Marse Henry: An Autobiography, Complete
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Title: Marse Henry: An Autobiography, Complete
Author: Henry Watterson
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8460]
Most recently updated: June 21, 2020
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARSE HENRY: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, COMPLETE ***
Produced by Curtis A. Weyant, David Widger and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team
“Marse Henry”
An Autobiography
by Henry Watterson
_Illustrated_
[Illustration: Henry Watterson (About 1908)]
To My Friend
Alexander Konta
With Affectionate Salutation
“Mansfield,”
1919
A mound of earth a little higher graded:
Perhaps upon a stone a chiselled name:
A dab of printer’s ink soon blurred and faded—
And then oblivion—that—that is fame!
—Henry Watterson
Contents
Chapter the First
I Am Born and Begin to Take Notice—John Quincy Adams and Andrew
Jackson—James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce—Jack Dade and “Beau
Hickman”—Old Times in Washington
Chapter the Second
Slavery the Trouble-Maker—Break-Up of the Whig Party and Rise of the
Republican—The Key—Sickle’s Tragedy—Brooks and
Sumner—Life at Washington in the Fifties
Chapter the Third
The Inauguration of Lincoln—I Quit Washington and Return to
Tennessee—A Run-a-bout with Forest—Through the Federal Lines and a
Dangerous Adventure—Good Luck at Memphis
Chapter the Fourth
I Go to London—Am Introduced to a Notable Set—Huxley, Spencer, Mill
and Tyndall—Artemus Ward Comes to Town—The Savage Club
Chapter the Fifth
Mark Twain—The Original of Colonel Mulberry Sellers—The “Earl
of Durham”—Some Noctes Ambrosianæ—A Joke on Murat Halstead
Chapter the Sixth
Houston and Wigfall of Texas—Stephen A. Douglas—The Twaddle about
Puritans and Cavaliers—Andrew Johnson and John C. Breckenridge
Chapter the Seventh
An Old Newspaper Rookery—Reactionary Sectionalism in Cincinnati and
Louisville—_The Courier-Journal_
Chapter the Eighth
Feminism and Woman Suffrage—The Adventures in Politics and
Society—A Real Heroine
Chapter the Ninth
Dr. Norvin Green—Joseph Pulitzer—Chester A. Arthur—General
Grant—The Case of Fitz-John Porter
Chapter the Tenth
Of Liars and Lying—Woman Suffrage and Feminism—The Professional
Female—Parties, Politics, and Politicians in America
Chapter the Eleventh
Andrew Johnson—The Liberal Convention in 1872—Carl Schurz—The
“Quadrilateral”—Sam Bowles, Horace White and Murat
Halstead—A Queer Composite of Incongruities
Chapter the Twelfth
The Ideal in Public Life—Politicians, Statesmen and
Philosophers—The Disputed Presidency in 1876—The Persona and
Character of Mr. Tilden—His Election and Exclusion by a Partisan Tribunal
Chapter the Thirteenth
Charles Eames and Charles Sumner-Schurzand Lamar—I Go to Congress—A
Heroic Kentuckian—Stephen Foster and His Songs—Music and Theodore
Thomas
Chapter the Fourteenth
Henry Adams and the Adams Family—John Hay and Frank Mason—The Three
_Mousquetaires_ of Culture—Paris—“The
Frenchman”—The South of France
Chapter the Fifteenth
Still the Gay Capital of France—Its Environs—Walewska and De
Morny—Thackeray in Paris—A _Pension_ Adventure
Chapter the Sixteenth
Monte Carlo—The European Shrine of Sport and Fashion—Apocryphal
Gambling Stories—Leopold, King of the Belgians—An Able and
Picturesque Man of Business
Chapter the Seventeenth
A Parisian _Pension_—The Widow of Walewska—Napoleon’s
Daughter-in-Law—The Changeless—A Moral and Orderly City
Chapter the Eighteenth
The Grover Cleveland Period—President Arthur and Mr. Blaine—John
Chamberlin—The Decrees of Destiny
Chapter the Nineteenth
Mr. Cleveland in the White House—Mr. Bayard in the Department of
State—Queer Appointments to Office—The One-Party Power—The
End of North and South Sectionalism
Chapter the Twentieth
The Real Grover Cleveland—Two Clevelands Before and After
Marriage—A Correspondence and a Break of Personal Relations
Chapter the Twenty-First
Stephen Foster, the Song-Writer—A Friend Comes to the Rescu His
Originality—“My Old Kentucky Home” and the “Old Folks
at Home”—General Sherman and “Marching Through Georgia”
Chapter the Twenty-Second
Theodore Roosevelt—His Problematic Character—He Offers Me an
Appointment—His _Bonhomie_ and Chivalry—Proud of His Rebel Kin
Chapter the Twenty-Third
The Actor and the Journalist—The Newspaper and the State—Joseph
Jefferson—His Personal and Artistic Career—Modest Character and
Religious Belief
Chapter the Twenty-Fourth
The Writing of Memoirs—Some Characteristics of Carl Shurz—Sam
Bowles—Horace White and the Mugwumps
Chapter the Twenty-Fifth
Every Trade Has Its Tricks—I Play One on William McKinley—Far Away
Party Politics and Political Issues
Chapter the Twenty-Sixth
A Libel on Mr. Cleveland—His Fondness for Cards—Some Poker
Stories—The “Senate Game”—Tom Ochiltree, Senator
Allison and General Schenck
Chapter the Twenty-Seventh
The Profession of Journalism—Newspapers and Editors in
America—Bennett, Greeley and Raymond—Forney and Dana—The
Education of a Journalist
Chapter the Twenty-Eighth
Bullies and Braggarts—Some Kentucky Illustrations—The Old Galt
House—The Throckmortons—A Famous Sugeon—“Old
Hell’s Delight”
Chapter the Twenty-Ninth
About Political Conventions, State and National—“Old Ben
Butler”—His Appearance as a Trouble-Maker in the Democratic
National Convention of 1892—Tarifa and the Tariff—Spain as a
Frightful Example
Chapter the Thirtieth
The Makers of the Republic—Lincoln, Jefferson, Clay and Webster—The
Proposed League of Nations—The Wilsonian Incertitude—The “New
Freedom”
Chapter the Thirty-First
The Age of Miracles—A Story of Franklin Pierce—Simon Suggs Billy
Sunday—Jefferson Davis and Aaron Burr—Certain Constitutional
Shortcomings
Chapter the Thirty-Second
A War Episode—I Meet my Fater—I Marry and Make a Home—The Ups
and Downs of Life Lead to a Happy Old Age
Illustrations
Henry Watterson (About 1908)
Henry Clay—Painted at Ashland by Dodge for The Hon. Andrew Ewing of
Tennessee—The Original Hangs in Mr. Watterson’s Library at “Mansfield”
W. P. Hardee, Lieutenant General C.S.A.
John Bell of Tennessee—In 1860 Presidential Candidate “Union
Party”—“Bell and Everett” Ticket
Artemus Ward
General Leonidas Polk—Lieutenant General C.S.A.—Killed in Georgia
June 14, 1864—P.E. Bishop of Louisiana
Mr. Watterson’s Editorial Staff in 1868 When the Three Daily
Newspapers of Louisville Were United into the _Courier-Journal_. Mr.
