[Illustration: Henry Watterson (About 1908)]

"Marse Henry"

An Autobiography

By

Henry Watterson

Volume I

TO MY FRIENDALEXANDER KONTAWITH 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

Illustrations

Henry Watterson (About 1908)

Henry Clay--Painted at Ashland by Dodge for The Hon. Andrew Ewing ofTennessee-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"--"Belland Everett" Ticket

Artemus Ward

General Leonidas Polk--Lieutenant General C. S. A. Killed in Georgia, June14, 1864--P. E. Bishop of Louisiana

Mr. Watterson's Editorial Staff in 1868 When the Three Daily Newspapersof 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

"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 ofrecord and memory as I may retain. I have been something of a student oflife; an observer of men and women and affairs; an appraiser of theircharacter, their conduct, and, on occasion, of their motives. Thus, a kindof instinct, which bred a tendency and grew to a habit, has led me intomany and diverse companies, the lowest not always the meanest. 

Circumstance has rather favored than hindered this bent. I was born in aparty camp and grew to manhood on a political battlefield. I have livedthrough stirring times and in the thick of events. In a vein colloquial andreminiscential, not ambitious, let me recall some impressions which thesehave left upon the mind of one who long ago reached and turned the cornerof the Scriptural limitation; who, approaching fourscore, does not yet feelpainfully 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 ofthe soul to reveal. 

It is not my purpose to be or to seem oracular. I shall not write after themanner of Rousseau, whose Confessions had been better honored in the breachthan the observance, and in any event whose sincerity will bear question;nor have I tales to tell after the manner of Paul Barras, whose Memoirshave earned him an immortality of infamy. Neither shall I emulate thegrandiose volubility and self-complacent posing of Metternich andTalleyrand, whose pretentious volumes rest for the most part unopened upondusty shelves. I aspire to none of the honors of the historian. It shall bemy aim as far as may be to avoid the garrulity of the raconteur and torestrain the exaggerations of the ego. But neither fear of the charge ofself-exploitation nor the specter of a modesty oft too obtrusive to bereal shall deter me from a proper freedom of narration, where, though inthe main but a humble chronicler, I must needs appear upon the scene andspeak of myself; for I at least have not always been a dummy and havesometimes in a way helped to make history. 

In my early life--as it were, my salad days--I aspired to becoming whatold Simon Cameron called "one of those damned literary fellows" and ThomasCarlyle less profanely described as "a leeterary celeebrity. " But somemalign fate always sat upon my ambitions in this regard. It was easy tobecome The National Gambler in Nast's cartoons, and yet easier The NationalDrunkard through the medium of the everlasting mint-julep joke; but thephantom 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 noone can now prove them on me, for even at that jejune period I had theprudence to use an anonym--the Harpers, luckily for me, declined to publisha volume of my poems. I went to London, carrying with me "the greatAmerican novel. " It was actually accepted by my ever too partial friend, Alexander Macmillan. But, rest his dear old soul, he died and hissuccessors refused to see the transcendent merit of that performance, aview which my own maturing sense of belles-lettres values subsequently cameto verify. 

When George Harvey arrived at the front I "'ad 'opes. " But, Lord, thatcast-iron man had never any bookish bowels of compassion--or politicaleither for the matter of that!--so that finally I gave up fiction andresigned myself to the humble category of the crushed tragi-comedians ofliterature, who inevitably drift into journalism. 

Thus my destiny has been casual. A great man of letters quite thwarted, Ibecame a newspaper reporter--a voluminous space writer for the press--nowand again an editor and managing editor--until, when I was nearly thirtyyears of age, I hit the Kentucky trail and set up for a journalist. I didthis, however, with a big "J, " nursing for a while some faint ambitionsof statesmanship--even office--but in the end discarding everything thatmight obstruct my entire freedom, for I came into the world an insurgent, or, as I have sometimes described myself in the Kentucky vernacular, "afree nigger and not a slave nigger. "

II

Though born in a party camp and grown to manhood on a political battlefieldmy earlier years were most seriously influenced by the religious spiritof the times. We passed to and fro between Washington and the two familyhomesteads in Tennessee, which had cradled respectively my father andmother, Beech Grove in Bedford County, and Spring Hill in Maury County. Both my grandfathers were devout churchmen of the Presbyterian faith. MyGrandfather Black, indeed, was the son of a Presbyterian clergyman, wholived, preached and died in Madison County, Kentucky. He was descended, Iam assured, in a straight line from that David Black, of Edinburgh, who, asBurkle tells us, having declared in a sermon that Elizabeth of Englandwas a harlot, and her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, little better, went toprison for it--all honor to his memory. 

My Grandfather Watterson was a man of mark in his day. He was decidedly aconstructive--the projector and in part the builder of an important railwayline--an early friend and comrade of General Jackson, who was all toobusy to take office, and, indeed, who throughout his life disdained theephemeral honors of public life. The Wattersons had migrated directly fromVirginia to Tennessee. 

The two families were prosperous, even wealthy for those days, and myfather had entered public life with plenty of money, and General Jacksonfor his sponsor. It was not, however, his ambitions or his career thatinterested me--that is, not until I was well into my teens--but the campmeetings and the revivalist preachers delivering the Word of God with moreor less of ignorant yet often of very eloquent and convincing fervor. 

The wave of the great Awakening of 1800 had not yet subsided. Bascom wasstill alive. I have heard him preach. The people were filled withthoughts of heaven and hell, of the immortality of the soul and the lifeeverlasting, of the Redeemer and the Cross of Calvary. The camp groundwitnessed an annual muster of the adjacent countryside. The revival wasa religious hysteria lasting ten days or two weeks. The sermons wereappeals to the emotions. The songs were the outpourings of the soul inecstacy. There was no fanaticism of the death-dealing, proscriptive sort;nor any conscious cant; simplicity, childlike belief in future rewards andpunishments, the orthodox Gospel the universal rule. There was a good dealof doughty controversy between the churches, as between the parties; butlove of the Union and the Lord was the bedrock of every confession. 

Inevitably an impressionable and imaginative mind opening to such sightsand sounds as it emerged from infancy must have been deeply affected. UntilI was twelve years old the enchantment of religion had complete possessionof my understanding. With the loudest, I could sing all the hymns. Beingearly taught in music I began to transpose them into many sorts of rhythmicmovement for the edification of my companions. Their words, aimed directlyat the heart, sank, never to be forgotten, into my memory. To this day Ican repeat the most of them--though not without a break of voice--while toomuch dwelling upon them would stir me to a pitch of feeling which a life ofactivity in very different walks and ways and a certain self-control I havebeen always able to command would scarcely suffice to restrain. 

The truth is that I retain the spiritual essentials I learned then andthere. I never had the young man's period of disbelief. There has neverbeen a time when if the Angel of Death had appeared upon the scene--nomatter how festal--I would not have knelt with adoration and welcome; nevera time on the battlefield or at sea when if the elements had opened toswallow me I would not have gone down shouting!

Sectarianism in time yielded to universalism. Theology came to seem to mymind more and more a weapon in the hands of Satan to embroil and divide thechurches. I found in the Sermon on the Mount leading enough for my ethicalguidance, in the life and death of the Man of Galilee inspiration enough tofulfill my heart's desire; and though I have read a great deal of moderninquiry--from Renan and Huxley through Newman and Döllinger, embracingdebates before, during and after the English upheaval of the late fiftiesand the Ecumenical Council of 1870, including the various raids upon theWestminster Confession, especially the revision of the Bible, down towriters like Frederic Harrison and Doctor Campbell--I have found nothingto shake my childlike faith in the simple rescript of Christ and Himcrucified. 

III

From their admission into the Union, the States of Kentucky andTennessee have held a relation to the politics of the country somewhatdisproportioned to their population and wealth. As between the two partiesfrom the Jacksonian era to the War of Sections, each was closely and hotlycontested. If not the birthplace of what was called "stump oratory, " inthem that picturesque form of party warfare flourished most and lastedlongest. The "barbecue" was at once a rustic feast and a forum of politicaldebate. Especially notable was the presidential campaign of 1840, the yearof 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 theother, cherishing for both a deep affection, and, maybe, over-estimatingtheir hold upon the public interest. Excepting General Jackson, who wasa fighter and not a talker, their public men, with Henry Clay and FelixGrundy in the lead, were "stump orators. " He who could not relate andimpersonate an anecdote to illustrate and clinch his argument, nor "makethe welkin ring" with the clarion tones of his voice, was politically goodfor nothing. James K. Polk and James C. Jones led the van of stump oratorsin Tennessee, Ben Hardin, John J. Crittenden and John C. Breckenridgein Kentucky. Tradition still has stories to tell of their exploits andprowess, their wit and eloquence, even their commonplace sayings anddoings. They were marked men who never failed to captivate their audiences. The system of stump oratory had many advantages as a public force and wasboth edifying and educational. There were a few conspicuous writers forthe press, such as Ritchie, Greeley and Prentice. But the day of personaljournalism 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 aWhig. "

In those primitive days there were only Whigs and Democrats. Men took theirpolitics, as their liquor, "straight"; and this father of mine was anundoubting Democrat of the schools of Jefferson and Jackson. He hadsucceeded James K. Polk in Congress when the future President was electedgovernor of Tennessee; though when nominated he was little beyond the agerequired 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 couarge. And so he was--a man of tremendous force ofcharacter, yet of surpassing sweetness of disposition; singularlydisdainful of office, and indeed of preferment of every sort; a profusemaker and a prodigal spender of money; who, his needs and recognitionassured, cared nothing at all for what he regarded as the costly gloriesof the little great men who rattled round in places often much too big forthem. 

Immediately succeeding Mr. Polk, and such a youth in appearance, heattracted instant attention. His father, my grandfather, allowed him alarger income than was good for him--seeing that the per diem then paidCongressmen was altogethr insufficient--and during the earlier days of hissojourn in the national capital he cut a wide swath; his principal yokematein the pleasures and dissipations of those times being Franklin Pierce, atfirst a representative and then a senator from New Hampshire. Fortunatelyfor both of them, they were whisked out of Washington by their families in1843; my father into the diplomatic service and Mr. Pierce to the seclusionof his New England home. They kept in close touch, however, the one withthe other, and ten years later, in 1853, were back again upon the sceneof their rather conspicuous frivolity, Pierce as President of the UnitedStates, my father, who had preceded him a year or two, as editor of theWashnigton Union, the organ of the Administration. 

When I was a boy the national capital was still rife with stories of theirescapades. One that I recall had it that on a certain occasion returningfrom an excursion late at night my father missed his footing and fell intothe canal that then divided the city, and that Pierce, after many fruitlessefforts, unable to assist him to dry land, exclaimed, "Well, Harvey, Ican't get you out, but I'll get in with you, " suiting the action to theword. And there they were found and rescued by a party of passers, verywell pleased with themselves. 

My father's absence in South America extended over two years. My mother'shealth, 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. Acommittee of citizens went on a steamer down the river to meet him, thewife and child along, of course, and the story was told that, seated onthe paternal knee curiously observant of every detail, the brat suddenlyexclaimed, "Ah ha, pa! Now you've got on your store clothes. But when magets you up at Beech Grove you'll have to lay off your broadcloth and puton your jeans, like I do. "

Being an only child and often an invalid, I was a pet in the family andmany tales were told of my infantile precocity. On one occasion I had afight with a little colored boy of my own age and I need not say got theworst of it. My grandfather, who came up betimes and separated us, said, "he has blackened your eye and he shall black your boots, " thereaftermaking me a deed to the lad. We grew up together in the greatest amityand in due time I gave him his freedom, and again to drop into thevernacular--"that was the only nigger I ever owned. " I should add that inthe "War of Sections" he fell in battle bravely fighting for the freedom ofhis race. 

It is truth to say that I cannot recall the time when I was notpassionately opposed to slavery, a crank on the subject of personalliberty, if I am a crank about anything. 

IV

In those days a less attractive place than the city of Washington couldhardly be imagined. It was scattered over an ill-paved and half-filledoblong extending east and west from the Capitol to the White House, andnorth 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 gameof it, for it was both unpromising and unsightly. 

Private carriages were not numerous. Hackney coaches had to be especiallyordered. The only public conveyance was a rickety old omnibus which, makinghourly trips, plied its lazy journey between the Navy Yard and Georgetown. There was a livery stable--Kimball's--having "stalls, " as the sleepingapartments above came to be called, thus literally serving man andbeast. These stalls often lodged very distinguished people. Kimball, theproprietor, a New Hampshire Democrat of imposing appearance, was one of thelast Washingtonians to wear knee breeches and a ruffled shirt. He was agreat 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 sideof the open entrance reading a book--Mr. Kimball seated on the other sidereading a newspaper--when there came down the street a tall, greasy-lookingperson, who as he approached said: "Kimball, I have another letter herefrom Frank. "

"Well, what does Frank say?"

Then the letter was produced, read and discussed. 

It was all about the coming National Democratic Convention and itsprospective nominee for President of the United States, "Frank" seeming tobe a principal. To me it sounded very queer. But I took it all in, and assoon 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 acandidate for President and talks it over with the keeper of a liverystable? What have such people to do with such things?"

My father said: "My son, Mr. Kimball is an estimable man. He has beenan important and popular Democrat in New Hampshire. He is not withoutinfluence here. The Frank they talked about is Gen. Franklin Pierce, of NewHampshire, an old friend and neighbor of Mr. Kimball. General Pierce servedin Congress with me and some of us are thinking that we may nominate himfor 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 aboutGen. Franklin Pierce. His nomination was no surprise to me, though to thecountry at large it was almost a shock. He had been nowhere seriouslyconsidered. 

In illustration of this a funny incident recurs to me. At Nashville thenight of the nomination a party of Whigs and Democrats had gathered infront of the principal hotel waiting for the arrival of the news, amongthe rest Sam Bugg and Chunky Towles, two local gamblers, both undoubtingDemocrats. At length Chunky Towles, worn out, went off to bed. The resultwas finally flashed over the wires. The crowd was nonplused. "Who the hellis Franklin Pierce?" passed from lip to lip. 

Sam Bugg knew his political catechism well. He proceeded at length to tellall about Franklin Pierce, ending with the opinion that he was the manwanted and would be elected hands down, and he had a thousand dollars tobet on it. 

Then he slipped away to tell his pal. 

"Wake up, Chunky, " he cried. "We got a candidate--Gen. Franklin Pierce, ofNew Hampshire. "

"Who the----"

"Chunky, " says Sam. "I am ashamed of your ignorance. Gen. Franklin Pierceis the son of Gen. Benjamin Pierce, of Revolutionary fame. He has servedin both houses of Congress. He declined a seat in Polk's Cabinet. He wondistinction 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, theWhig leader of the gathering, who had been deriding the convention, thecandidate and all things else Democratic, exclaimed:

"Here comes Chunky Towles. He's a good Democrat; and I'll bet ten to one henever heard of Franklin Pierce in his life before. "

Chunky Towles was one of the handsomest men of his time. His strong suitwas his unruffled composure and cool self-control. "Mr. Petway, " sayshe, "you would lose your money, and I won't take advantage of any man'signorance. Besides, I never gamble on a certainty. Gen. Franklin Pierce, sir, is a son of Gen. Benjamin Pierce of Revolutionary memory. He served inboth houses of Congress, sir--refused a seat in Polk's Cabinet, sir--wondistinction 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, theRevolutionary hero. He was of my own age. I was planning the good time wewere going to have in the White House when tidings came that he had beenkilled in a railway accident. It was a grievous blow, from which thestricken mother never recovered. One of the most vivid memories andaltogether the saddest episode of my childhood is that a few weeks later Iwas 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 herarms 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 gooff to the Mexican War and of making flags striped with pokeberryjuice--somehow the name of the fruit was mingled with that of thePresident--though a visit quite a year before to The Hermitage, whichadjoined 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 thisis Harvey's boy, " I looking the while in vain for the "hickory, " of which Ihad heard so much. 

On the personal side history owes General Jackson reparation. Hispersonality needs indeed complete reconstruction in the popular mind, whichmisconceives him a rough frontiersman having few or none of the socialgraces. In point of fact he came into the world a gentleman, a leader, aknight-errant who captivated women and dominated men. 

I shared when a young man the common belief about him. But there is ampleproof of the error of this. From middle age, though he ever liked a horserace, 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 totake command of the army, Governor Claiborne gave him a dinner; and afterhe had gone Mrs. Claiborne, who knew European courts and society betterthan any other American woman, said to her husband: "Call that man abackwoodsman? He is the finest gentleman I ever met!"

There is another witness--Mr. Buchanan, afterward President--who tells howhe took a distinguished English lady to the White House when Old Hickorywas President; how he went up to the general's private apartment, where hefound him in a ragged _robe-de-chambre_, smoking his pipe; how, whenhe intimated that the President might before coming down slick himself abit, he received the half-laughing rebuke: "Buchanan, I once knew a man inVirginia who made himself independently rich by minding his own business";how, when he did come down, he was _en règle_; and finally how, aftera half hour of delightful talk, the English lady as they regained thestreet 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 mylife. "

VI

The Presidential campaign of 1848--and the concurrent return of the Mexicansoldiers--seems but yesterday. We were in Nashville, where the camp firesof the two parties burned fiercely day and night, Tennessee a debatable, even a pivotal state. I was an enthusiastic politician on the Cass andButler side, and was correspondingly disappointed when the election wentagainst us for Taylor and Fillmore, though a little mollified when, on hisway 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 WhiteHouse. He died in July, 1850, and was succeeded by Millard Fillmore. It iscommon 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 himhighly. Once he told me that Daniel Webster had said to him: "Fillmore, Ilike 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 theHouse, 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 oldbald-headed gentleman who was good to me and would put his arm about me andstroll with me across the rotunda to the Library of Congress and getme books to read. I was not so young as not to know that he was anex-President of the United States, and to realize the meaning of it. He hadbeen the oldest member of the House when my father was the youngest. He wasJohn Quincy Adams. By chance I was on the floor of the House when he fellin his place, and followed the excited and tearful throng when they borehim into the Speaker's Room, kneeling by the side of the sofa with animprovised fan and crying as if my heart would break. 

One day in the spring of 1851 my father took me to a little hotel onPennsylvania Avenue near the Capitol and into a stuffy room, where a snuffyold man wearing an ill-fitting wig was busying himself over a pile ofdocuments. 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 heis. "

My enthusiasm over the Cass and Butler campaign had not subsided. Inevitably General Cass was to me the greatest of heroes. My father hadbeen and always remained his close friend. Later along we dwelt together atWillard's Hotel, my mother a chaperon for Miss Belle Cass, afterward MadameVon 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 treasurea 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 haveseen General Cass; what do you think of him?"

And the general patting me affectionately on the head laughingly said: "Hethinks 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--noother word can proprly describe them--Jack Dade, who signed himself "theHonorable John W. Dade, of Virginia;" and Beau Hickman, who hailed fromnowhere and acquired the pseudonym through sheer impudence. In one way andanother 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 livedlong and died in office--indeed, toward the close an office was actuallycreated for him. 

Dade had been a schoolmate of John Tyler--so intimate they were that atcollege they were called "the two Jacks"--and when the death of Harrisonmade Tyler President, the "off Jack, " as he dubbed himself, went up to theWhite House and said: "Jack Tyler, you've had luck and I haven't. You mustdo 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 arefit to fill?"

"Well, " said Dade, "I have heard them talking round here of a place theycall a sine-cu-ree--big pay and no work--and if there is one of them leftand 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 ofthe Federal prison of the District of Columbia. He assumed his post with_empressement_, called the prisoners before him and made them anaddress. 

"Ladies and gentlemen, " said he; "I have been chosen by my friend, thePresident of the United States, as superintendent of this eleemosynaryinstitution. It is my intention to treat you all as a Virginia gentlemanshould treat a body of American ladies and gentlemen gathered here from allparts of our beloved Union, and I shall expect the same considerationin return. Otherwise I will turn you all out upon the cold mercies of aheartless world and you will have to work for your living. "

There came to Congress from Alabama a roistering blade by the name ofMcConnell. He was something of a wit. During his brief sojourn in thenational capital he made a noisy record for himself as an all-round, all-night man about town, a dare-devil and a spendthrift. His firstencounter with Col. John W. Dade, of Virginia, used to be one of thestandard local jokes. Colonel Dade was seated in the barroom of Brown'sHotel early one morning, waiting for someone to come in and invite him todrink. 

Presently McConnell arrived. It was his custom when he entered a saloon toask 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 thehonor of drinking?"

"My name, " answered McConnell, "is Felix Grundy McConnell, begad! I am amember of Congress from Alabama. My mother is a justice of the peace, myaunt keeps a livery stable, and my grandmother commanded a company in theRevolution 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 canhave 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 inseparablecompanions and the best of friends. 

McConnell had a tragic ending. In James K. Polk's diary I find two entriesunder the dates, respectively, of September 8 and September 10, 1846. Thefirst of these reads as follows: "Hon. Felix G. McConnell, a representativein Congress from Alabama called. He looked very badly and as though he hadjust recovered from a fit of intoxication. He was sober, but was pale, hiscountenance haggard and his system nervous. He applied to me to borrow onehundred 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 inhis dissipation. I had known him in his youth and had not the moral courageto 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 notelegibly. I think it probable that he will never pay me. He informed me hewas detained at Washington attending to some business in the Indian Office. I supposed he had returned home at the adjournment of Congress until hecalled to-day. I doubt whether he has any business in Washington, but fearhe 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 myprivate secretary during the absence of J. Knox Walker, that Hon. FelixG. McConnell, a representative in Congress from the state of Alabama, had committed suicide this afternoon at the St. Charles Hotel, where heboarded. On Tuesday last Mr. McConnell called on me and I loaned him onehundred dollars. [See this diary of that day. ] I learn that but a shorttime 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 themfrom 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 havenot learned, but he had not written much when he said he would go to hisroom. 

"In the course of the morning I learn he went into the city and paid ahackman 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 throatwas cut. A hawkbill knife was found near him. A jury of inquest was heldand found a verdict that he had destroyed himself. It was a melancholyinstance of the effects of intemperance. Mr. McConnell when a youth residedat Fayetteville in my congressional district. Shortly after he grew up tomanhood he was at my instance appointed postmaster of that town. He was atrue Democrat and a sincere friend of mine. 

"His family in Tennessee are highly respectable and quite numerous. Theinformation as to the manner and particulars of his death I learned fromMr. 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 hehas left a wife and three or four children. "

Poor Felix Grundy McConnell! At a school in Tennessee he was a roommate ofmy father, who related that one night Felix awakened with a scream from abad 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, Idare say--for he lost his job as keeper of the district prison--yet neverwholly out-at-heel, scrupulously neat in his person no matter how seedy theattire. On the completion of the new wings of the Capitol and the removalof the House to its more commodious quarters he was made custodian of theold 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 expectantpoliticians elected to Congress have entered Washington all hope, eager todare and do, to come away broken in health, fame and fortune, happy to getback home--sometimes unable to get away, to linger on in obscurity andpoverty to a squalid and wretched old age. 

I have lived long enough to have known many such: Senators who have filledthe galleries when they rose to speak; House heroes living while they couldon borrowed money, then hanging about the hotels begging for money to buydrink. 

There was a famous statesman and orator who came to this at last, of whomthe typical and characteristic story was told that the holder of a claimagainst the Government, who dared not approach so great a man with so muchas the intimation of a bribe, undertook by argument to interest him in themerit of the case. 

The great man listened and replied: "I have noticed you scattering yourmeans 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 asto 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 anextraordinary run of luck, won heavily, and playing all night, forgettingabout his engagement, went to bed at daylight, not appearing in the Houseat all. The bill was called, and there being nobody to represent it, underthe rule it went over and to the bottom of the calendar, killed for thatsession at least. 

The day after the claimant met his recreant attorney on the avenue face toface and took him to task for his delinquency. 

"Ah, yes, " said the great man, "you are the little rascal who tried tobribe me the other day. Here is your dirty money. Take it and be off withyou. I was just seeing how far you would go. "

The comment made by those who best knew the great man was that if insteadof winning in the gambling house he had lost he would have been up betimesat his place in the House, and doing his utmost to pass the claimant's billand obtain a second fee. 

Another memory of those days has to do with music. This was the coming ofJenny 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 sellthe programs of the concert--a new thing in artistic showmanry. "I don'twant a paper carrier, or a newsboy, " said he, "but a young gentleman, threeor four young gentlemen. " I was sent to him. We readily agreed upon thecommission to be received--five cents on each twenty-five cent program--theoldest of old men do not forget such transactions. But, as an extrapercentage for "organizing the force, " I demanded a concert seat. Choiceseats were going at a fabulous figure and Barnum at first demurred. ButI told him I was a musical student, stood my ground, and, perhaps seeingsomething unusual in the eager spirit of a little boy, he gave in and thebargain was struck. 

Two of my pals became my assistants. But my sales beat both of them hollow. Before the concert began I had sold my programs and was in my seat. Irecall that my money profit was something over five dollars. 

The bell-like tones of the Jenny Lind voice in "Home, Sweet Home, " and "TheLast Rose of Summer" still come back to me, but too long after for me tomake, or imagine, comparisons between it and the vocalism of Grisi, Sontagand Parepa-Rosa. 

Meeting Mr. Barnum at Madison Square Garden in New York, when he wasrunning one of his entertainments there, I told him the story, and we had ahearty laugh, both of us very much pleased, he very much surprised to findin me a former employee. 

One of my earliest yearnings was for a home. I cannot recall the time whenI was not sick and tired of our migrations between Washington City and thetwo grand-paternal homesteads in Tennessee. The travel counted for much ofmy aversion to the nomadic life we led. The stage-coach is happier in thecontemplation than in the actuality. Even when the railways arrived therewere 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 inEastern Tennessee and in three of the Border States, Maryland, Kentuckyand Missouri, it was nowise a civil war--could have been averted must everremain a question of useless speculation. In recognizing the institution ofAfrican slavery, with no provision for its ultimate removal, the FederalUnion set out embodying the seeds of certain trouble. The wiser heads ofthe Constitutional Convention perceived this plainly enough; its dissonanceto the logic of their movement; on the sentimental side its repugnancy; onthe practical side its doubtful economy; and but for the tobacco growersand the cotton planters it had gone by the board. The North soon foundslave labor unprofitable and rid itself of slavery. Thus, restricted to theSouth, it came to represent in the Southern mind a "right" which the Southwas bound to defend. 

Mr. Slidell told me in Paris that Louis Napoleon had once said to him inanswer to his urgency for the recognition of the Southern Confederacy: "Ihave talked the matter over with Lord Palmerston and we are both of theopinion that as long as African slavery exists at the South, France andEngland cannot recognize the Confederacy. They do not demand its instantabolition. But if you put it in course of abatement and final abolishmentthrough a term of years--I do not care how many--we can intervene to somepurpose. As matters stand we dare not go before a European congress withsuch a proposition. "

Mr. Slidell passed it up to Richmond. Mr. Davis passed it on to thegenerals in the field. The response he received on every hand was thestatement that it would disorganize and disband the Confederate Armies. Yet we are told, and it is doubtless true, that scarcely one Confederatesoldier in ten actually owned a slave. 

Thus do imaginings become theories, and theories resolve themselvesinto claims; and interests, however mistaken, rise to the dignity ofprerogatives. 

II

The fathers had rather a hazy view of the future. I was witness to thedecline and fall of the old Whig Party and the rise of the RepublicanParty. There was a brief lull in sectional excitement after the CompromiseMeasures of 1850, but the overwhelming defeat of the Whigs in 1852 and thedominancy of Mr. Jefferson Davis in the cabinet of Mr. Pierce brought theagitation back again. Mr. Davis was a follower of Mr. Calhoun--though itmay be doubted whether Mr. Calhoun would ever have been willing to go tothe length of secession--and Mr. Pierce being by temperament a Southerneras well as in opinions a pro-slavery Democrat, his Administrationfell under the spell of the ultra Southern wing of the party. TheKansas-Nebraska Bill was originaly harmless enough, but the repeal of theMissouri 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 inhis bonnet. He thought the South would, as it could, nominate and elect himPresident. 

Personally he was a most lovable man--rather too convivial--and for awhile in 1852 it looked as though he might be the Democratic nominee. Hiscandidacy was premature, his backers overconfident and indiscreet. 

