me upon a public occasion and during a function.
I knew that I must introduce him, and with all possible ceremony, to
my colleagues. He was very queer; tall and peaked, wearing a black,
swallow-tailed suit, shiny with age, and a silk hat, bound with black crepe
to conceal its rustiness, not to indicate a recent death; but his linen as
spotless as new-fallen snow. I had my fears. Happily the company, quite
dazed by the apparition, proved decorous to solemnity, and the kind old
gentleman, pleased with himself and proud of his "distinguished young
kinsman," went away highly gratified.
Not long after this one of his daughters--pretty girls they were, too, and
in charm altogether worthy of their Cousin Sam Clemens--was to be married,
and Sellers wrote me a stately summons, all-embracing, though stiff and
formal, such as a baron of the Middle Ages might have indited to his noble
relative, the field marshal, bidding him bring his good lady and his
retinue and abide within the castle until the festivities were ended,
though in this instance the castle was a suburban cottage scarcely big
enough to accommodate the bridal couple. I showed the bombastic but
hospitable and genuine invitation to the actor Raymond, who chanced to be
playing in Louisville when it reached me. He read it through with care and
reread it.
"Do you know," said he, "it makes me want to cry. That is not the man I am
trying to impersonate at all."
Be sure it was not; for there was nothing funny about the spiritual being
of Mark Twain's Colonel Mulberry Sellers; he was as brave as a lion and as
upright as Sam Clemens himself.
When a very young man, living in a woodland cabin down in the Pennyrile
region of Kentucky, with a wife he adored and two or three small children,
he was so carried away by an unexpected windfall that he lingered overlong
in the nearby village, dispensing a royal hospitality; in point of fact, he
"got on a spree." Two or three days passed before he regained possession of
himself. When at last he reached home, he found his wife ill in bed and the
children nearly starved for lack of food. He said never a word, but walked
out of the cabin, tied himself to a tree, and was wildly horsewhipping
himself when the cries of the frightened family summoned the neighbors
and he was brought to reason. He never touched an intoxicating drop from
that day to his death.
II
Another one of our fantastic mutual cousins was the "Earl of Durham." I
ought to say that Mark Twain and I grew up on old wives' tales of estates
and titles, which, maybe due to a kindred sense of humor in both of us, we
treated with shocking irreverence. It happened some fifty years ago that
there turned up, first upon the plains and afterward in New York and
Washington, a lineal descendant of the oldest of the Virginia Lamptons--he
had somehow gotten hold of or had fabricated a bundle of documents--who
was what a certain famous American would have called a "corker." He wore
a sombrero with a rattlesnake for a band, and a belt with a couple of
six-shooters, and described himself and claimed to be the Earl of Durham.
"He touched me for a tenner the first time I ever saw him," drawled Mark
to me, "and I coughed it up and have been coughing them up, whenever he's
around, with punctuality and regularity."
The "Earl" was indeed a terror, especially when he had been drinking. His
belief in his peerage was as absolute as Colonel Sellers' in his millions.
All he wanted was money enough "to get over there" and "state his case."
During the Tichborne trial Mark Twain and I were in London, and one day he
said to me:
"I have investigated this Durham business down at the Herald's office.
There's nothing to it. The Lamptons passed out of the Demesne of Durham a
hundred years ago. They had long before dissipated the estates. Whatever
the title, it lapsed. The present earldom is a new creation, not the same
family at all. But, I tell you what, if you'll put up five hundred dollars
I'll put up five hundred more, we'll fetch our chap across and set him in
as a claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy's fat boy won't be a marker to
him!"
He was so pleased with his conceit that later along he wrote a novel and
called it The Claimant. It is the only one of his books, though I never
told him so, that I could not enjoy. Many years after, I happened to see
upon a hotel register in Rome these entries: "The Earl of Durham," and
in the same handwriting just below it, "Lady Anne Lambton" and "The Hon.
Reginald Lambton." So the Lambtons--they spelled it with a b instead of a
p--were yet in the peerage. A Lambton was Earl of Durham. The next time
I saw Mark I rated him on his deception. He did not defend himself, said
something about its being necessary to perfect the joke.
"Did you ever meet this present peer and possible usurper?" I asked.
"No," he answered, "I never did, but if he had called on me, I would have
had him come up."
III
His mind turned ever to the droll. Once in London I was living with my
family at 103 Mount Street. Between 103 and 102 there was the parochial
workhouse, quite a long and imposing edifice. One evening, upon coming in
from an outing, I found a letter he had written on the sitting-room table.
He had left it with his card. He spoke of the shock he had received upon
finding that next to 102--presumably 103--was the workhouse. He had loved
me, but had always feared that I would end by disgracing the family--being
hanged or something--but the "work'us," that was beyond him; he had not
thought it would come to that. And so on through pages of horseplay; his
relief on ascertaining the truth and learning his mistake, his regret at
not finding me at home, closing with a dinner invitation.
It was at Geneva, Switzerland, that I received a long, overflowing letter,
full of flamboyant oddities, written from London. Two or three hours later
came a telegram. "Burn letter. Blot it from your memory. Susie is dead."
How much of melancholy lay hidden behind the mask of his humour it would
be hard to say. His griefs were tempered by a vein of stoicism. He was a
medley of contradictions. Unconventional to the point of eccentricity, his
sense of his proper dignity was sound and sufficient. Though lavish in
the use of money, he had a full realization of its value and made close
contracts for his work. Like Sellers, his mind soared when it sailed
financial currents. He lacked acute business judgment in the larger things,
while an excellent economist in the lesser.
His marriage was the most brilliant stroke of his life. He got the woman of
all the world he most needed, a truly lovely and wise helpmate, who kept
him in bounds and headed him straight and right while she lived. She was
the best of housewives and mothers, and the safest of counsellors and
critics. She knew his worth; she appreciated his genius; she understood
his limitations and angles. Her death was a grievous disaster as well as a
staggering blow. He never wholly recovered from it.
IV
It was in the early seventies that Mark Twain dropped into New York, where
there was already gathered a congenial group to meet and greet him. John
Hay, quoting old Jack Dade's description of himself, was wont to speak of
this group as "of high aspirations and peregrinations." It radiated
between Franklin Square, where Joseph W. Harper--"Joe Brooklyn," we called
him--reigned in place of his uncle, Fletcher Harper, the man of genius
among the original Harper Brothers, and the Lotos Club, then in Irving
Place, and Delmonico's, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth
Street, with Sutherland's in Liberty Street for a downtown place of
luncheon resort, not to forget Dorlon's in Fulton Market.
[Illustration: General Leonidas Polk--Lieutenant General C.S.A.--Killed in
Georgia June 14, 1864--P.E. Bishop of Louisiana]
The Harper contingent, beside its chief, embraced Tom Nast and William A.
Seaver, whom John Russell Young named "Papa Pendennis," and pictured as "a
man of letters among men of the world and a man of the world among men of
letters," a very apt phrase appropriated from Doctor Johnson, and Major
Constable, a giant, who looked like a dragoon and not a bookman, yet
had known Sir Walter Scott and was sprung from the family of Edinburgh
publishers. Bret Harte had but newly arrived from California. Whitelaw
Reid, though still subordinate to Greeley, was beginning to make himself
felt in journalism. John Hay played high priest to the revels. Occasionally
I made a pious pilgrimage to the delightful shrine.
Truth to tell, it emulated rather the gods than the graces, though all of
us had literary leanings of one sort and another, especially late at night;
and Sam Bowles would come over from Springfield and Murat Halstead from
Cincinnati to join us. Howells, always something of a prig, living
in Boston, held himself at too high account; but often we had Joseph
Jefferson, then in the heyday of his career, with once in a while Edwin
Booth, who could not quite trust himself to go our gait. The fine fellows
we caught from oversea were innumerable, from the elder Sothern and Sala
and Yates to Lord Dufferin and Lord Houghton. Times went very well those
days, and whilst some looked on askance, notably Curtis and, rather oddly,
Stedman, and thought we were wasting time and convivializing more than was
good for us, we were mostly young and hearty, ranging from thirty to five
and forty years of age, with amazing capabilities both for work and play,
and I cannot recall that any hurt to any of us came of it.
Although robustious, our fribbles were harmless enough--ebullitions of
animal spirit, sometimes perhaps of gaiety unguarded--though each shade,
treading the Celestian way, as most of them do, and recurring to those
Noctes Ambrosianæ, might e'en repeat to the other the words on a memorable
occasion addressed by Curran to Lord Avonmore:
_"We spent them not in toys or lust or wine;
But search of deep philosophy,
Wit, eloquence and poesy--
Arts which I loved, for they, my friend, were thine."_
V
Mark Twain was the life of every company and all occasions. I remember a
practical joke of his suggestion played upon Murat Halstead. A party of
us were supping after the theater at the old Brevoort House. A card was
brought to me from a reporter of the World. I was about to deny myself,
when Mark Twain said:
"Give it to me, I'll fix it," and left the table.
Presently he came to the door and beckoned me out.
"I represented myself as your secretary and told this man," said he, "that
you were not here, but that if Mr. Halstead would answer just as well I
would fetch him. The fellow is as innocent as a lamb and doesn't know
either of you. I am going to introduce you as Halstead and we'll have some
fun."
No sooner said than done. The reporter proved to be a little bald-headed
cherub newly arrived from the isle of dreams, and I lined out to him a
column or more of very hot stuff, reversing Halstead in every opinion. I
declared him in favor of paying the national debt in greenbacks. Touching
the sectional question, which was then the burning issue of the time,
I made the mock Halstead say: "The 'bloody shirt' is only a kind of
Pickwickian battle cry. It is convenient during political campaigns and on
election day. Perhaps you do not know that I am myself of dyed-in-the-wool
Southern and secession stock. My father and grandfather came to Ohio from
South Carolina just before I was born. Naturally I have no sectional
prejudices, but I live in Cincinnati and I am a Republican."
There was not a little more of the same sort. Just how it passed through
the World office I know not; but it actually appeared. On returning to the
table I told the company what Mark Twain and I had done. They thought I was
joking. Without a word to any of us, next day Halstead wrote a note to the
World repudiating the interview, and the World printed his disclaimer with
a line which said: "When Mr. Halstead conversed with our reporter he had
dined." It was too good to keep. A day or two later, John Hay wrote an
amusing story for the Tribune, which set Halstead right.
Mark Twain's place in literature is not for me to fix. Some one has called
him "The Lincoln of letters." That is striking, suggestive and apposite.
The genius of Clemens and the genius of Lincoln possessed a kinship outside
the circumstances of their early lives; the common lack of tools to work
with; the privations and hardships to be endured and to overcome; the way
ahead through an unblazed and trackless forest; every footstep over a
stumbling block and each effort saddled with a handicap. But they got
there, both of them, they got there, and mayhap somewhere beyond the stars
the light of their eyes is shining down upon us even as, amid the thunders
of a world tempest, we are not wholly forgetful of them.
Chapter the Sixth
Houston and Wigfall of Texas--Stephen A. Douglas--The Twaddle about
Puritans and Cavaliers--Andrew Johnson and John C. Breckenridge
I
The National Capitol--old men's fancies fondly turn to thoughts of
youth--was picturesque in its personalities if not in its architecture. By
no means the least striking of these was General and Senator Sam Houston,
of Texas. In his life of adventure truth proved very much stranger than
fiction.
The handsomest of men, tall and stately, he could pass no way without
attracting attention; strangers in the Senate gallery first asked to have
him pointed out to them, and seeing him to all appearance idling his time
with his jacknife and bits of soft wood which he whittled into various
shapes of hearts and anchors for distribution among his lady acquaintances,
they usually went away thinking him a queer old man. So inded he was;
yet on his feet and in action singularly impressive, and, when he chose,
altogether the statesman and orator.
There united in him the spirits of the troubadour and the spearman. Ivanhoe
was not more gallant nor Bois-Guilbert fiercer. But the valor and the
prowess were tempered by humor. Below the surging subterranean flood that
stirred and lifted him to high attempt, he was a comedian who had tales to
tell, and told them wondrous well. On a lazy summer afternoon on the shady
side of Willard's Hotel--the Senate not in session--he might be seen,
an admiring group about him, spinning these yarns, mostly of personal
experience--rarely if ever repeating himself--and in tone, gesture and
grimace reproducing the drolleries of the backwoods, which from boyhood had
been his home.
He spared not himself. According to his own account he had been in the
early days of his Texas career a drunkard. "Everybody got drunk," I once
heard him say, referring to the beginning of the Texas revolution, as he
gave a side-splitting picture of that bloody episode, "and I realized that
somebody must get sober and keep sober."
From the hour of that realization, when he "swore off," to the hour of his
death he never touched intoxicants of any sort.
He had fought under Jackson, had served two terms in Congress and had been
elected governor of Tennessee before he was forty. Then he fell in love.
The young lady was a beautiful girl, well-born and highly educated, a
schoolmate of my mother's elder sister. She was persuaded by her family to
throw over an obscure young man whom she preferred, and to marry a young
man so eligible and distinguished.
He took her to Nashville, the state capital. There were rounds of gayety.
Three months passed. Of a sudden the little town woke to the startling
rumor, which proved to be true, that the brilliant young couple had come to
a parting of the ways. The wife had returned to her people. The husband had
resigned his office and was gone, no one knew where.
A few years later Mrs. Houston applied for a divorce, which in those days
had to be granted by the state legislature. Inevitably reports derogatory
to her had got abroad. Almost the first tidings of Governor Houston's
whereabouts were contained in a letter he wrote from somewhere in the
Indian country to my father, a member of the legislature to whom Mrs.
Houston had applied, in which he said that these reports had come to his
ears. "They are," he wrote, "as false as hell. If they be not stopped I
will return to Tennessee and have the heart's blood of him who repeats
them. A nobler, purer woman never lived. She should be promptly given the
divorce she asks. I alone am to blame."
She married again, though not the lover she had discarded. I knew her in
her old age--a gentle, placid lady, in whose face I used to fancy I could
read lines of sorrow and regret. He, to close this chapter, likewise
married again a wise and womanly woman who bore him many children and with
whom he lived happy ever after. Meanwhile, however, he had dwelt with the
Indians and had become an Indian chief. "Big Drunk, they called me," he
said to his familiars. His enemies averred that he brought into the world a
whole tribe of half-breeds.
II
Houston was a rare performer before a popular audience. His speech abounded
with argumentative appeal and bristled with illustrative anecdote, and,
when occasion required, with apt repartee.
Once an Irishman in the crowd bawled out, "ye were goin' to sell Texas to
England."
Houston paused long enough to center attention upon the quibble and then
said: "My friend, I first tried, unsuccessfully, to have the United States
take Texas as a gift. Not until I threatened to turn Texas over to England
did I finally succeed. There may be within the sound of my voice some who
have knowledge of sheep culture. They have doubtless seen a motherless lamb
put to the breast of a cross old ewe who refused it suck. Then the wise
shepherd calls his dog and there is no further trouble. My friend, England
was my dog."
He was inveighing against the New York Tribune. Having described Horace
Greeley as the sum of all villainy--"whose hair is white, whose skin is
white, whose eyes are white, whose clothes are white, and whose liver is in
my opinion of the same color"--he continued: "The assistant editor of
the Try-bune is Robinson--Solon Robinson. He is an Irishman, an Orange
Irishman, a redhaired Irishman!" Casting his eye over the audience
and seeing quite a sprinkling of redheads, and realizing that he had
perpetrated a slip of tongue, he added: "Fellow citizens, when I say that
Robinson is a red-haired Irishman I mean no disrespect to persons whose
hair is of that color. I have been a close observer of men and women for
thirty years, and I never knew a red-haired man who was not an honest man,
nor a red-headed woman who was not a virtuous woman; and I give it you as
my candid opinion that had it not been for Robinson's red hair he would
have been hanged long ago."
His pathos was not far behind his humor--though he used it sparingly. At a
certain town in Texas there lived a desperado who had threatened to kill
him on sight. The town was not on the route of his speaking dates but he
went out of his way to include it. A great concourse assembled to hear him.
He spoke in the open air and, as he began, observed his man leaning against
a tree armed to the teeth and waiting for him to finish. After a few
opening remarks, he dropped into the reminiscential. He talked of the old
times in Texas. He told in thrilling terms of the Alamo and of Goliad.
There was not a dry eye in earshot. Then he grew personal.
"I see Tom Gilligan over yonder. A braver man never lived than Tom
Gilligan. He fought by my side at San Jacinto. Together we buried poor Bill
Holman. But for his skill and courage I should not be here to-day. He--"
There was a stir in front. Gilligan had thrown away his knife and gun and
was rushing unarmed through the crowd, tears streaming down his face.
"For God's sake, Houston," he cried, "don't say another word and forgive me
my cowardly intention."
From that time to his death Tom Gilligan was Houston's devoted friend.
General Houston voted against the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and as a
consequence lost his seat in the Senate. It was thought, and freely said,
that for good and all he was down and out. He went home and announced
himself a candidate for governor of Texas.
The campaign that followed was of unexampled bitterness. The secession wave
was already mounting high. Houston was an uncompromising Unionist. His
defeat was generally expected. But there was no beating such a man in a
fair and square contest before the people. When the votes were counted he
led his competitor by a big majority. As governor he refused two years
later to sign the ordinance of secession and was deposed from office by
force. He died before the end of the war which so signally vindicated his
wisdom and verified his forecast.
III
Stephen Arnold Douglas was the Charles James Fox of American politics. He
was not a gambler as Fox was. But he went the other gaits and was possessed
of a sweetness of disposition which made him, like Fox, loved where he was
personally known. No one could resist the _bonhomie_ of Douglas.
They are not all Puritans in New England. Catch a Yankee off his base,
quite away from home, and he can be as gay as anybody. Boston and
Charleston were in high party times nearest alike of any two American
cities.
Douglas was a Green Mountain boy. He was born in Vermont. As Seargent
Prentiss had done he migrated beyond the Alleghanies before he came of age,
settling in Illinois as Prentiss had settled in Mississippi, to grow into a
typical Westerner as Prentiss into a typical Southerner.
There was never a more absurd theory than that, begot of sectional aims and
the sectional spirit, which proposed a geographic alignment of Cavalier and
Puritan. When sectionalism had brought a kindred people to blows over
the institution of African slavery there were Puritans who fought on the
Southern side and Cavaliers who fought on the Northern side. What was
Stonewall Jackson but a Puritan? What were Custer, Stoneman and Kearny but
Cavaliers? Wadsworth was as absolute an aristocrat as Hampton.
In the old days before the war of sections the South was full of typical
Southerners of Northern birth. John A. Quitman, who went from New York,
and Robert J. Walker, who went from Pennsylvania to Mississippi; James
H. Hammond, whose father, a teacher, went from Massachusetts to South
Carolina. John Slidell, born and bred in New York, was thirty years old
when he went to Louisiana. Albert Sidney Johnston, the rose and expectancy
of the young Confederacy--the most typical of rebel soldiers--had not a
drop of Southern blood in his veins, born in Kentucky a few months after
his father and mother had arrived there from Connecticut. The list might be
extended indefinitely.
Climate, which has something to do with temperament, has not so much to
do with character as is often imagined. All of us are more or less
the creatures of environment. In the South after a fashion the duello
flourished. Because it had not flourished in the North there rose a notion
that the Northerners would not fight. It proved to those who thought it a
costly mistake.
Down to the actual secession of 1860-61 the issue of issues--the issue
behind all issues--was the preservation of the Union. Between 1820 and
1850, by a series of compromises, largely the work of Mr. Clay, its
threatened disruption had been averted. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill put a sore
strain upon conservative elements North and South. The Whig Party went to
pieces. Mr. Clay passed from the scene. Had he lived until the presidential
election of 1852 he would have given his support to Franklin Pierce, as
Daniel Webster did. Mr. Buchanan was not a General Jackson. Judge Douglas,
who sought to play the rôle of Mr. Clay, was too late. The secession
leaders held the whip hand in the Gulf States. South Carolina was to have
her will at last. Crash came the shot in Charleston Harbor and the fall of
Sumter. Curiously enough two persons of Kentucky birth--Abraham Lincoln
and Jefferson Davis--led the rival hosts of war into which an untenable and
indefensible system of slave labor, for which the two sections were equally
responsible, had precipitated an unwilling people.
Had Judge Douglas lived he would have been Mr. Lincoln's main reliance in
Congress. As a debater his resources and prowess were rarely equaled
and never surpassed. His personality, whether in debate or private
conversation, was attractive in the highest degree. He possessed a full,
melodious voice, convincing fervor and ready wit.
He had married for his second wife the reigning belle of the National
Capital, a great-niece of Mrs. Madison, whose very natural ambitions
quickened and spurred his own.
It was fated otherwise. Like Clay, Webster, Calhoun and Blaine he was to be
denied the Presidency. The White House was barred to him. He was not yet
fifty when he died.
Tidings of his death took the country by surprise. But already the
sectional battle was on and it produced only a momentary impression, to be
soon forgotten amid the overwhelming tumult of events. He has lain in his
grave now nearly sixty years. Upon the legislation of his time his name was
writ first in water and then in blood. He received less than his desert in
life and the historic record has scarcely done justice to his merit. He
was as great a party leader as Clay. He could hold his own in debate with
Webster and Calhoun. He died a very poor man, though his opportunity for
enrichment by perfectly legitimate means were many. It is enough to
say that he lacked the business instinct and set no value upon money;
scrupulously upright in his official dealing; holding his senatorial duties
above all price and beyond the suspicion of dirt.
Touching a matter which involved a certain outlay in the winter of 1861, he
laughingly said to me: "I haven't the wherewithal to pay for a bottle of
whisky and shall have to borrow of Arnold Harris the wherewithal to take me
home."
His wife was a glorious creature. Early one morning calling at their home
to see Judge Douglas I was ushered into the library, where she was engaged
setting things to rights. My entrance took her by surprise. I had often
seen her in full ballroom regalia and in becoming out-of-door costume, but
as, in gingham gown and white apron, she turned, a little startled by my
sudden appearance, smiles and blushes in spite of herself, I thought I had
never seen any woman so beautiful before. She married again--the lover whom
gossip said she had thrown over to marry Judge Douglas--and the story went
that her second marriage was not very happy.
IV
In the midsummer of 1859 the burning question among the newsmen of
Washington was the Central American Mission. England and France had
displayed activity in that quarter and it was deemed important that the
United States should sit up and take notice. An Isthmian canal was being
considered.
Speculation was rife whom Mr. Buchanan would send to represent us. The
press gang of the National Capital was all at sea. There was scarcely a
Democratic leader of national prominence whose name was not mentioned in
that connection, though speculation from day to day eddied round Mr. James
S. Rollins, of Missouri, an especial friend of the President and a most
accomplished public man.
At the height of excitement I happened to be in the library of the State
Department. I was on a step-ladder in quest of a book when I heard a
messenger say to the librarian: "The President is in the Secretary's room
and wants to have Mr. Dimitry come there right away." An inspiration shot
through me like a flash. They had chosen Alexander Dimitry for the Central
American Mission.
He was the official translator of the Department of State. Though an able
and learned man he was not in the line of preferment. He was without
political standing or backing of any sort. At first blush a more unlikely,
impossible appointment could hardly be suggested. But--so on the instant
I reasoned--he was peculiarly fitted in his own person for the post in
question. Though of Greek origin he looked like a Spaniard. He spoke the
Spanish language fluently. He had the procedure of the State Department
at his finger's ends. He was the head of a charming domestic fabric--his
daughters the prettiest girls in Washington. Why not?
I climbed down from my stepladder and made tracks for the office of the
afternoon newspaper for which I was doing all-round work. I was barely on
time, the last forms being locked when I got there. I had the editorial
page opened and inserted at the top of the leading column a double-leaded
paragraph announcing that the agony was over--that the Gordian knot was
cut--that Alexander Dimitry had been selected as Envoy Extraordinary and
Minister Plenipotentiary to the Central American States.
It proved a veritable sensation as well as a notable scoop. To increase my
glory the correspondents of the New York dailies scouted it. But in a day
or two it was officially confirmed. General Cass, the Secretary of State,
sent for me, having learned that I had been in the department about the
time of the consultation between the President, himself and Mr. Dimitry.
"How did you get this?" he asked rather sharply.
"Out of my inner consciousness," I answered with flippant familiarity.
"Didn't you know that I have what they call second sight?"
The old gentleman laughed amiably. "It would seem so," he said, and sent me
about my business without further inquiry.
V
In the National Capital the winter of 1860-61 was both stormy and nebulous.
Parties were at sea. The Northerners in Congress had learned the trick of
bullying from the Southerners. In the Senate, Chandler was a match for
Toombs; and in the House, Thaddeus Stevens for Keitt and Lamar. All of
them, more or less, were playing a game. If sectional war, which was
incessantly threatened by the two extremes, had been keenly realized and
seriously considered it might have been averted. Very few believed that it
would come to actual war.
A convention of Border State men, over which ex-President John Tyler
presided, was held in Washington. It might as well have been held at the
North Pole. Moderate men were brushed aside, their counsels whistled down
the wind. There was a group of Senators, headed by Wigfall of Texas, who
meant disunion and war, and another group, headed by Seward, Hale and
Chase, who had been goaded up to this. Reading contemporary history and,
seeing the high-mightiness with which the Germans began what we conceive
their raid upon humanity, we are wont to regard it as evidence of
incredible stupidity, whereas it was, in point of fact, rather a
miscalculation of forces. That was the error of the secession leaders. They
refused to count the cost. Yancey firmly believed that England would be
forced to intervene. The mills of Lancashire he thought could not get on
without Southern cotton. He was sent abroad. He found Europe solid against
slavery and therefore set against the Confederacy. He came home with what
is called a broken heart--the dreams of a lifetime shattered--and, in a
kind of dazed stupor, laid himself down to die. With Richmond in flames and
the exultant shouts of the detested yet victorious Yankees in his ears, he
did die.
Wigfall survived but a few years. He was less a dreamer than Yancey. A man
big of brain and warm of heart he had gone from the ironclad provincialism
of South Carolina to the windswept vagaries of Texas. He believed wholly
the Yancey confession of faith; that secession was a constitutional right;
that African slavery was ordained of God; that the South was paramount,
the North inferior. Yet in worldly knowledge he had learned more than
Yancey--was an abler man than Jefferson Davis--and but for his affections
and generous habits he would have made a larger figure in the war, having
led the South's exit from the Senate.
VI
I do not think that either Hammond or Chestnut, the Senators from
South Carolina, both men of parts, had at bottom much belief in the
practicability of the Confederate movement. Neither had the Senators from
Arkansas and Alabama, nor Brown, of Mississippi, the colleague of Jefferson
Davis. Mason, of Virginia, a dogged old donkey, and Iverson, of Georgia,
another, were the kind of men whom Wigfall dominated.
One of the least confident of those who looked on and afterward fell in
line was the Vice President, John C. Breckenridge, of Kentucky. He was the
Beau Sabreur among statesmen as Albert Sidney Johnston, among soldiers.
Never man handsomer in person or more winning in manners. Sprung from a
race of political aristocrats, he was born to early and shining success
in public life. Of moderate opinions, winning and prudent, wherever he
appeared he carried his audience with him. He had been elected on the
ticket with Buchanan to the second office under the Government, when he was
but five and thirty years of age. There was nothing for him to gain from
a division of the Union; the Presidency, perhaps, if the Union continued
undivided. But he could not resist the onrush of disunionism, went with
the South, which he served first in the field and later as Confederate
Secretary of War, and after a few years of self-imposed exile in Europe
returned to Kentucky to die at four and fifty, a defeated and disappointed
old man.
The adjoining state of Tennessee was represented in the Senate by one of
the most problematic characters in American history. With my father, who
remained his friend through life, he had entered the state legislature in
1835, and having served ten years in the lower House of Congress, and
four years as governor of Tennessee he came back in 1857 to the National
Capital, a member of the Upper House. He was Andrew Johnson.
I knew him from my childhood. Thrice that I can recall I saw him weep;
never did I see him laugh. Life had been very serious, albeit very
successful, to him. Of unknown parentage, the wife he had married before he
was one and twenty had taught him to read. Yet at six and twenty he was in
the Tennessee General Assembly and at four and thirty in Congress.
There was from first to last not a little about him to baffle conjecture.
I should call him a cross between Jack Cade and Aaron Burr. His sympathies
were easily stirred by rags in distress. But he was uncompromising in his
detestation of the rich. It was said that he hated "a biled shirt." He
would have nothing to do "with people who wore broadcloth," though he
carefully dressed himself. When, as governor of Tennessee, he came to
Nashville he refused many invitations to take his first New Year's dinner
with a party of toughs at the house of a river roustabout.
There was nothing of the tough about him, however. His language was careful
and exact. I never heard him utter an oath or tell a risqué story. He
passed quite fifteen years in Washington, a total abstainer from the use of
intoxicants. He fell into the occasional-drink habit during the dark days
of the War. But after some costly experience he dropped it and continued a
total abstainer to the end of his days.
He had, indeed, admirable self-control. I do not believe a more
conscientious man ever lived. His judgments were sometimes peculiar, but
they were upright and sincere, having reasons, which he could give with
power and effect, behind them. Yet was he a born politician, crafty to a
degree, and always successful, relying upon a popular following which never
failed him.
In 1860 he supported the quasi-secession Breckenridge and Lane Presidential
ticket, but in 1861 he stood true to the Union, retaining his seat in the
Senate until he was appointed military governor of Tennessee. Nominated for
Vice President on the ticket with Lincoln, in 1864, he was elected, and
upon the assassination of Lincoln succeeded to the Presidency. Having
served out his term as President he returned to Tennessee to engage in
the hottest kind of politics, and though at the outset defeated finally
regained his seat in the Senate of the United States.
He hated Grant with a holy hate. His first act on reëntering the Senate was
to deliver an implacably bitter speech against the President. It was his
last public appearance. He went thence to his home in East Tennessee,
gratified and happy, to die in a few weeks.
VII
There used to be a story about Raleigh, in North Carolina, where Andrew
Johnson was born, which whispered that he was a natural son of William
Ruffin, an eminent jurist in the earlier years of the nineteenth century.
It was analogous to the story that Lincoln was the natural son of various
paternities from time to time assigned to him. I had my share in running
that calumny to cover. It was a lie out of whole cloth with nothing
whatever to support or excuse it. I reached the bottom of it to discover
proof of its baselessness abundant and conclusive. In Johnson's case I take
it that the story had nothing other to rest on than the obscurity of his
birth and the quality of his talents. Late in life Johnson went to Raleigh
and caused to be erected a modest tablet over the spot pointed out as the
grave of his progenitor, saying, I was told by persons claiming to have
been present, "I place this stone over the last earthly abode of my alleged
father."
Johnson, in the saying of the countryside, "out-married himself." His wife
was a plain woman, but came of good family. One day, when a child, so the
legend ran, she saw passing through the Greenville street in which her
people lived, a woman, a boy and a cow, the boy carrying a pack over his
shoulder. They were obviously weary and hungry. Extreme poverty could
present no sadder picture. "Mother," cried the girl, "there goes the man I
am going to marry." She was thought to be in jest. But a few years later
she made her banter good and lived to see her husband President of the
United States and with him to occupy the White House at Washington.
Much has been written of the humble birth and iron fortune of Abraham
Lincoln. He had no such obstacles to overcome as either Andrew Jackson
or Andrew Johnson. Jackson, a prisoner of war, was liberated, a lad of
sixteen, from the British pen at Charleston, without a relative, a friend
or a dollar in the world, having to make his way upward through the most
aristocratic community of the country and the time. Johnson, equally
friendless and penniless, started as a poor tailor in a rustic village.
Lincoln must therefore, take third place among our self-made Presidents.
The Hanks family were not paupers. He had a wise and helpful stepmother. He
was scarcely worse off than most young fellows of his neighborhood, first
in Indiana and then in Illinois. On this side justice has never been
rendered to Jackson and Johnson. In the case of Jackson the circumstance
was forgotten, while Johnson too often dwelt upon it and made capital out
of it.
Under date of the 23rd of May, 1919, the Hon. Josephus Daniels, Secretary
of the Navy, writes me the following letter, which I violate no confidence
in reproducing in this connection:
MY DEAR MARSE HENRY:--
I can't tell you how much delight and pleasure your reminiscences in the
Saturday Evening Post have given me, as well as the many others who have
followed them, and I suppose you will put them in a volume when they are
finished, so that we may have the pleasure of reading them in connected
order.
As you know, I live in Raleigh and I was very much interested in your
article in the issue of April 5, 1919, with reference to Andrew Johnson, in
which you quote a story that "used to be current in Raleigh, that he was
the son of William Ruffin, an eminent jurist of the nineteenth century." I
had never heard this story, but the story that was gossiped there was that
he was the son of a certain Senator Haywood. I ran that story down and
found that it had no foundation whatever, because if he had been the son of
the Senator reputed to be his father, the Senator was of the age of twelve
years when Andrew Johnson was born.
My own information is, for I have made some investigation of it, that the
story about Andrew Johnson's having a father other than the husband of his
mother, is as wanting in foundation as the story about Abraham Lincoln.
You did a great service in running that down and exposing it, and I trust
before you finish your book that you will make further investigation and
be able to do a like service in repudiating the unjust, idle gossip with
reference to Andrew Johnson. In your article you say that persons who claim
to have been present when Johnson came to Raleigh and erected a monument
over the grave of his father, declare that Johnson said he placed this
stone over the last earthly abode of "my alleged father." That is one phase
of the gossip, and the other is that he said "my reputed father," both
equally false.
The late Mr. Pulaski Cowper, who was private secretary to Governor Bragg,
of our State, just prior to the war, and who was afterwards president of
our leading life insurance company, a gentleman of high character, and of
the best memory, was present at the time that Johnson made the address from
which you quote the rumor. Mr. Cowper wrote an article for The News and
Observer, giving the story and relating that Johnson said that "he was glad
to come to Raleigh to erect a tablet to his father." The truth is that
while his father was a man of little or no education, he held the position
of janitor at the State Capitol, and he was not wanting in qualities which
made him superior to his humble position. If he had been living in this day
he would have been given a lifesaving medal, for upon the occasion of a
picnic near Raleigh when the cry came that children were drowning he was
the first to leap in and endanger his life to save them.
Andrew Johnson's mother was related to the Chappell family, of which there
are a number of citizens of standing and character near Raleigh, several of
them having been ministers of the Gospel, and one at least having gained
distinction as a missionary in China.
I am writing you because I know that your story will be read and accepted
and I thought you would be glad to have this story, based upon a study and
investigation and personal knowledge of Mr. Cowper, whose character and
competency are well known in North Carolina.
Chapter the Seventh
An Old Newspaper Rookery--Reactionary Sectionalism in Cincinnati and
Louisville--_The Courier-Journal_
I
My dream of wealth through my commission on the Confederate cotton I was to
sell to English buyers was quickly shattered. The cotton was burned and I
found myself in the early spring of 1865 in the little village of Glendale,
a suburb of Cincinnati, where the future Justice Stanley Matthews had his
home. His wife was a younger sister of my mother. My grandmother was still
alive and lived with her daughter and son-in-law.
I was received with open arms. A few days later the dear old lady said to
me: "I suppose, my son, you are rather a picked bird after your adventures
in the South. You certainly need better clothing. I have some money in bank
and it is freely yours."
I knew that my Uncle Stanley had put her up to this, and out of sheer
curiosity I asked her how much she could let me have. She named what seemed
to me a stupendous sum. I thanked her, told her I had quite a sufficiency
for the time being, slipped into town and pawned my watch; that is, as I
made light of it afterward in order to escape the humiliation of borrowing
from an uncle whose politics I did not approve, I went with my collateral
to an uncle who had no politics at all and got fifty dollars on it! Before
the money was gone I had found, through Judge Matthews, congenial work.
There was in Cincinnati but one afternoon newspaper--the Evening
Times--owned by Calvin W. Starbuck. He had been a practical printer but was
grown very rich. He received me kindly, said the editorial force was quite
full--must always be, on a daily newspaper--"but," he added, "my brother,
Alexander Starbuck, who has been running the amusements, wants to go
a-fishing in Canada--to be gone a month--and, if you wish, you can during
his absence sub for him."
It was just to my hand and liking. Before Alexander Starbuck returned the
leading editor of the paper fell from a ferryboat crossing the Ohio River
and was drowned. The next day General Starbuck sent for me and offered me
the vacant place.
"Why, general," I said, "I am an outlawed man: I do not agree with your
politics. I do not see how I can undertake a place so conspicuous and
responsible."
He replied: "I propose to engage you as an editorial manager. It is as
if building a house you should be head carpenter, I the architect. The
difference in salary will be seventy-five dollars a week against fifteen
dollars a week."
I took the place.
II
The office of the Evening Times was a queer old curiosity shop. I set to
and turned it inside out. I had very pronounced journalistic notions of my
own and applied them in every department of the sleepy old money-maker. One
afternoon a week later I put forth a paper whose oldest reader could not
have recognized it. The next morning's Cincinnati Commercial contained a
flock of paragraphs to which the Chattanooga-Cincinnati-Rebel Evening Times
furnished the keynote.
They made funny reading, but they threw a dangerous flare upon my "past"
and put me at a serious disadvantage. It happened that when Artemus Ward
had been in town a fortnight before he gave me a dinner and had some of his
friends to meet me. Among these was a young fellow of the name of Halstead,
who, I was told, was the coming man on the Commercial.
Round to the Commercial office I sped, and being conducted to this person,
who received me very blandly, I said: "Mr. Halstead, I am a journeyman day
laborer in your city--the merest bird of passage, with my watch at the
pawnbroker's. As soon as I am able to get out of town I mean to go--and
I came to ask if you can think the personal allusions to me in to-day's
paper, which may lose me my job but can nowise hurt the Times, are quite
fair--even--since I am without defense--quite manly."
He looked at me with that quizzical, serio-comic stare which so became him,
and with great heartiness replied: "No--they were damned mean--though I
did not realize how mean. The mark was so obvious and tempting I could not
resist, but--there shall be no more of them. Come, let us go and have a
drink."
That was the beginning of a friendship which brought happiness to both of
us and lasted nearly half a century, to the hour of his death, when, going
from Louisville to Cincinnati, I helped to lay him away in Spring Grove
Cemetery.
I had no thought of remaining in Cincinnati. My objective was Nashville,
where the young woman who was to become my wife, and whom I had not seen
for nearly two years, was living with her family. During the summer Mr.
Francisco, the business manager of the Evening Times, had a scheme to buy
the Toledo Commercial, in conjunction with Mr. Comly, of Columbus, and to
engage me as editor conjointly with Mr. Harrison Gray Otis as publisher. It
looked very good. Toledo threatened Cleveland and Detroit as a lake port.
But nothing could divert me. As soon as Parson Brownlow, who was governor
of Tennessee and making things lively for the returning rebels, would
allow, I was going to Nashville.
About the time the way was cleared my two pals, or bunkies, of the
Confederacy, Albert Roberts and George Purvis, friends from boyhood, put
in an appearance. They were on their way to the capital of Tennessee. The
father of Albert Roberts was chief owner of the Republican Banner, an old
and highly respectable newspaper, which had for nearly four years lain in a
state of suspension. Their plan now was to revive its publication, Purvis
to be business manager, and Albert and I to be editors. We had no cash.
Nobody on our side of the line had any cash. But John Roberts owned a farm
he could mortgage for money enough to start us. What had I to say?
Less than a week later saw us back at home winnowing the town for
subscribers and advertising. We divided it into districts, each taking a
specified territory. The way we boys hustled was a sight to see. But the
way the community warmed to us was another. When the familiar headline,
The Republican Banner, made its appearance there was a popular hallelujah,
albeit there were five other dailies ahead of us. A year later there was
only one, and it was nowise a competitor.
Albert Roberts had left his girl, Edith Scott, the niece of Huxley, whom I
have before mentioned, in Montgomery, Alabama. Purvis' girl, Sophie Searcy,
was in Selma. Their hope was to have enough money by Christmas each to
pay a visit to those distant places. My girl was on the spot, and we had
resolved, money or no money, to be married without delay. Before New Year's
the three of us were wedded and comfortably settled, with funds galore, for
the paper had thrived consumingly. It had thrived so consumingly that after
a little I was able to achieve the wish of my heart and to go to London,
taking my wife and my "great American novel" with me. I have related
elsewhere what came of this and what happened to me.
III
That bread cast upon the waters--"'dough' put out at usance," as Joseph
Jefferson used to phrase it--shall return after many days has been I dare
say discovered by most persons who have perpetrated acts of kindness,
conscious or unconscious. There was a poor, broken-down English actor with
a passion for Chaucer, whom I was wont to encounter in the Library of
Congress. His voice was quite gone. Now and again I had him join me in a
square meal. Once in a while I paid his room rent. I was loath to leave him
when the break came in 1861, though he declared he had "expectations," and
made sure he would not starve.
I was passing through Regent Street in London, when a smart brougham drove
up to the curb and a wheezy voice called after me. It was my old friend,
Newton. His "expectations" had not failed him, he had come into a property
and was living in affluence.
He knew London as only a Bohemian native and to the manner born could know
it. His sense of bygone obligation knew no bounds. Between him and John
Mahoney and Artemus Ward I was made at home in what might be called the
mysteries and eccentricities of differing phases of life in the British
metropolis not commonly accessible to the foreign casual. In many after
visits this familiar knowledge has served me well. But Newton did not live
to know of some good fortune that came to me and to feel my gratitude to
him, as dear old John Mahoney did. When I was next in London he was gone.
It was not, however, the actor, Newton, whom I had in mind in offering a
bread-upon-the-water moral, but a certain John Hatcher, the memory of whom
in my case illustrates it much better. He was a wit and a poet. He had been
State Librarian of Tennessee. Nothing could keep him out of the service,
though he was a sad cripple and wholly unequal to its requirements. He fell
ill. I had the opportunity to care for him. When the war was over his old
friend, George D. Prentice, called him to Louisville to take an editorial
place on the Journal.
About the same time Mr. Walter Haldeman returned from the South and resumed
the suspended publication of the Louisville Courier. He was in the prime of
life, a man of surpassing energy, enterprise and industry, and had with
him the popular sympathy. Mr. Prentice was nearly three score and ten. The
stream had passed him by. The Journal was not only beginning to feel the
strain but was losing ground. In this emergency Hatcher came to the rescue.
I was just back from London and was doing noticeable work on the Nashville
Banner.
"Here is your man," said Hatcher to Mr. Prentice and Mr. Henderson, the
owners of the Journal; and I was invited to come to Louisville.
After I had looked over the field and inspected the Journal's books I was
satisfied that a union with the Courier was the wisest solution of the
newspaper situation, and told them so. Meanwhile Mr. Haldeman, whom I had
known in the Confederacy, sent for me. He offered me the same terms for
part ownership and sole editorship of the Courier, which the Journal people
had offered me. This I could not accept, but proposed as an alternative the
consolidation of the two on an equal basis. He was willing enough for the
consolidation, but not on equal terms. There was nothing for it but a
fight. I took the Journal and began to hammer the Courier.
A dead summer was before us, but Mr. Henderson had plenty of money and was
willing to spend it. During the contest not an unkind word was printed on
either side. After stripping the Journal to its heels it had very little
to go on or to show for what had once been a prosperous business. But
circulation flowed in. From eighteen hundred daily it quickly mounted to
ten thousand; from fifteen hundred weekly to fifty thousand. The middle of
October it looked as if we had a straight road before us.
But I knew better. I had discovered that the field, no matter how worked,
was not big enough to support two rival dailies. There was toward the last
of October on the edge of town a real-estate sale which Mr. Haldeman and I
attended. Here was my chance for a play. I must have bid up to a hundred
thousand dollars and did actually buy nearly ten thousand dollars of the
lots put up at auction, relying upon some money presently coming to my
wife.
I could see that it made an impression on Mr. Haldeman. Returning in the
carriage which had brought us out I said: "Mr. Haldeman, I am going to ruin
you. But I am going to run up a money obligation to Isham Henderson I shall
never be able to discharge. You need an editor. I need a publisher. Let
us put these two newspapers together, buy the Democrat, and, instead of
cutting one another's throats, go after Cincinnati and St. Louis. You will
recall that I proposed this to you in the beginning. What is the matter
with it now?"
Nothing was the matter with it. He agreed at once. The details were soon
adjusted. Ten days later there appeared upon the doorsteps of the city in
place of the three familiar visitors, a double-headed stranger, calling
itself the Courier-Journal. Our exclusive possession of the field thus
acquired lasted two years. At the end of these we found that at least the
appearance of competition was indispensable and willingly accepted an offer
from a proposed Republican organ for a division of the Press dispatches
which we controlled. Then and there the real prosperity of the
Courier-Journal began, the paper having made no money out of its monopoly.
IV
Reconstruction, as it was called--ruin were a fitter name for it--had just
begun. The South was imprisoned, awaiting the executioner. The Constitution
of the United States hung in the balance. The Federal Union faced the
threat of sectional despotism. The spirit of the time was martial law. The
gospel of proscription ruled in Congress. Radicalism, vitalized by the
murder of Abraham Lincoln and inflamed by the inadequate effort of Andrew
Johnson to carry out the policies of Lincoln, was in the saddle riding
furiously toward a carpetbag Poland and a negroized Ireland.
The Democratic Party, which, had it been stronger, might have interposed,
lay helpless. It, too, was crushed to earth. Even the Border States, which
had not been embraced by the military agencies and federalized machinery
erected over the Gulf States, were seriously menaced. Never did newspaper
enterprise set out under gloomier auspices.
There was a party of reaction in Kentucky, claiming to be Democratic,
playing to the lead of the party of repression at the North. It refused to
admit that the head of the South was in the lion's mouth and that the first
essential was to get it out. The Courier-Journal proposed to stroke the
mane, not twist the tail of the lion. Thus it stood between two fires.
There arose a not unnatural distrust of the journalistic monopoly created
by the consolidation of the three former dailies into a single newspaper,
carrying an unfamiliar hyphenated headline. Touching its policy of
sectional conciliation it picked its way perilously through the cross
currents of public opinion. There was scarcely a sinister purpose that was
not alleged against it by its enemies; scarcely a hostile device that was
not undertaken to put it down and drive it out.
Its constituency represented an unknown quantity. In any event it had to be
created. Meanwhile, it must rely upon its own resources, sustained by the
courage of the venture, by the integrity of its convictions and aims, and
by faith in the future of the city, the state and the country.
Still, to be precise, it was the morning of Sunday, November 8,1868.
The night before the good people of Louisville had gone to bed expecting
nothing unusual to happen. They awoke to encounter an uninvited guest
arrived a little before the dawn. No hint of its coming had got abroad;
and thus the surprise was the greater. Truth to say, it was not a pleased
surprise, because, as it flared before the eye of the startled citizen in
big Gothic letters, The Courier-Journal, there issued thence an aggressive
self-confidence which affronted the _amour propre_ of the sleepy
villagers. They were used to a very different style of newspaper approach.
Nor was the absence of a timorous demeanor its only offense. The Courier
had its partisans, the Journal and the Democrat had their friends. The trio
stood as ancient landmarks, as recognized and familiar institutions. Here
was a double-headed monster which, without saying "by your leave" or "blast
your eyes" or any other politeness, had taken possession of each man's
doorstep, looking very like it had brought its knitting and was come to
stay.
The Journal established by Mr. Prentice, the Courier by Mr. Haldeman and
the Democrat by Mr. Harney, had been according to the standards of those
days successful newspapers. But the War of Sections had made many changes.
At its close new conditions appeared on every side. A revolution had come
into the business and the spirit of American journalism.
In Louisville three daily newspapers had for a generation struggled for
the right of way. Yet Louisville was a city of the tenth or twelfth class,
having hardly enough patronage to sustain one daily newspaper of the first
or second class. The idea of consolidating the three thus contending to
divide a patronage so insufficient, naturally suggested itself during the
years immediately succeeding the war. But it did not take definite shape
until 1868.
Mr. Haldeman had returned from a somewhat picturesque and not altogether
profitable pursuit of his "rights in the territories" and had resumed the
suspended publication of the Courier with encouraging prospects. I had
succeeded Mr. Prentice in the editorship and part ownership of the Journal.
Both Mr. Haldeman and I were newspaper men to the manner born and bred;
old and good friends; and after our rivalry of six months maintained with
activity on both sides, but without the publication of an unkind word on
either, a union of forces seemed exigent. To practical men the need of this
was not a debatable question. All that was required was an adjustment of
the details. Beginning with the simple project of joining the Courier and
the Journal, it ended by the purchase of the Democrat, which it did not
seem safe to leave outside.
V
The political conditions in Kentucky were anomalous. The Republican Party
had not yet definitely taken root. Many of the rich old Whigs, who had held
to the Government--to save their slaves--resenting Lincoln's Emancipation
Proclamation, had turned Democrats. Most of the before-the-war Democrats
had gone with the Confederacy. The party in power called itself Democratic,
but was in fact a body of reactionary nondescripts claiming to be Unionists
and clinging, or pretending to cling, to the hard-and-fast prejudices of
other days.
The situation may be the better understood when I add that "negro
testimony"--the introduction to the courts of law of the newly made
freedmen as witnesses--barred by the state constitution, was the burning
issue. A murder committed in the presence of a thousand negroes could not
be lawfully proved in court. Everything from a toothbrush to a cake of
soap might be cited before a jury, but not a human being if his skin
happened to be black.
[Illustration: Mr. Watterson's Editorial Staff in 1868, When the
Three Daily Newspapers of Louisville Were United into the
"_Courier-Journal_." Mr. George D. Prentice and Mr. Watterson Are in
the Center.]
To my mind this was monstrous. From my cradle I had detested slavery. The
North will never know how many people at the South did so. I could not go
with the Republican Party, however, because after the death of Abraham
Lincoln it had intrenched itself in the proscription of Southern men. The
attempt to form a third party had shown no strength and had broken down.
There was nothing for me, and the Confederates who were with me, but
the ancient label of a Democracy worn by a riffraff of opportunists,
Jeffersonian principles having quite gone to seed. But I proposed to
lead and reform it, not to follow and fall in behind the selfish and
short-sighted time servers who thought the people had learned nothing and
forgot nothing; and instant upon finding myself in the saddle I sought
to ride down the mass of ignorance which was at least for the time being
mainly what I had to look to for a constituency.
Mr. Prentice, who knew the lay of the ground better than I did, advised
against it. The personal risk counted for something. Very early in the
action I made a direct fighting issue, which--the combat interdicted--gave
me the opportunity to declare--with something of the bully in the
tone--that I might not be able to hit a barn door at ten paces, but could
shoot with any man in Kentucky across a pocket handkerchief, holding myself
at all times answerable and accessible. I had a fairly good fighting record
in the army and it was not doubted that I meant what I said.
But it proved a bitter, hard, uphill struggle, for a long while against
odds, before negro testimony was carried. A generation of politicians were
sent to the rear. Finally, in 1876, a Democratic State Convention put its
mark upon me as a Democrat by appointing me a Delegate at large to the
National Democratic Convention of that year called to meet at St. Louis to
put a Presidential ticket in the field.
The Courier-Journal having come to represent all three of the English
dailies of the city the public began to rebel. It could not see that
instead of three newspapers of the third or fourth class Louisville was
given one newspaper of the first class; that instead of dividing
the local patronage in three inadequate portions, wasted upon a triple
competition, this patronage was combined, enabling the one newspaper to
engage in a more equal competition with the newspapers of such rival and
larger cities as Cincinnati and St. Louis; and that one of the contracting
parties needing an editor, the other a publisher, in coming together the
two were able to put their trained faculties to the best account.
Nevertheless, during thirty-five years Mr. Haldeman and I labored side by
side, not the least difference having arisen between us. The attacks to
which we were subjected from time to time drew us together the closer.
These attacks were sometimes irritating and sometimes comical, but they had
one characteristic feature: Each started out apparently under a high state
of excitement. Each seemed to have some profound cause of grief, to be
animated by implacable hate and to aim at nothing short of annihilation.
Frequently the assailants would lie in wait to see how the
Courier-Journal's cat was going to jump, in order that they might take
the other side; and invariably, even if the Courier-Journal stood for
the reforms they affected to stand for, they began a system of
misrepresentation and abuse. In no instance did they attain any success.
Only once, during the Free Silver craze of 1896, and the dark and tragic
days that followed it the three or four succeeding years, the paper having
stood, as it had stood during the Greenback craze, for sound money, was
the property in danger. It cost more of labor and patience to save it from
destruction than it had cost to create it thirty years before. Happily Mr.
Haldeman lived to see the rescue complete, the tide turned and the future
safe.
VI
A newspaper, like a woman, must not only be honest, but must seem to be
honest; acts of levity, loose unbecoming expressions or behavior--though
never so innocent--tending in the one and in the other to lower reputation
and discredit character. During my career I have proceeded under a
confident belief in this principle of newspaper ethics and an unfailing
recognition of its mandates. I truly believe that next after business
integrity in newspaper management comes disinterestedness in the public
service, and next after disinterestedness come moderation and intelligence,
cleanliness and good feeling, in dealing with affairs and its readers.
From that blessed Sunday morning, November 8, 1868, to this good day, I
have known no other life and had no other aim. Those were indeed parlous
times. It was an era of transition. Upon the field of battle, after four
years of deadly but unequal combat, the North had vanquished the South.
The victor stood like a giant, with blood aflame, eyes dilate and hands
uplifted again to strike. The victim lay prostrate. Save self-respect and
manhood all was lost. Clasping its memories to its bosom the South sank
helpless amid the wreck of its fortunes, whilst the North, the benign
influence of the great Lincoln withdrawn, proceeded to decide its fate. To
this ghastly end had come slavery and secession, and all the pomp, pride
and circumstance of the Confederacy. To this bitter end had come the
soldiership of Lee and Jackson and Johnston and the myriads of brave men
who followed them.
The single Constitutional barrier that had stood between the people of the
stricken section and political extinction was about to be removed by the
exit of Andrew Johnson from the White House. In his place a man of blood
and iron--for such was the estimate at that time placed upon Grant--had
been elected President. The Republicans in Congress, checked for a time
by Johnson, were at length to have entire sway under Thaddeus Stevens.
Reconstruction was to be thorough and merciless. To meet these conditions
was the first requirement of the Courier-Journal, a newspaper conducted by
outlawed rebels and published on the sectional border line. The task was
not an easy one.
There is never a cause so weak that it does not stir into ill-timed
activity some wild, unpractical zealots who imagine it strong. There is
never a cause so just but that the malevolent and the mercenary will seek
to trade upon it. The South was helpless; the one thing needful was to get
it on its feet, and though the bravest and the wisest saw this plainly
enough there came to the front--particularly in Kentucky--a small but noisy
body of politicians who had only worked themselves into a state of war when
it was too late, and who with more or less of aggression, insisted that
"the states lately in rebellion" still had rights, which they were able to
maintain and which the North could be forced to respect.