George D. Prentice and Mr. Watterson Are in the Center
Abraham Lincoln in 1861. From a Photograph by M. B. Brady
Mrs. Lincoln in 1861
Henry Watterson—Fifty Years Ago
Henry Woodfire Grady—One of Mr. Watterson’s “Boys”
Mr. Watterson’s Library at “Mansfield”
A Corner of “Mansfield”—Home of Mr. Watterson
Henry Watterson (Photograph Taken in Florida)
Henry Watterson. From a painting by Louis Mark in the Manhattan Club,
New York
“MARSE HENRY”
Chapter the First
I Am Born and Begin to Take Notice—John Quincy Adams and Andrew
Jackson—James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce—Jack Dade and “Beau
Hickman”—Old Times in Washington
I
I am asked to jot down a few autobiographic odds and ends from such
data of record and memory as I may retain. I have been something of a
student of life; an observer of men and women and affairs; an appraiser
of their character, their conduct, and, on occasion, of their motives.
Thus, a kind of instinct, which bred a tendency and grew to a habit,
has led me into many and diverse companies, the lowest not always the
meanest.
Circumstance has rather favored than hindered this bent. I was born in
a party camp and grew to manhood on a political battlefield. I have
lived through stirring times and in the thick of events. In a vein
colloquial and reminiscential, not ambitious, let me recall some
impressions which these have left upon the mind of one who long ago
reached and turned the corner of the Scriptural limitation; who,
approaching fourscore, does not yet feel painfully the frost of age
beneath the ravage of time’s defacing waves. Assuredly they have not
obliterated his sense either of vision or vista. Mindful of the
adjuration of Burns,
Keep something to yourself, Ye scarcely tell to ony,
I shall yet hold little in reserve, having no state secrets or
mysteries of the soul to reveal.
It is not my purpose to be or to seem oracular. I shall not write after
the manner of Rousseau, whose Confessions had been better honored in
the breach than the observance, and in any event whose sincerity will
bear question; nor have I tales to tell after the manner of Paul
Barras, whose Memoirs have earned him an immortality of infamy. Neither
shall I emulate the grandiose volubility and self-complacent posing of
Metternich and Talleyrand, whose pretentious volumes rest for the most
part unopened upon dusty shelves. I aspire to none of the honors of the
historian. It shall be my aim as far as may be to avoid the garrulity
of the raconteur and to restrain the exaggerations of the ego. But
neither fear of the charge of self-exploitation nor the specter of a
modesty oft too obtrusive to be real shall deter me from a proper
freedom of narration, where, though in the main but a humble
chronicler, I must needs appear upon the scene and speak of myself; for
I at least have not always been a dummy and have sometimes in a way
helped to make history.
In my early life—as it were, my salad days—I aspired to becoming what
old Simon Cameron called “one of those damned literary fellows” and
Thomas Carlyle less profanely described as “a leeterary celeebrity.”
But some malign fate always sat upon my ambitions in this regard. It
was easy to become The National Gambler in Nast’s cartoons, and yet
easier The National Drunkard through the medium of the everlasting
mint-julep joke; but the phantom of the laurel crown would never linger
upon my fair young brow.
Though I wrote verses for the early issues of Harper’s Weekly—happily
no one can now prove them on me, for even at that jejune period I had
the prudence to use an anonym—the Harpers, luckily for me, declined to
publish a volume of my poems. I went to London, carrying with me “the
great American novel.” It was actually accepted by my ever too partial
friend, Alexander Macmillan. But, rest his dear old soul, he died and
his successors refused to see the transcendent merit of that
performance, a view which my own maturing sense of belles-lettres
values subsequently came to verify.
When George Harvey arrived at the front I “’ad ’opes.” But, Lord, that
cast-iron man had never any bookish bowels of compassion—or political
either for the matter of that!—so that finally I gave up fiction and
resigned myself to the humble category of the crushed tragi-comedians
of literature, who inevitably drift into journalism.
Thus my destiny has been casual. A great man of letters quite thwarted,
I became a newspaper reporter—a voluminous space writer for the
press—now and again an editor and managing editor—until, when I was
nearly thirty years of age, I hit the Kentucky trail and set up for a
journalist. I did this, however, with a big “J,” nursing for a while
some faint ambitions of statesmanship—even office—but in the end
discarding everything that might obstruct my entire freedom, for I came
into the world an insurgent, or, as I have sometimes described myself
in the Kentucky vernacular, “a free nigger and not a slave nigger.”
II
Though born in a party camp and grown to manhood on a political
battlefield my earlier years were most seriously influenced by the
religious spirit of the times. We passed to and fro between Washington
and the two family homesteads in Tennessee, which had cradled
respectively my father and mother, Beech Grove in Bedford County, and
Spring Hill in Maury County. Both my grandfathers were devout churchmen
of the Presbyterian faith. My Grandfather Black, indeed, was the son of
a Presbyterian clergyman, who lived, preached and died in Madison
County, Kentucky. He was descended, I am assured, in a straight line
from that David Black, of Edinburgh, who, as Burkle tells us, having
declared in a sermon that Elizabeth of England was a harlot, and her
cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, little better, went to prison for it—all
honor to his memory.
My Grandfather Watterson was a man of mark in his day. He was decidedly
a constructive—the projector and in part the builder of an important
railway line—an early friend and comrade of General Jackson, who was
all too busy to take office, and, indeed, who throughout his life
disdained the ephemeral honors of public life. The Wattersons had
migrated directly from Virginia to Tennessee.
The two families were prosperous, even wealthy for those days, and my
father had entered public life with plenty of money, and General
Jackson for his sponsor. It was not, however, his ambitions or his
career that interested me—that is, not until I was well into my
teens—but the camp meetings and the revivalist preachers delivering the
Word of God with more or less of ignorant yet often of very eloquent
and convincing fervor.
The wave of the great Awakening of 1800 had not yet subsided. Bascom
was still alive. I have heard him preach. The people were filled with
thoughts of heaven and hell, of the immortality of the soul and the
life everlasting, of the Redeemer and the Cross of Calvary. The camp
ground witnessed an annual muster of the adjacent countryside. The
revival was a religious hysteria lasting ten days or two weeks. The
sermons were appeals to the emotions. The songs were the outpourings of
the soul in ecstacy. There was no fanaticism of the death-dealing,
proscriptive sort; nor any conscious cant; simplicity, childlike belief
in future rewards and punishments, the orthodox Gospel the universal
rule. There was a good deal of doughty controversy between the
churches, as between the parties; but love of the Union and the Lord
was the bedrock of every confession.