"I like Douglas and am for him, " said Buck Stone, a member of Congress anddelegate to the National Democratic Convention from Kentucky, "thoughI consider him a good deal of a damn fool. " Pressed for a reason hecontinued; "Why, think of a man wanting to be President at forty years ofage, and obliged to behave himself for the rest of his life! I wouldn'ttake the job on any such terms. "

The proposed repeal of the Missouri Compromise opened up the slavery debateanew and gave it increased vitality. Hell literally broke loose among thepolitical elements. The issues which had divided Whigs and Democrats wentto 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 thebeaten politicians led by Mr. Seward. Rampant sectionalism was at firstkept a little in the background. There were on either side concealments andreserves. Many patriotic men put the Union above slavery or antislavery. But the two sets of rival extremists had their will at last, and in sevenshort years deepened and embittered the contention to the degree thatdisunion 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 leaderof the Union wing of the Democratic Party--headed in 1860 the Douglaspresidential ticket in Tennessee--and remained a Unionist during the War ofSections. He broke away from Pierce and retired from the editorship of theWashiongton 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 returnto the Senate of the United States in a year or two, when he and Oregon'sdelegate in Congress, Gen. Joseph Lane--the Lane of the Breckenridge andLane 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 havehappened to me if he had accepted the appointment and I had grownto manhood on the Pacific Coast. As it was I attended a school inPhiladelphia--the Protestant Episcopal Academy--came home to Tennesseein 1856, and after a season with private tutors found myself back in thenational capital in 1858. 

It was then that I began to nurse some ambitions of my own. I was going tobe a great man of letters. I was going to write histories and dramas andromances and poetry. But as I had set up for myself I felt in honor boundmeanwhile to earn my own living. 

III

I take it that the early steps of every man to get a footing may be ofinterest when fairly told. I sought work in New York with indifferentsuccess. Mr. Raymond of the Times, hearing me play the piano at which fromchildhood I had received careful instruction, gave me a job as "musicalcritic" during the absence of Mr. Seymour, the regular critic. I must havedone my work acceptably, since I was not fired. It included a report of thedebut of my boy-and-girl companion, Adelina Patti, when she made her firstappearance in opera at the Academy of Music. But, as the saying is, I didnot "catch on. " There might be a more promising opening in Washington, andthither I repaired. 

The Daily States had been established there by John P. Heiss, who withThomas Ritchie had years before established the Washington Union. Roger A. Pryor was its nominal editor. But he soon took himself home to his belovedVirginia and came to Congress, and the editorial writing on the States wasbeing done by Col. A. Dudley Mann, later along Confederate commissioner toFrance, preceding Mr. Slidell. 

Colonel Mann wished to work incognito. I was taken on as a kind ofgo-between and, as I may say, figurehead, on the strength of being myfather's son and a very self-confident young gentleman, and began to get mynewspaper education in point of fact as a kind of fetch-and-carry forMajor Heiss. He was a practical newspaper man who had started the Union atNashville as well as the Union at Washington and the Crescent--maybe it wasthe Delta--at New Orleans; and for the rudiments of newspaper work I couldscarcely have had a better teacher. 

Back of Colonel Mann as a leader writer on the States was a remarkablewoman. She was Mrs. Jane Casneau, the wife of Gen. George Casneau, ofTexas, 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 endingthe 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 starteda settlement they called Eagle Pass. Storm died, the Texas outbreak began, and the young widow was driven back to San Antonio, where she met andmarried 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 andactually wrote the final treaty. It was she who dubbed William Walker"the little gray-eyed man of destiny, " and put the nickname "Old Fuss andFeathers" on General Scott, whom she heartily disliked. 

[Illustration: Henry Clay--Painted at Ashland by Dodge for the Hon. AndrewEwing of Tennessee--The Original Hangs in Mr. Watterson's Library at"Mansfield"]

A braver, more intellectual woman never lived. She must have been a beautyin her youth; was still very comely at fifty; but a born insurrecto anda terror with her pen. God made and equipped her for a filibuster. Shepossessed infinite knowledge of Spanish-American affairs, looked like aSpanish woman, and wrote and spoke the Spanish language fluently. Herobsession was the bringing of Central America into the Federal Union. Butshe was not without literary aspirations and had some literary friends. Among these was Mrs. Southworth, the novelist, who had a lovely home inGeorgetown, and, whatever may be said of her works and articles, was alovely woman. She used to take me to visit this lady. With Major Heiss shedivided 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 tookgreat pains with me and mothered me in the absence of my own mother, whohad 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 breakingout, a Central American mission, and she and he were lost by shipwreck ontheir way to this post, somewhere in Caribbean waters. 

My immediate yokemate on the States was John Savage, "Jack, " as he wascommonly called; a brilliant Irishman, who with Devin Reilley and JohnMitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher, his intimates, and Joseph Brennan, hisbrother-in-law, made a pretty good Irishman of me. They were '48 men, withliterary gifts of one sort and another, who certainly helped me along withmy writing, but, as matters fell out, did not go far enough to influence mycharacter, for they were a wild lot, full of taking enthusiasm and juveniledecrepitude of judgment, ripe for adventures and ready for any enterprisethat promised fun and fighting. 

Between John Savage and Mrs. Casneau I had the constant spur ofcommendation and assistance as well as affection. I passed all my sparetime in the Library of Congress and knew its arrangements at least as wellas Mr. Meehan, the librarian, and Robert Kearon, the assistant, much to thesurprise 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 Statesto write occasional letters from Washington to the Philadelphia Press. Good fortune like ill fortune rarely comes singly. Without anybody'sinterposition I was appointed to a clerkship, a real "sinecure, " in theInterior Department by Jacob Thompson, the secretary, my father's oldcolleague in Congress. When the troubles of 1860-61 rose I was literallydoing "a land-office business, " with money galore and to spare. Somehow, Idon't know how, I contrived to spend it, though I had no vices, and workedlike a hired man upon my literary hopes and newspaper obligations. 

Life in Washington under these conditions was delightful. I did not knowhow my heart was wrapped up in it until I had to part from it. My fatherstood high in public esteem. My mother was a leader in society. All doorswere open to me. I had many friends. Going back to Tennessee in themidsummer of 1861, via Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, there happened a railwaybreak and a halt of several hours at a village on the Ohio. I strolleddown to the river and sat myself upon the brink, almost despairing--nighheartbroken--when I began to feel an irresistible fascination about theswift-flowing stream. I leaped to my feet and ran away; and that is theonly thought of suicide that I can recall. 

IV

Mrs. Clay, of Alabama, in her "Belle of the Fifties" has given a graphicpicture of life in the national capital during the administrations ofPierce and Buchanan. The South was very much in the saddle. Pierce, as Ihave said, was Southern in temperament, and Buchanan, who to those he didnot like or approve had, as Arnold Harris said, "a winning way of makinghimself hateful, " was an aristocrat under Southern and feminine influence. 

I was fond of Mr. Pierce, but I could never endure Mr. Buchanan. His veryvoice gave offense to me. Directed by a periodical publication to make asketch 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 thecourtier clumsier still. Nevertheless, as a friend of my father and mother"Old Buck" might have been a little more considerate than he was with alad 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 straightinto the Douglas camp. 

Taking nearly sixty years to think it over I have reached the conclusionthat 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 Housebefore the scrap began. He was of course on terms of intimacy with all thesecession leaders, especially Mr. Slidell, of Louisiana, like himselfa Northerner by birth, and Mr. Mason, a thick-skulled, ruffle-shirtedVirginian. It was not in him or in Mr. Pierce, with their antecedents andassociations, to be uncompromising Federalists. There was no clear law togo on. Moderate men were in a muck of doubt just what to do. With HoraceGreeley Mr. Buchanan was ready to say "Let the erring sisters go. " Thisindeed 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 RepublicanParty--was at the door and coming into power. Lifelong pro-slaveryDemocrats could not look on with equanimity, still less with complaisance, and doubtless Pierce and Buchanan to the end of their days thought lessof the Republicans than of the Confederates. As a consequence Republicanwriters have given quarter to neither of them. 

It will not do to go too deeply into the account of those days. The timeswere out of joint. I knew of two Confederate generals who first tried forcommissions in the Union Army; gallant and good fellows too; but they areboth dead and their secret shall die with me. I knew likewise a famousUnion general who was about to resign his commission in the army to go withthe South but was prevented by his wife, a Northern woman, who had obtainedof Mr. Lincoln a brigadier's commission. 

V

In 1858 a wonderful affair came to pass. It was Mrs. Senator Gwin's fancydress ball, written of, talked of, far and wide. I did not get to attendthis. My costume was prepared--a Spanish cavalier, Mrs. Casneau'sdoing--when I fell ill and had with bitter disappointment to read aboutit next day in the papers. I was living at Willard's Hotel, and one of myvolunteer nurses was Mrs. Daniel E. Sickles, a pretty young thing who wassoon to become the victim of a murder and world scandal. Her husband was amember of the House from New York, and during his frequent absences I usedto take her to dinner. Mr. Sickles had been Mr. Buchanan's Secretary ofLegation 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 ayear later Sickles, having killed her seducer--a handsome, unscrupulousfellow who understood how to take advantage of a husband's neglect--forgaveher and brought her home in the face of much obloquy, in my heart of heartsI did homage to his courage and generosity, for she was then as he and Iboth knew a dying woman. She did die but a few months later. He was by nomeans a politician after my fancy or approval, but to the end of his days Iwas his friend and could never bring myself to join in the repeated publicoutcries against him. 

Early in the fifties Willard's Hotel became a kind of headquarters for thetwo political extremes. During a long time their social intercoursewas unrestrained--often joyous. They were too far apart, figurativelyspeaking, to come to blows. Truth to say, their aims were after all notso far apart. They played to one another's lead. Many a time have I seenKeitt, of South Carolina, and Burlingame, of Massachusetts, hobnob in theliveliest 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 moreprofane among them interjecting "to hell!" The Secessionists liked to prodthe New Englanders with what the South was going to do when they got toBoston. None of them really meant it--not even Toombs when he talked aboutcalling the muster roll of his slaves beneath Bunker Hill Monument; norHammond, the son of a New England schoolmaster, when he spoke of the"mudsills of the North, " meaning to illustrate what he was saying by theunderpinning of a house built on marshy ground, and not the Northern workpeople. 

Toombs, who was a rich man, not quite impoverished by the war, banishedhimself in Europe for a number of years. At length he came home, andpassing the White House at Washington he called and sent his card to thePresident. General Grant, the most genial and generous of men, had him comedirectly up. 

[Illustration: W. P. Hardee, Lieutenant General C. S. A. ]

"Mr. President, " said Toombs, "in my European migrations I have made it arule when arriving in a city to call first and pay my respects to the Chiefof Police. "

The result was a most agreeable hour and an invitation to dinner. Notlong after this at the hospitable board of a Confederate general, then anAmerican senator, Toombs began to prod Lamar about his speech in the Houseupon the occasion of the death of Charles Sumner. Lamar was not quick toquarrel, though when aroused a man of devilish temper and courage. Thesubject had become distasteful to him. He was growing obviously restiveunder Toombs' banter. The ladies of the household apprehending what wascoming left the table. 

Then Lamar broke forth. He put Toombs' visit to Grant, "crawling at theseat of power, " against his eulogy of a dead enemy. I have never heardsuch 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 theolden time. But when Lamar, white with rage, had finished, Toombs without aruffle said, "Lamar, you surprise me, " and the host, with the rest ofus, took it as a signal to rise from table and rejoin the ladies in thedrawing-room. Of course nothing came of it. 

Toombs was as much a humorist as an extremist. I have ridden with him underfire 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; "Inever 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 andgraceful 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. Theybrought with them a baby in arms with the wife's sister for its nurse--amis-step which was quickly corrected. I cannot now tell just how I came tobe very intimate with them except that they lived at Willard's Hotel. Hisname 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 thenext House and then President of the United States. This was particularlylaughable to my mother and Mrs. Linn Boyd, the wife of the contemporarySpeaker, who had very solid presidential aspirations of his own. 

The suggestion perhaps originated with Mrs. Banks, to whom we two wereardently devoted. I have not seen her since those days, more than sixtyyears ago. But her beauty, which then charmed me, still lingers in mymemory--a gentle, sweet creature who made much of us boys--and two yearslater when Mr. Banks was actually elected Speaker I was greatly elated andtook some of the credit to myself. Twenty years afterwards General Banksand I had our seats close together in the Forty-fourth Congress, and he didnot 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 storyI was glad to throw myself into the breach. He had been a Speaker of theHouse, a general in the field and a Governor of Massachusetts, but was afaded old man, very commonplace, and except for the little post he heldunder Government pitiably helpless. 

Colonel George Walton was one of my father's intimates and an imposingand familiar figure about Washington. He was the son of a signer of theDeclaration of Independence, a distinction in those days, had been mayor ofMobile and was an unending raconteur. To my childish mind he appeared toknow everything that ever had been or ever would be. He would tell mestories by the hour and send me to buy him lottery tickets. I afterwardlearned that that form of gambling was his mania. I also learned that manyof his stories were apocryphal or very highly colored. 

One of these stories especially took me. It related how when he was on ayachting 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 tomake 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 wasperfectly disgusted. "

An old lady in Philadelphia, whilst I was at school, heard me mentionColonel Walton--a most distinguished, religious old lady--and said to me, "Henry, my son, you should be ashamed to speak of that old villainor 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 itto Colonel Walton the next time I went to the hotel where he was thenliving--I have since learned, with a lady not his wife, though he was thenthree score and ten--and he cried, "That old hag! Good Lord! Don't theyever die!"

Seeing every day the most distinguished public men of the country, and withmany of them brought into direct acquaintance by the easy intercourse ofhotel life, destroyed any reverence I might have acquired for officialstation. Familiarity may not always breed contempt, but it is a veritableeye opener. To me no divinity hedged the brow of a senator. I knew theWhite House too well to be impressed by its architectural grandeur withoutand rather bizarre furnishments within. 

VII

I have declaimed not a little in my time about the ignoble trade ofpolitics, the collective dishonesty of parties and the vulgarities ofthe self-exploiting professional office hunters. Parties are parties. Professional politics and politicians are probably neither worse norbetter--barring their pretensions--than other lines of human endeavor. Theplay actor must be agreeable on the stage of the playhouse; the politicianon the highways and the hustings, which constitute his playhouse--all theworld 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 avertedthe War of Sections were on either side professional politicians, with hereand there an unselfish, far-seeing, patriotic man, whose admonitions werenot heeded by the people ranging on opposing sides of party lines. The twomost potential of the party leaders were Mr. Davis and Mr. Seward. TheSouth might have seen and known that the one hope of the institution ofslavery lay in the Union. However it ended, disunion led to abolition. Theworld--the whole trend of modern thought--was set against slavery. Butpolitics, based on party feeling, is a game of blindman's buff. Andthen--here I show myself a son of Scotland--there is a destiny. "What is tobe, " says the predestinarian Mother Goose, "will be, though it never cometo pass. "

That was surely the logic of the irrepressible conflict--only it did cometo pass--and for four years millions of people, the most homogeneous, practical and intelligent, fought to a finish a fight over a quiddity; bothdevoted to liberty, order and law, neither seeking any real change in thecharacter of its organic contract. 

Human nature remains ever the same. These days are very like those days. Wehave had fifty years of a restored Union. The sectional fires have quitegone 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; societyas fraudulent as the satirists describe it; yet, when we turn to theuplift--particularly the professional uplift--what do we find but the sameold 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 presshave come through disheartening experience to a realizing sense of thefutility of printer's ink must our academic pundits begin to suspect thefutility of art and letters. Words however cleverly writ on paper are afterall but words. "In a nation of blind men, " we are told, "the one-eyed manis king. " In a nation of undiscriminating voters the noise of the agitatoris apt to drown the voice of the statesman. We have been teaching everybodyto read, nobody to think; and as a consequence--the rule of numbers thelaw of the land, partyism in the saddle--legislation, state and Federal, becomes largely a matter of riding to hounds and horns. All this, which wastrue in the fifties, is true to-day. 

Under the pretense of "liberalizing" the Government the politicians aresacrificing its organic character to whimsical experimentation; its checksand balances wisely designed to promote and protect liberty are beingloosened by schemes of reform more or less visionary; while nowhere do wefind intelligence enlightened by experience, and conviction supported byself-control, interposing to save the representative system of theConstitution from the onward march of the proletariat. 

One cynic tells us that "A statesman is a politician who is dead, " andanother cynic varies the epigram to read "A politician out of a job. "Patriotism cries "God give us men, " but the parties say "Give us votesand offices, " and Congress proceeds to create a commission. Thusresponsibilities are shirked and places are multiplied. 

Assuming, since many do, that the life of nations is mortal even as is thelife of man--in all things of growth and decline assimilating--has not ourworld reached the top of the acclivity, and pausing for a moment may it notbe about to take the downward course into another abyss of collapse andoblivion?

The miracles of electricity the last word of science, what is left forman to do? With wireless telegraphy, the airplane and the automobileannihilating time and space, what else? Turning from the material to theethical it seems of the very nature of the human species to meddle andmuddle. On every hand we see the organization of societies for making menand women over again according to certain fantastic images existing inthe minds of the promoters. "_Mon Dieu_!" exclaimed the visitingFrenchman. "Fifty religions and only one soup!" Since then both the soupsand the religions have multiplied until there is scarce a culinary or moralconception which has not some sect or club to represent it. The uplift isthe 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 dePompadour, who said, "After me the deluge;" but whichever it was, very muchthat thought was in Mr. Buchanan's mind in 1861 as the time for his exitfrom the White House approached. At the North there had been a politicalground-swell; at the South, secession, half accomplished by the GulfStates, yawned in the Border States. Curiously enough, very few believedthat war was imminent. 

As a reporter for the States I met Mr. Lincoln immediately on his arrivalin Washington. He came in unexpectedly ahead of the hour announced, toescape, as was given out, a well-laid plan to assassinate him as he passedthrough 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 hadit that Mr. Buchanan was to be kidnapped and made off with so that VicePresident Breckenridge might succeed and, acting as _de facto_President, throw the country into confusion and revolution, defeating theinauguration of Lincoln and the coming in of the Republicans. It was afigment of drink and fancy. There was never any such scheme. If there hadbeen Breckenridge would not have consented to be party to it. He was a manof unusual mental as well as personal dignity and both temperamentally andintellectually a thorough conservative. 

I had been engaged by Mr. L. A. Gobright, the agent of what became later theAssociated Press, to help with the report of the inauguration ceremoniesthe 4th of March, 1861, and in the discharge of this duty I kept as closeto Mr. Lincoln as I could get, following after him from the senate chamberto the east portico of the capitol and standing by his side whilst hedelivered his inaugural address. 

Perhaps I shall not be deemed prolix if I dwell with some particularityupon an occasion so historic. I had first encountered the newly electedPresident the afternoon of the day in the early morning of which he hadarrived in Washington. It was a Saturday, I think. He came to the capitolunder 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 someothers. I was familiar with the Western type, and whilst Mr. Lincoln wasnot an Adonis, even after prairie ideals, there was about him a dignitythat commanded respect. 

I met him again the next Monday forenoon in his apartment at Willard'sHotel as he was preparing to start to his inauguration, and was struck byhis 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 inaugurationspeech for the Associated Press. I turned it over to Ben Perley Poore, who, like myself, was assisting Mr. Gobright. The President that was about tobe seemed entirely self-possessed; not a sign of nervousness, and veryobliging. As I have said, I accompanied the cortège that passed from thesenate chamber to the east portico. When Mr. Lincoln removed his hat toface 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 andreceived it, holding it during the delivery of the address. I stood justnear 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 ofthe man. 

He delivered that inaugural address as if he had been delivering inauguraladdresses all his life. Firm, resonant, earnest, it announced the coming ofa man, of a leader of men; and in its tone and style the gentlemen whom hehad invited to become members of his political family--each of whom thoughthimself a bigger man than his chief--might have heard the voice and seenthe hand of one born to rule. Whether they did or not, they very soonascertained the fact. From the hour Abraham Lincoln crossed the thresholdof the White House to the hour he went thence to his death, there was nota moment when he did not dominate the political and military situation andhis official subordinates. The idea that he was overtopped at any time byanybody is contradicted by all that actually happened. 

I was a young Democrat and of course not in sympathy with Mr. Lincoln orhis 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 famousIllinois 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 beganto verify this opinion both in his private conversation and in his publicattitude. 

II

I had been an undoubting Union boy. Neither then nor afterward could I befairly classified as a Secessionist. Circumstance rather than conviction orpredilection threw me into the Confederate service, and, being in, I wentthrough with it. 

The secession leaders I held in distrust; especially Yancey, Mason, Slidell, Benjamin and Iverson, Jefferson Davis and Isham G. Harris were notfavorites of mine. Later along I came into familiar association withmost of them, and relations were established which may be described asconfidential and affectionate. Lamar and I were brought together oddlyenough in 1869 by Carl Schurz, and thenceforward we were the most devotedfriends. Harris and I fell together in 1862 in the field, first withForrest and later with Johnston and Hood, and we remained as brothers tothe end, when he closed a great career in the upper house of Congress, andby Republican votes, though he was a Democrat, as president of the Senate. 

He continued in the Governorship of Tennessee through the war. He at notime lost touch with the Tennessee troops, and though not always in thefield, never missed a forward movement. In the early spring of 1864, justbefore the famous Johnston-Sherman campaign opened, General Johnston askedhim to go around among the boys and "stir 'em up a bit. " The Governorinvited 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 Iheard it fifty times shouted from a distant clearing: "Here comes Gov-nerHarris, fellows; g'wine to be a fight. " His appearance at the front hadalways 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 havinglived 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 daysafter the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln, Colonel Forney came to my quartersand, having passed the time of day, said: "The Secretary of War wishes youto be at the department to-morrow morning as near nine o'clock as you canmake it. "

"What does he want, Colonel Forney?" I asked. 

"He is going to offer you the position of private secretary to theSecretary of War, with the rank of lieutenant colonel, and I am verydesirous that you accept it. "

He went away leaving me rather upset. I did not sleep very soundly thatnight. "So, " I argued to myself, "it has come to this, that Forney andCameron, lifelong enemies, have made friends and are going to rob theGovernment--one clerk of the House, the other Secretary of War--and I, amutual choice, am to be the confidential middle man. " I still had a home inTennessee and I rose from my bed, resolved to go there. 

I did not keep the proposed appointment for next day. As soon as I couldmake arrangements I quitted Washington and went to Tennessee, stillunchanged in my preconceptions. I may add, since they were verified byevents, 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. Iwould go back to my books and my literary ambitions and let the storm blowover. It could not last very long; the odds against the South were toogreat. Vain hope! As well expect a chip on the surface of the ocean to liequiet as a lad of twenty-one in those days to keep out of one or the othercamp. On reaching home I found myself alone. The boys were all gone to thefront. The girls were--well, they were all crazy. My native country wasabout to be invaded. Propinquity. Sympathy. So, casting opinions to thewinds 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 goodrebel and went the limit, changing my coat as it were, though not my betterjudgment, for with a gray jacket on my back and ready to do or die, Iretained my belief that secession was treason, that disunion was the heightof 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 ofsecession, 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 bytacit consent they would very soon have been back again seeking readmissionto the Union. 

Man proposes and God disposes. The ways of Deity to man are indeed pastfinding out. Why, the long and dreadful struggle of a kindred people, theawful bloodshed and havoc of four weary years, leaving us at the closemeasurably where we were at the beginning, is one of the mysteries whichshould prove to us that there is a world hereafter, since no great creativeprinciple could produce one with so dire, with so short a span and nothingbeyond. 

III

The change of parties wrought by the presidential election of 1860and completed by the coming in of the Republicans in 1861 was indeedrevolutionary. When Mr. Lincoln had finished his inaugural address andthe crowd on the east portico began to disperse, I reentered the rotundabetween 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, theydiscussing the speech we had just heard. 

Both were sure there would be no war. All would be well, they thought, eachspeaking kindly of Mr. Lincoln. They were among the most eminent men of thetime, I a boy of twenty-one; but to me war seemed a certainty. Recallingthe episode, I have often realized how the intuitions of youth outwit thewisdom and baffle the experience of age. 

I at once resigned my snug sinecure in the Interior Department and, closingmy accounts of every sort, was presently ready to turn my back uponWashington and seek adventures elsewhere. 

They met me halfway and came in plenty. I tried staff duty with GeneralPolk, who was making an expedition into Western Kentucky. In a few weeksillness drove me into Nashville, where I passed the next winter indesultory newspaper work. Then Nashville fell, and, as I was making my wayout of town afoot and trudging the Murfreesboro pike, Forrest, with hissquadron just escaped from Fort Donelson, came thundering by, and I leapedinto an empty saddle. A few days later Forrest, promoted to brigadiergeneral, attached me to his staff, and the next six months it was mainlyguerilla service, very much to my liking. But Fate, if not Nature, haddecided that I was a better writer than fighter, and the Bank of Tennesseehaving bought a newspaper outfit at Chattanooga, I was sent there to editThe Rebel--my own naming--established as the organ of the Tennessee stategovernment. I made it the organ of the army. 

It is not the purpose of these pages to retell the well-known story of thewar. My life became a series of ups and downs--mainly downs--the word beingfrom day to day to fire and fall back; in the Johnston-Sherman campaign, Iserved as chief of scouts; then as an aid to General Hood through the siegeof Atlanta, sharing the beginning of the chapter of disasters that befellthat gallant soldier and his army. I was spared the last and worst of theseby a curious piece of special duty, taking me elsewhere, to which I wasassigned in the autumn of 1864 by the Confederate government. 

This involved a foreign journey. It was no less than to go to England tosell to English buyers some hundred thousand bales of designated cotton tobe thus rescued from spoliation, acting under the supervision and indeedthe orders of the Confederate fiscal agency at Liverpool. 

Of course I was ripe for this; but it proved a bigger job than I hadconceived or dreamed. The initial step was to get out of the country. Buthow? That was the question. To run the blockade had been easy enough afew months earlier. All our ports were now sealed by Federal cruisers andgunboats. There was nothing for it but to slip through the North and to geteither 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 Irepaired. My plan was to get on a Mississippi steamer calling at one ofthe landings for wood. This proved impracticable. I wandered many days andnights, 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 comfortablefarmhouse. It seemed that I was at the end of my tether; I did not knowwhat 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 amorning 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, astepson of Congressman Peaslee, of New Hampshire, who had lived with us atWillard's Hotel--and were there not two children, Charley and Mamie, and adear 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 throughthe lines, and was returning next day. 

"I want to get into Memphis--I am a nephew of Mrs. General Dana. Can youtake me in?" I said to this person. 

After some hesitation he consented to try, it being agreed that my mountand 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 withfriends, loyal Confederates. Then I told them who I was, and all becameexcitement for the next day's adventure. 

We drove down to the Federal outpost. Crenshaw--that was the name of thecotton buyer--showed his pass to the officer in command, who then turned tome. "Captain, " I said, "I have no pass, but I am a nephew of Mrs. GeneralDana. Can you not pass me in without a pass?" He was very polite. It was achain 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 runin 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 aguard. "

"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'sheadquarters. "

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 anymore?" We did not. Then we gave him the bottle of whisky and he disappearedround 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 generalthat he had passed a relative of Mrs. Dana? What then? Provost guard. Drumhead court-martial. Shot at daylight. It seemed best to play out thehand 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 nearbyhackman to the General's residence, and, boldly asking for Mrs. Dana, Iwas more successful. I introduced myself as a teacher of music seekingto return to my friends in the North, working in a word about the oldWashington days, not forgetting "Charley" and "Mamie. " The dear littlewoman was heartily responsive. Both were there, including a pretty girlfrom Philadelphia, and she called them down. "Here is your old friend, Henry Waterman, " she joyfully exclaimed. Then guests began to arrive. Itwas a reception evening. My hope fell. Some one would surely recognize me. Presently a gentleman entered, and Mrs. Dana said: "Colonel Meehan, this ismy particular friend, Henry Waterman, who has been teaching music out inthe country, and wants to go up the river. You will give him a pass, I amsure. " It was the provost marshal, who answered, "certainly. " Now was mytime for disappearing. But Mrs. Dana would not listen to this. General Danawould never forgive her if she let me go. Besides, there was to be a supperand a dance. I sat down again very much disconcerted. The situation wasbecoming awkward. Then Mrs. Dana spoke. "You say you have been teachingmusic. What is your instrument?" Saved! "The piano, " I answered. The girlsescorted me to the rear drawing-room. It was a new Steinway Grand, justset up, and I played for my life. If the black bombazine covering my grayuniform did not break, all would be well. I was having a delightfully goodtime, the girls on either hand, when Mrs. Dana, still enthusiastic, ranin and said, "General Dana is here. Remembers you perfectly. Come and seehim. "

He stood by a table, tall, sardonic, and as I approached he put out hishand 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, mydaughter, take Mr. Watterson to the table!"