I was of a different opinion. It seemed to me that whatever of right might
exist the South was at the mercy of the North; that the radical party led
by Stevens and Wade dominated the North and could dictate its own terms;
and that the shortest way round lay in that course which was best
calculated to disarm radicalism by an intelligent appeal to the business
interests and conservative elements of Northern society, supported by a
domestic policy of justice alike to whites and blacks.
Though the institution of African slavery was gone the negro continued the
subject of savage contention. I urged that he be taken out of the arena of
agitation, and my way of taking him out was to concede him his legal and
civil rights. The lately ratified Constitutional Amendments, I contended,
were the real Treaty of Peace between the North and South. The recognition
of these Amendments in good faith by the white people of the South was
indispensable to that perfect peace which was desired by the best people of
both sections. The political emancipation of the blacks was essential to
the moral emancipation of the whites. With the disappearence of the negro
question as cause of agitation, I argued, radicalism of the intense,
proscriptive sort would die out; the liberty-loving, patriotic people of
the North would assert themselves; and, this one obstacle to a better
understanding removed, the restoration of Constitutional Government would
follow, being a matter of momentous concern to the body of the people both
North and South.
Such a policy of conciliation suited the Southern extremists as little as
it suited the Northern extremists. It took from the politicians their best
card. South no less than North, "the bloody shirt" was trumps. It could
always be played. It was easy to play it and it never failed to catch the
unthinking and to arouse the excitable. What cared the perennial candidate
so he got votes enough? What cared the professional agitator so his appeals
to passion brought him his audience?
It is a fact that until Lamar delivered his eulogy on Sumner not a Southern
man of prominence used language calculated to placate the North, and
between Lamar and Grady there was an interval of fifteen years. There was
not a Democratic press worthy the name either North or South. During those
evil days the Courier-Journal stood alone, having no party or organized
following. At length it was joined on the Northern side by Greeley. Then
Schurz raised his mighty voice. Then came the great liberal movement of
1871-72, with its brilliant but ill-starred campaign and its tragic finale;
and then there set in what, for a season, seemed the deluge.
But the cause of Constitutional Government was not dead. It had been merely
dormant. Champions began to appear in unexpected quarters. New men spoke
up, North and South. In spite of the Republican landslide of 1872, in 1874
the Democrats swept the Empire State. They carried the popular branch of
Congress by an overwhelming majority. In the Senate they had a respectable
minority, with Thurman and Bayard to lead it. In the House Randall and Kerr
and Cox, Lamar, Beck and Knott were about to be reënforced by Hill and
Tucker and Mills and Gibson. The logic of events was at length subduing the
rodomontade of soap-box oratory. Empty rant was to yield to reason. For all
its mischances and melancholy ending the Greeley campaign had shortened the
distance across the bloody chasm.
Chapter the Eighth
Feminism and Woman Suffrage--The Adventures in Politics and Society--A
Real Heroine
I
It would not be the writer of this narrative if he did not interject
certain opinions of his own which parties and politicians, even his
newspaper colleagues, have been wont to regard as peculiar. By common
repute he has been an all-round old-line Democrat of the regulation sort.
Yet on the three leading national questions of the last fifty years--the
Negro question, the Greenback question and the Free Silver question--he has
challenged and antagonized the general direction of that party. He takes
some pride to himself that in each instance the result vindicated alike his
forecast and his insubordination.
To one who witnessed the break-up of the Whig party in 1853 and of the
Democratic Party in 1860 the plight in which parties find themselves at
this time may be described as at least, suggestive. The feeling is at once
to laugh and to whistle. Too much "fuss and feathers" in Winfield Scott did
the business for the Whigs. Too much "bearded lady" in Charles Evans Hughes
perhaps cooked the goose of the Republicans. Too much Wilson--but let me
not fall into _lèse majesté_. The Whigs went into Know-Nothingism and
Free Soilism. Will the Democrats go into Prohibition and paternalism? And
the Republicans--
The old sectional alignment of North and South has been changed to East and
West.
For the time being the politicians of both parties are in something of a
funk. It is the nature of parties thus situate to fancy that there is no
hereafter, riding in their dire confusion headlong for a fall. Little other
than the labels being left, nobody can tell what will happen to either.
Progressivism seems the cant of the indifferent. Accentuated by the
indecisive vote in the elections and heralded by an ambitious President who
writes Humanity bigger than he writes the United States, and is accused
of aspiring to world leadership, democracy unterrified and undefiled--the
democracy of Jefferson, Jackson and Tilden ancient history--has become
a back number. Yet our officials still swear to a Constitution. We have not
eliminated state lines. State rights are not wholly dead.
The fight between capital and labor is on. No one can predict where it
will end. Shall it prove another irrepressible conflict? Are its issues
irreconcilable? Must the alternative of the future lie between Socialism
and Civil War, or both? Progress! Progress! Shall there be no stability in
either actualities or principles? And--and--what about the Bolsheviki?
II
Parties, like men, have their ups and downs. Like machines they get out of
whack and line. First it was the Federalists, then the Whigs, and then the
Democrats. Then came the Republicans. And then, after a long interruption,
the Democrats again. English political experience repeats itself in
America.
A taking label is as valuable to a party as it is to a nostrum. It becomes
in time an asset. We are told that a fool is born every minute, and, the
average man being something of a fool, the label easily catches him. Hence
the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
The old Whig Party went to pieces on the rocks of sectionalism. The
institution of African slavery arrived upon the scene at length as the
paramount political issue. The North, which brought the Africans here in
its ships, finding slave labor unprofitable, sold its slaves to the South
at a good price, and turned pious. The South took the bait and went crazy.
Finally, we had a pretty kettle of fish. Just as the Prohibitionists are
going to convert mortals into angels overnight by act of assembly--or still
better, by Constitutional amendment--were the short-haired women and the
long-haired men of Boston going to make a white man out of the black man by
Abolition. The Southern Whigs could not see it and would not stand for it.
So they fell in behind the Democrats. The Northern Whigs, having nowhere
else to go, joined the Republicans.
The wise men of both sections saw danger ahead. The North was warned that
the South would fight, the South, that if it did it went against incredible
odds. Neither would take the warning. Party spirit ran wild. Extremism had
its fling. Thus a long, bloody and costly War of Sections--a fraternal
war if ever there was one--brought on by alternating intolerance, the
politicians of both sides gambling upon the credulity and ignorance of the
people.
Hindsight is readier, certainly surer, than foresight. It comes easier and
shows clearer. Anybody can now see that the slavery problem might have had
a less ruinous solution; that the moral issue might have been compromised
from time to time and in the end disposed of. Slave labor even at the South
had shown itself illusory, costly and clumsy. The institution untenable,
modern thought against it, from the first it was doomed.
But the extremists would not have it. Each played to the lead of the other.
Whilst Wendell Phillips was preaching the equality of races, death to the
slaveholders and the brotherhood of man at the North, William Lowndes
Yancey was exclaiming that cotton was king at the South, and, to establish
these false propositions, millions of good Americans proceeded to cut one
another's throats.
There were agitators and agitators in those days as there are in these. The
agitator, like the poor, we have always with us. It used to be said even at
the North that Wendell Phillips was just a clever comedian. William Lowndes
Yancey was scarcely that. He was a serious, sincere, untraveled provincial,
possessing unusual gifts of oratory. He had the misfortune to kill a friend
in a duel when a young man, and the tragedy shadowed his life. He clung to
his plantation and rarely went away from home. When sent to Europe by the
South as its Ambassador in 1861, he discovered the futility of his scheme
of a Southern confederacy, and, seeing the cornerstone of the philosophy
on which he had constructed his pretty fabric, overthrown, he came home
despairing, to die of a broken heart.
The moral alike for governments and men is: Keep the middle of the road.
III
Which brings us to Feminism. I will not write Woman Suffrage, for that is
an accomplished fact--for good or evil we shall presently be better able to
determine.
Life is an adventure and all of us adventurers--saving that the word
presses somewhat harder upon the woman than the man--most things do in
fact, whereby she is given greater endurance--leaving to men the duty of
caring for the women; and, if need be, looking death squarely and defiantly
in the face.
The world often puts the artificial before the actual; but under the
dispensation of the Christian civilization--derived from the Hebraic--the
family requiring a head, headship is assigned to the male. This male is
commonly not much to speak of for beauty of form or decency of behavior.
He is made purposely tough for work and fight. He gets toughened by outer
contact. But back of all are the women, the children and the home.
I have been fighting the woman's battle for equality in the things that
count, all my life. I would despise myself if I had not been. In contesting
precipitate universal suffrage for women, I conceived that I was still
fighting the woman's battle.
We can escape none of Nature's laws. But we need not handicap ourselves
with artificial laws. At best, life is an experiment, Death the final
adventure. Feminism seems to me its next of kin; still we may not call the
woman who assails the soap boxes--even those that antic about the White
House gates--by the opprobrious terms of adventuress. Where such a one is
not a lunatic she is a nuisance. There are women and women.
We may leave out of account the shady ladies of history. Neither Aspasia
nor Lucrezia Borgia nor the Marquise de Brinvilliers could with accuracy
be called an adventuress. The term is of later date. Its origin and growth
have arisen out of the complexities of modern society.
In fiction Milady and Madame Marneffe come in for first honors--in each the
leopard crossed on the serpent and united under a petticoat, beautiful
and wicked--but since the Balzac and Dumas days the story-tellers and
stage-mongers have made exceeding free with the type, and we have between
Herman Merivale's Stephanie de Mohrivart and Victorien Sardou's Zica a
very theater--or shall we say a charnel house--of the woman with the past;
usually portrayed as the victim of circumstance; unprincipled through cruel
experience; insensible through lack of conscience; sexless in soul, but
a siren in seductive arts; cold as ice; hard as iron; implacable as the
grave, pursuing her ends with force of will, intellectual audacity and
elegance of manner, yet, beneath this brilliant depravity, capable of
self-pity, yielding anon in moments of depression to a sudden gleam of
human tenderness and a certain regret for the innocence she has lost.
Such a one is sometimes, though seldom, met in real life. But many
pretenders may be encountered at Monte Carlo and other European resorts.
They range from the Parisian cocotte, signalized by her chic apparel, to
the fashionable divorcée who in trying her luck at the tables keeps a sharp
lookout for the elderly gent with the wad, often fooled by the enterprising
sport who has been there before.
These are out and out professional adventuresses. There are other
adventuresses, however, than those of the story and the stage, the casino
and the cabaret. The woman with the past becomes the girl with the future.
Curiously enough this latter is mainly, almost exclusively, recruited
from our countrywomen, who to an abnormal passion for foreign titles join
surpassing ignorance of foreign society. Thus she is ready to the hand of
the Continental fortune seeker masquerading as a nobleman--occasionally but
not often the black sheep of some noble family--carrying not a bona fide
but a courtesy title--the count and the no-account, the lord and the Lord
knows who! The Yankee girl with a _dot_ had become before the world
war a regular quarry for impecunious aristocrats and clever crooks, the
matrimonial results tragic in their frequency and squalor.
Another curious circumstance is the readiness with which the American
newspaper tumbles to these frauds. The yellow press especially luxuriates
in them; woodcuts the callow bedizened bride, the jaded game-worn groom;
dilates upon the big money interchanged; glows over the tin-plate stars
and imaginary garters and pinchbeck crowns; and keeping the pictorial
paraphernalia in cold but not forgotten storage waits for the inevitable
scandal, and then, with lavish exaggeration, works the old story over
again.
These newspapers ring all the sensational changes. Now it is the wondrous
beauty with the cool million, who, having married some illegitimate of
a minor royal house, will probably be the next Queen of Rigmarolia, and
now--ever increasing the dose--it is the ten-million-dollar widow who is
going to marry the King of Pontarabia's brother, and may thus aspire to be
one day Empress of Sahara.
Old European travelers can recall many funny and sometimes melancholy
incidents--episodes--histories--of which they have witnessed the
beginning and the end, carrying the self-same dénouement and lesson.
IV
As there are women and women there are many kinds of adventuresses; not all
of them wicked and detestable. But, good or bad, the lot of the adventuress
is at best a hard lot. Be she a girl with a future or a woman with a past
she is still a woman, and the world can never be too kind to its women--the
child bearers, the home makers, the moral light of the universe as they
meet the purpose of God and Nature and seek not to thwart it by unsexing
themselves in order that they may keep step with man in ways of
self-indulgent dalliance. The adventuress of fiction always comes to grief.
But the adventuress in real life--the prudent adventuress who draws the
line at adultery--the would-be leader of society without the wealth--the
would-be political leader without the masculine fiber--is sure of
disappointment in the end.
Take the agitation over Suffragism. What is it that the woman suffragette
expects to get? No one of them can, or does, clearly tell us.
It is feminism, rather than suffragism, which is dangerous. Now that they
have it, my fear is that the leaders will not stop with the ballot for
women. They are too fond of the spotlight. It has become a necessity for
them. If all women should fall in with them there would be nothing of
womanhood left, and the world bereft of its women will become a masculine
harlotocracy.
Let me repeat that I have been fighting woman's battles in one way and
another all my life. I am not opposed to Votes for Women. But I would
discriminate and educate, and even at that rate I would limit the franchise
to actual taxpayers, and, outside of these, confine it to charities,
corrections and schools, keeping woman away from the dirt of politics. I do
not believe the ballot will benefit woman and cannot help thinking that in
seeking unlimited and precipitate suffrage the women who favor it are off
their reckoning! I doubt the performances got up to exploit it, though
somehow, when the hikers started from New York to Albany, and afterward
from New York to Washington, the inspiring thought of Bertha von Hillern
came back to me.
I am sure the reader never heard of her. As it makes a pretty story let me
tell it. Many years ago--don't ask me how many--there was a young woman,
Bertha von Hillern by name, a poor art student seeking money enough to take
her abroad, who engaged with the management of a hall in Louisville to walk
one hundred miles around a fixed track in twenty-four consecutive hours.
She did it. Her share of the gate money, I was told, amounted to three
thousand dollars.
I shall never forget the closing scenes of the wondrous test of courage and
endurance. She was a pretty, fair-haired thing, a trifle undersized, but
shapely and sinewy. The vast crowd that without much diminution, though
with intermittent changes, had watched her from start to finish, began to
grow tense with the approach to the end, and the last hour the enthusiasm
was overwhelming. Wave upon wave of cheering followed every footstep of the
plucky girl, rising to a storm of exultation as the final lap was reached.
More dead than alive, but game to the core, the little heroine was carried
off the field, a winner, every heart throbbing with human sympathy, every
eye wet with proud and happy tears. It is not possible adequately to
describe all that happened. One must have been there and seen it fully to
comprehend the glory of it.
Touching the recent Albany and Washington hikes and hikers let me say at
once that I cannot approve the cause of Votes for women as I had approved
the cause of Bertha von Hillern. Where she showed heroic, most of the
suffragettes appear to me grotesque. Where her aim was rational, their aim
has been visionary. To me the younger of them seem as children who need
to be spanked and kissed. There has been indeed about the whole Suffrage
business something pitiful and comic.
Often I have felt like swearing "You idiots!" and then like crying
"Poor dears!" But I have kept on with them, and had I been in Albany or
Washington I would have caught Rosalie Jones in my arms, and before she
could say "Jack Robinson" have exclaimed: "You ridiculous child, go and get
a bath and put on some pretty clothes and come and join us at dinner in
the State Banquet Hall, duly made and provided for you and the rest of you
delightful sillies."
Chapter the Ninth
Dr. Norvin Green--Joseph Pulitzer--Chester A. Arthur--General
Grant--The Case of Fitz-John Porter
I
Truth we are told is stranger than fiction. I have found it so in the
knowledge which has variously come to me of many interesting men and women.
Of these Dr. Norvin Green was a striking example. To have sprung from
humble parentage in the wilds of Kentucky and to die at the head of the
most potential corporation in the world--to have held this place against
all comers by force of abilities deemed indispensable to its welfare--to
have gone the while his ain gait, disdaining the precepts of Doctor
Franklin--who, by the way, did not trouble overmuch to follow them
himself--seems so unusual as to rival the most stirring stories of the
novel mongers.
When I first met Doctor Green he was president of a Kentucky railway
company. He had been, however, one of the organizers of the Western Union
Telegraph Company. He deluded himself for a little by political ambitions.
He wanted to go to the Senate of the United States, and during a
legislative session of prolonged balloting at Frankfort he missed his
election by a single vote.
It may be doubted whether he would have cut a considerable figure at
Washington. His talents were constructive rather than declamatory. He was
called to a greater field--though he never thought it so--and was foremost
among those who developed the telegraph system of the country almost from
its infancy. He possessed the daring of the typical Kentuckian, with the
dead calm of the stoic philosopher; imperturbable; never vexed or querulous
or excited; denying himself none of the indulgences of the gentleman of
leisure. We grew to be constant comrades and friends, and when he returned
to New York to take the important post which to the end of his days he
filled so completely his office in the Western Union Building became my
downtown headquarters.
There I met Jay Gould familiarly; and resumed acquaintance with Russell
Sage, whom I had known when a lad in Washington, he a hayseed member of
Congress; and occasionally other of the Wall Street leaders. In a small
way--though not for long--I caught the stock-gambling fever. But I was on
the "inside," and it was a cold day when I did not "clean up" a goodly
amount to waste uptown in the evening. I may say that I gave this over
through sheer disgust of acquiring so much and such easy and useless
money, for, having no natural love of money--no aptitude for making money
breed--no taste for getting it except to spend it--earning by my own
accustomed and fruitful toil always a sufficiency--the distractions and
dissipations it brought to my annual vacations and occasional visits,
affronted in a way my self-respect, and palled upon my rather eager quest
of pleasure. Money is purely relative. The root of all evil, too. Too much
of it may bring ills as great as not enough.
At the outset of my stock-gambling experience I was one day in the office
of President Edward H. Green, of the Louisville and Nashville Railway, no
relation of Dr. Norvin Green, but the husband of the famous Hetty Green. He
said to me, "How are you in stocks?"
"What do you mean?" said I.
"Why," he said, "do you buy long, or short? Are you lucky or unlucky?"
"You are talking Greek to me," I answered.
"Didn't you ever put up any money on a margin?"
"Never."
"Bless me! You are a virgin. I want to try your luck. Look over this stock
list and pick a stock. I will take a crack at it. All I make we'll divide,
and all we lose I'll pay."
"Will you leave this open for an hour or two?"
"What is the matter with it--is it not liberal enough?"
"The matter is that I am going over to the Western Union to lunch. The
Gould party is to sit in with the Orton-Green party for the first time
after their fight, and I am asked especially to be there. I may pick up
something."
Big Green, as he was called, paused a moment reflectively. "I don't want
any tip--especially from that bunch," said he. "I want to try your virgin
luck. But, go ahead, and let me know this afternoon."
At luncheon I sat at Doctor Green's right, Jay Gould at his left. For the
first and last time in its history wine was served at this board; Russell
Sage was effusive in his demonstrations of affection and went on with his
stories of my boyhood; every one sought to take the chill off the occasion;
and we had a most enjoyable time instead of what promised to be rather a
frosty formality. When the rest had departed, leaving Doctor Green, Mr.
Gould and myself at table, mindful of what I had come for, in a bantering
way I said to Doctor Green: "Now that I am a Wall Street ingénu, why don't
you tell me something?"
Gould leaned across the table and said in his velvet voice: "Buy Texas
Pacific."
Two or three days after, Texas Pacific fell off sixty points or more. I did
not see Big Green again. Five or six months later I received from him a
statement of account which I could never have unraveled, with a check
for some thousands of dollars, my one-half profit on such and such an
operation. Texas Pacific had come back again.
Two or three years later I sat at Doctor Green's table with Mr. Gould, just
as we had sat the first day. Mr. Gould recalled the circumstance.
"I did not think I could afford to have you lose on my suggestion and I
went to cover your loss, when I found five thousand shares of Texas Pacific
transferred on the books of the company in your name. I knew these could
not be yours. I thought the buyer was none other than the man I was after,
and I began hammering the stock. I have been curious ever since to make
sure whether I was right."
"Whom did you suspect, Mr. Gould?" I asked.
"My suspect was Victor Newcomb," he replied.
I then told him what had happened. "Dear, dear," he cried. "Ned Green! Big
Green. Well, well! You do surprise me. I would rather have done him a favor
than an injury. I am rejoiced to learn that no harm was done and that,
after all, you and he came out ahead."
It was about this time Jay Gould had bought of the Thomas A. Scott estate a
New York daily newspaper which, in spite of brilliant writers like Manton
Marble and William Henry Hurlbut, had never been a moneymaker. This was the
_World_. He offered me the editorship with forty-nine of the hundred
shares of stock on very easy terms, which nowise tempted me. But two or
three years after, I daresay both weary and hopeless of putting up so much
money on an unyielding investment, he was willing to sell outright, and
Joseph Pulitzer became the purchaser.
His career is another illustration of the saying that truth is stranger
than fiction.
II
Joseph Pulitzer and I came together familiarly at the Liberal Republican
Convention, which met at Cincinnati in 1872--the convocation of cranks,
as it was called--and nominated Horace Greeley for President. He was a
delegate from Missouri. Subsequent events threw us much together. He began
his English newspaper experience after a kind of apprenticeship on a German
daily with Stilson Hutchins, another interesting character of those days.
It was from Stilson Hutchins that I learned something of Pulitzer's origin
and beginnings, for he never spoke much of himself.
According to this story he was the offspring of a runaway marriage between
a subaltern officer in the Austrian service and a Hungarian lady of noble
birth. In some way he had got across the Atlantic, and being in Boston, a
wizened youth not speaking a word of English, he was spirited on board a
warship. Watching his chance of escape he leaped overboard in the darkness
of night, though it was the dead of winter, and swam ashore. He was found
unconscious on the beach by some charitable persons, who cared for him.
Thence he tramped it to St. Louis, where he heard there was a German
colony, and found work on a coal barge.
It was here that the journalistic instinct dawned upon him. He began to
carry river news items to the Westliche Post, which presently took him on
its staff of regular reporters.
The rest was easy. He learned to speak and write English, was transferred
to the paper of which Hutchins was the head, and before he was
five-and-twenty became a local figure.
When he turned up in New York with an offer to purchase the World we met
as old friends. During the interval between 1872 and 1883 we had had a
runabout in Europe and I was able to render him assistance in the purchase
proceeding he was having with Gould. When this was completed he said to me:
"You are at entire leisure; you are worse than that, you are wasting your
time about the clubs and watering places, doing no good for yourself, or
anybody else. I must first devote myself to the reorganization of the
business end of it. Here is a blank check. Fill it for whatever amount you
please and it will be honored. I want you to go upstairs and organize my
editorial force for me."
Indignantly I replied: "Go to the devil--you have not money enough--there
is not money enough in the universe--to buy an hour of my season's loaf."
A year later I found him occupying with his family a splendid mansion up
the Hudson, with a great stable of carriages and horses, living like a
country gentleman, going to the World office about time for luncheon and
coming away in the early afternoon. I passed a week-end with him. To me it
seemed the precursor of ruin. His second payment was yet to be made. Had I
been in his place I would have been taking my meals in an adjacent hotel,
sleeping on a cot in one of the editorial rooms and working fifteen hours
out of the twenty-four. To me it seemed dollars to doughnuts that he would
break down and go to smash. But he did not--another case of destiny.
I was abiding with my family at Monte Carlo, when in his floating palace,
the Liberty, he came into the harbor of Mentone. Then he bought a shore
palace at Cap Martin. That season, and the next two or three seasons, we
made voyages together from one end to the other of the Mediterranean,
visiting the islands, especially Corsica and Elba, shrines of Napoleon whom
he greatly admired.
He was a model host. He had surrounded himself with every luxury, including
some agreeable retainers, and lived like a prince aboard. His blindness had
already overtaken him. Other physical ailments assailed him. But no word of
complaint escaped his lips and he rarely failed to sit at the head of his
table. It was both splendid and pitiful.
Absolute authority made Pulitzer a tyrant. He regarded his newspaper
ownership as an autocracy. There was nothing gentle in his domination, nor,
I might say, generous either. He seriously lacked the sense of humor, and
even among his familiars could never take a joke. His love of money was by
no means inordinate. He spent it freely though not wastefully or joyously,
for the possession of it rather flattered his vanity than made occasion for
pleasure. Ability of varying kinds and degrees he had, a veritable genius
for journalism and a real capacity for affection. He held his friends at
good account and liked to have them about him. During the early days of his
success he was disposed to overindulgence, not to say conviviality. He
was fond of Rhine wines and an excellent judge of them, keeping a varied
assortment always at hand. Once, upon the Liberty, he observed that I
preferred a certain vintage. "You like this wine?" he said inquiringly. I
assented, and he said, "I have a lot of it at home, and when I get back I
will send you some." I had quite forgotten when, many months after, there
came to me a crate containing enough to last me a life-time.
He had a retentive memory and rarely forgot anything. I could recall many
pleasurable incidents of our prolonged and varied intimacy. We were one
day wandering about the Montmartre region of Paris when we came into a
hole-in-the-wall where they were playing a piece called "Les Brigands." It
was melodrama to the very marrow of the bones of the Apaches that gathered
and glared about. In those days, the "indemnity" paid and the "military
occupation" withdrawn, everything French pre-figured hatred of the German,
and be sure "Les Brigands" made the most of this; each "brigand" a
beer-guzzling Teuton; each hero a dare-devil Gaul; and, when Joan the Maid,
heroine, sent Goetz von Berlichingen, the Vandal Chieftain, sprawling in
the saw-dust, there was no end to the enthusiasm.
"We are all 'brigands'," said Pulitzer as we came away, "differing
according to individual character, to race and pursuit. Now, if I were
writing that play, I should represent the villain as a tyrannous City
Editor, meanly executing the orders of a niggardly proprietor."
"And the heroine?" I said.
"She should be a beautiful and rich young lady," he replied, "who buys
the newspaper and marries the cub--rescuing genius from poverty and
persecution."
He was not then the owner of the World. He had not created the
Post-Dispatch, or even met the beautiful woman who became his wife. He was
a youngster of five or six and twenty, revisiting the scenes of his boyhood
on the beautiful blue Danube, and taking in Paris for a lark.
III
I first met General Grant in my own house. I had often been invited to his
house. As far back as 1870 John Russell Young, a friend from boyhood, came
with an invitation to pass the week-end as the President's guest at Long
Branch. Many of my friends had cottages there. Of afternoons and evenings
they played an infinitesimal game of draw poker.
"John," my answer was, "I don't dare to do so. I know that I shall fall
in love with General Grant. We are living in rough times--particularly in
rough party times. We have a rough presidential campaign ahead of us. If I
go down to the seashore and go in swimming and play penny-ante with General
Grant I shall not be able to do my duty."
It was thus that after the general had gone out of office and made the
famous journey round the world, and had come to visit relatives in
Kentucky, that he accepted a dinner invitation from me, and I had a number
of his friends to meet him.
Among these were Dr. Richardson, his early schoolmaster when the Grant
family lived at Maysville, and Walter Haldeman, my business partner, a
Maysville boy, who had been his schoolmate at the Richardson Academy, and
General Cerro Gordo Williams, then one of Kentucky's Senators in Congress,
and erst his comrade and chum when both were lieutenants in the Mexican
War. The bars were down, the windows were shut and there was no end of
hearty hilarity. Dr. Richardson had been mentioned by Mr. Haldeman as "the
only man that ever licked Grant," and the general promptly retorted "he
never licked me," when the good old doctor said, "No, Ulysses, I never
did--nor Walter, either--for you two were the best boys in school."
I said "General Grant, why not give up this beastly politics, buy a
blue-grass farm, and settle down to horse-raising and tobacco growing in
Kentucky?" And, quick as a flash--for both he and the company perceived
that it was "a leading question"--he replied, "Before I can buy a farm
in Kentucky I shall have to sell a farm in Missouri," which left nothing
further to be said.
There was some sparring between him and General Williams over their
youthful adventures. Finally General Williams, one of the readiest and most
amusing of talkers, returned one of General Grant's sallies with, "Anyhow,
I know of a man whose life you took unknown to yourself." Then he told of a
race he and Grant had outside of Galapa in 1846. "Don't you remember," he
said, "that riding ahead of me you came upon a Mexican loaded with a lot of
milk cans piled above his head and that you knocked him over as you swept
by him?"
"Yes," said Grant, "I believed if I stopped or questioned or even deflected
it would lose me the race. I have not thought of it since. But now that you
mention it I recall it distinctly."
"Well," Williams continued, "you killed him. Your horse's hoof struck him.
When, seeing I was beaten, I rode back, his head was split wide open. I did
not tell you at the time because I knew it would cause you pain, and a dead
greaser more or less made no difference."
Later on General Grant took desk room in Victor Newcomb's private office in
New York. There I saw much of him, and we became good friends. He was the
most interesting of men. Soldierlike--monosyllabic--in his official and
business dealings he threw aside all formality and reserve in his social
intercourse, delightfully reminiscential, indeed a capital story teller. I
do not wonder that he had constant and disinterested friends who loved him
sincerely.
IV
It has always been my opinion that if Chester A. Arthur had been named by
the Republicans as their candidate in 1884 they would have carried the
election, spite of what Mr. Blaine, who defeated Arthur in the convention,
had said and thought about the nomination of General Sherman. Arthur, like
Grant, belonged to the category of lovable men in public life.
There was a gallant captain in the army who had slapped his colonel in
the face on parade. Morally, as man to man, he had the right of it. But
military law is inexorable. The verdict was dismissal from the service. I
went with the poor fellow's wife and her sister to see General Hancock at
Governor's Island. It was a most affecting meeting--the general, tears
rolling down his cheeks, taking them into his arms, and, when he could
speak, saying: "I can do nothing but hold up the action of the court till
Monday. Your recourse is the President and a pardon; I will recommend it,
but"--putting his hand upon my shoulder--"here is the man to get the pardon
if the President can be brought to see the case as most of us see it."
At once I went over to Washington, taking Stephen French with me. When
we entered the President's apartment in the White House he advanced
smiling to greet us, saying: "I know what you boys are after; you mean--"
"Yes, Mr. President," I answered, "we do, and if ever--"
"I have thought over it, sworn over it, and prayed over it," he said, "and
I am going to pardon him!"
V
Another illustrative incident happened during the Arthur Administration.
The dismissal of Gen. Fitz-John Porter from the army had been the subject
of more or less acrimonious controversy. During nearly two decades this had
raged in army circles. At length the friends of Porter, led by Curtin and
Slocum, succeeded in passing a relief measure through Congress. They were
in ecstasies. That there might be a presidential objection had not crossed
their minds.
Senator McDonald, of Indiana, a near friend of General Porter, and a man of
rare worldly wisdom, knew better. Without consulting them he came to me.
"You are personally close to the President," said he, "and you must know
that if this bill gets to the White House he will veto it. With the
Republican National Convention directly ahead he is bound to veto it. It
must not be allowed to get to him; and you are the man to stop it. They
will listen to you and will not listen to me."
First of all, I went to the White House.
"Mr. President," I said, "I want you to authorize me to tell Curtin and
Slocum not to send the Fitz-John Porter bill to you."
"Why?" he answered.
"Because," said I, "you will have to veto it; and, with the Frelinghuysens
wild for it, as well as others of your nearest friends, I am sure you don't
want to be obliged to do that. With your word to me I can stop it, and have
it for the present at least held up."
His answer was, "Go ahead."
Then I went to the Capitol. Curtin and Slocum were in a state of mind. It
was hard to make them understand or believe what I told them.
"Now, gentlemen," I continued, "I don't mean to argue the case. It is not
debatable. I am just from the White House, and I am authorized by the
President to say that if you send this bill to him he will veto it."
That, of course, settled it. They held it up. But after the presidential
election it reached Arthur, and he did veto it. Not till Cleveland came in
did Porter obtain his restoration.
Curiously enough General Grant approved this. I had listened to the
debate in the House--especially the masterly speech of William Walter
Phelps--without attaining a clear understanding of the many points at
issue. I said as much to General Grant.
"Why," he replied, "the case is as simple as A, B, C. Let me show you."
Then, with a pencil he traced the Second Bull Run battlefield, the location
of troops, both Federal and Confederate, and the exact passage in the
action which had compromised General Porter.
"If Porter had done what he was ordered to do," he went on, "Pope and his
army would have been annihilated. In point of fact Porter saved Pope's
Army." Then he paused and added: "I did not at the outset know this. I
was for a time of a different opinion and on the other side. It was
Longstreet's testimony--which had not been before the first Court of
Inquiry that convicted Porter--which vindicated him and convinced me."
Chapter the Tenth
Of Liars and Lying--Woman Suffrage and Feminism--The Professional
Female--Parties, Politics, and Politicians in America
I
All is fair in love and war, the saying hath it. "Lord!" cried the most
delightful of liars, "How this world is given to lying." Yea, and how
exigency quickens invention and promotes deceit.
Just after the war of sections I was riding in a train with Samuel Bowles,
who took a great interest in things Southern. He had been impressed by a
newspaper known as The Chattanooga Rebel and, as I had been its editor, put
innumerable questions to me about it and its affairs. Among these he asked
how great had been its circulation. Without explaining that often an entire
company, in some cases an entire regiment, subscribed for a few copies, or
a single copy, I answered: "I don't know precisely, but somewhere near a
hundred thousand, I take it." Then he said: "Where did you get your press
power?"
This was, of course, a poser, but it did not embarrass me in the least. I
was committed, and without a moment's thought I proceeded with an imaginary
explanation which he afterward declared had been altogether satisfying. The
story was too good to keep--maybe conscience pricked--and in a chummy talk
later along I laughingly confessed.
"You should tell that in your dinner speech tonight," he said. "If you tell
it as you have just told it to me, it will make a hit," and I did.
I give it as the opinion of a long life of experience and observation that
the newspaper press, whatever its delinquencies, is not a common liar, but
the most habitual of truth tellers. It is growing on its editorial page I
fear a little vapid and colorless. But there is a general and ever-present
purpose to print the facts and give the public the opportunity to reach its
own conclusions.
There are liars and liars, lying and lying. It is, with a single exception,
the most universal and venial of human frailties. We have at least three
kinds of lying and species, or types, of liars--first, the common,
ordinary, everyday liar, who lies without rime or reason, rule or compass,
aim, intent or interest, in whose mind the partition between truth and
falsehood has fallen down; then the sensational, imaginative liar, who has
a tale to tell; and, finally, the mean, malicious liar, who would injure
his neighbor.
This last is, indeed, but rare. Human nature is at its base amicable,
because if nothing hinders it wants to please. All of us, however, are more
or less its unconscious victims.
Competition is not alone the life of trade; it is the life of life; for
each of us is in one way, or another, competitive. There is but one
disinterested person in the world, the mother who whether of the human or
animal kingdom, will die for her young. Yet, after all, hers, too, is a
kind of selfishness.
The woman is becoming over much a professional female. It is of importance
that we begin to consider her as a new species, having enjoyed her beauty
long enough. Is the world on the way to organic revolution? If I were a
young man I should not care to be the lover of a professional female. As
an old man I have affectionate relations with a number of suffragettes, as
they dare not deny; that is to say, I long ago accepted woman suffrage as
inevitable, whether for good or evil, depending upon whether the woman's
movement is going to stop with suffrage or run into feminism, changing the
character of woman and her relations to men and with man.
II
I have never made party differences the occasion of personal quarrel or
estrangement. On the contrary, though I have been always called a Democrat,
I have many near and dear friends among the Republicans. Politics is not
war. Politics would not be war even if the politicians were consistent and
honest. But there are among them so many changelings, cheats and rogues.
Then, in politics as elsewhere, circumstances alter cases. I have as a rule
thought very little of parties as parties, professional politicians and
party leaders, and I think less of them as I grow older. The politician and
the auctioneer might be described like the lunatic, the lover and the poet,
as "of imagination all compact." One sees more mares' nests than would
fill a book; the other pure gold in pinchbeck wares; and both are out for
gudgeons.
It is the habit--nay, the business--of the party speaker when he mounts the
raging stump to roar his platitudes into the ears of those who have the
simplicity to listen, though neither edified nor enlightened; to aver that
the horse he rides is sixteen feet high; that the candidate he supports is
a giant; and that he himself is no small figure of a man.
Thus he resembles the auctioneer. But it is the mock auctioneer whom he
resembles; his stock in trade being largely, if not altogether, fraudulent.
The success which at the outset of party welfare attended this legalized
confidence game drew into it more and more players. For a long time they
deceived themselves almost as much as the voters. They had not become
professional. They were amateur. Many of them played for sheer love of
the gamble. There were rules to regulate the play. But as time passed and
voters multiplied, the popular preoccupation increased the temptations and
opportunities for gain, inviting the enterprising, the skillful and the
corrupt to reconstitute patriotism into a commodity and to organize public
opinion into a bill of lading. Thus politics as a trade, parties as
trademarks, the politicians, like harlots, plying their vocation.
Now and again an able, honest and brave man, who aims at better things,
appears. In the event that fortune favors him and he attains high station,
he finds himself surrounded and thwarted by men less able and courageous,
who, however equal to discovering right from wrong, yet wear the party
collar, owe fealty to the party machine, are sometimes actual slaves of the
party boss. In the larger towns we hear of the City Hall ring; out in the
counties of the Court House ring. We rarely anywhere encounter clean,
responsible administration and pure, disinterested, public service.
The taxpayers are robbed before their eyes. The evil grows greater as we
near the centers of population. But there is scarcely a village or hamlet
where graft does not grow like weeds, the voters as gullible and helpless
as the infatuated victims of bunko tricks, ingeniously contrived by
professional crooks to separate the fool and his money. Is self-government
a failure?
None of us would allow the votaries of the divine right of kings to tell
us so, albeit we are ready enough to admit the imperfections of universal
suffrage, too often committing affairs of pith and moment, even of life and
death, to the arbitrament of the mob, and costing more in cash outlay than
royal establishments.
The quadrennial period in American politics, set apart and dedicated to
the election of presidents, magnifies these evil features in an otherwise
admirable system of government. That the whipper-snappers of the vicinage
should indulge their propensities comes as the order of their nature.
But the party leaders are not far behind them. Each side construes every
occurrence as an argument in its favor, assuring it certain victory. Take,
for example, the latest state election anywhere. In point of fact, it
foretold nothing. It threw no light upon coming events, not even upon
current events. It leaves the future as hazy as before. Yet the managers of
either party affect to be equally confident that it presages the triumph of
their ticket in the next national election. The wonder is that so many of
the voters will believe and be influenced by such transparent subterfuge.
Is there any remedy for all this? I much fear that there is not.
Government, like all else, is impossible of perfection. It is as man
is--good, bad and indifferent; which is but another way of saying we live
in a world of cross purposes. We in America prefer republicanism. But would
despotism be so demurrable under a wise unselfish despot?
III
Contemplating the contrasts between foreign life and foreign history with
our own one cannot help reflecting upon the yet more startling contrasts of
ancient and modern religion and government. I have wandered not a little
over Europe at irregular intervals for more than fifty years. Always a
devotee to American institutions, I have been strengthened in my beliefs by
what I have encountered.
The mood in our countrymen has been overmuch to belittle things American.
The commercial spirit in the United States, which affects to be
nationalistic, is in reality cosmopolitan. Money being its god, French
money, English money, anything that calls itself money, is wealth to it. It
has no time to waste on theories or to think of generics. "Put money in thy
purse" has become its motto. Money constitutes the reason of its being.
The organic law of the land is Greek to it, as are those laws of God which
obstruct it. It is too busy with its greed and gain to think, or to feel,
on any abstract subject. That which does not appeal to it in the concrete
is of no interest at all.
Just as in the days of Charles V and Philip II, all things yielded to the
theologian's misconception of the spiritual life so in these days of the
Billionaires all things spiritual and abstract yield to what they call the
progress of the universe and the leading of the times. Under their rule we
have had extraordinary movement just as under the lords of the Palatinate
and the Escurial--the medieval union of the devils of bigotry and
power--Europe, which was but another name for Spain, had extraordinary
movement. We know where it ended with Spain. Whither is it leading us? Are
we traveling the same road?
Let us hope not. Let us believe not. Yet, once strolling along through the
crypt of the Church of the Escurial near Madrid, I could not repress the
idea of a personal and physical resemblance between the effigies in marble
and bronze looking down upon me whichever way I turned, to some of our
contemporary public men and seeming to say: "My love to the President when
you see him next," and "Don't forget to remember me kindly, please, to the
chairmen of both your national committees!"
IV
In a world of sin, disease and death--death inevitable--what may man do to
drive out sin and cure disease, to the end that, barring accident, old age
shall set the limit on mortal life?
The quack doctor equally in ethics and in physics has played a leading part
in human affairs. Only within a relatively brief period has science made
serious progress toward discovery. Though Nature has perhaps an antidote
for all her poisons many of them continue to defy approach. They lie
concealed, leaving the astutest to grope in the dark.
That which is true of material things is truer yet of spiritual things. The
ideal about which we hear so much, is as unattained as the fabled bag of
gold at the end of the rainbow. Nor is the doctrine of perfectability
anywhere one with itself. It speaks in diverse tongues. Its processes and
objects are variant. It seems but an iridescent dream which lends itself
equally to the fancies of the impracticable and the scheming of the
self-seeking, breeding visionaries and pretenders.
Easily assumed and asserted, too often it becomes tyrannous, dealing with
things outer and visible while taking little if any account of the inner
lights of the soul. Thus it imposes upon credulity and ignorance; makes
fakers of some and fanatics of others; in politics where not an engine of
oppression, a corrupt influence; in religion where not a zealot, a promoter
of cant. In short the self-appointed apostle of uplift, who disregarding
individual character would make virtue a matter of statute law and ordain
uniformity of conduct by act of conventicle or assembly, is likelier to
produce moral chaos than to reach the sublime state he claims to seek.
The bare suggestion is full of startling possibilities. Individualism was
the discovery of the fathers of the American Republic. It is the bedrock
of our political philosophy. Human slavery was assuredly an indefensible
institution. But the armed enforcement of freedom did not make a black man
a white man. Nor will the wave of fanaticism seeking to control the food
and drink and dress of the people make men better men. Danger lurks and is
bound to come with the inevitable reaction.
The levity of the men is recruited by the folly of the women. The leaders
of feminism would abolish sex. To what end? The pessimist answers what
easier than the demolition of a sexless world gone entirely mad? How simple
the engineries of destruction. Civil war in America; universal hara-kiri
in Europe; the dry rot of wealth wasting itself in self-indulgence. Then a
thousand years of total eclipse. Finally Macaulay's Australian surveying
the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral from a broken parapet of London Bridge;
and a Moslem conqueror of America looking from the hill of the Capitol at
Washington upon the desolation of what was once the District of Columbia.
Shall the end be an Oriental renaissance with the philosophies of Buddha,
Mohammed and Confucius welded into a new religion describing itself as the
last word of science, reason and common sense?
Alas, and alack the day! In those places where the suffering rich most do
congregate the words of Watts' hymn have constant application:
_For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do._
When they have not gone skylarking or grown tired of bridge they devote
their leisure to organizing clubs other than those of the uplift. There
are all sorts, from the Society for the Abrogation of Bathing Suits at the
seaside resorts to the League at Mewville for the Care of Disabled Cats.
Most of these clubs are all officers and no privates. That is what many of
them are got up for. Do they advance the world in grace? One who surveys
the scene can scarcely think so.
But the whirl goes on; the yachts sweep proudly out to sea; the auto cars
dash madly through the streets; more and darker and deeper do the contrasts
of life show themselves. How long shall it be when the mudsill millions
take the upper ten thousand by the throat and rend them as the furiosos of
the Terror in France did the aristocrats of the _Régime Ancien_? The
issue between capital and labor, for example, is full of generating
heat and hate. Who shall say that, let loose in the crowded centers of
population, it may not one day engulf us all?
Is this rank pessimism or merely the vagaries of an old man dropping back
into second childhood, who does not see that the world is wiser and better
than ever it was, mankind and womankind, surely on the way to perfection?
V
One thing is certain: We are not standing still. Since "Adam delved and Eve
span"--if they ever did--in the Garden of Eden, "somewhere in Asia," to the
"goings on" in the Garden of the Gods directly under Pike's Peak--the earth
we inhabit has at no time and nowhere wanted for liveliness--but surely
it was never livelier than it now is; as the space-writer says, more
"dramatic"; indeed, to quote the guidebooks, quite so "picturesque and
interesting."
Go where one may, on land or sea, he will come upon activities of one sort
and another. Were Timon of Athens living, he might be awakened from his
misanthrophy and Jacques, the forest cynic, stirred to something like
enthusiasm. Is the world enduring the pangs of a second birth which shall
recreate all things anew, supplementing the miracles of modern invention
with a corresponding development of spiritual life; or has it reached the
top of the hill, and, mortal, like the human atoms that compose it, is it
starting downward on the other side into an abyss which the historians of
the future will once again call "the dark ages?"
We know not, and there is none to tell us. That which is actually happening
were unbelievable if we did not see it, from hour to hour, from day to day.
Horror succeeding horror has in some sort blunted our sensibilities. Not
only are our sympathies numbed by the immensity of the slaughter and the
sorrow, but patriotism itself is chilled by the selfish thought that,
having thus far measurably escaped, we may pull through without paying our
share. This will account for a certain indifferentism we now and again
encounter.
At the moment we are felicitating ourselves--or, is it merely confusing
ourselves?--over the revolution in Russia. It seems of good augury. To
begin with, for Russia. Then the murder war fairly won for the Allies, we
are promised by the optimists a wise and lasting peace.
The bells that rang out in Petrograd and Moscow sounded, we are told, the
death knell of autocracy in Berlin and Vienna. The clarion tones that
echoed through the Crimea and Siberia, albeit to the ear of the masses
muffled in the Schwarzwald and along the shores of the North Sea, and up
and down the Danube and the Rhine, yet conveyed a whispered message which
may presently break into song; the glad song of freedom with it glorious
refrain: "The Romanoffs gone! Perdition having reached the Hohenzollerns
and the Hapsburgs, all will be well!"
Anyhow, freedom; self-government; for whilst a scrutinizing and solicitous
pessimism, observing and considering many abuses, administrative and
political, federal and local, in our republican system--abuses which being
very visible are most lamentable--may sometimes move us to lose heart of
hope in democracy, we know of none better. So, let us stand by it; pray for
it; fight for it. Let us by our example show the Russians how to attain it.
Let us by the same token show the Germans how to attain it when they come
to see, if they ever do, the havoc autocracy has made for Germany. That
should constitute the bed rock of our politics and our religion. It is the
true religion. Love of country is love of God. Patriotism is religion.
It is also Christianity. The pacifist, let me parenthetically observe,
is scarcely a Christian. There be technical Christians and there be
Christians. The technical Christian sees nothing but the blurred letter of
the law, which he misconstrues. The Christian, animated by its holy spirit
and led by its rightful interpretation, serves the Lord alike of heaven and
hosts when he flies the flag of his country and smites its enemies hip and
thigh!
Chapter the Eleventh
Andrew Johnson--The Liberal Convention in 1872--Carl Schurz--The
"Quadrilateral"--Sam Bowles, Horace White and Murat Halstead--A Queer
Composite of Incongruities
I
Among the many misconceptions and mischances that befell the slavery
agitation in the United States and finally led a kindred people into actual
war the idea that got afloat after this war that every Confederate was a
Secessionist best served the ends of the radicalism which sought to reduce
the South to a conquered province, and as such to reconstruct it by hostile
legislation supported wherever needed by force.
Andrew Johnson very well understood that a great majority of the men who
were arrayed on the Southern side had taken the field against their better
judgment through pressure of circumstance. They were Union men who had
opposed secession and clung to the old order. Not merely in the Border
States did this class rule but in the Gulf States it held a respectable
minority until the shot fired upon Sumter drew the call for troops from
Lincoln. The Secession leaders, who had staked their all upon the hazard,
knew that to save their movement from collapse it was necessary that blood
be sprinkled in the faces of the people. Hence the message from Charleston:
_With cannon, mortar and petard
We tender you our Beauregard_--
with the response from Washington precipitating the conflict of theories
into a combat of arms for which neither party was prepared.
The debate ended, battle at hand, Southern men had to choose between the
North and the South, between their convictions and predilections on one
side and expatriation on the other side--resistance to invasion, not
secession, the issue. But four years later, when in 1865 all that they had
believed and feared in 1861 had come to pass, these men required no drastic
measures to bring them to terms. Events more potent than acts of Congress
had already reconstructed them. Lincoln with a forecast of this had shaped
his ends accordingly. Johnson, himself a Southern man, understood it even
better than Lincoln, and backed by the legacy of Lincoln he proceeded not
very skillfully to build upon it.
The assassination of Lincoln, however, had played directly into the hands
of the radicals, led by Ben Wade in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens in the
House. Prior to that baleful night they had fallen behind the marching
van. The mad act of Booth put them upon their feet and brought them to the
front. They were implacable men, politicians equally of resolution and
ability. Events quickly succeeding favored them and their plans. It was not
alone Johnson's lack of temper and tact that gave them the whip hand. His
removal from office would have opened the door of the White House to Wade,
so that strategically Johnson's position was from the beginning beleaguered
and came perilously near before the close to being untenable.
Grant, a political nondescript, not Wade, the uncompromising extremist,
came after; and inevitably four years of Grant had again divided the
triumphant Republicans. This was the situation during the winter of
1871-72, when the approaching Presidential election brought the country
face to face with a most extraordinary state of affairs. The South was in
irons. The North was growing restive. Thinking people everywhere felt
that conditions so anomalous to our institutions could not and should not
endure.
II
Johnson had made a bungling attempt to carry out the policies of Lincoln
and had gone down in the strife. The Democratic Party had reached the ebb
tide of its disastrous fortunes.
It seemed the merest reactionary. A group of influential Republicans,
dissatisfied for one cause and another with Grant, held a caucus and issued
a call for what they described as a Liberal Republican Convention to
assemble in Cincinnati May 1, 1872.
A Southern man and a Confederate soldier, a Democrat by conviction and
inheritance, I had been making in Kentucky an uphill fight for the
acceptance of the inevitable. The line of cleavage between the old and the
new South I had placed upon the last three amendments to the Constitution,
naming them the Treaty of Peace between the Sections. The negro must be
invested with the rights conferred upon him by these amendments, however
mistaken and injudicious the South might think them. The obsolete Black
Laws instituted during the slave régime must be removed from the statute
books. The negro, like Mohammed's coffin, swung in midair. He was neither
fish, flesh nor fowl, nor good red herring. For our own sake we must
habilitate him, educate and elevate him, make him, if possible, a contented
and useful citizen. Failing of this, free government itself might be
imperiled.
I had behind me the intelligence of the Confederate soldiers almost to a
man. They at least were tired of futile fighting, and to them the war was
over. But--and especially in Kentucky--there was an element that wanted to
fight when it was too late; old Union Democrats and Union Whigs who clung
to the hull of slavery when the kernel was gone, and proposed to win in
politics what had been lost in battle.
The leaders of this belated element were in complete control of the
political machinery of the state. They regarded me as an impudent
upstart--since I had come to Kentucky from Tennessee--as little better than
a carpet-bagger; and had done their uttermost to put me down and drive me
out.
[Illustration: Abraham Lincoln in 1861 _From a Photograph by M B
Brady_]
I was a young fellow of two and thirty, of boundless optimism and my full
share of self-confidence, no end of physical endurance and mental vitality,
having some political as well as newspaper experience. It never crossed my
fancy that I could fail.
I met resistance with aggression, answered attempts at bullying with
scorn, generally irradiated by laughter. Yet was I not wholly blind to
consequences and the admonitions of prudence; and when the call for a
Liberal Republican Convention appeared I realized that if I expected to
remain a Democrat in a Democratic community, and to influence and lead a
Democratic following, I must proceed warily.
Though many of those proposing the new movement were familiar
acquaintances--some of them personal friends--the scheme was in the air, as
it were. Its three newspaper bellwethers--Samuel Bowles, Horace White and
Murat Halstead--were especially well known to me; so were Horace Greeley,
Carl Schurz and Charles Sumner, Stanley Matthews being my kinsman, George
Hoadley and Cassius M. Clay next-door neighbors. But they were not the men
I had trained with--not my "crowd"--and it was a question how far I might
be able to reconcile myself, not to mention my political associates, to
such company, even conceding that they proceeded under good fortune with a
good plan, offering the South extrication from its woes and the Democratic
Party an entering wedge into a solid and hitherto irresistible North.
Nevertheless, I resolved to go a little in advance to Cincinnati, to have a
look at the stalking horse there to be displayed, free to take it or leave
it as I liked, my bridges and lines of communication quite open and intact.
III
A livelier and more variegated omnium-gatherum was never assembled. They
had already begun to straggle in when I arrived. There were long-haired
and spectacled doctrinaires from New England, spliced by short-haired and
stumpy emissaries from New York--mostly friends of Horace Greeley, as it
turned out. There were brisk Westerners from Chicago and St. Louis. If
Whitelaw Reid, who had come as Greeley's personal representative, had his
retinue, so had Horace White and Carl Schurz. There were a few rather
overdressed persons from New Orleans brought up by Governor Warmouth, and a
motely array of Southerners of every sort, who were ready to clutch at any
straw that promised relief to intolerable conditions. The full contingent
of Washington correspondents was there, of course, with sharpened eyes and
pens to make the most of what they had already begun to christen a conclave
of cranks.
Bowles and Halstead met me at the station, and we drove to the St. Nicholas
Hotel, where Schurz and White were awaiting us. Then and there was
organized a fellowship which in the succeeding campaign cut a considerable
figure and went by the name of the Quadrilateral. We resolved to limit
the Presidential nominations of the convention to Charles Francis Adams,
Bowles' candidate, and Lyman Trumbull, White's candidate, omitting
altogether, because of specific reasons urged by White, the candidacy of B.
Gratz Brown, who because of his Kentucky connections had better suited my
purpose.
The very next day the secret was abroad, and Whitelaw Reid came to me to
ask why in a newspaper combine of this sort the New York Tribune had been
left out.
To my mind it seemed preposterous that it had been or should be, and I
stated as much to my new colleagues. They offered objection which to me
appeared perverse if not childish. They did not like Reid, to begin with.
He was not a principal like the rest of us, but a subordinate. Greeley was
this, that and the other. He could never be relied upon in any coherent
practical plan of campaign. To talk about him as a candidate was
ridiculous.
I listened rather impatiently and finally I said: "Now, gentlemen, in this
movement we shall need the New York Tribune. If we admit Reid we clinch it.