Inevitably an impressionable and imaginative mind opening to such
sights and sounds as it emerged from infancy must have been deeply
affected. Until I was twelve years old the enchantment of religion had
complete possession of my understanding. With the loudest, I could sing
all the hymns. Being early taught in music I began to transpose them
into many sorts of rhythmic movement for the edification of my
companions. Their words, aimed directly at the heart, sank, never to be
forgotten, into my memory. To this day I can repeat the most of
them—though not without a break of voice—while too much dwelling upon
them would stir me to a pitch of feeling which a life of activity in
very different walks and ways and a certain self-control I have been
always able to command would scarcely suffice to restrain.
The truth is that I retain the spiritual essentials I learned then and
there. I never had the young man’s period of disbelief. There has never
been a time when if the Angel of Death had appeared upon the scene—no
matter how festal—I would not have knelt with adoration and welcome;
never a time on the battlefield or at sea when if the elements had
opened to swallow me I would not have gone down shouting!
Sectarianism in time yielded to universalism. Theology came to seem to
my mind more and more a weapon in the hands of Satan to embroil and
divide the churches. I found in the Sermon on the Mount leading enough
for my ethical guidance, in the life and death of the Man of Galilee
inspiration enough to fulfill my heart’s desire; and though I have read
a great deal of modern inquiry—from Renan and Huxley through Newman and
Döllinger, embracing debates before, during and after the English
upheaval of the late fifties and the Ecumenical Council of 1870,
including the various raids upon the Westminster Confession, especially
the revision of the Bible, down to writers like Frederic Harrison and
Doctor Campbell—I have found nothing to shake my childlike faith in the
simple rescript of Christ and Him crucified.
III
From their admission into the Union, the States of Kentucky and
Tennessee have held a relation to the politics of the country somewhat
disproportioned to their population and wealth. As between the two
parties from the Jacksonian era to the War of Sections, each was
closely and hotly contested. If not the birthplace of what was called
“stump oratory,” in them that picturesque form of party warfare
flourished most and lasted longest. The “barbecue” was at once a rustic
feast and a forum of political debate. Especially notable was the
presidential campaign of 1840, the year of my birth, “Tippecanoe and
Tyler,” for the Whig slogan—“Old Hickory” and “the battle of New
Orleans,” the Democratic rallying cry—Jackson and Clay, the adored
party chieftains.
I grew up in the one State, and have passed the rest of my life in the
other, cherishing for both a deep affection, and, maybe,
over-estimating their hold upon the public interest. Excepting General
Jackson, who was a fighter and not a talker, their public men, with
Henry Clay and Felix Grundy in the lead, were “stump orators.” He who
could not relate and impersonate an anecdote to illustrate and clinch
his argument, nor “make the welkin ring” with the clarion tones of his
voice, was politically good for nothing. James K. Polk and James C.
Jones led the van of stump orators in Tennessee, Ben Hardin, John J.
Crittenden and John C. Breckenridge in Kentucky. Tradition still has
stories to tell of their exploits and prowess, their wit and eloquence,
even their commonplace sayings and doings. They were marked men who
never failed to captivate their audiences. The system of stump oratory
had many advantages as a public force and was both edifying and
educational. There were a few conspicuous writers for the press, such
as Ritchie, Greeley and Prentice. But the day of personal journalism
and newspaper influence came later.
I was born at Washington—February 16, 1840—“a bad year for Democrats,”
as my father used to say, adding: “I am afraid the boy will grow up to
be a Whig.”
In those primitive days there were only Whigs and Democrats. Men took
their politics, as their liquor, “straight”; and this father of mine
was an undoubting Democrat of the schools of Jefferson and Jackson. He
had succeeded James K. Polk in Congress when the future President was
elected governor of Tennessee; though when nominated he was little
beyond the age required to qualify as a member of the House.
To the end of his long life he appeared to me the embodiment of wisdom,
integrity and courage. And so he was—a man of tremendous force of
character, yet of surpassing sweetness of disposition; singularly
disdainful of office, and indeed of preferment of every sort; a profuse
maker and a prodigal spender of money; who, his needs and recognition
assured, cared nothing at all for what he regarded as the costly
glories of the little great men who rattled round in places often much
too big for them.
Immediately succeeding Mr. Polk, and such a youth in appearance, he
attracted instant attention. His father, my grandfather, allowed him a
larger income than was good for him—seeing that the per diem then paid
Congressmen was altogether insufficient—and during the earlier days of
his sojourn in the national capital he cut a wide swath; his principal
yokemate in the pleasures and dissipations of those times being
Franklin Pierce, at first a representative and then a senator from New
Hampshire. Fortunately for both of them, they were whisked out of
Washington by their families in 1843; my father into the diplomatic
service and Mr. Pierce to the seclusion of his New England home. They
kept in close touch, however, the one with the other, and ten years
later, in 1853, were back again upon the scene of their rather
conspicuous frivolity, Pierce as President of the United States, my
father, who had preceded him a year or two, as editor of the Washington
Union, the organ of the Administration.
When I was a boy the national capital was still rife with stories of
their escapades. One that I recall had it that on a certain occasion
returning from an excursion late at night my father missed his footing
and fell into the canal that then divided the city, and that Pierce,
after many fruitless efforts, unable to assist him to dry land,
exclaimed, “Well, Harvey, I can’t get you out, but I’ll get in with
you,” suiting the action to the word. And there they were found and
rescued by a party of passers, very well pleased with themselves.
My father’s absence in South America extended over two years. My
mother’s health, maybe her aversion to a long overseas journey, kept
her at home, and very soon he tired of life abroad without her and came
back. A committee of citizens went on a steamer down the river to meet
him, the wife and child along, of course, and the story was told that,
seated on the paternal knee curiously observant of every detail, the
brat suddenly exclaimed, “Ah ha, pa! Now you’ve got on your store
clothes. But when ma gets you up at Beech Grove you’ll have to lay off
your broadcloth and put on your jeans, like I do.”
Being an only child and often an invalid, I was a pet in the family and
many tales were told of my infantile precocity. On one occasion I had a
fight with a little colored boy of my own age and I need not say got
the worst of it. My grandfather, who came up betimes and separated us,
said, “he has blackened your eye and he shall black your boots,”
thereafter making me a deed to the lad. We grew up together in the
greatest amity and in due time I gave him his freedom, and again to
drop into the vernacular—“that was the only nigger I ever owned.” I
should add that in the “War of Sections” he fell in battle bravely
fighting for the freedom of his race.
It is truth to say that I cannot recall the time when I was not
passionately opposed to slavery, a crank on the subject of personal
liberty, if I am a crank about anything.
IV
In those days a less attractive place than the city of Washington could
hardly be imagined. It was scattered over an ill-paved and half-filled
oblong extending east and west from the Capitol to the White House, and
north and south from the line of the Maryland hills to the Potomac
River. One does not wonder that the early Britishers, led by Tom Moore,
made game of it, for it was both unpromising and unsightly.
Private carriages were not numerous. Hackney coaches had to be
especially ordered. The only public conveyance was a rickety old
omnibus which, making hourly trips, plied its lazy journey between the
Navy Yard and Georgetown. There was a livery stable—Kimball’s—having
“stalls,” as the sleeping apartments above came to be called, thus
literally serving man and beast. These stalls often lodged very
distinguished people. Kimball, the proprietor, a New Hampshire Democrat
of imposing appearance, was one of the last Washingtonians to wear knee
breeches and a ruffled shirt. He was a great admirer of my father and
his place was a resort of my childhood.