Lord! That supper! Canvasback! Terrapin! Champagne! The general had seatedme at his right. Somewhere toward the close those expressive gray eyeslooked 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 seeyour mother. Have you money enough to carry you through? If you have notdon'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 somedancing. 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 theriver by the first steamer. " I was in luck, was I not?

But I made no impression on those girls. Many years after, meeting MamieDana, as the wife of an army officer at Fortress Monroe, I related theMemphis incident. She did not in the least recall it. 

V

I had one other adventure during the war that may be worth telling. It wasin 1862. Forrest took it into his inexperienced fighting head to make acavalry attack upon a Federal stockade, and, repulsed with considerableloss, the command had to disperse--there were not more than two hundred ofus--in order to escape capture by the newly-arrived reinforcements thatswarmed about. We were to rendezvous later at a certain point. Having sometime to spare, and being near the family homestead at Beech Grove, I put inthere. 

It was midnight when I reached my destination. I had been erroneouslyinformed that the Union Army was on the retreat--quite gone from theneighborhood; and next day, believing the coast was clear, I donned asummer suit and with a neighbor boy who had been wounded at Shiloh andinvalided home, rode over to visit some young ladies. We had scarcely beenwelcomed and were taking a glass of wine when, looking across the lawn, wesaw that the place was being surrounded by a body of blue-coats. The storyof their departure had been a mistake. They were not all gone. 

There was no chance of escape. We were placed in a hollow square andmarched across country into camp. Before we got there I had ascertainedthat they were Indianians, and I was further led rightly to surmise what wecalled in 1860 Douglas Democrats. 

My companion, a husky fellow, who looked and was every inch a soldier, wasfirst questioned by the colonel in command. His examination was brief. Hesaid he was as good a rebel as lived, that he was only waiting for hiswound to heal to get back into the Confederate Army, and that if theywanted to hang him for a spy to go ahead. 

I was aghast. It was not he that was in danger of hanging, but myself, asoldier in citizen's apparel within the enemy's lines. The colonel turnedto 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 tobe a very good Union man--a Douglas Democrat--and I am not conscious ofhaving changed my political opinions. "

That softened him and we had an old-fashioned, friendly talk about thesituation, in which I kept the Douglas Democratic end of it well to thefore. He, too, had been a Douglas Democrat. I soon saw that it was mycompanion and not myself whom they were after. Presently Colonel Shook, that being the commandant's name, went into the adjacent stockade andthe boys about began to be hearty and sympathetic. I made them a regularDouglas Democratic speech. They brought some "red licker" and I asked forsome sugar for a toddy, not failing to cite the familiar Sut Lovingoodsaying that "there were about seventeen round the door who said they'dtake 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 Ihoped 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. Hehas no real idea of returning to the Confederate service. He is teachingschool over here at Beech Grove and engaged to be married to one ofthe--girls. If you carry him off a prisoner he will be exchanged back intothe fighting line, and we make nothing by it. There is a hot luncheonwaiting 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 feelentirely 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 assembledblue-coats. 

No lunch for us. We got to our horses, rode away, and that night I was atour rendezvous to tell the tale to those of my comrades who had arrivedbefore me. 

Colonel Shook and I met after the war at a Grand Army reunion where I wasbilled to speak and to which he introduced me, relating the incidentand saying, among other things: "I do believe that when he told me nearWartrace that day twenty years ago that he was a good Union man he told atleast 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 opinionof thoughtful people, the sure precursor of the fall of the doomedConfederacy. I had an affectionate regard for General Hood, but it was mybelief that neither he nor any other soldier could save the day, andbeing out of commission and having no mind for what I conceived aimlesscampaigning through another winter--especially an advance into Tennesseeupon Nashville--I wrote to an old friend of mine, who owned the MontgomeryMail, asking for a job. He answered that if I would come right along andtake the editorship of the paper he would make me a present of half ofit--a proposal so opportune and tempting that forty-eight hours later sawme in the capital of Alabama. 

I was accompanied by my fidus Achates, Albert Roberts. The morning afterour arrival, by chance I came across a printed line which advertised a roomand board for two "single gentlemen, " with the curious affix for thosetimes, "references will be given and required. " This latter caught me. When I rang the visitors' bell of a pretty dwelling upon one of the nearbystreets 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 myfriend Roberts and I moved in. The incident proved in many ways fateful. The military gentleman proved to be Doctor Scott, the post surgeon. Hewas, when we came to know him, the most interesting of men, a son of thatCaptain Scott who commanded Byron's flagship at Missolonghi in 1823; hadas a lad attended the poet and he in his last illness and been in at thedeath, seeing the club foot when the body was prepared for burial. Hiswife was adorable. There were two girls and two boys. To make a long storyshort, Albert Roberts married one of the daughters, his brother the other;the lads growing up to be successful and distinguished men--one a navaladmiral, the other a railway president. When, just after the war, I wasgoing abroad, Mrs. Scott said: "I have a brother living in London to whomI will be glad to give you a letter. "

II

Upon the deck of the steamer bound from New York to London direct, aswe, my wife and I newly married, were taking a last look at the recedingAmerican shore, there appeared a gentleman who seemed by the cut of his jibstartlingly French. We had under our escort a French governess returning toParis. 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 MadameMahoney. 

I was not at all preconceived in his favor, nor did Monsieur Mahoney, uponnearer approach, conciliate my simple taste. In person, manners and apparelhe was quite beyond me. Mrs. Mahoney, however, as we soon called her, was adear, 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 perforcebelow, and cut it as I have worn it ever since. The day before we were todock he took me aside and said:

"Mee young friend"--he had a brogue which thirty years in Algiers, where hehad been consul, and a dozen in Paris as a gentleman of leisure, had notwholly 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 hecalled Mrs. Watterson, "and if you will allow us, we can be of some sarvisto you when we get to town. "

Certainly there was no help for it. I was too ill of the long crossing tooppose him. At Blackwall we took the High Level for Fenchurch Street, atFenchurch Street a cab for the West End--Mr. Mahoney bossing the job--andfinally, in most comfortable and inexpensive lodgings, we were settled inJermyn Street. The Mahoneys were visiting Lady Elmore, widow of a famoussurgeon and mother of the President of the Royal Academy. Thus we wereintroduced to quite a distinguished artistic set. 

It was great. It was glorious. At last we were in London--the dream of myliterary ambitions. I have since lived much in this wondrous city and inmany parts of it between Hyde Park Corner, the heart of May Fair, to theeast end of Bloomsbury under the very sound of Bow Bells. All the way asit were from Tyburn Tree that was, and the Marble Arch that is, to CharingCross and the Hay Market. This were not to mention casual sojourns alongPiccadilly and the Strand. 

In childhood I was obsessed by the immensity, the atmosphere and themystery of London. Its nomenclature embedded itself in my fancy; Hounsditchand Shoreditch, Billingsgate and Blackfriars; Bishopgate, within, andBishopgate, without; Threadneedle Street and Wapping-Old-Stairs; the Innsof Court where Jarndyce struggled with Jarndyce, and the taverns where theMark Tapleys, the Captain Costigans and the Dolly Vardens consorted. 

Alike in winter fog and summer haze, I grew to know and love it, and thosethat may be called its dramatis personae, especially its tatterdemalions, the long procession led by Jack Sheppard, Dick Turpin and Jonathan Wildthe Great. Inevitably I sought their haunts--and they were not all gone inthose days; the Bull-and-Gate in Holborn, whither Mr. Tom Jones repaired onhis arrival in town, and the White Hart Tavern, where Mr. Pickwick fell inwith Mr. Sam Weller; the regions about Leicester Fields and Russell Squaresacred to the memory of Captain Booth and the lovely Amelia and BeckySharp; where Garrick drank tea with Dr. Johnson and Henry Esmond tippledwith Sir Richard Steele. There was yet a Pump Court, and many places alongOxford Street where Mantalini and De Quincy loitered: and Covent Garden andDrury Lane. Evans' Coffee House, or shall I say the Cave of Harmony, andThe Cock and the Cheshire Cheese were near at hand for refreshment in theagreeable society of Daniel Defoe and Joseph Addison, with Oliver Goldsmithand Dick Swiveller and Colonel Newcome to clink ghostly glasses amid thepunch fumes and tobacco smoke. In short I knew London when it was still OldLondon--the knowledge of Temple Bar and Cheapside--before the vandal hordeof 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 amashamed to say--to Mrs. Scott's letter of introduction to her brother. Theaddress 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, notknowing just who Mr. Thomas H. Huxley might be. 

I was conducted to a dark, stuffy little room. The gentleman who met me wasexceedingly handsome and very agreeable. He greeted me cordially and wehad some talk about his relatives in America. Of course my wife and I wereinvited at once to dinner. I was a little perplexed. There was no one totell me about Huxley, or in what way he might be connected with the Schoolof Mines. 

It was a good dinner. There sat at table a gentleman by the name of Tyndalland another by the name of Mill--of neither I had ever heard--but there wasstill another of the name of Spencer, whom I fancied must be a literaryman, for I recalled having reviewed a clever book on Education some fouryears agone by a writer of that name; a certain Herbert Spencer, whom Irightly judged might he be. 

The dinner, I repeat, was a very good dinner indeed--the Huxleys, I tookit, 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 andwished to hear Mrs. Watterson sing, especially Longfellow's Rainy Day, andleft the others of us--Huxley, Mill, Tyndall and myself--at table. Findingthem a little off on the Irish question as well as American affairs, Iset them right as to both with much particularity and a great deal ofsatisfaction to myself. 

Whatever Huxley's occupation, it turned out that he had at least onebook-publishing acquaintance, Mr. Alexander Macmillan, to whom heintroduced me next day, for I had brought with me a novel--the greatAmerican romance--too good to be wasted on New York, Philadelphia orBoston, but to appear simultaneously in England and the United States, to be translated, of course, into French, Italian and German. This wasactually accepted. It was held for final revision. 

We were to pass the winter in Italy. An event, however, called me suddenlyhome. Politics and journalism knocked literature sky high, and thenovel--it was entitled "One Story's Good Till Another Is Told"--was laid byand quite forgotten. Some twenty years later, at a moment when I was beinglashed from one end of the line to the other, my wife said:

"Let us drop the nasty politics and get back to literature. " She hadpreserved the old manuscript, two thousand pages of it. 

"Fetch it, " I said. 

She brought it with effulgent pride. Heavens! The stuff it was! Not agleam, never a radiance. I had been teaching myself to write--I had beenwriting for the English market--perpendicular! The Lord has surely beengood to me. If the "boys" had ever got a peep at that novel, I had beenlost 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 wayfrom Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, where he was to lecture. We had been thebest of friends, were near of an age, and only round-the-corner apart webecame from the first inseparable. I introduced him to the distinguishedscientific set into which chance had thrown me, and he introduced me to avery 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 Isaw of him was the evening of the 21st of December, 1866. He had dined withmy wife and myself, and, accompanied by Arthur Sketchley, who had droppedin after dinner, he bade us good-by and went for his nightly grind, ashe called it. We were booked to take our departure the next morning. His condition was pitiable. He was too feeble to walk alone, and wascontinually struggling to breathe freely. His surgeon had forbidden the useof wine or liquor of any sort. Instead he drank quantities of water, eatinglittle and taking no exercise at all. Nevertheless, he stuck to his lectureand contrived to keep up appearances before the crowds that flocked to hearhim, 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 himmethodically and industriously arranging for his début. He had brought someletters, mainly to newspaper people, and was already making progress towardwhat might be called the interior circles of the press, which are soessential to the success of a newcomer in London. Charles Reade and AndrewHaliday became zealous friends. It was to the latter that he owed hisintroduction to the Savage Club. Here he soon made himself at home. Hismanners, even his voice, were half English, albeit he possessed amost engaging disposition--a ready tact and keen discernment, veryun-English, --and these won him an efficient corps of claquers and backersthroughout the newspapers and periodicals of the metropolis. Thus hissuccess was assured from the first. 

The raw November evening when he opened at Egyptian Hall the room wascrowded with an audience of literary men and women, great and small, fromSwinburne and Edmund Yates to the trumpeters and reporters of the morningpapers. The next day most of these contained glowing accounts. The Timeswas 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 proveda kind of ovation. Seats were engaged for a week in advance. Up and downPiccadilly, from St. James Church to St. James Street, carriages bearingthe first arms in the kingdom were parked night after night; and theevening 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 thelike. 

All this while the poor author of the sport was slowly dying. The demandsupon his animal spirits at the Savage Club, the bodily fatigue of "gettinghimself up to it, " the "damnable iteration" of the lecture itself, wore himout. George, his valet, whom he had brought from America, had finally tolift him about his bedroom like a child. His quarters in Picadilly, as Ihave said, were just opposite the Hall, but he could not go backward andforward without assistance. It was painful in the extreme to see the manwho was undergoing tortures behind the curtain step lightly before theaudience amid a burst of merriment, and for more than an hour sustain thepart of jester, tossing his cap and jingling his bells, a painted death'shead, 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. Atone 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? TheEnglish are scary about death. I'll have to cut it out. "

He had become a contributor to Punch, a lucky rather than smart businessstroke, for it was not of his own initiation. He did not continue hiscontributions after he began to appear before the public, and thediscontinuance was made the occasion of some ill-natured remarks in certainAmerican papers, which very much wounded him. They were largely circulatedand credited at the time, the charge being that Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, the publishers of the English charivari, had broken with him because theEnglish would not have him. The truth is that their original proposal wasmade to him, not by him to them, the price named being fifteen guineas aletter. He asked permission to duplicate the arrangement with some New Yorkperiodical, so as to secure an American copyright. This they refused. Iread the correspondence at the time. "Our aim, " they said, "in makingthe 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, tothat effect. Before he received an answer from Hall he got Carleton'sadvertisement announcing the book. Considering this a piratical design onthe part of Carleton, he addressed that enterprising publisher a savageletter, but the matter was ultimately cleared up to his satisfaction, forhe said just before we parted: "It was all a mistake about Carleton. I didhim an injustice and mean to ask his pardon. He has behaved very handsomelyto me. " Then the letters reappeared in Punch. 

V

Whatever may be thought of them on this side of the Atlantic, their successin England was undeniable. They were more talked about than any currentliterary matter; never a club gathering or dinner party at which they werenot discussed. There did seem something both audacious and grotesque inthis ruthless Yankee poking in among the revered antiquities of Britain, sothat the beef-eating British themselves could not restrain their laughter. They took his jokes in excellent part. The letters on the Tower and Chawsirwere palpable hits, and it was generally agreed that Punch had containednothing better since the days of Yellow-plush. This opinion was notconfined to the man in the street. It was shared by the high-brows of thereviews and the appreciative of society, and gained Artemus the entréewherever he cared to go. 

Invitations pursued him and he was even elected to two or three fashionableclubs. But he had a preference for those which were less conventional. Hisadmission to the Garrick, which had been at first "laid over, " affords anexample of London club fastidiousness. The gentleman who proposed him usedhis pseudonym, Artemus Ward, instead of his own name, Charles F. Browne. Ihad the pleasure of introducing him to Mr. Alexander Macmillan, the famousbook publisher of Oxford and Cambridge, a leading member of the Garrick. Wedined together at the Garrick clubhouse, when the matter was brought up andexplained. The result was that Charles F. Browne was elected at the nextmeeting, 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 withthem. 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 wasone 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 ofit in the spring, and did not realize his true condition. He merelysaid, "I have overworked myself, and must lay by or I shall break downaltogether. " 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 seasonand go to the continent. His receipts averaged about three hundred dollarsa night, whilst his expenses were not fifty dollars. "This, mind you, " heused to say, "is in very hard cash, an article altogether superior to thatof my friend Charles Reade. "

[Illustration: Artemas Ward]

His idea was to set aside out of his earnings enough to make himindependent, and then to give up "this mountebank business, " as hecalled it. He had a great respect for scholarly culture and personalrespectability, and thought that if he could get time and health he mightdo 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 sohighfalutin as the Atlantic nor so popular as Harper's. " His mind wasbeginning to soar above the showman and merrymaker. His manners had alwaysbeen captivating. Except for the nervous worry of ill-health, he was thekind-hearted, unaffected Artemus of old, loving as a girl and liberal as aprince. He once showed me his daybook in which were noted down over fivehundred 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 ofloose fellows black-guarding me at home because I wouldn't let them have asovereign or so over here?"

There was no lack of independence, however, about him. The benefit which hegave Mrs. Jefferson Davis in New Orleans, which was denounced at the Northas toadying to the Rebels, proceeded from a wholly different motive. Hetook a kindly interest in the case because it was represented to him as oneof suffering, and knew very well at the time that his bounty would meetwith 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 theCincinnati editor, and began in his usual jocose way to ask for the needfulcorrection. Halstead resented the proffered familiarity, when Artemus toldhim flatly, suddenly changing front, that he "didn't care a d--n for theCommercial, and the whole establishment might go to hell. " Next day thepaper appeared with a handsome amende, and the two became excellentfriends. "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 agentleman. "

Artemus received many tempting offers from book publishers in London. Several of the Annuals for 1866-67 contain sketches, some of themanonymous, written by him, for all of which he was well paid. He wrote forFun--the editor of which, Mr. Tom Hood, son of the great humorist, was anintimate friend--as well as for Punch; his contributions to the formerbeing printed without his signature. If he had been permitted to remainuntil the close of his season, he would have earned enough, with what hehad already, to attain the independence which was his aim and hope. Hisbest friends in London were Charles Reade, Tom Hood, Tom Robertson, thedramatist, 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, andtherefore had to keep his lodgings something of a mystery. 

So little is known of Artemus Ward that some biographic particulars may notin 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 wealthycitizen; but at his death, when his famous son was yet a lad, left hisfamily little or no property. Charles apprenticed himself to a printer, andserved out his time, first in Springfield and then in Boston. In the lattercity he made the acquaintance of Shilaber, Ben Perley Poore, Halpine, andothers, and tried his hand as a "sketchist" for a volume edited by Mrs. Partington. His early effusions bore the signature of "Chub. " From the Hubhe emigrated to the West. At Toledo, Ohio, he worked as a "typo" and lateras a "local" on a Toledo newspaper. Then he went to Cleveland, where ascity editor of the Plain Dealer he began the peculiar vein from which stilllater he worked so successfully. 

The soubriquet "Artemus Ward, " was not taken from the Revolutionarygeneral. It was suggested by an actual personality. In an adjoining townto 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 purportedto 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 hissketches began to be copied and he became a newspaper favorite. He remainedin Cleveland from 1857 to 1860, when he was called to New York to take theeditorship of a venture called Vanity Fair. This died soon after. Buthe did not die with it. A year later, in the fall of 1861, he made hisappearance as a lecturer at New London, and met with encouragement. Then heset out _en tour_, returned to the metropolis, hired a hall and openedwith "the show. " Thence onward all went well. 

The first money he made was applied to the purchase of the old familyhomestead in Maine, which he presented to his mother. The payments on thisbeing 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 notdestined 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 thesphere in which at that time he was the most prominent figure. There wasthen no Mark Twain or Bret Harte. His rivals were such humorists asOrpheus 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 withthe 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 saidthat he did much to give permanency and respectability to the styleof literature of which he was at once a brilliant illustrator andillustration. His was a short life indeed, though a merry one, and a saddeath. In a strange land, yet surrounded by admiring friends, about toreach the coveted independence he had looked forward to so long, he sank torest, his dust mingling with that of the great Thomas Hood, alongside ofwhom 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 passedfrom the scene; but as an American humorist with whom during half a centuryI was closely intimate and round whom many of my London experiencesrevolve, it may be apropos to speak of him next after his elder. There wasnot lacking a certain likeness between them. 

Samuel L. Clemens and I were connected by a domestic tie, though beforeeither of us were born the two families on the maternal side had beenneighbors and friends. An uncle of his married an aunt of mine--thechildren of this marriage cousins in common to us--albeit, this apart, wewere life-time cronies. He always contended that we were "bloodkin. "

Notwithstanding that when Mark Twain appeared east of the Alleghanies andnorth of the Blue Ridge he showed the weather-beating of the west, thebizarre 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 andthe Lamptons were of good old English stock. Toward the middle of theeighteenth century three younger scions of the Manor of Durham migratedfrom the County of Durham to Virginia and thence branched out intoTennessee, Kentucky and Missouri. 

His mother was the loveliest old aristocrat with a taking drawl, a drawlthat was high-bred and patrician, not rustic and plebeian, which her famousson inherited. All the women of that ilk were gentlewomen. The literary andartistic instinct which attained its fruition in him had percolated throughthe veins of a long line of silent singers, of poets and painters, unbornto the world of expression till he arrived upon the scene. 

These joint cousins of ours embraced an exceedingly large, varied andpicturesque assortment. Their idiosyncrasies were a constant source ofamusement to us. Just after the successful production of his play, TheGilded Age, and the uproarious hit of the comedian, Raymond, in the leadingrole, I received a letter from him in which he told me he had made inColonel Mulberry Sellers a close study of one of these kinsmen and thoughthe had drawn him to the life. "But for the love o' God, " he said, "don'twhisper it, for he would never understand or forgive me, if he did notthrash 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 hewas disgusted by the Raymond portrayal. Except for its popularity andmoney-making, he would have withdrawn it from the stage as, in a fit ofpique, Raymond himself did while it was still packing the theaters. 

The original Sellers had partly brought him up and had been very good tohim. A second Don Quixote in appearance and not unlike the knight of LaMancha in character, it would have been safe for nobody to laugh at JamesLampton, or by the slightest intimation, look or gesture to treat him withinconsideration, 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, tomy colleagues. He was very queer; tall and peaked, wearing a black, swallow-tailed suit, shiny with age, and a silk hat, bound with black crepeto conceal its rustiness, not to indicate a recent death; but his linen asspotless as new-fallen snow. I had my fears. Happily the company, quitedazed by the apparition, proved decorous to solemnity, and the kind oldgentleman, pleased with himself and proud of his "distinguished youngkinsman, " went away highly gratified. 

Not long after this one of his daughters--pretty girls they were, too, andin charm altogether worthy of their Cousin Sam Clemens--was to be married, and Sellers wrote me a stately summons, all-embracing, though stiff andformal, such as a baron of the Middle Ages might have indited to his noblerelative, the field marshal, bidding him bring his good lady and hisretinue and abide within the castle until the festivities were ended, though in this instance the castle was a suburban cottage scarcely bigenough to accommodate the bridal couple. I showed the bombastic buthospitable and genuine invitation to the actor Raymond, who chanced to beplaying in Louisville when it reached me. He read it through with care andreread it. 

"Do you know, " said he, "it makes me want to cry. That is not the man I amtrying to impersonate at all. "

Be sure it was not; for there was nothing funny about the spiritual beingof Mark Twain's Colonel Mulberry Sellers; he was as brave as a lion and asupright as Sam Clemens himself. 

When a very young man, living in a woodland cabin down in the Pennyrileregion 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 overlongin 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 ofhimself. When at last he reached home, he found his wife ill in bed and thechildren nearly starved for lack of food. He said never a word, but walkedout of the cabin, tied himself to a tree, and was wildly horsewhippinghimself when the cries of the frightened family summoned the neighborsand he was brought to reason. He never touched an intoxicating drop fromthat day to his death. 

II

Another one of our fantastic mutual cousins was the "Earl of Durham. " Iought to say that Mark Twain and I grew up on old wives' tales of estatesand titles, which, maybe due to a kindred sense of humor in both of us, wetreated with shocking irreverence. It happened some fifty years ago thatthere turned up, first upon the plains and afterward in New York andWashington, a lineal descendant of the oldest of the Virginia Lamptons--hehad somehow gotten hold of or had fabricated a bundle of documents--whowas what a certain famous American would have called a "corker. " He worea sombrero with a rattlesnake for a band, and a belt with a couple ofsix-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 Markto me, "and I coughed it up and have been coughing them up, whenever he'saround, with punctuality and regularity. "

The "Earl" was indeed a terror, especially when he had been drinking. Hisbelief 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 hesaid 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 ahundred years ago. They had long before dissipated the estates. Whateverthe title, it lapsed. The present earldom is a new creation, not the samefamily at all. But, I tell you what, if you'll put up five hundred dollarsI'll put up five hundred more, we'll fetch our chap across and set him inas a claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy's fat boy won't be a marker tohim!"

He was so pleased with his conceit that later along he wrote a novel andcalled it The Claimant. It is the only one of his books, though I nevertold him so, that I could not enjoy. Many years after, I happened to seeupon a hotel register in Rome these entries: "The Earl of Durham, " andin 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 ap--were yet in the peerage. A Lambton was Earl of Durham. The next timeI saw Mark I rated him on his deception. He did not defend himself, saidsomething 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 havehad him come up. "

III

His mind turned ever to the droll. Once in London I was living with myfamily at 103 Mount Street. Between 103 and 102 there was the parochialworkhouse, quite a long and imposing edifice. One evening, upon coming infrom 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 uponfinding that next to 102--presumably 103--was the workhouse. He had lovedme, but had always feared that I would end by disgracing the family--beinghanged or something--but the "work'us, " that was beyond him; he had notthought it would come to that. And so on through pages of horseplay; hisrelief on ascertaining the truth and learning his mistake, his regret atnot 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 latercame 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 wouldbe hard to say. His griefs were tempered by a vein of stoicism. He was amedley of contradictions. Unconventional to the point of eccentricity, hissense of his proper dignity was sound and sufficient. Though lavish inthe use of money, he had a full realization of its value and made closecontracts for his work. Like Sellers, his mind soared when it sailedfinancial 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 ofall the world he most needed, a truly lovely and wise helpmate, who kepthim in bounds and headed him straight and right while she lived. She wasthe best of housewives and mothers, and the safest of counsellors andcritics. She knew his worth; she appreciated his genius; she understoodhis limitations and angles. Her death was a grievous disaster as well as astaggering blow. He never wholly recovered from it. 

IV

It was in the early seventies that Mark Twain dropped into New York, wherethere was already gathered a congenial group to meet and greet him. JohnHay, quoting old Jack Dade's description of himself, was wont to speak ofthis group as "of high aspirations and peregrinations. " It radiatedbetween Franklin Square, where Joseph W. Harper--"Joe Brooklyn, " we calledhim--reigned in place of his uncle, Fletcher Harper, the man of geniusamong the original Harper Brothers, and the Lotos Club, then in IrvingPlace, and Delmonico's, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and FourteenthStreet, with Sutherland's in Liberty Street for a downtown place ofluncheon resort, not to forget Dorlon's in Fulton Market. 

[Illustration: General Leonidas Polk--Lieutenant General C. S. A. --Killed inGeorgia 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 "aman of letters among men of the world and a man of the world among men ofletters, " a very apt phrase appropriated from Doctor Johnson, and MajorConstable, a giant, who looked like a dragoon and not a bookman, yethad known Sir Walter Scott and was sprung from the family of Edinburghpublishers. Bret Harte had but newly arrived from California. WhitelawReid, though still subordinate to Greeley, was beginning to make himselffelt in journalism. John Hay played high priest to the revels. OccasionallyI made a pious pilgrimage to the delightful shrine. 