You will all agree that Greeley has no chance of a nomination, and so by
taking him in we both eat our cake and have it."
On this view of the case Reid was invited to join us, and that very night
he sat with us at the St. Nicholas, where from night to night until the end
we convened and went over the performances and developments of the day and
concerted plans for the morrow.
As I recall these symposiums some amusing and some plaintive memories rise
before me.
The first serious business that engaged us was the killing of the boom for
Judge David Davis, of the Supreme Court, which was assuming definite and
formidable proportions. The preceding winter it had been incubating at
Washington under the ministration of some of the most astute politicians of
the time, mainly, however, Democratic members of Congress.
A party of these had brought it to Cincinnati, opening headquarters well
provided with the requisite commissaries. Every delegate who came in that
could be reached was laid hold of and conducted to Davis' headquarters.
We considered it flat burglary. It was a gross infringement upon our
copyrights. What business had the professional politicians with a great
reform movement? The influence and dignity of journalism were at stake. The
press was imperilled. We, its custodians, could brook no such deflection,
not to say defiance, from intermeddling office seekers, especially from
broken-down Democratic office seekers.
The inner sanctuary of our proceedings was a common drawing-room between
two bedchambers, occupied by Schurz and myself. Here we repaired after
supper to smoke the pipe of fraternity and reform, and to save the country.
What might be done to kill off "D. Davis," as we irreverently called the
eminent and learned jurist, the friend of Lincoln and the only aspirant
having a "bar'l"? That was the question. We addressed ourselves to the task
with earnest purpose, but characteristically. The power of the press must
be invoked. It was our chief if not our only weapon. Seated at the same
table each of us indited a leading editorial for his paper, to be wired
to its destination and printed next morning, striking D. Davis at a
prearranged and varying angle. Copies of these were made for Halstead, who
having with the rest of us read and compared the different scrolls
indited one of his own in general commentation and review for Cincinnati
consumption. In next day's Commercial, blazing under vivid headlines, these
leading editorials, dated "Chicago" and "New York," "Springfield, Mass.,"
and "Louisville, Ky.," appeared with the explaining line "The Tribune
of to-morrow morning will say--" "The Courier-Journal--and the
Republican--will say to-morrow morning--"
Wondrous consensus of public opinion! The Davis boom went down before it.
The Davis boomers were paralyzed. The earth seemed to have risen and hit
them midships. The incoming delegates were arrested and forewarned. Six
months of adroit scheming was set at naught, and little more was heard of
"D. Davis."
We were, like the Mousquetaires, equally in for fighting and foot-racing,
the point with us being to get there, no matter how; the end--the defeat
of the rascally machine politicians and the reform of the public
service--justifying the means. I am writing this nearly fifty years after
the event and must be forgiven the fling of my wisdom at my own expense and
that of my associates in harmless crime.
Some ten years ago I wrote: "Reid and White and I the sole survivors; Reid
a great Ambassador, White and I the virtuous ones, still able to sit up and
take notice, with three meals a day for which we are thankful and able to
pay; no one of us recalcitrant. We were wholly serious--maybe a trifle
visionary, but as upright and patriotic in our intentions and as loyal to
our engagements as it was possible for older and maybe better men to be.
For my part I must say that if I have never anything on my conscience worse
than the massacre of that not very edifying yet promising combine I shall
be troubled by no remorse, but to the end shall sleep soundly and well."
Alas, I am not the sole survivor. In this connection an amusing incident
throwing some light upon the period thrusts itself upon my memory. The
Quadrilateral, including Reid, had just finished its consolidation of
public opinion before related, when the cards of Judge Craddock, chairman
of the Kentucky Democratic Committee, and of Col. Stoddard Johnston, editor
of the Frankfort Yeoman, the organ of the Kentucky Democracy, were brought
from below. They had come to look after me--that was evident. By no chance
could they find me in more equivocal company. In addition to ourselves--bad
enough, from the Kentucky point of view--Theodore Tilton, Donn Piatt and
David A. Wells were in the room.
When the Kentuckians crossed the threshold and were presented seriatim the
face of each was a study. Even a proper and immediate application of whisky
and water did not suffice to restore their lost equilibrium and bring them
to their usual state of convivial self-possession. Colonel Johnston told me
years after that when they went away they walked in silence a block or two,
when the old judge, a model of the learned and sedate school of Kentucky
politicians and jurists, turned to him and said: "It is no use, Stoddart,
we cannot keep up with that young man or with these times. 'Lord, now
lettest thou thy servant depart in peace!'"
IV
The Jupiter Tonans of reform in attendance upon the convention was Col.
Alexander K. McClure. He was one of the handsomest and most imposing of
men; Halstead himself scarcely more so. McClure was personally unknown to
the Quadrilateral. But this did not stand in the way of our asking him
to dine with us as soon as his claims to fellowship in the good cause of
reform began to make themselves apparent through the need of bringing the
Pennsylvania delegation to a realizing sense.
He looked like a god as he entered the room; nay, he acted like one. Schurz
first took him in hand. With a lofty courtesy I have never seen equalled he
tossed his inquisitor into the air. Halstead came next, and tried him upon
another tack. He fared no better than Schurz. And hurrying to the rescue
of my friends, McClure, looking now a bit bored and resentful, landed me
somewhere near the ceiling.
It would have been laughable if it had not been ignominious. I took my
discomfiture with the bad grace of silence throughout the stiff, formal and
brief meal which was then announced. But when it was over and the party,
risen from table, was about to disperse I collected my energies and
resources for a final stroke. I was not willing to remain so crushed nor to
confess myself so beaten, though I could not disguise from myself a feeling
that all of us had been overmatched.
"McClure," said I with the cool and quiet resolution of despair, drawing
him aside, "what in the ---- do you want anyhow?"
He looked at me with swift intelligence and a sudden show of sympathy, and
then over at the others with a withering glance.
"What? With those cranks? Nothing."
Jupiter descended to earth. I am afraid we actually took a glass of wine
together. Anyhow, from that moment to the hour of his death we were the
best of friends.
Without the inner circle of the Quadrilateral, which had taken matters into
their own hands, were a number of persons, some of them disinterested and
others simple curiosity and excitement seekers, who might be described as
merely lookers-on in Vienna. The Sunday afternoon before the convention was
to meet we, the self-elect, fell in with a party of these in a garden "over
the Rhine," as the German quarter of Cincinnati is called. There was first
general and rather aimless talk. Then came a great deal of speech making.
Schurz started it with a few pungent observations intended to suggest and
inspire some common ground of opinion and sentiment. Nobody was inclined
to dispute his leadership, but everybody was prone to assert his own. It
turned out that each regarded himself and wished to be regarded as a man
with a mission, having a clear idea how things were not to be done. There
were Civil Service Reform Protectionists and Civil Service Reform Free
Traders. There were a few politicians, who were discovered to be spoilsmen,
the unforgivable sin, and quickly dismissed as such.
Coherence was the missing ingredient. Not a man jack of them was willing
to commit or bind himself to anything. Edward Atkinson pulled one way and
William Dorsheimer exactly the opposite way. David A. Wells sought to
get the two together; it was not possible. Sam Bowles shook his head
in diplomatic warning. Horace White threw in a chunk or so of a rather
agitating newspaper independency, and Halstead was in an inflamed state of
jocosity to the more serious-minded.
It was nuts to the Washington Correspondents--story writers and satirists
who were there to make the most out of an occasion in which the bizarre was
much in excess of the conventional--with George Alfred Townsend and Donn
Piatt to set the pace. Hyde had come from St. Louis to keep especial tab on
Grosvenor. Though rival editors facing our way, they had not been admitted
to the Quadrilateral. McCullagh and Nixon arrived with the earliest from
Chicago. The lesser lights of the guild were innumerable. One might have
mistaken it for an annual meeting of the Associated Press.
V
The convention assembled. It was in Cincinnati's great Music Hall. Schurz
presided. Who that was there will ever forget his opening words: "This is
moving day." He was just turned forty-two; in his physiognomy a scholarly
_Herr Doktor_; in his trim lithe figure a graceful athlete; in the
tones of his voice an orator.
Even the bespectacled doctrinaires of the East, whence, since the days when
the Star of Bethlehem shone over the desert, wisdom and wise men have had
their emanation, were moved to something like enthusiasm. The rest of us
were fervid and aglow. Two days and a night and a half the Quadrilateral
had the world in a sling and things its own way. It had been agreed, as I
have said, to limit the field to Adams, Trumbull and Greeley; Greeley being
out of it, as having no chance, still further abridged it to Adams and
Trumbull; and, Trumbull not developing very strong, Bowles, Halstead and
I, even White, began to be sure of Adams on the first ballot; Adams the
indifferent, who had sailed away for Europe, observing that he was not a
candidate for the nomination and otherwise intimating his disdain of us and
it.
Matters thus apparently cocked and primed, the convention adjourned over
the first night of its session with everybody happy except the D. Davis
contingent, which lingered on the scene, but knew its "cake was dough."
If we had forced a vote that night, as we might have done, we should have
nominated Adams. But inspired by the bravery of youth and inexperience we
let the golden opportunity slip. The throng of delegates and the audience
dispersed.
In those days, it being the business of my life to turn day into night and
night into day, it was not my habit to seek my bed much before the presses
began to thunder below, and this night proving no exception, and being
tempted by a party of Kentuckians, who had come, some to back me and some
to watch me, I did not quit their agreeable society until the "wee short
hours ayont the twal." Before turning in I glanced at the early edition
of the Commercial, to see that something--I was too tired to decipher
precisely what--had happened. It was, in point of fact, the arrival about
midnight of Gen. Frank P. Blair and Governor B. Gratz Brown.
I had in my possession documents that would have induced at least one of
them to pause before making himself too conspicuous. The Quadrilateral,
excepting Reid, knew this. We had separated upon the adjournment of the
convention. I being across the river in Covington, their search was
unavailing. I was not to be found. They were in despair. When having had
a few hours of rest I reached the convention hall toward noon it was too
late.
I got into the thick of it in time to see the close, not without an angry
collision with that one of the newly arrived actors whose coming had
changed the course of events, with whom I had lifelong relations of
affectionate intimacy. Sailing but the other day through Mediterranean
waters with Joseph Pulitzer, who, then a mere youth, was yet the secretary
of the convention, he recalled the scene; the unexpected and not over
attractive appearance of the governor of Missouri; his not very pleasing
yet ingenious speech; the stoical, almost lethargic indifference of Schurz.
"Carl Schurz," said Pulitzer, "was the most industrious and the least
energetic man I have ever worked with. A word from him at that crisis would
have completely routed Blair and squelched Brown. It was simply not in him
to speak it."
Greeley was nominated amid a whirl of enthusiasm, his workers, with
Whitelaw Reid at their head, having maintained an admirable and effective
organization and being thoroughly prepared to take advantage of the
opportune moment. It was the logic of the event that B. Gratz Brown should
be placed on the ticket with him.
The Quadrilateral was nowhere. It was done for. The impossible had come to
pass. There rose thereafter a friendly issue of veracity between Schurz and
myself, which illustrates our state of mind. My version is that we left the
convention hall together with an immaterial train of after incidents, his
that we had not met after the adjournment--he quite sure of this because he
had looked for me in vain.
"Schurz was right," said Joseph Pulitzer upon the occasion of our yachting
cruise just mentioned, "I know, for he and I went directly from the hall
with Judge Stallo to his home on Walnut Hills, where we dined and passed
the afternoon."
[Illustration: Mrs. Lincoln in 1861 _From a Photograph by M. B.
Brady_]
The Quadrilateral had been knocked into a cocked hat. Whitelaw Reid was the
only one of us who clearly understood the situation and thoroughly knew
what he was about. He came to me and said: "I have won, and you people have
lost. I shall expect that you stand by the agreement and meet me as my
guests at dinner to-night. But if you do not personally look after this the
others will not be there."
I was as badly hurt as any, but a bond is a bond and I did as he desired,
succeeding partly by coaxing and partly by insisting, though it was devious
work.
Frostier conviviality I have never sat down to than Reid's dinner. Horace
White looked more than ever like an iceberg, Sam Bowles was diplomatic
but ineffusive, Schurz was as a death's head at the board; Halstead and I
through sheer bravado tried to enliven the feast. But they would none of
us, nor it, and we separated early and sadly, reformers hoist by their own
petard.
VI
The reception by the country of the nomination of Horace Greeley was as
inexplicable to the politicians as the nomination itself had been
unexpected by the Quadrilateral. The people rose to it. The sentimental,
the fantastic and the paradoxical in human nature had to do with this. At
the South an ebullition of pleased surprise grew into positive enthusiasm.
Peace was the need if not the longing of the Southern heart, and Greeley's
had been the first hand stretched out to the South from the enemy's
camp--very bravely, too, for he had signed the bail bond of Jefferson
Davis--and quick upon the news flashed the response from generous men eager
for the chance to pay something upon a recognized debt of gratitude.
Except for this spontaneous uprising, which continued unabated in July, the
Democratic Party could not have been induced at Baltimore to ratify the
proceedings at Cincinnati and formally to make Greeley its candidate. The
leaders dared not resist it. Some of them halted, a few held out, but by
midsummer the great body of them came to the front to head the procession.
He was a queer old man; a very medley of contradictions; shrewd and simple;
credulous and penetrating; a master penman of the school of Swift and
Cobbett; even in his odd picturesque personality whimsically attractive; a
man to be reckoned with where he chose to put his powers forth, as Seward
learned to his cost.
What he would have done with the Presidency had he reached it is not easy
to say or surmise. He was altogether unsuited for official life, for which
nevertheless he had a passion. But he was not so readily deceived in men or
misled in measures as he seemed and as most people thought him.
His convictions were emotional, his philosophy was experimental; but there
was a certain method in their application to public affairs. He gave
bountifully of his affection and his confidence to the few who enjoyed his
familiar friendship--accessible and sympathetic though not indiscriminating
to those who appealed to his impressionable sensibilities and sought his
help. He had been a good party man and was by nature and temperament a
partisan.
To him place was not a badge of servitude; it was a decoration--preferment,
promotion, popular recognition. He had always yearned for office as the
legitimate destination of public life and the honorable award of party
service. During the greater part of his career the conditions of journalism
had been rather squalid and servile. He was really great as a journalist.
He was truly and highly fit for nothing else, but seeing less deserving and
less capable men about him advanced from one post of distinction to another
he wondered why his turn proved so tardy in coming, and when it would come.
It did come with a rush. What more natural than that he should believe it
real instead of the empty pageant of a vision?
It had taken me but a day and a night to pull myself together after the
first shock and surprise and to plunge into the swim to help fetch the
waterlogged factions ashore. This was clearly indispensable to forcing
the Democratic organization to come to the rescue of what would have been
otherwise but a derelict upon a stormy sea. Schurz was deeply disgruntled.
Before he could be appeased a bridge, found in what was called the Fifth
Avenue Hotel Conference, had to be constructed in order to carry him across
the stream which flowed between his disappointed hopes and aims and what
appeared to him an illogical and repulsive alternative. He had taken to his
tent and sulked like another Achilles. He was harder to deal with than any
of the Democratic file leaders, but he finally yielded and did splendid
work in the campaign.
His was a stubborn spirit not readily adjustable. He was a nobly gifted
man, but from first to last an alien in an alien land. He once said to me,
"If I should live a thousand years they would still call me a Dutchman." No
man of his time spoke so well or wrote to better purpose. He was equally
skillful in debate, an overmatch for Conkling and Morton, whom--especially
in the French arms matter--he completely dominated and outshone. As sincere
and unselfish, as patriotic and as courageous as any of his contemporaries,
he could never attain the full measure of the popular heart and confidence,
albeit reaching its understanding directly and surely; within himself a man
of sentiment who was not the cause of sentiment in others. He knew this and
felt it.
The Nast cartoons, which as to Greeley and Sumner were unsparing in the
last degree, whilst treating Schurz with a kind of considerate qualifying
humor, nevertheless greatly offended him. I do not think Greeley minded
them much if at all. They were very effective; notably the "Pirate Ship,"
which represented Greeley leaning over the taffrail of a vessel carrying
the Stars and Stripes and waving his handkerchief at the man-of-war Uncle
Sam in the distance, the political leaders of the Confederacy dressed in
true corsair costume crouched below ready to spring. Nothing did more to
sectionalize Northern opinion and fire the Northern heart, and to lash the
fury of the rank and file of those who were urged to vote as they had shot
and who had hoisted above them the Bloody Shirt for a banner. The first
half of the canvass the bulge was with Greeley; the second half began in
eclipse, to end in something very like collapse.
The old man seized his flag and set out upon his own account for a tour of
the country. Right well he bore himself. If speech-making ever does any
good toward the shaping of results Greeley's speeches surely should have
elected him. They were marvels of impromptu oratory, mostly homely and
touching appeals to the better sense and the magnanimity of a people not
ripe or ready for generous impressions; convincing in their simplicity and
integrity; unanswerable from any standpoint of sagacious statesmanship or
true patriotism if the North had been in any mood to listen and to reason.
I met him at Cincinnati and acted as his escort to Louisville and thence to
Indianapolis, where others were waiting to take him in charge. He was in a
state of querulous excitement. Before the vast and noisy audiences which we
faced he stood apparently pleased and composed, delivering his words as he
might have dictated them to a stenographer. As soon as we were alone he
would break out into a kind of lamentation, punctuated by occasional bursts
of objurgation. He especially distrusted the Quadrilateral, making an
exception in my case, as well he might, because however his nomination had
jarred my judgment I had a real affection for him, dating back to the years
immediately preceding the war when I was wont to encounter him in the
reporters' galleries at Washington, which he preferred to using his floor
privilege as an ex-member of Congress.
It was mid-October. We had heard from Maine; Indiana and Ohio had voted. He
was for the first time realizing the hopeless nature of the contest. The
South in irons and under military rule and martial law sure for Grant,
there had never been any real chance. Now it was obvious that there was to
be no compensating ground swell at the North. That he should pour forth his
chagrin to one whom he knew so well and even regarded as one of his boys
was inevitable. Much of what he said was founded on a basis of fact, some
of it was mere suspicion and surmise, all of it came back to the main point
that defeat stared us in the face. I was glad and yet loath to part with
him. If ever a man needed a strong friendly hand and heart to lean upon he
did during those dark days--the end in darkest night nearer than anyone
could divine. He showed stronger mettle than had been allowed him: bore
a manlier part than was commonly ascribed to the slovenly slipshod
habiliments and the aspects in which benignancy and vacillation seemed to
struggle for the ascendancy. Abroad the elements conspired against him.
At home his wife lay ill, as it proved, unto death. The good gray head he
still carried like a hero, but the worn and tender heart was beginning to
break. Overwhelming defeat was followed by overwhelming affliction. He
never quitted his dear one's beside until the last pulsebeat, and then he
sank beneath the load of grief.
"The Tribune is gone and I am gone," he said, and spoke no more.
The death of Greeley fell upon the country with a sudden shock. It roused a
universal sense of pity and sorrow and awe. All hearts were hushed. In an
instant the bitterness of the campaign was forgotten, though the huzzas of
the victors still rent the air. The President, his late antagonist, with
his cabinet and the leading members of the two Houses of Congress, attended
his funeral. As he lay in his coffin he was no longer the arch rebel,
leading a combine of buccaneers and insurgents, which the Republican
orators and newspapers had depicted him, but the brave old apostle of
freedom who had done more than all others to make the issues upon which a
militant and triumphant party had risen to power.
The multitude remembered only the old white hat and the sweet old baby
face beneath it, heart of gold, and hand wielding the wizard pen; the
incarnation of probity and kindness, of steadfast devotion to his duty as
he saw it, and to the needs of the whole human family. A tragedy in truth
it was; and yet as his body was lowered into its grave there rose above it,
invisible, unnoted, a flower of matchless beauty--the flower of peace
and love between the sections of the Union to which his life had been a
sacrifice.
The crank convention had builded wiser than it knew. That the Democratic
Party could ever have been brought to the support of Horace Greeley for
President of the United States reads even now like a page out of a nonsense
book. That his warmest support should have come from the South seems
incredible and was a priceless fact. His martyrdom shortened the distance
across the bloody chasm; his coffin very nearly filled it. The candidacy of
Charles Francis Adams or of Lyman Trumbull meant a mathematical formula,
with no solution of the problem and as certain defeat at the end of it.
His candidacy threw a flood of light and warmth into the arena of deadly
strife; it made a more equal and reasonable division of parties possible;
it put the Southern half of the country in a position to plead its own
case by showing the Northern half that it was not wholly recalcitrant or
reactionary; and it made way for real issues of pith and moment relating to
the time instead of pigments of bellicose passion and scraps of ante-bellum
controversy.
In a word Greeley did more by his death to complete the work of Lincoln
than he could have done by a triumph at the polls and the term in the White
House he so much desired. Though but sixty-one years of age, his race
was run. Of him it may be truly written that he lived a life full of
inspiration to his countrymen and died not in vain, "our later Franklin"
fittingly inscribed upon his tomb.
Chapter the Twelfth
The Ideal in Public Life--Politicians, Statesmen and Philosophers--The
Disputed Presidency in 1876--The Personality and Character of Mr.
Tilden--His Election and Exclusion by a Partisan Tribunal
I
The soul of journalism is disinterestedness. But neither as a principle nor
an asset had this been generally discovered fifty years ago. Most of my
younger life I was accused of ulterior motives of political ambition,
whereas I had seen too much of preferment not to abhor it. To me, as to
my father, office has seemed ever a badge of servitude. For a long time,
indeed, I nursed the delusions of the ideal. The love of the ideal has not
in my old age quite deserted me. But I have seen the claim of it so much
abused that when a public man calls it for a witness I begin to suspect his
sincerity.
A virile old friend of mine--who lived in Texas, though he went there from
Rhode Island--used to declare with sententious emphasis that war is the
state of man. "Sir," he was wont to observe, addressing me as if I were
personally accountable, "you are emasculating the human species. You are
changing men into women and women into men. You are teaching everybody
to read, nobody to think; and do you know where you will end, sir?
Extermination, sir--extermination! On the north side of the North Pole
there is another world peopled by giants; ten thousand millions at the very
least; every giant of them a hundred feet high. Now about the time you have
reduced your universe to complete effeminacy some fool with a pick-axe will
break through the thin partition--the mere ice curtain--separating these
giants from us, and then they will sweep through and swoop down and swallow
you, sir, and the likes of you, with your topsy-turvy civilization, your
boasted literature and science and art!"
This old friend of mine had a sure recipe for success in public life.
"Whenever you get up to make a speech," said he, "begin by proclaiming
yourself the purest, the most disinterested of living men, and end
by intimating that you are the bravest;" and then with the charming
inconsistency of the dreamer he would add: "If there be anything on this
earth that I despise it is bluster."
Decidedly he was not a disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet he, too, in
his way was an idealist, and for all his oddity a man of intellectual
integrity, a trifle exaggerated perhaps in its methods and illustrations,
but true to his convictions of right and duty, as Emerson would have had
him be. For was it not Emerson who exclaimed, "We will walk on our own
feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds?"
II
In spite of our good Woodrow and our lamented Theodore I have quite made up
my mind that there is no such thing as the ideal in public life, construing
public life to refer to political transactions. The ideal may exist in art
and letters, and sometimes very young men imagine that it exists in very
young women. But here we must draw the line. As society is constituted the
ideal has no place, not even standing room, in the arena of civics.
If we would make a place for it we must begin by realizing this.
The painter, like the lover, is a law unto himself, with his little
picture--the poet, also, with his little rhyme--his atelier his universe,
his attic his field of battle, his weapons the utensils of his craft--he
himself his own Providence. It is not so in the world of action, where the
conditions are directly reversed; where the one player contends against
many players, seen and unseen; where each move is met by some counter-move;
where the finest touches are often unnoted of men or rudely blotted out by
a mysterious hand stretched forth from the darkness.
"I wish I could be as sure of anything," said Melbourne, "as Tom Macaulay
is of everything." Melbourne was a man of affairs, Macaulay a man of books;
and so throughout the story the men of action have been fatalists, from
Cæsar to Napoleon and Bismarck, nothing certain except the invisible player
behind the screen.
Of all human contrivances the most imperfect is government. In spite of
the essays of Bentham and Mill the science of government has yet to be
discovered. The ideal statesman can only exist in the ideal state, which
has never existed.
The politician, like the poor, we have always with us. As long as men
delegate to other men the function of acting for them, of thinking for
them, we shall continue to have him.
He is a variable quantity. In the crowded centers his distinguishing
marks are short hair and cunning; upon the frontier, sentiment and the
six-shooter! In New York he becomes a boss; in Kentucky and Texas, a
fighter and an orator. But the statesman--the ideal statesman--in the
mind's eye, Horatio! Bound by practical limitations such an anomaly would
be a statesman minus a party, a statesman who never gets any votes or
anywhere--a statesman perpetually out of a job. We have had some imitation
ideal statesmen who have been more or less successful in palming off their
pinchbeck wares for the real; but looking backward over the history of
the country we shall find the greatest among our public men--measuring
greatness by real and useful service--to have been while they lived least
regarded as idealists; for they were men of flesh and blood, who amid the
rush of events and the calls to duty could not stop to paint pictures, to
consider sensibilities, to put forth the deft hand where life and death
hung upon the stroke of a bludgeon or the swinging of a club.
Washington was not an ideal statesman, nor Hamilton, nor Jefferson, nor
Lincoln, though each of them conceived grandly and executed nobly. They
loved truth for truth's sake, even as they loved their country. Yet no one
of them ever quite attained his conception of it.
Truth indeed is ideal. But when we come to adapt and apply it, how many
faces it shows us, what varying aspects, so that he is fortunate who is
able to catch and hold a single fleeting expression. To bridle this and
saddle it, and, as we say in Kentucky, to ride it a turn or two around the
paddock or, still better, down the home-stretch of things accomplished,
is another matter. The real statesman must often do as he can, not as he
would; the ideal statesman existing only in the credulity of those simple
souls who are captivated by appearances or deceived by professions.
The nearest approach to the ideal statesman I have known was most grossly
stigmatized while he lived. I have Mr. Tilden in mind. If ever man pursued
an ideal life he did. From youth to age he dwelt amid his fancies. He was
truly a man of the world among men of letters and a man of letters among
men of the world. A philosopher pure and simple--a lover of books, of
pictures, of all things beautiful and elevating--he yet attained great
riches, and being a doctrinaire and having a passion for affairs he was
able to gratify the aspirations to eminence and the yearning to be of
service to the State which had filled his heart.
He seemed a medley of contradiction. Without the artifices usual to the
practical politician he gradually rose to be a power in his party; thence
to become the leader of a vast following, his name a shibboleth to millions
of his countrymen, who enthusiastically supported him and who believed that
he was elected Chief Magistrate of the United States. He was an idealist;
he lost the White House because he was so, though represented while he
lived by his enemies as a scheming spider weaving his web amid the coil of
mystification in which he hid himself. For he was personally known to few
in the city where he had made his abode; a great lawyer and jurist who
rarely appeared in court; a great political leader to whom the hustings
were mainly a stranger; a thinker, and yet a dreamer, who lived his own
life a little apart, as a poet might; uncorrupting and incorruptible; least
of all were his political companions moved by the loss of the presidency,
which had seemed in his grasp. And finally he died--though a master of
legal lore--to have his last will and testament successfully assailed.
Except as news venders the newspapers--especially newspaper workers--should
give politics a wide berth. Certainly they should have no party politics.
True to say, journalism and literature and politics are as wide apart as
the poles. From Bolingbroke, the most splendid of the world's failures, to
Thackeray, one of its greatest masters of letters--who happily did not get
the chance he sought in parliamentary life to fall--both English history
and American history are full of illustrations to this effect. Except in
the comic opera of French politics the poet, the artist, invested with
power, seems to lose his efficiency in the ratio of his genius; the
literary gift, instead of aiding, actually antagonizing the aptitude for
public business.
The statesman may not be fastidious. The poet, the artist, must be always
so. If the party leader preserve his integrity--if he keep himself
disinterested and clean--if his public influence be inspiring to his
countrymen and his private influence obstructive of cheats and rogues among
his adherents--he will have done well.
We have left behind us the gibbet and the stake. No further need of the
Voltaires, the Rousseaus and the Diderots to declaim against kingcraft
and priestcraft. We have done something more than mark time. We report
progress. Yet despite the miracles of modern invention how far in the arts
of government has the world traveled from darkness to light since the old
tribal days, and what has it learned except to enlarge the area, to
amplify and augment the agencies, to multiply and complicate the forms and
processes of corruption? By corruption I mean the dishonest advantage of
the few over the many.
The dreams of yesterday, we are told, become the realities of to-morrow.
In these despites I am an optimist. Much truly there needs still to be
learned, much to be unlearned. Advanced as we consider ourselves we are yet
a long way from the most rudimentary perception of the civilization we are
so fond of parading. The eternal verities--where shall we seek them? Little
in religious affairs, less still in commercial affairs, hardly any at all
in political affairs, that being right which represents each organism.
Still we progress. The pulpit begins to turn from the sinister visage of
theology and to teach the simple lessons of Christ and Him crucified. The
press, which used to be omniscient, is now only indiscriminate--a clear
gain, emitting by force of publicity, if not of shine, a kind of light
through whose diverse rays and foggy luster we may now and then get a
glimpse of truth.
III
The time is coming, if it has not already arrived, when among fair-minded
and intelligent Americans there will not be two opinions touching the
Hayes-Tilden contest for the presidency in 1876-77--that both by the
popular vote and a fair count of the electoral vote Tilden was elected
and Hayes was defeated; but the whole truth underlying the determinate
incidents which led to the rejection of Tilden and the seating of Hayes
will never be known.
"All history is a lie," observed Sir Robert Walpole, the corruptionist,
mindful of what was likely to be written about himself; and "What is
history," asked Napoleon, the conqueror, "but a fable agreed upon?"
In the first administration of Mr. Cleveland there were present at a
dinner table in Washington, the President being of the party, two leading
Democrats and two leading Republicans who had sustained confidential
relations to the principals and played important parts in the drama of the
Disputed Succession. These latter had been long upon terms of personal
intimacy. The occasion was informal and joyous, the good fellowship of the
heartiest.
Inevitably the conversation drifted to the Electoral Commission, which had
counted Tilden out and Hayes in, and of which each of the four had some
story to tell. Beginning in banter with interchanges of badinage it
presently fell into reminiscence, deepening as the interest of the
listeners rose to what under different conditions might have been described
as unguarded gayety if not imprudent garrulity. The little audience was
rapt.
Finally Mr. Cleveland raised both hands and exclaimed, "What would the
people of this country think if the roof could be lifted from this house
and they could hear these men?" And then one of the four, a gentleman noted
for his wealth both of money and humor, replied, "But the roof is not going
to be lifted from this house, and if any one repeats what I have said I
will denounce him as a liar."
Once in a while the world is startled by some revelation of the unknown
which alters the estimate of a historic event or figure; but it is
measurably true, as Metternich declares, that those who make history rarely
have time to write it.
It is not my wish in recurring to the events of nearly five-and-forty years
ago to invoke and awaken any of the passions of that time, nor my purpose
to assail the character or motives of any of the leading actors. Most of
them, including the principals, I knew well; to many of their secrets I
was privy. As I was serving, in a sense, as Mr. Tilden's personal
representative in the Lower House of the Forty-fourth Congress, and as a
member of the joint Democratic Advisory or Steering Committee of the two
Houses, all that passed came more or less, if not under my supervision, yet
to my knowledge; and long ago I resolved that certain matters should remain
a sealed book in my memory.
I make no issue of veracity with the living; the dead should be sacred.
The contradictory promptings, not always crooked; the double constructions
possible to men's actions; the intermingling of ambition and patriotism
beneath the lash of party spirit; often wrong unconscious of itself;
sometimes equivocation deceiving itself--in short, the tangled web of good
and ill inseparable from great affairs of loss and gain made debatable
ground for every step of the Hayes-Tilden proceeding.
I shall bear sure testimony to the integrity of Mr. Tilden. I directly know
that the presidency was offered to him for a price, and that he refused it;
and I indirectly know and believe that two other offers came to him, which
also he declined. The accusation that he was willing to buy, and through
the cipher dispatches and other ways tried to buy, rests upon appearance
supporting mistaken surmise. Mr. Tilden knew nothing of the cipher
dispatches until they appeared in the New York _Tribune_. Neither did
Mr. George W. Smith, his private secretary, and later one of the trustees
of his will.
It should be sufficient to say that so far as they involved No. 15 Gramercy
Park they were the work solely of Colonel Pelton, acting on his own
responsibility, and as Mr. Tilden's nephew exceeding his authority to act;
that it later developed that during this period Colonel Pelton had not been
in his perfect mind, but was at least semi-irresponsible; and that on two
occasions when the vote or votes sought seemed within reach Mr. Tilden
interposed to forbid. Directly and personally I know this to be true.
The price, at least in patronage, which the Republicans actually paid
for possession is of public record. Yet I not only do not question the
integrity of Mr. Hayes, but I believe him and most of those immediately
about him to have been high-minded men who thought they were doing for the
best in a situation unparalleled and beset with perplexity. What they did
tends to show that men will do for party and in concert what the same men
never would be willing to do each on his own responsibility. In his "Life
of Samuel J. Tilden," John Bigelow says:
"Why persons occupying the most exalted positions should have ventured to
compromise their reputations by this deliberate consummation of a series of
crimes which struck at the very foundations of the republic is a question
which still puzzles many of all parties who have no charity for the crimes
themselves. I have already referred to the terrors and desperation with
which the prospect of Tilden's election inspired the great army of
office-holders at the close of Grant's administration. That army, numerous
and formidable as it was, was comparatively limited. There was a much
larger and justly influential class who were apprehensive that the return
of the Democratic party to power threatened a reactionary policy at
Washington, to the undoing of some or all the important results of the
war. These apprehensions were inflamed by the party press until they were
confined to no class, but more or less pervaded all the Northern States.
The Electoral Tribunal, consisting mainly of men appointed to their
positions by Republican Presidents or elected from strong Republican
States, felt the pressure of this feeling, and from motives compounded in
more or less varying proportions of dread of the Democrats, personal
ambition, zeal for their party and respect for their constituents,
reached the conclusion that the exclusion of Tilden from the White House
was an end which justified whatever means were necessary to accomplish
it. They regarded it, like the emancipation of the slaves, as a war
measure."
IV
The nomination of Horace Greeley in 1872 and the overwhelming defeat that
followed left the Democratic party in an abyss of despair. The old Whig
party, after the disaster that overtook it in 1852, had been not more
demoralized. Yet in the general elections of 1874 the Democrats swept the
country, carrying many Northern States and sending a great majority to the
Forty-fourth Congress.
Reconstruction was breaking down of its very weight and rottenness. The
panic of 1873 reacted against the party in power. Dissatisfaction with
Grant, which had not sufficed two years before to displace him, was growing
apace. Favoritism bred corruption and corruption grew more and more
flagrant. Succeeding scandals cast their shadows before. Chickens of
carpetbaggery let loose upon the South were coming home to roost at the
North. There appeared everywhere a noticeable subsidence of the sectional
spirit. Reform was needed alike in the State Governments and the National
Government, and the cry for reform proved something other than an idle
word. All things made for Democracy.
Yet there were many and serious handicaps. The light and leading of the
historic Democratic party which had issued from the South were in obscurity
and abeyance, while most of those surviving who had been distinguished in
the party conduct and counsels were disabled by act of Congress. Of the few
prominent Democrats left at the North many were tainted by what was called
Copperheadism--sympathy with the Confederacy. To find a chieftain wholly
free from this contamination, Democracy, having failed of success in
presidential campaigns, not only with Greeley but with McClellan and
Seymour, was turning to such Republicans as Chase, Field and Davis. At last
heaven seemed to smile from the clouds upon the disordered ranks and to
summon thence a man meeting the requirements of the time. This was Samuel
Jones Tilden.
To his familiars Mr. Tilden was a dear old bachelor who lived in a fine old
mansion in Gramercy Park. Though 60 years old he seemed in the prime of
his manhood; a genial and overflowing scholar; a trained and earnest
doctrinaire; a public-spirited, patriotic citizen, well known and highly
esteemed, who had made fame and fortune at the bar and had always been
interested in public affairs. He was a dreamer with a genius for business,
a philosopher yet an organizer. He pursued the tenor of his life with
measured tread.
His domestic fabric was disfigured by none of the isolation and squalor
which so often attend the confirmed celibate. His home life was a model
of order and decorum, his home as unchallenged as a bishopric, its
hospitality, though select, profuse and untiring. An elder sister presided
at his board, as simple, kindly and unostentatious, but as methodical as
himself. He was a lover of books rather than music and art, but also of
horses and dogs and out-of-door activity.
He was fond of young people, particularly of young girls; he drew them
about him, and was a veritable Sir Roger de Coverley in his gallantries
toward them and his zeal in amusing them and making them happy. His
tastes were frugal and their indulgence was sparing. He took his wine not
plenteously, though he enjoyed it--especially his "blue seal" while
it lasted--and sipped his whisky-and-water on occasion with a pleased
composure redolent of discursive talk, of which, when he cared to lead
the conversation, he was a master. He had early come into a great legal
practice and held a commanding professional position. His judgment was
believed to be infallible; and it is certain that after 1871 he rarely
appeared in the courts of law except as counsellor, settling in chambers
most of the cases that came to him.
It was such a man whom, in 1874, the Democrats nominated for Governor of
New York. To say truth, it was not thought by those making the nomination
that he had any chance to win. He was himself so much better advised that
months ahead he prefigured very near the exact vote. The afternoon of the
day of election one of the group of friends, who even thus early had the
Presidency in mind, found him in his library confident and calm.
"What majority will you have?" he asked cheerily.
"Any," replied the friend sententiously.
"How about fifteen thousand?"
"Quite enough."
"Twenty-five thousand?"
"Still better."
"The majority," he said, "will be a little in excess of fifty thousand."
It was 53,315. His estimate was not guesswork. He had organized his
campaign by school districts. His canvass system was perfect, his
canvassers were as penetrating and careful as census takers. He had before
him reports from every voting precinct in the State. They were corroborated
by the official returns. He had defeated Gen. John A. Dix, thought to be
invincible by a majority very nearly the same as that by which Governor Dix
had been elected two years before.
V
The time and the man had met. Though Mr. Tilden had not before held
executive office he was ripe and ready for the work. His experience in the
pursuit and overthrow of the Tweed Ring in New York, the great metropolis,
had prepared and fitted him to deal with the Canal Ring at Albany, the
State capital. Administrative reform was now uppermost in the public mind,
and here in the Empire State of the Union had come to the head of affairs
a Chief Magistrate at once exact and exacting, deeply versed not only in
legal lore but in a knowledge of the methods by which political power
was being turned to private profit and of the men--Democrats as well as
Republicans--who were preying upon the substance of the people.
The story of the two years that followed relates to investigations that
investigated, to prosecutions that convicted, to the overhauling of popular
censorship, to reduced estimates and lower taxes.
The campaign for the Presidential nomination began as early as the autumn
of 1875. The Southern end of it was easy enough. A committee of Southerners
residing in New York was formed. Never a leading Southern man came to town
who was not "seen." If of enough importance he was taken to No. 15 Gramercy
Park. Mr. Tilden measured to the Southern standard of the gentleman in
politics. He impressed the disfranchised Southern leaders as a statesman
of the old order and altogether after their own ideas of what a President
ought to be.
The South came to St. Louis, the seat of the National Convention,
represented by its foremost citizens, and almost a unit for the Governor of
New York. The main opposition sprang from Tammany Hall, of which John Kelly
was then the chief. Its very extravagance proved an advantage to Tilden.
Two days before the meeting of the convention I sent this message to Mr.
Tilden: "Tell Blackstone"--his favorite riding horse--"that he wins in a
walk."
The anti-Tilden men put up the Hon. S.S.--"Sunset"--Cox for temporary
chairman. It was a clever move. Mr. Cox, though sure for Tammany, was
popular everywhere and especially at the South. His backers thought that
with him they could count a majority of the National Committee.
The night before the assembling Mr. Tilden's two or three leading friends
on the committee came to me and said: "We can elect you chairman over Cox,
but no one else."
I demurred at once. "I don't know one rule of parliamentary law from
another," I said.
"We will have the best parliamentarian on the continent right by you all
the time," they said.
"I can't see to recognize a man on the floor of the convention," I said.
"We'll have a dozen men at hand to tell you," they replied. So it was
arranged, and thus at the last moment I was chosen.
I had barely time to write the required keynote speech, but not enough to
commit it to memory; nor sight to read it, even had I been willing to adopt
that mode of delivery. It would not do to trust to extemporization. A
friend, Col. J. Stoddard Johnston, who was familiar with my penmanship,
came to the rescue. Concealing my manuscript behind his hat he lined the
words out to me between the cheering, I having mastered a few opening
sentences.
Luck was with me. It went with a bang--not, however, wholly without
detection. The Indianans, devoted to Hendricks, were very wroth.
"See that fat man behind the hat telling him what to say," said one to his
neighbor, who answered, "Yes, and wrote it for him, too, I'll be bound!"
One might as well attempt to drive six horses by proxy as preside over a
national convention by hearsay. I lost my parliamentarian at once. I
just made my parliamentary law as we went. Never before or since did any
deliberate body proceed under manual so startling and original. But
I delivered each ruling with a resonance--it were better called an
impudence--which had an air of authority. There was a good deal of quiet
laughter on the floor among the knowing ones, though I knew the mass was
as ignorant as I was myself; but realizing that I meant to be just and was
expediting business the convention soon warmed to me, and feeling this I
began to be perfectly at home. I never had a better day's sport in all my
life.
One incident was particularly amusing. Much against my will and over my
protest I was brought to promise that Miss Phoebe Couzins, who bore a
Woman's Rights Memorial, should at some opportune moment be given the floor
to present it. I foresaw what a row it was bound to occasion.
Toward noon, when there was a lull in the proceedings, I said with an
emphasis meant to carry conviction: "Gentlemen of the convention, Miss
Phoebe Couzins, a representative of the Woman's Association of America, has
a memorial from that body, and in the absence of other business the chair
will now recognize her."
Instantly and from every part of the hall arose cries of "No!" These put
some heart into me. Many a time as a schoolboy I had proudly declaimed the
passage from John Home's tragedy, "My Name is Norval." Again I stood upon
"the Grampian hills." The committee was escorting Miss Couzins down the
aisle. When she came within the radius of my poor vision I saw that she was
a beauty and dressed to kill.
That was reassurance. Gaining a little time while the hall fairly rocked
with its thunder of negation I laid the gavel down and stepped to the edge
of the platform and gave Miss Couzins my hand.
As she appeared above the throng there was a momentary "Ah!" and then a
lull, broken by a single voice:
"Mister Chairman. I rise to a point of order."
Leading Miss Couzins to the front of the stage I took up the gavel and gave
a gentle rap, saying: "The gentleman will take his seat."
"But, Mister Chairman, I rose to a point of order," he vociferated.
"The gentleman will take his seat instantly," I answered in a tone of one
about to throw the gavel at his head. "No point of order is in order when a
lady has the floor."
After that Miss Couzins received a positive ovation and having delivered
her message retired in a blaze of glory.
VI
Mr. Tilden was nominated on the second ballot. The campaign that followed
proved one of the most memorable in our history. When it came to an end
the result showed on the face of the returns 196 in the Electoral College,
eleven more than a majority; and in the popular vote 4,300,316, a majority
of 264,300 for Tilden over Hayes.
How this came to be first contested and then complicated so as ultimately
to be set aside has been minutely related by its authors. The newspapers,
both Republican and Democratic, of November 8, 1876, the morning after the
election, conceded an overwhelming victory for Tilden and Hendricks. There
was, however, a single exception. The New York Times had gone to press with
its first edition, leaving the result in doubt but inclining toward the
success of the Democrats. In its later editions this tentative attitude
was changed to the statement that Mr. Hayes lacked the vote of
Florida--"claimed by the Republicans"--to be sure of the required votes in
the Electoral College.
The story of this surprising discrepancy between midnight and daylight
reads like a chapter of fiction.
After the early edition of the Times had gone to press certain members of
the editorial staff were at supper, very much cast down by the returns,
when a messenger brought a telegram from Senator Barnum, of Connecticut,
financial head of the Democratic National Committee, asking for the Times'
latest news from Oregon, Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina. But for
that unlucky telegram Tilden would probably have been inaugurated President
of the United States.
The Times people, intense Republican partisans, at once saw an opportunity.
If Barnum did not know, why might not a doubt be raised? At once the
editorial in the first edition was revised to take a decisive tone and
declare the election of Hayes. One of the editorial council, Mr. John C.
Reid, hurried to Republican headquarters in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which
he found deserted, the triumph of Tilden having long before sent everybody
to bed. Mr. Reid then sought the room of Senator Zachariah Chandler,
chairman of the National Republican Committee.
While upon this errand he encountered in the hotel corridor "a small man
wearing an enormous pair of goggles, his hat drawn over his ears, a
greatcoat with a heavy military cloak, and carrying a gripsack and
newspaper in his hand. The newspaper was the New York Tribune," announcing
the election of Tilden and the defeat of Hayes. The newcomer was Mr.
William E. Chandler, even then a very prominent Republican politician,
just arrived from New Hampshire and very much exasperated by what he had
read.
Mr. Reid had another tale to tell. The two found Mr. Zachariah Chandler,
who bade them leave him alone and do whatever they thought best. They
did so, consumingly, sending telegrams to Columbia, Tallahassee and New
Orleans, stating to each of the parties addressed that the result of the
election depended upon his State. To these was appended the signature of
Zachariah Chandler.
Later in the day Senator Chandler, advised of what had been set on foot
and its possibilities, issued from National Republican headquarters this
laconic message: "Hayes has 185 electoral votes and is elected."
Thus began and was put in motion the scheme to confuse the returns and make
a disputed count of the vote.
VII
The day after the election I wired Mr. Tilden suggesting that as Governor
of New York he propose to Mr. Hayes, the Governor of Ohio, that they unite
upon a committee of eminent citizens, composed in equal numbers of the
friends of each, who should proceed at once to Louisiana, which appeared to
be the objective point of greatest moment to the already contested result.
Pursuant to a telegraphic correspondence which followed, I left Louisville
that night for New Orleans. I was joined en route by Mr. Lamar and General
Walthal, of Mississippi, and together we arrived in the Crescent City
Friday morning.
It has since transpired that the Republicans were promptly advised by the
Western Union Telegraph Company of all that had passed over its wires, my
dispatches to Mr. Tilden being read in Republican headquarters at least as
soon as they reached Gramercy Park.
Mr. Tilden did not adopt the plan of a direct proposal to Mr. Hayes.
Instead he chose a body of Democrats to go to the "seat of war." But before
any of them had arrived General Grant, the actual President, anticipating
what was about to happen, appointed a body of Republicans for the like
purpose, and the advance guard of these appeared on the scene the following
Monday.
Within a week the St. Charles Hotel might have been mistaken for a
caravansary of the national capital. Among the Republicans were John
Sherman, Stanley Matthews, Garfield, Evarts, Logan, Kelley, Stoughton, and
many others. Among the Democrats, besides Lamar, Walthal and myself, came
Lyman Trumbull, Samuel J. Randall, William R. Morrison, McDonald, of
Indiana, and many others.
A certain degree of personal intimacy existed between the members of the
two groups, and the "entente" was quite as unrestrained as might have
existed between rival athletic teams. A Kentucky friend sent me a demijohn
of what was represented as very old Bourbon, and I divided it with
"our friends the enemy." New Orleans was new to most of the "visiting
statesmen," and we attended the places of amusement, lived in the
restaurants, and saw the sights as if we had been tourists in a foreign
land and not partisans charged with the business of adjusting a
Presidential election from implacable points of view.
My own relations were especially friendly with John Sherman and James A.
Garfield, a colleague on the Committee of Ways and Means, and with Stanley
Matthews, a near kinsman by marriage, who had stood as an elder brother to
me from my childhood.
Corruption was in the air. That the Returning Board was for sale and could
be bought was the universal impression. Every day some one turned up with
pretended authority and an offer to sell. Most of these were, of course,
the merest adventurers. It was my own belief that the Returning Board was
playing for the best price it could get from the Republicans and that the
only effect of any offer to buy on our part would be to assist this scheme
of blackmail.
The Returning Board consisted of two white men, Wells and Anderson; and two
negroes, Kenner and Casanave. One and all they were without character. I
was tempted through sheer curiosity to listen to a proposal which seemed to
come direct from the board itself, the messenger being a well-known State
Senator. As if he were proposing to dispose of a horse or a dog he stated
his errand.
"You think you can deliver the goods?" said I.
"I am authorized to make the offer," he answered.
"And for how much?" I asked.
"Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars," he replied. "One hundred thousand
each for Wells and Anderson, and twenty-five thousand apiece for the
niggers."
To my mind it was a joke. "Senator," said I, "the terms are as cheap as
dirt. I don't happen to have the amount about me at the moment, but I will
communicate with my principal and see you later."
Having no thought of entertaining the proposal, I had forgotten the
incident, when two or three days later my man met me in the lobby of the
hotel and pressed for a definite reply. I then told him I had found that I
possessed no authority to act and advised him to go elsewhere.
It is asserted that Wells and Anderson did agree to sell and were turned
down by Mr. Hewitt; and, being refused their demands for cash by the
Democrats, took their final pay, at least in patronage, from their own
party.
VIII
I passed the Christmas week of 1876 in New York with Mr. Tilden. On
Christmas day we dined alone. The outlook, on the whole, was cheering.
With John Bigelow and Manton Marble, Mr. Tilden had been busily engaged
compiling the data for a constitutional battle to be fought by
the Democrats in Congress, maintaining the right of the House of
Representatives to concurrent jurisdiction with the Senate in the counting
of the electoral vote, pursuant to an unbroken line of precedents
established by that method of proceeding in every presidential election
between 1793 and 1872.
There was very great perplexity in the public mind. Both parties appeared
to be at sea. The dispute between the Democratic House and the
Republican Senate made for thick weather. Contests of the vote of three
States--Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida, not to mention single votes
in Oregon and Vermont--which presently began to blow a gale, had already
spread menacing clouds across the political sky. Except Mr. Tilden, the
wisest among the leaders knew not precisely what to do.
From New Orleans, on the Saturday night succeeding the presidential
election, I had telegraphed to Mr. Tilden detailing the exact conditions
there and urging active and immediate agitation. The chance had been lost.
I thought then and I still think that the conspiracy of a few men to use
the corrupt returning boards of Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida to
upset the election and make confusion in Congress might by prompt exposure
and popular appeal have been thwarted. Be this as it may, my spirit was
depressed and my confidence discouraged by the intense quietude on our
side, for I was sure that beneath the surface the Republicans, with
resolute determination and multiplied resources, were as busy as bees.
Mr. Robert M. McLane, later Governor of Maryland and later still Minister
to France--a man of rare ability and large experience, who had served in
Congress and in diplomacy, and was an old friend of Mr. Tilden--had been at
a Gramercy Park conference when my New Orleans report arrived, and had then
and there urged the agitation recommended by me. He was now again in New
York. When a lad he had been in England with his father, Lewis McLane, then
American Minister to the Court of St. James, during the excitement over the
Reform Bill of 1832. He had witnessed the popular demonstrations and had
been impressed by the direct force of public opinion upon law-making and
law-makers. An analogous situation had arrived in America. The Republican
Senate was as the Tory House of Lords. We must organize a movement such as
had been so effectual in England. Obviously something was going amiss with
us and something had to be done.
It was agreed that I should return to Washington and make a speech "feeling
the pulse" of the country, with the suggestion that in the National Capital
should assemble "a mass convention of at least 100,000 peaceful citizens,"
exercising "the freeman's right of petition."
The idea was one of many proposals of a more drastic kind and was the
merest venture. I myself had no great faith in it. But I prepared the
speech, and after much reading and revising, it was held by Mr. Tilden and
Mr. McLane to cover the case and meet the purpose, Mr. Tilden writing Mr.
Randall, Speaker of the House of Representatives, a letter, carried to
Washington by Mr. McLane, instructing him what to do in the event that the
popular response should prove favorable.
Alack the day! The Democrats were equal to nothing affirmative. The
Republicans were united and resolute. I delivered the speech, not in
the House, as had been intended, but at a public meeting which seemed
opportune. The Democrats at once set about denying the sinister and violent
purpose ascribed to it by the Republicans, who, fully advised that it
had emanated from Gramercy Park and came by authority, started a counter
agitation of their own.
I became the target for every kind of ridicule and abuse. Nast drew a
grotesque cartoon of me, distorting my suggestion for the assembling of
100,000 citizens, which was both offensive and libellous.
Being on friendly terms with the Harpers, I made my displeasure so resonant
in Franklin Square--Nast himself having no personal ill will toward me
--that a curious and pleasing opportunity which came to pass was taken to
make amends. A son having been born to me, Harper's Weekly contained an
atoning cartoon representing the child in its father's arms, and, above,
the legend "10,000 sons from Kentucky alone." Some wag said that the son
in question was "the only one of the 100,000 in arms who came when he was
called."
For many years afterward I was pursued by this unlucky speech, or rather
by the misinterpretation given to it alike by friend and foe. Nast's
first cartoon was accepted as a faithful portrait, and I was accordingly
satirized and stigmatized, though no thought of violence ever had entered
my mind, and in the final proceedings I had voted for the Electoral
Commission Bill and faithfully stood by its decisions. Joseph Pulitzer, who
immediately followed me on the occasion named, declared that he wanted my
"one hundred thousand" to come fully armed and ready for business; yet he
never was taken to task or reminded of his temerity.
IX
The Electoral Commission Bill was considered with great secrecy by the
joint committees of the House and Senate. Its terms were in direct
contravention of Mr. Tilden's plan. This was simplicity itself. He was
for asserting by formal resolution the conclusive right of the two Houses
acting concurrently to count the electoral vote and determine what should
be counted as electoral votes; and for denying, also by formal resolution,
the pretension set up by the Republicans that the President of the Senate
had lawful right to assume that function. He was for urging that issue
in debate in both Houses and before the country. He thought that if the
attempt should be made to usurp for the president of the Senate a power to
make the count, and thus practically to control the Presidential election,
the scheme would break down in process of execution.
Strange to say, Mr. Tilden was not consulted by the party leaders in
Congress until the fourteenth of January, and then only by Mr. Hewitt, the
extra constitutional features of the electoral-tribunal measure having
already received the assent of Mr. Bayard and Mr. Thurman, the Democratic
members of the Senate committee.
Standing by his original plan and answering Mr. Hewitt's statement that Mr.