One day in the early April of 1852 I was humped in a chair upon one
side of the open entrance reading a book—Mr. Kimball seated on the
other side reading a newspaper—when there came down the street a tall,
greasy-looking person, who as he approached said: “Kimball, I have
another letter here from Frank.”
“Well, what does Frank say?”
Then the letter was produced, read and discussed.
It was all about the coming National Democratic Convention and its
prospective nominee for President of the United States, “Frank” seeming
to be a principal. To me it sounded very queer. But I took it all in,
and as soon as I reached home I put it up to my father:
“How comes it,” I asked, “that a big old loafer gets a letter from a
candidate for President and talks it over with the keeper of a livery
stable? What have such people to do with such things?”
My father said: “My son, Mr. Kimball is an estimable man. He has been
an important and popular Democrat in New Hampshire. He is not without
influence here. The Frank they talked about is Gen. Franklin Pierce, of
New Hampshire, an old friend and neighbor of Mr. Kimball. General
Pierce served in Congress with me and some of us are thinking that we
may nominate him for President. The ‘big old loafer,’ as you call him,
was Mr. John C. Rives, a most distinguished and influential Democrat
indeed.”
Three months later, when the event came to pass, I could tell all about
Gen. Franklin Pierce. His nomination was no surprise to me, though to
the country at large it was almost a shock. He had been nowhere
seriously considered.
In illustration of this a funny incident recurs to me. At Nashville the
night of the nomination a party of Whigs and Democrats had gathered in
front of the principal hotel waiting for the arrival of the news, among
the rest Sam Bugg and Chunky Towles, two local gamblers, both
undoubting Democrats. At length Chunky Towles, worn out, went off to
bed. The result was finally flashed over the wires. The crowd was
nonplused. “Who the hell is Franklin Pierce?” passed from lip to lip.
Sam Bugg knew his political catechism well. He proceeded at length to
tell all about Franklin Pierce, ending with the opinion that he was the
man wanted and would be elected hands down, and he had a thousand
dollars to bet on it.
Then he slipped away to tell his pal.
“Wake up, Chunky,” he cried. “We got a candidate—Gen. Franklin Pierce,
of New Hampshire.”
“Who the——”
“Chunky,” says Sam. “I am ashamed of your ignorance. Gen. Franklin
Pierce is the son of Gen. Benjamin Pierce, of Revolutionary fame. He
has served in both houses of Congress. He declined a seat in Polk’s
Cabinet. He won distinction in the Mexican War. He is the very
candidate we’ve been after.”
“In that case,” says Chunky, “I’ll get up.” When he reappeared Petway,
the Whig leader of the gathering, who had been deriding the convention,
the candidate and all things else Democratic, exclaimed:
“Here comes Chunky Towles. He’s a good Democrat; and I’ll bet ten to
one he never heard of Franklin Pierce in his life before.”
Chunky Towles was one of the handsomest men of his time. His strong
suit was his unruffled composure and cool self-control. “Mr. Petway,”
says he, “you would lose your money, and I won’t take advantage of any
man’s ignorance. Besides, I never gamble on a certainty. Gen. Franklin
Pierce, sir, is a son of Gen. Benjamin Pierce of Revolutionary memory.
He served in both houses of Congress, sir—refused a seat in Polk’s
Cabinet, sir—won distinction in the Mexican War, sir. He has been from
the first my choice, and I’ve money to bet on his election.”
Franklin Pierce had an only son, named Benny, after his grandfather,
the Revolutionary hero. He was of my own age. I was planning the good
time we were going to have in the White House when tidings came that he
had been killed in a railway accident. It was a grievous blow, from
which the stricken mother never recovered. One of the most vivid
memories and altogether the saddest episode of my childhood is that a
few weeks later I was carried up to the Executive Mansion, which, all
formality and marble, seemed cold enough for a mausoleum, where a lady
in black took me in her arms and convulsively held me there, weeping as
if her heart would break.
V
Sometimes a fancy, rather vague, comes to me of seeing the soldiers go
off to the Mexican War and of making flags striped with pokeberry
juice—somehow the name of the fruit was mingled with that of the
President—though a visit quite a year before to The Hermitage, which
adjoined the farm of an uncle, to see General Jackson is still
uneffaced.
I remember it vividly. The old hero dandled me in his arms, saying “So
this is Harvey’s boy,” I looking the while in vain for the “hickory,”
of which I had heard so much.
On the personal side history owes General Jackson reparation. His
personality needs indeed complete reconstruction in the popular mind,
which misconceives him a rough frontiersman having few or none of the
social graces. In point of fact he came into the world a gentleman, a
leader, a knight-errant who captivated women and dominated men.
I shared when a young man the common belief about him. But there is
ample proof of the error of this. From middle age, though he ever liked
a horse race, he was a regular if not a devout churchman. He did not
swear at all, “by the Eternal” or any other oath. When he reached New
Orleans in 1814 to take command of the army, Governor Claiborne gave
him a dinner; and after he had gone Mrs. Claiborne, who knew European
courts and society better than any other American woman, said to her
husband: “Call that man a backwoodsman? He is the finest gentleman I
ever met!”
There is another witness—Mr. Buchanan, afterward President—who tells
how he took a distinguished English lady to the White House when Old
Hickory was President; how he went up to the general’s private
apartment, where he found him in a ragged _robe-de-chambre_, smoking
his pipe; how, when he intimated that the President might before coming
down slick himself a bit, he received the half-laughing rebuke:
“Buchanan, I once knew a man in Virginia who made himself independently
rich by minding his own business”; how, when he did come down, he was
_en règle_; and finally how, after a half hour of delightful talk, the
English lady as they regained the street broke forth with enthusiasm,
using almost the selfsame words of Mrs. Claiborne: “He is the finest
gentleman I ever met in the whole course of my life.”
VI
The Presidential campaign of 1848—and the concurrent return of the
Mexican soldiers—seems but yesterday. We were in Nashville, where the
camp fires of the two parties burned fiercely day and night, Tennessee
a debatable, even a pivotal state. I was an enthusiastic politician on
the Cass and Butler side, and was correspondingly disappointed when the
election went against us for Taylor and Fillmore, though a little
mollified when, on his way to Washington, General Taylor grasping his
old comrade, my grandfather, by the hand, called him “Billy,” and
paternally stroked my curls.
Though the next winter we passed in Washington I never saw him in the
White House. He died in July, 1850, and was succeeded by Millard
Fillmore. It is common to speak of Old Rough and Ready as an ignoramus.
I don’t think this. He may not have been very courtly, but he was a
gentleman.
Later in life I came to know Millard Fillmore well and to esteem him
highly. Once he told me that Daniel Webster had said to him: “Fillmore,
I like Clay—I like Clay very much—but he rides rough, sir; damned
rough!”