Truth to tell, it emulated rather the gods than the graces, though all ofus had literary leanings of one sort and another, especially late at night;and Sam Bowles would come over from Springfield and Murat Halstead fromCincinnati to join us. Howells, always something of a prig, livingin Boston, held himself at too high account; but often we had JosephJefferson, then in the heyday of his career, with once in a while EdwinBooth, who could not quite trust himself to go our gait. The fine fellowswe caught from oversea were innumerable, from the elder Sothern and Salaand Yates to Lord Dufferin and Lord Houghton. Times went very well thosedays, and whilst some looked on askance, notably Curtis and, rather oddly, Stedman, and thought we were wasting time and convivializing more than wasgood for us, we were mostly young and hearty, ranging from thirty to fiveand 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 ofanimal spirit, sometimes perhaps of gaiety unguarded--though each shade, treading the Celestian way, as most of them do, and recurring to thoseNoctes Ambrosianæ, might e'en repeat to the other the words on a memorableoccasion 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 apractical joke of his suggestion played upon Murat Halstead. A party ofus were supping after the theater at the old Brevoort House. A card wasbrought 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, "thatyou were not here, but that if Mr. Halstead would answer just as well Iwould fetch him. The fellow is as innocent as a lamb and doesn't knoweither of you. I am going to introduce you as Halstead and we'll have somefun. "

No sooner said than done. The reporter proved to be a little bald-headedcherub newly arrived from the isle of dreams, and I lined out to him acolumn or more of very hot stuff, reversing Halstead in every opinion. Ideclared him in favor of paying the national debt in greenbacks. Touchingthe sectional question, which was then the burning issue of the time, I made the mock Halstead say: "The 'bloody shirt' is only a kind ofPickwickian battle cry. It is convenient during political campaigns and onelection day. Perhaps you do not know that I am myself of dyed-in-the-woolSouthern and secession stock. My father and grandfather came to Ohio fromSouth Carolina just before I was born. Naturally I have no sectionalprejudices, but I live in Cincinnati and I am a Republican. "

There was not a little more of the same sort. Just how it passed throughthe World office I know not; but it actually appeared. On returning to thetable I told the company what Mark Twain and I had done. They thought I wasjoking. Without a word to any of us, next day Halstead wrote a note to theWorld repudiating the interview, and the World printed his disclaimer witha line which said: "When Mr. Halstead conversed with our reporter he haddined. " It was too good to keep. A day or two later, John Hay wrote anamusing story for the Tribune, which set Halstead right. 

Mark Twain's place in literature is not for me to fix. Some one has calledhim "The Lincoln of letters. " That is striking, suggestive and apposite. The genius of Clemens and the genius of Lincoln possessed a kinship outsidethe circumstances of their early lives; the common lack of tools to workwith; the privations and hardships to be endured and to overcome; the wayahead through an unblazed and trackless forest; every footstep over astumbling block and each effort saddled with a handicap. But they gotthere, both of them, they got there, and mayhap somewhere beyond the starsthe light of their eyes is shining down upon us even as, amid the thundersof 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 ofyouth--was picturesque in its personalities if not in its architecture. Byno means the least striking of these was General and Senator Sam Houston, of Texas. In his life of adventure truth proved very much stranger thanfiction. 

The handsomest of men, tall and stately, he could pass no way withoutattracting attention; strangers in the Senate gallery first asked to havehim pointed out to them, and seeing him to all appearance idling his timewith his jacknife and bits of soft wood which he whittled into variousshapes 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. Ivanhoewas not more gallant nor Bois-Guilbert fiercer. But the valor and theprowess were tempered by humor. Below the surging subterranean flood thatstirred and lifted him to high attempt, he was a comedian who had tales totell, and told them wondrous well. On a lazy summer afternoon on the shadyside of Willard's Hotel--the Senate not in session--he might be seen, an admiring group about him, spinning these yarns, mostly of personalexperience--rarely if ever repeating himself--and in tone, gesture andgrimace reproducing the drolleries of the backwoods, which from boyhood hadbeen his home. 

He spared not himself. According to his own account he had been in theearly days of his Texas career a drunkard. "Everybody got drunk, " I onceheard him say, referring to the beginning of the Texas revolution, as hegave a side-splitting picture of that bloody episode, "and I realized thatsomebody must get sober and keep sober. "

From the hour of that realization, when he "swore off, " to the hour of hisdeath he never touched intoxicants of any sort. 

He had fought under Jackson, had served two terms in Congress and had beenelected governor of Tennessee before he was forty. Then he fell in love. The young lady was a beautiful girl, well-born and highly educated, aschoolmate of my mother's elder sister. She was persuaded by her family tothrow over an obscure young man whom she preferred, and to marry a youngman 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 startlingrumor, which proved to be true, that the brilliant young couple had come toa parting of the ways. The wife had returned to her people. The husband hadresigned his office and was gone, no one knew where. 

A few years later Mrs. Houston applied for a divorce, which in those dayshad to be granted by the state legislature. Inevitably reports derogatoryto her had got abroad. Almost the first tidings of Governor Houston'swhereabouts were contained in a letter he wrote from somewhere in theIndian 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 hisears. "They are, " he wrote, "as false as hell. If they be not stopped Iwill return to Tennessee and have the heart's blood of him who repeatsthem. A nobler, purer woman never lived. She should be promptly given thedivorce she asks. I alone am to blame. "

She married again, though not the lover she had discarded. I knew her inher old age--a gentle, placid lady, in whose face I used to fancy I couldread lines of sorrow and regret. He, to close this chapter, likewisemarried again a wise and womanly woman who bore him many children and withwhom he lived happy ever after. Meanwhile, however, he had dwelt with theIndians and had become an Indian chief. "Big Drunk, they called me, " hesaid to his familiars. His enemies averred that he brought into the world awhole tribe of half-breeds. 

II

Houston was a rare performer before a popular audience. His speech aboundedwith 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 toEngland. "

Houston paused long enough to center attention upon the quibble and thensaid: "My friend, I first tried, unsuccessfully, to have the United Statestake Texas as a gift. Not until I threatened to turn Texas over to Englanddid I finally succeed. There may be within the sound of my voice some whohave knowledge of sheep culture. They have doubtless seen a motherless lambput to the breast of a cross old ewe who refused it suck. Then the wiseshepherd calls his dog and there is no further trouble. My friend, Englandwas my dog. "

He was inveighing against the New York Tribune. Having described HoraceGreeley as the sum of all villainy--"whose hair is white, whose skin iswhite, whose eyes are white, whose clothes are white, and whose liver is inmy opinion of the same color"--he continued: "The assistant editor ofthe Try-bune is Robinson--Solon Robinson. He is an Irishman, an OrangeIrishman, a redhaired Irishman!" Casting his eye over the audienceand seeing quite a sprinkling of redheads, and realizing that he hadperpetrated a slip of tongue, he added: "Fellow citizens, when I say thatRobinson is a red-haired Irishman I mean no disrespect to persons whosehair is of that color. I have been a close observer of men and women forthirty 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 asmy candid opinion that had it not been for Robinson's red hair he wouldhave been hanged long ago. "

His pathos was not far behind his humor--though he used it sparingly. At acertain town in Texas there lived a desperado who had threatened to killhim on sight. The town was not on the route of his speaking dates but hewent 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 againsta tree armed to the teeth and waiting for him to finish. After a fewopening remarks, he dropped into the reminiscential. He talked of the oldtimes 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 TomGilligan. He fought by my side at San Jacinto. Together we buried poor BillHolman. 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 andwas rushing unarmed through the crowd, tears streaming down his face. 

"For God's sake, Houston, " he cried, "don't say another word and forgive memy 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 aconsequence 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 announcedhimself a candidate for governor of Texas. 

The campaign that followed was of unexampled bitterness. The secession wavewas already mounting high. Houston was an uncompromising Unionist. Hisdefeat was generally expected. But there was no beating such a man in afair and square contest before the people. When the votes were counted heled his competitor by a big majority. As governor he refused two yearslater to sign the ordinance of secession and was deposed from office byforce. He died before the end of the war which so signally vindicated hiswisdom and verified his forecast. 

III

Stephen Arnold Douglas was the Charles James Fox of American politics. Hewas not a gambler as Fox was. But he went the other gaits and was possessedof a sweetness of disposition which made him, like Fox, loved where he waspersonally 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 andCharleston were in high party times nearest alike of any two Americancities. 

Douglas was a Green Mountain boy. He was born in Vermont. As SeargentPrentiss had done he migrated beyond the Alleghanies before he came of age, settling in Illinois as Prentiss had settled in Mississippi, to grow into atypical Westerner as Prentiss into a typical Southerner. 

There was never a more absurd theory than that, begot of sectional aims andthe sectional spirit, which proposed a geographic alignment of Cavalier andPuritan. When sectionalism had brought a kindred people to blows overthe institution of African slavery there were Puritans who fought on theSouthern side and Cavaliers who fought on the Northern side. What wasStonewall Jackson but a Puritan? What were Custer, Stoneman and Kearny butCavaliers? Wadsworth was as absolute an aristocrat as Hampton. 

In the old days before the war of sections the South was full of typicalSoutherners of Northern birth. John A. Quitman, who went from New York, and Robert J. Walker, who went from Pennsylvania to Mississippi; JamesH. Hammond, whose father, a teacher, went from Massachusetts to SouthCarolina. John Slidell, born and bred in New York, was thirty years oldwhen he went to Louisiana. Albert Sidney Johnston, the rose and expectancyof the young Confederacy--the most typical of rebel soldiers--had not adrop of Southern blood in his veins, born in Kentucky a few months afterhis father and mother had arrived there from Connecticut. The list might beextended indefinitely. 

Climate, which has something to do with temperament, has not so much todo with character as is often imagined. All of us are more or lessthe creatures of environment. In the South after a fashion the duelloflourished. Because it had not flourished in the North there rose a notionthat the Northerners would not fight. It proved to those who thought it acostly mistake. 

Down to the actual secession of 1860-61 the issue of issues--the issuebehind all issues--was the preservation of the Union. Between 1820 and1850, by a series of compromises, largely the work of Mr. Clay, itsthreatened disruption had been averted. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill put a sorestrain upon conservative elements North and South. The Whig Party went topieces. Mr. Clay passed from the scene. Had he lived until the presidentialelection of 1852 he would have given his support to Franklin Pierce, asDaniel Webster did. Mr. Buchanan was not a General Jackson. Judge Douglas, who sought to play the rôle of Mr. Clay, was too late. The secessionleaders held the whip hand in the Gulf States. South Carolina was to haveher will at last. Crash came the shot in Charleston Harbor and the fall ofSumter. Curiously enough two persons of Kentucky birth--Abraham Lincolnand Jefferson Davis--led the rival hosts of war into which an untenable andindefensible system of slave labor, for which the two sections were equallyresponsible, had precipitated an unwilling people. 

Had Judge Douglas lived he would have been Mr. Lincoln's main reliance inCongress. As a debater his resources and prowess were rarely equaledand never surpassed. His personality, whether in debate or privateconversation, 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 NationalCapital, a great-niece of Mrs. Madison, whose very natural ambitionsquickened and spurred his own. 

It was fated otherwise. Like Clay, Webster, Calhoun and Blaine he was to bedenied the Presidency. The White House was barred to him. He was not yetfifty when he died. 

Tidings of his death took the country by surprise. But already thesectional battle was on and it produced only a momentary impression, to besoon forgotten amid the overwhelming tumult of events. He has lain in hisgrave now nearly sixty years. Upon the legislation of his time his name waswrit first in water and then in blood. He received less than his desert inlife and the historic record has scarcely done justice to his merit. Hewas as great a party leader as Clay. He could hold his own in debate withWebster and Calhoun. He died a very poor man, though his opportunity forenrichment by perfectly legitimate means were many. It is enough tosay that he lacked the business instinct and set no value upon money;scrupulously upright in his official dealing; holding his senatorial dutiesabove all price and beyond the suspicion of dirt. 

Touching a matter which involved a certain outlay in the winter of 1861, helaughingly said to me: "I haven't the wherewithal to pay for a bottle ofwhisky and shall have to borrow of Arnold Harris the wherewithal to take mehome. "

His wife was a glorious creature. Early one morning calling at their hometo see Judge Douglas I was ushered into the library, where she was engagedsetting things to rights. My entrance took her by surprise. I had oftenseen her in full ballroom regalia and in becoming out-of-door costume, butas, in gingham gown and white apron, she turned, a little startled by mysudden appearance, smiles and blushes in spite of herself, I thought I hadnever seen any woman so beautiful before. She married again--the lover whomgossip said she had thrown over to marry Judge Douglas--and the story wentthat her second marriage was not very happy. 

IV

In the midsummer of 1859 the burning question among the newsmen ofWashington was the Central American Mission. England and France haddisplayed activity in that quarter and it was deemed important that theUnited States should sit up and take notice. An Isthmian canal was beingconsidered. 

Speculation was rife whom Mr. Buchanan would send to represent us. Thepress gang of the National Capital was all at sea. There was scarcely aDemocratic leader of national prominence whose name was not mentioned inthat connection, though speculation from day to day eddied round Mr. JamesS. Rollins, of Missouri, an especial friend of the President and a mostaccomplished public man. 

At the height of excitement I happened to be in the library of the StateDepartment. I was on a step-ladder in quest of a book when I heard amessenger say to the librarian: "The President is in the Secretary's roomand wants to have Mr. Dimitry come there right away. " An inspiration shotthrough me like a flash. They had chosen Alexander Dimitry for the CentralAmerican Mission. 

He was the official translator of the Department of State. Though an ableand learned man he was not in the line of preferment. He was withoutpolitical standing or backing of any sort. At first blush a more unlikely, impossible appointment could hardly be suggested. But--so on the instantI reasoned--he was peculiarly fitted in his own person for the post inquestion. Though of Greek origin he looked like a Spaniard. He spoke theSpanish language fluently. He had the procedure of the State Departmentat his finger's ends. He was the head of a charming domestic fabric--hisdaughters the prettiest girls in Washington. Why not?

I climbed down from my stepladder and made tracks for the office of theafternoon newspaper for which I was doing all-round work. I was barely ontime, the last forms being locked when I got there. I had the editorialpage opened and inserted at the top of the leading column a double-leadedparagraph announcing that the agony was over--that the Gordian knot wascut--that Alexander Dimitry had been selected as Envoy Extraordinary andMinister Plenipotentiary to the Central American States. 

It proved a veritable sensation as well as a notable scoop. To increase myglory the correspondents of the New York dailies scouted it. But in a dayor two it was officially confirmed. General Cass, the Secretary of State, sent for me, having learned that I had been in the department about thetime 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 meabout 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 ofbullying from the Southerners. In the Senate, Chandler was a match forToombs; and in the House, Thaddeus Stevens for Keitt and Lamar. All ofthem, more or less, were playing a game. If sectional war, which wasincessantly threatened by the two extremes, had been keenly realized andseriously considered it might have been averted. Very few believed that itwould come to actual war. 

A convention of Border State men, over which ex-President John Tylerpresided, was held in Washington. It might as well have been held at theNorth Pole. Moderate men were brushed aside, their counsels whistled downthe wind. There was a group of Senators, headed by Wigfall of Texas, whomeant disunion and war, and another group, headed by Seward, Hale andChase, who had been goaded up to this. Reading contemporary history and, seeing the high-mightiness with which the Germans began what we conceivetheir raid upon humanity, we are wont to regard it as evidence ofincredible stupidity, whereas it was, in point of fact, rather amiscalculation of forces. That was the error of the secession leaders. Theyrefused to count the cost. Yancey firmly believed that England would beforced to intervene. The mills of Lancashire he thought could not get onwithout Southern cotton. He was sent abroad. He found Europe solid againstslavery and therefore set against the Confederacy. He came home with whatis called a broken heart--the dreams of a lifetime shattered--and, in akind of dazed stupor, laid himself down to die. With Richmond in flames andthe exultant shouts of the detested yet victorious Yankees in his ears, hedid die. 

Wigfall survived but a few years. He was less a dreamer than Yancey. A manbig of brain and warm of heart he had gone from the ironclad provincialismof South Carolina to the windswept vagaries of Texas. He believed whollythe 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 thanYancey--was an abler man than Jefferson Davis--and but for his affectionsand generous habits he would have made a larger figure in the war, havingled the South's exit from the Senate. 

VI

I do not think that either Hammond or Chestnut, the Senators fromSouth Carolina, both men of parts, had at bottom much belief in thepracticability of the Confederate movement. Neither had the Senators fromArkansas and Alabama, nor Brown, of Mississippi, the colleague of JeffersonDavis. 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 inline was the Vice President, John C. Breckenridge, of Kentucky. He was theBeau Sabreur among statesmen as Albert Sidney Johnston, among soldiers. Never man handsomer in person or more winning in manners. Sprung from arace of political aristocrats, he was born to early and shining successin public life. Of moderate opinions, winning and prudent, wherever heappeared he carried his audience with him. He had been elected on theticket with Buchanan to the second office under the Government, when he wasbut five and thirty years of age. There was nothing for him to gain froma division of the Union; the Presidency, perhaps, if the Union continuedundivided. But he could not resist the onrush of disunionism, went withthe South, which he served first in the field and later as ConfederateSecretary of War, and after a few years of self-imposed exile in Europereturned to Kentucky to die at four and fifty, a defeated and disappointedold man. 

The adjoining state of Tennessee was represented in the Senate by one ofthe most problematic characters in American history. With my father, whoremained his friend through life, he had entered the state legislature in1835, and having served ten years in the lower House of Congress, andfour years as governor of Tennessee he came back in 1857 to the NationalCapital, 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 verysuccessful, to him. Of unknown parentage, the wife he had married before hewas one and twenty had taught him to read. Yet at six and twenty he was inthe 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 sympathieswere easily stirred by rags in distress. But he was uncompromising in hisdetestation of the rich. It was said that he hated "a biled shirt. " Hewould have nothing to do "with people who wore broadcloth, " though hecarefully dressed himself. When, as governor of Tennessee, he came toNashville he refused many invitations to take his first New Year's dinnerwith a party of toughs at the house of a river roustabout. 

There was nothing of the tough about him, however. His language was carefuland exact. I never heard him utter an oath or tell a risqué story. Hepassed quite fifteen years in Washington, a total abstainer from the use ofintoxicants. He fell into the occasional-drink habit during the dark daysof the War. But after some costly experience he dropped it and continued atotal abstainer to the end of his days. 

He had, indeed, admirable self-control. I do not believe a moreconscientious man ever lived. His judgments were sometimes peculiar, butthey were upright and sincere, having reasons, which he could give withpower and effect, behind them. Yet was he a born politician, crafty to adegree, and always successful, relying upon a popular following which neverfailed him. 

In 1860 he supported the quasi-secession Breckenridge and Lane Presidentialticket, but in 1861 he stood true to the Union, retaining his seat in theSenate until he was appointed military governor of Tennessee. Nominated forVice President on the ticket with Lincoln, in 1864, he was elected, andupon the assassination of Lincoln succeeded to the Presidency. Havingserved out his term as President he returned to Tennessee to engage inthe hottest kind of politics, and though at the outset defeated finallyregained his seat in the Senate of the United States. 

He hated Grant with a holy hate. His first act on reëntering the Senate wasto deliver an implacably bitter speech against the President. It was hislast 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 AndrewJohnson was born, which whispered that he was a natural son of WilliamRuffin, an eminent jurist in the earlier years of the nineteenth century. It was analogous to the story that Lincoln was the natural son of variouspaternities from time to time assigned to him. I had my share in runningthat calumny to cover. It was a lie out of whole cloth with nothingwhatever to support or excuse it. I reached the bottom of it to discoverproof of its baselessness abundant and conclusive. In Johnson's case I takeit that the story had nothing other to rest on than the obscurity of hisbirth and the quality of his talents. Late in life Johnson went to Raleighand caused to be erected a modest tablet over the spot pointed out as thegrave of his progenitor, saying, I was told by persons claiming to havebeen present, "I place this stone over the last earthly abode of my allegedfather. "

Johnson, in the saying of the countryside, "out-married himself. " His wifewas a plain woman, but came of good family. One day, when a child, so thelegend ran, she saw passing through the Greenville street in which herpeople lived, a woman, a boy and a cow, the boy carrying a pack over hisshoulder. They were obviously weary and hungry. Extreme poverty couldpresent no sadder picture. "Mother, " cried the girl, "there goes the man Iam going to marry. " She was thought to be in jest. But a few years latershe made her banter good and lived to see her husband President of theUnited States and with him to occupy the White House at Washington. 

Much has been written of the humble birth and iron fortune of AbrahamLincoln. He had no such obstacles to overcome as either Andrew Jacksonor Andrew Johnson. Jackson, a prisoner of war, was liberated, a lad ofsixteen, from the British pen at Charleston, without a relative, a friendor a dollar in the world, having to make his way upward through the mostaristocratic community of the country and the time. Johnson, equallyfriendless 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. Hewas scarcely worse off than most young fellows of his neighborhood, firstin Indiana and then in Illinois. On this side justice has never beenrendered to Jackson and Johnson. In the case of Jackson the circumstancewas forgotten, while Johnson too often dwelt upon it and made capital outof it. 

Under date of the 23rd of May, 1919, the Hon. Josephus Daniels, Secretaryof the Navy, writes me the following letter, which I violate no confidencein reproducing in this connection:

MY DEAR MARSE HENRY:--

I can't tell you how much delight and pleasure your reminiscences in theSaturday Evening Post have given me, as well as the many others who havefollowed them, and I suppose you will put them in a volume when they arefinished, so that we may have the pleasure of reading them in connectedorder. 

As you know, I live in Raleigh and I was very much interested in yourarticle in the issue of April 5, 1919, with reference to Andrew Johnson, inwhich you quote a story that "used to be current in Raleigh, that he wasthe son of William Ruffin, an eminent jurist of the ninetenth century. " Ihad never heard this story, but the story that was gossiped there was thathe was the son of a certain Senator Haywood. I ran that story down andfound that it had no foundation whatever, because if he had been the son ofthe Senator reputed to be his father, the Senator was of the age of twelveyears when Andrew Johnson was born. 

My own information is, for I have made some investigation of it, that thestory about Andrew Johnson's having a father other than the husband of hismother, 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 trustbefore you finish your book that you will make further investigation andbe able to do a like service in repudiating the unjust, idle gossip withreference to Andrew Johnson. In your article you say that persons who claimto have been present when Johnson came to Raleigh and erected a monumentover the grave of his father, declare that Johnson said he placed thisstone over the last earthly abode of "my alleged father. " That is one phaseof the gossip, and the other is that he said "my reputed father, " bothequally 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 ofour leading life insurance company, a gentleman of high character, and ofthe best memory, was present at the time that Johnson made the address fromwhich you quote the rumor. Mr. Cowper wrote an article for The News andObserver, giving the story and relating that Johnson said that "he was gladto come to Raleigh to erect a tablet to his father. " The truth is thatwhile his father was a man of little or no education, he held the positionof janitor at the State Capitol, and he was not wanting in qualities whichmade him superior to his humble position. If he had been living in this dayhe would have been given a lifesaving medal, for upon the occasion of apicnic near Raleigh when the cry came that children were drowning he wasthe first to leap in and endanger his life to save them. 

Andrew Johnson's mother was related to the Chappell family, of which thereare a number of citizens of standing and character near Raleigh, several ofthem having been ministers of the Gospel, and one at least having gaineddistinction as a missionary in China. 

I am writing you because I know that your story will be read and acceptedand I thought you would be glad to have this story, based upon a study andinvestigation and personal knowledge of Mr. Cowper, whose character andcompetency 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 tosell to English buyers was quickly shattered. The cotton was burned and Ifound myself in the early spring of 1865 in the little village of Glendale, a suburb of Cincinnati, where the future Justice Stanley Matthews had hishome. His wife was a younger sister of my mother. My grandmother was stillalive and lived with her daughter and son-in-law. 

I was received with open arms. A few days later the dear old lady said tome: "I suppose, my son, you are rather a picked bird after your adventuresin the South. You certainly need better clothing. I have some money in bankand it is freely yours. "

I knew that my Uncle Stanley had put her up to this, and out of sheercuriosity I asked her how much she could let me have. She named what seemedto me a stupendous sum. I thanked her, told her I had quite a sufficiencyfor the time being, slipped into town and pawned my watch; that is, as Imade light of it afterward in order to escape the humiliation of borrowingfrom an uncle whose politics I did not approve, I went with my collateralto an uncle who had no politics at all and got fifty dollars on it! Beforethe money was gone I had found, through Judge Matthews, congenial work. 

There was in Cincinnati but one afternoon newspaper--the EveningTimes--owned by Calvin W. Starbuck. He had been a practical printer but wasgrown very rich. He received me kindly, said the editorial force was quitefull--must always be, on a daily newspaper--"but, " he added, "my brother, Alexander Starbuck, who has been running the amusements, wants to goa-fishing in Canada--to be gone a month--and, if you wish, you can duringhis absence sub for him. "

It was just to my hand and liking. Before Alexander Starbuck returned theleading editor of the paper fell from a ferryboat crossing the Ohio Riverand was drowned. The next day General Starbuck sent for me and offered methe vacant place. 

"Why, general, " I said, "I am an outlawed man: I do not agree with yourpolitics. I do not see how I can undertake a place so conspicuous andresponsible. "

He replied: "I propose to engage you as an editorial manager. It is asif building a house you should be head carpenter, I the architect. Thedifference in salary will be seventy-five dollars a week against fifteendollars a week. "

I took the place. 

II

The office of the Evening Times was a queer old curiosity shop. I set toand turned it inside out. I had very pronounced journalistic notions of myown and applied them in every department of the sleepy old money-maker. Oneafternoon a week later I put forth a paper whose oldest reader could nothave recognized it. The next morning's Cincinnati Commercial contained aflock of paragraphs to which the Chattanooga-Cincinnati-Rebel Evening Timesfurnished 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 Wardhad been in town a fortnight before he gave me a dinner and had some of hisfriends 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 daylaborer in your city--the merest bird of passage, with my watch at thepawnbroker's. As soon as I am able to get out of town I mean to go--andI came to ask if you can think the personal allusions to me in to-day'spaper, which may lose me my job but can nowise hurt the Times, are quitefair--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 Idid not realize how mean. The mark was so obvious and tempting I could notresist, but--there shall be no more of them. Come, let us go and have adrink. "

That was the beginning of a friendship which brought happiness to both ofus and lasted nearly half a century, to the hour of his death, when, goingfrom Louisville to Cincinnati, I helped to lay him away in Spring GroveCemetery. 

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 seenfor nearly two years, was living with her family. During the summer Mr. Francisco, the business manager of the Evening Times, had a scheme to buythe Toledo Commercial, in conjunction with Mr. Comly, of Columbus, and toengage me as editor conjointly with Mr. Harrison Gray Otis as publisher. Itlooked very good. Toledo threatened Cleveland and Detroit as a lake port. But nothing could divert me. As soon as Parson Brownlow, who was governorof Tennessee and making things lively for the returning rebels, wouldallow, I was going to Nashville. 

About the time the way was cleared my two pals, or bunkies, of theConfederacy, Albert Roberts and George Purvis, friends from boyhood, putin an appearance. They were on their way to the capital of Tennessee. Thefather of Albert Roberts was chief owner of the Republican Banner, an oldand highly respectable newspaper, which had for nearly four years lain in astate of suspension. Their plan now was to revive its publication, Purvisto 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 farmhe 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 forsubscribers and advertising. We divided it into districts, each taking aspecified territory. The way we boys hustled was a sight to see. But theway the community warmed to us was another. When the familiar headline, The Republican Banner, made its apearance there was a popular hallelujah, albeit there were five other dailies ahead of us. A year later there wasonly one, and it was nowise a competitor. 

Albert Roberts had left his girl, Edith Scott, the niece of Huxley, whom Ihave before mentioned, in Montgomery, Alabama. Purvis' girl, Sophie Searcy, was in Selma. Their hope was to have enough money by Christmas each topay a visit to those distant places. My girl was on the spot, and we hadresolved, money or no money, to be married without delay. Before New Year'sthe three of us were wedded and comfortably settled, with funds galore, forthe paper had thrived consumingly. It had thrived so consumingly that aftera 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 relatedelsewhere what came of this and what happened to me. 

III

That bread cast upon the waters--"'dough' put out at usance, " as JosephJefferson used to phrase it--shall return after many days has been I daresay discovered by most persons who have perpetrated acts of kindness, conscious or unconscious. There was a poor, broken-down English actor witha passion for Chaucer, whom I was wont to encounter in the Library ofCongress. His voice was quite gone. Now and again I had him join me in asquare meal. Once in a while I paid his room rent. I was loath to leave himwhen the break came in 1861, though he declared he had "expectations, " andmade sure he would not starve. 

I was passing through Regent Street in London, when a smart brougham droveup 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 propertyand was living in affluence. 

