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Title: “Marse Henry”

Author: Henry Watterson

Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8460]
[Most recently updated: February 2, 2020]

Language: English

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“Marse Henry”

An Autobiography

by Henry Watterson

_Illustrated_

[Illustration: Henry Watterson (About 1908)]

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.

[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”]

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 originally 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.

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: Artemus 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 ninetenth 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
disappearance 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.]

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.


[Illustration:  Henry Watterson—Fifty Years Ago]




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 Woodfire 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 Cleveland 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 Mr. 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” approached 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 became 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 failure 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 Shall
become everlasting to-morrow._




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