I was fond of going to the Capitol and of playing amateur page in the
House, of which my father had been a member and where he had many
friends, though I was never officially a page. There was in particular
a little old bald-headed gentleman who was good to me and would put his
arm about me and stroll with me across the rotunda to the Library of
Congress and get me books to read. I was not so young as not to know
that he was an ex-President of the United States, and to realize the
meaning of it. He had been the oldest member of the House when my
father was the youngest. He was John Quincy Adams. By chance I was on
the floor of the House when he fell in his place, and followed the
excited and tearful throng when they bore him into the Speaker’s Room,
kneeling by the side of the sofa with an improvised fan and crying as
if my heart would break.
One day in the spring of 1851 my father took me to a little hotel on
Pennsylvania Avenue near the Capitol and into a stuffy room, where a
snuffy old man wearing an ill-fitting wig was busying himself over a
pile of documents. He turned about and was very hearty.
“Aha, you’ve brought the boy,” said he.
And my father said: “My son, you wanted to see General Cass, and here
he is.”
My enthusiasm over the Cass and Butler campaign had not subsided.
Inevitably General Cass was to me the greatest of heroes. My father had
been and always remained his close friend. Later along we dwelt
together at Willard’s Hotel, my mother a chaperon for Miss Belle Cass,
afterward Madame Von Limbourg, and I came into familiar intercourse
with the family.
The general made me something of a pet and never ceased to be a hero to
me. I still think he was one of the foremost statesmen of his time and
treasure a birthday present he made me when I was just entering my
teens.
The hour I passed with him that afternoon I shall never forget.
As we were about taking our leave my father said: “Well, my son, you
have seen General Cass; what do you think of him?”
And the general patting me affectionately on the head laughingly said:
“He thinks he has seen a pretty good-looking old fogy—that is what he
thinks!”
VII
There flourished in the village life of Washington two old blokes—no
other word can properly describe them—Jack Dade, who signed himself
“the Honorable John W. Dade, of Virginia;” and Beau Hickman, who hailed
from nowhere and acquired the pseudonym through sheer impudence. In one
way and another they lived by their wits, the one all dignity, the
other all cheek. Hickman fell very early in his career of sponge and
beggar, but Dade lived long and died in office—indeed, toward the close
an office was actually created for him.
Dade had been a schoolmate of John Tyler—so intimate they were that at
college they were called “the two Jacks”—and when the death of Harrison
made Tyler President, the “off Jack,” as he dubbed himself, went up to
the White House and said: “Jack Tyler, you’ve had luck and I haven’t.
You must do something for me and do it quick. I’m hard up and I want an
office.”
“You old reprobate,” said Tyler, “what office on earth do you think you
are fit to fill?”
“Well,” said Dade, “I have heard them talking round here of a place
they call a sine-cu-ree—big pay and no work—and if there is one of them
left and lying about loose I think I could fill it to a T.”
“All right,” said the President good naturedly, “I’ll see what can be
done. Come up to-morrow.”
The next day “Col. John W. Dade, of Virginia,” was appointed keeper of
the Federal prison of the District of Columbia. He assumed his post
with _empressement_, called the prisoners before him and made them an
address.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said he; “I have been chosen by my friend, the
President of the United States, as superintendent of this eleemosynary
institution. It is my intention to treat you all as a Virginia
gentleman should treat a body of American ladies and gentlemen gathered
here from all parts of our beloved Union, and I shall expect the same
consideration in return. Otherwise I will turn you all out upon the
cold mercies of a heartless world and you will have to work for your
living.”
There came to Congress from Alabama a roistering blade by the name of
McConnell. He was something of a wit. During his brief sojourn in the
national capital he made a noisy record for himself as an all-round,
all-night man about town, a dare-devil and a spendthrift. His first
encounter with Col. John W. Dade, of Virginia, used to be one of the
standard local jokes. Colonel Dade was seated in the barroom of Brown’s
Hotel early one morning, waiting for someone to come in and invite him
to drink.
Presently McConnell arrived. It was his custom when he entered a saloon
to ask the entire roomful, no matter how many, “to come up and licker,”
and, of course, he invited the solitary stranger.
When the glasses were filled Dade pompously said: “With whom have I the
honor of drinking?”
“My name,” answered McConnell, “is Felix Grundy McConnell, begad! I am
a member of Congress from Alabama. My mother is a justice of the peace,
my aunt keeps a livery stable, and my grandmother commanded a company
in the Revolution and fit the British, gol darn their souls!”
Dade pushed his glass aside.
“Sir,” said he, “I am a man of high aspirations and peregrinations and
can have nothing to do with such low-down scopangers as yourself. Good
morning, sir!”
It may be presumed that both spoke in jest, because they became
inseparable companions and the best of friends.
McConnell had a tragic ending. In James K. Polk’s diary I find two
entries under the dates, respectively, of September 8 and September 10,
1846. The first of these reads as follows: “Hon. Felix G. McConnell, a
representative in Congress from Alabama called. He looked very badly
and as though he had just recovered from a fit of intoxication. He was
sober, but was pale, his countenance haggard and his system nervous. He
applied to me to borrow one hundred dollars and said he would return it
to me in ten days.
“Though I had no idea that he would do so I had a sympathy for him even
in his dissipation. I had known him in his youth and had not the moral
courage to refuse. I gave him the one hundred dollars in gold and took
his note. His hand was so tremulous that he could scarcely write his
name to the note legibly. I think it probable that he will never pay
me. He informed me he was detained at Washington attending to some
business in the Indian Office. I supposed he had returned home at the
adjournment of Congress until he called to-day. I doubt whether he has
any business in Washington, but fear he has been detained by
dissipation.”
The second of Mr. Polk’s entries is a corollary of the first and reads:
“About dark this evening I learned from Mr. Voorhies, who is acting as
my private secretary during the absence of J. Knox Walker, that Hon.
Felix G. McConnell, a representative in Congress from the state of
Alabama, had committed suicide this afternoon at the St. Charles Hotel,
where he boarded. On Tuesday last Mr. McConnell called on me and I
loaned him one hundred dollars. [See this diary of that day.] I learn
that but a short time before the horrid deed was committed he was in
the barroom of the St. Charles Hotel handling gold pieces and stating
that he had received them from me, and that he loaned thirty-five
dollars of them to the barkeeper, that shortly afterward he had
attempted to write something, but what I have not learned, but he had
not written much when he said he would go to his room.
“In the course of the morning I learn he went into the city and paid a
hackman a small amount which he owed him. He had locked his room door,
and when found he was stretched out on his back with his hands
extended, weltering in his blood. He had three wounds in the abdomen
and his throat was cut. A hawkbill knife was found near him. A jury of
inquest was held and found a verdict that he had destroyed himself. It
was a melancholy instance of the effects of intemperance. Mr. McConnell
when a youth resided at Fayetteville in my congressional district.
Shortly after he grew up to manhood he was at my instance appointed
postmaster of that town. He was a true Democrat and a sincere friend of
mine.