He knew London as only a Bohemian native and to the manner born could knowit. His sense of bygone obligation knew no bounds. Between him and JohnMahoney and Artemus Ward I was made at home in what might be called themysteries and eccentricities of differing phases of life in the Britishmetropolis not commonly accessible to the foreign casual. In many aftervisits this familiar knowledge has served me well. But Newton did not liveto know of some good fortune that came to me and to feel my gratitude tohim, 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 abread-upon-the-water moral, but a certain John Hatcher, the memory of whomin my case illustrates it much better. He was a wit and a poet. He had beenState Librarian of Tennessee. Nothing could keep him out of the service, though he was a sad cripple and wholly unequal to its requirements. He fellill. I had the opportunity to care for him. When the war was over his oldfriend, George D. Prentice, called him to Louisville to take an editorialplace on the Journal. 

About the same time Mr. Walter Haldeman returned from the South and resumedthe suspended publication of the Louisville Courier. He was in the prime oflife, a man of surpassing energy, enterprise and industry, and had withhim the popular sympathy. Mr. Prentice was nearly three score and ten. Thestream had passed him by. The Journal was not only beginning to feel thestrain 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 NashvilleBanner. 

"Here is your man, " said Hatcher to Mr. Prentice and Mr. Henderson, theowners 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 wassatisfied that a union with the Courier was the wisest solution of thenewspaper situation, and told them so. Meanwhile Mr. Haldeman, whom I hadknown in the Confederacy, sent for me. He offered me the same terms forpart ownership and sole editorship of the Courier, which the Journal peoplehad offered me. This I could not accept, but proposed as an alternative theconsolidation of the two on an equal basis. He was willing enough for theconsolidation, but not on equal terms. There was nothing for it but afight. I took the Journal and began to hammer the Courier. 

A dead summer was before us, but Mr. Henderson had plenty of money and waswilling to spend it. During the contest not an unkind word was printed oneither side. After stripping the Journal to its heels it had very littleto go on or to show for what had once been a prosperous business. Butcirculation flowed in. From eighteen hundred daily it quickly mounted toten thousand; from fifteen hundred weekly to fifty thousand. The middle ofOctober 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 lastof October on the edge of town a real-estate sale which Mr. Haldeman and Iattended. Here was my chance for a play. I must have bid up to a hundredthousand dollars and did actually buy nearly ten thousand dollars of thelots put up at auction, relying upon some money presently coming to mywife. 

I could see that it made an impression on Mr. Haldeman. Returning in thecarriage which had brought us out I said: "Mr. Haldeman, I am going to ruinyou. But I am going to run up a money obligation to Isham Henderson I shallnever be able to discharge. You need an editor. I need a publisher. Letus put these two newspapers together, buy the Democrat, and, instead ofcutting one another's throats, go after Cincinnati and St. Louis. You willrecall that I proposed this to you in the beginning. What is the matterwith it now?"

Nothing was the matter with it. He agreed at once. The details were soonadjusted. Ten days later there appeared upon the doorsteps of the city inplace of the three familiar visitors, a double-headed stranger, callingitself the Courier-Journal. Our exclusive possession of the field thusacquired lasted two years. At the end of these we found that at least theappearance of competition was indispensable and willingly acepted an offerfrom a proposed Republican organ for a division of the Press dispatcheswhich we controlled. Then and there the real prosperity of theCourier-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 justbegun. The South was imprisoned, awaiting the executioner. The Constitutionof the United States hung in the balance. The Federal Union faced thethreat of sectional despotism. The spirit of the time was martial law. Thegospel of proscription ruled in Congress. Radicalism, vitalized by themurder of Abraham Lincoln and inflamed by the inadequate effort of AndrewJohnson to carry out the policies of Lincoln, was in the saddle ridingfuriously 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, whichhad not been embraced by the military agencies and federalized machineryerected over the Gulf States, were seriously menaced. Never did newspaperenterprise 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 toadmit that the head of the South was in the lion's mouth and that the firstessential was to get it out. The Courier-Journal proposed to stroke themane, not twist the tail of the lion. Thus it stood between two fires. There arose a not unnatural distrust of the journalistic monopoly createdby the consolidation of the three former dailies into a single newspaper, carrying an unfamiliar hyphenated headline. Touching its policy ofsectional conciliation it picked its way perilously through the crosscurrents of public opinion. There was scarcely a sinister purpose that wasnot alleged against it by its enemies; scarcely a hostile device that wasnot undertaken to put it down and drive it out. 

Its constituency represented an unknown quantity. In any event it had to becreated. Meanwhile, it must rely upon its own resources, sustained by thecourage of the venture, by the integrity of its convictions and aims, andby 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 expectingnothing unusual to happen. They awoke to encounter an uninvited guestarrived 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 pleasedsurprise, because, as it flared before the eye of the startled citizen inbig Gothic letters, The Courier-Journal, there issued thence an aggressiveself-confidence which affronted the _amour propre_ of the sleepyvillagers. They were used to a very different style of newspaper approach. 

Nor was the absence of a timorous demeanor its only offense. The Courierhad its partisans, the Journal and the Democrat had their friends. The triostood as ancient landmarks, as recognized and familiar institutions. Herewas a double-headed monster which, without saying "by your leave" or "blastyour eyes" or any other politeness, had taken possession of each man'sdoorstep, looking very like it had brought its knitting and was come tostay. 

The Journal established by Mr. Prentice, the Courier by Mr. Haldeman andthe Democrat by Mr. Harney, had been according to the standards of thosedays successful newspapers. But the War of Sections had made many changes. At its close new conditions appeared on every side. A revolution had comeinto the business and the spirit of American journalism. 

In Louisville three daily newspapers had for a generation struggled forthe 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 firstor second class. The idea of consolidating the three thus contending todivide a patronage so insufficient, naturally suggested itself during theyears immediately succeeding the war. But it did not take definite shapeuntil 1868. 

Mr. Haldeman had returned from a somewhat picturesque and not altogetherprofitable pursuit of his "rights in the territories" and had resumed thesuspended publication of the Courier with encouraging prospects. I hadsucceeded 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 withactivity on both sides, but without the publication of an unkind word oneither, a union of forces seemed exigent. To practical men the need of thiswas not a debatable question. All that was required was an adjustment ofthe details. Beginning with the simple project of joining the Courier andthe Journal, it ended by the purchase of the Democrat, which it did notseem safe to leave outside. 

V

The political conditions in Kentucky were anomalous. The Republican Partyhad not yet definitely taken root. Many of the rich old Whigs, who had heldto the Government--to save their slaves--resenting Lincoln's EmancipationProclamation, had turned Democrats. Most of the before-the-war Democratshad gone with the Confederacy. The party in power called itself Democratic, but was in fact a body of reactionary nondescripts claiming to be Unionistsand clinging, or pretending to cling, to the hard-and-fast prejudices ofother days. 

The situation may be the better understood when I add that "negrotestimony"--the introduction to the courts of law of the newly madefreedmen as witnesses--barred by the state constitution, was the burningissue. A murder committed in the presence of a thousand negroes could notbe lawfully proved in court. Everything from a toothbrush to a cake ofsoap might be cited before a jury, but not a human being if his skinhappened to be black. 

[Illustration: Mr. Watterson's Editorial Staff in 1868, When theThree Daily Newspapers of Louisville Were United into the"_Courier-Journal_. " Mr. George D. Prentice and Mr. Watterson Are inthe Center. ]

To my mind this was monstrous. From my cradle I had detested slavery. TheNorth will never know how many people at the South did so. I could not gowith the Republican Party, however, because after the death of AbrahamLincoln it had intrenched itself in the proscription of Southern men. Theattempt 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, butthe ancient label of a Democracy worn by a riffraff of opportunists, Jeffersonian principles having quite gone to seed. But I proposed tolead and reform it, not to follow and fall in behind the selfish andshort-sighted time servers who thought the people had learned nothing andforgot nothing; and instant upon finding myself in the saddle I soughtto ride down the mass of ignorance which was at least for the time beingmainly what I had to look to for a constituency. 

Mr. Prentice, who knew the lay of the ground better than I did, advisedagainst it. The personal risk counted for something. Very early in theaction I made a direct fighting issue, which--the combat interdicted--gaveme the opportunity to declare--with something of the bully in thetone--that I might not be able to hit a barn door at ten paces, but couldshoot with any man in Kentucky across a pocket handkerchief, holding myselfat all times answerable and accessible. I had a fairly good fighting recordin 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 againstodds, before negro testimony was carried. A generation of politicians weresent to the rear. Finally, in 1876, a Democratic State Convention put itsmark upon me as a Democrat by appointing me a Delegate at large to theNational Democratic Convention of that year called to meet at St. Louis toput a Presidential ticket in the field. 

The Courier-Journal having come to represent all three of the Englishdailies of the city the public began to rebel. It could not see thatinstead of three newspapers of the third or fourth class Louisville wasgiven one newspaper of the first class; that instead of dividingthe local patronage in three inadequate portions, wasted upon a triplecompetition, this patronage was combined, enabling the one newspaper toengage in a more equal competition with the newspapers of such rival andlarger cities as Cincinnati and St. Louis; and that one of the contractingparties needing an editor, the other a publisher, in coming together thetwo were able to put their trained faculties to the best account. 

Nevertheless, during thirty-five years Mr. Haldeman and I labored side byside, not the least difference having arisen between us. The attacks towhich we were subjected from time to time drew us together the closer. These attacks were sometimes irritating and sometimes comical, but they hadone characteristic feature: Each started out apparently under a high stateof excitement. Each seemed to have some profound cause of grief, to beanimated by implacable hate and to aim at nothing short of annihilation. Frequently the assailants would lie in wait to see how theCourier-Journal's cat was going to jump, in order that they might takethe other side; and invariably, even if the Courier-Journal stood forthe reforms they affected to stand for, they began a system ofmisrepresentation and abuse. In no instance did they attain any success. 

Only once, during the Free Silver craze of 1896, and the dark and tragicdays that followed it the three or four succeeding years, the paper havingstood, as it had stood during the Greenback craze, for sound money, wasthe property in danger. It cost more of labor and patience to save it fromdestruction than it had cost to create it thirty years before. Happily Mr. Haldeman lived to see the rescue complete, the tide turned and the futuresafe. 

VI

A newspaper, like a woman, must not only be honest, but must seem to behonest; acts of levity, loose unbecoming expressions or behavior--thoughnever so innocent--tending in the one and in the other to lower reputationand discredit character. During my career I have proceeded under aconfident belief in this principle of newspaper ethics and an unfailingrecognition of its mandates. I truly believe that next after businessintegrity in newspaper management comes disinterestedness in the publicservice, 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, Ihave known no other life and had no other aim. Those were indeed parloustimes. It was an era of transition. Upon the field of battle, after fouryears of deadly but unequal combat, the North had vanquished the South. The victor stood like a giant, with blood aflame, eyes dilate and handsuplifted again to strike. The victim lay prostrate. Save self-respect andmanhood all was lost. Clasping its memories to its bosom the South sankhelpless amid the wreck of its fortunes, whilst the North, the benigninfluence of the great Lincoln withdrawn, proceeded to decide its fate. Tothis ghastly end had come slavery and secession, and all the pomp, prideand circumstance of the Confederacy. To this bitter end had come thesoldiership of Lee and Jackson and Johnston and the myriads of brave menwho followed them. 

The single Constitutional barrier that had stood between the people of thestricken section and political extinction was about to be removed by theexit of Andrew Johnson from the White House. In his place a man of bloodand iron--for such was the estimate at that time placed upon Grant--hadbeen elected President. The Republicans in Congress, checked for a timeby Johnson, were at length to have entire sway under Thaddeus Stevens. Reconstruction was to be thorough and merciless. To meet these conditionswas the first requirement of the Courier-Journal, a newspaper conducted byoutlawed rebels and published on the sectional border line. The task wasnot an easy one. 

There is never a cause so weak that it does not stir into ill-timedactivity some wild, unpractical zealots who imagine it strong. There isnever a cause so just but that the malevolent and the mercenary will seekto trade upon it. The South was helpless; the one thing needful was to getit on its feet, and though the bravest and the wisest saw this plainlyenough there came to the front--particularly in Kentucky--a small but noisybody of politicians who had only worked themselves into a state of war whenit 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 tomaintain and which the North could be forced to respect. 

I was of a different opinion. It seemed to me that whatever of right mightexist the South was at the mercy of the North; that the radical party ledby Stevens and Wade dominated the North and could dictate its own terms;and that the shortest way round lay in that course which was bestcalculated to disarm radicalism by an intelligent appeal to the businessinterests and conservative elements of Northern society, supported by adomestic policy of justice alike to whites and blacks. 

Though the institution of African slavery was gone the negro continued thesubject of savage contention. I urged that he be taken out of the arena ofagitation, and my way of taking him out was to concede him his legal andcivil rights. The lately ratified Constitutional Amendments, I contended, were the real Treaty of Peace between the North and South. The recognitionof these Amendments in good faith by the white people of the South wasindispensable to that perfect peace which was desired by the best people ofboth sections. The political emancipation of the blacks was essential tothe moral emancipation of the whites. With the disappearence of the negroquestion as cause of agitation, I argued, radicalism of the intense, proscriptive sort would die out; the liberty-loving, patriotic people ofthe North would assert themselves; and, this one obstacle to a betterunderstanding removed, the restoration of Constitutional Government wouldfollow, being a matter of momentous concern to the body of the people bothNorth and South. 

Such a policy of conciliation suited the Southern extremists as little asit suited the Northern extremists. It took from the politicians their bestcard. South no less than North, "the bloody shirt" was trumps. It couldalways be played. It was easy to play it and it never failed to catch theunthinking and to arouse the excitable. What cared the perennial candidateso he got votes enough? What cared the professional agitator so his appealsto passion brought him his audience?

It is a fact that until Lamar delivered his eulogy on Sumner not a Southernman of prominence used language calculated to placate the North, andbetween Lamar and Grady there was an interval of fifteen years. There wasnot a Democratic press worthy the name either North or South. During thoseevil days the Courier-Journal stood alone, having no party or organizedfollowing. At length it was joined on the Northern side by Greeley. ThenSchurz raised his mighty voice. Then came the great liberal movement of1871-72, 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 merelydormant. Champions began to appear in unexpected quarters. New men spokeup, North and South. In spite of the Republican landslide of 1872, in 1874the Democrats swept the Empire State. They carried the popular branch ofCongress by an overwhelming majority. In the Senate they had a respectableminority, with Thurman and Bayard to lead it. In the House Randall and Kerrand Cox, Lamar, Beck and Knott were about to be reënforced by Hill andTucker and Mills and Gibson. The logic of events was at length subduing therodomontade of soap-box oratory. Empty rant was to yield to reason. For allits mischances and melancholy ending the Greeley campaign had shortened thedistance 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 interjectcertain opinions of his own which parties and politicians, even hisnewspaper colleagues, have been wont to regard as peculiar. By commonrepute 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--theNegro question, the Greenback question and the Free Silver question--he haschallenged and antagonized the general direction of that party. He takessome pride to himself that in each instance the result vindicated alike hisforecast and his insubordination. 

To one who witnessed the break-up of the Whig party in 1853 and of theDemocratic Party in 1860 the plight in which parties find themselves atthis time may be described as at least, suggestive. The feeling is at onceto laugh and to whistle. Too much "fuss and feathers" in Winfield Scott didthe business for the Whigs. Too much "bearded lady" in Charles Evans Hughesperhaps cooked the goose of the Republicans. Too much Wilson--but let menot fall into _lèse majesté_. The Whigs went into Know-Nothingism andFree Soilism. Will the Democrats go into Prohibition and paternalism? Andthe Republicans--

The old sectional alignment of North and South has been changed to East andWest. 

For the time being the politicians of both parties are in something of afunk. It is the nature of parties thus situate to fancy that there is nohereafter, riding in their dire confusion headlong for a fall. Little otherthan the labels being left, nobody can tell what will happen to either. 

Progressivism seems the cant of the indifferent. Accentuated by theindecisive vote in the elections and heralded by an ambitious President whowrites Humanity bigger than he writes the United States, and is accusedof aspiring to world leadership, democracy unterrified and undefiled--thedemocracy of Jefferson, Jackson and Tilden ancient history--has becomea back number. Yet our officials still swear to a Constitution. We have noteliminated state lines. State rights are not wholly dead. 

The fight between capital and labor is on. No one can predict where itwill end. Shall it prove another irrepressible conflict? Are its issuesirreconcilable? Must the alternative of the future lie between Socialismand Civil War, or both? Progress! Progress! Shall there be no stability ineither actualities or principles? And--and--what about the Bolsheviki?

II

Parties, like men, have their ups and downs. Like machines they get out ofwhack and line. First it was the Federalists, then the Whigs, and then theDemocrats. Then came the Republicans. And then, after a long interruption, the Democrats again. English political experience repeats itself inAmerica. 

A taking label is as valuable to a party as it is to a nostrum. It becomesin time an asset. We are told that a fool is born every minute, and, theaverage man being something of a fool, the label easily catches him. Hencethe Democratic Party and the Republican Party. 

The old Whig Party went to pieces on the rocks of sectionalism. Theinstitution of African slavery arrived upon the scene at length as theparamount political issue. The North, which brought the Africans here inits ships, finding slave labor unprofitable, sold its slaves to the Southat 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 aregoing to convert mortals into angels overnight by act of assembly--or stillbetter, by Constitutional amendment--were the short-haired women and thelong-haired men of Boston going to make a white man out of the black man byAbolition. The Southern Whigs could not see it and would not stand for it. So they fell in behind the Democrats. The Northern Whigs, having nowhereelse to go, joined the Republicans. 

The wise men of both sections saw danger ahead. The North was warned thatthe South would fight, the South, that if it did it went against incredibleodds. Neither would take the warning. Party spirit ran wild. Extremism hadits fling. Thus a long, bloody and costly War of Sections--a fraternalwar if ever there was one--brought on by alternating intolerance, thepoliticians of both sides gambling upon the credulity and ignorance of thepeople. 

Hindsight is readier, certainly surer, than foresight. It comes easier andshows clearer. Anybody can now see that the slavery problem might have hada less ruinous solution; that the moral issue might have been compromisedfrom time to time and in the end disposed of. Slave labor even at the Southhad 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 theslaveholders and the brotherhood of man at the North, William LowndesYancey was exclaiming that cotton was king at the South, and, to establishthese false propositions, millions of good Americans proceeded to cut oneanother's throats. 

There were agitators and agitators in those days as there are in these. Theagitator, like the poor, we have always with us. It used to be said even atthe North that Wendell Phillips was just a clever comedian. William LowndesYancey was scarcely that. He was a serious, sincere, untraveled provincial, possessing unusual gifts of oratory. He had the misfortune to kill a friendin a duel when a young man, and the tragedy shadowed his life. He clung tohis plantation and rarely went away from home. When sent to Europe by theSouth as its Ambassador in 1861, he discovered the futility of his schemeof a Southern confederacy, and, seeing the cornerstone of the philosophyon which he had constructed his pretty fabric, overthrown, he came homedespairing, 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 isan accomplished fact--for good or evil we shall presently be better able todetermine. 

Life is an adventure and all of us adventurers--saving that the wordpresses somewhat harder upon the woman than the man--most things do infact, whereby she is given greater endurance--leaving to men the duty ofcaring for the women; and, if need be, looking death squarely and defiantlyin the face. 

The world often puts the artificial before the actual; but under thedispensation of the Christian civilization--derived from the Hebraic--thefamily requiring a head, headship is assigned to the male. This male iscommonly 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 outercontact. 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 thatcount, all my life. I would despise myself if I had not been. In contestingprecipitate universal suffrage for women, I conceived that I was stillfighting the woman's battle. 

We can escape none of Nature's laws. But we need not handicap ourselveswith artificial laws. At best, life is an experiment, Death the finaladventure. Feminism seems to me its next of kin; still we may not call thewoman who assails the soap boxes--even those that antic about the WhiteHouse gates--by the opprobrious terms of adventuress. Where such a one isnot a lunatic she is a nuisance. There are women and women. 

We may leave out of account the shady ladies of history. Neither Aspasianor Lucrezia Borgia nor the Marquise de Brinvilliers could with accuracybe called an adventuress. The term is of later date. Its origin and growthhave arisen out of the complexities of modern society. 

In fiction Milady and Madame Marneffe come in for first honors--in each theleopard crossed on the serpent and united under a petticoat, beautifuland wicked--but since the Balzac and Dumas days the story-tellers andstage-mongers have made exceeding free with the type, and we have betweenHerman Merivale's Stephanie de Mohrivart and Victorien Sardou's Zica avery theater--or shall we say a charnel house--of the woman with the past;usually portrayed as the victim of circumstance; unprincipled through cruelexperience; insensible through lack of conscience; sexless in soul, buta siren in seductive arts; cold as ice; hard as iron; implacable as thegrave, pursuing her ends with force of will, intellectual audacity andelegance of manner, yet, beneath this brilliant depravity, capable ofself-pity, yielding anon in moments of depression to a sudden gleam ofhuman tenderness and a certain regret for the innocence she has lost. 

Such a one is sometimes, though seldom, met in real life. But manypretenders may be encountered at Monte Carlo and other European resorts. They range from the Parisian cocotte, signalized by her chic apparel, tothe fashionable divorcée who in trying her luck at the tables keeps a sharplookout for the elderly gent with the wad, often fooled by the enterprisingsport who has been there before. 

These are out and out professional adventuresses. There are otheradventuresses, however, than those of the story and the stage, the casinoand the cabaret. The woman with the past becomes the girl with the future. 

Curiously enough this latter is mainly, almost exclusively, recruitedfrom our countrywomen, who to an abnormal passion for foreign titles joinsurpassing ignorance of foreign society. Thus she is ready to the hand ofthe Continental fortune seeker masquerading as a nobleman--occasionally butnot often the black sheep of some noble family--carrying not a bona fidebut a courtesy title--the count and the no-account, the lord and the Lordknows who! The Yankee girl with a _dot_ had become before the worldwar a regular quarry for impecunious aristocrats and clever crooks, thematrimonial results tragic in their frequency and squalor. 

Another curious circumstance is the readiness with which the Americannewspaper tumbles to these frauds. The yellow press especially luxuriatesin them; woodcuts the callow bedizened bride, the jaded game-worn groom;dilates upon the big money interchanged; glows over the tin-plate starsand imaginary garters and pinchbeck crowns; and keeping the pictorialparaphernalia in cold but not forgotten storage waits for the inevitablescandal, and then, with lavish exaggeration, works the old story overagain. 

These newspapers ring all the sensational changes. Now it is the wondrousbeauty with the cool million, who, having married some illegitimate ofa minor royal house, will probably be the next Queen of Rigmarolia, andnow--ever increasing the dose--it is the ten-million-dollar widow who isgoing to marry the King of Pontarabia's brother, and may thus aspire to beone day Empress of Sahara. 

Old European travelers can recall many funny and sometimes melancholyincidents--episodes--histories--of which they have witnessed thebeginning and the end, carrying the self-same dénouement and lesson. 

IV

As there are women and women there are many kinds of adventuresses; not allof them wicked and detestable. But, good or bad, the lot of the adventuressis at best a hard lot. Be she a girl with a future or a woman with a pastshe is still a woman, and the world can never be too kind to its women--thechild bearers, the home makers, the moral light of the universe as theymeet the purpose of God and Nature and seek not to thwart it by unsexingthemselves in order that they may keep step with man in ways ofself-indulgent dalliance. The adventuress of fiction always comes to grief. But the adventuress in real life--the prudent adventuress who draws theline at adultery--the would-be leader of society without the wealth--thewould-be political leader without the masculine fiber--is sure ofdisappointment in the end. 

Take the agitation over Suffragism. What is it that the woman suffragetteexpects to get? No one of them can, or does, clearly tell us. 

It is feminism, rather than suffragism, which is dangerous. Now that theyhave it, my fear is that the leaders will not stop with the ballot forwomen. They are too fond of the spotlight. It has become a necessity forthem. If all women should fall in with them there would be nothing ofwomanhood left, and the world bereft of its women will become a masculineharlotocracy. 

Let me repeat that I have been fighting woman's battles in one way andanother all my life. I am not opposed to Votes for Women. But I woulddiscriminate and educate, and even at that rate I would limit the franchiseto actual taxpayers, and, outside of these, confine it to charities, corrections and schools, keeping woman away from the dirt of politics. I donot believe the ballot will benefit woman and cannot help thinking that inseeking unlimited and precipitate suffrage the women who favor it are offtheir reckoning! I doubt the performances got up to exploit it, thoughsomehow, when the hikers started from New York to Albany, and afterwardfrom New York to Washington, the inspiring thought of Bertha von Hillerncame back to me. 

I am sure the reader never heard of her. As it makes a pretty story let metell 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 takeher abroad, who engaged with the management of a hall in Louisville to walkone 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 threethousand dollars. 

I shall never forget the closing scenes of the wondrous test of courage andendurance. She was a pretty, fair-haired thing, a trifle undersized, butshapely and sinewy. The vast crowd that without much diminution, thoughwith intermittent changes, had watched her from start to finish, began togrow tense with the approach to the end, and the last hour the enthusiasmwas overwhelming. Wave upon wave of cheering followed every footstep of theplucky 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 carriedoff the field, a winner, every heart throbbing with human sympathy, everyeye wet with proud and happy tears. It is not possible adequately todescribe all that happened. One must have been there and seen it fully tocomprehend the glory of it. 

Touching the recent Albany and Washington hikes and hikers let me say atonce that I cannot approve the cause of Votes for women as I had approvedthe cause of Bertha von Hillern. Where she showed heroic, most of thesuffragettes appear to me grotesque. Where her aim was rational, their aimhas been visionary. To me the younger of them seem as children who needto be spanked and kissed. There has been indeed about the whole Suffragebusiness 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 orWashington I would have caught Rosalie Jones in my arms, and before shecould say "Jack Robinson" have exclaimed: "You ridiculous child, go and geta bath and put on some pretty clothes and come and join us at dinner inthe State Banquet Hall, duly made and provided for you and the rest of youdelightful 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 theknowledge which has variously come to me of many interesting men and women. Of these Dr. Norvin Green was a striking example. To have sprung fromhumble parentage in the wilds of Kentucky and to die at the head of themost potential corporation in the world--to have held this place againstall comers by force of abilities deemed indispensable to its welfare--tohave gone the while his ain gait, disdaining the precepts of DoctorFranklin--who, by the way, did not trouble overmuch to follow themhimself--seems so unusual as to rival the most stirring stories of thenovel mongers. 

When I first met Doctor Green he was president of a Kentucky railwaycompany. He had been, however, one of the organizers of the Western UnionTelegraph Company. He deluded himself for a little by political ambitions. He wanted to go to the Senate of the United States, and during alegislative session of prolonged balloting at Frankfort he missed hiselection by a single vote. 

It may be doubted whether he would have cut a considerable figure atWashington. His talents were constructive rather than declamatory. He wascalled to a greater field--though he never thought it so--and was foremostamong those who developed the telegraph system of the country almost fromits infancy. He possessed the daring of the typical Kentuckian, with thedead calm of the stoic philosopher; imperturbable; never vexed or querulousor excited; denying himself none of the indulgences of the gentleman ofleisure. We grew to be constant comrades and friends, and when he returnedto New York to take the important post which to the end of his days hefilled so completely his office in the Western Union Building became mydowntown headquarters. 

There I met Jay Gould familiarly; and resumed acquaintance with RussellSage, whom I had known when a lad in Washington, he a hayseed member ofCongress; and occasionally other of the Wall Street leaders. In a smallway--though not for long--I caught the stock-gambling fever. But I was onthe "inside, " and it was a cold day when I did not "clean up" a goodlyamount to waste uptown in the evening. I may say that I gave this overthrough sheer disgust of acquiring so much and such easy and uselessmoney, for, having no natural love of money--no aptitude for making moneybreed--no taste for getting it except to spend it--earning by my ownaccustomed and fruitful toil always a sufficiency--the distractions anddissipations it brought to my annual vacations and occasional visits, affronted in a way my self-respect, and palled upon my rather eager questof pleasure. Money is purely relative. The root of all evil, too. Too muchof it may bring ills as great as not enough. 

At the outset of my stock-gambling experience I was one day in the officeof President Edward H. Green, of the Louisville and Nashville Railway, norelation of Dr. Norvin Green, but the husband of the famous Hetty Green. Hesaid 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 stocklist 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. TheGould party is to sit in with the Orton-Green party for the first timeafter their fight, and I am asked especially to be there. I may pick upsomething. "

Big Green, as he was called, paused a moment reflectively. "I don't wantany tip--especially from that bunch, " said he. "I want to try your virginluck. But, go ahead, and let me know this afternoon. "

At luncheon I sat at Doctor Green's right, Jay Gould at his left. For thefirst and last time in its history wine was served at this board; RussellSage was effusive in his demonstrations of affection and went on with hisstories 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 afrosty formality. When the rest had departed, leaving Doctor Green, Mr. Gould and myself at table, mindful of what I had come for, in a banteringway I said to Doctor Green: "Now that I am a Wall Street ingénu, why don'tyou tell me something?"