Bayard and Mr. Thurman were fully committed, Mr. Tilden said: "Is it not,
then, rather late to consult me?"
To which Mr. Hewitt replied: "They do not consult you. They are public men,
and have their own duties and responsibilities. I consult you."
In the course of the discussion with Mr. Hewitt which followed Mr. Tilden
said: "If you go into conference with your adversary, and can't break off
because you feel you must agree to something, you cannot negotiate--you are
not fit to negotiate. You will be beaten upon every detail."
Replying to the apprehension of a collision of force between the parties
Mr. Tilden thought it exaggerated, but said: "Why surrender now? You can
always surrender. Why surrender before the battle for fear you may have to
surrender after the battle?"
In short, Mr. Tilden condemned the proceeding as precipitate. It was a
month before the time for the count, and he saw no reason why opportunity
should not be given for consideration and consultation by all the
representatives of the people. He treated the state of mind of Bayard and
Thurman as a panic in which they were liable to act in haste and repent at
leisure. He stood for publicity and wider discussion, distrusting a scheme
to submit such vast interests to a small body sitting in the Capitol as
likely to become the sport of intrigue and fraud.
Mr. Hewitt returned to Washington and without communicating to Mr. Tilden's
immediate friends in the House his attitude and objection, united with
Mr. Thurman and Mr. Bayard in completing the bill and reporting it to the
Democratic Advisory Committee, as, by a caucus rule, had to be done with
all measures relating to the great issue then before us. No intimation had
preceded it. It fell like a bombshell upon the members of the committee.
In the debate that followed Mr. Bayard was very insistent, answering the
objections at once offered by me, first aggressively and then angrily,
going the length of saying, "If you do not accept this plan I shall wash my
hands of the whole business, and you can go ahead and seat your President
in your own way."
Mr. Randall, the Speaker, said nothing, but he was with me, as were a
majority of my colleagues. It was Mr. Hunton, of Virginia, who poured oil
on the troubled waters, and somewhat in doubt as to whether the changed
situation had changed Mr. Tilden I yielded my better judgment, declaring
it as my opinion that the plan would seat Hayes; and there being no other
protestant the committee finally gave a reluctant assent.
In open session a majority of Democrats favored the bill. Many of them made
it their own. They passed it. There was belief that Justice David Davis,
who was expected to become a member of the commission, was sure for Tilden.
If, under this surmise, he had been, the political complexion of "8 to 7"
would have been reversed.
Elected to the United States Senate from Illinois, Judge Davis declined to
serve, and Mr. Justice Bradley was chosen for the commission in his place.
The day after the inauguration of Hayes my kinsman, Stanley Matthews, said
to me: "You people wanted Judge Davis. So did we. I tell you what I know,
that Judge Davis was as safe for us as Judge Bradley. We preferred him
because he carried more weight."
The subsequent career of Judge Davis in the Senate gave conclusive proof
that this was true.
When the consideration of the disputed votes before the commission had
proceeded far enough to demonstrate the likelihood that its final decision
would be for Hayes a movement of obstruction and delay, a filibuster, was
organized by about forty Democratic members of the House. It proved rather
turbulent than effective. The South stood very nearly solid for carrying
out the agreement in good faith.
Toward the close the filibuster received what appeared formidable
reinforcement from the Louisiana delegation. This was in reality merely
a bluff, intended to induce the Hayes people to make certain concessions
touching their State government. It had the desired effect. Satisfactory
assurances having been given, the count proceeded to the end--a very bitter
end indeed for the Democrats.
The final conference between the Louisianans and the accredited
representatives of Mr. Hayes was held at Wormley's Hotel and came to be
called "the Wormley Conference." It was the subject of uncommon interest
and heated controversy at the time and long afterward. Without knowing why
or for what purpose, I was asked to be present by my colleague, Mr. Ellis,
of Louisiana, and later in the day the same invitation came to me from the
Republicans through Mr. Garfield. Something was said about my serving as a
referee.
Just before the appointed hour Gen. M. C. Butler, of South Carolina,
afterward so long a Senator in Congress, said to me: "This meeting is
called to enable Louisiana to make terms with Hayes. South Carolina is
as deeply concerned as Louisiana, but we have nobody to represent us in
Congress and hence have not been invited. South Carolina puts herself in
your hands and expects you to secure for her whatever terms are given to
Louisiana."
So of a sudden I found myself invested with responsibility equally as an
agent and a referee.
It is hardly worth while repeating in detail all that passed at this
Wormley Conference, made public long ago by Congressional investigation.
When I entered the apartment of Mr. Evarts at Wormley's I found, besides
Mr. Evarts, Mr. John Sherman, Mr. Garfield, Governor Dennison, and Mr.
Stanley Matthews, of the Republicans; and Mr. Ellis, Mr. Levy, and Mr.
Burke, Democrats of Louisiana. Substantially the terms had been agreed upon
during the previous conferences--that is, the promise that if Hayes came in
the troops should be withdrawn and the people of Louisiana be left free to
set their house in order to suit themselves. The actual order withdrawing
the troops was issued by President Grant two or three days later, just as
he was going out of office.
"Now, gentlemen," said I, half in jest, "I am here to represent South
Carolina; and if the terms given to Louisiana are not equally applied to
South Carolina I become a filibuster myself to-morrow morning."
There was some chaffing as to what right I had there and how I got in, when
with great earnestness Governor Dennison, who had been the bearer of a
letter from Mr. Hayes, which he had read to us, put his hand on my shoulder
and said: "As a matter of course the Southern policy to which Mr. Hayes has
here pledged himself embraces South Carolina as well as Louisiana."
Mr. Sherman, Mr. Garfield and Mr. Evarts concurred warmly in this, and
immediately after we separated I communicated the fact to General Butler.
In the acrimonious discussion which subsequently sought to make "bargain,
intrigue and corruption" of this Wormley Conference, and to involve certain
Democratic members of the House who were nowise party to it but had
sympathized with the purpose of Louisiana and South Carolina to obtain some
measure of relief from intolerable local conditions, I never was questioned
or assailed. No one doubted my fidelity to Mr. Tilden, who had been
promptly advised of all that passed and who approved what I had done.
Though "conscripted," as it were, and rather a passive agent, I could
see no wrong in the proceeding. I had spoken and voted in favor of the
Electoral Tribunal Bill, and losing, had no thought of repudiating its
conclusions. Hayes was already as good as seated. If the States of
Louisiana and South Carolina could save their local autonomy out of the
general wreck there seemed no good reason to forbid.
On the other hand, the Republican leaders were glad of an opportunity to
make an end of the corrupt and tragic farce of Reconstruction; to unload
their party of a dead weight which had been burdensome and was growing
dangerous; mayhap to punish their Southern agents, who had demanded so much
for doctoring the returns and making an exhibit in favor of Hayes.
X
Mr. Tilden accepted the result with equanimity.
"I was at his house," says John Bigelow, "when his exclusion was announced
to him, and also on the fourth of March when Mr. Hayes was inaugurated, and
it was impossible to remark any change in his manner, except perhaps that
he was less absorbed than usual and more interested in current affairs."
His was an intensely serious mind; and he had come to regard the
presidency as rather a burden to be borne--an opportunity for public
usefulness--involving a life of constant toil and care, than as an occasion
for personal exploitation and rejoicing.
How much of captivation the idea of the presidency may have had for
him when he was first named for the office I cannot say, for he was as
unexultant in the moment of victory as he was unsubdued in the hour of
defeat; but it is certainly true that he gave no sign of disappointment to
any of his friends.
He lived nearly ten years longer, at Greystone, in a noble homestead he had
purchased for himself overlooking the Hudson River, the same ideal life of
the scholar and gentleman that he had passed in Gramercy Park.
Looking back over these untoward and sometimes mystifying events, I have
often asked myself: Was it possible, with the elements what they were, and
he himself what he was, to seat Mr. Tilden in the office to which he had
been elected? The missing ingredient in a character intellectually and
morally great and a personality far from unimpressive, was the touch of the
dramatic discoverable in most of the leaders of men; even in such leaders
as William of Orange and Louis XI; as Cromwell and Washington.
There was nothing spectacular about Mr. Tilden. Not wanting the sense of
humor, he seldom indulged it. In spite of his positiveness of opinion and
amplitude of knowledge he was always courteous and deferential in debate.
He had none of the audacious daring, let us say, of Mr. Elaine, the
energetic self-assertion of Mr. Roosevelt. Either in his place would have
carried all before him.
I repeat that he was never a subtle schemer--sitting behind the screen and
pulling his wires--which his political and party enemies discovered him to
be as soon as he began to get in the way of the machine and obstruct the
march of the self-elect. His confidences were not effusive, nor their
subjects numerous. His deliberation was unfailing and sometimes it carried
the idea of indecision, not to say actual love of procrastination. But in
my experience with him I found that he usually ended where he began, and it
was nowise difficult for those whom he trusted to divine the bias of his
mind where he thought it best to reserve its conclusions.
I do not think in any great affair he ever hesitated longer than the
gravity of the case required of a prudent man or that he had a preference
for delays or that he clung tenaciously to both horns of the dilemma, as
his training and instinct might lead him to do, and did certainly expose
him to the accusation of doing.
He was a philosopher and took the world as he found it. He rarely
complained and never inveighed. He had a discriminating way of balancing
men's good and bad qualities and of giving each the benefit of a generous
accounting, and a just way of expecting no more of a man than it was in him
to yield. As he got into deeper water his stature rose to its level, and
from his exclusion from the presidency in 1877 to his renunciation of
public affairs in 1884 and his death in 1886 his walks and ways might have
been a study for all who would learn life's truest lessons and know the
real sources of honor, happiness and fame.
Chapter the Thirteenth
Charles Eames and Charles Sumner-Schurzand Lamar--I Go to Congress--A
Heroic Kentuckian--Stephen Foster and His Songs--Music and Theodore
Thomas
I
Swift's definition of "conversation" did not preside over or direct the
daily intercourse between Charles Sumner, Charles Eames and Robert J.
Walker in the old days in the National Capital. They did not converse. They
discoursed. They talked sententiously in portentous essays and learned
dissertations. I used to think it great, though I nursed no little dislike
of Sumner.
Charles Eames was at the outset of his career a ne'er-do-well New
Englander--a Yankee Jack-of-all-trades--kept at the front by an exceedingly
clever wife. Through the favor she enjoyed at court he received from Pierce
and Buchanan unimportant diplomatic appointments. During their sojourns in
Washington their home was a kind of political and literary headquarters.
Mrs. Eames had established a salon--the first attempt of the kind made
there; and it was altogether a success. Her Sundays evenings were notable,
indeed. Whoever was worth seeing, if in town, might usually be found there.
Charles Sumner led the procession. He was a most imposing person. Both
handsome and distinguished in appearance, he possessed in an eminent degree
the Harvard pragmatism--or, shall I say, affectation?--and seemed never
happy except on exhibition. He had made a profitable political and personal
issue of the Preston Brooks attack. Brooks was an exceeding light weight,
but he did for Sumner more than Sumner could ever have done for himself.
In the Charles Eames days Sumner was exceedingly disagreeable to me. Many
people, indeed, thought him so. Many years later, in the Greeley campaign
of 1872, Schurz brought us together--they had become as very brothers in
the Senate--and I found him the reverse of my boyish ill conceptions.
He was a great old man. He was a delightful old man, every inch a
statesman, much of a scholar, and something of a hero. I grew in time to be
actually fond of him, passed with him entire afternoons and evenings in his
library, mourned sincerely when he died, and went with Schurz to Boston, on
the occasion when that great German-American delivered the memorial address
in honor of the dead Abolitionist.
Of all the public men of that period Carl Schurz most captivated me. When
we first came into personal relations, at the Liberal Convention, which
assembled at Cincinnati and nominated Greeley and Brown as a presidential
ticket, he was just turned forty-three; I, two and thirty. The closest
intimacy followed. Our tastes were much alike. Both of us had been educated
in music. He played the piano with intelligence and feeling--especially
Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, neither of us ever having quite reached
the "high jinks" of Wagner.
To me his oratory was wonderful. He spoke to an audience of five or ten
thousand as he would have talked to a party of three or six. His style was
simple, natural, unstrained; the lucid statement and cogent argument now
and again irradiated by a salient passage of satire or a burst of not too
eloquent rhetoric.
He was quite knocked out by the nomination of Horace Greeley. For a long
time he could not reconcile himself to support the ticket. Horace White and
I addressed ourselves to the task of "fetching him into camp"--there being
in point of fact nowhere else for him to go--though we had to get up what
was called The Fifth Avenue Conference to make a bridge.
Truth to say, Schurz never wholly adjusted himself to political conditions
in the United States. He once said to me in one of the querulous moods that
sometimes overcame him: "If I should live a hundred years my enemies would
still call me a--Dutchman!"
It was Schurz, as I have said, who brought Lamar and me together. The
Mississippian had been a Secession Member of Congress when I was a Unionist
scribe in the reporters' gallery. I was a furious partisan in those
days and disliked the Secessionists intensely. Of them, Lamar was most
aggressive. I later learned that he was very many-sided and accomplished,
the most interesting and lovable of men. He and Schurz "froze together,"
as, brought together by Schurz, he and I "froze together." On one side he
was a sentimentalist and on the other a philosopher, but on all sides a
fighter.
They called him a dreamer. He sprang from a race of chevaliers and
scholars. Oddly enough, albeit in his moods a recluse, he was a man of
the world; a favorite in society; very much at home in European courts,
especially in that of England; the friend of Thackeray, at whose house,
when in London, he made his abode. Lady Ritchie--Anne Thackeray--told me
many amusing stories of his whimsies. He was a man among brainy men and a
lion among clever women.
We had already come to be good friends and constant comrades when the
whirligig of time threw us together for a little while in the lower house
of Congress. One day he beckoned me over to his seat. He was leaning
backward with his hands crossed behind his head.
As I stood in front of him he said: "On the eighth of February, 1858, Mrs.
Gwin, of California, gave a fancy dress ball. Mr. Lamar, of Mississippi,
a member of Congress, was there. Also a glorious young woman--a vision of
beauty and grace--with whom the handsome and distinguished young statesman
danced--danced once, twice, thrice, taking her likewise down to supper.
He went to bed, turned his face to the wall and dreamed of her. That was
twenty years ago. To-day this same Mr. Lamar, after an obscure interregnum,
was with Mrs. Lamar looking over Washington for an apartment. In quest of
cheap lodging they came to a mean house in a mean quarter, where a poor,
wizened, ill-clad woman showed them through the meanly furnished rooms. Of
course they would not suffice.
"As they were coming away the great Mr. Lamar said to the poor landlady,
'Madam, have you lived long in Washington?' She said all her life. 'Madam,'
he continued, 'were you at a fancy dress ball given by Mrs. Senator Gwin
of California, the eighth of February, 1858?' She said she was. 'Do you
remember,' the statesman, soldier and orator continued, 'a young and
handsome Mississippian, a member of Congress, by the name of Lamar?' She
said she didn't."
I rather think that Lamar was the biggest brained of all the men I have met
in Washington. He possessed the courage of his convictions. A doctrinaire,
there was nothing of the typical doctrinaire, or theorist, about him. He
really believed that cotton was king and would compel England to espouse
the cause of the South.
Despite his wealth of experience and travel he was not overmuch of a
raconteur, but he once told me a good story about his friend Thackeray. The
two were driving to a banquet of the Literary Fund, where Dickens was to
preside. "Lamar," said Thackeray, "they say I can't speak. But if I want to
I can speak. I can speak every bit as good as Dickens, and I am going to
show you to-night that I can speak almost as good as you." When the moment
arrived Thackeray said never a word. Returning in the cab, both silent,
Thackeray suddenly broke forth. "Lamar," he exclaimed, "don't you think you
have heard the greatest speech to-night that was never delivered?"
II
Holding office, especially going to Congress, had never entered any wish
or scheme of mine. Office seemed to me ever a badge of bondage. I knew too
much of the national capital to be allured by its evanescent and lightsome
honors. When the opportunity sought me out none of its illusions appealed
to me. But after a long uphill fight for personal and political recognition
in Kentucky an election put a kind of seal upon the victory I had won and
enabled me in a way to triumph over my enemies. I knew that if I accepted
the nomination offered me I would get a big popular vote--as I did--and so,
one full term, and half a term, incident to the death of the sitting member
for the Louisville district being open to me, I took the short term,
refusing the long term.
Though it was midsummer and Congress was about to adjourn I went to
Washington and was sworn in. A friend of mine, Col. Wake Holman, had made
a bet with one of our pals I would be under arrest before I had been
twenty-four hours in town, and won it. It happened in this wise: The night
of the day when I took my seat there was an all-night session. I knew too
well what that meant, and, just from a long tiresome journey, I went to bed
and slept soundly till sunrise. Just as I was up and dressing for a stroll
about the old, familiar, dearly loved quarter of the town there came an
imperative rap upon the door and a voice said: "Get up, colonel, quick!
This is a sergeant at arms. There has been a call of the House and I am
after you. Everybody is drunk, more or less, and they are noisy to have
some fun with you."
It was even as he said. Everybody, more or less, was drunk--especially the
provisional speaker whom Mr. Randall had placed in the chair--and when we
arrived and I was led a prisoner down the center aisle pandemonium broke
loose.
They had all sorts of fun with me, such as it was. It was moved that I
be fined the full amount of my mileage. Then a resolution was offered
suspending my membership and sending me under guard to the old Capitol
prison. Finally two or three of my friends rescued me and business was
allowed to proceed. It was the last day of a very long session and those
who were not drunk were worn out.
When I returned home there was a celebration in honor of the bet Wake
Holman had won at my expense. Wake was the most attractive and lovable of
men, by nature a hero, by profession a "filibuster" and soldier of fortune.
At two and twenty he was a private in Col. Humphrey Marshall's Regiment
of Kentucky Riflemen, which reached the scene of hostilities upon the Rio
Grande in the midsummer of 1846. He had enlisted from Owen county--"Sweet
Owen," as it used to be called--and came of good stock, his father, Col.
Harry Holman, in the days of aboriginal fighting and journalism, a frontier
celebrity. Wake's company, out on a scout, was picked off by the Mexicans,
and the distinction between United States soldiers and Texan rebels not
being yet clearly established, a drumhead court-martial ordered "the
decimation."
This was a decree that one of every ten of the Yankee captives should be
shot. There being a hundred of Marshall's men, one hundred beans--ninety
white and ten black--were put in a hat. Then the company was mustered as on
dress parade. Whoso drew a white bean was to be held prisoner of war; whoso
drew a black bean was to die.
In the early part of the drawing Wake drew a white bean. Toward the close
the turn of a neighbor and comrade from Owen county who had left a wife and
baby at home was called. He and Wake were standing together, Holman brushed
him aside, walked out in his place and drew his bean. It turned out to be a
white one. Twice within the half hour death had looked him in the eye and
found no blinking there.
I have seen quite a deal of hardihood, endurance, suffering, in both women
and men; splendid courage on the field of action; perfect self-possession
in the face of danger; but I rather think that Wake Holman's exploit that
day--next to actually dying for a friend, what can be nobler than being
willing to die for him?--is the bravest thing I know or have ever been told
of mortal man.
Wake Holman went to Cuba in the Lopez Rebellion of 1851, and fought under
Pickett at the Battle of Cardenas. In 1855-56 he was in Nicaragua, with
Walker. He commanded a Kentucky regiment of cavalry on the Union side in
our War of Sections. After the war he lived the life of a hunter and fisher
at his home in Kentucky; a cheery, unambitious, big-brained and big-hearted
cherub, whom it would not do to "projeck" with, albeit with entire safety
you could pick his pocket; the soul of simplicity and amiability.
To have known him was an education in primal manhood. To sit at his
hospitable board, with him at the head of the table, was an inspiration in
the genius of life and the art of living. One of his familiars started the
joke that when Wake drew the second white bean "he got a peep." He took
it kindly; though in my intimacy with him, extending over thirty years, I
never heard him refer to any of his adventures as a soldier.
It was not possible that such a man should provide for his old age. He had
little forecast. He knew not the value of money. He had humor, affection
and courage. I held him in real love and honor. When the Mexican War
Pension Act was passed by Congress I took his papers to General Black, the
Commissioner of Pensions, and related this story.
"I have promised Gen. Cerro Gordo Williams," said General Black, referring
to the then senior United States Senator from Kentucky, "that his name
shall go first on the roll of these Mexican pensioners. But"--and the
General looked beamingly in my face, a bit tearful, and says he: "Wake
Holman's name shall come right after." And there it is.
III
I was very carefully and for those times not ignorantly taught in music.
Schell, his name was, and they called him "Professor." He lived over in
Georgetown, where he had organized a little group of Prussian refugees into
a German club, and from my tenth to my fifteenth year--at first regularly,
and then in a desultory way as I came back to Washington City from my
school in Philadelphia, he hammered Bach and Handel and Mozart--nothing so
modern as Mendelssohn--into my not unwilling nor unreceptive mind, for my
bent was in the beginning to compose dramas, and in the end operas.
Adelina Patti was among my child companions. Once in the national capital,
when I was 12 years old and Adelina 9, we played together at a charity
concert. She had sung "The Last Rose of Summer," and I had played her
brother-in-law's variation upon "Home, Sweet Home." The audience was
enthusiastic. We were called out again and again. Then we came on the stage
together, and the applause increasing I sat down at the keyboard and played
an accompaniment with my own interpolations upon "Old Folks At Home," which
I had taught Adelina, and she sang the words. Then they fairly took the
roof off.
Once during a sojourn in Paris I was thrown with Christine Nilsson. She was
in the heyday of her success at the Theater Lyrique under the patronage of
Madame Miolan-Carvalho. One day I said to her: "The time may come when you
will be giving concerts." She was indignant. "Nevertheless," I continued,
"let me teach you a sure encore." I played her Stephen Foster's immortal
ditty. She was delighted. The sequel was that it served her even a better
turn than it had served Adelina Patti.
I played and transposed for the piano most of the melodies of Foster as
they were published, they being first produced in public by Christy's
Minstrels.
IV
Stephen Foster was the ne'er-do-well of a good Pennsylvania family. A
sister of his had married a brother of James Buchanan. There were two
daughters of this marriage, nieces of the President, and when they were
visiting the White House we had--shall I dare write it?--high jinks with
our nigger-minstrel concerts on the sly.
Will S. Hays, the rival of Foster as a song writer and one of my reporters
on the Courier-Journal, told me this story: "Foster," said he, "was a good
deal of what you might call a barroom loafer. He possessed a sweet tenor
voice before it was spoiled by drink, and was fond of music, though
technically he knew nothing about it. He had a German friend who when
he died left him a musical scrapbook, of all sorts of odds and ends of
original text. There is where Foster got his melodies. When the scrapbook
gave out he gave out."
I took it as merely the spleen of a rival composer. But many years after
in Vienna I heard a concert given over exclusively to the performance of
certain posthumous manuscripts of Schubert. Among the rest were selections
from an unfinished opera--"Rosemonde," I think it was called--in which the
whole rhythm and movements and parts of the score of Old Folks at Home were
the feature.
It was something to have grown up contemporary, as it were, with these
songs. Many of them were written in the old Rowan homestead, just outside
of Bardstown, Ky., where Louis Philippe lived and taught, and for a season
Talleyrand made his abode. The Rowans were notable people. John Rowan,
the elder, head of the house, was a famous lawyer, who divided oratorical
honors with Henry Clay, and like Clay, was a Senator in Congress; his son,
"young John," as he was called, Stephen Foster's pal, went as minister to
Naples, and fought duels, and was as Bob Acres wanted to be, "a devil of a
fellow." He once told me he had been intimate with Thackeray when they were
wild young men in Paris, and that they had both of them known the woman
whom Thackeray had taken for the original of Becky Sharp.
The Foster songs quite captivated my boyhood. I could sing a little, as
well as play, and learned each of them--especially Old Folks at Home and
My Old Kentucky Home--as they appeared. Their contemporary vogue was
tremendous. Nothing has since rivalled the popular impression they made,
except perhaps the Arthur Sullivan melodies.
Among my ambitions to be a great historian, dramatist, soldier and writer
of romance I desired also to be a great musician, especially a great
pianist. The bone-felon did the business for this later. But all my life I
have been able to thumb the keyboard at least for the children to dance,
and it has been a recourse and solace sometimes during intervals of
embittered journalism and unprosperous statesmanship.
V
Theodore Thomas and I used to play duos together. He was a master of the
violin before he took to orchestration. We remained the best of friends to
the end of his days.
On the slightest provocation, or none, we passed entire nights together.
Once after a concert he suddenly exclaimed: "Don't you think Wagner was a
---- fraud?"
A little surprised even by one of his outbreaks, I said: "Wagner may have
written some trick music but I hardly think that he was a fraud."
He reflected a moment. "Well," he continued, "it may not lie in my mouth to
say it--and perhaps I ought not to say it--I know I am most responsible for
the Wagner craze--but I consider him a ---- fraud."
He had just come from a long "classic entertainment," was worn out with
travel and worry, and meant nothing of the sort.
After a very tiresome concert when he was railing at the hard lines of a
peripatetic musician I said: "Come with me and I will give you a soothing
quail and as dry a glass of champagne as you ever had in your life."
The wine was poured out and he took a sip.
"I don't call that dry wine," he crossly said, and took another sip. "My
God," without a pause he continued, "isn't that great?"
Of course he was impulsive, even impetuous. Beneath his seeming cold
exterior and admirable self-control--the discipline of the master
artist--lay the moods and tenses of the musical temperament. He knew little
or nothing outside of music and did not care to learn. I tried to interest
him in politics. It was of no use. First he laughed my suggestions to scorn
and then swore like a trooper. German he was, through and through. It
was well that he passed away before the world war. Pat Gilmore--"Patrick
Sarsfield," we always called him--was a born politician, and if he had not
been a musician he would have been a statesman. I kept the peace between
him and Theodore Thomas by an ingenious system of telling all kinds of kind
things each had said of the other, my "repetitions" being pure inventions
of my own.
Chapter the Fourteenth
Henry Adams and the Adams Family--John Hay and Frank Mason--The Three
_Mousquetaires_ of Culture--Paris--"The Frenchman"--The South of
France
I
I have been of late reading The Education of Henry Adams, and it recalls
many persons and incidents belonging to the period about which I am now
writing. I knew Henry Adams well; first in London, then in Boston and
finally throughout his prolonged residence in Washington City. He was an
Adams; very definitely an Adams, but, though his ghost may revisit the
glimpses of the moon and chide me for saying so, with an English "cut to
his jib."
No three brothers could be more unlike than Charles Francis, John Quincy
and Henry Adams. Brooks Adams I did not know. They represented the fourth
generation of the brainiest pedigree--that is in continuous line--known to
our family history. Henry thought he was a philosopher and tried to be one.
He thought he was a man of the world and wanted to be one. He was, in spite
of himself, a provincial.
Provincialism is not necessarily rustic, even suburban. There is no
provincial quite so provincial as he who has passed his life in great
cities. The Parisian boulevardier taken away from the asphalt, the cockney
a little off Clapham Common and the Strand, is lost. Henry Adams knew
his London and his Paris, his Boston and his Quincy--we must not forget
Quincy--well. But he had been born, and had grown up, between the lids of
history, and for all his learning and travel he never got very far outside
them.
In manner and manners, tone and cast of thought he was
English--delightfully English--though he cultivated the cosmopolite.
His house in the national capital, facing the Executive Mansion across
Lafayette Square--especially during the life of his wife, an adorable
woman, who made up in sweetness and tact for some of the qualities lacking
in her husband--was an intellectual and high-bred center, a rendezvous for
the best ton and the most accepted people. The Adamses may be said to
have succeeded the Eameses as leaders in semi-social, semi-literary and
semi-political society.
There was a trio--I used to call them the Three Musketeers of Culture--John
Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge and Henry Adams. They made an interesting and
inseparable trinity--Caleb Cushing, Robert J. Walker and Charles Sumner not
more so--and it was worth while to let them have the floor and to hear them
talk; Lodge, cool and wary as a politician should be; Hay, helterskelter,
the real man of the world crossed on a Western stock; and Adams, something
of a litératteur, a statesman and a cynic.
John Randolph Tucker, who when he was in Congress often met Henry at
dinners and the like, said to him on the appearance of the early volumes of
his History of the United States: "I am not disappointed, for how could an
Adams be expected to do justice to a Randolph?"
While he was writing this history Adams said to me: "There is an old
villain--next to Andrew Jackson the greatest villain of his time--a
Kentuckian--don't say he was a kinsman of yours!--whose papers, if he
left any, I want to see."
"To whom are you referring?" I asked with mock dignity.
"To John Adair," he answered.
"Well," said I, "John Adair married my grandmother's sister and I can put
you in the way of getting whatever you require."
I have spoken of John Hay as Master of the Revels in the old
Sutherland-Delmonico days. Even earlier than that--in London and Paris--an
intimacy had been established between us. He married in Cleveland, Ohio,
and many years passed before I came up with him again. One day in Whitelaw
Reid's den in the Tribune Building he reappeared, strangely changed--no
longer the rosy-cheeked, buoyant boy--an overserious, prematurely old man.
I was shocked, and when he had gone Reid, observing this, said: "Oh, Hay
will come round all right. He is just now in one of his moods. I picked him
up in Piccadilly the other day and by sheer force brought him over."
When we recall the story of Hay's life--one weird tragedy after another,
from the murder of Lincoln to the murder of McKinley, including the tragic
end of two members of his immediate family--there rises in spite of the
grandeur that pursued him a single exclamation: "The pity of it!"
This is accentuated by Henry Adams' Education. Yet the silent courage with
which Hay met disaster after disaster must increase both the sympathy
and the respect of those who peruse the melancholy pages of that vivid
narrative. Toward the end, meeting him on a public occasion, I said: "You
work too hard--you are not looking well."
"I am dying," said he.
"Yes," I replied in the way of banter, "you are dying of fame and fortune."
But I went no further. He was in no mood for the old verbal horseplay.
He looked wan and wizened. Yet there were still several years before him.
When he came from Mannheim to Paris it was clear that the end was nigh. I
did not see him--he was too ill to see any one--but Frank Mason kept me
advised from day to day, and when, a month or two later, having reached
home, the news came to us that he was dead we were nowise surprised, and
almost consoled by the thought that rest had come at last.
Frank Mason and his wife--"the Masons," they were commonly called, for Mrs.
Mason made a wondrous second to her husband--were from Cleveland, Ohio, she
a daughter of Judge Birchard--Jennie Birchard--he a rising young journalist
caught in the late seventies by the glitter of a foreign appointment. They
ran the gamut of the consular service, beginning with Basel and Marseilles
and ending with Frankfurt, Berlin and Paris. Wherever they were their
house was a very home--a kind of Yankee shrine--of visiting Americans and
militant Americanism.
Years before he was made consul general--in point of fact when he was plain
consul at Marseilles--he ran over to Paris for a lark. One day he said to
me, "A rich old hayseed uncle of mine has come to town. He has money to
burn and he wants to meet you. I have arranged for us to dine with him at
the Anglaise to-night and we are to order the dinner--carte blanche." The
rich old uncle to whom I was presented did not have the appearance of a
hayseed. On the contrary he was a most distinguished-looking old gentleman.
The dinner we ordered was "stunning"--especially the wines. When the bill
was presented our host scanned it carefully, scrutinizing each item and
making his own addition, altogether "like a thoroughbred." Frank and I
watched him not without a bit of anxiety mixed with contrition. When he had
paid the score he said with a smile: "That was rather a steep bill, but we
have had rather a good dinner, and now, if you boys know of as good a dance
hall we'll go there and I'll buy the outfit."
II
First and last I have lived much in the erstwhile gay capital of France. It
was gayest when the Duke de Morny flourished as King of the Bourse. He was
reputed the Emperor's natural half-brother. The breakdown of the Mexican
adventure, which was mostly his, contributed not a little to the final
Napoleonic fall. He died of dissipation and disappointment, and under the
pseudonym of the Duke de Morra, Daudet celebrated him in "The Nabob."
De Morny did not live to see the tumble of the house of cards he had built.
Next after I saw Paris it was a pitiful wreck indeed; the Hotel de Ville
and the Tuileries in flames; the Column gone from the Place Vendôme; but
later the rise of the Third Republic saw the revival of the unquenchable
spirit of the irrepressible French.
Nevertheless I should scarcely be taken for a Parisian. Once, when
wandering aimlessly, as one so often does through the Paris streets, one of
the touts hanging round the Cafe de la Paix to catch the unwary stranger
being a little more importunate than usual, I ordered him to go about his
business.
"This is my business," he impudently answered.
"Get away, I tell you!" I thundered, "I am a Parisian myself!"
He drew a little out of reach of the umbrella I held in my hand, and with
a drawl of supreme and very American contempt, exclaimed, "Well, you don't
look it," and scampered off.
Paris, however, is not all of France. Sometimes I have thought not the
best part of it. There is the south of France, with Avignon, the heart of
Provence, seat of the French papacy six hundred years ago, the metropolis
of Christendom before the Midi was a region--Paris yet a village, and Rome
struggling out of the debris of the ages--with Arles and Nîmes, and, above
all, Tarascon, the home of the immortal Tartarin, for next-door neighbors.
They are all hard by Marseilles. But Avignon ever most caught my fancy, for
there the nights seem peopled with the ghosts of warriors and cardinals,
and there on festal mornings the spirits of Petrarch and his Laura walk
abroad, the ramparts, which bade defiance to Goth and Vandal and Saracen
hordes, now giving shelter to bats and owls, but the atmosphere laden with
legend
_"...tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance and Provençal song and sun-burnt mirth."_
Something too much of this! Let me not yield to the spell of the
picturesque. To recur to matters of fact and get down to prose and the
times we live in let us halt a moment on this southerly journey and have a
look in upon Lyons, the industrial capital of France, which is directly on
the way.
The idiosyncrasy of Lyons is silk. There are two schools of introduction in
the art of silk weaving, one of them free to any lad in the city, the other
requiring a trifle of matriculation. The first of these witnesses the whole
process of fabrication from the reeling of threads to the finishing of
dress goods, and the loom painting of pictures. It is most interesting of
course, the painstaking its most obvious feature, the individual weaver
living with his family upon a wage representing the cost of the barest
necessities of life. Again, and ever and ever again, the inequalities of
fortune! Where will it end?
The world has tried revolution and it has tried anarchy. Always the
survival of the strong, nicknamed by Spencer and his ilk the "fittest." Ten
thousand heads were chopped off during the Terror in France to make room
for whom? Not for the many, but the few; though it must be allowed that in
some ways the conditions were improved.
Yet here after a hundred years, here in Lyons, faithful, intelligent men
struggle for sixty, for forty cents a day, with never a hope beyond! What
is to be done about it? Suppose the wealth of the universe were divided per
capita, how long would it remain out of the clutches of the Napoleons of
finance, only a percentage of whom find ultimately their Waterloo, little
to the profit of the poor who spin and delve, who fight and die, in the
Grand Army of the Wretched!
III
We read a deal that is amusing about the southerly Frenchman. He is indeed
_sui generis_. Some five and twenty years ago there appeared in
Louisville a dapper gentleman, who declared himself a Marseillais, and who
subsequently came to be known variously as The Major and The Frenchman. I
shall not mention him otherwise in this veracious chronicle, but, looking
through the city directory of Marseilles I found an entire page devoted to
his name, though all the entries may not have been members of his family.
There is no doubt that he was a Marseillais.
Wandering through the streets of the old city, now in a café of La
Cannebière and now along a quay of the Old Port, his ghost has often
crossed my path and dogged my footsteps, though he has lain in his grave
this many a day. I grew to know him very well, to be first amused by him,
then to be interested, and in the end to entertain an affection for him.
The Major was a delightful composite of Tartarin of Tarascon and the
Brigadier Gerard, with a dash of the Count of Monte Cristo; for when he was
flush--which by some odd coincidence happened exactly four times a year--he
was as liberal a spendthrift as one could wish to meet anywhere between the
little principality of Monaco and the headwaters of the Nile; transparent
as a child; idiosyncratic to a degree.
I understand Marseilles better and it has always seemed nearer to me since
he was born there and lived there when a boy, and, I much fear me, was
driven away, the scapegrace of excellent and wealthy people; not, I feel
sure, for any offense that touched the essential parts of his manhood. A
gentler, a more upright and harmless creature I never knew in all my life.
I very well recall when he first arrived in the Kentucky metropolis. His
attire and raiment were faultless. He wore a rose in his coat, he carried
a delicate cane, and a most beautiful woman hung upon his arm. She was his
wife. It was a circumstance connected with this lady which led to the after
intimacy between him and me. She fell dangerously ill. I had casually met
her husband as an all-round man-about-town, and by this token, seeking
sympathy on lines of least resistance, he came to me with his sorrow.
I have never seen grief more real and fervid. He swore, on his knees and
with tears in his eyes, that if she recovered, if God would give her back
to him, he would never again touch a card; for gambling was his passion,
and even among amateurs he would have been accounted the softest of soft
things. His prayer was answered, she did recover, and he proceeded to
fulfill his vow.
But what was he to do? He had been taught, or at least he had learned,
to do nothing, not even to play poker! I suggested that as running a
restaurant was a French prerogative and that as he knew less about cooking
than about anything else--we had had a contest or two over the mysteries of
a pair of chafing dishes--and as there was not a really good eating place
in Louisville, he should set up a restaurant. It was said rather in jest
than in earnest; but I was prepared to lend him the money. The next thing I
knew, and without asking for a dollar, he had opened The Brunswick.
In those days I saw the Courier-Journal to press, turning night into day,
and during a dozen years I took my twelve o'clock supper there. It was thus
and from these beginnings that the casual acquaintance between us ripened
into intimacy, and that I gradually came into a knowledge of the reserves
behind The Major's buoyant optimism and occasional gasconnade.
He ate and drank sparingly; but he was not proof against the seduction
of good company, and he had plenty of it, from William Preston to Joseph
Jefferson, with such side lights as Stoddard Johnston, Boyd Winchester,
Isaac Caldwell and Proctor Knott, of the Home Guard--very nearly all the
celebrities of the day among the outsiders--myself the humble witness
and chronicler. He secured an excellent chef, and of course we lived
exceedingly well.
The Major's most obvious peculiarity was that he knew everything and had
been everywhere. If pirates were mentioned he flowered out at once into an
adventure upon the sea; if bandits, on the land. If it was Wall Street
he had a reminiscence and a scheme; if gambling, a hard-luck story and
a system. There was no quarter of the globe of which he had not been an
inhabitant.
Once the timbered riches of Africa being mentioned, at once the Major gave
us a most graphic account of how "the old house"--for thus he designated
some commercial establishment, which either had no existence or which he
had some reason for not more particularly indicating--had sent him in
charge of a rosewood saw mill on the Ganges, and, after many ups and downs,
of how the floods had come and swept the plant away; and Rudolph Fink, who
was of the party, immediately said, "I can attest the truth of The Major's
story, because my brother Albert and I were in charge of some fishing camps
at the mouth of the Ganges at the exact date of the floods, and we caught
many of those rosewood logs in our nets as they floated out to sea."
Augustine's Terrapin came to be for a while the rage in Philadelphia, and
even got as far as New York and Washington, and straightway, The Major
declared he could and would make Augustine and his terrapin look "like a
monkey." He proposed to give a dinner.
There were great preparations and expectancy. None of us ate much at
luncheon that day. At the appointed hour, we assembled at The Brunswick. I
will dismiss the decorations and the preludes except to say that they were
Parisian. After a while in full regalia The Major appeared, a train of
servants following with a silver tureen. The lid was lifted.
"_Voilà!_" says he.
The vision disclosed to our startled eyes was an ocean that looked like
bean soup flecked by a few strands of black crape!
The explosion duly arrived from the assembled gourmets, I, myself, I am
sorry to say, leading the rebellion.
"I put seeks terrapin in zat soup!" exclaimed The Frenchman, quite losing
his usual good English in his excitement.
We reproached him. We denounced him. He was driven from the field. But he
bore us no malice. Ten days later he invited us again, and this time Sam
Ward himself could have found no fault with the terrapin.
Next afternoon, when I knew The Major was asleep, I slipped back into the
kitchen and said to Louis Garnier, the chef: "Is there any of that terrapin
left over from last night?"
All unconscious of his treason Louis took me into the pantry and
triumphantly showed me three jars bearing the Augustine label and the
Philadelphia express tags!
On another occasion a friend of The Major's, passing The Brunswick and
observing some diamond-back shells in the window said, "Major, have you any
real live terrapins?"
[Illustration: Henry Woodfin Grady One of Mr. Watterson's "Boys".]
"Live!" cried The Frenchman. "Only this morning I open the ice box and they
were all dancing the cancan."
"Major," persisted the friend, "I'll go you a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, you
cannot show me an actual living terrapin."
"What do you take me for--confidence man?" The Major retorted. "How you
expect an old sport like me to bet upon a certainty?"
"Never mind your ethics. The wager is drink, not money. In any event we
shall have the wine."
"Oh, well," says The Frenchman, with a shrug and a droll grimace, "if you
insist on paying for a bottle of wine come with me."
He took a lighted candle, and together they went back to the ice box. It
was literally filled with diamond backs, and my friend thought he was gone
for sure.
"Là!" says The Major with triumph, rummaging among the mass of shells with
his cane as he held the candle aloft.
"But," says my friend, ready to surrender, yet taking a last chance, "you
told me they were dancing the cancan!"
The Major picked up a terrapin and turned it over in his hand. Quite numb
and frozen, the animal within made no sign. Then he stirred the shells
about in the box with his cane. Still not a show of life. Of a sudden he
stopped, reflected a moment, then looked at his watch.
"Ah," he murmured. "I quite forget. The terrapin, they are asleep. It is
ten-thirty, and the terrapin he regularly go to sleep at ten o'clock by
the watch every night." And without another word he reached for the Veuve
Cliquot!
For all his volubility in matters of romance and sentiment The Major was
exceeding reticent about his immediate self and his own affairs. His
legends referred to the distant of time and place. A certain dignity could
not be denied him, and, on occasion, a proper reserve; he rarely mentioned
his business--though he worked like a slave, and could not have been making
much or any profit--so that there rose the query how he contrived to make
both ends meet. Little by little I came into the knowledge that there was
a money supply from somewhere; finally, it matters not how, that he had an
annuity of forty thousand francs, paid in quarterly installments of ten
thousand francs each.
Occasionally he mentioned "the Old House," and in relating the famous
Sophonisba episode late at night, and only in the very fastnesses of
the wine cellar, as it were, at the most lachrymose passage he spoke of
"l'Oncle Célestin," with the deepest feeling.
"Did you ever hear The Frenchman tell that story about Sophonisba?" Doctor
Stoic, whom on account of his affectation of insensibility we were wont to
call Old Adamant, once asked me. "Well, sir, the other night he told it to
me, and he was drunk, and he cried, sir; and I was drunk, and I cried too!"
I had known The Frenchman now ten or a dozen years. That he came
from Marseilles, that he had served on the Confederate side in the
Trans-Mississippi, that he possessed an annuity, that he must have been
well-born and reared, that he was simple, yet canny, and in his money
dealings scrupulously honest--was all I could be sure of. What had he done
to be ashamed about or wish to conceal? In what was he a black sheep, for
that he had been one seemed certain? Had the beautiful woman, his wife--a
tireless church and charity worker, who lived the life of a recluse and a
saint--had she reclaimed him from his former self? I knew that she had
been the immediate occasion of his turning over a new leaf. But before her
time what had he been, what had he done?
Late one night, when the rain was falling and the streets were empty, I
entered The Brunswick. It was empty too. In the farthest corner of the
little dining room The Major, his face buried in his hands, laid upon the
table in front of him, sat silently weeping. He did not observe my entrance
and I seated myself on the opposite side of the table. Presently he looked
up, and seeing me, without a word passed me a letter which, all blistered
with tears, had brought him to this distressful state. It was a formal
French burial summons, with its long list of family names--his among the
rest--the envelope, addressed in a lady's hand--his sister's, the wife of
a nobleman in high military command--the postmark "Lyon." Uncle Celestin
was dead.
Thereafter The Frenchman told me much which I may not recall and must not
repeat; for, included in that funeral list were some of the best names in
France, Uncle Célestin himself not the least of them.
At last he died, and as mysteriously as he had come his body was taken
away, nobody knew when, nobody where, and with it went the beautiful woman,
his wife, of whom from that day to this I have never heard a word.
Chapter the Fifteenth
Still the Gay Capital of France--Its Environs--Walewska and De
Morny--Thackeray in Paris--A _Pension_ Adventure
I
Each of the generations thinks itself commonplace. Familiarity breeds
equally indifference and contempt. Yet no age of the world has witnessed so
much of the drama of life--of the romantic and picturesque--as the age
we live in. The years betwixt Agincourt and Waterloo were not more
delightfully tragic than the years between Serajevo and Senlis.
The gay capital of France remains the center of the stage and retains the
interest of the onlooking universe. All roads lead to Paris as all roads
led to Rome. In Dickens' day "a tale of two cities" could only mean London
and Paris then, and ever so unalike. To be brought to date the title would
have now to read "three," or even "four," cities, New York and Chicago
putting in their claims for mundane recognition.
I have been not only something of a traveller, but a diligent student
of history and a voracious novel reader, and, once-in-a-while, I get my
history and my fiction mixed. This has been especially the case when the
hum-drum of the Boulevards has driven me from the fascinations of the Beau
Quartier into the by-ways of the Marais and the fastnesses of what was once
the Latin Quarter. More than fifty years of intimacy have enabled me to
learn many things not commonly known, among them that Paris is the most
orderly and moral city in the world, except when, on rare and brief
occasions, it has been stirred to its depths.
I have crossed the ocean many times--have lived, not sojourned, on the
banks of the Seine, and, as I shall never see the other side again--do
not want to see it in its time of sorrow and garb of mourning--I may be
forgiven a retrospective pause in this egotistic chronicle. Or, shall I not
say, a word or two of affectionate retrogression, though perchance it leads
me after the manner of Silas Wegg to drop into poetry and take a turn with
a few ghosts into certain of their haunts, when you, dear sir, or madame,
or miss, as the case may be, and I were living that "other life," whereof
we remember so little that we cannot recall who we were, or what name we
went by, howbeit now-and-then we get a glimpse in dreams, or a "hunch" from
the world of spirits, or spirts-and-water, which makes us fancy we might
have been Julius Caesar, or Cleopatra--as maybe we were!--or at least Joan
of Arc, or Jean Valjean!
II
Let me repeat that upon no spot of earth has the fable we call existence
had so rare a setting and rung up its curtain upon such a succession of
performances; has so concentrated human attention upon mundane affairs; has
called such a muster roll of stage favorites; has contributed to romance so
many heroes and heroines, to history so many signal episodes and personal
exploits, to philosophy so much to kindle the craving for vital knowledge,
to stir sympathy and to awaken reflection.
Greece and Rome seem but myths of an Age of Fable. They live for us as
pictures live, as statues live. What was it I was saying about statues--that
they all look alike to me? There are too many of them. They bring the
ancients down to us in marble and bronze, not in flesh and blood. We do not
really laugh with Terence and Horace, nor weep with Æschylus and Homer. The
very nomenclature has a ticket air like tags on a collection of curios in
an auction room, droning the dull iteration of a catalogue. There is as
little to awaken and inspire in the system of religion and ethics of the
pagan world they lived in as in the eyes of the stone effigies that stare
blankly upon us in the British Museum, the Uffizi and the Louvre.
We walk the streets of the Eternal City with wonderment, not with pity, the
human side quite lost in the archaic. What is Cæsar to us, or we to Cæsar?
Jove's thunder no longer terrifies, and we look elsewhere than the Medici
Venus for the lights o' love.
Not so with Paris. There the unbroken line of five hundred
years--semi-modern years, marking a longer period than we commonly ascribe
to Athens or Rome--beginning with the exit of this our own world from the
dark ages into the partial light of the middle ages, and continuing thence
through the struggle of man toward achievement--tells us a tale more
consecutive and thrilling, more varied and instructive, than may be found
in all the pages of all the chroniclers and poets of the civilizations
which vibrated between the Bosphorus and the Tiber, to yield at last to
triumphant Barbarism swooping down from Tyrol crag and Alpine height, from
the fastnesses of the Rhine and the Rhone, to swallow luxury and culture.
Refinement had done its perfect work. It had emasculated man and unsexed
woman and brought her to the front as a political force, even as it is
trying to do now.
The Paris of Balzac and Dumas, of De Musset and Hugo--even of
Thackeray--could still be seen when I first went there. Though our age is
as full of all that makes for the future of poetry and romance, it does not
contemporaneously lend itself to sentimental abstraction. Yet it is hard to
separate fact and fiction here; to decide between the true and the
false; to pluck from the haze with which time has enveloped them, and to
distinguish the puppets of actual flesh and blood who lived and moved and
had their being, and the phantoms of imagination called into life and
given each its local habitation and its name by the poet's pen working its
immemorial spell upon the reader's credulity.
To me D'Artagnan is rather more vital than Richelieu. Hugo's imps
and Balzac's bullies dance down the stage and shut from the view the
tax-collectors and the court favorites. The mousquetaires crowd the field
marshals off the scene. There is something real in Quasimodo, in Cæsar de
Birotteau, in Robert Macaire, something mythical in Mazarin, in the Regent
and in Jean Lass. Even here, in faraway Kentucky, I can shut my eyes and
see the Lady of Dreams as plainly as if she were coming out of the Bristol
or the Ritz to step into her automobile, while the Grande Mademoiselle is
merely a cloud of clothes and words that for me mean nothing at all.
I once passed a week, day by day, roaming through the Musee Carnavalet.
Madame de Sevigne had an apartment and held her salon there for nearly
twenty years. Hard by is the house where the Marquise de Brinvilliers--a
gentle, blue-eyed thing they tell us--a poor, insane creature she must have
been--disseminated poison and death, and, just across and beyond the Place
des Vosges, the Hotel de Sens, whither Queen Margot took her doll-rags and
did her spriting after she and Henri Quatre had agreed no longer to slide
down the same cellar door. There is in the Museum a death-mask, colored and
exceeding life-like, taken the day after Ravaillac delivered the finishing
knife-thrust in the Rue de Ferronnerie, which represents the Bèarnais as
anything but a tamer of hearts. He was a fighter, however, from Wayback,
and I dare say Dumas' narrative is quite as authentic as any.
One can scarce wonder that men like Hugo and Balzac chose this quarter
of the town to live in--and Rachael, too!--it having given such frequent
shelter to so many of their fantastic creations, having been the real abode
of a train of gallants and bravos, of saints and harlots from the days of
Diane de Poitiers to the days of Pompadour and du Barry, and of statesmen
and prelates likewise from Sully to Necker, from Colbert to Turgot.
III
I speak of the Marais as I might speak of Madison Square, or Hyde Park--as
a well-known local section--yet how few Americans who have gone to Paris
have ever heard of it. It is in the eastern division of the town. One finds
it a curious circumstance that so many if not most of the great cities
somehow started with the rising, gradually to migrate toward the setting
sun.
When I first wandered about Paris there was little west of the Arch of
Stars except groves and meadows. Neuilly and Passy were distant villages.
Auteuil was a safe retreat for lovers and debtors, with comic opera villas
nestled in high-walled gardens. To Auteuil Armand Duval and his Camille
hied away for their short-lived idyl. In those days there was a lovely lane
called Marguerite Gautier, with a dovecote pointed out as the very "rustic
dwelling" so pathetically sung in Verdi's tuneful score and tenderly
described in the original Dumas text. The Boulevard Montmorenci long ago
plowed the shrines of romance out of the knowledge of the living, and a
part of the Longchamps racecourse occupies the spot whither impecunious
poets and adventure-seeking wives repaired to escape the insistence of
cruel bailiffs and the spies of suspicious and monotonous husbands.
Tempus fugit! I used to read Thackeray's Paris Sketches with a kind of awe.
The Thirties and the Forties, reincarnated and inspired by his glowing
spirit, seemed clad in translucent garments, like the figures in the
Nibelungenlied, weird, remote, glorified. I once lived in the street "for
which no rhyme our language yields," next door to a pastry shop
that claimed to have furnished the mise en scène for the "Ballad of
Bouillabaisse," and I often followed the trail of Louis Dominic Cartouche
"down that lonely and crooked byway that, setting forth from a palace yard,
led finally to the rear gate of a den of thieves." Ah, well-a-day! I have
known my Paris now twice as long as Thackeray knew his Paris, and my Paris
has been as interesting as his Paris, for it includes the Empire, the Siege
and the Republic.
I knew and sat for months at table with Comtesse Walewska, widow of the
bastard son of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Duke de Morny was rather a person in
his way and Gambetta was no slouch, as Titmarsh would himself agree. I knew
them both. The Mexican scheme, which was going to make every Frenchman
rich, was even more picturesque and tragical than the Mississippi bubble.
There were lively times round about the last of the Sixties and the early
Seventies. The Terror lasted longer, but it was not much more lurid than
the Commune; the Hotel de Ville and the Tuileries in flames, the column
gone from the Place Vendôme, when I got there just after the siege. The
regions of the beautiful Opera House and of the venerable Notre Dame they
told me had been but yesterday running streams of blood. At the corner of
the Rue de la Paix and the Rue Dannou (they called it then the Rue St.
Augustine) thirty men, women, and boys were one forenoon stood against
the wall and shot, volley upon volley, to death. In the Sacristy of the
Cathedral over against the Morgue and the Hotel Dieu, they exhibit the
gore-stained vestments of three archbishops of Paris murdered within as
many decades.
IV
Thackeray came to Paris when a very young man. He was for painting
pictures, not for writing books, and he retained his artistic yearnings if
not ambitions long after he had become a great and famous man of letters.
It was in Paris that he married his wife, and in Paris that the melancholy
finale came to pass; one of the most heartbreaking chapters in literary
history.
His little girls lived here with their grandparents. The elder of them
relates how she was once taken up some flights of stairs by the Countess X
to the apartment of a frail young man to whom the Countess was carrying a
basket of fruit; and how the frail young man insisted, against the protest
of the Countess, upon sitting at the piano and playing; and of how they
came out again, the eyes of the Countess streaming with tears, and of her
saying, as they drove away, "Never, never forget, my child, as long as
you live, that you have heard Chopin play." It was in one of the lubberly
houses of the Place Vendôme that the poet of the keyboard died a few days
later. Just around the corner, in the Rue du Mont Thabor, died Alfred de
Musset. A brass plate marks the house.
May I not here transcribe that verse of the famous "Ballad of
Bouillabaisse," which I have never been able to recite, or read aloud, and
part of which I may at length take to myself:
_"Ah me, how quick the days are flitting!