“His family in Tennessee are highly respectable and quite numerous. The
information as to the manner and particulars of his death I learned
from Mr. Voorhies, who reported it to me as he had heard it in the
streets. Mr. McConnell removed from Tennessee to Alabama some years
ago, and I learn he has left a wife and three or four children.”
Poor Felix Grundy McConnell! At a school in Tennessee he was a roommate
of my father, who related that one night Felix awakened with a scream
from a bad dream he had, the dream being that he had cut his own
throat.
“Old Jack Dade,” as he was always called, lived on, from hand to mouth,
I dare say—for he lost his job as keeper of the district prison—yet
never wholly out-at-heel, scrupulously neat in his person no matter how
seedy the attire. On the completion of the new wings of the Capitol and
the removal of the House to its more commodious quarters he was made
custodian of the old Hall of Representatives, a post he held until he
died.
VIII
Between the idiot and the man of sense, the lunatic and the man of
genius, there are degrees—streaks—of idiocy and lunacy. How many
expectant politicians elected to Congress have entered Washington all
hope, eager to dare and do, to come away broken in health, fame and
fortune, happy to get back home—sometimes unable to get away, to linger
on in obscurity and poverty to a squalid and wretched old age.
I have lived long enough to have known many such: Senators who have
filled the galleries when they rose to speak; House heroes living while
they could on borrowed money, then hanging about the hotels begging for
money to buy drink.
There was a famous statesman and orator who came to this at last, of
whom the typical and characteristic story was told that the holder of a
claim against the Government, who dared not approach so great a man
with so much as the intimation of a bribe, undertook by argument to
interest him in the merit of the case.
The great man listened and replied: “I have noticed you scattering your
means round here pretty freely but you haven’t said ‘turkey’ to me.”
Surprised but glad and unabashed the claimant said “I was coming to
that,” produced a thousand-dollar bank roll and entered into an
understanding as to what was to be done next day, when the bill was due
on the calendar.
The great man took the money, repaired to a gambling house, had an
extraordinary run of luck, won heavily, and playing all night,
forgetting about his engagement, went to bed at daylight, not appearing
in the House at all. The bill was called, and there being nobody to
represent it, under the rule it went over and to the bottom of the
calendar, killed for that session at least.
The day after the claimant met his recreant attorney on the avenue face
to face and took him to task for his delinquency.
“Ah, yes,” said the great man, “you are the little rascal who tried to
bribe me the other day. Here is your dirty money. Take it and be off
with you. I was just seeing how far you would go.”
The comment made by those who best knew the great man was that if
instead of winning in the gambling house he had lost he would have been
up betimes at his place in the House, and doing his utmost to pass the
claimant’s bill and obtain a second fee.
Another memory of those days has to do with music. This was the coming
of Jenny Lind to America. It seemed an event. When she reached
Washington Mr. Barnum asked at the office of my father’s newspaper for
a smart lad to sell the programs of the concert—a new thing in artistic
showmanry. “I don’t want a paper carrier, or a newsboy,” said he, “but
a young gentleman, three or four young gentlemen.” I was sent to him.
We readily agreed upon the commission to be received—five cents on each
twenty-five cent program—the oldest of old men do not forget such
transactions. But, as an extra percentage for “organizing the force,” I
demanded a concert seat. Choice seats were going at a fabulous figure
and Barnum at first demurred. But I told him I was a musical student,
stood my ground, and, perhaps seeing something unusual in the eager
spirit of a little boy, he gave in and the bargain was struck.
[Illustration: Henry Clay—Painted at Ashland by Dodge for The Hon.
Andrew Ewing of Tennessee—The Original Hangs in Mr. Watterson’s Library
at “Mansfield”]
Two of my pals became my assistants. But my sales beat both of them
hollow. Before the concert began I had sold my programs and was in my
seat. I recall that my money profit was something over five dollars.
The bell-like tones of the Jenny Lind voice in “Home, Sweet Home,” and
“The Last Rose of Summer” still come back to me, but too long after for
me to make, or imagine, comparisons between it and the vocalism of
Grisi, Sontag and Parepa-Rosa.
Meeting Mr. Barnum at Madison Square Garden in New York, when he was
running one of his entertainments there, I told him the story, and we
had a hearty laugh, both of us very much pleased, he very much
surprised to find in me a former employee.
One of my earliest yearnings was for a home. I cannot recall the time
when I was not sick and tired of our migrations between Washington City
and the two grand-paternal homesteads in Tennessee. The travel counted
for much of my aversion to the nomadic life we led. The stage-coach is
happier in the contemplation than in the actuality. Even when the
railways arrived there were no sleeping cars, the time of transit three
or four days and nights. In the earlier journeys it had been ten or
twelve days.
Chapter the Second
Slavery the Trouble-Maker—Break-Up of the Whig Party and Rise of the
Republican—The Key—Sickle’s Tragedy—Brooks and Sumner—Life at
Washington in the Fifties
I
Whether the War of Sections—as it should be called, because, except in
Eastern Tennessee and in three of the Border States, Maryland, Kentucky
and Missouri, it was nowise a civil war—could have been averted must
ever remain a question of useless speculation. In recognizing the
institution of African slavery, with no provision for its ultimate
removal, the Federal Union set out embodying the seeds of certain
trouble. The wiser heads of the Constitutional Convention perceived
this plainly enough; its dissonance to the logic of their movement; on
the sentimental side its repugnancy; on the practical side its doubtful
economy; and but for the tobacco growers and the cotton planters it had
gone by the board. The North soon found slave labor unprofitable and
rid itself of slavery. Thus, restricted to the South, it came to
represent in the Southern mind a “right” which the South was bound to
defend.
Mr. Slidell told me in Paris that Louis Napoleon had once said to him
in answer to his urgency for the recognition of the Southern
Confederacy: “I have talked the matter over with Lord Palmerston and we
are both of the opinion that as long as African slavery exists at the
South, France and England cannot recognize the Confederacy. They do not
demand its instant abolition. But if you put it in course of abatement
and final abolishment through a term of years—I do not care how many—we
can intervene to some purpose. As matters stand we dare not go before a
European congress with such a proposition.”
Mr. Slidell passed it up to Richmond. Mr. Davis passed it on to the
generals in the field. The response he received on every hand was the
statement that it would disorganize and disband the Confederate Armies.
Yet we are told, and it is doubtless true, that scarcely one
Confederate soldier in ten actually owned a slave.
Thus do imaginings become theories, and theories resolve themselves
into claims; and interests, however mistaken, rise to the dignity of
prerogatives.
II
The fathers had rather a hazy view of the future. I was witness to the
decline and fall of the old Whig Party and the rise of the Republican
Party. There was a brief lull in sectional excitement after the
Compromise Measures of 1850, but the overwhelming defeat of the Whigs
in 1852 and the dominancy of Mr. Jefferson Davis in the cabinet of Mr.
Pierce brought the agitation back again. Mr. Davis was a follower of
Mr. Calhoun—though it may be doubted whether Mr. Calhoun would ever
have been willing to go to the length of secession—and Mr. Pierce being
by temperament a Southerner as well as in opinions a pro-slavery
Democrat, his Administration fell under the spell of the ultra Southern
wing of the party. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill was originally harmless
enough, but the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which on Mr. Davis’
insistence was made a part of it, let slip the dogs of war.