Gould leaned across the table and said in his velvet voice: "Buy TexasPacific. "

Two or three days after, Texas Pacific fell off sixty points or more. I didnot see Big Green again. Five or six months later I received from him astatement of account which I could never have unraveled, with a checkfor some thousands of dollars, my one-half profit on such and such anoperation. Texas Pacific had come back again. 

Two or three years later I sat at Doctor Green's table with Mr. Gould, justas 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 Iwent to cover your loss, when I found five thousand shares of Texas Pacifictransferred on the books of the company in your name. I knew these couldnot 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 makesure 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! BigGreen. Well, well! You do surprise me. I would rather have done him a favorthan 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 aNew York daily newspaper which, in spite of brilliant writers like MantonMarble and William Henry Hurlbut, had never been a moneymaker. This was the_World_. He offered me the editorship with forty-nine of the hundredshares of stock on very easy terms, which nowise tempted me. But two orthree years after, I daresay both weary and hopeless of putting up so muchmoney on an unyielding investment, he was willing to sell outright, andJoseph Pulitzer became the purchaser. 

His career is another illustration of the saying that truth is strangerthan fiction. 

II

Joseph Pulitzer and I came together familiarly at the Liberal RepublicanConvention, which met at Cincinnati in 1872--the convocation of cranks, as it was called--and nominated Horace Greeley for President. He was adelegate from Missouri. Subsequent events threw us much together. He beganhis English newspaper experience after a kind of apprenticeship on a Germandaily with Stilson Hutchins, another interesting character of those days. It was from Stilson Hutchins that I learned something of Pulitzer's originand beginnings, for he never spoke much of himself. 

According to this story he was the offspring of a runaway marriage betweena subaltern officer in the Austrian service and a Hungarian lady of noblebirth. In some way he had got across the Atlantic, and being in Boston, awizened youth not speaking a word of English, he was spirited on board awarship. Watching his chance of escape he leaped overboard in the darknessof night, though it was the dead of winter, and swam ashore. He was foundunconscious on the beach by some charitable persons, who cared for him. Thence he tramped it to St. Louis, where he heard there was a Germancolony, and found work on a coal barge. 

It was here that the journalistic instinct dawned upon him. He began tocarry river news items to the Westliche Post, which presently took him onits staff of regular reporters. 

The rest was easy. He learned to speak and write English, was transferredto the paper of which Hutchins was the head, and before he wasfive-and-twenty became a local figure. 

When he turned up in New York with an offer to purchase the World we metas old friends. During the interval between 1872 and 1883 we had had arunabout in Europe and I was able to render him assistance in the purchaseproceeding 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 yourtime about the clubs and watering places, doing no good for yourself, oranybody else. I must first devote myself to the reorganization of thebusiness end of it. Here is a blank check. Fill it for whatever amount youplease and it will be honored. I want you to go upstairs and organize myeditorial force for me. "

Indignantly I replied: "Go to the devil--you have not money enough--thereis 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 upthe Hudson, with a great stable of carriages and horses, living like acountry gentleman, going to the World office about time for luncheon andcoming away in the early afternoon. I passed a week-end with him. To me itseemed the precursor of ruin. His second payment was yet to be made. Had Ibeen 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 hoursout of the twenty-four. To me it seemed dollars to doughnuts that he wouldbreak 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 shorepalace at Cap Martin. That season, and the next two or three seasons, wemade voyages together from one end to the other of the Mediterranean, visiting the islands, especially Corsica and Elba, shrines of Napoleon whomhe greatly admired. 

He was a model host. He had surrounded himself with every luxury, includingsome agreeable retainers, and lived like a prince aboard. His blindness hadalready overtaken him. Other physical ailments assailed him. But no word ofcomplaint escaped his lips and he rarely failed to sit at the head of histable. It was both splendid and pitiful. 

Absolute authority made Pulitzer a tyrant. He regarded his newspaperownership as an autocracy. There was nothing gentle in his domination, nor, I might say, generous either. He seriously lacked the sense of humor, andeven among his familiars could never take a joke. His love of money was byno means inordinate. He spent it freely though not wastefully or joyously, for the possession of it rather flattered his vanity than made occasion forpleasure. Ability of varying kinds and degrees he had, a veritable geniusfor journalism and a real capacity for affection. He held his friends atgood account and liked to have them about him. During the early days of hissuccess he was disposed to overindulgence, not to say conviviality. Hewas fond of Rhine wines and an excellent judge of them, keeping a variedassortment always at hand. Once, upon the Liberty, he observed that Ipreferred a certain vintage. "You like this wine?" he said inquiringly. Iassented, and he said, "I have a lot of it at home, and when I get back Iwill send you some. " I had quite forgotten when, many months after, therecame to me a crate containing enough to last me a life-time. 

He had a retentive memory and rarely forgot anything. I could recall manypleasurable incidents of our prolonged and varied intimacy. We were oneday wandering about the Montmartre region of Paris when we came into ahole-in-the-wall where they were playing a piece called "Les Brigands. " Itwas melodrama to the very marrow of the bones of the Apaches that gatheredand glared about. In those days, the "indemnity" paid and the "militaryoccupation" withdrawn, everything French pre-figured hatred of the German, and be sure "Les Brigands" made the most of this; each "brigand" abeer-guzzling Teuton; each hero a dare-devil Gaul; and, when Joan the Maid, heroine, sent Goetz von Berlichingen, the Vandal Chieftain, sprawling inthe saw-dust, there was no end to the enthusiasm. 

"We are all 'brigands', " said Pulitzer as we came away, "differingaccording to individual character, to race and pursuit. Now, if I werewriting that play, I should represent the villain as a tyrannous CityEditor, 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 buysthe newspaper and marries the cub--rescuing genius from poverty andpersecution. "

He was not then the owner of the World. He had not created thePost-Dispatch, or even met the beautiful woman who became his wife. He wasa youngster of five or six and twenty, revisiting the scenes of his boyhoodon 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 hishouse. As far back as 1870 John Russell Young, a friend from boyhood, camewith an invitation to pass the week-end as the President's guest at LongBranch. Many of my friends had cottages there. Of afternoons and eveningsthey played an infinitesimal game of draw poker. 

"John, " my answer was, "I don't dare to do so. I know that I shall fallin love with General Grant. We are living in rough times--particularly inrough party times. We have a rough presidential campaign ahead of us. If Igo down to the seashore and go in swimming and play penny-ante with GeneralGrant I shall not be able to do my duty. "

It was thus that after the general had gone out of office and made thefamous journey round the world, and had come to visit relatives inKentucky, that he accepted a dinner invitation from me, and I had a numberof his friends to meet him. 

Among these were Dr. Richardson, his early schoolmaster when the Grantfamily lived at Maysville, and Walter Haldeman, my business partner, aMaysville boy, who had been his schoolmate at the Richardson Academy, andGeneral Cerro Gordo Williams, then one of Kentucky's Senators in Congress, and erst his comrade and chum when both were lieutenants in the MexicanWar. The bars were down, the windows were shut and there was no end ofhearty hilarity. Dr. Richardson had been mentioned by Mr. Haldeman as "theonly man that ever licked Grant, " and the general promptly retorted "henever licked me, " when the good old doctor said, "No, Ulysses, I neverdid--nor Walter, either--for you two were the best boys in school. "

I said "General Grant, why not give up this beastly politics, buy ablue-grass farm, and settle down to horse-raising and tobacco growing inKentucky?" And, quick as a flash--for both he and the company perceivedthat it was "a leading question"--he replied, "Before I can buy a farmin Kentucky I shall have to sell a farm in Missouri, " which left nothingfurther to be said. 

There was some sparring between him and General Williams over theiryouthful adventures. Finally General Williams, one of the readiest and mostamusing 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 arace he and Grant had outside of Galapa in 1846. "Don't you remember, " hesaid, "that riding ahead of me you came upon a Mexican loaded with a lot ofmilk cans piled above his head and that you knocked him over as you sweptby him?"

"Yes, " said Grant, "I believed if I stopped or questioned or even deflectedit would lose me the race. I have not thought of it since. But now that youmention 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 didnot tell you at the time because I knew it would cause you pain, and a deadgreaser more or less made no difference. "

Later on General Grant took desk room in Victor Newcomb's private office inNew York. There I saw much of him, and we became good friends. He was themost interesting of men. Soldierlike--monosyllabic--in his official andbusiness dealings he threw aside all formality and reserve in his socialintercourse, delightfully reminiscential, indeed a capital story teller. Ido not wonder that he had constant and disinterested friends who loved himsincerely. 

IV

It has always been my opinion that if Chester A. Arthur had been named bythe Republicans as their candidate in 1884 they would have carried theelection, spite of what Mr. Blaine, who defeated Arthur in the convention, had said and thought about the nomination of General Sherman. Arthur, likeGrant, belonged to the category of lovable men in public life. 

There was a gallant captain in the army who had slapped his colonel inthe face on parade. Morally, as man to man, he had the right of it. Butmilitary law is inexorable. The verdict was dismissal from the service. Iwent with the poor fellow's wife and her sister to see General Hancock atGovernor's Island. It was a most affecting meeting--the general, tearsrolling down his cheeks, taking them into his arms, and, when he couldspeak, saying: "I can do nothing but hold up the action of the court tillMonday. 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 pardonif 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. Whenwe entered the President's apartment in the White House he advancedsmiling 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, "andI 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 subjectof more or less acrimonious controversy. During nearly two decades this hadraged in army circles. At length the friends of Porter, led by Curtin andSlocum, succeeded in passing a relief measure through Congress. They werein ecstasies. That there might be a presidential objection had not crossedtheir minds. 

Senator McDonald, of Indiana, a near friend of General Porter, and a man ofrare worldly wisdom, knew better. Without consulting them he came to me. 

"You are personally close to the President, " said he, "and you must knowthat if this bill gets to the White House he will veto it. With theRepublican National Convention directly ahead he is bound to veto it. Itmust not be allowed to get to him; and you are the man to stop it. Theywill 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 andSlocum 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 Frelinghuysenswild for it, as well as others of your nearest friends, I am sure you don'twant to be obliged to do that. With your word to me I can stop it, and haveit 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. Itwas 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 notdebatable. I am just from the White House, and I am authorized by thePresident 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 presidentialelection it reached Arthur, and he did veto it. Not till Cleveland came indid Porter obtain his restoration. 

Curiously enough General Grant approved this. I had listened to thedebate in the House--especially the masterly speech of William WalterPhelps--without attaining a clear understanding of the many points atissue. 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 locationof troops, both Federal and Confederate, and the exact passage in theaction which had compromised General Porter. 

"If Porter had done what he was ordered to do, " he went on, "Pope and hisarmy would have been annihilated. In point of fact Porter saved Pope'sArmy. " Then he paused and added: "I did not at the outset know this. Iwas for a time of a different opinion and on the other side. It wasLongstreet's testimony--which had not been before the first Court ofInquiry 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 mostdelightful of liars, "How this world is given to lying. " Yea, and howexigency 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 anewspaper known as The Chattanooga Rebel and, as I had been its editor, putinnumerable questions to me about it and its affairs. Among these he askedhow great had been its circulation. Without explaining that often an entirecompany, in some cases an entire regiment, subscribed for a few copies, ora single copy, I answered: "I don't know precisely, but somewhere near ahundred thousand, I take it. " Then he said: "Where did you get your presspower?"

This was, of course, a poser, but it did not embarrass me in the least. Iwas committed, and without a moment's thought I proceeded with an imaginaryexplanation which he afterward declared had been altogether satisfying. Thestory was too good to keep--maybe conscience pricked--and in a chummy talklater along I laughingly confessed. 

"You should tell that in your dinner speech tonight, " he said. "If you tellit 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 thatthe newspaper press, whatever its delinquencies, is not a common liar, butthe most habitual of truth tellers. It is growing on its editorial page Ifear a little vapid and colorless. But there is a general and ever-presentpurpose to print the facts and give the public the opportunity to reach itsown 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 threekinds 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 andfalsehood has fallen down; then the sensational, imaginative liar, who hasa tale to tell; and, finally, the mean, malicious liar, who would injurehis 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 moreor less its unconscious victims. 

Competition is not alone the life of trade; it is the life of life; foreach of us is in one way, or another, competitive. There is but onedisinterested person in the world, the mother who whether of the human oranimal kingdom, will die for her young. Yet, after all, hers, too, is akind of selfishness. 

The woman is becoming over much a professional female. It is of importancethat we begin to consider her as a new species, having enjoyed her beautylong enough. Is the world on the way to organic revolution? If I were ayoung man I should not care to be the lover of a professional female. Asan old man I have affectionate relations with a number of suffragettes, asthey dare not deny; that is to say, I long ago accepted woman suffrage asinevitable, whether for good or evil, depending upon whether the woman'smovement is going to stop with suffrage or run into feminism, changing thecharacter of woman and her relations to men and with man. 

II

I have never made party differences the occasion of personal quarrel orestrangement. On the contrary, though I have been always called a Democrat, I have many near and dear friends among the Republicans. Politics is notwar. Politics would not be war even if the politicians were consistent andhonest. But there are among them so many changelings, cheats and rogues. 

Then, in politics as elsewhere, circumstances alter cases. I have as a rulethought very little of parties as parties, professional politicians andparty leaders, and I think less of them as I grow older. The politician andthe auctioneer might be described like the lunatic, the lover and the poet, as "of imagination all compact. " One sees more mares' nests than wouldfill a book; the other pure gold in pinchbeck wares; and both are out forgudgeons. 

It is the habit--nay, the business--of the party speaker when he mounts theraging stump to roar his platitudes into the ears of those who have thesimplicity to listen, though neither edified nor enlightened; to aver thatthe horse he rides is sixteen feet high; that the candidate he supports isa giant; and that he himself is no small figure of a man. 

Thus he resembles the auctioneer. But it is the mock auctioneer whom heresembles; his stock in trade being largely, if not altogether, fraudulent. The success which at the outset of party welfare attended this legalizedconfidence game drew into it more and more players. For a long time theydeceived themselves almost as much as the voters. They had not becomeprofessional. They were amateur. Many of them played for sheer love ofthe gamble. There were rules to regulate the play. But as time passed andvoters multiplied, the popular preoccupation increased the temptations andopportunities for gain, inviting the enterprising, the skillful and thecorrupt to reconstitute patriotism into a commodity and to organize publicopinion into a bill of lading. Thus politics as a trade, parties astrademarks, 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 partycollar, owe fealty to the party machine, are sometimes actual slaves of theparty boss. In the larger towns we hear of the City Hall ring; out in thecounties 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 wenear the centers of population. But there is scarcely a village or hamletwhere graft does not grow like weeds, the voters as gullible and helplessas the infatuated victims of bunko tricks, ingeniously contrived byprofessional crooks to separate the fool and his money. Is self-governmenta failure?

None of us would allow the votaries of the divine right of kings to tellus so, albeit we are ready enough to admit the imperfections of universalsuffrage, too often committing affairs of pith and moment, even of life anddeath, to the arbitrament of the mob, and costing more in cash outlay thanroyal establishments. 

The quadrennial period in American politics, set apart and dedicated tothe election of presidents, magnifies these evil features in an otherwiseadmirable system of government. That the whipper-snappers of the vicinageshould indulge their propensities comes as the order of their nature. But the party leaders are not far behind them. Each side construes everyoccurrence as an argument in its favor, assuring it certain victory. Take, for example, the latest state election anywhere. In point of fact, itforetold nothing. It threw no light upon coming events, not even uponcurrent events. It leaves the future as hazy as before. Yet the managers ofeither party affect to be equally confident that it presages the triumph oftheir ticket in the next national election. The wonder is that so many ofthe 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 manis--good, bad and indifferent; which is but another way of saying we livein a world of cross purposes. We in America prefer republicanism. But woulddespotism be so demurrable under a wise unselfish despot?

III

Contemplating the contrasts between foreign life and foreign history withour own one cannot help reflecting upon the yet more startling contrasts ofancient and modern religion and government. I have wandered not a littleover Europe at irregular intervals for more than fifty years. Always adevotee to American institutions, I have been strengthened in my beliefs bywhat 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 benationalistic, is in reality cosmopolitan. Money being its god, Frenchmoney, English money, anything that calls itself money, is wealth to it. Ithas no time to waste on theories or to think of generics. "Put money in thypurse" 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 whichobstruct 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 concreteis of no interest at all. 

Just as in the days of Charles V and Philip II, all things yielded to thetheologian's misconception of the spiritual life so in these days of theBillionaires all things spiritual and abstract yield to what they call theprogress of the universe and the leading of the times. Under their rule wehave had extraordinary movement just as under the lords of the Palatinateand the Escurial--the medieval union of the devils of bigotry andpower--Europe, which was but another name for Spain, had extraordinarymovement. We know where it ended with Spain. Whither is it leading us? Arewe traveling the same road?

Let us hope not. Let us believe not. Yet, once strolling along through thecrypt of the Church of the Escurial near Madrid, I could not repress theidea of a personal and physical resemblance between the effigies in marbleand bronze looking down upon me whichever way I turned, to some of ourcontemporary public men and seeming to say: "My love to the President whenyou see him next, " and "Don't forget to remember me kindly, please, to thechairmen of both your national committees!"

IV

In a world of sin, disease and death--death inevitable--what may man do todrive out sin and cure disease, to the end that, barring accident, old ageshall set the limit on mortal life?

The quack doctor equally in ethics and in physics has played a leading partin human affairs. Only within a relatively brief period has science madeserious progress toward discovery. Though Nature has perhaps an antidotefor all her posions many of them continue to defy approach. They lieconcealed, leaving the astutest to grope in the dark. 

That which is true of material things is truer yet of spiritual things. Theideal about which we hear so much, is as unattained as the fabled bag ofgold at the end of the rainbow. Nor is the doctrine of perfectabilityanywhere one with itself. It speaks in diverse tongues. Its processes andobjects are variant. It seems but an iridescent dream which lends itselfequally to the fancies of the impracticable and the scheming of theself-seeking, breeding visionaries and pretenders. 

Easily assumed and asserted, too often it becomes tyrannous, dealing withthings outer and visible while taking little if any account of the innerlights of the soul. Thus it imposes upon credulity and ignorance; makesfakers of some and fanatics of others; in politics where not an engine ofoppression, a corrupt influence; in religion where not a zealot, a promoterof cant. In short the self-appointed apostle of uplift, who disregardingindividual character would make virtue a matter of statute law and ordainuniformity of conduct by act of conventicle or assembly, is likelier toproduce moral chaos than to reach the sublime state he claims to seek. 

The bare suggestion is full of startling possibilities. Individualism wasthe discovery of the fathers of the American Republic. It is the bedrockof our political philosophy. Human slavery was assuredly an indefensibleinstitution. But the armed enforcement of freedom did not make a black mana white man. Nor will the wave of fanaticism seeking to control the foodand drink and dress of the people make men better men. Danger lurks and isbound to come with the inevitable reaction. 

The levity of the men is recruited by the folly of the women. The leadersof feminism would abolish sex. To what end? The pessimist answers whateasier than the demolition of a sexless world gone entirely mad? How simplethe engineries of destruction. Civil war in America; universal hara-kiriin Europe; the dry rot of wealth wasting itself in self-indulgence. Then athousand years of total eclipse. Finally Macaulay's Australian surveyingthe 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 atWashington 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 thelast word of science, reason and common sense?

Alas, and alack the day! In those places where the suffering rich most docongregate 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 devotetheir leisure to organizing clubs other than those of the uplift. Thereare all sorts, from the Society for the Abrogation of Bathing Suits at theseaside 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 ofthem are got up for. Do they advance the world in grace? One who surveysthe scene can scarcely think so. 

But the whirl goes on; the yachts sweep proudly out to sea; the auto carsdash madly through the streets; more and darker and deeper do the contrastsof life show themselves. How long shall it be when the mudsill millionstake the upper ten thousand by the throat and rend them as the furiosos ofthe Terror in France did the aristocrats of the _Régime Ancien_? Theissue between capital and labor, for example, is full of generatingheat and hate. Who shall say that, let loose in the crowded centers ofpopulation, it may not one day engulf us all?

Is this rank pessimism or merely the vagaries of an old man dropping backinto second childhood, who does not see that the world is wiser and betterthan 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 Evespan"--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 earthwe inhabit has at no time and nowhere wanted for liveliness--but surelyit was never livelier than it now is; as the space-writer says, more"dramatic"; indeed, to quote the guidebooks, quite so "picturesque andinteresting. "

Go where one may, on land or sea, he will come upon activities of one sortand another. Were Timon of Athens living, he might be awakened from hismisanthrophy and Jacques, the forest cynic, stirred to something likeenthusiasm. Is the world enduring the pangs of a second birth which shallrecreate all things anew, supplementing the miracles of modern inventionwith a corresponding development of spiritual life; or has it reached thetop of the hill, and, mortal, like the human atoms that compose it, is itstarting downward on the other side into an abyss which the historians ofthe future will once again call "the dark ages?"

We know not, and there is none to tell us. That which is actually happeningwere 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. Notonly are our sympathies numbed by the immensity of the slaughter and thesorrow, but patriotism itself is chilled by the selfish thought that, having thus far measurably escaped, we may pull through without paying ourshare. This will account for a certain indifferentism we now and againencounter. 

At the moment we are felicitating ourselves--or, is it merely confusingourselves?--over the revolution in Russia. It seems of good augury. Tobegin with, for Russia. Then the murder war fairly won for the Allies, weare promised by the optimists a wise and lasting peace. 

The bells that rang out in Petrograd and Moscow sounded, we are told, thedeath knell of autocracy in Berlin and Vienna. The clarion tones thatechoed through the Crimea and Siberia, albeit to the ear of the massesmuffled in the Schwarzwald and along the shores of the North Sea, and upand down the Danube and the Rhine, yet conveyed a whispered message whichmay presently break into song; the glad song of freedom with it gloriousrefrain: "The Romanoffs gone! Perdition having reached the Hohenzollernsand the Hapsburgs, all will be well!"

Anyhow, freedom; self-government; for whilst a scrutinizing and solicitouspessimism, observing and considering many abuses, administrative andpolitical, federal and local, in our republican system--abuses which beingvery visible are most lamentable--may sometimes move us to lose heart ofhope in democracy, we know of none better. So, let us stand by it; pray forit; 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 cometo see, if they ever do, the havoc autocracy has made for Germany. Thatshould constitute the bed rock of our politics and our religion. It is thetrue 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 beChristians. The technical Christian sees nothing but the blurred letter ofthe law, which he misconstrues. The Christian, animated by its holy spiritand led by its rightful interpretation, serves the Lord alike of heaven andhosts when he flies the flag of his country and smites its enemies hip andthigh!

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 slaveryagitation in the United States and finally led a kindred people into actualwar the idea that got afloat after this war that every Confederate was aSecessionist best served the ends of the radicalism which sought to reducethe South to a conquered province, and as such to reconstruct it by hostilelegislation supported wherever needed by force. 

Andrew Johnson very well understood that a great majority of the men whowere arrayed on the Southern side had taken the field against their betterjudgment through pressure of circumstance. They were Union men who hadopposed secession and clung to the old order. Not merely in the BorderStates did this class rule but in the Gulf States it held a respectableminority until the shot fired upon Sumter drew the call for troops fromLincoln. The Secession leaders, who had staked their all upon the hazard, knew that to save their movement from collapse it was necessary that bloodbe 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 theoriesinto a combat of arms for which neither party was prepared. 

The debate ended, battle at hand, Southern men had to choose between theNorth and the South, between their convictions and predilections on oneside and expatriation on the other side--resistance to invasion, notsecession, the issue. But four years later, when in 1865 all that they hadbelieved and feared in 1861 had come to pass, these men required no drasticmeasures to bring them to terms. Events more potent than acts of Congresshad already reconstructed them. Lincoln with a forecast of this had shapedhis ends accordingly. Johnson, himself a Southern man, understood it evenbetter than Lincoln, and backed by the legacy of Lincoln he proceeded notvery skillfully to build upon it. 

The assassination of Lincoln, however, had played directly into the handsof the radicals, led by Ben Wade in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens in theHouse. Prior to that baleful night they had fallen behind the marchingvan. The mad act of Booth put them upon their feet and brought them to thefront. They were implacable men, politicians equally of resolution andability. Events quickly succeeding favored them and their plans. It was notalone Johnson's lack of temper and tact that gave them the whip hand. Hisremoval from office would have opened the door of the White House to Wade, so that strategically Johnson's position was from the beginning beleagueredand 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 thetriumphant Republicans. This was the situation during the winter of1871-72, when the approaching Presidential election brought the countryface to face with a most extraordinary state of affairs. The South was inirons. The North was growing restive. Thinking people everywhere feltthat conditions so anomalous to our institutions could not and should notendure. 

II

Johnson had made a bungling attempt to carry out the policies of Lincolnand had gone down in the strife. The Democratic Party had reached the ebbtide 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 issueda call for what they described as a Liberal Republican Convention toassemble in Cincinnati May 1, 1872. 

A Southern man and a Confederate soldier, a Democrat by conviction andinheritance, I had been making in Kentucky an uphill fight for theacceptance of the inevitable. The line of cleavage between the old and thenew South I had placed upon the last three amendments to the Constitution, naming them the Treaty of Peace between the Sections. The negro must beinvested with the rights conferred upon him by these amendments, howevermistaken and injudicious the South might think them. The obsolete BlackLaws instituted during the slave régime must be removed from the statutebooks. The negro, like Mohammed's coffin, swung in midair. He was neitherfish, flesh nor fowl, nor good red herring. For our own sake we musthabilitate him, educate and elevate him, make him, if possible, a contentedand useful citizen. Failing of this, free government itself might beimperiled. 

I had behind me the intelligence of the Confederate soldiers almost to aman. They at least were tired of futile fighting, and to them the war wasover. But--and especially in Kentucky--there was an element that wanted tofight when it was too late; old Union Democrats and Union Whigs who clungto the hull of slavery when the kernel was gone, and proposed to win inpolitics what had been lost in battle. 

The leaders of this belated element were in complete control of thepolitical machinery of the state. They regarded me as an impudentupstart--since I had come to Kentucky from Tennessee--as little better thana carpet-bagger; and had done their uttermost to put me down and drive meout. 

[Illustration: Abraham Lincoln in 1861 _From a Photograph by M BBrady_]

I was a young fellow of two and thirty, of boundless optimism and my fullshare of self-confidence, no end of physical endurance and mental vitality, having some political as well as newspaper experience. It never crossed myfancy that I could fail. 

I met resistance with aggression, answered attempts at bullying withscorn, generally irradiated by laughter. Yet was I not wholly blind toconsequences and the admonitions of prudence; and when the call for aLiberal Republican Convention appeared I realized that if I expected toremain a Democrat in a Democratic community, and to influence and lead aDemocratic following, I must proceed warily. 

Though many of those proposing the new movement were familiaracquaintances--some of them personal friends--the scheme was in the air, asit were. Its three newspaper bellwethers--Samuel Bowles, Horace White andMurat Halstead--were especially well known to me; so were Horace Greeley, Carl Schurz and Charles Sumner, Stanley Matthews being my kinsman, GeorgeHoadley and Cassius M. Clay next-door neighbors. But they were not the menI had trained with--not my "crowd"--and it was a question how far I mightbe able to reconcile myself, not to mention my political associates, tosuch company, even conceding that they proceeded under good fortune with agood plan, offering the South extrication from its woes and the DemocraticParty an entering wedge into a solid and hitherto irresistible North. 

Nevertheless, I resolved to go a little in advance to Cincinnati, to have alook at the stalking horse there to be displayed, free to take it or leaveit as I liked, my bridges and lines of communication quite open and intact. 