I mind me of a time that's gone,
When here I'd sit, as now I'm sitting
In this same place--but not alone--
A fair young form was nestled near me,
A dear, dear face looked fondly up,
And sweetly spoke and smiled to hear me,
There's no one now to share my cup."_
The writer of these lines a cynic! Nonsense. When will the world learn to
discriminate?
V
It is impossible to speak of Paris without giving a foremost place in the
memorial retrospect to the Bois de Boulogne, the Parisian's Coney Island.
I recall that I passed the final Sunday of my last Parisian sojourn just
before the outbreak of the World War with a beloved family party in the
joyous old Common. There is none like it in the world, uniting the urban
to the rural with such surpassing grace as perpetually to convey a double
sensation of pleasure; primal in its simplicity, superb in its setting; in
the variety and brilliancy of the life which, upon sunny afternoons, takes
possession of it and makes it a cross between a parade and a paradise.
There was a time when, rather far away for foot travel, the Bois might
be considered a driving park for the rich. It fairly blazed with the
ostentatious splendor of the Second Empire; the shoddy Duke with his shady
retinue, in gilded coach-and-four; the world-famous courtesan, bedizened
with costly jewels and quite as well known as the Empress; the favorites
of the Tuileries, the Comédie Française, the Opera, the Jardin Mabille,
forming an unceasing and dazzling line of many-sided frivolity from the
Port de Ville to the Port St. Cloud, circling round La Bagatelle and
ranging about the Cafe Cascade, a human tiara of diamonds, a moving bouquet
of laces and rubies, of silks and satins and emeralds and sapphires. Those
were the days when the Due de Morny, half if not full brother of the
Emperor, ruled as king of the Bourse, and Cora Pearl, a clever and not at
all good-looking Irish girl gone wrong, reigned as Queen of the Demimonde.
All this went by the board years ago. Everywhere, more or less, electricity
has obliterated distinctions of rank and wealth. It has circumvented lovers
and annihilated romance. The Republic ousted the bogus nobility. The
subways and the tram cars connect the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de
Vincennes so closely that the poorest may make himself at home in either or
both.
The automobile, too, oddly enough, is proving a very leveller. The crowd
recognizes nobody amid the hurly-burly of coupes, pony-carts, and taxicabs,
each trying to pass the other. The conglomeration of personalities effaces
the identity alike of the statesman and the artist, the savant and the
cyprian. No six-inch rules hedge the shade of the trees and limit the glory
of the grass. The _ouvrier_ can bring his brood and his basket and
have his picnic where he pleases. The pastry cook and his chére amie,
the coiffeur and his grisette can spoon by the lake-side as long as the
moonlight lasts, and longer if they list, with never a gendarme to say them
nay, or a rude voice out of the depths hoarsely to declaim, "allez!" The
Bois de Boulogne is literally and absolutely a playground, the playground
of the people, and this last Sunday of mine, not fewer than half a million
of Parisians were making it their own.
Half of these encircled the Longchamps racecourse. The other half were
shared by the boats upon the lagoons and the bosky dells under the summer
sky and the cafés and the restaurants with which the Bois abounds. Our
party, having exhausted the humors of the drive, repaired to Pré Catalan.
Aside from the "two old brides" who are always in evidence on such
occasions, there was a veritable "young couple," exceedingly pretty to look
at, and delightfully in love! That sort of thing is not so uncommon in
Paris as cynics affect to think.
If it be true, as the witty Frenchman observes, that "gambling is the
recreation of gentlemen and the passion of fools," it is equally true that
love is a game where every player wins if he sticks to it and is loyal to
it. Just as credit is the foundation of business is love both the asset
and the trade-mark of happiness. To see it is to believe it, and--though a
little cash in hand is needful to both--where either is wanting, look out
for sheriffs and scandals.
Pré Catalan, once a pasture for cows with a pretty kiosk for the sale
of milk, has latterly had a tea-room big enough to seat a thousand, not
counting the groves which I have seen grow up about it thickly dotted with
booths and tables, where some thousands more may regale themselves. That
Sunday it was never so glowing with animation and color. As it makes one
happy to see others happy it makes one adore his own land to witness that
which makes other lands great.
I have not loved Paris as a Parisian, but as an American; perhaps it is a
stretch of words to say I love Paris at all. I used to love to go there and
to behold the majesty of France. I have always liked to mark the startling
contrasts of light and shade. I have always known what all the world now
knows, that beneath the gayety of the French there burns a patriotic
and consuming fire, a high sense of public honor; a fine spirit of
self-sacrifice along with the sometimes too aggressive spirit of freedom.
In 1873 I saw them two blocks long and three files deep upon the Rue St.
Honore press up to the Bank of France, old women and old men with their
little all tied in handkerchiefs and stockings to take up the tribute
required by Bismarck to rid the soil of the detested German. They did it.
Alone they did it--the French people--the hard-working, frugal, loyal
commonalty of France--without asking the loan of a sou from the world
outside.
VI
Writing of that last Sunday in the Bois de Boulogne, I find by recurring
to the record that I said: "There is a deal more of good than bad in every
Nation. I take off my hat to the French. But, I have had my fling and I am
quite ready to go home. Even amid the gayety and the glare, the splendor of
color and light, the Hungarian band wafting to the greenery and the stars
the strains of the delicious waltz, La Veuve Joyeuse her very self--yea,
many of her--tapping the time at many adjacent tables, the song that fills
my heart is 'Hame, Hame, Hame!--Hame to my ain countree.' Yet, to come
again, d'ye mind? I should be loath to say good-by forever to the Bois
de Boulogne. I want to come back to Paris. I always want to come back to
Paris. One needs not to make an apology or give a reason.
"We turn rather sadly away from Pré Catalan and the Café Cascade. We
glide adown the flower-bordered path and out from the clusters of Chinese
lanterns, and leave the twinkling groves to their music and merry-making.
Yonder behind us, like a sentinel, rises Mont Valerien. Before us glimmer
the lamps of uncountable coaches, as our own, veering toward the city,
the moon just topping the tower of St. Jacques de la Boucherie and
silver-plating the bronze figures upon the Arch of Stars.
"We enter the Port Maillot. We turn into the Avenue du Bois. Presently we
shall sweep with the rest through the Champs Èlysées and on to the ocean of
the infinite, the heart of the mystery we call Life, nowhere so condensed,
so palpable, so appealing. Roll the screen away! The shades of Clovis and
Genevieve may be seen hand-in-hand with the shades of Martel and Pepin,
taking the round of the ghost-walk between St. Denis and St. Germain, now
le Balafré and again Navarre, now the assassins of the Ligue and now the
assassins of the Terror, to keep them company. Nor yet quite all on murder
bent, some on pleasure; the Knights and Ladies of the Cloth of Gold and the
hosts of the Renaissance: Cyrano de Bergerac and François Villon leading
the ragamuffin procession; the jades of the Fronde, Longueville, Chevreuse
and fair-haired Anne of Austria; and Ninon, too, and Manon; and the
never-to-be-forgotten Four, 'one for all and all for one;' Cagliostro and
Monte Cristo; on the side, Rabelais taking notes and laughing under his
cowl. Catherine de Medici and Robespierre slinking away, poor, guilty
things, into the pale twilight of the Dawn!
"Names! Names! Only names? I am not just so sure about that. In any event,
what a roll call! We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little
life is rounded by a sleep; the selfsame sleep which these, our living dead
men and women in steel armor and gauzy muslins, in silken hose and sock and
buskin, epaulettes and top boots, brocades and buff facings, have endured
so long and know so well!
"If I should die in Paris I should expect them--or some of them--to meet me
at the barriers and to say, 'Behold, the wickedness that was done in the
world, the cruelty and the wrong, dwelt in the body, not in the soul of
man, which freed from its foul incasement, purified and made eternal by the
hand of death, shall see both the glory and the hand of God!'"
It was not to be. I shall not die in Paris. I shall never come again.
Neither shall I make apology for this long quotation by myself from myself,
for am I not inditing an autobiography, so called?
Chapter the Sixteenth
Monte Carlo--The European Shrine of Sport and Fashion--Apocryphal
Gambling Stories--Leopold, King of the Belgians--An Able and
Picturesque Man of Business
I
Having disported ourselves in and about Paris, next in order comes a
journey to the South of France--that is to the Riviera--by geography the
main circle of the Mediterranean Sea, by proclamation Cannes, Nice, and
Mentone, by actual fact and count, Monte Carlo--even the swells adopting a
certain hypocrisy as due to virtue.
Whilst Monte Carlo is chiefly, I might say exclusively, identified in the
general mind with gambling, and was indeed at the outset but a gambling
resort, it long ago outgrew the limits of the Casino, becoming a Mecca
of the world of fashion as well as the world of sport. Half the ruling
sovereigns of Europe and all the leaders of European swelldom, the more
prosperous of the demi-mondaines and no end of the merely rich of every
land, congregate there and thereabouts. At the top of the season the show
of opulence and impudence is bewildering.
The little principality of Monaco is hardly bigger than the Cabbage Patch
of the renowned Mrs. Wiggs. It is, however, more happily situate. Nestled
under the heights of La Condamine and Tête de Chien and looking across
a sheltered bay upon the wide and blue Mediterranean, it has better
protection against the winds of the North than Nice, or Cannes, or Mentone.
It is an appanage--in point of fact the only estate--remaining to the once
powerful Grimaldi family.
In the early days of land-piracy Old Man Grimaldi held his own with Old Man
Hohenzollern and Old Man Hapsburg. The Savoys and the Bourbons were kith
and kin. But in the long run of Freebooting the Grimaldis did not keep
up with the procession. How they retained even this remnant of inherited
brigandage and self-appointed royalty, I do not know. They are here under
leave of the Powers and the especial protection, strange to say, of the
French Republic.
Something over fifty years ago, being hard-up for cash, the Grimaldi of the
period fell under the wiles of an ingenious Alsatian gambler, Guerlac by
name, who foresaw that Baden-Baden and Hombourg were approaching their
finish and that the sports must look elsewhere for their living, the idle
rich for their sport. This tiny "enclave" in French territory presented
many advantages over the German Dukedoms. It was an independent sovereignty
issuing its own coins and postage stamps. It was in proud possession of
a half-dozen policemen which it called its "army." It was paradisaic in
beauty and climate. Its "ruler" was as poor as Job's turkey, but by no
means as proud as Lucifer.
The bargain was struck. The gambler smote the rock of Monte Carlo as with a
wand of enchantment and a stream of plenty burst forth. The mountain-side
responded to the touch. It chortled in its glee and blossomed as the rose.
II
The region known as the Riviera comprises, as I have said, the whole
land-circle of the Mediterranean Sea. But, as generally written and
understood, it stands for the shoreline between Marseilles and Genoa. The
two cities are connected by the Corniche Road, built by the First Napoleon,
who learned the need of it when he made his Italian campaign, and the
modern railway, the distance 260 miles, two-thirds of the way through
France, the residue through Italy, and all of it surpassing fine.
The climate is very like that of Southern Florida. But as in Florida they
have the "Nor'westers" and the "Nor'easters," on the Riviera they have the
"mistral." In Europe there is no perfect winter weather north of Spain, as
in the United States none north of Cuba.
I have often thought that Havana might be made a dangerous rival of Monte
Carlo under the one-man power, exercising its despotism with benignant
intelligence and spending its income honestly upon the development of both
the city and the island. The motley populace would probably be none the
worse for it. The Government could upon a liberal tariff collect not less
than thirty-five millions of annual revenue. Twenty-five of these millions
would suffice for its own support. Ten millions a year laid out upon
harbors, roadways and internal improvements in general would within ten
years make the Queen of the Antilles the garden spot and playground of
Christendom. They would build a Casino to outshine even the architectural
miracles of Charles Garnier. Then would Havana put Cairo out of business
and give the Prince of Monaco a run for his money.
With the opening of every Monte Carlo season the newspapers used to tell of
the colossal winnings of purely imaginary players. Sometimes the favored
child of chance was a Russian, sometimes an Englishman, sometimes an
American. He was usually a myth, of course. As Mrs. Prig observed to Mrs.
Camp, "there never was no sich person."
III
Charles Garnier, the Parisian architect, came and built the Casino, next to
the Library of Congress at Washington and the Grand Opera House at Paris
the most beautiful building in the world, with incomparable gardens and
commanding esplanades to set it off and display it. Around it palatial
hotels and private mansions and villas sprang into existence. Within it a
gold-making wheel of fortune fabricated the wherewithal. Old Man Grimaldi
in his wildest dreams of land-piracy--even Old Man Hohenzollern, or Old Man
Hapsburg--never conceived the like.
There is no poverty, no want, no taxes--not any sign of dilapidation or
squalor anywhere in the principality of Monaco. Yet the "people," so
called, have been known to lapse into a state of discontent. They sometimes
"yearned for freedom." Too well fed and cared for, too rid of dirt and
debt, too flourishing, they "riz." Prosperity grew monotonous. They even
had the nerve to demand a "Constitution."
The reigning Prince was what Yellowplush would call "a scientific gent."
His son and heir, however, had not his head in the clouds, being in point
of fact of the earth earthly, and, of consequence, more popular than his
father. He came down from the Castle on the hill to the marketplace in the
town and says he: "What do you galoots want, anyhow?"
First, their "rights." Then a change in the commander-in-chief of the army,
which had grown from six to sixteen. Finally, a Board of Aldermen and a
Common Council.
"Is that all?" says his Royal Highness. They said it was. "Then," says he,
"take it, mes enfants, and bless you!"
So, all went well again. The toy sovereignty began to rattle around in its
own conceit, the "people" regarded themselves, and wished to be regarded,
as a chartered Democracy. The little gim-crack economic system experienced
the joys of reform. A "New Nationalism" was established in the brewery down
by the railway station and a reciprocity treaty was negotiated between the
Casino and Vanity Fair, witnessing the introduction of two roulette tables
and an extra brazier for cigar stumps.
But the Prince of Monaco stood on one point. He would have no Committee on
Credentials. He told me once that he had heard of Tom Reed and Champ Clark
and Uncle Joe Cannon, but that he preferred Uncle Joe. He would, and he
did, name his own committees both in the Board of Aldermen and the Common
Council. Thus, for the time being, "insurgency" was quelled. And once more
serenely sat the Castle on the hill hard by the Cathedral. Calmly again
flowed the waters in the harbor. More and more the autos honked outside the
Casino. Within "the little ball ever goes merrily round," and according to
the croupiers and the society reporters "the gentleman wins and the poor
gambler loses!"
IV
To illustrate, I recall when on a certain season the lucky sport of print
and fancy was an Englishman. In one of those farragos of stupidity and
inaccuracy which are syndicated and sent from abroad to America, I found
the following piece with the stuff and nonsense habitually worked off on
the American press as "foreign correspondence":
"Now and then the newspapers report authentic instances of large sums
having been won at the gaming tables at Monte Carlo. One of the most
fortunate players at Monte Carlo for a long time past has been a Mr.
Darnbrough, an Englishman, whose remarkable run of luck had furnished the
morsels of gossip in the capitals of Continental Europe recently.
"If reports are true, he left the place with the snug sum of more than
1,000,000 francs to the good as the result of a month's play. But this, I
hear, did not represent all of Mr. Darnbrough's winnings. The story goes
that on the opening day of his play he staked 24,000 francs, winning all
along the line. Emboldened by his success, he continued playing, winning
again and again with marvelous luck. At one period, it is said, his credit
balance amounted to no less than 1,850,000 francs; but from that moment
Dame Fortune ceased to smile upon him. He lost steadily from 200,000 to
300,000 francs a day, until, recognizing that luck had turned against him,
he had sufficient strength of will to turn his back on the tables and
strike for home with the very substantial winnings that still remained.
"On another occasion a well-known London stock broker walked off with
little short of £40,000. This remarkable performance occasioned no small
amount of excitement in the gambling rooms, as such an unusual incident
does invariably.
"Bent on making a 'plunge,' he went from one table to another, placing the
maximum stake on the same number. Strange to relate, at each table the same
number won, and it was his number. Recognizing that this perhaps might be
his lucky day, the player wended his way to the trente-et-quarante room
and put the maximum on three of the tables there. To his amazement, he
discovered that there also he had been so fortunate as to select the
winning number.
"The head croupier confided to a friend of the writer who happened to be
present that that day had been the worst in the history of the Monaco bank
for years. He it was also who mentioned the amount won by the fortunate
Londoner, as given above."
It is prudent of the space-writers to ascribe such "information" as this
to "the head croupier," because it is precisely the like that such an
authority would give out. People upon the spot know that nothing of the
kind happened, and that no person of that name had appeared upon the scene.
The story on the face of it bears to the knowing its own refutation, being
absurd in every detail. As if conscious of this, the author proceeds to
quality it in the following:
"It is a well-known fact that one of the most successful players at the
Monte Carlo tables was Wells, who as the once popular music-hall song put
it, 'broke the bank' there. He was at the zenith of his fame, about twenty
years ago, when his escapades--and winnings--were talked about widely and
envied in European sporting circles and among the demi-monde.
"In ten days, it was said, he made upward of £35,000 clear winnings at
the tables after starting with the modest capital of £400. It must not be
forgotten, however, that at his trial later Wells denied this, stating
that all he had made was £7,000 at four consecutive sittings. He made the
statement that, even so, he had been a loser in the end.
"The reader may take his choice of the two statements, but among
frequenters of the rooms at Monte Carlo it is generally considered
impossible to amass large winnings without risking large stakes. Even then
the chances are 1,000 to 1 in favor of the bank. Yet occasionally there
are winnings running into four or five figures, and to human beings the
possibility of chance constitutes an irresistible fascination.
"Only a few years ago a young American was credited with having risen from
the tables $75,000 richer than when first he had sat down. It was his first
visit to Monte Carlo and he had not come with any system to break the bank
or with any 'get-rich-quick' idea. For the novelty of the thing he risked
about $4,000, and lost it all in one fell swoop without turning a hair.
Then he 'plunged' with double that amount, but the best part of that, too,
went the same way. Nothing daunted, he next ventured $10,000. This time
fickle fortune favored him. He played on with growing confidence and when
his winnings amounted to the respectable sum of $75,000 he had the good
sense to quit and to leave the place despite the temptation to continue."
V
The "man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo," and gave occasion for the
song, was not named "Wells" and he was not an Englishman. He was an
American. I knew him well and soon after the event had from his own lips
the whole story.
He came to Monte Carlo with a good deal of money won at draw-poker in a
club at Paris and went away richer by some 100,000 francs (about $20,000)
than he came.
The catch-line of the song is misleading. There is no such thing as
"breaking the bank at Monte Carlo." This particular player won so fast upon
two or three "spins" that the table at which he played had to suspend until
it could be replenished by another "bank," perhaps ten minutes in point of
time. There used to be some twenty tables. Just how one man could play at
more than one of them at one time a "foreign correspondent," but only
a "foreign correspondent," might explain to the satisfaction of the
horse-marines.
I very much doubt whether any player ever won more than 100,000 francs at a
single sitting. To do even that he must plunge like a ship in a hurricane.
There is, of course, a saving limit set by the Casino Company upon the
play. It is to the interest of the Casino to cultivate the idea, and the
letter writers are willing tools. Not only at Monte Carlo, but everywhere,
in dearth of news, gambling stories come cheap and easy. And the cheaper
the story the bigger the play. "The Jedge raised him two thousand dollars.
The Colonel raised him back ten thousand more. Both of 'em stood pat. The
Jedge bet him a hundred thousand. The Colonel called. 'What you got?' says
he. 'Ace high,' says the Jedge; 'what you got?' 'Pair o' deuces,' says the
Colonel."
Assuredly the "play" in the Casino is entirely fair. It could hardly be
otherwise with such crowds of players at the tables, often covering the
whole "layout." But there is no such thing as "honest gambling." The
"house" must have "the best of it." A famous American gambler, when I had
referred to one of his guild, lately deceased, as "an honest gambler," said
to me: "What do you mean by 'an honest gambler'?"
"A gambler who will not take unfair advantage!" I answered.
"Well," said he, "the gambler must have his advantage, because gambling is
his livelihood. He must fit himself for its profitable pursuit by learning
all the tricks of trade like other artists and artificers. With him it is
win or starve."
Among the variegate crowds that thronged the highways and byways of Monte
Carlo in those days there was no single figure more observed and striking
than that of Leopold the Second, King of the Belgians. He had a bungalow
overlooking the sea where he lived three months of the year like a country
gentleman. Although I have made it a rule to avoid courts and courtiers,
an event brought me into acquaintance with this best abused man in Europe,
enabling me to form my own estimate of his very interesting personality.
He was not at all what his enemies represented him to be, a sot, a gambler
and a roué. In appearance a benignant burgomaster, tall and stalwart; in
manner and voice very gentle, he should be described as first of all a man
of business. His weakness was rather for money than women. Speaking of
the most famous of the Parisian dancers with whom his name had been
scandalously associated, he told me that he had never met her but once in
his life, and that after the newspaper gossips had been busy for years with
their alleged love affair. "I kissed her hand," he related, "and bade her
adieu, saying, 'Ah, ma'mselle, you and I have indeed reason to congratulate
ourselves.'"
It was the Congo business that lay at the bottom of the abuse of Leopold.
Henry Stanley had put him up to this. It turned out a gold mine, and then
two streams of defamation were let loose; one from the covetous commercial
standpoint and the other from the humanitarian. Between them, seeking to
drive him out, they depicted him as a monster of cruelty and depravity.
A King must be an anchorite to escape calumny, and Leopold was not an
anchorite. I asked him why I never saw him in the Casino. "Play," he
answered, "does not interest me. Besides, I do not enjoy being talked
about. Nor do I think the game they play there quite fair."
"In what way do you consider it unfair, your Majesty?" I asked.
"In the zero," he replied. "At the Brussels Casino I do not allow them to
have a zero. Come and see me and I will show you a perfectly equal chance
for your money, to win or lose."
Years after I was in Brussels. Leopold had gone to his account and his
nephew, Albert, had come to the throne. There was not a roulette table in
the Casino, but there was one conveniently adjacent thereto, managed by a
clique of New York gamblers, which had both a single "and a double O,"
and, as appeared when the municipality made a descent upon the place, was
ingeniously wired to throw the ball wherever the presiding coupier wanted
it to go.
I do not believe, however, that Leopold was a party to this, or could have
had any knowledge of it. He was a skillful, not a dishonest, business man,
who showed his foresight when he listened to Stanley and took him under his
wing. If the Congo had turned out worthless nobody would ever have heard of
the delinquencies of the King of the Belgians.
Chapter the Seventeenth
A Parisian _Pension_--The Widow of Walewska--Napoleon's
Daughter-in-Law--The Changeless--A Moral and Orderly City
I
I have said that I knew the widow of Walewska, the natural son of Napoleon
Bonaparte by the Polish countess he picked up in Warsaw, who followed him
to Paris; and thereby hangs a tale which may not be without interest.
In each of our many sojourns in Paris my wife and I had taken an apartment,
living the while in the restaurants, at first the cheaper, like the Café de
Progress and the Duval places; then the Boeuf à la Mode, the Café Voisin
and the Café Anglais, with Champoux's, in the Place de la Bourse, for a
regular luncheon resort.
At length, the children something more than half grown, I said: "We have
never tried a Paris _pension_."
So with a half dozen recommended addresses we set out on a house hunt. We
had not gone far when our search was rewarded by a veritable find. This
was on the Avenue de Courcelles, not far from the Pare Monceau; newly
furnished; reasonable charges; the lady manager a beautiful well-mannered
woman, half Scotch and half French.
We moved in. When dinner was called the boarders assembled in the very
elegant drawing-room. Madame presented us to Baron ----. Then followed
introductions to Madame la Duchesse and Madame la Princesse and Madame la
Comtesse. Then the folding doors opened and dinner was announced.
The baron sat at the center of the table. The meal consisted of eight or
ten courses, served as if at a private house, and of surpassing quality.
During the three months that we remained there was no evidence of a
boarding house. It appeared an aristocratic family into which we had been
hospitably admitted. The baron was a delightful person. Madame la Duchesse
was the mother of Madame la Princesse, and both were charming. The
Comtesse, the Napoleonic widow, was at first a little formal, but she came
round after we had got acquainted, and, when we took our departure, it was
like leaving a veritable domestic circle.
Years after we had the sequel. The baron, a poor young nobleman, had come
into a little money. He thought to make it breed. He had an equally poor
Scotch cousin, who undertook to play hostess. Both the Duchess and the
Countess were his kinswomen. How could such a ménage last?
He lost his all. What became of our fellow-lodgers I never learned, but the
venture coming to naught, the last I heard of the beautiful high-bred
lady manager, she was serving as a stewardess on an ocean liner. Nothing,
however, could exceed the luxury, the felicity and the good company
of those memorable three months _chez l'Avenue de Courcelles, Pare
Monceau_.
We never tried a _pension_ again. We chose a delightful hotel in the
Rue de Castiglione off the Rue de Rivoli, and remained there as fixtures
until we were reckoned the oldest inhabitants. But we never deserted the
dear old Boeuf à la Mode, which we lived to see one of the most flourishing
and popular places in Paris.
II
In the old days there was a little hotel on the Rue Dannou, midway between
the Rue de la Paix and what later along became the Avenue de l'Opéra,
called the Hôtel d'Orient. It was conducted by a certain Madame Hougenin,
whose family had held the lease for more than a hundred years, and was
typical of what the comfort-seeking visitor, somewhat initiate, might find
before the modern tourist onrush overflowed all bounds and effaced the
ancient landmarks--or should I say townmarks?--making a resort instead of a
home of the gay French capital. The d'Orient was delightfully comfortable
and fabulously cheap.
The wayfarer entered a darksome passage that led to an inner court. There
were on the four sides of this seven or eight stories pierced by many
windows. There was never a lift, or what we Americans call an elevator. If
you wanted to go up you walked up; and after dark your single illuminant
was candlelight. The service could hardly be recommended, but cleanliness
herself could find no fault with the beds and bedding; nor any queer people
about; changeless; as still and stationary as a nook in the Rockies.
A young girl might dwell there year in and year out in perfect safety--many
young girls did so--madame a kind of duenna. The food--for it was a
_pension_--was all a gourmet could desire. And the wine!
I was lunching with an old Parisian friend.
"What do you think of this vintage?" says he.
"Very good," I answered. "Come and dine with me to-morrow and I will give
you the mate to it."
"What--at the d'Orient?"
"Yes, at the d'Orient."
"Preposterous!"
Nevertheless, he came. When the wine was poured out he took a sip.
"By ----!" he exclaimed. "That is good, isn't it? I wonder where they got
it? And how?"
During the week after we had it every day. Then no more. The headwaiter,
with many apologies, explained that he had found those few bottles in a
forgotten bin, where they had lain for years, and he begged a thousand
pardons of monsieur, but we had drunk them all--_rien du plus_--no
more. I might add that precisely the same thing happened to me at the Hôtel
Continental. Indeed, it is not uncommon with the French caravansaries
to keep a little extra good wine in stock for those who can distinguish
between an _ordinaire_ and a _supérieur_, and are willing to pay
the price.
III
"See Naples and die," say the Italians. "See Paris and live," say the
French. Old friends, who have been over and back, have been of late telling
me that Paris, having woefully suffered, is nowise the Paris it was, and
as the provisional offspring of four years of desolating war I can well
believe them. But a year or two of peace, and the city will rise again,
as after the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, which laid upon it a
sufficiently blighting hand. In spite of fickle fortune and its many ups
and downs it is, and will ever remain, "Paris, the Changeless."
I never saw the town so much itself as just before the beginning of the
world war. I took my departure in the early summer of that fateful year and
left all things booming--not a sign or trace that there had ever been aught
but boundless happiness and prosperity. It is hard, the saying has it,
to keep a squirrel on the ground, and surely Paris is the squirrel among
cities. The season just ended had been, everybody declared, uncommonly
successful from the standpoints alike of the hotels and cafés, the shop
folk and their patrons, not to mention the purely pleasure-seeking throng.
People seemed loaded with money and giddy to spend it.
The headwaiter at Voisin's told me this: "Mr. Barnes, of New York, ordered
a dinner, carte blanche, for twelve.
"'Now,' says he, 'garçon, have everything bang up, and here's seventy-five
francs for a starter.'
"The dinner was bang up. Everybody hilarious. Mr. Barnes immensely pleased.
When he came to pay his bill, which was a corker, he made no objection.
"'Garçon,' says he, 'if I ask you a question will you tell me the truth?'
"'_Oui, monsieur; certainement._'
"Well, how much was the largest tip you ever received?"
"Seventy-five francs, monsieur."
"'Very well; here are 100 francs.'
"Then, after a pause for the waiter to digest his joy and express a proper
sense of gratitude and wonder, Mr. Barnes came to time with: 'Do you
remember who was the idiot that paid you the seventy-five francs?'
"'Oh, yes, monsieur. It was you.'"
IV
It has occurred to me that of late years--I mean the years immediately
before 1914--Paris has been rather more bent upon adapting itself to human
and moral as well as scientific progress. There has certainly been less
debauchery visible to the naked eye. I was assured that the patronage had
so fallen away from the Moulin Rouge that they were planning to turn it
into a decent theater. Nor during my sojourn did anybody in my hearing so
much as mention the Dead Rat. I doubt whether it is still in existence.
The last time I was in Maxim's--quite a dozen years ago now--a young woman
sat next to me whose story could be read in her face. She was a pretty
thing not five and twenty, still blooming, with iron-gray hair. It had
turned in a night, I was told. She had recently come from Baltimore and
knew no more what she was doing or whither she was drifting than a baby.
The old, old story: a comfortable home and a good husband; even a child or
two; a scoundrel, a scandal, an elopement, and the inevitable desertion.
Left without a dollar in the streets of Paris. She was under convoy of a
noted procuress.
"A duke or the morgue," she whimpered, "in six months."
Three months sufficed. They dragged all that remained of her out of the
Seine, and then the whole of the pitiful disgrace and tragedy came out.
V
If ever I indite a volume to be entitled Adventures in Paris it will
contain not a line to feed any prurient fancy, but will embrace the record
of many little journeys between the Coiffeur and the Marché des Fleurs,
with maybe an excursion among the cemeteries and the restaurants.
Each city is as one makes it for himself. Paris has contributed greatly to
my appreciation, and perhaps my knowledge, of history and literature and
art and life. I have seen it in all its aspects; under the empire, when the
Due de Morny was king of the Bourse and Mexico was to make every Frenchman
rich; after the commune and the siege, when the Hôtel de Ville was in
ruins, the palace of the Tuileries still aflame, the column gone from the
Place Vendôme, and everything a blight and waste; and I have marked it rise
from its ashes, grandly, proudly, and like a queen come to her own again,
resume its primacy as the only complete metropolis in all the universe.
There is no denying it. No city can approach Paris in structural unity and
regality, in things brilliant and beautiful, in buoyancy, variety, charm
and creature comfort. Drunkenness, of the kind familiar to London and New
York, is invisible to Paris. The brandy and absinthe habit has been greatly
exaggerated. In truth, everywhere in Europe the use of intoxicants is on
the decline. They are, for the first time in France, stimulated partly
by the alarming adulteration of French wines, rigorously applying and
enforcing the pure-food laws.
As a consequence, there is a palpable and decided improvement of the
vintage of the Garonne and the Champagne country. One may get a good glass
of wine now without impoverishing himself. As men drink wine, and as the
wine is pure, they fall away from stronger drink. I have always considered,
with Jefferson, the brewery in America an excellent temperance society.
That which works otherwise is the dive which too often the brewery fathers.
They are drinking more beer in France--even making a fairly good beer. And
then--
But gracious, this is getting upon things controversial, and if there is
anything in this world that I do hybominate, it is controversy!
Few of the wondrous changes which the Age of Miracles has wrought in my day
and generation exceeded those of ocean travel. The modern liner is but a
moving palace. Between the ports of the Old World and the ports of the
new the transit is so uneventful as to grow monotonous. There are no more
adventures on the high seas. The ocean is a thoroughfare, the crossing a
ferry. My experience forty years ago upon one of the ancient tubs which
have been supplanted by these liners would make queer reading to the
latter-day tourist, taking, let us say, any one of the steamers of any one
of the leading transatlantic companies. The difference in the appointments
of the William Penn of 1865 and the star boats of 1914 is indescribable.
It seems a fairy tale to think of a palm garden where the ladies dress for
dinner, a Hungarian band which plays for them whilst they dine, and a sky
parlor where they go after dinner for their coffee and what not; a tea-room
for the five-o'clockers; and except in excessive weather scarcely any
motion at all. It is this palm garden which most appeals to a certain lady
of my very intimate acquaintance who had made many crossings and never gone
to her meals--sick from shore to shore--until the gods ordained for her a
watery, winery, flowery paradise--where the billows ceased from troubling
and a woman could appear at her best. Since then she has sailed many times,
lodged à la Waldorf-Astoria to eat her victuals and sip her wine with
perfect contentment. Coming ashore from our last crossing a friend found
her in the Red Room of that hostel just as she had been sitting the evening
before on shipboard.
"Seems hardly any motion at all," she said, looking about her and fancying
herself still at sea, as well she might.
Chapter the Eighteenth
The Grover Cleveland Period--President Arthur and Mr. Blaine--John
Chamberlin--The Decrees of Destiny
I
What may be called the Grover Cleveland period of American politics began
with the election of that extraordinary person--another man of destiny--to
the governorship of New York. Nominated, as it were, by chance, he carried
the State by an unprecedented majority. That was not because of his
popularity, but that an incredible number of Republican voters refused
to support their party ticket and stayed away from the polls. The
Blaine-Conkling feud, inflamed by the murder of Garfield, had rent the
party of Lincoln and Grant asunder. Arthur, a Conkling leader, had
succeeded to the presidency.
If any human agency could have sealed the breach he might have done it. No
man, however, can achieve the impossible. The case was hopeless.
Arthur was a man of surpassing sweetness and grace. As handsome as Pierce,
as affable as McKinley, he was a more experienced and dextrous politician
than either. He had been put on the ticket with Garfield to placate
Conkling. All sorts of stories to his discredit were told during the
ensuing campaign. The Democrats made him out a tricky and typical "New York
politician." In point of fact he was a many-sided, accomplished man who
had a taking way of adjusting all conditions and adapting himself to all
companies.
With a sister as charming and tactful as he for head of his domestic
fabric, the White House bloomed again. He possessed the knack of
surrounding himself with all sorts of agreeable people. Frederick
Frelinghuysen was Secretary of State and Robert Lincoln, continued from the
Garfield Cabinet, Secretary of War. Then there were three irresistibles:
Walter Gresham, Frank Hatton and "Ben" Brewster. His home
contingent--"Clint" Wheeler, "Steve" French, and "Jake" Hess--pictured as
"ward heelers"--were, in reality, efficient and all-around, companionable
men, capable and loyal.
I was sent by the Associated Press to Washington on a fool's errand--that
is, to get an act of Congress extending copyright to the news of the
association--and, remaining the entire session, my business to meet the
official great and to make myself acceptable, I came into a certain
intimacy with the Administration circle, having long had friendly relations
with the President. In all my life I have never passed so delightful and
useless a winter.
Very early in the action I found that my mission involved a serious and
vexed question--nothing less than the creation of a new property--and I
proceeded warily. Through my uncle, Stanley Matthews, I interested the
members of the Supreme Court. The Attorney General, a great lawyer and
an old Philadelphia friend, was at my call and elbow. The Joint Library
Committee of Congress, to which the measure must go, was with me. Yet
somehow the scheme lagged.
I could not account for this. One evening at a dinner Mr. Blaine
enlightened me. We sat together at table and suddenly he turned and said:
"How are you getting on with your bill?" And my reply being rather halting,
he continued, "You won't get a vote in either House," and he proceeded
very humorously to improvise the average member's argument against it as
a dangerous power, a perquisite to the great newspapers and an imposition
upon the little ones. To my mind this was something more than the
post-prandial levity it was meant to be.
Not long after a learned but dissolute old lawyer said to me, "You need no
act of Congress to protect your news service. There are at least two, and I
think four or five, English rulings that cover the case. Let me show them
to you." He did so and I went no further with the business, quite agreeing
with Mr. Blaine, and nothing further came of it. To a recent date the
Associated Press has relied on these decisions under the common law of
England. Curiously enough, quite a number of newspapers in whose actual
service I was engaged, opened fire upon me and roundly abused me.
II
There appeared upon the scene in Washington toward the middle of the
seventies one of those problematical characters the fiction-mongers delight
in. This was John Chamberlin. During two decades "Chamberlin's," half
clubhouse and half chophouse, was all a rendezvous.
"John" had been a gambler; first an underling and then a partner of the
famous Morrissy-McGrath racing combination at Saratoga and Long Branch.
There was a time when he was literally rolling in wealth. Then he went
broke--dead broke. Black Friday began it and the panic of '73 finished
it. He came over to Washington and his friends got him the restaurant
privileges of the House of Representatives. With this for a starting point,
he was able to take the Fernando Wood residence, in the heart of the
fashionable quarter, to add to it presently the adjoining dwelling of
Governor Swann, of Maryland, and next to that, finally, the Blaine
mansion, making a suite, as it were, elegant yet cozy. "Welcker's," erst a
fashionable resort, and long the best eating-place in town, had been ruined
by a scandal, and "Chamberlin's" succeeded it, having the field to itself,
though, mindful of the "scandal" which had made its opportunity, ladies
were barred.
There was a famous cook--Emeline Simmons--a mulatto woman, who was equally
at home in French dishes and Maryland-Virginia kitchen mysteries--a very
wonder with canvasback and terrapin--who later refused a great money offer
to he chef at the White House--whom John was able to secure. Nothing could
surpass--could equal--her preparations. The charges, like the victuals,
were sky-high and tip-top. The service was handled by three "colored
gentlemen," as distinguished in manners as in appearance, who were known
far and wide by name and who dominated all about them, including John and
his patrons.
No such place ever existed before, or will ever exist again. It was the
personality of John Chamberlin, pervasive yet invisible, exhaling a silent,
welcoming radiance. General Grant once said to me, "During my eight years
in the White House, John Chamberlin once in a while--once in a great
while--came over. He did not ask for anything. He just told me what to do,
and I did it." I mentioned this to President Arthur. "Well," he laughingly
said, "that has been my experience with John Chamberlin. It never crosses
my mind to say him 'nay.' Often I have turned this over in my thought
to reach the conclusion that being a man of sound judgment and worldly
knowledge, he has fully considered the case--his case and my case--leaving
me no reasonable objection to interpose."
John obtained an act of Congress authorizing him to build a hotel on the
Government reservation at Fortress Monroe, and another of the Virginia
Legislature confirming this for the State. Then he came to me. It was at
the moment when I was flourishing as "a Wall Street magnate." He said: "I
want to sell this franchise to some man, or company, rich enough to carry
it through. All I expect is a nest egg for Emily and the girls"--he had
married the beautiful Emily Thorn, widow of George Jordan, the actor, and
there were two daughters--"you are hand-and-glove with the millionaires.
Won't you manage it for me?" Like Grant and Arthur, I never thought of
refusing. Upon the understanding that I was to receive no commission, I
agreed, first ascertaining that it was really a most valuable franchise.
I began with the Willards, in whose hotel I had grown up. They were rich
and going out of business. Then I laid it before Hitchcock and Darling, of
the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. They, rich like the Willards, were
also retiring. Then a bright thought occurred to me. I went to the Prince
Imperial of Standard Oil. "Mr. Flagler," I said, "you have hotels at St.
Augustine and you have hotels at Palm Beach. Here is a halfway point
between New York and Florida," and more of the same sort. "My dear friend,"
he answered, "every man has the right to make a fool of himself once in his
life. This I have already done. Never again for me. I have put up my
last dollar south of the Potomac." Then I went to the King of the
transcontinental railways. "Mr. Huntington," I said, "you own a road
extending from St. Louis to Newport News, having a terminal in a cornfield
just out of Hampton Roads. Here is a franchise which gives you a
magnificent site at Hampton Roads itself. Why not?" He gazed upon me with
a blank stare--such I fancy as he usually turned upon his suppliants--and
slowly replied: "I would not spend another dollar in Virginia if the Lord
commanded me. In the event that some supernatural power should take the
Chesapeake & Ohio Railway by the nape of the neck and the seat of the
breeches and pitch it out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean it would be
doing me a favor."
So I returned John his franchise marked "nothing doing." Afterward he put
it in the hands of a very near friend, a great capitalist, who had no
better luck with it. Finally, here and there, literally by piecemeal, he
got together money enough to build and furnish the Hotel Chamberlin, had a
notable opening with half of Congress there to see, and gently laid himself
down and died, leaving little other than friends and debts.
III
Macaulay tells us that the dinner-table is a wondrous peacemaker, miracle
worker, social solvent; and many were the quarrels composed and the plans
perfected under the Chamberlin roof. It became a kind of Congressional
Exchange with a close White House connection. If those old walls, which by
the way are still standing, could speak, what tales they might tell, what
testimonies refute, what new lights throw into the vacant corners and dark
places of history!
Coming away from Chamberlin's with Mr. Blaine for an after-dinner stroll
during the winter of 1883-4, referring to the approaching National
Republican Convention, he said: "I do not want the nomination. In my
opinion there is but one nominee the Republicans can elect this year and
that is General Sherman. I have written him to tell him so and urge it upon
him. In default of him the time of you people has come." He subsequently
showed me this letter and General Sherman's reply. My recollection is that
the General declared that he would not take the presidency if it were
offered him, earnestly invoking Mr. Elaine to support his brother, John
Sherman.
This would seem clear refutation that Mr. Blaine was party to his own
nomination that year. It assuredly reveals keen political instinct and
foresight. The capital prize in the national lottery was not for him.
I did not meet him until two years later, when he gave me a minute account
of what had happened immediately thereafter; the swing around the circle;
Belshazzar's feast, as a fatal New York banquet was called; the far-famed
Burchard incident. "I did not hear the words, 'Rum, Romanism and
Rebellion,'" he told me, "else, as you must know, I would have fittingly
disposed of them."
I said: "Mr. Blaine, you may as well give it up. The doom of Webster,
Clay, and Douglas is upon you. If you are nominated again, with an assured
election, you will die before the day of election. If you survive the day
and are elected, you'll die before the 4th of March." He smiled grimly and
replied: "It really looks that way."
My own opinion has always been that if the Republicans had nominated
Mr. Arthur in 1884 they would have elected him. The New York vote would
scarcely have been so close. In the count of the vote the Arthur end of
it would have had some advantage--certainly no disadvantage. Cleveland's
nearly 200,000 majority had dwindled to the claim of a beggarly few
hundred, and it was charged that votes which belonged to Butler, who ran as
an independent labor candidate, were actually counted for Cleveland.
When it was over an old Republican friend of mine said: "Now we are even.
History will attest that we stole it once and you stole it once. Turn about
may be fair play; but, all the same, neither of us likes it."
So Grover Cleveland, unheard of outside of Buffalo two years before, was to
be President of the United States. The night preceding his nomination for
the governorship of New York, General Slocum seemed in the State convention
sure of that nomination. Had he received it he would have carried the State
as Cleveland did, and Slocum, not Cleveland, would have been the Chief
Magistrate. It cost Providence a supreme effort to pull Cleveand through.
But in his case, as in many another, Providence "got there" in fulfilment
of a decree of Destiny.
Chapter the Nineteenth
Mr. Cleveland in the White House--Mr. Bayard in the Department of
State--Queer Appointments to Office--The One-Party Power--The End of
North and South Sectionalism
I
The futility of political as well as of other human reckoning was set
forth by the result of the presidential election of 1884. With a kind
of prescience, as I have related, Mr. Blaine had foreseen it. He was
a sagacious as well as a lovable and brilliant man. He looked back
affectionately upon the days he had passed in Kentucky, when a poor
school-teacher, and was especially cordial to the Kentuckians. In the House
he and Beck were sworn friends, and they continued their friendship when
both of them had reached the Senate.
I inherited Mr. Blaine's desk in the Ways and Means Committee room. In one
of the drawers of this he had left a parcel of forgotten papers, which
I returned to him. He made a joke of the secrets they covered and the
fortunate circumstance that they had fallen into the hands of a friend and
not of an enemy.
No man of his time could hold a candle to Mr. Blaine in what we call
magnetism--that is, in manly charm, supported by facility and brain power.
Clay and Douglas had set the standard of party leadership before his time.
He made a good third to them. I never knew Mr. Clay, but with Judge Douglas
I was well acquainted, and the difference between him and Mr. Blaine in
leadership might be called negligible.
Both were intellectually aggressive and individually amiable. They at least
seemed to love their fellow men. Each had been tried by many adventures.
Each had gone, as it were, "through the flint mill." Born to good
conditions--Mr. Blaine sprang from aristocratic forebears--each knew by
early albeit brief experience the seamy side of life; as each, like Clay,
nursed a consuming passion for the presidency. Neither had been made for
a subaltern, and they chafed under the subaltern yoke to which fate had
condemned them.
II
In Grover Cleveland a total stranger had arrived at the front of affairs.
The Democrats, after a rule of more than half a century, had been out of
power twenty-four years. They could scarce realize at first that they were
again in power. The new chieftain proved more of an unknown quantity than
had been suspected. William Dorsheimer, a life-long crony, had brought the
two of us together before Cleveland's election to the governorship of the
Empire State as one of a group of attractive Buffalo men, most of whom
might be said to have been cronies of mine, Buffalo being a delightful
halfway stop-over in my frequent migrations between Kentucky and the
Eastern seaboard. As in the end we came to a parting of the ways I want to
write of Mr. Cleveland as a historian and not as a critic.
He said to Mr. Carlisle after one of our occasional tiffs: "Henry will
never like me until God makes me over again." The next time we met,
referring to this, I said: "Mr. President, I like you very much--very much
indeed--but sometimes I don't like some of your ways."
There were in point of fact two Clevelands--before marriage and after
marriage--the intermediate Cleveland rather unequal and indeterminate.
Assuredly no one of his predecessors had entered the White House so wholly
ignorant of public men and national affairs. Stories used to be told
assigning to Zachary Taylor this equivocal distinction. But General Taylor
had grown up in the army and advanced in the military service to a chief
command, was more or less familiar with the party leaders of his time,
and was by heredity a gentleman. The same was measurably true of Grant.
Cleveland confessed himself to have had no social training, and he
literally knew nobody.
Five or six weeks after his inauguration I went to Washington to ask a
diplomatic appointment for my friend, Boyd Winchester. Ill health had cut
short a promising career in Congress, but Mr. Winchester was now well on to
recovery, and there seemed no reason why he should not and did not stand in
the line of preferment. My experience may be worth recording because it is
illustrative.
In my quest I had not thought of going beyond Mr. Bayard, the new Secretary
of State. I did go to him, but the matter seemed to make no headway. There
appeared a hitch somewhere. It had not crossed my mind that it might be
the President himself. What did the President know or care about foreign
appointments?
He said to me on a Saturday when I was introducing a party of Kentucky
friends: "Come up to-morrow for luncheon. Come early, for Rose"--his
sister, for the time being mistress of the White House--"will be at church
and we can have an old-fashioned talk-it-out."
The next day we passed the forenoon together. He was full of homely and
often whimsical talk. He told me he had not yet realized what had happened
to him.
"Sometimes," he said, "I wake at night and rub my eyes and wonder if it is
not all a dream."
He asked an infinite number of questions about this, that and the other
Democratic politician. He was having trouble with the Kentucky Congressmen.
He had appointed a most unlikely scion of a well-known family to a foreign
mission, and another young Kentuckian, the son of a New York magnate, to a
leading consul generalship, without consultation with any one. He asked me
about these. In a way one of them was one of my boys, and I was glad to see
him get what he wanted, though he aspired to nothing so high. He was indeed
all sorts of a boy, and his elevation to such a post was so grotesque that
the nomination, like that of his mate, was rejected by the Senate. I
gave the President a serio-comic but kindly account, at which he laughed
heartily, and ended by my asking how he had chanced to make two such
appointments.
"Hewitt came over here," he answered, "and then Dorsheimer. The father is
the only Democrat we have in that great corporation. As to the other, he
struck me as a likely fellow. It seemed good politics to gratify them and
their friends."
I suggested that such backing was far afield and not very safe to go by,
when suddenly he said: "I have been told over and over again by you and by
others that you will not take office. Too much of a lady, I suppose! What
are you hanging round Washington for anyhow? What do you want?"
Here was my opportunity to speak of Winchester, and I did so.
When I had finished he said: "What are you doing about Winchester?"
"Relying on the Secretary of State, who served in Congress with him and
knows him well."
Then he asked: "What do you want for Winchester?"
I answered: "Belgium or Switzerland."
He said: "I promised Switzerland for a friend of Corning's. He brought
him over here yesterday and he is an out-and-out Republican who voted for
Blaine, and I shall not appoint him. If you want the place for Winchester,
Winchester it is."
Next day, much to Mr. Bayard's surprise, the commission was made out.
Mr. Cleveland had a way of sudden fancies to new and sometimes queer
people. Many of his appointments were eccentric and fell like bombshells
upon the Senate, taking the appointee's home people completely by surprise.
The recommendation of influential politicians seemed to have little if any
weight with him.
There came to Washington from Richmond a gentleman by the name of Keiley,
backed by the Virginia delegation for a minor consulship. The President at
once fell in love with him.
[Illustration: Mr. Watterson's Library at "Mansfield"]
"Consul be damned," he said. "He is worth more than that," and named him
Ambassador to Vienna.
It turned out that Mrs. Keiley was a Jewess and would not be received at
court. Then he named him Ambassador to Italy, when it appeared that Keiley
was an intense Roman Catholic, who had made at least one ultramontane
speech, and would be _persona non grata_ at the Quirinal. Then
Cleveland dropped him. Meanwhile poor Keiley had closed out bag and baggage
at Richmond and was at his wit's end. After much ado the President was
brought to a realizing sense and a place was found for Keiley as consul
general and diplomatic agent at Cairo, whither he repaired. At the end
of the four years he came to Paris and one day, crossing the Place de la
Concorde, he was run over by a truck and killed. He deserved a longer
career and a better fate, for he was a man of real capacity.
III
Taken to task by thick and thin Democratic partisans for my criticism of
the only two Democratic Presidents we have had since the War of Sections,
Cleveland and Wilson, I have answered by asserting the right and duty of
the journalist to talk out in meeting, flatly repudiating the claims as
well as the obligations of the organ grinder they had sought to put upon
me, and closing with the knife grinder's retort--
_Things have come to a hell of a pass
When a man can't wallop his own jackass_.
In the case of Mr. Cleveland the break had come over the tariff issue.
Reading me his first message to Congress the day before he sent it in, he
had said: "I know nothing about the tariff, and I thought I had best leave
it where you and Morrison had put it in the platform."
We had indeed had a time in the Platform Committee of the Chicago
convention of 1884. After an unbroken session of fifty hours a straddle
was all that the committee could be brought to agree upon. The leading
recalcitrant had been General Butler, who was there to make trouble and who
later along bolted the ticket and ran as an independent candidate.
One aim of the Democrats was to get away from the bloody shirt as an issue.
Yet, as the sequel proved, it was long after Cleveland's day before the
bloody shirt was laid finally to rest. It required a patriot and a hero
like William McKinley to do this. When he signed the commissions of Joseph
Wheeler and Fitzhugh Lee, Confederate generals and graduates of the West
Point Military Academy, to be generals in the Army of the United States,
he made official announcement that the War of Sections was over and gave
complete amnesty to the people and the soldiers of the South.
Yet the bloody shirt lingered long as a troublemaker, and was invoked by
both parties.
IV
That chance gathering of heedless persons, stirred by the bombast of
self-exploiting orators eager for notoriety or display--loose mobs of
local nondescripts led by pension sharks so aptly described by the gallant
General Bragg, of Wisconsin, as coffee coolers and camp followers--should
tear their passion to tatters with the thought that Virginia, exercising an
indisputable right and violating no reasonable sensibility, should elect
to send memorials of Washington and Lee for the Hall of Statues in the
nation's Capitol, came in the accustomed way of bloody-shirt agitation. It
merely proved how easily men are led when taken in droves and stirred by
partyism. Such men either bore no part in the fighting when fighting was
the order of the time, or else they were too ignorant and therefore too
unpatriotic to comprehend the meaning of the intervening years and the
glory these had brought with the expanse of national progress and prowess.
In spite of their lack of representative character it was not easy to
repress impatience at ebullitions of misguided zeal so ignoble; and of
course it was not possible to dissuade or placate them.
All the while never a people more eager to get together than the people of
the United States after the War of Sections, as never a people so averse to
getting into that war. A very small group of extremists and doctrinaires
had in the beginning made a War of Sections possible. Enough of these
survived in the days of Cleveland and McKinley to keep sectionalism alive.
It was mainly sectional clamor out for partisan advantage. But it made
the presidential campaigns lurid in certain quarters. There was no end of
objurgation, though it would seem that even the most embittered Northerner
and ultra Republican who could couple the names of Robert E. Lee and
Benedict Arnold, as was often done in campaign lingo, would not hesitate,
if his passions were roused or if he fancied he saw in it some profit to
himself or his party, to liken George Washington to Judas Iscariot.
The placing of Lee's statue in the Capitol at Washington made the occasion
for this.
It is true that long before Confederate officers had sat in both Houses of
Congress and in Republican and Democratic cabinets and upon the bench of
the Supreme Court, and had served as ambassadors and envoys extraordinary
in foreign lands. But McKinley's doing was the crowning stroke of union and
peace.
There had been a weary and varied interim. Sectionalism proved a sturdy
plant. It died hard. We may waive the reconstruction period as ancient
history. There followed it intense party spirit. Yet, in spite of
extremists and malignants on both sides of the line, the South rallied
equally with the North to the nation's drumbeat after the Maine went down
in the harbor of Havana. It fought as bravely and as loyally at Santiago
and Manila. Finally, by the vote of the North, there came into the Chief
Magistracy one who gloried in the circumstance that on the maternal side
he came of fighting Southern stock; who, amid universal applause, declared
that no Southerner could be prouder than he of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall
Jackson, apotheosizing an uncle, his mother's brother, who had stood at the
head of the Confederate naval establishment in Europe and had fitted out
the Confederate cruisers, as the noblest and purest man he had ever known,
a composite of Colonel Newcome and Henry Esmond.
Meanwhile the process of oblivion had gone on. The graven effigy of
Jefferson Davis at length appeared upon the silver service of an American
battleship. This told the Mississippi's guests, wherever and whenever they
might meet round her hospitable board, of national unification and peace,
giving the lie to sectional malignancy. In the most famous and conspicuous
of the national cemeteries now stands the monument of a Confederate general
not only placed there by consent of the Government, but dedicated with
fitting ceremonies supervised by the Department of War, which sent as its
official representative the son of Grant, himself an army officer of rank
and distinction.