In Stephen A. Douglas was found an able and pliant instrument. Like
Clay, Webster and Calhoun before him, Judge Douglas had the
presidential bee in his bonnet. He thought the South would, as it
could, nominate and elect him President.
Personally he was a most lovable man—rather too convivial—and for a
while in 1852 it looked as though he might be the Democratic nominee.
His candidacy was premature, his backers overconfident and indiscreet.
“I like Douglas and am for him,” said Buck Stone, a member of Congress
and delegate to the National Democratic Convention from Kentucky,
“though I consider him a good deal of a damn fool.” Pressed for a
reason he continued; “Why, think of a man wanting to be President at
forty years of age, and obliged to behave himself for the rest of his
life! I wouldn’t take the job on any such terms.”
The proposed repeal of the Missouri Compromise opened up the slavery
debate anew and gave it increased vitality. Hell literally broke loose
among the political elements. The issues which had divided Whigs and
Democrats went to the rear, while this one paramount issue took
possession of the stage. It was welcomed by the extremists of both
sections, a very godsend to the beaten politicians led by Mr. Seward.
Rampant sectionalism was at first kept a little in the background.
There were on either side concealments and reserves. Many patriotic men
put the Union above slavery or antislavery. But the two sets of rival
extremists had their will at last, and in seven short years deepened
and embittered the contention to the degree that disunion and war
seemed, certainly proved, the only way out of it.
The extravagance of the debates of those years amazes the modern
reader. Occasionally when I have occasion to recur to them I am myself
nonplussed, for they did not sound so terrible at the time. My father
was a leader of the Union wing of the Democratic Party—headed in 1860
the Douglas presidential ticket in Tennessee—and remained a Unionist
during the War of Sections. He broke away from Pierce and retired from
the editorship of the Washington Union upon the issue of the repeal of
the Missouri Compromise, to which he was opposed, refusing the
appointment of Governor of Oregon, with which the President sought to
placate him, though it meant his return to the Senate of the United
States in a year or two, when he and Oregon’s delegate in Congress,
Gen. Joseph Lane—the Lane of the Breckenridge and Lane ticket of
1860—had brought the territory of Oregon in as a state.
I have often thought just where I would have come in and what might
have happened to me if he had accepted the appointment and I had grown
to manhood on the Pacific Coast. As it was I attended a school in
Philadelphia—the Protestant Episcopal Academy—came home to Tennessee in
1856, and after a season with private tutors found myself back in the
national capital in 1858.
It was then that I began to nurse some ambitions of my own. I was going
to be a great man of letters. I was going to write histories and dramas
and romances and poetry. But as I had set up for myself I felt in honor
bound meanwhile to earn my own living.
III
I take it that the early steps of every man to get a footing may be of
interest when fairly told. I sought work in New York with indifferent
success. Mr. Raymond of the Times, hearing me play the piano at which
from childhood I had received careful instruction, gave me a job as
“musical critic” during the absence of Mr. Seymour, the regular critic.
I must have done my work acceptably, since I was not fired. It included
a report of the debut of my boy-and-girl companion, Adelina Patti, when
she made her first appearance in opera at the Academy of Music. But, as
the saying is, I did not “catch on.” There might be a more promising
opening in Washington, and thither I repaired.
The Daily States had been established there by John P. Heiss, who with
Thomas Ritchie had years before established the Washington Union. Roger
A. Pryor was its nominal editor. But he soon took himself home to his
beloved Virginia and came to Congress, and the editorial writing on the
States was being done by Col. A. Dudley Mann, later along Confederate
commissioner to France, preceding Mr. Slidell.
Colonel Mann wished to work incognito. I was taken on as a kind of
go-between and, as I may say, figurehead, on the strength of being my
father’s son and a very self-confident young gentleman, and began to
get my newspaper education in point of fact as a kind of
fetch-and-carry for Major Heiss. He was a practical newspaper man who
had started the Union at Nashville as well as the Union at Washington
and the Crescent—maybe it was the Delta—at New Orleans; and for the
rudiments of newspaper work I could scarcely have had a better teacher.
Back of Colonel Mann as a leader writer on the States was a remarkable
woman. She was Mrs. Jane Casneau, the wife of Gen. George Casneau, of
Texas, who had a claim before Congress. Though she was unknown to fame,
Thomas A. Benton used to say that she had more to do with making and
ending the Mexican War than anybody else.
Somewhere in the early thirties she had gone with her newly wedded
husband, an adventurous Yankee by the name of Storm, to the Rio Grande
and started a settlement they called Eagle Pass. Storm died, the Texas
outbreak began, and the young widow was driven back to San Antonio,
where she met and married Casneau, one of Houston’s lieutenants, like
herself a New Yorker. She was sent by Polk with Pillow and Trist to the
City of Mexico and actually wrote the final treaty. It was she who
dubbed William Walker “the little gray-eyed man of destiny,” and put
the nickname “Old Fuss and Feathers” on General Scott, whom she
heartily disliked.
A braver, more intellectual woman never lived. She must have been a
beauty in her youth; was still very comely at fifty; but a born
insurrecto and a terror with her pen. God made and equipped her for a
filibuster. She possessed infinite knowledge of Spanish-American
affairs, looked like a Spanish woman, and wrote and spoke the Spanish
language fluently. Her obsession was the bringing of Central America
into the Federal Union. But she was not without literary aspirations
and had some literary friends. Among these was Mrs. Southworth, the
novelist, who had a lovely home in Georgetown, and, whatever may be
said of her works and articles, was a lovely woman. She used to take me
to visit this lady. With Major Heiss she divided my newspaper
education, her part of it being the writing part. Whatever I may have
attained in that line I largely owe to her. She took great pains with
me and mothered me in the absence of my own mother, who had long been
her very dear friend. To get rid of her, or rather her pen, Mr.
Buchanan gave General Casneau, when the Douglas schism was breaking
out, a Central American mission, and she and he were lost by shipwreck
on their way to this post, somewhere in Caribbean waters.
My immediate yokemate on the States was John Savage, “Jack,” as he was
commonly called; a brilliant Irishman, who with Devin Reilley and John
Mitchel and Thomas Francis Meagher, his intimates, and Joseph Brennan,
his brother-in-law, made a pretty good Irishman of me. They were 48
men, with literary gifts of one sort and another, who certainly helped
me along with my writing, but, as matters fell out, did not go far
enough to influence my character, for they were a wild lot, full of
taking enthusiasm and juvenile decrepitude of judgment, ripe for
adventures and ready for any enterprise that promised fun and fighting.
Between John Savage and Mrs. Casneau I had the constant spur of
commendation and assistance as well as affection. I passed all my spare
time in the Library of Congress and knew its arrangements at least as
well as Mr. Meehan, the librarian, and Robert Kearon, the assistant,
much to the surprise of Mr. Spofford, who in 1861 succeeded Mr. Meehan
as librarian.