III

A livelier and more variegated omnium-gatherum was never assembled. Theyhad already begun to straggle in when I arrived. There were long-hairedand spectacled doctrinaires from New England, spliced by short-haired andstumpy emissaries from New York--mostly friends of Horace Greeley, as itturned out. There were brisk Westerners from Chicago and St. Louis. IfWhitelaw Reid, who had come as Greeley's personal representative, had hisretinue, so had Horace White and Carl Schurz. There were a few ratheroverdressed persons from New Orleans brought up by Governor Warmouth, and amotely array of Southerners of every sort, who were ready to clutch at anystraw that promised relief to intolerable conditions. The full contingentof Washington correspondents was there, of course, with sharpened eyes andpens to make the most of what they had already begun to christen a conclaveof cranks. 

Bowles and Halstead met me at the station, and we drove to the St. NicholasHotel, where Schurz and White were awaiting us. Then and there wasorganized a fellowship which in the succeeding campaign cut a considerablefigure and went by the name of the Quadrilateral. We resolved to limitthe Presidential nominations of the convention to Charles Francis Adams, Bowles' candidate, and Lyman Trumbull, White's candidate, omittingaltogether, because of specific reasons urged by White, the candidacy of B. Gratz Brown, who because of his Kentucky connections had better suited mypurpose. 

The very next day the secret was abroad, and Whitelaw Reid came to me toask why in a newspaper combine of this sort the New York Tribune had beenleft out. 

To my mind it seemed preposterous that it had been or should be, and Istated as much to my new colleagues. They offered objection which to meappeared 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 wasthis, that and the other. He could never be relied upon in any coherentpractical plan of campaign. To talk about him as a candidate wasridiculous. 

I listened rather impatiently and finally I said: "Now, gentlemen, in thismovement 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 bytaking 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 nighthe sat with us at the St. Nicholas, where from night to night until the endwe convened and went over the performances and developments of the day andconcerted plans for the morrow. 

As I recall these symposiums some amusing and some plaintive memories risebefore me. 

The first serious business that engaged us was the killing of the boom forJudge David Davis, of the Supreme Court, which was assuming definite andformidable proportions. The preceding winter it had been incubating atWashington under the ministration of some of the most astute politicians ofthe time, mainly, however, Democratic members of Congress. 

A party of these had brought it to Cincinnati, opening headquarters wellprovided with the requisite commissaries. Every delegate who came in thatcould be reached was laid hold of and conducted to Davis' headquarters. 

We considered it flat burglary. It was a gross infringement upon ourcopyrights. What business had the professional politicians with a greatreform movement? The influence and dignity of journalism were at stake. Thepress was imperilled. We, its custodians, could brook no such deflection, not to say defiance, from intermeddling office seekers, especially frombroken-down Democratic office seekers. 

The inner sanctuary of our proceedings was a common drawing-room betweentwo bedchambers, occupied by Schurz and myself. Here we repaired aftersupper 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 theeminent and learned jurist, the friend of Lincoln and the only aspiranthaving a "bar'l"? That was the question. We addressed ourselves to the taskwith earnest purpose, but characteristically. The power of the press mustbe invoked. It was our chief if not our only weapon. Seated at the sametable each of us indited a leading editorial for his paper, to be wiredto its destination and printed next morning, striking D. Davis at aprearranged and varying angle. Copies of these were made for Halstead, whohaving with the rest of us read and compared the different scrollsindited one of his own in general commentation and review for Cincinnaticonsumption. In next day's Commercial, blazing under vivid headlines, theseleading editorials, dated "Chicago" and "New York, " "Springfield, Mass. , "and "Louisville, Ky. , " appeared with the explaining line "The Tribuneof to-morrow morning will say--" "The Courier-Journal--and theRepublican--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 hitthem midships. The incoming delegates were arrested and forewarned. Sixmonths 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 defeatof the rascally machine politicians and the reform of the publicservice--justifying the means. I am writing this nearly fifty years afterthe event and must be forgiven the fling of my wisdom at my own expense andthat of my associates in harmless crime. 

Some ten years ago I wrote: "Reid and White and I the sole survivors; Reida great Ambassador, White and I the virtuous ones, still able to sit up andtake notice, with three meals a day for which we are thankful and able topay; no one of us recalcitrant. We were wholly serious--maybe a triflevisionary, but as upright and patriotic in our intentions and as loyal toour 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 worsethan the massacre of that not very edifying yet promising combine I shallbe 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 incidentthrowing some light upon the period thrusts itself upon my memory. TheQuadrilateral, including Reid, had just finished its consolidation ofpublic opinion before related, when the cards of Judge Craddock, chairmanof the Kentucky Democratic Committee, and of Col. Stoddard Johnston, editorof the Frankfort Yeoman, the organ of the Kentucky Democracy, were broughtfrom below. They had come to look after me--that was evident. By no chancecould they find me in more equivocal company. In addition to ourselves--badenough, from the Kentucky point of view--Theodore Tilton, Donn Piatt andDavid A. Wells were in the room. 

When the Kentuckians crossed the threshold and were presented seriatim theface of each was a study. Even a proper and immediate application of whiskyand water did not suffice to restore their lost equilibrium and bring themto their usual state of convivial self-possession. Colonel Johnston told meyears 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 Kentuckypoliticians 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, nowlettest 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 ofmen; Halstead himself scarcely more so. McClure was personally unknown tothe Quadrilateral. But this did not stand in the way of our asking himto dine with us as soon as his claims to fellowship in the good cause ofreform began to make themselves apparent through the need of bringing thePennsylvania delegation to a realizing sense. 

He looked like a god as he entered the room; nay, he acted like one. Schurzfirst took him in hand. With a lofty courtesy I have never seen equalled hetossed his inquisitor into the air. Halstead came next, and tried him uponanother tack. He fared no better than Schurz. And hurrying to the rescueof my friends, McClure, looking now a bit bored and resentful, landed mesomewhere near the ceiling. 

It would have been laughable if it had not been ignominious. I took mydiscomfiture with the bad grace of silence throughout the stiff, formal andbrief meal which was then announced. But when it was over and the party, risen from table, was about to disperse I collected my energies andresources for a final stroke. I was not willing to remain so crushed nor toconfess myself so beaten, though I could not disguise from myself a feelingthat all of us had been overmatched. 

"McClure, " said I with the cool and quiet resolution of despair, drawinghim aside, "what in the ---- do you want anyhow?"

He looked at me with swift intelligence and a sudden show of sympathy, andthen 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 winetogether. Anyhow, from that moment to the hour of his death we were thebest of friends. 

Without the inner circle of the Quadrilateral, which had taken matters intotheir own hands, were a number of persons, some of them disinterested andothers simple curiosity and excitement seekers, who might be described asmerely lookers-on in Vienna. The Sunday afternoon before the convention wasto meet we, the self-elect, fell in with a party of these in a garden "overthe Rhine, " as the German quarter of Cincinnati is called. There was firstgeneral and rather aimless talk. Then came a great deal of speech making. Schurz started it with a few pungent observations intended to suggest andinspire some common ground of opinion and sentiment. Nobody was inclinedto dispute his leadership, but everybody was prone to assert his own. Itturned out that each regarded himself and wished to be regarded as a manwith a mission, having a clear idea how things were not to be done. Therewere Civil Service Reform Protectionists and Civil Service Reform FreeTraders. 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 willingto commit or bind himself to anything. Edward Atkinson pulled one way andWilliam Dorsheimer exactly the opposite way. David A. Wells sought toget the two together; it was not possible. Sam Bowles shook his headin diplomatic warning. Horace White threw in a chunk or so of a ratheragitating newspaper independency, and Halstead was in an inflamed state ofjocosity to the more serious-minded. 

It was nuts to the Washington Correspondents--story writers and satiristswho were there to make the most out of an occasion in which the bizarre wasmuch in excess of the conventional--with George Alfred Townsend and DonnPiatt to set the pace. Hyde had come from St. Louis to keep especial tab onGrosvenor. Though rival editors facing our way, they had not been admittedto the Quadrilateral. McCullagh and Nixon arrived with the earliest fromChicago. The lesser lights of the guild were innumerable. One might havemistaken it for an annual meeting of the Associated Press. 

V

The convention assembled. It was in Cincinnati's great Music Hall. Schurzpresided. Who that was there will ever forget his opening words: "This ismoving day. " He was just turned forty-two; in his physiognomy a scholarly_Herr Doktor_; in his trim lithe figure a graceful athlete; in thetones of his voice an orator. 

Even the bespectacled doctrinaires of the East, whence, since the days whenthe Star of Bethlehem shone over the desert, wisdom and wise men have hadtheir emanation, were moved to something like enthusiasm. The rest of uswere fervid and aglow. Two days and a night and a half the Quadrilateralhad the world in a sling and things its own way. It had been agreed, as Ihave said, to limit the field to Adams, Trumbull and Greeley; Greeley beingout of it, as having no chance, still further abridged it to Adams andTrumbull; and, Trumbull not developing very strong, Bowles, Halstead andI, even White, began to be sure of Adams on the first ballot; Adams theindifferent, who had sailed away for Europe, observing that he was not acandidate for the nomination and otherwise intimating his disdain of us andit. 

Matters thus apparently cocked and primed, the convention adjourned overthe first night of its session with everybody happy except the D. Daviscontingent, 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 havenominated Adams. But inspired by the bravery of youth and inexperience welet the golden opportunity slip. The throng of delegates and the audiencedispersed. 

In those days, it being the business of my life to turn day into night andnight into day, it was not my habit to seek my bed much before the pressesbegan to thunder below, and this night proving no exception, and beingtempted by a party of Kentuckians, who had come, some to back me and someto watch me, I did not quit their agreeable society until the "wee shorthours ayont the twal. " Before turning in I glanced at the early editionof the Commercial, to see that something--I was too tired to decipherprecisely what--had happened. It was, in point of fact, the arrival aboutmidnight of Gen. Frank P. Blair and Governor B. Gratz Brown. 

I had in my possession documents that would have induced at least one ofthem to pause before making himself too conspicuous. The Quadrilateral, excepting Reid, knew this. We had separated upon the adjournment of theconvention. I being across the river in Covington, their search wasunavailing. I was not to be found. They were in despair. When having hada few hours of rest I reached the convention hall toward noon it was toolate. 

I got into the thick of it in time to see the close, not without an angrycollision with that one of the newly arrived actors whose coming hadchanged the course of events, with whom I had lifelong relations ofaffectionate intimacy. Sailing but the other day through Mediterraneanwaters with Joseph Pulitzer, who, then a mere youth, was yet the secretaryof the convention, he recalled the scene; the unexpected and not overattractive appearance of the governor of Missouri; his not very pleasingyet ingenious speech; the stoical, almost lethargic indifference of Schurz. 

"Carl Schurz, " said Pulitzer, "was the most industrious and the leastenergetic man I have ever worked with. A word from him at that crisis wouldhave completely routed Blair and squelched Brown. It was simply not in himto speak it. "

Greeley was nominated amid a whirl of enthusiasm, his workers, withWhitelaw Reid at their head, having maintained an admirable and effectiveorganization and being thoroughly prepared to take advantage of theopportune moment. It was the logic of the event that B. Gratz Brown shouldbe placed on the ticket with him. 

The Quadrilateral was nowhere. It was done for. The impossible had come topass. There rose thereafter a friendly issue of veracity between Schurz andmyself, which illustrates our state of mind. My version is that we left theconvention hall together with an immaterial train of after incidents, histhat we had not met after the adjournment--he quite sure of this because hehad looked for me in vain. 

"Schurz was right, " said Joseph Pulitzer upon the occasion of our yachtingcruise just mentioned, "I know, for he and I went directly from the hallwith Judge Stallo to his home on Walnut Hills, where we dined and passedthe afternoon. "

[Illustration: Mrs. Lincoln in 1861 _From a Photograph by M. B. Brady_]

The Quadrilateral had been knocked into a cocked hat. Whitelaw Reid was theonly one of us who clearly understood the situation and thoroughly knewwhat he was about. He came to me and said: "I have won, and you people havelost. I shall expect that you stand by the agreement and meet me as myguests at dinner to-night. But if you do not personally look after this theothers 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 deviouswork. 

Frostier conviviality I have never sat down to than Reid's dinner. HoraceWhite looked more than ever like an iceberg, Sam Bowles was diplomaticbut ineffusive, Schurz was as a death's head at the board; Halstead and Ithrough sheer bravado tried to enliven the feast. But they would none ofus, nor it, and we separated early and sadly, reformers hoist by their ownpetard. 

VI

The reception by the country of the nomination of Horace Greeley was asinexplicable to the politicians as the nomination itself had beenunexpected by the Quadrilateral. The people rose to it. The sentimental, the fantastic and the paradoxical in human nature had to do with this. Atthe South an ebullition of pleased surprise grew into positive enthusiasm. Peace was the need if not the longing of the Southern heart, and Greeley'shad been the first hand stretched out to the South from the enemy'scamp--very bravely, too, for he had signed the bail bond of JeffersonDavis--and quick upon the news flashed the response from generous men eagerfor the chance to pay something upon a recognized debt of gratitude. 

Except for this spontaneous uprising, which continued unabated in July, theDemocratic Party could not have been induced at Baltimore to ratify theproceedings at Cincinnati and formally to make Greeley its candidate. Theleaders dared not resist it. Some of them halted, a few held out, but bymidsummer 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 andCobbett; even in his odd picturesque personality whimsically attractive; aman to be reckoned with where he chose to put his powers forth, as Sewardlearned to his cost. 

What he would have done with the Presidency had he reached it is not easyto say or surmise. He was altogether unsuited for official life, for whichnevertheless he had a passion. But he was not so readily deceived in men ormisled in measures as he seemed and as most people thought him. 

His convictions were emotional, his philosophy was experimental; but therewas a certain method in their application to public affairs. He gavebountifully of his affection and his confidence to the few who enjoyed hisfamiliar friendship--accessible and sympathetic though not indiscriminatingto those who appealed to his impressionable sensibilities and sought hishelp. He had been a good party man and was by nature and temperament apartisan. 

To him place was not a badge of servitude; it was a decoration--preferment, promotion, popular recognition. He had always yearned for office as thelegitimate destination of public life and the honorable award of partyservice. During the greater part of his career the conditions of journalismhad 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 andless capable men about him advanced from one post of distinction to anotherhe 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 itreal instead of the empty pageant of a vision?

It had taken me but a day and a night to pull myself together after thefirst shock and surprise and to plunge into the swim to help fetch thewaterlogged factions ashore. This was clearly indispensable to forcingthe Democratic organization to come to the rescue of what would have beenotherwise but a derelict upon a stormy sea. Schurz was deeply disgruntled. Before he could be appeased a bridge, found in what was called the FifthAvenue Hotel Conference, had to be constructed in order to carry him acrossthe stream which flowed between his disappointed hopes and aims and whatappeared to him an illogical and repulsive alternative. He had taken to histent and sulked like another Achilles. He was harder to deal with than anyof the Democratic file leaders, but he finally yielded and did splendidwork in the campaign. 

His was a stubborn spirit not readily adjustable. He was a nobly giftedman, 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. " Noman of his time spoke so well or wrote to better purpose. He was equallyskillful in debate, an overmatch for Conkling and Morton, whom--especiallyin the French arms matter--he completely dominated and outshone. As sincereand 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 manof sentiment who was not the cause of sentiment in others. He knew this andfelt it. 

The Nast cartoons, which as to Greeley and Sumner were unsparing in thelast degree, whilst treating Schurz with a kind of considerate qualifyinghumor, nevertheless greatly offended him. I do not think Greeley mindedthem much if at all. They were very effective; notably the "Pirate Ship, "which represented Greeley leaning over the taffrail of a vessel carryingthe Stars and Stripes and waving his handkerchief at the man-of-war UncleSam in the distance, the political leaders of the Confederacy dressed intrue corsair costume crouched below ready to spring. Nothing did more tosectionalize Northern opinion and fire the Northern heart, and to lash thefury of the rank and file of those who were urged to vote as they had shotand who had hoisted above them the Bloody Shirt for a banner. The firsthalf of the canvass the bulge was with Greeley; the second half began ineclipse, to end in something very like collapse. 

The old man seized his flag and set out upon his own account for a tour ofthe country. Right well he bore himself. If speech-making ever does anygood toward the shaping of results Greeley's speeches surely should haveelected him. They were marvels of impromptu oratory, mostly homely andtouching appeals to the better sense and the magnanimity of a people notripe or ready for generous impressions; convincing in their simplicity andintegrity; unanswerable from any standpoint of sagacious statesmanship ortrue 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 toIndianapolis, where others were waiting to take him in charge. He was in astate of querulous excitement. Before the vast and noisy audiences which wefaced he stood apparently pleased and composed, delivering his words as hemight have dictated them to a stenographer. As soon as we were alone hewould break out into a kind of lamentation, punctuated by occasional burstsof objurgation. He especially distrusted the Quadrilateral, making anexception in my case, as well he might, because however his nomination hadjarred my judgment I had a real affection for him, dating back to the yearsimmediately preceding the war when I was wont to encounter him in thereporters' galleries at Washington, which he preferred to using his floorprivilege as an ex-member of Congress. 

It was mid-October. We had heard from Maine; Indiana and Ohio had voted. Hewas for the first time realizing the hopeless nature of the contest. TheSouth 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 tobe no compensating ground swell at the North. That he should pour forth hischagrin to one whom he knew so well and even regarded as one of his boyswas inevitable. Much of what he said was founded on a basis of fact, someof it was mere suspicion and surmise, all of it came back to the main pointthat defeat stared us in the face. I was glad and yet loath to part withhim. If ever a man needed a strong friendly hand and heart to lean upon hedid during those dark days--the end in darkest night nearer than anyonecould divine. He showed stronger mettle than had been allowed him: borea manlier part than was commonly ascribed to the slovenly slipshodhabiliments and the aspects in which benignancy and vacillation seemed tostruggle for the ascendancy. Abroad the elements conspired against him. At home his wife lay ill, as it proved, unto death. The good gray head hestill carried like a hero, but the worn and tender heart was beginning tobreak. Overwhelming defeat was followed by overwhelming affliction. Henever quitted his dear one's beside until the last pulsebeat, and then hesank 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 auniversal sense of pity and sorrow and awe. All hearts were hushed. In aninstant the bitterness of the campaign was forgotten, though the huzzas ofthe victors still rent the air. The President, his late antagonist, withhis cabinet and the leading members of the two Houses of Congress, attendedhis funeral. As he lay in his coffin he was no longer the arch rebel, leading a combine of buccaneers and insurgents, which the Republicanorators and newspapers had depicted him, but the brave old apostle offreedom who had done more than all others to make the issues upon which amilitant and triumphant party had risen to power. 

The multitude remembered only the old white hat and the sweet old babyface beneath it, heart of gold, and hand wielding the wizard pen; theincarnation of probity and kindness, of steadfast devotion to his duty ashe saw it, and to the needs of the whole human family. A tragedy in truthit 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 peaceand love between the sections of the Union to which his life had been asacrifice. 

The crank convention had builded wiser than it knew. That the DemocraticParty could ever have been brought to the support of Horace Greeley forPresident of the United States reads even now like a page out of a nonsensebook. That his warmest support should have come from the South seemsincredible and was a priceless fact. His martyrdom shortened the distanceacross the bloody chasm; his coffin very nearly filled it. The candidacy ofCharles 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 deadlystrife; 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 owncase by showing the Northern half that it was not wholly recalcitrant orreactionary; and it made way for real issues of pith and moment relating tothe time instead of pigments of bellicose passion and scraps of ante-bellumcontroversy. 

In a word Greeley did more by his death to complete the work of Lincolnthan he could have done by a triumph at the polls and the term in the WhiteHouse he so much desired. Though but sixty-one years of age, his racewas run. Of him it may be truly written that he lived a life full ofinspiration 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 noran asset had this been generally discovered fifty years ago. Most of myyounger 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 tomy 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 notin my old age quite deserted me. But I have seen the claim of it so muchabused that when a public man calls it for a witness I begin to suspect hissincerity. 

A virile old friend of mine--who lived in Texas, though he went there fromRhode Island--used to declare with sententious emphasis that war is thestate of man. "Sir, " he was wont to observe, addressing me as if I werepersonally accountable, "you are emasculating the human species. You arechanging men into women and women into men. You are teaching everybodyto read, nobody to think; and do you know where you will end, sir?Extermination, sir--extermination! On the north side of the North Polethere is another world peopled by giants; ten thousand millions at the veryleast; every giant of them a hundred feet high. Now about the time you havereduced your universe to complete effeminacy some fool with a pick-axe willbreak through the thin partition--the mere ice curtain--separating thesegiants from us, and then they will sweep through and swoop down and swallowyou, sir, and the likes of you, with your topsy-turvy civilization, yourboasted 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 proclaimingyourself the purest, the most disinterested of living men, and endby intimating that you are the bravest;" and then with the charminginconsistency of the dreamer he would add: "If there be anything on thisearth that I despise it is bluster. "

Decidedly he was not a disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yet he, too, inhis way was an idealist, and for all his oddity a man of intellectualintegrity, a trifle exaggerated perhaps in its methods and illustrations, but true to his convictions of right and duty, as Emerson would have hadhim be. For was it not Emerson who exclaimed, "We will walk on our ownfeet; 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 upmy mind that there is no such thing as the ideal in public life, construingpublic life to refer to political transactions. The ideal may exist in artand letters, and sometimes very young men imagine that it exists in veryyoung women. But here we must draw the line. As society is constituted theideal 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 littlepicture--the poet, also, with his little rhyme--his atelier his universe, his attic his field of battle, his weapons the utensils of his craft--hehimself his own Providence. It is not so in the world of action, where theconditions are directly reversed; where the one player contends againstmany 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 bya mysterious hand stretched forth from the darkness. 

"I wish I could be as sure of anything, " said Melbourne, "as Tom Macaulayis 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, fromCæsar to Napoleon and Bismarck, nothing certain except the invisible playerbehind the screen. 

Of all human contrivances the most imperfect is government. In spite ofthe essays of Bentham and Mill the science of government has yet to bediscovered. The ideal statesman can only exist in the ideal state, whichhas never existed. 

The politician, like the poor, we have always with us. As long as mendelegate to other men the function of acting for them, of thinking forthem, we shall continue to have him. 

He is a variable quantity. In the crowded centers his distinguishingmarks are short hair and cunning; upon the frontier, sentiment and thesix-shooter! In New York he becomes a boss; in Kentucky and Texas, afighter and an orator. But the statesman--the ideal statesman--in themind's eye, Horatio! Bound by practical limitations such an anomaly wouldbe a statesman minus a party, a statesman who never gets any votes oranywhere--a statesman perpetually out of a job. We have had some imitationideal statesmen who have been more or less successful in palming off theirpinchbeck wares for the real; but looking backward over the history ofthe country we shall find the greatest among our public men--measuringgreatness by real and useful service--to have been while they lived leastregarded as idealists; for they were men of flesh and blood, who amid therush of events and the calls to duty could not stop to paint pictures, toconsider sensibilities, to put forth the deft hand where life and deathhung upon the stroke of a bludgeon or the swinging of a club. 

Washington was not an ideal statesman, nor Hamilton, nor Jefferson, norLincoln, though each of them conceived grandly and executed nobly. Theyloved truth for truth's sake, even as they loved their country. Yet no oneof them ever quite attained his conception of it. 

Truth indeed is ideal. But when we come to adapt and apply it, how manyfaces it shows us, what varying aspects, so that he is fortunate who isable to catch and hold a single fleeting expression. To bridle this andsaddle it, and, as we say in Kentucky, to ride it a turn or two around thepaddock or, still better, down the home-stretch of things accomplished, is another matter. The real statesman must often do as he can, not as hewould; the ideal statesman existing only in the credulity of those simplesouls who are captivated by appearances or deceived by professions. 

The nearest approach to the ideal statesman I have known was most grosslystigmatized while he lived. I have Mr. Tilden in mind. If ever man pursuedan ideal life he did. From youth to age he dwelt amid his fancies. He wastruly a man of the world among men of letters and a man of letters amongmen of the world. A philosopher pure and simple--a lover of books, ofpictures, of all things beautiful and elevating--he yet attained greatriches, and being a doctrinaire and having a passion for affairs he wasable to gratify the aspirations to eminence and the yearning to be ofservice to the State which had filled his heart. 

He seemed a medley of contradiction. Without the artifices usual to thepractical politician he gradually rose to be a power in his party; thenceto become the leader of a vast following, his name a shibboleth to millionsof his countrymen, who enthusiastically supported him and who believed thathe was elected Chief Magistrate of the United States. He was an idealist;he lost the White House because he was so, though represented while helived by his enemies as a scheming spider weaving his web amid the coil ofmystification in which he hid himself. For he was personally known to fewin the city where he had made his abode; a great lawyer and jurist whorarely appeared in court; a great political leader to whom the hustingswere mainly a stranger; a thinker, and yet a dreamer, who lived his ownlife a little apart, as a poet might; uncorrupting and incorruptible; leastof 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 oflegal lore--to have his last will and testament successfully assailed. 

Except as news venders the newspapers--especially newspaper workers--shouldgive politics a wide berth. Certainly they should have no party politics. True to say, journalism and literature and politics are as wide apart asthe poles. From Bolingbroke, the most splendid of the world's failures, toThackeray, one of its greatest masters of letters--who happily did not getthe chance he sought in parliamentary life to fall--both English historyand American history are full of illustrations to this effect. Except inthe comic opera of French politics the poet, the artist, invested withpower, seems to lose his efficiency in the ratio of his genius; theliterary gift, instead of aiding, actually antagonizing the aptitude forpublic business. 

The statesman may not be fastidious. The poet, the artist, must be alwaysso. If the party leader preserve his integrity--if he keep himselfdisinterested and clean--if his public influence be inspiring to hiscountrymen and his private influence obstructive of cheats and rogues amonghis adherents--he will have done well. 

We have left behind us the gibbet and the stake. No further need of theVoltaires, the Rousseaus and the Diderots to declaim against kingcraftand priestcraft. We have done something more than mark time. We reportprogress. Yet despite the miracles of modern invention how far in the artsof government has the world traveled from darkness to light since the oldtribal days, and what has it learned except to enlarge the area, toamplify and augment the agencies, to multiply and complicate the forms andprocesses of corruption? By corruption I mean the dishonest advantage ofthe 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 belearned, much to be unlearned. Advanced as we consider ourselves we are yeta long way from the most rudimentary perception of the civilization we areso fond of parading. The eternal verities--where shall we seek them? Littlein religious affairs, less still in commercial affairs, hardly any at allin political affairs, that being right which represents each organism. Still we progress. The pulpit begins to turn from the sinister visage oftheology and to teach the simple lessons of Christ and Him crucified. Thepress, which used to be omniscient, is now only indiscriminate--a cleargain, emitting by force of publicity, if not of shine, a kind of lightthrough whose diverse rays and foggy luster we may now and then get aglimpse of truth. 

III

The time is coming, if it has not already arrived, when among fair-mindedand intelligent Americans there will not be two opinions touching theHayes-Tilden contest for the presidency in 1876-77--that both by thepopular vote and a fair count of the electoral vote Tilden was elctedand Hayes was defeated; but the whole truth underlying the determinateincidents which led to the rejection of Tilden and the seating of Hayeswill 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 ishistory, " asked Napoleon, the conqueror, "but a fable agreed upon?"

In the first administration of Mr. Cleveland there were present at adinner table in Washington, the President being of the party, two leadingDemocrats and two leading Republicans who had sustained confidentialrelations to the principals and played important parts in the drama of theDisputed Succession. These latter had been long upon terms of personalintimacy. The occasion was informal and joyous, the good fellowship of theheartiest. 

Inevitably the conversation drifted to the Electoral Commission, which hadcounted Tilden out and Hayes in, and of which each of the four had somestory to tell. Beginning in banter with interchanges of badinage itpresently fell into reminiscence, deepening as the interest of thelisteners rose to what under different conditions might have been describedas unguarded gayety if not imprudent garrulity. The little audience wasrapt. 

Finally Mr. Cleveland raised both hands and exclaimed, "What would thepeople of this country think if the roof could be lifted from this houseand they could hear these men?" And then one of the four, a gentleman notedfor his wealth both of money and humor, replied, "But the roof is not goingto be lifted from this house, and if any one repeats what I have said Iwill denounce him as a liar. "

Once in a while the world is startled by some revelation of the unknownwhich alters the estimate of a historic event or figure; but it ismeasurably true, as Metternich declares, that those who make history rarelyhave time to write it. 