The world has looked on, incredulous and amazed, whilst our country has
risen to each successive act in the drama of reconciliation with increasing
enthusiasm.
I have been all my life a Constitutional Nationalist; first the nation and
then the state. The episode of the Confederacy seems already far away. It
was an interlude, even as matters stood in the Sixties and Seventies, and
now he who would thwart the unification of the country on the lines of
oblivion, of mutual and reciprocal forgiveness, throws himself across the
highway of his country's future, and is a traitor equally to the essential
principles of free government and the spirit of the age.
If sectionalism be not dead it should have no place in popular
consideration. The country seems happily at last one with itself. The
South, like the East and the West, has come to be the merest geographic
expression. Each of its states is in the Union, precisely like the states
of the East and the West, all in one and one in all. Interchanges of every
sort exist.
These exchanges underlie and interlace our social, domestic and business
fabric. That the arrangement and relation after half a century of strife
thus established should continue through all time is the hope and prayer
of every thoughtful, patriotic American. There is no greater dissonance
to that sentiment in the South than in the North. To what end, therefore,
except ignominious recrimination and ruinous dissension, could a revival of
old sectional and partisan passions--if it were possible--be expected to
reach?
V
Humor has played no small part in our politics. It was Col. Mulberry
Sellers, Mark Twain's hero, who gave currency to the conceit and enunciated
the principle of "the old flag and an appropriation." He did not claim the
formula as his own, however. He got it, he said, of Senator Dillworthy, his
patriotic file leader and ideal of Christian statesmanship.
The original of Senator Dillworthy was recognized the country over as
Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, "Old Pom," as he had come to be called, whose
oleaginous piety and noisy patriotism, adjusting themselves with equal
facility to the purloining of subsidies and the roasting of rebels, to
prayer and land grants, had impressed themselves upon the Satirist of
the Gilded Age as upon his immediate colleagues in Congress. He was a
ruffle-shirted Pharisee, who affected the airs of a bishop, and resembled
Cruikshank's pictures of Pecksniff.
There have not been many "Old Poms" in our public life; or, for that matter
Aaron Burrs either, and but one Benedict Arnold. That the chosen people of
God did not dwell amid the twilight of the ages and in far-away Judea, but
were reserved to a later time, and a region then undiscovered of men, and
that the American republic was ordained of God to illustrate upon the
theater of the New World the possibilities of free government in contrast
with the failures and tyrannies and corruptions of the Old, I do truly
believe. That is the first article in my confession of faith. And the
second is like unto it, that Washington was raised up by God to create it,
and that Lincoln was raised up by God to save it; else why the militia
colonel of Virginia and the rail splitter of Illinois, for no reason that
was obvious at the time, before all other men? God moves in a mysterious
way his wonders to perform. The star of the sublime destiny that hung over
the manager of our blessed Savior hung over the cradle of our blessed
Union.
Thus far it has weathered each historic danger which has gone before to
mark the decline and fall of nations; the struggle for existence; the
foreign invasion; the internecine strife; the disputed succession;
religious bigotry and racial conflict. One other peril confronts
it--the demoralization of wealth and luxury; too great prosperity; the
concentration and the abuse of power. Shall we survive the lures with which
the spirit of evil, playing upon our self-love, seeks to trip our wayward
footsteps, purse-pride and party spirit, mistaken zeal and perverted
religion, fanaticism seeking to abridge liberty and liberty running to
license, greed masquerading as a patriot and ambition making a commodity of
glory--or under the process of a divine evolution shall we be able to mount
and ride the waves which swallowed the tribes of Israel, which engulfed the
phalanxes of Greece and the legions of Rome, and which still beat the sides
and sweep the decks of Europe?
The one-party power we have escaped; the one-man power we have escaped. The
stars in their courses fight for us; the virtue and intelligence of the
people are still watchful and alert. Truth is mightier than ever, and
justice, mounting guard even in the Hall of Statues, walks everywhere the
battlements of freedom!
Chapter the Twentieth
The Real Grover Cleveland--Two Clevelands Before and After Marriage--A
Correspondence and a Break of Personal Relations
I
There were, as I have said, two Grover Clevelands--before and after
marriage--and, it might be added, between his defeat in 1888 and his
election in 1892. He was so sure of his election in 1888 that he could not
be induced to see the danger of the situation in his own State of New York,
where David Bennett Hill, who had succeeded him in the governorship, was a
candidate for reelection, and whom he personally detested, had become the
ruling party force. He lost the State, and with it the election, while Hill
won, and thereby arose an ugly faction fight.
I did not believe as the quadrennial period approached in 1892 that Mr.
Cleveland could be elected. I still think he owed his election, and
Harrison his defeat, to the Homestead riots of the midsummer, which
transferred the labor vote bodily from the Republicans to the Democrats.
Mainly on account of this belief I opposed his nomination that year.
In the Kentucky State Convention I made my opposition resonant, if not
effective. "I understand," I said in an address to the assembled delegates,
"that you are all for Grover Cleveland?"
There came an affirmative roar.
"Well," I continued, "I am not, and if you send me to the National
Convention I will not vote for his nomination, if his be the only name
presented, because I firmly believe that his nomination will mean the
marching through a slaughter-house to an open grave, and I refuse to be
party to such a folly."
The answer of the convention was my appointment by acclamation, but it was
many a day before I heard the last of my unlucky figure of speech.
Notwithstanding this splendid indorsement, I went to the National
Convention feeling very like the traditional "poor boy at a frolic." All
seemed to me lost save honor and conviction. I had become the embodiment
of my own epigram, "a tariff for revenue only." Mr. Cleveland, in the
beginning very much taken by it, had grown first lukewarm and then
frightened. His "Free Trade" message of 1887 had been regarded by the party
as an answering voice. But I knew better.
In the national platform, over the protest of Whitney, his organizer, and
Vilas, his spokesman, I had forced him to stand on that gospel. He flew
into a rage and threatened to modify, if not to repudiate, the plank in his
letter of acceptance. We were still on friendly terms and, upon reaching
home, I wrote him the following letter. It reads like ancient history,
but, as the quarrel which followed cut a certain figure in the political
chronicle of the time, the correspondence may not be historically out of
date, or biographically uninteresting:
II
MR. WATTERSON TO MR. CLEVELAND
Courier-Journal Office, Louisville, July 9, 1892.--My Dear Mr. President:
I inclose you two editorial articles from the Courier-Journal, and, that
their spirit and purpose may not be misunderstood by you, I wish to add a
word or two of a kind directly and entirely personal.
To a man of your robust understanding and strong will, opposition and
criticism are apt to be taken as more or less unfriendly; and, as you are
at present advised, I can hardly expect that any words of mine will be
received by you with sentiments either of confidence or favor.
I was admonished by a certain distrust, if not disdain, visited upon the
honest challenge I ventured to offer your Civil Service policy, when you
were actually in office, that you did not differ from some other great men
I have known in an unwillingness, or at least an inability, to accept,
without resentment, the question of your infallibility. Nevertheless, I was
then, as I am now, your friend, and not your enemy, animated by the
single purpose to serve the country, through you, as, wanting your great
opportunities, I could not serve it through myself.
During the four years when you were President, I asked you but for one
thing that lay near my heart. You granted that handsomely; and, if you
had given me all you had to give beside, you could not have laid me under
greater obligation. It is a gratification to me to know, and it ought to be
some warrant both of my intelligence and fidelity for you to remember that
that matter resulted in credit to the Administration and benefit to the
public service.
But to the point; I had at St. Louis in 1888 and at Chicago, the present
year, to oppose what was represented as your judgment and desire in the
adoption of a tariff plank in our national platform; successfully in both
cases. The inclosed articles set forth the reasons forcing upon me a
different conclusion from yours, in terms that may appear to you bluntly
specific, but I hope not personally offensive; certainly not by intention,
for, whilst I would not suppress the truth to please you or any man, I
have a decent regard for the sensibilities and the rights of all men,
particularly of men so eminent as to be beyond the reach of anything except
insolence and injustice. Assuredly in your case, I am incapable of even so
much as the covert thought of either, entertaining for you absolute respect
and regard. But, my dear Mr. President, I do not think that you appreciate
the overwhelming force of the revenue reform issue, which has made you its
idol.
[Illustration: A Corner of "Mansfield"--Home of Henry Watterson]
If you will allow me to say so, in perfect frankness and without intending
to be rude or unkind, the gentlemen immediately about you, gentlemen upon
whom you rely for material aid and energetic party management, are not, as
to the Tariff, Democrats at all; and have little conception of the place in
the popular mind and heart held by the Revenue Reform idea, or, indeed of
any idea, except that of organization and money.
Of the need of these latter, no man has a more realizing sense, or larger
information and experience, than I have. But they are merely the brakes and
wheels of the engine, to which principles and inspirations are, and must
always be, the elements of life and motion. It is to entreat you therefore,
in your coming letter and address, not to underestimate the tremendous
driving power of this Tariff issue, and to beg you, not even to seem to
qualify it, or to abridge its terms in a mistaken attempt to seem to be
conservative.
You cannot escape your great message of 1887 if you would. I know it by
heart, and I think that I perfectly apprehend its scope and tenor. Take it
as your guiding star. Stand upon it. Reiterate it. Emphasize it, amplify
it, but do not subtract a thought, do not erase a word. For every vote
which a bold front may lose you in the East you will gain two votes in the
West. In the East, particularly in New York, enemies lurk in your very
cupboard, and strike at you from behind your chair at table. There is more
than a fighting chance for Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota, and next to
a certainty in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana, if you put yourself
personally at the head of the column which is moving in your name,
supposing it to be another name for reduced taxes and freer exchanges.
Discouraged as I was by the condition of things in New York and Indiana
prior to the Chicago Convention, depressed and almost hopeless by your
nomination, I can see daylight, if you will relax your grip somewhat upon
the East and throw yourself confidently upon the West.
I write warmly because I feel warmly. If you again occupy the White House,
and it is my most constant and earnest prayer that you may, be sure that
you will not be troubled by me. I cannot hope that my motives in opposing
your nomination, consistent as you know them to have been, or that my
conduct during the post-convention discussion and canvass, free as I know
it to have been of ill-feeling, or distemper, has escaped misrepresentation
and misconception. I could not, without the loss of my self-respect,
approach you on any private matter whatever; though it may not be amiss
for me to say to you, that three weeks before the meeting of the National
Convention, I wrote to Mr. Gorman and Mr. Brice urging the withdrawal of
any opposition, and declaring that I would be a party to no movement to
work the two-thirds rule to defeat the will of the majority.
This is all I have to say, Mr. President, and you can believe it or not, as
you please; though you ought to know that I would write you nothing except
in sincere conviction, nor speak to you, or of you, except in a candid and
kindly spirit. Trusting that this will find you hale, hearty, and happy, I
am, dear sir, your fellow democrat and most faithful friend,
HENRY WATTERSON.
The Honorable Grover Cleveland.
III
MR. CLEVELAND TO MR. WATTERSON
By return mail I received this answer:
Gray Gables, Buzzards Bay, Mass., July 15, 1892.
MY DEAR MR. WATTERSON:
I have received your letter and the clippings you inclosed.
I am not sure that I understand perfectly all that they mean. One thing
they demonstrate beyond any doubt, to-wit: that you have not--I think I may
say--the slightest conception of my disposition. It may be that I know
as little about yours. I am surprised by the last paragraph of The
Courier-Journal article of July 8 and amazed to read the statements
contained in your letter, that you know the message of 1887 by heart. It
is a matter of very small importance, but I hope you will allow me to say,
that in all the platform smashing you ever did, you never injured nor
inspired me that I have ever seen or heard of, except that of 1888. I
except that, so I may be exactly correct when I write, "seen or heard
of,"--for I use the words literally.
I would like very much to present some views to you relating to the tariff
position, but I am afraid to do so.
I will, however, venture to say this: If we are defeated this year, I
predict a Democratic wandering in the dark wilds of discouragement for
twenty-five years. I do not purpose to be at all responsible for such a
result. I hope all others upon whom rests the least responsibility will
fully appreciate it.
The world will move on when both of us are dead. While we stay, and
especially while we are in any way concerned in political affairs and while
we are members of the same political brotherhood, let us both resolve to be
just and modest and amiable. Yours very sincerely,
GROVER CLEVELAND.
Hon. Henry Watterson, Louisville, Ky.
IV
MR. WATTERSON TO MR. CLEVELAND
I said in answer:
Louisville, July 22, 1892.--My Dear Sir: I do not see how you could
misunderstand the spirit in which I wrote, or be offended by my plain
words. They were addressed as from one friend to another, as from one
Democrat to another. If you entertain the idea that this is a false view
of our relative positions, and that your eminence lifts you above both
comradeship and counsels, I have nothing to say except to regret that, in
underestimating your breadth of character I exposed myself too contumely.
You do, indeed, ride a wave of fortune and favor. You are quite beyond
the reach of insult, real or fancied. You could well afford to be more
tolerant.
In answer to the ignorance of my service to the Democratic party, which you
are at such pains to indicate--and, particularly, with reference to the
sectional issue and the issue of tariff reform--I might, if I wanted to be
unamiable, suggest to you a more attentive perusal of the proceedings of
the three national conventions which nominated you for President.
But I purpose nothing of the sort. In the last five national conventions my
efforts were decisive in framing the platform of the party. In each of them
I closed the debate, moved the previous question and was sustained by the
convention. In all of them, except the last, I was a maker, not a smasher.
Touching what happened at Chicago, the present year, I had a right, in
common with good Democrats, to be anxious; and out of that sense of anxiety
alone I wrote you. I am sorry that my temerity was deemed by you intrusive
and, entering a respectful protest against a ban which I cannot believe to
be deserved by me, and assuring you that I shall not again trouble you in
that way, I am, your obedient servant,
HENRY WATTERSON.
The Hon. Grover Cleveland.
V
This ended my personal relations with Mr. Cleveland. Thereafter we did not
speak as we passed by. He was a hard man to get on with. Overcredulous,
though by no means excessive, in his likes, very tenacious in his dislikes,
suspicious withal, he grew during his second term in the White House,
exceedingly "high and mighty," suggesting somewhat the "stuffed prophet,"
of Mr. Dana's relentless lambasting and verifying my insistence that he
posed rather as an idol to be worshiped, than a leader to be trusted and
loved. He was in truth a strong man, who, sufficiently mindful of his
limitations in the beginning, grew by unexampled and continued success
overconfident and overconscious in his own conceit. He had a real desire to
serve the country. But he was apt to think that he alone could effectively
serve it. In one of our spats I remember saying to him, "You seem, Mr.
President, to think you are the only pebble on the beach--the one honest
and brave man in the party--hut let me assure you of my own knowledge that
there are others." His answer was, "Oh, you go to ----!"
He split his party wide open. The ostensible cause was the money issue.
But, underlying this, there was a deal of personal embitterment. Had he
been a man of foresight--or even of ordinary discernment--he might have
held it together and with it behind him have carried the gold standard.
I had contended for a sound currency from the outset of the fiscal
contention, fighting first the green-back craze and then the free silver
craze against an overwhelming majority in the West and South, nowhere more
radically relentless than in Kentucky. Both movements had their origin on
economic fallacies and found their backing in dishonest purpose to escape
honest indebtedness.
Through Mr. Cleveland the party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Tilden was
converted from a Democrat into a Populist, falling into the arms of Mr.
Bryan, whose domination proved as baleful in one way as Mr. Cleveland's had
been in another, the final result shipwreck, with the extinguishment of all
but the label.
Mr. Bryan was a young man of notable gifts of speech and boundless
self-assertion. When he found himself well in the saddle he began to rule
despotically and to ride furiously. A party leader more short-sighted could
hardly be imagined. None of his judgments came true. As a consequence the
Republicans for a long time had everything their own way, and, save for
the Taft-Roosevelt quarrel, might have held their power indefinitely. All
history tells us that the personal equation must be reckoned with in
public life. Assuredly it cuts no mean figure in human affairs. And, when
politicians fall out--well--the other side comes in.
Chapter the Twenty-First
Stephen Foster, the Song-Writer--A Friend Comes to the Rescu
His Originality--"My Old Kentucky Home" and the "Old Folks at
Home"--General Sherman and "Marching Through Georgia"
I have received many letters touching what I said a little while ago of
Stephen Collins Foster, the song writer. In that matter I had, and could
have had, no unkindly thought or purpose. The story of the musical
scrapbook rested not with me, but as I stated, upon the averment of Will S.
Hays, a rival song writer. But that the melody of Old Folks at Home may be
found in Schubert's posthumous Rosemonde admits not of contradiction for
there it is, and this would seem to be in some sort corroborative evidence
of the truth of Hays' story.
Among these letters comes one from Young E. Allison which is entitled to
serious consideration. Mr. Allison is a gentleman of the first order of
character and culture, an editor and a musician, and what he writes cannot
fail to carry with it very great weight. I need make no apology for quoting
him at length.
"I have long been collecting material about Foster from his birth to his
death," says Mr. Allison, "and aside from his weak and fatal love of drink,
which developed after he was twenty-five, and had married, his life was one
continuous devotion to the study of music, of painting, of poetry and of
languages; in point of fact, of all the arts that appeal to one who feels
within him the stir of the creative. He was, quite singularly enough, a
fine mathematician, which undoubtedly aided him in the study of music as a
science, to which time and balance play such an important part. In fact, I
believe it was the mathematical devil in his brain that came to hold him
within such bare and primitive forms of composition and so, to some extent,
to delimit the wider development of his genius.
"Now as to Foster's drinking habits, however unfortunate they proved to him
they did not affect the quality of his art as he bequeathed it to us.
No one cares to recall the unhappy fortunes of Burns, De Musset, Chopin
or--even in our own time--of O. Henry, and others who might be named. In
none of their productions does the hectic fever of over-stimulation show
itself. No purer, gentler or simpler aspirations were ever expressed in the
varying forms of music and verse than flowed from Foster's pen, even as
penetrating benevolence came from the pen of O. Henry, embittered and
solitary as his life had been. Indeed when we come to regard what the
drinkers of history have done for the world in spite of the artificial
stimulus they craved, we may say with Lincoln as Lincoln said of Grant,
'Send the other generals some of the same brand.'
"Foster was an aristocrat of aristocrats, both by birth and gifts. He
inherited the blood of Richard Steele and of the Kemble family, noted in
English letters and dramatic annals. To these artistic strains he
added undoubtedly the musical temperament of an Italian grandmother or
great-grand-mother. He was a cousin of John Rowan, the distinguished
Kentucky lawyer and senator. Of Foster's family, his father, his brothers,
his sisters were all notable as patriots, as pioneers in engineering, in
commerce and in society. One of his brothers designed and built the early
Pennsylvania Railroad system and died executive vice-president of that
great corporation. Thus he was born to the arts and to social distinction.
But, like many men of the creative temperament, he was born a solitary,
destined to live in a land of dreams. The singular beauty and grace of his
person and countenance, the charm of his voice, manner and conversation,
were for the most part familiar to the limited circle of his immediate
family and friends. To others he was reticent, with a certain hauteur of
timidity, avoiding society and public appearances to the day of his death.
"Now those are the facts about Foster. They certainly do not describe the
'ne'er-do-well of a good family' who hung round barrooms, colored-minstrel
haunts and theater entrances. I can find only one incident to show that
Foster ever went to hear his own songs sung in public. He was essentially a
solitary, who, while keenly observant of and entering sympathizingly into
the facts of life, held himself aloof from immediate contact with its
crowded stream. He was solitary from sensitivity, not from bitterness or
indifference. He made a large fortune for his day with his songs and was a
popular idol.
"Let us come now to the gravamen of my complaint. You charge on the
authority of mere gossip from the late Will S. Hays, that Foster did not
compose his own music, but that he had obtained a collection of unpublished
manuscripts by an unnamed old 'German musician and thus dishonestly,
by pilfering and suppression' palmed off upon the public themes and
compositions which he could not himself have originated. Something like
this has been said about every composer and writer, big and little, whose
personality and habits did not impress his immediate neighbors as implying
the possession of genius. The world usually expects direct inheritance and
a theatric impressiveness of genius in its next-door neighbor before it
accepts the proof of his works alone. For that reason Napoleon's paternity
in Corsica was ascribed to General Maboeuf, and Henry Clay's in early
Kentucky to Patrick Henry. That legend of the 'poor, unknown German
musician' who composed in poverty and secrecy the deathless songs that
have obsessed the world of music lovers, has been told of numberless young
composers on their way to fame, but died out in the blaze of their later
work. I have no doubt they told it of Foster, as they did also of Hays.
And Colonel Hays doubtless repeated it to you as the intimate gossip about
Foster.
"I have an article written by Colonel Hays and published in and cut from
The Courier-Journal some twelve years after the composer's death, in which
he sketches the life and work of Stephen Collins Foster. In that article he
lays especial stress upon the surprising originality of the Foster themes
and of their musical setting. He praises their distinct American or rather
native inspiration and flavor, and describes from his own knowledge of
Foster how they were 'written from his heart.' No mention or suggestion in
it of any German or other origin for any of those melodies that the world
then and now cherishes as American in costume, but universal in appeal.
While you may have heard something in Schubert's compositions that
suggested something in Foster's most famous song, still I venture to say it
was only a suggestion, such as often arises from the works of composers of
the same general type. Schubert and Foster were both young sentimentalists
and dreamers who must have had similar dreams that found expression in
their similar progressions.
"The German musicians from whom Foster got inspiration to work were
Beethoven, Glück, Weber, Mozart. He was a student of all of them and of the
Italian school also, as some of his songs show. Foster's first and only
music teacher--except in the 'do-re-mi' exercises in his schoolboy
life--testifies that Foster's musical apprehension was so quick, his
intuitive grasp of its science so complete that after a short time there
was nothing he could teach him of the theory of composition; that his
pupil went straight to the masters and got illustration and discipline for
himself.
"This was to be expected of a precocious genius who had written a concerted
piece for flutes at thirteen, who was trying his wings on love songs at
sixteen, and before he was twenty-one had composed several of the most
famous of his American melodies, among them Oh Susannah, Old Dog Tray and
Old Uncle Ned. As in other things he taught himself music, but he studied
it ardently at the shrines of the masters. He became a master of the art of
song writing. If anybody cares to hunt up the piano scores that Verdi made
of songs from his operas in the days of Foster he will find that the great
Italian composer's settings were quite as thin as Foster's and exhibited
not much greater art. It was the fault of the times on the piano, not of
the composers. It was not till long afterward that the color capacities
of the piano were developed. As Foster was no pianist, but rather a pure
melodist, he could not be expected to surpass his times in the management
of the piano, the only 'orchestra' he had. It will not do to regard Foster
as a crude musician. His own scores reveal him as the most artful of
'artless' composers.
"It is not even presumption to speak of him in the same breath with Verdi.
The breadth and poignancy of Foster's melodies entitle them to the highest
critical respect, as they have received worldwide appreciation from great
musicians and plain music lovers. Wherever he has gone he has reached the
popular heart. Here in the United States he has quickened the pulse beats
of four generations. But this master creator of a country's only native
songs has invariably here at home been apologized for as a sort of
'cornfield musician,' a mere banjo strummer, a hanger-on at barrooms where
minstrel quartets rendered his songs and sent the hat round. The reflection
will react upon his country; it will not detract from the real Foster when
the constructive critic appears to write his brief and unfortunate life. I
am not contending that he was a genius of the highest rank, although he had
the distinction that great genius nearly always achieves, of creating a
school that produced many imitators and established a place apart for
itself in the world's estimation. In ballad writing he did for the United
States what Watteau did for painting in France. As Watteau found a Flemish
school in France and left a French school stamped forever, so Foster found
the United States a home for imitations of English, Irish, German and
Italian songs, and left a native ballad form and melodic strain forever
impressed upon it as pure American.
"He was like Watteau in more than that. Watteau took the elegancies and
fripperies of the corrupt French court and fixed them in art immortal, as
if the moment had been arrested and held in actual motion. Foster took
the curious and melancholy spectacle of African slavery at its height,
superimposed by the most elegant and picturesque social manners this
country has known, at the moment the institution was at its zenith. He
saw the glamor, the humor, the tragedy, the contrasts, the emotional
depths--that lay unplumbed beneath it all. He fixed it there for all time,
for all hearts and minds everywhere. His songs are not only the pictorial
canvas of that time, they are the emotional history of the times. It was
done by a boy who was not prophet enough to foresee the end, or philosopher
enough to demonstrate the conditions, but who was born with the intuition
to feel it all and set it forth deeply and truly from every aspect.
"While Foster wrote many comic songs there is ever in them something of
the melancholy undercurrent that has been detected under the laces and
arabesques of Chopin's nominally frivolous dances. Foster's ballad form was
extremely attenuated, but the melodic content filled it so completely that
it seems to strain at the bounds and must be repeated and repeated to
furnish full gratification to the ear. His form when compared with
the modern ballad's amplitude seems like a Tanagra figurine beside a
Michelangelo statue--but the figurine is as fine in its scope as the statue
is in the greater.
"I hope you will think Foster over and revise him 'upward.'"
All of us need to be admonished to speak no evil of the dead. I am trying
in Looking Backward to square the adjuration with the truth. Perhaps I
should speak only of that which is known directly to myself. It costs me
nothing to accept this statement of Mr. Allison and to incorporate it as an
essential part of the record as far as it relates to the most famous and in
his day the most beloved of American song writers.
Once at a Grand Army encampment General Sherman and I were seated together
on the platform when the band began to play Marching Through Georgia, when
the general said rather impatiently: "I wish I had a dollar for every time
I have had to listen to that blasted tune."
And I answered: "Well, there is another tune about which I might say the
same thing," meaning My Old Kentucky Home.
Neither of us was quite sincere. Both were unconsciously pleased to hear
the familiar strains. At an open-air fiesta in Barcelona some American
friends who made their home there put the bandmaster up to breaking forth
with the dear old melody as I came down the aisle, and I was mightily
pleased. Again at a concert in Lucerne, the band, playing a potpourri of
Swiss songs, interpolated Kentucky's national anthem and the group of us
stood up and sang the chorus.
I do not wonder that men march joyously to battle and death to drum and
fife squeaking and rattling The Girl I Left Behind Me. It may be a long
way to Tipperary, but it is longer to the end of the tether that binds the
heart of man to the cradle songs of his nativity. With the cradle songs of
America the name of Stephen Collins Foster "is immortal bound," and I would
no more dishonor his memory than that of Robert Burns or the author of The
Star-Spangled Banner.
Chapter the Twenty-Second
Theodore Roosevelt--His Problematic Character--He Offers Me an
Appointment--His _Bonhomie_ and Chivalry--Proud of His Rebel Kin
I
It is not an easy nor yet a wholly congenial task to write--truthfully,
intelligently and frankly to write--about Theodore Roosevelt. He belonged
to the category of problematical characters. A born aristocrat, he at no
time took the trouble to pose as a special friend of the people; a born
leader, he led with a rough unsparing hand. He was the soul of controversy.
To one who knew him from his childhood as I did, always loving him and
rarely agreeing with him, it was plain to see how his most obvious faults
commended him to the multitude and made for a popularity that never quite
deserted him.
As poorly as I rate the reign of majorities I prefer it to the one-man
power, either elective or dynastic. The scheme of a third term in the
presidency for General Grant seemed to me a conspiracy though with many of
its leaders I was on terms of affectionate intimacy. I fought and helped
to kill in 1896 the unborn scheme to give Mr. Cleveland a third term.
Inevitably as the movement for the retention of Theodore Roosevelt beyond
the time already fixed began to show itself in 1907, my pen was primed
against it and I wrote variously and voluminously.
There appeared in one of the periodicals for January, 1908, a sketch of
mine which but for a statement issued concurrently from the White House
would have attracted more attention than it did. In this I related how at
Washington just before the War of Sections I had a musical pal--the niece
of a Southern senator--who had studied in Paris, been a protégée of the
Empress Eugénie and become an out-and-out imperialist. Louis Napoleon was
her ideal statesman. She not only hated the North but accepted as gospel
truth all the misleading theories of the South: that cotton was king; that
slavery was a divine institution; that in any enterprise one Southern man
was a match for six Northern men.
On these points we had many contentions. When the break came she went
South with her family. The last I saw of her was crossing Long Bridge in a
lumbering family carriage waving a tiny Confederate flag.
Forty-five years intervened. I had heard of her from time to time wandering
aimlessly over Europe, but had not met her until the preceding winter in a
famous Southern homestead. There she led me into a rose garden, and seated
beneath its clustered greeneries she said with an air of triumph, "Now you
see, my dear old friend, that I was right and you were wrong all the time."
Startled, and altogether forgetful, I asked in what way.
"Why," she answered, "at last the South is coming to its own."
Still out of rapport with her thought I said something about the
obliteration of sectionalism and the arrival of political freedom and
general prosperity. She would none of this.
[Illustration: Henry Watterson (Photograph taken in Florida)]
"I mean," she abruptly interposed, "that the son of Martha Bullock has come
to his own and he will rescue us from the mudsills of the North."
She spoke as if our former discussions had been but yesterday. Then I gave
her the right of way, interjecting a query now and then to give emphasis to
her theme, while she unfolded the plan which seemed to her so simple and
easy; God's own will; the national destiny, first a third term, and then
life tenure à la Louis Napoleone for Theodore Roosevelt, the son of Martha
Bullock, the nephew of our great admiral, who was to redress all the wrongs
of the South and bring the Yankees to their just deserts at last.
"If," I ended my sketch, "out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, why not
out of the brain of this crazed old woman of the South?"
Early in the following April I came from my winter home in Florida to the
national capital, and the next day was called by the President to the White
House.
"The first thing I want to ask," said he, "is whether that old woman was a
real person or a figment of your imagination?"
"She was a figment of my imagination," I answered, "but you put her out of
business with a single punch. Why didn't you hold back your statement a
bit? If you had done so there was room for lots of sport ahead."
He was in no mood for joking. "Henry Watterson," he said, "I want to talk
to you seriously about this third-term business. I will not deny that I
have thought of the thing--thought of it a great deal." Then he proceeded
to relate from his point of view the state of the country and the immediate
situation. He spoke without reserve of his relations to the nearest
associated public men, of what were and what were not his personal and
party obligations, his attitude toward the political questions of the
moment, and ended by saying, "What do you make of all this?"
"Mr. President," I replied, "you know that I am your friend, and as your
friend I tell you that if you go out of here the fourth of next March
placing your friend Taft in your place you will make a good third to
Washington and Lincoln; but if you allow these wild fellows willy-nilly
to induce you, in spite of your declaration, to accept the nomination,
substantially for a third term, all issues will be merged in that issue,
and in my judgment you will not carry a state in the Union."
As if much impressed and with a show of feeling he said: "It may be so. At
any rate I will not do it. If the convention nominates me I will promptly
send my declination. If it nominates me and adjourns I will call it
together again and it will have to name somebody else."
As an illustration of the implacability which pursued him I may mention
that among many leading Republicans to whom I related the incident most
of them discredited his sincerity, one of them--a man of national
importance--expressing the opinion that all along he was artfully playing
for the nomination. This I do not believe. Perhaps he was never quite fixed
in his mind. The presidency is a wondrous lure. Once out of the White
House--what else and what----?
II
Upon his return from one of his several foreign journeys a party of some
hundred or more of his immediate personal friends gave him a private dinner
at a famous uptown restaurant. I was placed next him at table. It goes
without saying that we had all sorts of a good time--he Cæsar and I
Brutus--the prevailing joke the entente between the two.
"I think," he began his very happy speech, "that I am the bravest man
that ever lived, for here I have been sitting three hours by the side of
Brutus--have repeatedly seen him clutch his knife--without the blink of an
eye or the turn of a feature."
To which in response when my turn came I said: "You gentlemen seem to be
surprised that there should be so perfect an understanding between our
guest and myself. But there is nothing new or strange in that. It goes
back, indeed, to his cradle and has never been disturbed throughout the
intervening years of political discussion--sometimes acrimonious. At the
top of the acclivity of his amazing career--in the very plenitude of his
eminence and power--let me tell you that he offered me one of the most
honorable and distinguished appointments within his gift."
"Tell them about that, Marse Henry," said he.
"With your permission, Mr. President, I will," I said, and continued: "The
centenary of the West Point Military Academy was approaching. I was at
dinner with my family at a hotel in Washington when General Corbin joined
us. 'Will you,' he abruptly interjected, 'accept the chairmanship of the
board of visitors to the academy this coming June?'
"'What do you want of me?' I asked.
"'It is the academy's centenary, which we propose to celebrate, and we want
an orator.'
"'General Corbin,' said I, 'you are coming at me in a most enticing way.
I know all about West Point. Here at Washington I grew up with it. I have
been fighting legislative battles for the Army all my life. That you
Yankees should come to a ragged old rebel like me for such a service is a
distinction indeed, and I feel immensely honored. But which page of the
court calendar made you a plural? Whom do you mean by "we"?'
"'Why,' he replied in serio-comic vein, 'the President, the Secretary of
War and Me, myself.'
"I promised him to think it over and give him an answer. Next day I
received a letter from the President, making the formal official tender and
expressing the hope that I would not decline it. Yet how could I accept it
with the work ahead of me? It was certain that if I became a part of the
presidential junket and passed a week in the delightful company promised
me, I would be unfit for the loyal duty I owed my belongings and my party,
and so reluctantly--more reluctantly than I can tell you--I declined,
obliging them to send for Gen. Horace Porter and bring him over from across
the ocean, where he was ably serving as Ambassador to France. I need
not add how well that gifted and versatile gentleman discharged the
distinguished and pleasing duty."
III
The last time I met Theodore Roosevelt was but a little while before his
death. A small party of us, Editor Moore, of Pittsburgh, and Mr. Riggs,
of the New York Central, at his invitation had a jolly midday breakfast,
extending far into the afternoon. I never knew him happier or heartier.
His jocund spirit rarely failed him. He enjoyed life and wasted no time on
trivial worries, hit-or-miss, the keynote to his thought.
The Dutch blood of Holland and the cavalier blood of England mingled in
his veins in fair proportion. He was especially proud of the uncle, his
mother's brother, the Southern admiral, head of the Confederate naval
organization in Europe, who had fitted out the rebel cruisers and sent them
to sea. And well he might be, for a nobler American never lived. At the
close of the War of Sections Admiral Bullock had in his possession some
half million dollars of Confederate money. Instead of appropriating this to
his own use, as without remark or hindrance he might have done, he turned
it over to the Government of the United States, and died a poor man.
The inconsistencies and quarrels in which Theodore Roosevelt was now and
again involved were largely temperamental. His mind was of that order which
is prone to believe what it wants to believe. He did not take much time to
think. He leaped at conclusions, and from his premise his conclusion was
usually sound. His tastes were domestic, his pastime, when not at his
books, field sports.
He was not what might be called convivial, though fond of good
company--very little wine affecting him--so that a certain self-control
became second nature to him.
To be sure, he had no conscientious or doctrinal scruples about a third
term. He had found the White House a congenial abode, had accepted the
literal theory that his election in 1908 would not imply a third but a
second term, and he wanted to remain. In point of fact I have an impression
that, barring Jackson and Polk, most of those who have got there were loath
to give it up. We know that Grant was, and I am sure that Cleveland was. We
owe a great debt to Washington, because if a third why not a fourth term?
And then life tenure after the manner of the Caesars and Cromwells of
history, and especially the Latin-Americans--Bolivar, Rosas and Diaz?
Away back in 1873, after a dinner, Mr. Blaine took me into his den and told
me that it was no longer a surmise but a fact that the group about General
Grant, who had just been reflected by an overwhelming majority, was
maneuvering for a third term. To me this was startling, incredible.
Returning to my hotel I saw a light still burning in the room of Senator
Morton, of Indiana, and rapping at the door I was bidden to enter.
Without mentioning how it had reached me, I put the proposition to him.
"Certainly," he said, "it is true."
The next day, in a letter to the Courier-Journal, I reduced what I had
heard to writing. Reading this over it seemed so sensational that I added a
closing paragraph, meant to qualify what I had written and to imply that I
had not gone quite daft.
"These things," I wrote, "may sound queer to the ear of the country. They
may have visited me in my dreams; they may, indeed, have come to me betwixt
the sherry and the champagne, but nevertheless I do aver that they are
buzzing about here in the minds of many very serious and not unimportant
persons."
Never was a well-intentioned scribe so berated and ridiculed as I, never a
simple news gatherer so discredited. Democratic and Republican newspapers
vied with one another which could say crossest things and laugh loudest.
One sentence especially caught the newspaper risibilities of the time, and
it was many a year before the phrase "between the sherry and the champagne"
ceased to pursue me. That any patriotic American, twice elevated to the
presidency, could want a third term, could have the hardihood to seek one
was inconceivable. My letter was an insult to General Grant and proof of my
own lack of intelligence and restraint. They lammed me, laughed at me, good
and strong. On each successive occasion of recurrence I have encountered
the same criticism.
Chapter the Twenty-Third
The Actor and the Journalist--The Newspaper and the State--Joseph
Jefferson--His Personal and Artistic Career--Modest Character and
Religious Belief
I
The journalist and the player have some things in common. Each turns night
into day. I have known rather intimately all the eminent English-speaking
actors of my time from Henry Irving and Charles Wyndham to Edwin Booth and
Joseph Jefferson, from Charlotte Cushman to Helena Modjeska. No people are
quite so interesting as stage people.
During nearly fifty years my life and the life of Joseph Jefferson ran
close upon parallel lines. He was eleven years my senior; but after
the desultory acquaintance of a man and a boy we came together under
circumstances which obliterated the disparity of age and established
between us a lasting bond of affection. His wife, Margaret, had died, and
he was passing through Washington with the little brood of children she had
left him.
It made the saddest spectacle I had ever seen. As I recall it after more
than sixty years, the scene of silent grief, of unutterable helplessness,
has still a haunting power over me, the oldest lad not eight years of age,
the youngest a girl baby in arms, the young father aghast before the sudden
tragedy which had come upon him. There must have been something in my
sympathy which drew him toward me, for on his return a few months later
he sought me out and we fell into the easy intercourse of established
relations.
I was recovering from an illness, and every day he would come and read by
my bedside. I had not then lost the action of one of my hands, putting an
end to a course of musical study I had hoped to develop into a career. He
was infinitely fond of music and sufficiently familiar with the old masters
to understand and enjoy them. He was an artist through and through,
possessing a sweet nor yet an uncultivated voice--a blend between a low
tenor and a high baritone--I was almost about to write a "contralto," it
was so soft and liquid. Its tones in speech retained to the last their
charm. Who that heard them shall ever forget them?
Early in 1861 my friend Jefferson came to me and said: "There is going to
be a war of the sections. I am not a warrior. I am neither a Northerner
nor a Southerner. I cannot bring myself to engage in bloodshed, or to take
sides. I have near and dear ones North and South. I am going away and I
shall stay away until the storm blows over. It may seem to you unpatriotic,
and it is, I know, unheroic. I am not a hero; I am, I hope, an artist. My
world is the world of art, and I must be true to that; it is my patriotism,
my religion. I can do no manner of good here, and I am going away."
II
At that moment statesmen were hopefully estimating the chances of a
peaceful adjustment and solution of the sectional controversy. With the
prophet instinct of the artist he knew better. Though at no time taking an
active interest in politics or giving expression to party bias of any kind,
his personal associations led him into a familiar knowledge of the trend of
political opinion and the portent of public affairs, and I can truly say
that during the fifty years that passed thereafter I never discussed any
topic of current interest or moment with him that he did not throw upon
it the side lights of a luminous understanding, and at the same time an
impartial and intelligent judgment.
His mind was both reflective and radiating. His humor though perennial was
subdued; his wit keen and spontaneous, never acrid or wounding. His speech
abounded with unconscious epigram. He had his beliefs and stood by them;
but he was never aggressive. Cleaner speech never fell from the lips of
man. I never heard him use a profanity. We once agreed between ourselves to
draw a line across the salacious stories so much in vogue during our day;
the wit must exceed the dirt; where the dirt exceeded the wit we would none
of it.
He was a singularly self-respecting man; genuinely a modest man. The
actor is supposed to be so familiar with the pubic as to be proof against
surprises. Before his audience he must be master of himself, holding the
situation and his art by the firmest grip. He must simulate, not experience
emotion, the effect referable to the seeming, never to the actuality
involving the realization.
Mr. Jefferson held to this doctrine and applied it rigorously. On a certain
occasion he was playing Caleb Plummer. In the scene between the old
toy-maker and his blind daughter, when the father discovers the dreadful
result of his dissimulation--an awkward hitch; and, the climax quite
thwarted, the curtain came down. I was standing at the wings.
"Did you see that?" he said as he brushed by me, going to his
dressing-room.
"No," said I, following him. "What was it?"
He turned, his eyes still wet and his voice choked. "I broke down," said
he; "completely broke down. I turned away from the audience to recover
myself. But I failed and had the curtain rung."
The scene had been spoiled because the actor had been overcome by a sudden
flood of real feeling, whereas he was to render by his art the feeling of
a fictitious character and so to communicate this to his audience. Caleb's
cue was tears, but not Jefferson's.
On another occasion I saw his self-possession tried in a different way. We
were dining with a gentleman who had overpartaken of his own hospitality.
Mr. Murat Halstead was of the company. There was also a German of
distinction, whose knowledge of English was limited. The Rip Van Winkle
craze was at its height. After sufficiently impressing the German with the
rare opportunity he was having in meeting a man so famous as Mr. Jefferson,
our host, encouraged by Mr. Halstead, and I am afraid not discouraged by
me, began to urge Mr. Jefferson to give us, as he said, "a touch of his
mettle," and failing to draw the great comedian out he undertook himself to
give a few descriptive passages from the drama which was carrying the
town by storm. Poor Jefferson! He sat like an awkward boy, helpless and
blushing, the German wholly unconscious of the fun or even comprehending
just what was happening--Halstead and I maliciously, mercilessly enjoying
it.
III
I never heard Mr. Jefferson make a recitation or, except in the singing of
a song before his voice began to break, make himself a part of any private
entertainment other than that of a spectator and guest.
He shrank from personal displays of every sort. Even in his younger days he
rarely "gagged," or interpolated, upon the stage. Yet he did not lack for
a ready wit. One time during the final act of Rip Van Winkle, a young
countryman in the gallery was so carried away that he quite lost his
bearings and seemed to be about to climb over the outer railing. The
audience, spellbound by the actor, nevertheless saw the rustic, and its
attention was being divided between the two when Jefferson reached that
point in the action of the piece where Rip is amazed by the docility of his
wife under the ill usage of her second husband. He took in the situation at
a glance.
Casting his eye directly upon the youth in the gallery, he uttered the
lines as if addressing them directly to him, "Well, I would never have
believed it if I had not seen it."
The poor fellow, startled, drew back from his perilous position, and the
audience broke into a storm of applause.
Joseph Jefferson was a Swedenborgian in his religious belief. At one
time too extreme a belief in spiritualism threatened to cloud his sound,
wholesome understanding. As he grew older and happier and passed out
from the shadow of his early tragedy he fell away from the more sinister
influence the supernatural had attained over his imagination. One time in
Washington I had him to breakfast to meet the Chief Justice and Mr. Justice
Matthews and Mr. Carlisle, the newly-elected Speaker of the House. It was a
rainy Sunday, and it was in my mind to warn him that our company was made
up of hard-headed lawyers not apt to be impressed by fairy tales and
ghost stories, and to suggest that he cut the spiritualism in case the
conversation fell, as was likely, into the speculative. I forgot, or
something hindered, and, sure enough, the question of second sight and mind
reading came up, and I said to myself: "Lord, now we'll have it." But it
was my kinsman, Stanley Matthews, who led off with a clairvoyant experience
in his law practice. I began to be reassured. Mr. Carlisle followed with a
most mathematical account of some hobgoblins he had encountered in his
law practice. Finally the Chief Justice, Mr. Waite, related a series of
incidents so fantastic and incredible, yet detailed with the precision and
lucidity of a master of plain statement, as fairly to stagger the most
believing ghostseer. Then I said to myself again: "Let her go, Joe, no
matter what you tell now you will fall below the standard set by these
professional perfecters of pure reason, and are safe to do your best, or
your worst." I think he held his own, however.
IV
Joseph Jefferson came to his artistic spurs slowly but surely, being nearly
thirty years of age when he got his chance, and therefore wholly equal to
it and prepared for it.
William E. Burton stood and had stood for twenty-five years the recognized,
the reigning king of comedy in America. He was a master of his craft as
well as a leader in society and letters. To look at him when he came
upon the stage was to laugh; yet he commanded tears almost as readily as
laughter. In New York City particularly he ruled the roost, and could and
did do that which had cost another his place. He began to take too many
liberties with the public favor and, truth to say, was beginning to be both
coarse and careless. People were growing restive under ministrations which
were at times little less than impositions upon their forbearance. They
wanted something if possible as strong, but more refined, and in the person
of the leading comedy man of Laura Keene's company, a young actor by the
name of Jefferson, they got it.
Both Mr. Sothern and Mr. Jefferson have told the story of Tom Taylor's
extravaganza, "Our American Cousin," in which the one as Dundreary, the
other as Asa Trenchard, rose to almost instant popularity and fame. I shall
not repeat it except to say that Jefferson's Asa Trenchard was unlike any
other the English or American stage has known. He played the raw Yankee
boy, not in low comedy at all, but made him innocent and ignorant as a
well-born Green Mountain lad might be, never a bumpkin; and in the scene
when Asa tells his sweetheart the bear story and whilst pretending to light
his cigar burns the will, he left not a dry eye in the house.
New York had never witnessed, never divined anything in pathos and humor
so exquisite. Burton and his friends struggled for a season, but Jefferson
completely knocked them out. Even had Burton lived, and had there been no
diverting war of sections to drown all else, Jefferson would have come to
his growth and taken his place as the first serio-comic actor of his time.
Rip Van Winkle was an evolution. Jefferson's half-brother, Charles Burke,
had put together a sketchy melodrama in two acts and had played in it, was
playing in it when he died. After his Trenchard, Jefferson turned himself
loose in all sorts of parts, from Diggory to Mazeppa, a famous burlesque,
which he did to a turn, imitating the mock heroics of the feminine horse
marines, so popular in the equestrian drama of the period, Adah Isaacs
Menken, the beautiful and ill-fated, at their head. Then he produced
a version of Nicholas Nickleby, in which his Newman Noggs took a more
ambitious flight. These, however, were but the avant-couriers of the
immortal Rip.
Charles Burke's piece held close to the lines of Irving's legend. When the
vagabond returns from the mountains after the twenty years' sleep Gretchen
is dead. The apex is reached when the old man, sitting dazed at a table in
front of the tavern in the village of Falling Water, asks after Derrick Van
Beekman and Nick Vedder and other of his cronies. At last, half twinkle of
humor and half glimmer of dread, he gets himself to the point of asking
after Dame Van Winkle, and is told that she has been dead these ten years.
Then like a flash came that wonderful Jeffersonian change of facial
expression, and as the white head drops upon the arms stretched before him
on the table he says: "Well, she led me a hard life, a hard life, but she
was the wife of my bosom, she was _meine frau!_"
I did not see the revised, or rather the newly-created and written, Rip
Van Winkle until Mr. Jefferson brought it to America and was playing it at
Niblo's Garden in New York. Between himself and Dion Boucicault a drama
carrying all the possibilities, all the lights and shadows of his genius
had been constructed. In the first act he sang a drinking song to a wing
accompaniment delightfully, adding much to the tone and color of the
situation. The exact reversal of the Lear suggestion in the last act was an
inspiration, his own and not Boucicault's. The weird scene in the mountains
fell in admirably with a certain weird note in the Jefferson genius, and
supplied the needed element of variety.
I always thought it a good acting play under any circumstances, but, in
his hands, matchless. He thought himself that the piece, as a piece, and
regardless of his own acting, deserved better of the critics than they were
always willing to give it. Assuredly, no drama that ever was written, as he
played it, ever took such a hold upon the public. He rendered it to three
generations, and to a rising, not a falling, popularity, drawing to the
very last undiminished audiences.
Because of this unexampled run he was sometimes described by unthinking
people as a one-part actor. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He
possessed uncommon versatility. That after twenty years of the new Rip Van
Winkle, when he was past fifty years of age, he could come back to such
parts as Caleb Plummer and Acres is proof of this. He need not have done so
at all. Carrying a pension roll of dependents aggregating fifteen or twenty
thousand a year for more than a quarter of a century, Rip would still have
sufficed his requirements. It was his love for his art that took him to The
Cricket and The Rivals, and at no inconsiderable cost to himself.
I have heard ill-natured persons, some of them envious actors, say that he
did nothing for the stage.
He certainly did not make many contributions to its upholstery. He was in
no position to emulate Sir Henry Irving in forcing and directing the public
taste. But he did in America quite as much as Sir Charles Wyndham and
Sir Henry Irving in England to elevate the personality, the social and
intellectual standing of the actor and the stage, effecting in a lifetime a
revolution in the attitude of the people and the clergy of both countries
to the theater and all things in it. This was surely enough for one man in
any craft or country.
He was always a good stage speaker. Late in life he began to speak
elsewhere, and finally to lecture. His success pleased him immensely. The
night of the Sunday afternoon charity for the Newsboys' Home in Louisville,
when the promise of a talk from him had filled the house to overflowing,
he was like a boy who had come off from a college occasion with all the
honors. Indeed, the degrees of Harvard and Yale, which had reached him both
unexpectedly and unsolicited, gave him a pleasure quite apart from the
vanity they might have gratified in another; he regarded them, and justly,
as the recognition at once of his profession and of his personal character.
I never knew a man whose moral sensibilities were more acute. He loved the
respectable. He detested the unclean. He was just as attractive off the
stage as upon it, because he was as unaffected and real in his personality
as he was sincere and conscientious in his public representations, his
lovely nature showing through his art in spite of him. His purpose was to
fill the scene and forget himself.
V
The English newspapers accompanied the tidings of Mr. Jefferson's death
with rather sparing estimates of his eminence and his genius, though his
success in London, where he was well known, had been unequivocal. Indeed,
himself, alone with Edwin Booth and Mary Anderson, may be said to complete
the list of those Americans who have attained any real recognition in the
British metropolis. The Times spoke of him as "an able if not a great
actor." If Joseph Jefferson was not a great actor I should like some
competent person to tell me what actor of our time could be so described.
Two or three of the journals of Paris referred to him as "the American
Coquelin." It had been apter to describe Coquelin as the French Jefferson.
I never saw Frederic Lemaître. But, him apart, I have seen all the
eccentric comedians, the character actors of the last fifty years, and, in
spell power, in precision and deftness of touch, in acute, penetrating,
all-embracing and all-embodying intelligence and grasp, I should place
Joseph Jefferson easily at their head.
Shakespeare was his Bible. The stage had been his cradle. He continued all
his days a student. In him met the meditative and the observing faculties.
In his love of fishing, his love of painting, his love of music we see the
brooding, contemplative spirit joined to the alert in mental force and
foresight when he addressed himself to the activities and the objectives
of the theater. He was a thorough stage manager, skillful, patient and
upright. His company was his family. He was not gentler with the children
and grandchildren he ultimately drew about him than he had been with the
young men and young women who had preceded them in his employment and
instruction.
He was nowise ashamed of his calling. On the contrary, he was proud of it.
His mother had lived and died an actress. He preferred that his progeny
should follow in the footsteps of their forebears even as he had done.
It is beside the purpose to inquire, as was often done, what might have
happened had he undertaken the highest flights of tragedy; one might as
well discuss the relation of a Dickens to a Shakespeare. Sir Henry
Irving and Sir Charles Wyndham in England, M. Coquelin in France, his
contemporaries--each had his _métier_. They were perfect in their art
and unalike in their art. No comparison between them can be justly drawn.
I was witness to the rise of all three of them, and have followed them
in their greatest parts throughout their most brilliant and eminent and
successful careers, and can say of each as of Mr. Jefferson:
_More than King can no man be--Whether he
rule in Cyprus or in Dreams._
There shall be Kings of Thule after kings are gone. The actor dies and
leaves no copy; his deeds are writ in water, only his name survives upon
tradition's tongue, and yet, from Betterton and Garrick to Irving, from
Macklin and Quin to Wyndham and Jefferson, how few!
Chapter the Twenty-Fourth
The Writing of Memoirs--Some Characteristics of Carl Shurz--Sam
Bowles--Horace White and the Mugwumps
I
Talleyrand was so impressed by the world-compelling character of the
memoirs he had prepared for posterity that he fixed an interdict of more
than fifty years upon the date set for their publication, and when at
last the bulky tomes made their appearance, they excited no especial
interest--certainly created no sensation--and lie for the most part dusty
upon the shelves of the libraries that contain them. For a different
reason, Henry Ward Beecher put a time limit upon the volume, or volumes,
which will tell us, among other things, all about one of the greatest
scandals of modern times; and yet how few people now recall it or care
anything about the dramatis personæ and the actual facts! Metternich, next
after Napoleon and Talleyrand, was an important figure in a stirring epoch.
He, too, indicted an autobiography, which is equally neglected among the
books that are sometimes quoted and extolled, but rarely read. Rousseau,
the half insane, and Barras, the wholly vicious, have twenty readers where
Talleyrand and Metternich have one.
From this point of view, the writing of memoirs, excepting those of the
trivial French School or gossiping letters and diaries of the Pepys-Walpole
variety, would seem an unprofitable task for a great man's undertaking.
Boswell certainly did for Johnson what the thunderous old doctor could not
have done for himself. Nevertheless, from the days of Cæsar to the days
of Sherman and Lee, the captains of military and senatorial and literary
industry have regaled themselves, if they have not edified the public, by
the narration of their own stories; and, I dare say, to the end of time,
interest in one's self, and the mortal desire to linger yet a little longer
on the scene--now and again, as in the case of General Grant, the assurance
of honorable remuneration making needful provision for others--will move
those who have cut some figure in the world to follow the wandering Celt in
the wistful hope--
_Around my fire an evening group to draw,
And tell of all I felt and all I saw._
Something like this occurs to me upon a reperusal of the unfinished memoirs
of my old and dear friend, Carl Schurz. Assuredly few men had better
warrant for writing about themselves or a livelier tale to tell than the
famous German-American, who died leaving that tale unfinished. No man in
life was more misunderstood and maligned. There was nothing either erratic
or conceited about Schurz, nor was he more pragmatic than is common to
the possessor of positive opinions along with the power to make their
expression effectual.
The actual facts of his public life do not anywhere show that his politics
shifted with his own interests. On the contrary, he was singularly
regardless of his interests where his convictions interposed. Though an
alien, and always an alien, he possessed none of the shifty traits of the
soldier of fortune. Never in his career did he crook the pregnant hinges of
the knee before any worldly throne of grace or flatter any mob that place
might follow fawning. His great talents had only to lend themselves to
party uses to get their full requital. He refused them equally to Grant in
the White House and the multitude in Missouri, going his own gait, which
could be called erratic only by the conventional, to whom regularity is
everything and individuality nothing.
Schurz was first of all and above all an orator. His achievements on the
platform and in the Senate were undeniable. He was unsurpassed in debate.
He had no need to exploit himself. The single chapter in his life on which
light was desirable was the military episode. The cruel and false saying,
"I fight mit Sigel und runs mit Schurz," obviously the offspring of
malignity, did mislead many people, reënforced by the knowledge that Schurz
was not an educated soldier. How thoroughly he disposes of this calumny his
memoirs attest. Fuller, more convincing vindication could not be asked of
any man; albeit by those familiar with the man himself it could not be
doubted that he had both courage and aptitude for military employment.
II
A philosopher and an artist, he was drawn by circumstance into the vortex
of affairs. Except for the stirring events of 1848, he might have lived
and died a professor at Bonn or Heidelberg. If he had pursued his musical
studies at Leipsic he must have become a master of the piano keyboard. As
it was, he played Schumann and Chopin creditably. The rescue of Kinkel,
the flight from the fatherland, the mild Bohemianizing in Paris and London
awakened within him the spirit of action rather than of adventure.
There was nothing of the Dalgetty about him; too reflective and too
accomplished. His early marriage attests a domestic trend, from which he
never departed; though an idealist in his public aspirations and aims he
was a sentimentalist in his home life and affections. Genial in temperament
and disposition, his personal habit was moderation itself.
He was a German. Never did a man live so long in a foreign country and take
on so few of its thoughts and ways. He threw himself into the anti-slavery
movement upon the crest of the wave; the flowing sea carried him quickly
from one distinction to another; the ebb tide, which found him in the
Senate of the United States, revealed to his startled senses the creeping,
crawling things beneath the surface; partyism rampant, tyrannous and
corrupt; a self-willed soldier in the White House; a Blaine, a Butler and a
Garfield leading the Representatives, a Cameron and a Conkling leading the
Senate; single-minded disinterestedness, pure unadulterated conviction,
nowhere.
Jobs and jobbing flourished on every side. An impossible scheme of
reconstruction was trailing its slow, putrescent length along. The revenue
service was thick with thieves, the committees of Congress were packed with
mercenaries. Money-making in high places had become the order of the day.
Was it for this that oceans of patriotism, of treasure and of blood had
been poured out? Was it for this that he had fought with tongue and pen and
sword?
There was Sumner--the great Sumner--who had quarreled with Grant and Fish,
to keep him company and urge him on. There was the Tribune, the puissant
Tribune--two of them, one in New York and the other in Chicago--to give
him countenance. There was need of liberalizing and loosening things in
Missouri, for which he sat in the Senate--they could not go on forever half
the best elements in the State disfranchised.
Thus the Liberal Movement of 1872.
Schurz went to Cincinnati elate with hope. He was an idealist--not quite
yet a philosopher. He had his friends about him. Sam Bowles--the first
newspaper politician of his day, with none of the handicaps carried by
Raymond and Forney--a man keen of insight and foresight, fertile of
resources, and not afraid--stood foremost among them. Next came Horace
White. Doric in his simplicity like a marble shaft, and to the outer eye
as cold as marble, but below a man of feeling, conviction and tenacity, a
working journalist and a doughty doctrinaire. A little group of such men
formed itself about Schurz--then only forty-three years old--to what end?
Why, Greeley, Horace Greeley, the bellwether of abolitionism, the king bee
of protectionism, the man of fads and isms and the famous "old white hat."
To some of us it was laughable. To Schurz it was tragical. A bridge had to
be constructed for him to pass--for retrace his steps he could not--and,
as it were, blindfolded, he had to be backed upon this like a mule aboard
a train of cars. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if Schurz had
then and there resigned his seat in the Senate, got his brood together and
returned to Germany. I dare say he would have been welcomed by Bismarck.
Certainly there was no lodgment for him thenceforward in American politics.
The exigencies of 1876-77 made him a provisional place in the Hayes
Administration; but, precisely as the Democrats of Missouri could put such
a man to no use, the Republicans at large could find no use for him. He
seemed a bull in a china shop to the political organization he honored with
a preference wholly intellectual, and having no stomach for either extreme,
he became a Mugwump.
III
He was a German. He was an artist. By nature a doctrinaire, he had become
a philosopher. He could never wholly adjust himself to his environment.
He lectured Lincoln, and Lincoln, perceiving his earnest truthfulness and
genuine qualities, forgave him his impertinence, nor ceased to regard him
with the enduring affection one might have for an ardent, aspiring and
lovable boy. He was repellant to Grant, who could not and perhaps did
not desire to understand him.... To him the Southerners were always the
red-faced, swashbuckling slave-drivers he had fancied and pictured them in
the days of his abolition oratory. More and more he lived in a rut of his
own fancies, wise in books and counsels, gentle in his relations with the
few who enjoyed his confidence; to the last a most captivating personality.
Though fastidious, Schurz was not intolerant. Yet he was hard to
convince--tenacious of his opinions--courteous but insistent in debate. He
was a German; a German Herr Doktor of Music, of Letters and of Common Law.
During an intimacy of more than thirty years we scarcely ever wholly agreed
about any public matter; differing about even the civil service and the
tariff. But I admired him hugely and loved him heartily.
I had once a rather amusing encounter with him. There was a dinner at
Delmonico's, from whose program of post-prandial oratory I had purposely
caused my own name to be omitted. Indeed, I had had with a lady a wager I
very much wished to win that I would not speak. General Grant and I went in
together, and during the repast he said that the only five human beings in
the world whom he detested were actually here at table.
Of course, Schurz was one of these. He was the last on the list of speakers
and, curiously enough--the occasion being the consideration of certain
ways and means for the development of the South--and many leading
Southerners present--he composed his speech out of an editorial tour de
force he was making in the Evening Post on The Homicidal Side of Southern
Life. Before he had proceeded half through General Grant, who knew of my
wager, said, "You'll lose your bet," and, it being one o'clock in the
morning, I thought so too, and did not care whether I won or lost it. When
he finished, the call on me was spontaneous and universal. "Now give it to
him good," said General Grant.
And I did; I declared--the reporters were long since gone--that there had
not been a man killed amiss in Kentucky since the war; that where one had
been killed two should have been; and, amid roars of laughter which gave me
time to frame some fresh absurdity, I delivered a prose paean to murder.
Nobody seemed more pleased than Schurz himself, and as we came
away--General Grant having disappeared--he put his arm about me like a
schoolboy and said: "Well, well, I had no idea you were so bloody-minded."
Chapter the Twenty-Fifth
Every Trade Has Its Tricks--I Play One on William McKinley--Far Away
Party Politics and Political Issues
I
There are tricks in every trade. The tariff being the paramount issue of
the day, I received a tempting money offer from Philadelphia to present my
side of the question, but when the time fixed was about to arrive I found
myself billed for a debate with no less an adversary than William McKinley,
protectionist leader in the Lower House of Congress. We were the best of
friends and I much objected to a joint meeting. The parties, however, would
take no denial, and it was arranged that we should be given alternate
dates. Then it appeared that the designated thesis read: "Which political
party offers for the workingman the best solution of the tariff problem?"
Here was a poser. It required special preparation, for which I had not the
leisure. I wanted the stipend, but was not willing--scarcely able--to pay
so much for it. I was about to throw the engagement over when a lucky
thought struck me. I had a cast-off lecture entitled Money and Morals. It
had been rather popular. Why might I not put a head and tail to this--a
foreword and a few words in conclusion--and make it meet the purpose and
serve the occasion?
When the evening arrived there was a great audience. Half of the people had
come to applaud, the other half to antagonize. I was received, however,
with what seemed a united acclaim. When the cheering had ceased, with the
blandest air I began:
"In that chapter of the history of Ireland which was reserved for the
consideration of snakes, the historian, true to the solecism as well as the
brevity of Irish wit, informs us that 'there are no snakes in Ireland.'
"I am afraid that on the present occasion I shall have to emulate this
flight of the Celtic imagination. I find myself billed to speak from a
Democratic standpoint as to which party offers the best practical means for
the benefit of the workingmen of the country. If I am to discharge with
fidelity the duty thus assigned me, I must begin by repudiating the text in
toto, because the Democratic Party recognizes no political agency for one
class which is not equally open to all classes. The bulwark and belltower
of its faith, the source and resource of its strength are laid in the
declaration, 'Freedom for all, special privileges to none,' which applied
to practical affairs would deny to self-styled workingmen, organized into
a coöperative society, any political means not enjoyed by every other
organized coöperative society, and by each and every citizen, individually,
to himself and his heirs and assigns, forever.
"But in a country like ours, what right has any body of men to get together
and, labelling themselves workingmen, to talk about political means and
practical ends exclusive to themselves? Who among us has the single
right to claim for himself, and the likes of him, the divine title of a
workingman? We are all workingmen, the earnest plodding scholar in his
library, surrounded by the luxury and comfort which his learning and his
labor have earned for him, no less than the poor collier in the mine, with
darkness and squalor closing him round about, and want maybe staring him in
the face, yet--if he be a true man--with a little bird singing ever in his
heart the song of hope and cheer which cradled the genius of Stephenson and
Arkwright and the long procession of inventors, lowly born, to whom
the world owes the glorious achievements of this, the greatest of the
centuries. We are all workingmen--the banker, the minister, the lawyer, the
doctor--toiling from day to day, and it may be we are well paid for our
toil, to represent and to minister to the wants of the time no less than
the farmer and the farmer's boy, rising with the lark to drive the team
afield, and to dally with land so rich it needs to be but tickled with a
hoe to laugh a harvest.
"Having somewhat of an audacious fancy, I have sometimes in moments of
exuberance ventured upon the conceit that our Jupiter Tonans, the American
editor, seated upon his three-legged throne and enveloped by the majesty
and the mystery of his pretentious 'we,' is a workingman no less than the
poor reporter, who year in and year out braves the perils of the midnight
rounds through the slums of the city, yea in the more perilous temptations
of the town, yet carries with him into the darkest dens the love of work,
the hope of reward and the fear only of dishonor.
"Why, the poor officeseeker at Washington begging a bit of that pie, which,
having got his own slice, a cruel, hard-hearted President would eliminate
from the bill of fare, he likewise is a workingman, and I can tell you a
very hard-working man with a tough job of work, and were better breaking
rock upon a turnpike in Dixie or splitting rails on a quarter section out
in the wild and woolly West.
"It is true that, as stated on the program, I am a Democrat--as Artemus
Ward once said of the horses in his panorama, I can conceal it no
longer--at least I am as good a Democrat as they have nowadays. But first
of all, I am an American, and in America every man who is not a policeman
or a dude is a workingman. So, by your leave, my friends, instead of
sticking very closely to the text, and treating it from a purely party
point of view, I propose to take a ramble through the highways and byways
of life and thought in our beloved country and to cast a balance if I can
from an American point of view.
"I want to say in the beginning that no party can save any man or any set
of men from the daily toil by which all of us live and move and have our
being."
Then I worked in my old lecture.
It went like hot cakes. When next I met William McKinley he said jocosely:
"You are a mean man, Henry Watterson!"
"How so?" I asked.
"I accepted the invitation to answer you because I wanted and needed the
money. Of course I had no time to prepare a special address. My idea was to
make my fee by ripping you up the back. But when I read the verbatim report
which had been prepared for me there was not a word with which I could take
issue, and that completely threw me out."
Then I told him how it had happened and we had a hearty laugh. He was the
most lovable of men. That such a man should have fallen a victim to the
blow of an assassin defies explanation, as did the murders of Lincoln and
Garfield, like McKinley, amiable, kindly men giving never cause of personal
offense.
II
The murderer is past finding out. In one way and another I fancy that I am
well acquainted with the assassins of history. Of those who slew Cæsar I
learned in my schooldays, and between Ravaillac, who did the business for
Henry of Navarre, and Booth and Guiteau, my familiar knowledge seems almost
at first hand. One night at Chamberlin's, in Washington, George Corkhill,
the district attorney who was prosecuting the murderer of Garfield, said
to me: "You will never fully understand this case until you have sat by me
through one day's proceedings in court." Next day I did this.
Never have I passed five hours in a theater so filled with thrills. I
occupied a seat betwixt Corkhill and Scoville, Guiteau's brother-in-law
and voluntary attorney. I say "voluntary" because from the first Guiteau
rejected him and vilely abused him, vociferously insisting upon being his
own lawyer.
From the moment Guiteau entered the trial room it was a theatrical
extravaganza. He was in irons, sandwiched between two deputy sheriffs, came
in shouting like a madman, and began at once railing at the judge, the jury
and the audience. A very necessary rule had been established that when he
interposed, whatever was being said or done automatically stopped. Then,
when he ceased, the case went on again as if nothing had happened.
Only Scoville intervened between me and Guiteau and I had an excellent
opportunity to see, hear and size him up. In visage and voice he was the
meanest creature I have, either in life or in dreams, encountered. He had
the face and intonations of a demon. Everything about him was loathsome.
I cannot doubt that his criminal colleagues of history were of the same
description.
Charlotte Corday was surely a lunatic. Wilkes Booth I knew. He was drunk,
had been drunk all that winter, completely muddled and perverted by brandy,
the inheritant of mad blood. Czolgosz, the slayer of McKinley, and the
assassin of the Empress Elizabeth were clearly insane.
III
McKinley and Protectionism, Cleveland, Carlisle and Free Trade--how far
away they seem!
With the passing of the old issues that divided parties new issues have
come upon the scene. The alignment of the future will turn upon these. But
underlying all issues of all time are fundamental ideas which live forever
and aye, and may not be forgotten or ignored.
It used to be claimed by the followers of Jefferson that Democracy was
a fixed quantity, rising out of the bedrock of the Constitution, while
Federalism, Whiggism and Republicanism were but the chimeras of some
prevailing fancy drawing their sustenance rather from temporizing
expediency and current sentiment than from basic principles and profound
conviction. To make haste slowly, to look before leaping, to take counsel
of experience--were Democratic axioms. Thus the fathers of Democracy, while
fully conceiving the imperfections of government and meeting as events
required the need alike of movement and reform, put the visionary and
experimental behind them to aim at things visible, attainable, tangible,
the written Constitution the one safe precedent, the morning star and the
evening star of their faith and hope.
What havoc the parties and the politicians have made of all these lofty
pretenses! Where must an old-line Democrat go to find himself? Two issues,
however, have come upon the scene which for the time being are paramount
and which seem organic. They are set for the determination of the twentieth
century: The sex question and the drink question.
I wonder if it be possible to consider them in a catholic spirit from a
philosophic standpoint. I can truly say that the enactment of prohibition
laws, state or national, is personally nothing to me. I long ago reached an
age when the convivialism of life ceased to cut any figure in the equation
of my desires and habits. It is the never-failing recourse of the
intolerant, however, to ascribe an individual, and, of course, an unworthy,
motive to contrariwise opinions, and I have not escaped that kind of
criticism.
The challenge underlying prohibition is twofold: Does prohibition prohibit,
and, if it does, may it not generate evils peculiarly its own?
The question hinges on what are called "sumptuary laws"; that is, statutes
regulating the food and drink, the habits and apparel of the individual
citizen. This in turn harks back to the issue of paternal government. That,
once admitted and established, becomes in time all-embracing.
Bigotry is a disease. The bigot pursuing his narrow round is like the
bedridden possessed by his disordered fancy. Bigotry sees nothing but
itself, which it mistakes for wisdom and virtue. But Bigotry begets
hypocrisy. When this spreads over a sufficient area and counts a voting
majority it sends its agents abroad, and thus we acquire canting apostles
and legislators at once corrupt and despotic.
They are now largely in evidence in the national capital and in the various
state capitals, where the poor-dog, professional politicians most do
congregate and disport themselves.
The worst of it is that there seems nowhere any popular
realization--certainly any popular outcry. Do the people grow degenerate?
Are they willfully dense?
Chapter the Twenty-Sixth
A Libel on Mr. Cleveland--His Fondness for Cards--Some Poker
Stories--The "Senate Game"--Tom Ochiltree, Senator Allison and General
Schenck
I
Not long after Mr. Cleveland's marriage, being in Washington, I made a box
party embracing Mrs. Cleveland, and the Speaker and Mrs. Carlisle, at one
of the theaters where Madame Modjeska was appearing. The ladies expressing
a desire to meet the famous Polish actress who had so charmed them, I took
them after the play behind the scenes. Thereafter we returned to the White
House where supper was awaiting us, the President amused and pleased when
told of the agreeable incident.
The next day there began to buzz reports to the contrary. At first covert,
they gained in volume and currency until a distinguished Republican party
leader put his imprint upon them in an after-dinner speech, going the
length of saying the newly-wedded Chief Magistrate had actually struck his
wife and forbidden me the Executive Mansion, though I had been there every
day during the week that followed.
Mr. Cleveland believed the matter too preposterous to be given any credence
and took it rather stoically. But naturally Mrs. Cleveland was shocked and
outraged, and I made haste to stigmatize it as a lie out of whole cloth.
Yet though this was sent away by the Associated Press and published
broadcast I have occasionally seen it referred to by persons over eager to
assail a man incapable of an act of rudeness to a woman.
II
Mr. Cleveland was fond--not overfond--of cards. He liked to play the noble
game at, say, a dollar limit--even once in a while for a little more--but
not much more. And as Dr. Norvin Green was wont to observe of Commodore
Vanderbilt, "he held them exceeding close to his boo-som."
Mr. Whitney, Secretary of the Navy in his first administration, equally
rich and hospitable, had often "the road gang," as a certain group, mainly
senators, was called, to dine, with the inevitable after-dinner soirée or
séance. I was, when in Washington, invited to these parties. At one of
them I chanced to sit between the President and Senator Don Cameron. Mr.
Carlisle, at the time Speaker of the House--who handled his cards like
a child and, as we all knew, couldn't play a little--was seated on the
opposite side of the table.
After a while Mr. Cameron and I began "bluffing" the game--I recall that
the limit was five dollars--that is, raising and back-raising each other,
and whoever else happened to be in, without much or any regard to the cards
we held.
It chanced on a deal that I picked up a pat flush, Mr. Cleveland a pat
full. The Pennsylvania senator and I went to the extreme, the President of
course willing enough for us to play his hand for him. But the Speaker of
the House persistently stayed with us and could not be driven out.
When it came to a draw Senator Cameron drew one card. Mr. Cleveland and I
stood pat. But Mr. Carlisle drew four cards. At length, after much banter
and betting, it reached a show-down and, _mirabile dictu_, the Speaker
held four kings!
"Take the money, Carlisle; take the money," exclaimed the President. "If
ever I am President again you shall be Secretary of the Treasury. But don't
you make that four-card draw too often."
He was President again, and Mr. Carlisle was Secretary of the Treasury.
III
There had arisen a disagreeable misunderstanding between General Schenck
and myself during the period when the general was Minister at the Court of
St. James. In consequence of this we did not personally meet. One evening
at Chamberlin's years after, a party of us--mainly the Ohio statesman's
old colleagues in Congress--were playing poker. He came in and joined us.
Neither of us knew the other even by sight and there was no presentation
when he sat in.
At length a direct play between the newcomer and me arose. There was a
moment's pause. Obviously we were strangers. Then it was that Senator
Allison, of Iowa, who had in his goodness of heart purposely brought about
this very situation, introduced us. The general reddened. I was taken
aback. But there was no escape, and carrying it off amiably we shook hands.
It is needless to say that then and there we dropped our groundless feud
and remained the rest of his life very good friends.
In this connection still another poker story. Sam Bugg, the Nashville
gambler, was on a Mississippi steamer bound for New Orleans. He came upon
a party of Tennesseeans whom a famous card sharp had inveigled and was
flagrantly robbing. Sam went away, obtained a pack of cards, and stacked
them to give the gambler four kings and the brightest one of the Nashville
boys four aces. After two or three failures to bring the cold deck into
action Sam Bugg brushed a spider--an imaginary spider, of course--from the
gambler's coat collar, for an instant distracting his attention--and in
the momentary confusion the stacked cards were duly dealt and the betting
began, the gambler confident and aggressive. Finally, all the money up,
the four aces beat the four kings, and for a greater amount than the
Nashvillians had lost and the gambler had won. Whereupon, without change
of muscle, the gambler drawled: "Mr. Bugg, the next time you see a spider
biting me let him bite on!"
I was told that the Senate Game had been played during the War of Sections
and directly after for large sums. With the arrival of the rebel brigadiers
it was perforce reduced to a reasonable limit.
The "road gang" was not unknown at the White House. Sometimes it assembled
at private houses, but its accustomed place of meeting was first Welcker's
and then Chamberlin's. I do not know whether it continues to have abiding
place or even an existence. In spite of the reputation given me by the
pert paragraphers I have not been on a race course or seen a horse race or
played for other than immaterial stakes for more than thirty years.
IV
As an all-round newspaper writer and reporter many sorts of people, high
and low, little and big, queer and commonplace, fell in my way; statesmen
and politicians, artists and athletes, circus riders and prize fighters;
the riffraff and the élite; the professional and dilettante of the world
polite and the underworld.
I knew Mike Walsh and Tim Campbell. I knew John Morrissey. I have seen
Heenan--one of the handsomest men of his time--and likewise Adah Isaacs
Menken, his inamorata--many said his wife--who went into mourning for him
and thereafter hied away to Paris, where she lived under the protection
of Alexandre Dumas, the elder, who buried her in Père Lachaise under a
handsome monument bearing two words, "Thou knowest," beneath a carved hand
pointed to heaven.
I did draw the line, however, at Cora Pearl and Marcus Cicero Stanley.
The Parisian courtesan was at the zenith of her extraordinary celebrity
when I became a rustic boulevardier. She could be seen everywhere and on
all occasions. Her gowns were the showiest, her equipage the smartest; her
entourage, loud though it was and vulgar, yet in its way was undeniable.
She reigned for a long time the recognized queen of the demi-monde. I
have beheld her in her glory on her throne--her two thrones, for she had
two--one on the south side of the river, the other at the east end--not to
mention the race course--surrounded by a retinue of the disreputable. She
did not awaken in me the least curiosity, and I declined many opportunities
to meet her.
Marcus Cicero Stanley was sprung from an aristocratic, even a
distinguished, North Carolina family. He came to New York and set up for a
swell. How he lived I never cared to find out, though he was believed to
be what the police call a "fence." He seemed a cross between a "con" and
a "beat." Yet for a while he flourished at Delmonico's, which he made his
headquarters, and cut a kind of dash with the unknowing. He was a handsome,
mannerly brute who knew how to dress and carry himself like a gentleman.
Later there came to New York another Southerner--a Far Southerner of a
very different quality--who attracted no little attention. This was Tom
Ochiltree. He, too, was well born, his father an eminent jurist of Texas;
he, himself, a wit, _bon homme_ and raconteur. Travers once said: "We
have three professional liars in America--Tom Ochiltree is one and George
Alfred Townsend is the other two."
The stories told of Tom would fill a book. He denied none, however
preposterous--was indeed the author of many of the most amusing--of how,
when the old judge proposed to take him into law partnership he caused to
be painted an office sign: Thomas P. Ochiltree and Father; of his reply to
General Grant, who had made him United States Marshal of Texas, and later
suggested that it would be well for Tom to pay less attention to the race
course: "Why, Mr. President, all that turf publicity relates to a horse
named after me, not to me," it being that the horse of the day had been so
called; and of General Grant's reply: "Nevertheless, it would be well,
Tom, for you to look in upon Texas once in a while"--in short, of his
many sayings and exploits while a member of Congress from the Galveston
district; among the rest, that having brought in a resolution tendering
sympathy to the German Empire on the death of Herr Laska, the most advanced
and distinguished of Radical Socialists, which became for the moment a
_cause célébre_. Tom remarked, "Not that I care a damn about it,
except for the prominence it gives to Bismarck."
He lived when in Washington at Chamberlin's. He and John Chamberlin were
close friends. Once when he was breakfasting with John a mutual friend came
in. He was in doubt what to order. Tom suggested beefsteak and onions.
"But," objected the newcomer, "I am about to call on some ladies, and the
smell of onions on my breath, you know!"
"Don't let that trouble you," said Tom; "you have the steak and onions and
when you get your bill that will take your breath away!"
Under an unpromising exterior--a stocky build and fiery red head--there
glowed a brave, generous and tender spirit. The man was a _preux
chevalier_. He was a knight-errant. All women--especially all good and
discerning women who knew him and who could intuitively read beneath that
clumsy personality his fine sense of respect--even of adoration--loved Tom
Ochiltree.
The equivocal celebrity he enjoyed was largely fostered by himself, his
stories mostly at his own expense. His education had been but casual. But
he had a great deal of it and a varied assortment. He knew everybody on
both sides of the Atlantic, his friends ranging from the Prince of Wales,
afterward Edward VII, Gladstone and Disraeli, Gambetta and Thiers, to
the bucks of the jockey clubs. There were two of Tom--Tom the noisy on
exhibition, and Tom the courtier in society.
How he lived when out of office was the subject of unflattering conjecture.
Many thought him the stipendiary of Mr. Mackay, the multimillionaire, with
whom he was intimate, who told me he could never induce Tom to take money
except for service rendered. Among his familiars was Colonel North, the
English money magnate, who said the same thing. He had a widowed sister
in Texas to whom he regularly sent an income sufficient for herself and
family. And when he died, to the surprise of every one, he left his sister
quite an accumulation. He had never been wholly a spendthrift. Though he
lived well at Chamberlin's in Washington and the Waldorf in New York he was
careful of his credit and his money. I dare say he was not unfortunate in
the stock market. He never married and when he died, still a youngish man
as modern ages go, all sorts of stories were told of him, and the space
writers, having a congenial subject, disported themselves voluminously.
Inevitably most of their stories were apocryphal.
I wonder shall we ever get any real truth out of what is called history?
There are so many sides to it and such a confusing din of voices. How much
does old Sam Johnson owe of the fine figure he cuts to Boswell, and, minus
Boswell, how much would be left of him? For nearly a century the Empress
Josephine was pictured as the effigy of the faithful and suffering wife
sacrificed upon the altar of unprincipled and selfish ambition--lovelorn,
deserted, heartbroken. It was Napoleon, not Josephine, except in her pride,
who suffered. Who shall tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth, about Hamilton; about Burr; about Cæsar, Caligula and Cleopatra?
Did Washington, when he was angry, swear like a trooper? What was the
matter with Nero?
IV
One evening Edward King and I were dining in the Champs Elysées when
he said: "There is a new coon--a literary coon--come to town. He is a
Scotchman and his name is Robert Louis Stevenson." Then he told me of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At that moment the subject of our talk was living in
a kind of self-imposed penury not half a mile away. Had we known this we
could have ended the poor fellow's struggle with his pride and ambition
then and there; have put him in the way of sure work and plenty of it;
perhaps have lengthened, certainly have sweetened, his days, unless it be
true that he was one of the impossibles, as he may easily be conceived to
have been from reading his wayward biography and voluminous correspondence.
To a young Kentuckian, one of "my boys," was given the opportunity to see
the last of him and to bury him in far-away Samoa, whither he had taken
himself for the final adventure and where he died, having attained some
measure of the dreams he had cherished, and, let us hope, happy in the
consciousness of the achievement.
I rather think Stevenson should be placed at the head of the latter-day
fictionists. But fashions in literature as in dress are ever changing.
Washington Irving was the first of our men of letters to obtain foreign
recognition. While the fires of hate between Great Britain and America were
still burning he wrote kindly and elegantly of England and the English, and
was accepted on both sides of the ocean. Taking his style from Addison and
Goldsmith, he emulated their charity and humor; he went to Spain and in the
same deft way he pictured the then unknown byways of the land of dreams;
and coming home again he peopled the region of the Hudson with the beings
of legend and fancy which are dear to us.
He became our national man of letters. He stood quite at the head of our
literature, giving the lie to the scornful query, "Who reads an American
book?" As a pioneer he will always be considered; as a simple and vivid
writer of things familiar and entertaining he will probably always be read;
but as an originator literary history will hardly place him very high.
There Bret Harte surely led him. The Tales of the Argonauts as works of
creative fancy exceed the Sketches of Washington Irving alike in wealth of
color and humor, in pathos and dramatic action.
Some writers make an exception of the famous Sleepy Hollow story. But they
have in mind the Rip Van Winkle of Jefferson and Boucicault, not the
rather attenuated story of Irving, which--as far as the twenty years of
sleep went--was borrowed from an old German legend.
Mark Twain and Bret Harte, however, will always be bracketed with
Washington Irving. Of the three I incline to the opinion that Mark Twain
did the broadest and strongest work. His imagination had wider reach than
Irving's. There is nowhere, as there is in Harte, the suspicion either of
insincerity or of artificiality. Irving's humor was the humor of Sir Roger
de Coverley and the Vicar of Wakefield. It is old English. Mark Twain's is
his own--American through and through to the bone. I am not unmindful of
Cooper and Hawthorne, of Longfellow, of Lowell and of Poe, but speak of
Irving as the pioneer American man of letters, and of Mark Twain and
Bret Harte as American literature's most conspicuous and original modern
examples.
Chapter the Twenty-Seventh
The Profession of Journalism--Newspapers and Editors in
America--Bennett, Greeley and Raymond--Forney and Dana--The Education
of a Journalist
I
The American newspaper has had, even in my time, three separate and
distinct epochs; the thick-and-thin, more or less servile party organ; the
personal, one-man-controlled, rather blatant and would-be independent; and
the timorous, corporation, or family-owned billboard of such news as the
ever-increasing censorship of a constantly centralizing Federal Government
will allow.
This latter appears to be its present state. Neither its individuality nor
its self-exploitation, scarcely its grandiose pretension, remains. There
continues to be printed in large type an amount of shallow stuff that would
not be missed if it were omitted altogether. But, except as a bulletin of
yesterday's doings, limited, the daily newspaper counts for little, the
single advantage of the editor--in case there is an editor--that is, one
clothed with supervising authority who "edits"--being that he reaches the
public with his lucubrations first, the sanctity that once hedged the
editorial "we" long since departed.
The editor dies, even as the actor, and leaves no copy. Editorial
reputations have been as ephemeral as the publications which gave them
contemporary importance. Without going as far back as the Freneaus and
the Callenders, who recalls the names of Mordecai Mannasseh Noah, of Edwin
Crosswell and of James Watson Webb? In their day and generation they were
influential and distinguished journalists. There are dozens of other names
once famous but now forgotten; George Wilkins Kendall; Gerard Hallock;
Erastus Brooks; Alexander Bullitt; Barnwell Rhett; Morton McMichael; George
William Childs, even Thomas Ritchie, Duff Green and Amos Kendall. "Gales
and Seaton" sounds like a trade-mark; but it stood for not a little and
lasted a long time in the National Capital, where newspaper vassalage and
the public printing went hand-in-hand.
For a time the duello flourished. There were frequent "affairs of
honor"--notably about Richmond in Virginia and Charleston in South
Carolina--sometimes fatal meetings, as in the case of John H. Pleasants and
one of the sons of Thomas Ritchie in which Pleasants was killed, and the
yet more celebrated affair between Graves, of Kentucky, and Cilley, of
Maine, in which Cilley was killed; Bladensburg the scene, and the refusal
of Cilley to recognize James Watson Webb the occasion.
I once had an intimate account of this duel with all the cruel incidents
from Henry A. Wise, a party to it, and a blood-curdling narrative it made.
They fought with rifles at thirty paces, and Cilley fell on the third fire.
It did much to discredit duelling in the South. The story, however, that
Graves was so much affected that thereafter he could never sleep in a
darkened chamber had no foundation whatever, a fact I learned from my
associate in the old Louisville Journal and later in The Courier-Journal,
Mr. Isham Henderson, who was a brother-in-law of Mr. Graves, his sister,
Mrs. Graves, being still alive. The duello died at length. There was
never sufficient reason for its being. It was both a vanity and a fad. In
Hopkinson Smith's "Col. Carter of Cartersville," its real character is hit
off to the life.
II
When very early, rather too early, I found myself in the saddle, Bennett
and Greeley and Raymond in New York, and Medill and Storey in Chicago, were
yet alive and conspicuous figures in the newspaper life of the time. John
Bigelow, who had retired from the New York Evening Post, was Minister to
France. Halstead was coming on, but, except as a correspondent, Whitelaw
Reid had not "arrived." The like was true of "Joe" McCullagh, who, in the
same character, divided the newspaper reading attention of the country with
George Alfred Townsend and Donn Piatt. Joseph Medill was withdrawing from
the Chicago Tribune in favor of Horace White, presently to return and die
in harness--a man of sterling intellect and character--and Wilbur F.
Storey, his local rival, who was beginning to show signs of the mental
malady that, developed into monomania, ultimately ended his life in gloom
and despair, wrecking one of the finest newspaper properties outside of New
York. William R. Nelson, who was to establish a really great newspaper in
Kansas City, was still a citizen of Ft. Wayne.
James Gordon Bennett, the elder, seemed then to me, and has always
seemed, the real founder of the modern newspaper as a vehicle of popular
information, and, in point of apprehension, at least, James Gordon Bennett,
the younger, did not fall behind his father. What was, and might have been
regarded and dismissed as a trivial slander drove him out of New York and
made him the greater part of his life a resident of Paris, where I was wont
to meet and know much of him.
The New York Herald, under father and son, attained enormous prosperity,
prestige and real power. It suffered chiefly from what they call in Ireland
"absentee landlordism." Its "proprietor," for he never described himself
as its "editor," was a man of exquisite sensibilities--a "despot" of
course--whom nature created for a good citizen, a good husband and the head
of a happy domestic fabric. He should have married the woman of his choice,
for he was deeply in love with her and never ceased to love her, forty
years later leaving her in his will a handsome legacy.
Crossing the ocean with the "Commodore," as he was called by his familiars,
not long after he had taken up his residence abroad, naturally we fell
occasionally into shop talk. "What would you do," he once said, "if you
owned the Herald?" "Why," I answered, "I would stay in New York and edit
it;" and then I proceeded, "but you mean to ask me what I think you ought
to do with it?" "Yes," he said, "that is about the size of it."
"Well, Commodore," I answered, "if I were you, when we get in I would send
for John Cockerill and make him managing editor, and for John Young, and
put him in charge of the editorial page, and then I would go and lose
myself in the wilds of Africa."
He adopted the first two of these suggestions. John A. Cockerill was still
under contract with Joseph Pulitzer and could not accept for a year or
more. He finally did accept and died in the Bennett service. John Russell
Young took the editorial page and was making it "hum" when a most
unaccountable thing happened. I was amazed to receive an invitation to a
dinner he had tendered and was about to give to the quondam Virginian and
just elected New York Justice Roger A. Pryor. "Is Young gone mad," I said
to myself, "or can he have forgotten that the one man of all the world whom
the House of Bennett can never forget, or forgive, is Roger A. Pryor?"
The Bennett-Pry or quarrel had been a _cause célèbre_ when John Young
was night editor of the Philadelphia Press and I was one of its Washington
correspondents. Nothing so virulent had ever passed between an editor and a
Congressman. In one of his speeches Pryor had actually gone the length of
rudely referring to Mrs. James Gordon Bennett.
The dinner was duly given. But it ended John's connection with the Herald
and his friendly relations with the owner of the Herald. The incident might
be cited as among "The Curiosities of Journalism," if ever a book with that
title is written. John's "break" was so bad that I never had the heart to
ask him how he could have perpetrated it.
III
The making of an editor is a complex affair. Poets and painters are said to
be born. Editors and orators are made. Many essential elements enter into
the editorial fabrication; need to be concentrated upon and embodied by a
single individual, and even, with these, environment is left to supply the
opportunity and give the final touch.
Aptitude, as the first ingredient, goes without saying of every line of
human endeavor. We have the authority of the adage for the belief that it
is not possible to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Yet have I known
some unpromising tyros mature into very capable workmen.
The modern newspaper, as we know it, may be fairly said to have been
the invention of James Gordon Bennett, the elder. Before him there were
journals, not newspapers. When he died he had developed the news scheme in
kind, though not in the degree that we see so elaborate and resplendent in
New York and other of the leading centers of population. Mr. Bennett had
led a vagrant and varied life when he started the Herald. He had been many
things by turns, including a writer of verses and stories, but nothing very
successful nor very long. At length he struck a central idea--a really
great, original idea--the idea of printing the news of the day, comprising
the History of Yesterday, fully and fairly, without fear or favor. He was
followed by Greeley and Raymond--making a curious and very dissimilar
triumvirate--and, at longer range, by Prentice and Forney, by Bowles and
Dana, Storey, Medill and Halstead. All were marked men; Greeley a writer
and propagandist; Raymond a writer, declaimer and politician; Prentice a
wit and partisan; Dana a scholar and an organizer; Bowles a man both of
letters and affairs. The others were men of all work, writing and fighting
their way to the front, but possessing the "nose for news," using the
Bennett formula and rescript as the basis of their serious efforts, and
never losing sight of it. Forney had been a printer. Medill and Storey were
caught young by the lure of printer's ink. Bowles was born and reared
in the office of the Springfield Republican, founded by his father, and
Halstead, a cross betwixt a pack horse and a race horse, was broken to
harness before he was out of his teens.
Assuming journalism, equally with medicine and law, to be a profession,
it is the only profession in which versatility is not a disadvantage.
Specialism at the bar, or by the bedside, leads to perfection and
attains results. The great doctor is the great surgeon or the great
prescriptionist--he cannot be great in both--and the great lawyer is rarely
great, if ever, as counselor and orator.
[Illustration: Henry Watterson--From a painting by Louis Mark in the
Manhattan Club, New York]
The great editor is by no means the great writer. But he ought to be able
to write and must be a judge of writing. The newspaper office is a little
kingdom. The great editor needs to know and does know every range of it
between the editorial room, the composing room and the pressroom. He must
hold well in hand everybody and every function, having risen, as it were,
step-by-step from the ground floor to the roof. He should be level-headed,
yet impressionable; sympathetic, yet self-possessed; able quickly to sift,
detect and discriminate; of various knowledge, experience and interest; the
cackle of the adjacent barnyard the noise of the world to his eager mind
and pliant ear. Nothing too small for him to tackle, nothing too great,
he should keep to the middle of the road and well in rear of the moving
columns; loving his art--for such it is--for art's sake; getting his
sufficiency, along with its independence, in the public approval and
patronage, seeking never anything further for himself. Disinterestedness
being the soul of successful journalism, unselfish devotion to every noble
purpose in public and private life, he should say to preferment, as to
bribers, "get behind me, Satan." Whitelaw Reid, to take a ready and
conspicuous example, was a great journalist, but rather early in life
he abandoned journalism for office and became a figure in politics and
diplomacy so that, as in the case of Franklin, whose example and footsteps
in the main he followed, he will be remembered rather as the Ambassador
than as the Editor.
More and more must these requirements be fulfilled by the aspiring
journalist. As the world passes from the Rule of Force--force of prowess,
force of habit, force of convention--to the Rule of Numbers, the daily
journal is destined, if it survives as a power, to become the teacher--the
very Bible--of the people. The people are already beginning to distinguish
between the wholesome and the meretricious in their newspapers. Newspaper
owners, likewise, are beginning to realize the value of character.
Instances might be cited where the public, discerning some sinister
but unseen power behind its press, has slowly yet surely withdrawn its
confidence and support. However impersonal it pretends to be, with whatever
of mystery it affects to envelop itself, the public insists upon some
visible presence. In some States the law requires it. Thus "personal
journalism" cannot be escaped, and whether the "one-man power" emanates
from the Counting Room or the Editorial Room, as they are called, it must
be clear and answerable, responsive to the common weal, and, above all,
trustworthy.
IV
John Weiss Forney was among the most conspicuous men of his time. He was
likewise one of the handsomest. By nature and training a journalist, he
played an active, not to say an equivocal, part in public life-at the
outset a Democratic and then a Republican leader.
Born in the little town of Lancaster, it was his mischance to have attached
himself early in life to the fortunes of Mr. Buchanan, whom he long served
with fidelity and effect. But when Mr. Buchanan came to the Presidency,
Forney, who aspired first to a place in the Cabinet, which was denied him,
and then to a seat in the Senate, for which he was beaten--through flagrant
bribery, as the story ran--was left out in the cold. Thereafter he became
something of a political adventurer.
The days of the newspaper "organ" aproached their end. Forney's occupation,
like Othello's, was gone, for he was nothing if not an organ grinder.
Facile with pen and tongue, he seemed a born courtier--a veritable
Dalgetty, whose loyal devotion to his knight-at-arms deserved better
recognition than the cold and wary Pennsylvania chieftain was willing to
give. It is only fair to say that Forney's character furnished reasonable
excuse for this neglect and apparent ingratitude. The row between them,
however, was party splitting. As the friend and backer of Douglas, and
later along a brilliant journalistic soldier of fortune, Forney did as much
as any other man to lay the Democratic party low.
I can speak of him with a certain familiarity and authority, for I was one
of his "boys." I admired him greatly and loved him dearly. Most of the
young newspaper men about Philadelphia and Washington did so. He was an
all-around modern journalist of the first class. Both as a newspaper writer
and creator and manager, he stood upon the front line, rating with Bennett
and Greeley and Raymond. He first entertained and then cultivated the
thirst for office, which proved the undoing of Greeley and Raymond, and it
proved his undoing. He had a passion for politics. He would shine in public
life. If he could not play first fiddle he would take any other instrument.
Thus failing of a Senatorship, he was glad to get the Secretaryship of the
Senate, having been Clerk of the House.
He was bound to be in the orchestra. In those days newspaper independence
was little known. Mr. Greeley was willing to play bottle-holder to Mr.
Seward, Mr. Prentice to Mr. Clay. James Gordon Bennett, the elder, and
later his son, James Gordon Bennett, the younger, challenged this kind of
servility. The Herald stood at the outset of its career manfully in the
face of unspeakable obloquy against it. The public understood it and rose
to it. The time came when the elder Bennett was to attain official as well
as popular recognition. Mr. Lincoln offered him the French mission and Mr.
Bennett declined it. He was rich and famous, and to another it might have
seemed a kind of crowning glory. To him it seemed only a coming down--a
badge of servitude--a lowering of the flag of independent journalism under
which, and under which alone, he had fought all his life.
Charles A. Dana was not far behind the Bennetts in his independence.
He well knew what parties and politicians are. The most scholarly and
accomplished of American journalists, he made the Sun "shine for all," and,
during the years of his active management, a most prosperous property. It
happened that whilst I was penny-a-lining in New York I took a piece of
space work--not very common in those days--to the Tribune and received a
few dollars for it. Ten years later, meeting Mr. Dana at dinner, I recalled
the circumstance, and thenceforward we became the best of friends. Twice
indeed we had runabouts together in foreign lands. His house in town, and
the island home called Dorsoris, which he had made for himself, might not
inaptly be described as very shrines of hospitality and art, the master of
the house a virtuoso in music and painting no less than in letters. One
might meet under his roof the most diverse people, but always interesting
and agreeable people. Perhaps at times he carried his aversions a little
too far. But he had reasons for them, and a man of robust temperament and
habit, it was not in him to sit down under an injury, or fancied injury.
I never knew a more efficient journalist. What he did not know about a
newspaper, was scarcely worth knowing.
In my day Journalism has made great strides. It has become a recognized
profession. Schools of special training are springing up here and there.
Several of the universities have each its College of Journalism. The
tendency to discredit these, which was general and pronounced at the start,
lowers its tone and grows less confident.
Assuredly there is room for special training toward the making of an
editor. Too often the newspaper subaltern obtaining promotion through
aptitudes peculiarly his own, has failed to acquire even the most
rudimentary knowledge of his art. He has been too busy seeking "scoops" and
doing "stunts" to concern himself about perspectives, principles, causes
and effects, probable impressions and consequences, or even to master the
technical details which make such a difference in the preparation of matter
intended for publication and popular perusal. The School of Journalism may
not be always able to give him the needful instruction. But it can set him
in the right direction and better prepare him to think and act for himself.
Chapter the Twenty-Eighth
Bullies and Braggarts--Some Kentucky Illustrations--The Old Galt
House--The Throckmortons--A Famous Sugeon--"Old Hell's Delight"
I
I do not believe that the bully and braggart is more in evidence in
Kentucky and Texas than in other Commonwealths of the Union, except that
each is by the space writers made the favorite arena of his exploits
and adopted as the scene of the comic stories told at his expense. The
son-of-a-gun from Bitter Creek, like the "elegant gentleman" from the Dark
and Bloody Ground, represents a certain type to be found more or less
developed in each and every State of the Union. He is not always a coward.
Driven, as it were, to the wall, he will often make good.
He is as a rule in quest of adventures. He enters the village from the
countryside and approaches the mêlée. "Is it a free fight?" says he.
Assured that it is, "Count me in," says he. Ten minutes later, "Is it still
a free fight?" he says, and, again assured in the affirmative, says he,
"Count me out."
Once the greatest of bullies provoked old Aaron Pennington, "the strongest
man in the world," who struck out from the shoulder and landed his victim
in the middle of the street. Here he lay in a helpless heap until they
carted him off to the hospital, where for a day or two he flickered between
life and death. "Foh God," said Pennington, "I barely teched him."
This same bully threatened that when a certain mountain man came to town
he would "finish him." The mountain man came. He was enveloped in an
old-fashioned cloak, presumably concealing his armament, and walked about
ostentatiously in the proximity of his boastful foeman, who remained as
passive as a lamb. When, having failed to provoke a fight, he had taken
himself off, an onlooker said: "Bill, I thought you were going to do him
up?"
"But," says Bill, "did you see him?"
"Yes, I saw him. What of that?"
"Why," exclaimed the bully, "that man was a walking arsenal."
Aaron Pennington, the strong man just mentioned, was, in his younger
days, a river pilot. Billy Hite, a mite of a man, was clerk. They had a
disagreement, when Aaron told Billy that if he caught him on "the harrican
deck," he would pitch him overboard. The next day Billy appeared whilst
Aaron, off duty, was strolling up and down outside the pilot-house, and
strolled offensively in his wake. Never a hostile glance or a word from
Aaron. At last, tired of dumb show, Billy broke forth with a torrent of
imprecation closing with "When are you going to pitch me off the boat, you
blankety-blank son-of-a-gun and coward?"
Aaron Pennington was a brave man. He was both fearless and self-possessed.
He paused, gazed quizzically at his little tormentor, and says he: "Billy,
you got a pistol, and you want to get a pretext to shoot me, and I ain't
going to give it to you."
II
Among the hostels of Christendom the Galt House, of Louisville, for a long
time occupied a foremost place and held its own. It was burned to the
ground fifty years ago and a new Galt House was erected, not upon the
original site, but upon the same street, a block above, and, although one
of the most imposing buildings in the world, it could never be made to
thrive. It stands now a rather useless encumbrance--a whited sepulchre--a
marble memorial of the Solid South and the Kentucky that was, on whose
portal might truthfully appear the legend:
"_A jolly place it was in days of old,
But something ails it now_"
Aris Throckmorton, its manager in the Thirties, the Forties and the
Fifties, was a personality and a personage. The handsomest of men and the
most illiterate, he exemplified the characteristics and peculiarities of
the days of the river steamer and the stage coach, when "mine host" felt it
his duty to make the individual acquaintance of his patrons and each
and severally to look after their comfort. Many stories are told at his
expense; of how he made a formal call upon Dickens--it was, in point of
fact, Marryatt--in his apartment, to be coolly told that when its occupant
wanted him he would ring for him; and of how, investigating a strange box
which had newly arrived from Florida, the prevailing opinion being that the
live animal within was an alligator, he exclaimed, "Alligator, hell; it's
a scorponicum." He died at length, to be succeeded by his son John, a very
different character. And thereby hangs a tale.
John Throckmorton, like Aris, his father, was one of the handsomest of men.
Perhaps because he was so he became the victim of one of the strangest of
feminine whimsies and human freaks. There was a young girl in Louisville,
named Ellen Godwin. Meeting him at a public ball she fell violently in love
with him. As Throckmorton did not reciprocate this, and refused to pursue
the acquaintance, she began to dog his footsteps. She dressed herself in
deep black and took up a position in front of the Galt House, and when
he came out and wherever he went she followed him. No matter how long he
stayed, when he reappeared she was on the spot and watch. He took himself
away to San Francisco. It was but the matter of a few weeks when she was
there, too. He hied him thence to Liverpool, and as he stepped upon the
dock there she was. She had got wind of his going and, having caught an
earlier steamer, preceded him.
Finally the War of Sections arrived. John Throckmorton hecame a Confederate
officer, and, being able to keep her out of the lines, he had a rest of
four years. But, when after the war he returned to Louisville, the quarry
began again.
He was wont to call her "Old Hell's Delight." Finally, one night, as he was
passing the market, she rushed out and rained upon him blow after blow with
a frozen rabbit.
Then the authorities took a hand. She was arraigned for disorderly conduct
and brought before the Court of Police. Then the town, which knew nothing
of the case and accepted her goings on as proof of wrong, rose; and she had
a veritable ovation, coming away with flying colors. This, however, served
to satisfy her. Thenceforward she desisted and left poor John Throckmorton
in peace.
I knew her well. She used once in a while to come and see me, having some
story or other to tell. On one occasion I said to her: "Ellen, why do you
pursue this man in this cruel way? What possible good can it do you?" She
looked me straight in the eye and slowly replied: "Because I love him."
I investigated the case closely and thoroughly and was assured, as he had
assured me, that he had never done her the slightest wrong. She had, on
occasion, told me the same thing, and this I fully believed.
He was a man, every inch of him, and a gentleman through and through--the
very soul of honor in his transactions of every sort--most highly respected
and esteemed wherever he was known--yet his life was made half a failure
and wholly unhappy by this "crazy Jane," the general public taking
appearances for granted and willing to believe nothing good of one who,
albeit proud and honorable, held defiantly aloof, disdaining self-defense.
On the whole I have not known many men more unfortunate than John
Throckmorton, who, but for "Old Hell's Delight," would have encountered
little obstacle to the pursuit of prosperity and happiness.
III
Another interesting Kentuckian of this period was John Thompson Gray.
He was a Harvard man--a wit, a scholar, and, according to old Southern
standards, a chevalier. Handsome and gifted, he had the disastrous
misfortune just after leaving college to kill his friend in a duel--a
mortal affair growing, as was usual in those days, out of a trivial
cause--and this not only saddened his life, but, in its ambitious aims,
shadowed and defeated it. His university comrades had fully counted on his
making a great career. Being a man of fortune, he was able to live like
a gentleman without public preferment, and this he did, except to his
familiars aloof and sensitive to the last.
William Preston, the whilom Minister to Spain and Confederate General, and
David Yandell, the eminent surgeon, were his devoted friends, and a notable
trio they made. Stoddard Johnston, Boyd Winchester and I--very much younger
men--sat at their feet and immensely enjoyed their brilliant conversation.
Dr. Yandell was not only as proclaimed by Dr. Gross and Dr. Sayre the
ablest surgeon of his day, but he was also a gentleman of varied experience
and great social distinction. He had studied long in Paris and was the pal
of John Howard Payne, the familiar friend of Lamartine, Dumas and Lemaître.
He knew Béranger, Hugo and Balzac. It would be hard to find three
Kentuckians less provincial, more unaffected, scintillant and worldly wise
than he and William Preston and John Thompson Gray.
Indeed the list of my acquaintances--many of them intimates--some of them
friends--would be, if recounted, a long one, not mentioning the foreigners,
embracing a diverse company all the way from Chunkey Towles to Grover
Cleveland, from Wake Holman to John Pierpont Morgan, from John Chamberlin
to Thomas Edison. I once served as honorary pall-bearer to a professional
gambler who was given a public funeral; a man who had been a gallant
Confederate soldier; whom nature intended for an artist, and circumstance
diverted into a sport; but who retained to the last the poetic fancy
and the spirit of the gallant, leaving behind him, when he died, like a
veritable cavalier, chiefly debts and friends. He was not a bad sort in
business, as the English say, nor in conviviality. But in fighting he was
"a dandy." The goody-goody philosophy of the namby-pamby takes an extreme
and unreal view of life. It flies to extremes. There are middle men.
Travers used to describe one of these, whom he did not wish particularly to
emphasize, as "a fairly clever son-of-a-gun."
Chapter the Twenty-Ninth
About Political Conventions, State and National--"Old Ben Butler"--His
Appearance as a Trouble-Maker in the Democratic National Convention of
1892--Tarifa and the Tariff--Spain as a Frightful Example
I
I have had a liberal education in party convocations, State and national.
In those of 1860 I served as an all-around newspaper reporter. A member of
each National Democratic Convention from 1876 to 1892, presiding over the
first, and in those of 1880 and 1888 chosen chairman of the Resolutions
Committee, I wrote many of the platforms and had a decisive voice in all of
them.
In 1880 I had stood for the renomination of "the Old Ticket," that is,
Tilden and Hendricks, making the eight-to-seven action of the Electoral
Tribunal of 1877 in favor of Hayes and Wheeler the paramount issue. It
seems strange now that any one should have contested this. Yet it was
stoutly contested. Mr. Tilden settled all dispute by sending a letter to
the convention declining to be a candidate. In answer to this I prepared a
resolution of regret to be incorporated in the platform. It raised stubborn
opposition. David A. Wells and Joseph Pulitzer, who were fellow members of
the committee, were with me in my contention, but the objection to making
it a part of the platform grew so pronounced that they thought I had best
not insist upon it.
The day wore on and the latent opposition seemed to increase. I had been
named chairman of the committee and had at a single sitting that morning
written a completed platform. Each plank of this was severally and closely
scrutinized. It was well into the afternoon before we reached the plank I
chiefly cared about. When I read this the storm broke. Half the committee
rose against it. At the close, with more heat than was either courteous or
tactful, I said: "Gentlemen, I wish to do no more than bid farewell to a
leader who four years ago took the Democratic party at its lowest fortunes
and made it a power again. He is well on his way to the grave. I would
place a wreath of flowers on that grave. I ask only this of you. Refuse me,
and by God, I will go to that mob yonder and, dead or alive, nominate him,
and you will be powerless to prevent!"
Mr. Barksdale, of Mississippi, a suave gentleman, who had led the
dissenters, said, "We do not refuse you. But you say that we 'regret' Mr.
Tilden's withdrawal. Now I do not regret it, nor do those who agree with
me. Could you not substitute some other expression?"