It is not my wish in recurring to the events of nearly five-and-forty yearsago to invoke and awaken any of the passions of that time, nor my purposeto assail the character or motives of any of the leading actors. Most ofthem, including the principals, I knew well; to many of their secrets Iwas privy. As I was serving, in a sense, as Mr. Tilden's personalrepresentative in the Lower House of the Forty-fourth Congress, and as amember of the joint Democratic Advisory or Steering Committee of the twoHouses, all that passed came more or less, if not under my supervision, yetto my knowledge; and long ago I resolved that certain matters should remaina 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 constructionspossible to men's actions; the intermingling of ambition and patriotismbeneath the lash of party spirit; often wrong unconscious of itself;sometimes equivocation deceiving itself--in short, the tangled web of goodand ill inseparable from great affairs of loss and gain made debatableground for every step of the Hayes-Tilden proceeding. 

I shall bear sure testimony to the integrity of Mr. Tilden. I directly knowthat 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, whichalso he declined. The accusation that he was willing to buy, and throughthe cipher dispatches and other ways tried to buy, rests upon appearancesupporting mistaken surmise. Mr. Tilden knew nothing of the cipherdispatches until they appeared in the New York _Tribune_. Neither didMr. George W. Smith, his private secretary, and later one of the trusteesof his will. 

It should be sufficient to say that so far as they involved No. 15 GramercyPark they were the work solely of Colonel Pelton, acting on his ownresponsibility, and as Mr. Tilden's nephew exceeding his authority to act;that it later developed that during this period Colonel Pelton had not beenin his perfect mind, but was at least semi-irresponsible; and that on twoocasions when the vote or votes sought seemed within reach Mr. Tildeninterposed to forbid. Directly and personally I know this to be true. 

The price, at least in patronage, which the Republicans actually paidfor possession is of public record. Yet I not only do not question theintegrity of Mr. Hayes, but I believe him and most of those immediatelyabout him to have been high-minded men who thought they were doing for thebest in a situation unparalleled and beset with perplexity. What they didtends to show that men will do for party and in concert what the same mennever would be willing to do each on his own responsibility. In his "Lifeof Samuel J. Tilden, " John Bigelow says:

"Why persons occupying the most exalted positions should have ventured tocompromise their reputations by this deliberate consummation of a series ofcrimes which struck at the very foundations of the republic is a questionwhich still puzzles many of all parties who have no charity for the crimesthemselves. I have already referred to the terrors and desperation withwhich the prospect of Tilden's election inspired the great army ofoffice-holders at the close of Grant's administration. That army, numerousand formidable as it was, was comparatively limited. There was a muchlarger and justly influential class who were apprehensive that the returnof the Democratic party to power threatened a reactionary policy atWashington, to the undoing of some or all the important results of thewar. These apprehensions were inflamed by the party press until they wereconfined to no class, but more or less pervaded all the Northern States. The Electoral Tribunal, consisting mainly of men appointed to theirpositions by Republican Presidents or elected from strong RepublicanStates, felt the pressure of this feeling, and from motives compounded inmore or less varying proportions of dread of the Democrats, personalambition, zeal for their party and respect for their constituents, reached the conclusion that the exclusion of Tilden from the White Housewas an end which justified whatever means were necessary to accomplishit. They regarded it, like the emancipation of the slaves, as a warmeasure. "

IV

The nomination of Horace Greeley in 1872 and the overwhelming defeat thatfollowed left the Democratic party in an abyss of despair. The old Whigparty, after the disaster that overtook it in 1852, had been not moredemoralized. Yet in the general elections of 1874 the Democrats swept thecountry, carrying many Northern States and sending a great majority to theForty-fourth Congress. 

Reconstruction was breaking down of its very weight and rottenness. Thepanic of 1873 reacted against the party in power. Dissatisfaction withGrant, which had not sufficed two years before to displace him, was growingapace. Favoritism bred corruption and corruption grew more and moreflagrant. Succeeding scandals cast their shadows before. Chickens ofcarpetbaggery let loose upon the South were coming home to roost at theNorth. There appeared everywhere a noticeable subsidence of the sectionalspirit. Reform was needed alike in the State Governments and the NationalGovernment, and the cry for reform proved something other than an idleword. All things made for Democracy. 

Yet there were many and serious handicaps. The light and leading of thehistoric Democratic party which had issued from the South were in obscurityand abeyance, while most of those surviving who had been distinguished inthe party conduct and counsels were disabled by act of Congress. Of the fewprominent Democrats left at the North many were tainted by what was calledCopperheadism--sympathy with the Confederacy. To find a chieftain whollyfree from this contamination, Democracy, having failed of success inpresidential campaigns, not only with Greeley but with McClellan andSeymour, was turning to such Republicans as Chase, Field and Davis. At lastheaven seemed to smile from the clouds upon the disordered ranks and tosummon thence a man meeting the requirements of the time. This was SamuelJones Tilden. 

To his familiars Mr. Tilden was a dear old bachelor who lived in a fine oldmansion in Gramercy Park. Though 60 years old he seemed in the prime ofhis manhood; a genial and overflowing scholar; a trained and earnestdoctrinaire; a public-spirited, patriotic citizen, well known and highlyesteemed, who had made fame and fortune at the bar and had always beeninterested in public affairs. He was a dreamer with a genius for business, a philosopher yet an organizer. He pursued the tenor of his life withmeasured tread. 

His domestic fabric was disfigured by none of the isolation and squalorwhich so often attend the confirmed celibate. His home life was a modelof order and decorum, his home as unchallenged as a bishopric, itshospitality, though select, profuse and untiring. An elder sister presidedat his board, as simple, kindly and unostentatious, but as methodical ashimself. He was a lover of books rather than music and art, but also ofhorses and dogs and out-of-door activity. 

He was fond of young people, particularly of young girls; he drew themabout him, and was a veritable Sir Roger de Coverley in his gallantriestoward them and his zeal in amusing them and making them happy. Histastes were frugal and their indulgence was sparing. He took his wine notplenteously, though he enjoyed it--especially his "blue seal" whileit lasted--and sipped his whisky-and-water on occasion with a pleasedcomposure redolent of discursive talk, of which, when he cared to leadthe conversation, he was a master. He had early come into a great legalpractice and held a commanding professional position. His judgment wasbelieved to be infallible; and it is certain that after 1871 he rarelyappeared in the courts of law except as counsellor, settling in chambersmost of the cases that came to him. 

It was such a man whom, in 1874, the Democrats nominated for Governor ofNew York. To say truth, it was not thought by those making the nominationthat he had any chance to win. He was himself so much better advised thatmonths ahead he prefigured very near the exact vote. The afternoon of theday of election one of the group of friends, who even thus early had thePresidency 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 hiscampaign by school districts. His canvass system was perfect, hiscanvassers were as penetrating and careful as census takers. He had beforehim reports from every voting precinct in the State. They were corroboratedby the official returns. He had defeated Gen. John A. Dix, thought to beinvincible by a majority very nearly the same as that by which Governor Dixhad been elected two years before. 

V

The time and the man had met. Though Mr. Tilden had not before heldexecutive office he was ripe and ready for the work. His experience in thepursuit 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, theState 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 affairsa Chief Magistrate at once exact and exacting, deeply versed not only inlegal lore but in a knowledge of the methods by which political powerwas being turned to private profit and of the men--Democrats as well asRepublicans--who were preying upon the substance of the people. 

The story of the two years that followed relates to investigations thatinvestigated, to prosecutions that convicted, to the overhauling of popularcensorship, to reduced estimates and lower taxes. 

The campaign for the Presidential nomination began as early as the autumnof 1875. The Southern end of it was easy enough. A committee of Southernersresiding in New York was formed. Never a leading Southern man came to townwho was not "seen. " If of enough importance he was taken to No. 15 GramercyPark. Mr. Tilden measured to the Southern standard of the gentleman inpolitics. He impressed the disfranchised Southern leaders as a statesmanof the old order and altogether after their own ideas of what a Presidentought 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 ofNew York. The main opposition sprang from Tammany Hall, of which John Kellywas 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 awalk. "

The anti-Tilden men put up the Hon. S. S. --"Sunset"--Cox for temporarychairman. It was a clever move. Mr. Cox, though sure for Tammany, waspopular everywhere and especially at the South. His backers thought thatwith him they could count a majority of the National Committee. 

The night before the assembling Mr. Tilden's two or three leading friendson 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 fromanother, " I said. 

"We will have the best parliamentarian on the continent right by you allthe 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 wasarranged, and thus at the last moment I was chosen. 

I had barely time to write the required keynote speech, but not enough tocommit it to memory; nor sight to read it, even had I been willing to adoptthat mode of delivery. It would not do to trust to extemporization. Afriend, Col. J. Stoddard Johnston, who was familiar with my penmanship, came to the rescue. Concealing my manuscript behind his hat he lined thewords out to me between the cheering, I having mastered a few openingsentences. 

Luck was with me. It went with a bang--not, however, wholly withoutdetection. The Indianans, devoted to Hendricks, were very wroth. 

"See that fat man behind the hat telling him what to say, " said one to hisneighbor, 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 anational convention by hearsay. I lost my parliamentarian at once. Ijust made my parliamentary law as we went. Never before or since did anydeliberate body proceed under manual so startling and original. ButI delivered each ruling with a resonance--it were better called animpudence--which had an air of authority. There was a good deal of quietlaughter on the floor among the knowing ones, though I knew the mass wasas ignorant as I was myself; but realizing that I meant to be just and wasexpediting business the convention soon warmed to me, and feeling this Ibegan to be perfectly at home. I never had a better day's sport in all mylife. 

One incident was particularly amusing. Much against my will and over myprotest I was brought to promise that Miss Phoebe Couzins, who bore aWoman's Rights Memorial, should at some opportune moment be given the floorto 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 anemphasis meant to carry conviction: "Gentlemen of the convention, MissPhoebe Couzins, a representative of the Woman's Association of America, hasa memorial from that body, and in the absence of other business the chairwill now recognize her. "

Instantly and from every part of the hall arose cries of "No!" These putsome heart into me. Many a time as a schoolboy I had proudly declaimed thepassage from John Home's tragedy, "My Name is Norval. " Again I stood upon"the Grampian hills. " The committee was escorting Miss Couzins down theaisle. When she came within the radius of my poor vision I saw that she wasa beauty and dressed to kill. 

That was reassurance. Gaining a little time while the hall fairly rockedwith its thunder of negation I laid the gavel down and stepped to the edgeof the platform and gave Miss Couzins my hand. 

As she appeared above the throng there was a momentary "Ah!" and then alull, 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 gavea 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 oneabout to throw the gavel at his head. "No point of order is in order when alady has the floor. "

After that Miss Couzins received a positive ovation and having deliveredher message retired in a blaze of glory. 

VI

Mr. Tilden was nominated on the second ballot. The campaign that followedproved one of the most memorable in our history. When it came to an endthe 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 majorityof 264, 300 for Tilden over Hayes. 

How this came to be first contested and then complicated so as ultimatelyto be set aside has been minutely related by its authors. The newspapers, both Republican and Democratic, of November 8, 1876, the morning after theelection, conceded an overwhelming victory for Tilden and Hendricks. Therewas, however, a single exception. The New York Times had gone to press withits first edition, leaving the result in doubt but inclining toward thesuccess of the Democrats. In its later editions this tentative attitudewas changed to the statement that Mr. Hayes lacked the vote ofFlorida--"claimed by the Republicans"--to be sure of the required votes inthe Electoral College. 

The story of this surprising discrepancy between midnight and daylightreads like a chapter of fiction. 

After the early edition of the Times had gone to press certain members ofthe 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 forthat unlucky telegram Tilden would probably have been inaugurated Presidentof 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 theeditorial in the first edition was revised to take a decisive tone anddeclare the election of Hayes. One of the editorial council, Mr. John C. Reid, hurried to Republican headquarters in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, whichhe found deserted, the triumph of Tilden having long before sent everybodyto 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 manwearing an enormous pair of goggles, his hat drawn over his ears, agreatcoat with a heavy military cloak, and carrying a gripsack andnewspaper in his hand. The newspaper was the New York Tribune, " announcingthe 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 hadread. 

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. Theydid so, consumingly, sending telegrams to Columbia, Tallahassee and NewOrleans, stating to each of the parties addressed that the result of theelection depended upon his State. To these was appended the signature ofZachariah Chandler. 

Later in the day Senator Chandler, advised of what had been set on footand its possibilities, issued from National Republican headquarters thislaconic message: "Hayes has 185 electoral votes and is elected. "

Thus began and was put in motion the scheme to confuse the returns and makea disputed count of the vote. 

VII

The day after the election I wired Mr. Tilden suggesting that as Governorof New York he propose to Mr. Hayes, the Governor of Ohio, that they uniteupon a committee of eminent citizens, composed in equal numbers of thefriends of each, who should proceed at once to Louisiana, which appeared tobe the objective point of greatest moment to the already contested result. Pursuant to a telegraphic correspondence which followed, I left Louisvillethat night for New Orleans. I was joined en route by Mr. Lamar and GeneralWalthal, of Mississippi, and together we arrived in the Crescent CityFriday morning. 

It has since transpired that the Republicans were promptly advised by theWestern Union Telegraph Company of all that had passed over its wires, mydispatches to Mr. Tilden being read in Republican headquarters at least assoon 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 beforeany of them had arrived General Grant, the actual President, anticipatingwhat was about to happen, appointed a body of Republicans for the likepurpose, and the advance guard of these appeared on the scene the followingMonday. 

Within a week the St. Charles Hotel might have been mistaken for acaravansary of the national capital. Among the Republicans were JohnSherman, Stanley Matthews, Garfield, Evarts, Logan, Kelley, Stoughton, andmany others. Among the Democrats, besides Lamar, Walthal and myself, cameLyman Trumbull, Samuel J. Randall, William R. Morrison, McDonald, ofIndiana, and many others. 

A certain degree of personal intimacy existed between the members of thetwo groups, and the "entente" was quite as unrestrained as might haveexisted between rival athletic teams. A Kentucky friend sent me a demijohnof what was represented as very old Bourbon, and I divided it with"our friends the enemy. " New Orleans was new to most of the "visitingstatesmen, " and we attended the places of amusement, lived in therestaurants, and saw the sights as if we had been tourists in a foreignland and not partisans charged with the business of adjusting aPresidential 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 StanleyMatthews, a near kinsman by marriage, who had stood as an elder brother tome from my childhood. 

Corruption was in the air. That the Returning Board was for sale and couldbe bought was the universal impression. Every day some one turned up withpretended authority and an offer to sell. Most of these were, of course, the merest adventurers. It was my own belief that the Returning Board wasplaying for the best price it could get from the Republicans and that theonly effect of any offer to buy on our part would be to assist this schemeof blackmail. 

The Returning Board consisted of two white men, Wells and Anderson; and twonegroes, Kenner and Casanave. One and all they were without character. Iwas tempted through sheer curiosity to listen to a proposal which seemed tocome direct from the board itself, the messenger being a well-known StateSenator. As if he were proposing to dispose of a horse or a dog he statedhis 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 thousandeach for Wells and Anderson, and twenty-five thousand apiece for theniggers. "

To my mind it was a joke. "Senator, " said I, "the terms are as cheap asdirt. I don't happen to have the amount about me at the moment, but I willcommunicate with my principal and see you later. "

Having no thought of entertaining the proposal, I had forgotten theincident, when two or three days later my man met me in the lobby of thehotel and pressed for a definite reply. I then told him I had found that Ipossessed no authority to act and advised him to go elsewhere. 

It is asserted that Wells and Anderson did agree to sell and were turneddown by Mr. Hewitt; and, being refused their demands for cash by theDemocrats, took their final pay, at least in patronage, from their ownparty. 

VIII

I passed the Christmas week of 1876 in New York with Mr. Tilden. OnChristmas day we dined alone. The outlook, on the whole, was cheering. With John Bigelow and Manton Marble, Mr. Tilden had been busily engagedcompiling the data for a constitutional battle to be fought bythe Democrats in Congress, maintaining the right of the House ofRepresentatives to concurrent jurisdiction with the Senate in the countingof the electoral vote, pursuant to an unbroken line of precedentsestablished by that method of proceeding in every presidential electionbetween 1793 and 1872. 

There was very great perplexity in the public mind. Both parties appearedto be at sea. The dispute between the Democratic House and theRepublican Senate made for thick weather. Contests of the vote of threeStates--Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida, not to mention single votesin Oregon and Vermont--which presently began to blow a gale, had alreadyspread menacing clouds across the political sky. Except Mr. Tilden, thewisest among the leaders knew not precisely what to do. 

From New Orleans, on the Saturday night succeeding the presidentialelection, I had telegraphed to Mr. Tilden detailing the exact conditionsthere 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 usethe corrupt returning boards of Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida toupset the election and make confusion in Congress might by prompt exposureand popular appeal have been thwarted. Be this as it may, my spirit wasdepressed and my confidence discouraged by the intense quietude on ourside, for I was sure that beneath the surface the Republicans, withresolute determination and multiplied resources, were as busy as bees. 

Mr. Robert M. McLane, later Governor of Maryland and later still Ministerto France--a man of rare ability and large experience, who had served inCongress and in diplomacy, and was an old friend of Mr. Tilden--had been ata Gramercy Park conference when my New Orleans report arrived, and had thenand there urged the agitation recommended by me. He was now again in NewYork. When a lad he had been in England with his father, Lewis McLane, thenAmerican Minister to the Court of St. James, during the excitement over theReform Bill of 1832. He had witnessed the popular demonstrations and hadbeen impressed by the direct force of public opinion upon law-making andlaw-makers. An analogous situation had arrived in America. The RepublicanSenate was as the Tory House of Lords. We must organize a movement such ashad been so effectual in England. Obviously something was going amiss withus and something had to be done. 

It was agreed that I should return to Washington and make a speech "feelingthe pulse" of the country, with the suggestion that in the National Capitalshould 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 themerest venture. I myself had no great faith in it. But I prepared thespeech, and after much reading and revising, it was held by Mr. Tilden andMr. McLane to cover the case and meet the purpose, Mr. Tilden writing Mr. Randall, Speaker of the House of Representatives, a letter, carried toWashington by Mr. McLane, instructing him what to do in the event that thepopular response should prove favorable. 

Alack the day! The Democrats were equal to nothing affirmative. TheRepublicans were united and resolute. I delivered the speech, not inthe House, as had been intended, but at a public meeting which seemedopportune. The Democrats at once set about denying the sinister and violentpurpose ascribed to it by the Republicans, who, fully advised that ithad emanated from Gramercy Park and came by authority, started a counteragitation of their own. 

I became the target for every kind of ridicule and abuse. Nast drew agrotesque cartoon of me, distorting my suggestion for the assembling of100, 000 citizens, which was both offensive and libellous. 

Being on friendly terms with the Harpers, I made my displeasure so resonantin Franklin Square--Nast himself having no personal ill will toward me--that a curious and pleasing opportunity which came to pass was taken tomake amends. A son having been born to me, Harper's Weekly contained anatoning cartoon representing the child in its father's arms, and, above, the legend "10, 000 sons from Kentucky alone. " Some wag said that the sonin question was "the only one of the 100, 000 in arms who came when he wascalled. "

For many years afterward I was pursued by this unlucky speech, or ratherby the misinterpretation given to it alike by friend and foe. Nast'sfirst cartoon was accepted as a faithful portrait, and I was accordinglysatirized and stigmatized, though no thought of violence ever had enteredmy mind, and in the final proceedings I had voted for the ElectoralCommission Bill and faithfully stood by its decisions. Joseph Pulitzer, whoimmediately followed me on the occasion named, declared that he wanted my"one hundred thousand" to come fully armed and ready for business; yet henever was taken to task or reminded of his temerity. 

IX

The Electoral Commission Bill was considered with great secrecy by thejoint committees of the House and Senate. Its terms were in directcontravention of Mr. Tilden's plan. This was simplicity itself. He wasfor asserting by formal resolution the conclusive right of the two Housesacting concurrently to count the electoral vote and determine what shouldbe counted as electoral votes; and for denying, also by formal resolution, the pretension set up by the Republicans that the President of the Senatehad lawful right to assume that function. He was for urging that issuein debate in both Houses and before the country. He thought that if theattempt should be made to usurp for the president of the Senate a power tomake 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 inCongress until the fourteenth of January, and then only by Mr. Hewitt, theextra constitutional features of the electoral-tribunal measure havingalready received the assent of Mr. Bayard and Mr. Thurman, the Democraticmembers 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. Tildensaid: "If you go into conference with your adversary, and can't break offbecause you feel you must agree to something, you cannot negotiate--you arenot fit to negotiate. You will be beaten upon every detail. "

Replying to the apprehension of a collision of force between the partiesMr. Tilden thought it exaggerated, but said: "Why surrender now? You canalways surrender. Why surrender before the battle for fear you may have tosurrender after the battle?"

In short, Mr. Tilden condemned the proceeding as precipitate. It was amonth before the time for the count, and he saw no reason why opportunityshould not be given for consideration and consultation by all therepresentatives of the people. He treated the state of mind of Bayard andThurman as a panic in which they were liable to act in haste and repent atleisure. He stood for publicity and wider discussion, distrusting a schemeto submit such vast interests to a small body sitting in the Capitol aslikely to become the sport of intrigue and fraud. 

Mr. Hewitt returned to Washington and without communicating to Mr. Tilden'simmediate friends in the House his attitude and objection, united withMr. Thurman and Mr. Bayard in completing the bill and reporting it to theDemocratic Advisory Committee, as, by a caucus rule, had to be done withall measures relating to the great issue then before us. No intimation hadpreceded it. It fell like a bombshell upon the members of the committee. 

In the debate that followed Mr. Bayard was very insistent, answering theobjections 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 myhands of the whole business, and you can go ahead and seat your Presidentin your own way. "

Mr. Randall, the Speaker, said nothing, but he was with me, as were amajority of my colleagues. It was Mr. Hunton, of Virginia, who poured oilon the troubled waters, and somewhat in doubt as to whether the changedsituation had changed Mr. Tilden I yielded my better judgment, declaringit as my opinion that the plan would seat Hayes; and there being no otherprotestant the committee finally gave a reluctant assent. 

In open session a majority of Democrats favored the bill. Many of them madeit 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 toserve, and Mr. Justice Bradley was chosen for the commission in his place. 

The day after the inauguration of Hayes my kinsman, Stanley Matthews, saidto 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 himbecause he carried more weight. "

The subsequent career of Judge Davis in the Senate gave conclusive proofthat this was true. 

When the consideration of the disputed votes before the commission hadproceeded far enough to demonstrate the likelihood that its final decisionwould be for Hayes a movement of obstruction and delay, a filibuster, wasorganized by about forty Democratic members of the House. It proved ratherturbulent than effective. The South stood very nearly solid for carryingout the agreement in good faith. 

Toward the close the filibuster received what appeared formidablereinforcement from the Louisiana delegation. This was in reality merelya bluff, intended to induce the Hayes people to make certain concessionstouching their State government. It had the desired effect. Satisfactoryassurances having been given, the count proceeded to the end--a very bitterend indeed for the Democrats. 

The final conference between the Louisianans and the accreditedrepresentatives of Mr. Hayes was held at Wormley's Hotel and came to becalled "the Wormley Conference. " It was the subject of uncommon interestand heated controversy at the time and long afterward. Without knowing whyor 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 theRepublicans through Mr. Garfield. Something was said about my serving as areferee. 

Just before the appointed hour Gen. M. C. Butler, of South Carolina, afterward so long a Senator in Congress, said to me: "This meeting iscalled to enable Louisiana to make terms with Hayes. South Carolina isas deeply concerned as Louisiana, but we have nobody to represent us inCongress and hence have not been invited. South Carolina puts herself inyour hands and expects you to secure for her whatever terms are given toLouisiana. "

So of a sudden I found myself invested with responsibility equally as anagent and a referee. 

It is hardly worth while repeating in detail all that passed at thisWormley Conference, made public long ago by Congressional investigation. When I entered the apartment of Mr. Evarts at Wormley's I found, besidesMr. 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 uponduring the previous conferences--that is, the promise that if Hayes came inthe troops should be withdrawn and the people of Louisiana be left free toset their house in order to suit themselves. The actual order withdrawingthe troops was issued by President Grant two or three days later, just ashe was going out of office. 

"Now, gentlemen, " said I, half in jest, "I am here to represent SouthCarolina; and if the terms given to Louisiana are not equally applied toSouth 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, whenwith great earnestness Governor Dennison, who had been the bearer of aletter from Mr. Hayes, which he had read to us, put his hand on my shoulderand said: "As a matter of course the Southern policy to which Mr. Hayes hashere pledged himself embraces South Carolina as well as Louisiana. "

Mr. Sherman, Mr. Garfield and Mr. Evarts concurred warmly in this, andimmediately 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 certainDemocratic members of the House who were nowise party to it but hadsympathized with the purpose of Louisiana and South Carolina to obtain somemeasure of relief from intolerable local conditions, I never was questionedor assailed. No one doubted my fidelity to Mr. Tilden, who had beenpromptly advised of all that passed and who approved what I had done. 

Though "conscripted, " as it were, and rather a passive agent, I couldsee no wrong in the proceeding. I had spoken and voted in favor of theElectoral Tribunal Bill, and losing, had no thought of repudiating itsconclusions. Hayes was already as good as seated. If the States ofLouisiana and South Carolina could save their local autonomy out of thegeneral wreck there seemed no good reason to forbid. 

On the other hand, the Republican leaders were glad of an opportunity tomake an end of the corrupt and tragic farce of Reconstruction; to unloadtheir party of a dead weight which had been burdensome and was growingdangerous; mayhap to punish their Southern agents, who had demanded so muchfor 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 announcedto him, and also on the fourth of March when Mr. Hayes was inaugurated, andit was impossible to remark any change in his manner, except perhaps thathe was less absorbed than usual and more interested in current affairs. "

His was an intensely serious mind; and he had come to regard thepresidency as rather a burden to be borne--an opportunity for publicusefulness--involving a life of constant toil and care, than as an occasionfor personal exploitation and rejoicing. 

How much of captivation the idea of the presidency may have had forhim when he was first named for the office I cannot say, for he was asunexultant in the moment of victory as he was unsubdued in the hour ofdefeat; but it is certainly true that he gave no sign of disappointment toany of his friends. 

He lived nearly ten years longer, at Greystone, in a noble homestead he hadpurchased for himself overlooking the Hudson River, the same ideal life ofthe scholar and gentleman that he had passed in Gramercy Park. 

Looking back over these untoward and sometimes mystifying events, I haveoften asked myself: Was it possible, with the elements what they were, andhe himself what he was, to seat Mr. Tilden in the office to which he hadbeen elected? The missing ingredient in a character intellectually andmorally great and a personality far from unimpressive, was the touch of thedramatic discoverable in most of the leaders of men; even in such leadersas William of Orange and Louis XI; as Cromwell and Washington. 

There was nothing spectacular about Mr. Tilden. Not wanting the sense ofhumor, he seldom indulged it. In spite of his positiveness of opinion andamplitude of knowledge he was always courteous and deferential in debate. He had none of the audacious daring, let us say, of Mr. Elaine, theenergetic self-assertion of Mr. Roosevelt. Either in his place would havecarried all before him. 

I repeat that he was never a subtle schemer--sitting behind the screen andpulling his wires--which his political and party enemies discovered him tobe as soon as he began to get in the way of the machine and obstruct themarch of the self-elect. His confidences were not effusive, nor theirsubjects numerous. His deliberation was unfailing and sometimes it carriedthe idea of indecision, not to say actual love of procrastination. But inmy experience with him I found that he usually ended where he began, and itwas nowise difficult for those whom he trusted to divine the bias of hismind where he thought it best to reserve its conclusions. 

I do not think in any great affair he ever hesitated longer than thegravity of the case required of a prudent man or that he had a preferencefor delays or that he clung tenaciously to both horns of the dilemma, ashis training and instinct might lead him to do, and did certainly exposehim to the accusation of doing. 

He was a philosopher and took the world as he found it. He rarelycomplained and never inveighed. He had a discriminating way of balancingmen's good and bad qualities and of giving each the benefit of a generousaccounting, and a just way of expecting no more of a man than it was in himto yield. As he got into deeper water his stature rose to its level, andfrom his exclusion from the presidency in 1877 to his renunciation ofpublic affairs in 1884 and his death in 1886 his walks and ways might havebeen a study for all who would learn life's truest lessons and know thereal sources of honor, happiness and fame.