"I don't stand on words," I answered. "What would you suggest?"
Mr. Barksdale said: "Would not the words 'We have received with the deepest
sensibility Mr. Tilden's letter of withdrawal,' answer your purpose?"
"Certainly," said I, and the plank in the platform, as it was amended, was
adopted unanimously.
Mr. Tilden did not die. He outlived all his immediate rivals. Four years
later, in 1884, his party stood ready again to put him at its head.
In nominating Mr. Cleveland it thought it was accepting his dictation
reënforced by the enormous majority--nearly 200,000--by which Mr.
Cleveland, as candidate for Governor, had carried New York in the preceding
State election. Yet, when the votes in the presidential election came to be
counted, he carried it, if indeed he carried it at all, by less than 1,100
majority, the result hanging in the balance for nearly a week.
II
In the convention of 1884, which met at Chicago, we had a veritable
monkey-and-parrot time. It was next after the schism in Congress between
the Democratic factions led respectively by Carlisle and Randall, Carlisle
having been chosen Speaker of the House over Randall.
Converse, of Ohio, appeared in the Platform Committee representing Randall,
and Morrison, of Illinois, and myself, representing Carlisle. I was bent
upon making Morrison chairman of the committee. But it was agreed that
the chairmanship should be held in abeyance until the platform had been
formulated and adopted. The subcommittee to whom the task was delegated
sat fifty-one hours without a break before its work was completed. Then
Morrison was named chairman. It was arranged thereafter between Converse,
Morrison and myself that when the agreed report was made, Converse and
I should have each what time he required to say what was desired in
explanation, I to close the debate and move the previous question. At this
point General Butler sidled up. "Where do I come in?" he asked.
"You don't get in at all, you blasted old sinner," said Morrison.
"I have scriptural warrant," General Butler said. "Thou shalt not muzzle
the ox that treadeth the corn."
"All right, old man," said Morrison, good-humoredly, "take all the time you
want."
In his speech before the convention General Butler was not at his happiest,
and in closing he gave me a particularly good opening. "If you adopt this
platform of my friend Watterson," he said, "God may help you, but I can't."
I was standing by his side, and, it being my turn, he made way for me, and
I said: "During the last few days and nights of agreeable, though rather
irksome, intercourse, I have learned to love General Butler, but I must
declare that in an option between him and the Almighty I have a prejudice
in favor of God."
In his personal intercourse, General Butler was the most genial of men. The
subcommittee in charge of the preparation of a platform held its meetings
in the drawing-room of his hotel apartment, and he had constituted himself
our host as well as our colleague. I had not previously met him. It was
not long after we came together before he began to call me by my Christian
name. At one stage of the proceedings when by substituting one word for
another it looked as though we might reach an agreement, he said to me:
"Henry, what is the difference between 'exclusively for public purposes'
and 'a tariff for revenue only'?"
"I know of none," I answered.
"Do you think that the committee have found you out?"
"No, I scarcely think so."
"Then I will see that they do," and he proceeded in his peculiarly subtle
way to undo all that we had done, prolonging the session twenty-four hours.
He was an able man and a lovable man. The missing ingredient was serious
belief. Just after the nomination of the Breckinridge and Lane Presidential
ticket in 1860, I heard him make an ultra-Southern speech from Mr.
Breckinridge's doorway. "What do you think of that?" I asked Andrew
Johnson, who stood by me, and Johnson answered sharply, with an oath: "I
never like a man to be for me more than I am for myself." I have been told
that even at home General Butler could never acquire the public confidence.
In spite of his conceded mentality and manliness he gave the impression of
being something of an intellectual sharper.
He was charitable, generous and amiable. The famous New Orleans order which
had made him odious to the women of the South he had issued to warn
bad women and protect good women. Assuredly he did not foresee the
interpretation that would be put upon it. He was personally popular in
Congress. When he came to Washington he dispensed a lavish hospitality.
Such radical Democrats as Beck and Knott did not disdain his company,
became, indeed, his familiars. Yet, curious to relate, a Kentucky
Congressman of the period lost his seat because it was charged and proven
that he had ridden in a carriage to the White House with the Yankee
Boanerges on a public occasion.
III
Mere party issues never counted with me. I have read too much and seen too
much. At my present time of life they count not at all. I used to think
that there was a principle involved between the dogmas of Free Trade and
Protection as they were preached by their respective attorneys. Yet what
was either except the ancient, everlasting scheme--
--"_The good old rôle--the simple plan,
That they should take who have the power
And they should keep who can_."
How little wisdom one man may get from another man's counsels, one nation
may get from another nation's history, can be partly computed when we
reflect how often our personal experience has failed in warning admonition.
Temperament and circumstance do indeed cut a prodigious figure in life.
Traversing the older countries, especially Spain, the most illustrative,
the wayfarer is met at all points by what seems not merely the logic of
events, but the common law of the inevitable. The Latin of the Sixteenth
century was a recrudescence of the Roman of the First. He had not, like the
Mongolian, lived long enough to become a stoic. He was mainly a cynic and
an adventurer. Thence he flowered into a sybarite. Coming to great wealth
with the discoveries of Columbus and the conquests of Pizarro and Cortes,
he proceeded to enjoy its fruits according to his fancy and the fashion of
the times.
He erected massive shrines to his deities. He reared noble palaces. He
built about his cathedrals and his castles what were then thought to be
great cities, walled and fortified. He was, for all his self-sufficiency
and pride, short-sighted; and yet, until they arrived, how could he foresee
the developments of artillery? They were as hidden from him as three
centuries later the wonders of electricity were hidden from us.
I was never a Free Trader. I stood for a tariff for revenue as the least
oppressive and safest support of Government. The protective system in the
United States, responsible for our unequal distribution of wealth, took at
least its name from Spain, and the Robber Barons, as I used to call the
Protectionists of Pennsylvania, were not of immediate German origin.
Truth to say, both on land and water Spain has made a deal of history, and
the front betwixt Gibraltar and the Isle of San Fernando--Tangier on one
side and the Straits of Tarifa on the other--Cape Trafalgar, where Nelson
fought the famous battle, midway between them--has had its share.
Tarifa! What memories it invokes! In the olden and golden days of primitive
man, before corporation lawyers had learned how to frame pillaging
statutes, and rascally politicians to bamboozle confiding
constituencies--thus I used to put it--the gentle pirates of Tarifa laid
broad and deep the foundations for the Protective System in the United
States.
It was a fruitful as well as a congenial theme, and I rang all the changes
on it. To take by law from one man what is his and give it to another man
who has not earned it and has no right to it, I showed to be an invention
of the Moors, copied by the Spaniards and elevated thence into political
economy by the Americans. Tarifa took its name from Tarif-Ben-Malik, the
most enterprising Robber Baron of his day, and thus the Lords of Tarifa
were the progenitors of the Robber Barons of the Black Forest, New England
and Pittsburgh. Tribute was the name the Moors gave their robbery, which
was open and aboveboard. The Coal Kings, the Steel Kings and the Oil Kings
of the modern world have contrived to hide the process; but in Spain the
palaces of their forefathers rise in lonely and solemn grandeur just as a
thousand years hence the palaces upon the Fifth Avenue side of Central Park
and along Riverside Drive, not to mention those of the Schuylkill and the
Delaware, may become but roosts for bats and owls, and the chronicler of
the Anthropophagi, "whose heads do reach the skies," may tell how the
voters of the Great Republic were bought and sold with their own money,
until "Heaven released the legions north of the North Pole, and they
swooped down and crushed the pulpy mass beneath their avenging snowshoes."
The gold that was gathered by the Spaniards and fought over so valiantly
is scattered to the four ends of the earth. It may be as potent to-day as
then; but it does not seem nearly so heroic. A good deal of it has found
its way to London, which a short century and a half ago "had not,"
according to Adam Smith, "sufficient wealth to compete with Cadiz." We have
had our full share without fighting for it. Thus all things come to him who
contrives and waits.
Meanwhile, there are "groups" and "rings." And, likewise, "leaders" and
"bosses." What do they know or care about the origins of wealth; about
Venice; about Cadiz; about what is said of Wall Street? The Spanish Main
was long ago stripped of its pillage. The buccaneers took themselves off to
keep company with the Vikings. Yet, away down in those money chests, once
filled with what were pieces of eight and ducats and doubloons, who shall
say that spirits may not lurk and ghosts walk, one old freebooter wheezing
to another old freebooter: "They order these things better in the
'States.'"
IV
I have enjoyed hugely my several sojourns in Spain. The Spaniard is unlike
any other European. He may not make you love him. But you are bound to
respect him.
There is a mansion in Seville known as The House of Pontius Pilate because
part of the remains of the abode of the Roman Governor was brought from
Jerusalem and used in a building suited to the dignity of a Spanish grandee
who was also a Lord of Tarifa. The Duke of Medina Celi, its present owner,
is a lineal scion of the old piratical crew. The mansion is filled with the
fruits of many a foray. There are plunder from Naples, where one ancestor
was Viceroy, and treasures from the temples of the Aztecs and the Incas,
where two other ancestors ruled. Every coping stone and pillar cost some
mariner of the Tarifa Straits a pot of money.
Its owner is a pauper. A carekeeper shows it for a peseta a head. To such
base uses may we come at last. Yet Seville basks in the sun and smiles on
the flashing waters of the Guadalquivir, and Cadiz sits serene upon the
green hillsides of San Sebastian, just as if nothing had ever happened;
neither the Barber and Carmen, nor Nelson and Byron; the past but a
phantom; the present the prosiest of prose-poems.
There are canny Spaniards even as there are canny Scots, who grow rich and
prosper; but there is never a Spaniard who does not regard the political
fabric, and the laws, as fair game, the rule being always "devil take the
hindmost," community of interests nowhere. "The good old vices of Spain,"
that is, the robbing of the lesser rogue by the greater in regulated
gradations all the way from the King to the beggar, are as prevalent and as
vital as ever they were. Curiously enough, a tiny stream of Hebraic blood
and Moorish blood still trickles through the Spanish coast towns. It may be
traced through the nomenclature in spite of its Castilian prefigurations
and appendices, which would account for some of the enterprise and activity
that show themselves, albeit only by fits and starts.
Chapter the Thirtieth
The Makers of the Republic--Lincoln, Jefferson, Clay and Webster--The
Proposed League of Nations--The Wilsonian Incertitude--The "New
Freedom"
I
The makers of the American Republic range themselves in two
groups--Washington, Franklin and Jefferson--Clay, Webster and Lincoln--each
of whom, having a genius peculiarly his own, gave himself and his best to
the cause of national unity and independence.
In a general way it may be said that Washington created and Lincoln saved
the Union. But along with Washington and Lincoln, Clay makes a good
historic third, for it was the masterful Kentuckian who, joining rare
foresight to surpassing eloquence and leading many eminent men, including
Webster, was able to hold the legions of unrest at bay during the formative
period.
There are those who call these great men "back numbers," who tell us we
have left the past behind us and entered an epoch of more enlightened
progress--who would displace the example of the simple lives they led and
the homely truths they told, to set up a school of philosophy which had
made Athens stare and Rome howl, and, I dare say, is causing the Old
Continentals to turn over in their graves. The self-exploiting spectacle
and bizarre teaching of this school passes the wit of man to fathom.
Professing the ideal and proposing to recreate the Universe, the New
Freedom, as it calls itself, would standardize it. The effect of that would
be to desiccate the human species in human conceit. It would cheapen the
very harps and halos in Heaven and convert the Day of Judgment into a
moving picture show.
I protest that I am not of its kidney. In point of fact, its platitudes
"stick in my gizzard." I belong the rather to those old-fashioned ones--
"Who love their land because it is their own,
And scorn to give aught other reason why;
Who'd shake hands with a king upon his throne,
And think it kindness to his majesty."
I have many rights--birthrights--to speak of Kentucky as a Kentuckian,
beside that of more than fifty years' service upon what may be fairly
called the battle-line of the Dark and Bloody Ground.
My grandmother's father, William Mitchell Morrison, had raised a company
of riflemen in the War of the Revolution, and, after the War, marched it
westward. He commanded the troops in the old fort at Harrodsburg, where
my grandmother was born in 1784. He died a general. My grandfather,
James Black's father, the Rev. James Black, was chaplain of the fort. He
remembered the birth of the baby girl who was to become his wife. He was a
noble stalwart--a perfect type of the hunters of Kentucky--who could bring
down a squirrel from the highest bough and hit a bull's eye at a hundred
yards after he was three score and ten.
It was he who delighted my childhood with bear stories and properly lurid
narrations of the braves in buckskin and the bucks in paint and feathers,
with now and then a red-coat to give pungency and variety to the tale. He
would sing me to sleep with hunting songs. He would take me with him afield
to carry the game bag, and I was the only one of many grandchildren to be
named in his will. In my thoughts and in my dreams he has been with me all
my life, a memory and an example, and an ever glorious inspiration.
Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton were among my earliest heroes.
II
Born in a Democratic camp, and growing to manhood on the Democratic side of
a political battlefield, I did not accept, as I came later to realize, the
transcendent personal merit and public service of Henry Clay. Being of
Tennessee parentage, perhaps the figure of Andrew Jackson came between;
perhaps the rhetoric of Daniel Webster. Once hearing me make some slighting
remark of the Great Commoner, my father, a life-long Democrat, who, on
opposing sides, had served in Congress with Mr. Clay, gently rebuked me.
"Do not express such opinions, my son," he said, "they discredit yourself.
Mr. Clay was a very great man--a born leader of men."
It was certainly he, more than any other man, who held the Union together
until the time arrived for Lincoln to save it.
I made no such mistake, however, with respect to Abraham Lincoln. From the
first he appeared to me a great man, a born leader of men. His death proved
a blow to the whole country--most of all to the Southern section of it.
If he had lived there would have been no Era of Reconstruction, with its
repressive agencies and oppressive legislation; there would have been
wanting to the extremism of the time the bloody cue of his taking off to
mount the steeds and spur the flanks of vengeance. For Lincoln entertained,
with respect to the rehabilitation of the Union, the single wish that the
Southern States--to use his homely phraseology--"should come back home
and behave themselves," and if he had lived he would have made this wish
effectual as he made everything else effectual to which he addressed
himself.
His was the genius of common sense. Of perfect intellectual acuteness and
aplomb, he sprang from a Virginia pedigree and was born in Kentucky.
He knew all about the South, its institutions, its traditions and its
peculiarities. He was an old-line Whig of the school of Henry Clay, with
strong Emancipation leaning, never an Abolitionist. "If slavery be not
wrong," he said, "nothing is wrong," but he also said and reiterated it
time and again, "I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are
just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist
among them they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we
would not instantly give it up."
From first to last throughout the angry debates preceding the War of
Sections, amid the passions of the War itself, not one vindictive,
prescriptive word fell from his tongue or pen, whilst during its progress
there was scarcely a day when he did not project his great personality
between some Southern man or woman and danger.
III
There has been much discussion about what did and what did not occur at the
famous Hampton Roads Conference. That Mr. Lincoln met and conferred with
the official representatives of the Confederate Government, led by the Vice
President of the Confederate States, when it must have been known to him
that the Confederacy was nearing the end of its resources, is sufficient
proof of the breadth both of his humanity and his patriotism. Yet he went
to Fortress Monroe prepared not only to make whatever concessions toward
the restoration of Union and Peace he had the lawful authority to make,
but to offer some concessions which could in the nature of the case go no
further at that time than his personal assurance. His constitutional powers
were limited. But he was in himself the embodiment of great moral power.
The story that he offered payment for the slaves--so often affirmed and
denied--is in either case but a quibble with the actual facts. He could not
have made such an offer except tentatively, lacking the means to carry it
out. He was not given the opportunity to make it, because the Confederate
Commissioners were under instructions to treat solely on the basis of the
recognition of the independence of the Confederacy. The conference came to
nought. It ended where it began. But there is ample evidence that he went
to Hampton Roads resolved to commit himself to that proposition. He did,
according to the official reports, refer to it in specific terms, having
already formulated a plan of procedure. This plan exists and may be seen in
his own handwriting. It embraced a joint resolution to be submitted by the
President to the two Houses of Congress appropriating $400,000,000 to be
distributed among the Southern States on the basis of the slave population
of each according to the Census of 1860, and a proclamation to be issued
by himself, as President, when the joint resolution had been passed by
Congress.
There can be no controversy among honest students of history on this point.
That Mr. Lincoln said to Mr. Stephens, "Let me write Union at the top
of this page and you may write below it whatever else you please," is
referable to Mr. Stephens' statement made to many friends and attested by a
number of reliable persons. But that he meditated the most liberal terms,
including payment for the slaves, rests neither upon conjecture nor
hearsay, but on documentary proof. It may be argued that he could not
have secured the adoption of any such plan; but of his purpose, and
its genuineness, there can be no question and there ought to be no
equivocation.
Indeed, payment for the slaves had been all along in his mind. He believed
the North equally guilty with the South for the original existence of
slavery. He clearly understood that the Irrepressible Conflict was a
Conflict of systems, not a merely sectional and partisan quarrel. He was a
just man, abhorring proscription: an old Conscience Whig, indeed, who stood
in awe of the Constitution and his oath of office. He wanted to leave the
South no right to claim that the North, finding slave labor unremunerative,
had sold its negroes to the South and then turned about and by force of
arms confiscated what it had unloaded at a profit. He fully recognized
slavery as property. The Proclamation of Emancipation was issued as a war
measure. In his message to Congress of December, 1862, he proposed payment
for the slaves, elaborating a scheme in detail and urging it with copious
and cogent argument. "The people of the South," said he, addressing a
Congress at that moment in the throes of a bloody war with the South, "are
not more responsible for the original introduction of this property than
are the people of the North, and, when it is remembered how unhesitatingly
we all use cotton and sugar and share the profits of dealing in them, it
may not be quite safe to say that the South has been more responsible than
the North for its continuance."
IV
It has been my rule, aim and effort in my newspaper career to print nothing
of a man which I would not say to his face; to print nothing of a man in
malice; to look well and think twice before consigning a suspect to the
ruin of printer's ink; to respect the old and defend the weak; and, lastly,
at work and at play, daytime and nighttime, to be good to the girls and
square with the boys, for hath it not been written of such is the kingdom
of Heaven?
There will always be in a democracy two or more sets of rival leaders to
two or more differing groups of followers. Hitherto history has classified
these as conservatives and radicals. But as society has become more and
more complex the groups have had their subdivisions. As a consequence
speculative doctrinaries and adventurous politicians are enabled to get in
their work of confusing the issues and exploiting themselves.
"'What are these fireworks for?' asks the rustic in the parable. 'To blind
the eyes of the people,' answers the cynic."
I would not say aught in a spirit of hostility to the President of the
United States. Woodrow Wilson is a clever speaker and writer. Yet the usual
trend and phrase of his observations seem to be those of a special pleader,
rather than those of a statesman. Every man, each of the nations, is for
peace as an abstract proposition. That much goes without saying. But Mr.
Wilson proposes to bind the hands of a giant and take lottery chances on
the future. This, I think, the country will contest.
He is obsessed by the idea of a League of Nations. If not his own discovery
he has yet made himself its leader. He talks flippantly about "American
ideals" that have won the war against Germany, as if there were no English
ideals and French ideals.
"In all that he does we can descry the school-master who arrived at the
front rather late in life. One needs only to go over the record and
mark how often he has reversed himself to detect a certain mental and
temperamental instability clearly indicating a lack of fixed or resolute
intellectual purpose. This is characteristic of an excess in education; of
the half baked mind overtrained. The overeducated mind fancies himself a
doctrinaire when he is in point of fact only a disciple."
Woodrow Wilson was born to the rather sophisticated culture of the too, too
solid South. Had he grown up in England a hundred years ago he would have
been a follower of the Della Cruscans. He has what is called a facile pen,
though it sometimes runs away with him. It seems to have done so in the
matter of the League of Nations. Inevitably such a scheme would catch the
fancy of one ever on the alert for the fanciful.
I cannot too often repeat that the world we inhabit is a world of sin,
disease and death. Men will fight whenever they want to fight, and no
artificial scheme or process is likely to restrain them. It is mainly the
costliness of war that makes most against it. But, as we have seen the last
four years, it will not quell the passions of men or dull national and
racial ambitions.
All that Mr. Wilson and his proposed League of Nations can do will be to
revamp, and maybe for a while to reimpress the minds of the rank and file,
until the bellowing followers of Bellona are ready to spring.
Eternal peace, universal peace, was not the purpose of the Deity in the
creation of the universe.
Nevertheless, it would seem to be the duty of men in great place, as of
us all, to proclaim the gospel of good will and cultivate the arts of
fraternity. I have no quarrel with the President on this score. What I
contest is the self-exploitation to which he is prone, so lacking in
dignity and open to animadversion.
V
Thus it was that instant upon the appearance of the proposed League of
Nations I made bold to challenge it, as but a pretty conceit having no real
value, a serious assault upon our national sovereignty.
Its argument seemed to me full of copybook maxims, easier recited than
applied. As what I wrote preceded the debates and events of the last six
months, I may not improperly make the following quotation from a screed of
mine appearing in The Courier-Journal of the 5th of March, 1919:
"The League of Nations is a fad. Politics, like society and letters, has
its fads. In society they call them fashion and in literature originality.
Politics gives the name of 'issues' to its fads. A taking issue is as a
stunning gown, or 'a best seller.' The President's mind wears a coat of
many colors, and he can change it at will, his mood being the objective
point, not always too far ahead, or clear of vision. Carl Schurz was wont
to speak of Gratz Brown as 'a man of thoughts rather than of ideas.' I
wonder if that can be justly said of the President? 'Gentlemen will please
not shoot at the pianiste,' adjured the superscription over the music stand
in the Dakota dive; 'she is doing the best that she knows how.'
"Already it is being proclaimed that Woodrow Wilson can have a third
nomination for the presidency if he wants it, and nobody seems shocked by
it, which proves that the people grow degenerate and foreshadows that one
of these nights some fool with a spyglass will break into Mars and let
loose the myriads of warlike gyascutes who inhabit that freak luminary,
thence to slide down the willing moonbeam and swallow us every one!
"In a sense the Monroe Doctrine was a fad. Oblivious to Canada, and British
Columbia and the Spanish provinces, it warned the despots of Europe off the
grass in America. We actually went to war with Mexico, having enjoyed two
wars with England, and again and again we threatened to annex the Dominion.
Everything betwixt hell and Halifax was Yankee preëmpted.
"Truth to say, your Uncle Samuel was ever a jingo. But your Cousin Woodrow,
enlarging on the original plan, would stretch our spiritual boundaries to
the ends of the earth and make of us the moral custodian of the universe.
This much, no less, he got of the school of sweetness and light in which he
grew up.
"I am a jingo myself. But a wicked material jingo, who wants facts, not
theories. If I thought it possible and that it would pay, I would annex the
North Pole and colonize the Equator. It is, after the manner of the lady in
the play, that the President 'doth protest too much,' which displeases me
and where, in point of fact, I 'get off the reservation.'
"That, being a politician and maybe a candidate, he is keenly alive to
votes goes without saying. On the surface this League of Nations having the
word 'peace' in big letters emblazoned both upon its forehead and the
seat of its trousers--or, should I say, woven into the hem of its
petticoat?--seems an appeal for votes. I do not believe it will bear
discussion. In a way, it tickles the ear without convincing the sense.
There is nothing sentimental about the actualities of Government, much
as public men seek to profit by arousing the passions of the people.
Government is a hard and fast and dry reality. At best statesmanship can
only half do the things it would. Its aims are most assured when tending a
little landward; its footing safest on its native heath. We have plenty
to do on our own continent without seeking to right things on
other continents. Too many of us--the President among the rest, I
fear--miscalculate the distance between contingency and desire.
"'We figure to ourselves
The thing we like: and then we build it up:
As chance will have it on the rock or sand--
When thought grows tired of wandering o'er the world,
And homebound Fancy runs her bark ashore.'"
I am sorry to see the New York World fly off at a tangent about this latest
of the Wilsonian hobbies. Frank Irving Cobb, the editor of the World, is,
as I have often said, the strongest writer on the New York press since
Horace Greeley. But he can hardly be called a sentimentalist, as Greeley
was, and there is nothing but sentiment--gush and gammon--in the proposed
League of Nations.
It may be all right for England. There are certainly no flies on it for
France. But we don't need it. Its effects can only be to tie our hands, not
keep the dogs away, and even at the worst, in stress of weather, we are
strong enough to keep the dogs away ourselves.
We should say to Europe: "Shinny on your own side of the water and we will
shinny on our side." It may be that Napoleon's opinion will come true that
ultimately Europe will be "all Cossack or all republican." Part of it has
come true already. Meanwhile it looks as though the United States, having
exhausted the reasonable possibilities of democracy, is beginning to turn
crank. Look at woman suffrage by Federal edict; look at prohibition by
act of Congress and constitutional amendment; tobacco next to walk on the
plank; and then!--Lord, how glad I feel that I am nearly a hundred years
old and shall not live to see it!
Chapter the Thirty-First
The Age of Miracles--A Story of Franklin Pierce--Simon Suggs
Billy Sunday--Jefferson Davis and Aaron Burr--Certain Constitutional
Shortcomings
I
The years intervening between 1865 and 1919 may be accounted the most
momentous in all the cycles of the ages. The bells that something more than
half a century ago rang forth to welcome peace in America have been from
that day to this jangled out of tune and harsh with the sounding of war's
alarms in every other part of the world. We flatter ourselves with the
thought that our tragedy lies behind us. Whether this be true or not, the
tragedy of Europe is at hand and ahead. The miracles of modern invention,
surpassing those of old, have made for strife, not for peace. Civilization
has gone backward, not forward. Rulers, intoxicated by the lust of power
and conquest, have lost their reason, and nations, following after, like
cattle led to slaughter, seem as the bereft of Heaven "that knew not God."
We read the story of our yesterdays as it unfolds itself in the current
chronicle; the ascent to the bank-house, the descent to the mad-house, and,
over the glittering paraphernalia that follows to the tomb, we reflect upon
the money-zealot's progress; the dizzy height, the dazzling array, the
craze for more and more and more; then the temptation and fall, millions
gone, honor gone, reason gone--the innocent and the gentle, with the
guilty, dragged through the mire of the prison, and the court--and we draw
back aghast. Yet, if we speak of these things we are called pessimists.
I have always counted myself an optimist. I know that I do not lie awake
nights musing on the ingratitude either of my stars or my countrymen. I
pity the man who does. Looking backward, I have sincere compassion for
Webster and for Clay! What boots it to them, now that they lie beneath the
mold, and that the drums and tramplings of nearly seventy years of the
world's strifes and follies and sordid ambitions and mean repinings, and
longings, and laughter, and tears, have passed over their graves, what
boots it to them, now, that they failed to get all they wanted? There is
indeed snug lying in the churchyard; but the flowers smell as sweet and
the birds sing as merry, and the stars look down as loving upon the
God-hallowed mounds of the lowly and the poor, as upon the man-bedecked
monuments of the Kings of men. All of us, the least with the greatest, let
us hope and believe shall attain immortal life at last. What was there for
Webster, what was there for Clay to quibble about? I read with a kind of
wonder, and a sickening sense of the littleness of great things, those
passages in the story of their lives where it is told how they stormed
and swore, when tidings reached them that they had been balked of their
desires.
Yet they might have been so happy; so happy in their daily toil, with its
lofty aims and fair surroundings; so happy in the sense of duty done;
so happy, above all, in their own Heaven-sent genius, with its noble
opportunities and splendid achievements. They should have emulated the
satisfaction told of Franklin Pierce. It is related that an enemy was
inveighing against him, when an alleged friend spoke up and said: "You
should not talk so about the President, I assure you that he is not at all
the man you describe him to be. On the contrary, he is a man of the rarest
gifts and virtues. He has long been regarded as the greatest orator in New
England, and the greatest lawyer in New England, and surely no one of his
predecessors ever sent such state papers to Congress."
"How are you going to prove it," angrily retorted the first speaker.
"I don't need to prove it," coolly replied the second. "He admits it."
I cannot tell just how I should feel if I were President, though, on the
whole, I fancy fairly comfortable, but I am quite certain that I would not
exchange places with any of the men who have been President, and I have
known quite a number of them.
II
I am myself accused sometimes of being a "pessimist." Assuredly I am
no optimist of the Billy Sunday sort, who fancies the adoption of the
prohibition amendment the coming of "de jubilo." Early in life, while yet
a recognized baseball authority, Mr. Sunday discovered "pay dirt" in what
Col. Mulberry Sellers called "piousness." He made it an asset and began
to issue celestial notes, countersigned by himself and made redeemable
in Heaven. From that day to this he has been following the lead of the
renowned Simon Suggs, who, having in true camp meeting style acquired
"the grace of God," turned loose as an exhorter shouting "Step up to the
mourner's bench, my brethering, step up lively, and be saved! I come in on
na 'er par, an' see what I draw'd! Religion's the only game whar you can't
lose. Him that trusts the Lord holds fo' aces!"
The Billy Sunday game has made Billy Sunday rich. Having exhausted
Hell-fire-and-brimstone, the evangel turns to the Demon Rum. Satan, with
hide and horns, has had his day. Prohibition is now the trick card.
The fanatic is never either very discriminating or very particular. As
a rule, for him any taking "ism" will suffice. To-day, it happens to be
"whisky." To-morrow it will be tobacco. Finally, having established the spy
system and made house-to-house espionage a rule of conventicle, it will
become a misdemeanor for a man to kiss his wife.
From fakers who have cards up their sleeves, not to mention snakes in their
boots, we hear a great deal about "the people," pronounced by them as if it
were spelled "pee-pul." It is the unfailing recourse of the professional
politician in quest of place. Yet scarcely any reference, or referee, were
faultier.
The people en masse constitute what we call the mob. Mobs have rarely been
right--never except when capably led. It was the mob of Jerusalem that did
the unoffending Jesus of Nazareth to death. It was the mob in Paris that
made the Reign of Terror. Mobs have seldom been tempted, even had a chance
to go wrong, that they have not gone wrong.
The "people" is a fetish. It was the people, misled, who precipitated the
South into the madness of secession and the ruin of a hopelessly unequal
war of sections. It was the people backing if not compelling the Kaiser,
who committed hari-kari for themselves and their empire in Germany. It is
the people leaderless who are making havoc in Russia. Throughout the length
and breadth of Christendom, in all lands and ages, the people, when turned
loose, have raised every inch of hell to the square foot they were able to
raise, often upon the slightest pretext, or no pretext at all.
This is merely to note the mortal fallibility of man, most fallible when
herded in groups and prone to do in the aggregate what he would hesitate to
do when left to himself and his individual accountability.
Under a wise dispensation of power, despotism, we are told embodies the
best of all government. The trouble is that despotism is seldom, if ever,
wise. It is its nature to be inconsiderate, being essentially selfish,
grasping and tyrannous. As a rule therefore revolution--usually of
force--has been required to change or reform it. Perfectibility was not
designed for mortal man. That indeed furnishes the strongest argument in
favor of the immortality of the soul, life on earth but the ante-chamber of
eternal life. It would be a cruel Deity that condemned man to the brief and
vexed span of human existence with nothing beyond the grave.
We know not whence we came, or whither we go; but it is a fair guess that
we shall in the end get better than we have known.
III
Historic democracy is dead.
This is not to say that a Democratic party organization has ceased to
exist. Nor does it mean that there are no more Democrats and that the
Democratic party is dead in the sense that the Federalist party is dead or
the Whig party is dead, or the Greenback party is dead, or the Populist
party is dead. That which has died is the Democratic party of Jefferson and
Jackson and Tilden. The principles of government which they laid down
and advocated have been for the most part obliterated. What slavery and
secession were unable to accomplish has been brought about by nationalizing
sumptuary laws and suffrage.
The death-blow to Jeffersonian democracy was delivered by the Democratic
Senators and Representatives from the South and West who carried through
the prohibition amendment. The _coup de grâce_ was administered by a
President of the United States elected as a Democrat when he approved the
Federal suffrage amendment to the Constitution.
The kind of government for which the Jeffersonian democracy successfully
battled for more than a century was thus repudiated; centralization was
invited; State rights were assassinated in the very citadel of State
rights. The charter of local self-government become a scrap of paper, the
way is open for the obliteration of the States in all their essential
functions and the erection of a Federal Government more powerful than
anything of which Alexander Hamilton dared to dream.
When the history of these times comes to be written it may be said of
Woodrow Wilson: he rose to world celebrity by circumstance rather than by
character. He was favored of the gods. He possessed a bright, forceful
mind. His achievements were thrust upon him. Though it sometimes ran away
with him, his pen possessed extraordinary facility. Thus he was ever able
to put his best foot foremost. Never in the larger sense a leader of men as
were Chatham and Fox, as were Washington, Clay and Lincoln; nor of ideas as
were Rousseau, Voltaire and Franklin, he had the subtle tenacity of Louis
the Eleventh of France, the keen foresight of Richelieu with a talent for
the surprising which would have raised him to eminence in journalism.
In short he was an opportunist void of conviction and indifferent to
consistency.
The pen is mightier than the sword only when it has behind it a heart as
well as a brain. He who wields it must be brave, upright and steadfast.
We are giving our Chief Executive enormous powers. As a rule his wishes
prevail. His name becomes the symbol of party loyalty. Yet it is after all
a figure of speech not a personality that appeals to our sense of duty
without necessarily engaging our affection.
Historic Republicanism is likewise dead, as dead as historic Democracy,
only in both cases the labels surviving.
IV
We are told by Herbert Spencer that the political superstition of the past
having been the divine right of kings, the political superstition of the
present is the divine right of parliaments and he might have said of
peoples. The oil of anointing seems unawares, he thinks, to have dripped
from the head of the one upon the heads of the many, and given sacredness
to them also, and to their decrees.
That the Proletariat, the Bolsheviki, the People are on the way seems plain
enough. How far they will go, and where they will end, is not so clear.
With a kind of education--most men taught to read, very few to think--the
masses are likely to demand yet more and more for themselves. They will
continue strenuously and effectively to resent the startling contrasts
of fortune which aptitude and opportunity have created in a social and
political structure claiming to rest upon the formula "equality for all,
special privilege for none."
The law of force will yield to the rule of numbers. Socialism, disappointed
of its Utopia, may then repeat the familiar lesson and reproduce the
man-on-horseback, or the world may drop into another abyss, and, after the
ensuing "dark ages," like those that swallowed Babylon and Tyre, Greece and
Rome, emerge with a new civilization and religion.
"Man never is, but always to be blessed." We know not whence we came, or
whither we go. Hope that springs eternal in the human breast tells us
nothing. History seems, as Napoleon said, a series of lies agreed upon, yet
not without dispute.
V
I read in an ultra-sectional non-partisan diatribe that "Jefferson Davis
made Aaron Burr respectable," a sentence which clearly indicates that the
writer knew nothing either of Jefferson Davis or Aaron Burr.
Both have been subjected to unmeasured abuse. They are variously
misunderstood. Their chief sin was failure; the one to establish an
impossible confederacy laid in human slavery, the other to achieve certain
vague schemes of empire in Mexico and the far Southwest, which, if not
visionary, were premature.
The final collapse of the Southern Confederacy can be laid at the door of
no man. It was doomed the day of its birth. The wonder is that sane leaders
could invoke such odds against them and that a sane people could be induced
to follow. The single glory of the South is that it was able to stand out
so long against such odds.
Jefferson Davis was a high-minded and well-intentioned man. He was chosen
to lead the South because he was, in addition, an accomplished soldier. As
one who consistently opposed him in his public policies, I can specify no
act to the discredit of his character, his one serious mistake being his
failiure to secure the peace offered by Abraham Lincoln two short months
before Appomattox.
Taking account of their personalities and the lives they led, there is
little to suggest comparison, except that they were soldiers and Senators,
who, each in his day, filled a foremost place in public affairs.
Aaron Burr, though well born and highly educated, was perhaps a
rudely-minded man. But he was no traitor. If the lovely woman, Theodosia
Prevost, whom he married, had lived, there is reason to believe that the
whole course and tenor of his career would have been altered. Her death was
an irreparable blow, as it were, a prelude to the series of mischances
that followed. The death of their daughter, the lovely Theodosia Alston,
completed the tragedy of his checkered life.
Born a gentleman and attaining soldierly distinction and high place, he
fell a victim to the lure of a soaring ambition and the devious experience
of a man about town.
The object of political proscription for all his intellectual and personal
resources, he could not successfully meet and stand against it. There was
nothing in the affair with Hamilton actually to damn and ruin him. Neither
morally nor politically was Hamilton the better man of the two. Nor was
there treason in his Mexican scheme. He meant no more with universal
acclaim than Houston did three decades later. To couple his name with that
of Benedict Arnold is historic sacrilege.
Jefferson pursued him relentlessly. But even Jefferson could not have
destroyed him. When, after an absence of four years abroad, he returned to
America, there was still a future for him had he stood up like a man, but,
instead, like one confessing defeat, he sank down, whilst the wave of
obloquy rolled over him.
His is one of the few pathetic figures in our national history. Mr. Davis
has had plenty of defenders. Poor Burr has had scarcely an apologist. His
offense, whatever it was, has been overpaid. Even the War of Sections
begins to fade into the mist and become dreamlike even to those who bore an
actual part in it.
The years are gliding swiftly by. Only a little while, and there shall not
be one man living who saw service on either side of that great struggle of
systems and ideas. Its passions long ago vanished from manly bosoms. That
has come to pass within a single generation in America which in Europe
required ages to accomplish.
There is no disputing the verdict of events. Let us relate them truly and
interpret them fairly. If the South would have the North do justice to its
heroes, the South must do justice to the heroes of the North. Each must
render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's even as each would render
unto God the things that are God's. As living men, standing erect in the
presence of Heaven and the world, the men of the South have grown gray
without being ashamed; and they need not fear that History will fail to
vindicate their integrity.
When those are gone that fought the battle, and Posterity comes to strike
the balance, it will be shown that the makers of the Constitution left
the relation of the States to the Federal Government and of the Federal
Government to the States open to a double construction. It will be told
how the mistaken notion that slave labor was requisite to the profitable
cultivation of sugar, rice and cotton, raised a paramount property interest
in the Southern section of the Union, whilst in the Northern section,
responding to the trend of modern thought and the outer movements of
mankind, there arose a great moral sentiment against slavery. The conflict
thus established, gradually but surely sectionalizing party lines, was as
inevitable as it was irrepressible. It was fought out to its bitter
and logical conclusion at Appomattox. It found us a huddle of petty
sovereignties, held together by a rope of sand. It made and it left us a
Nation.
Chapter the Thirty-Second
A War Episode--I Meet my Fater--I Marry and Make a Home--The Ups and
Downs of Life Lead to a Happy Old Age
I
In bringing these desultory--perhaps too fragmentary--recollections to a
close the writer may not be denied his final word. This shall neither be
self-confident nor overstated; the rather a confession of faith somewhat in
rejection of political and religious pragmatism. In both his experience has
been ample if not exhaustive. During the period of their serial publication
he has received many letters--suggestive, informatory and critical--now and
again querulous--which he has not failed to consider, and, where occasion
seemed to require, to pursue to original sources in quest of accuracy. In
no instance has he found any essential error in his narrative. Sometimes he
has been charged with omissions--as if he were writing a history of his own
times--whereas he has been only, and he fears, most imperfectly, relating
his immediate personal experience.
I was born in the Presbyterian Church, baptized in the Roman Catholic
Church, educated in the Church of England in America and married into the
Church of the Disciples. The Roman Catholic baptism happened in this way:
It was my second summer; my parents were sojourning in the household of a
devout Catholic family; my nurse was a fond, affectionate Irish Catholic;
the little life was almost despaired of, so one sunny day, to rescue me
from that form of theologic controversy known as infant damnation, the baby
carriage was trundled round the corner to Saint Matthew's Church--it was in
the national capital--and the baby brow was touched with holy water out of
a font blessed of the Virgin Mary. Surely I have never felt or been the
worse for it.
Whilst I was yet too young to understand I witnessed an old-fashioned
baptism of the countryside. A person who had borne a very bad character in
the neighborhood was being immersed. Some one, more humorous than reverent,
standing near me, said as the man came to the surface, "There go his sins,
men and brethren, there go his sins"; and having but poor eyesight I
thought I saw them passing down the stream never to trouble him, or
anybody, more. I can see them still floating, floating down the stream, out
and away from the sight of men. Does this make me a Baptist, I wonder?
I fear not, I fear not; because I am unable to rid myself of the impression
that there are many roads leading to heaven, and I have never believed in
what is called close communion. I have not hated and am unable to hate any
man because either in political or in religious opinion he differs from
me and insists upon voting his party ticket and worshiping his Creator
according to his conscience. Perfect freedom of conscience and thought has
been my lifelong contention.
I suppose I must have been born an insurrecto. Pursuing the story of the
dark ages when men were burnt at the stake for the heresy of refusing to
bow to the will of the majority, it is not the voice of the Protestant or
the Catholic that issues from the flames and reaches my heart, but the cry
of suffering man, my brother. To me a saint is a saint whether he wears
wooden shoes or goes barefoot, whether he gets his baptism silently out
of a font of consecrated water or comes dripping from the depths of
the nearest brook, shouting, "Glory hallelujah!" From my boyhood the
persecution of man for opinion's sake--and no matter for what opinion's
sake--has roused within me the only devil I have ever personally known.
My reading has embraced not a few works which seek or which affect to deal
with the mystery of life and death. Each and every one of them leaves a
mystery still. For all their learning and research--their positivity and
contradiction--none of the writers know more than I think I know myself,
and all that I think I know myself may be abridged to the simple rescript,
I know nothing. The wisest of us reck not whence we came or whither we go;
the human mind is unable to conceive the eternal in either direction; the
soul of man inscrutable even to himself.
_The night has a thousand eyes,
The day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun._
_The mind has a thousand eyes,
The heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done._
All that there is to religion, therefore, is faith; not much more in
politics. We are variously told that the church is losing its hold upon
men. If it be true it is either that it gives itself over to theology--the
pride of opinion--or yields itself to the celebration of the mammon of
unrighteousness.
I do not believe that it is true. Never in the history of the world was
Jesus of Nazareth so interesting and predominant. Between Buddha, teaching
the blessing of eternal sleep, and Christ, teaching the blessing of eternal
life, mankind has been long divided, but slowly, surely, the influence of
the Christ has overtaken that of the Buddha until that portion of the world
which has advanced most by process of evolution from the primal state of
man now worships at the shrine of Christ and him risen from the dead, not
at the sign of Buddha and total oblivion.
The blessed birthright from God, the glory of heaven, the teaching and
example of the Prince of Peace--have been engulfed beneath oceans of
ignorance and superstition through two thousand years of embittered
controversy. During the dark ages coming down even to our own time the very
light of truth was shut out from the eyes and hearts and minds of men. The
blood of the martyrs we were assured in those early days was the seed of
the church. The blood of the martyrs was the blood of man--weak, cruel,
fallible man, who, whether he got his inspiration from the Tiber or the
Rhine, from Geneva, from Edinburgh or from Rome, did equally the devil's
work in God's name. None of the viceregents of heaven, as they claimed to
be, knew much or seemed to care much about the word of the Gentle One of
Bethlehem, whom they had adopted as their titular divinity much as men in
commerce adopt a trade-mark.
II
It was knock-down and drag-out theology, the ruthless machinery of
organized churchism--the rank materialism of things temporal--not the
teachings of Christ and the spirit of the Christian religion--which so long
filled the world with blood and tears.
I have often in talking with intelligent Jews expressed a wonder that they
should stigmatize the most illustrious Jew as an impostor, saying to them:
"What matters it whether Jesus was of divine or human parentage--a human
being or an immortal spirit? He was a Jew: a glorious, unoffending Jew,
done to death by a mob of hoodlums in Jerusalem. Why should not you and I
call him Master and kneel together in love and pity at his feet?"
Never have I received any satisfying answer. Partyism--churchism--will
ever stick to its fetish. Too many churches--or, shall I say, church
fabrics--breeding controversy where there should be agreement, each sect
and subdivision fighting phantoms of its fancy. In the city that once
proclaimed itself eternal there is war between the Quirinal and the
Vatican, the government of Italy and the papal hierarchy. In France the
government of the republic and the Church of Rome are at daggers-drawn.
Before the world-war England and Germany--each claiming to be
Protestant--were looking on askance, irresolute, not as to which side might
be right and which wrong, but on which side "is my bread to be buttered?"
In America, where it was said by the witty Frenchmen we have fifty
religions and only one soup, there are people who think we should begin
to organize to stop the threatened coming of the Pope, and such like! "O
Liberty," cried Madame Roland, "how many crimes are committed in thy name!"
"O Churchism," may I not say, "how much nonsense is trolled off in thy
name!"
I would think twice before trusting the wisest and best of men with
absolute power; but I would trust never any body of men--never any
Sanhedrim, consistory, church congress or party convention--with absolute
power. Honest men are often led to do or to assent, in association, what
they would disdain upon their conscience and responsibility as individuals.
_En masse_ extremism generally prevails, and extremism is always
wrong; it is the more wrong and the more dangerous because it is rarely
wanting for plausible sophistries, furnishing congenial and convincing
argument to the mind of the unthinking for whatever it has to propose.
III
Too many churches and too much partyism! It is love--love through grace of
God--truth where we can find it--which shall irradiate the life that is.
If when we have prepared ourselves for the life to come love be wanting,
nothing else is much worth while. Not alone the love of man for woman,
but the love of woman for woman and of man for man; the divine fraternity
taught us by the Sermon on the Mount; the religion of giving, not of
getting; of whole-hearted giving; of joy in the love and the joy of others.
_Who giveth himself with his alms feeds three--
Himself, his hungering neighbor and Me_.
For myself I can truthfully subscribe to the formula: "I believe in God the
Father Almighty; Maker of heaven and earth. And Jesus Christ, his only Son,
who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered
under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried; He descended into
hell, the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven,
and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty; from thence He
shall come to judge the quick and the dead."
That is my faith. It is my religion. It was my cradle song. It may not be,
dear ones of contrariwise beliefs, your cradle song or your belief, or your
religion. What boots it? Can you discover another in word and deed, in
luminous, far-reaching power of speech and example, to walk by the side of
this the Anointed One of your race and of my belief?
As the Irish priest said to the British prelate touching the doctrine of
purgatory: "You may go further and fare worse, my lord," so may I say to my
Jewish friends--"Though the stars in their courses lied to the Wise Men of
the desert, the bloody history of your Judea, altogether equal in atrocity
to the bloody history of our Christendom, has yet to fulfill the promise
of a Messiah--and were it not well for those who proclaim themselves God's
people to pause and ask, 'Has He not arisen already?'"
I would not inveigh against either the church or its ministry; I would not
stigmatize temporal preaching; I would have ministers of religion as free
to discuss the things of this world as the statesmen and the journalists;
but with this difference: That the objective point with them shall be the
regeneration of man through grace of God and not the winning of office or
the exploitation of parties and newspapers. Journalism is yet too unripe to
do more than guess at truth from a single side. The statesman stands mainly
for political organism. Until he dies he is suspect. The pulpit remains
therefore still the moral hope of the universe and the spiritual light of
mankind.
It must be nonpartisan. It must be nonprofessional. It must be manly and
independent. But it must also be worldy-wise, not artificial, sympathetic,
broad-minded and many-sided, equally ready to smite wrong in high places
and to kneel by the bedside of the lowly and the poor.
I have so found most of the clergymen I have known, the exceptions too few
to remember. In spite of the opulence we see about us let us not take to
ourselves too much conceit. May every pastor emulate the virtues of that
village preacher of whom it was written that:
_Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway,
And fools who came to scoff, remained to pray._
* * * * *
_A man he was to all the country dear,
And passing rich with forty pounds a year._
* * * * *
_His house was known to all the vagrant train,
He chid their wanderings, but relieved their pain;
The long-remembered beggar was his guest,
Whose beard descending swept his aged breast;
The ruined spendthrift, now no longer proud,
Claimed kindred there, and had his claims allowed;
The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay,
Sate by the fire, and talked the night away;
Wept o'er his wounds, or, tales of sorrow done,
Shouldered his crutch, and showed how fields were won.
Pleased with his guests, the good man learned to glow,
And quite forgot their vices in their woe;
Careless their merits or their faults to scan,
His pity gave ere charity began._
IV
I have lived a long life--rather a happy and a busy than a merry
one--enjoying where I might, but, let me hope I may fairly claim, shirking
no needful labor or duty. The result is some accretions to my credit. It
were, however, ingratitude and vanity in me to set up exclusive ownership
of these. They are the joint products and property of my dear wife and
myself.
I do not know just what had befallen if love had failed me, for as far back
as I can remember love has been to me the bedrock of all that is worth
living for, striving for or possessing in this cross-patch of a world of
ours.
I had realized the meaning of it in the beautiful concert of affection
between my father and mother, who lived to celebrate their golden
wedding. My wife and I have enjoyed now the like conjugal felicity
fifty-four--counted to include two years of betrothal, fifty-six years.
Never was a young fellow more in love than I--never has love been more
richly rewarded--yet not without some heartbreaking bereavements.
I met the woman who was to become my wife during the War of Sections--amid
its turmoil and peril--and when at its close we were married, at Nashville,
Tennessee, all about us was in mourning, the future an adventure. It was
at Chattanooga, the winter of 1862-63, that fate brought us together and
riveted our destinies. She had a fine contralto voice and led the church
choir. Doctor Palmer, of New Orleans, was on a certain Sunday well into the
long prayer of the Presbyterian service. Bragg's army was still in middle
Tennessee. There was no thought of an attack. Bang! Bang! Then the bursting
of a shell too close for comfort. Bang! Bang! Then the rattle of shell
fragments on the roof. On the other side of the river the Yankees were upon
us.
The man of God gave no sign that anything unusual was happening. He did not
hurry. He did not vary the tones of his voice. He kept on praying. Nor was
there panic in the congregation, which did not budge.
That was the longest long prayer I ever heard. When it was finally ended,
and still without changing a note the preacher delivered the benediction,
the crowded church in the most orderly manner moved to the several
doorways.
I was quick to go for my girl. By the time we reached the street the firing
had become general. We had to traverse quite half a mile of it before
attaining a place of safety. Two weeks later we were separated for nearly
two years, when, the war over, we found ourselves at home again.
In the meantime her father had fallen in the fight, and in the far South
I had buried him. He was one of the most eminent and distinguished and
altogether the best beloved of the Tennesseeans of his day, Andrew Ewing,
who, though a Democrat, had in high party times represented the Whig
Nashville district in Congress and in the face of assured election declined
the Democratic nomination for governor of the state. A foremost Union
leader in the antecedent debate, upon the advent of actual war he had
reluctantly but resolutely gone with his state and section.
V
The intractable Abolitionists of the North and the radical Secessionists of
the South have much historically to answer for. The racial warp and woof in
the United States were at the outset of our national being substantially
homogeneous. That the country should have been geographically divided and
sectionally set by the ears over the institution of African slavery was
the work of agitation that might have attained its ends by less costly
agencies.
How often human nature seeking its bent prefers the crooked to the straight
way ahead! The North, having in its ships brought the negroes from Africa
and sold them to the planters of the South, putting the money it got for
them in its pocket, turned philanthropist. The South, having bought its
slaves from the slave traders of the North under the belief that slave
labor was requisite to the profitable production of sugar, rice and cotton,
stood by property-rights lawfully acquired, recognized and guaranteed by
the Constitution. Thence arose an irrepressible conflict of economic forces
and moral ideas whose doubtful adjustment was scarcely worth what it cost
the two sections in treasure and blood.
On the Northern side the issue was made to read freedom, on the Southern
side, self-defense. Neither side had any sure law to coerce the other.
Upon the simple right and wrong of it each was able to establish a case
convincing to itself. Thus the War of Sections, fought to a finish so
gallantly by the soldiers of both sides, was in its origination largely a
game of party politics.
The extremists and doctrinaires who started the agitation that brought it
about were relatively few in number. The South was at least defending its
own. That what it considered its rights in the Union and the Territories
being assailed it should fight for aggressively lay in the nature of the
situation and the character of the people. Aggression begot aggression, the
unoffending negro, the provoking cause, a passive agent. Slavery is gone.
The negro we still have with us. To what end?
Life indeed is a mystery--a hopelessly unsolved problem. Could there be
a stronger argument in favor of a world to come than may be found in the
brevity and incertitude of the world that is? Where this side of heaven
shall we look for the court of last resort? Who this side of the grave
shall be sure of anything?
At this moment the world having reached what seems the apex of human
achievement is topsy-turvy and all agog. Yet have we the record of any
moment when it was not so? That to keep what we call the middle of the road
is safest most of us believe. But which among us keeps or has ever kept the
middle of the road? What else and what next? It is with nations as with
men. Are we on the way to another terrestrial collapse, and so on ad
infinitum to the end of time?
VI
The home which I pictured in my dreams and projected in my hopes came to me
at last. It arrived with my marriage. Then children to bless it. But it
was not made complete and final--a veritable Kentucky home--until the
all-round, all-night work which had kept my nose to the grindstone had been
shifted to younger shoulders I was able to buy a few acres of arable land
far out in the county--the County of Jefferson!--and some ancient brick
walls, which the feminine genius to which I owe so much could convert to
itself and tear apart and make over again. Here "the sun shines bright" as
in the song, and--
_The corn tops ripe and the meadows in the bloom
The birds make music all the day._
They waken with the dawn--a feathered orchestra--incessant, fearless--for
each of its pieces--from the sweet trombone of the dove to the shrill
clarionet of the jay--knows that it is safe. There are no guns about. We
have with us, and have had for five and twenty years, a family of colored
people who know our ways and meet them intelligently and faithfully.
When we go away--as we do each winter and sometimes during the other
seasons--and come again--dinner is on the table, and everybody--even to
Tigue and Bijou, the dogs--is glad to see us. Could mortal ask for more?
And so let me close with the wish of my father's old song come true--the
words sufficiently descriptive of the reality:
_In the downhill of life when I find I'm declining,
May my fate no less fortunate be
Than a snug elbow chair can afford for reclining
And a cot that o'erlooks the wide sea--
A cow for my dairy, a dog for my game.
And a purse when my friend needs to borrow;
I'll envy no nabob his riches, nor fame,
Nor the honors that wait him to-morrow._
_And when at the close I throw off this frail cov'ring
Which I've worn for three-score years and ten--
On the brink of the grave I'll not seek to keep hov'ring
Nor my thread wish to spin o'er again.
But my face in the glass I'll serenely survey,
And with smiles count each wrinkle and furrow--
That this worn-out old stuff which is thread-bare to-day_