Not long after my return to Washington Col. John W. Forney picked me
up, and I was employed in addition to my not very arduous duties on the
States to write occasional letters from Washington to the Philadelphia
Press. Good fortune like ill fortune rarely comes singly. Without
anybody’s interposition I was appointed to a clerkship, a real
“sinecure,” in the Interior Department by Jacob Thompson, the
secretary, my father’s old colleague in Congress. When the troubles of
1860-61 rose I was literally doing “a land-office business,” with money
galore and to spare. Somehow, I don’t know how, I contrived to spend
it, though I had no vices, and worked like a hired man upon my literary
hopes and newspaper obligations.
Life in Washington under these conditions was delightful. I did not
know how my heart was wrapped up in it until I had to part from it. My
father stood high in public esteem. My mother was a leader in society.
All doors were open to me. I had many friends. Going back to Tennessee
in the midsummer of 1861, via Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, there happened
a railway break and a halt of several hours at a village on the Ohio. I
strolled down to the river and sat myself upon the brink, almost
despairing—nigh heartbroken—when I began to feel an irresistible
fascination about the swift-flowing stream. I leaped to my feet and ran
away; and that is the only thought of suicide that I can recall.
IV
Mrs. Clay, of Alabama, in her “Belle of the Fifties” has given a
graphic picture of life in the national capital during the
administrations of Pierce and Buchanan. The South was very much in the
saddle. Pierce, as I have said, was Southern in temperament, and
Buchanan, who to those he did not like or approve had, as Arnold Harris
said, “a winning way of making himself hateful,” was an aristocrat
under Southern and feminine influence.
I was fond of Mr. Pierce, but I could never endure Mr. Buchanan. His
very voice gave offense to me. Directed by a periodical publication to
make a sketch of him to accompany an engraving, I did my best on it.
Jacob Thompson, the Secretary of the Interior, said to me: “Now, Henry,
here’s your chance for a foreign appointment.”
I now know that my writing was clumsy enough and my attempt to play the
courtier clumsier still. Nevertheless, as a friend of my father and
mother “Old Buck” might have been a little more considerate than he was
with a lad trying to please and do him honor. I came away from the
White House my _amour propre_ wounded, and though I had not far to go
went straight into the Douglas camp.
Taking nearly sixty years to think it over I have reached the
conclusion that Mr. Buchanan was the victim of both personal and
historic injustice. With secession in sight his one aim was to get out
of the White House before the scrap began. He was of course on terms of
intimacy with all the secession leaders, especially Mr. Slidell, of
Louisiana, like himself a Northerner by birth, and Mr. Mason, a
thick-skulled, ruffle-shirted Virginian. It was not in him or in Mr.
Pierce, with their antecedents and associations, to be uncompromising
Federalists. There was no clear law to go on. Moderate men were in a
muck of doubt just what to do. With Horace Greeley Mr. Buchanan was
ready to say “Let the erring sisters go.” This indeed was the extent of
Mr. Pierce’s pacifism during the War of Sections.
A new party risen upon the remains of the Whig Party—the Republican
Party—was at the door and coming into power. Lifelong pro-slavery
Democrats could not look on with equanimity, still less with
complaisance, and doubtless Pierce and Buchanan to the end of their
days thought less of the Republicans than of the Confederates. As a
consequence Republican writers have given quarter to neither of them.
It will not do to go too deeply into the account of those days. The
times were out of joint. I knew of two Confederate generals who first
tried for commissions in the Union Army; gallant and good fellows too;
but they are both dead and their secret shall die with me. I knew
likewise a famous Union general who was about to resign his commission
in the army to go with the South but was prevented by his wife, a
Northern woman, who had obtained of Mr. Lincoln a brigadier’s
commission.
V
In 1858 a wonderful affair came to pass. It was Mrs. Senator Gwin’s
fancy dress ball, written of, talked of, far and wide. I did not get to
attend this. My costume was prepared—a Spanish cavalier, Mrs. Casneau’s
doing—when I fell ill and had with bitter disappointment to read about
it next day in the papers. I was living at Willard’s Hotel, and one of
my volunteer nurses was Mrs. Daniel E. Sickles, a pretty young thing
who was soon to become the victim of a murder and world scandal. Her
husband was a member of the House from New York, and during his
frequent absences I used to take her to dinner. Mr. Sickles had been
Mr. Buchanan’s Secretary of Legation in London, and both she and he
were at home in the White House.
She was an innocent child. She never knew what she was doing, and when
a year later Sickles, having killed her seducer—a handsome,
unscrupulous fellow who understood how to take advantage of a husband’s
neglect—forgave her and brought her home in the face of much obloquy,
in my heart of hearts I did homage to his courage and generosity, for
she was then as he and I both knew a dying woman. She did die but a few
months later. He was by no means a politician after my fancy or
approval, but to the end of his days I was his friend and could never
bring myself to join in the repeated public outcries against him.
Early in the fifties Willard’s Hotel became a kind of headquarters for
the two political extremes. During a long time their social intercourse
was unrestrained—often joyous. They were too far apart, figuratively
speaking, to come to blows. Truth to say, their aims were after all not
so far apart. They played to one another’s lead. Many a time have I
seen Keitt, of South Carolina, and Burlingame, of Massachusetts, hobnob
in the liveliest manner and most public places.
It is certainly true that Brooks was not himself when he attacked
Sumner. The Northern radicals were wont to say, “Let the South go,” the
more profane among them interjecting “to hell!” The Secessionists liked
to prod the New Englanders with what the South was going to do when
they got to Boston. None of them really meant it—not even Toombs when
he talked about calling the muster roll of his slaves beneath Bunker
Hill Monument; nor Hammond, the son of a New England schoolmaster, when
he spoke of the “mudsills of the North,” meaning to illustrate what he
was saying by the underpinning of a house built on marshy ground, and
not the Northern work people.
Toombs, who was a rich man, not quite impoverished by the war, banished
himself in Europe for a number of years. At length he came home, and
passing the White House at Washington he called and sent his card to
the President. General Grant, the most genial and generous of men, had
him come directly up.
[Illustration: W. P. Hardee, Lieutenant General C.S.A.]
“Mr. President,” said Toombs, “in my European migrations I have made it
a rule when arriving in a city to call first and pay my respects to the
Chief of Police.”
The result was a most agreeable hour and an invitation to dinner. Not
long after this at the hospitable board of a Confederate general, then
an American senator, Toombs began to prod Lamar about his speech in the
House upon the occasion of the death of Charles Sumner. Lamar was not
quick to quarrel, though when aroused a man of devilish temper and
courage. The subject had become distasteful to him. He was growing
obviously restive under Toombs’ banter. The ladies of the household
apprehending what was coming left the table.
Then Lamar broke forth. He put Toombs’ visit to Grant, “crawling at the
seat of power,” against his eulogy of a dead enemy. I have never heard
such a scoring from one man to another. It was magisterial in its
dignity, deadly in its diction. Nothing short of a duel could have
settled it in the olden time. But when Lamar, white with rage, had
finished, Toombs without a ruffle said, “Lamar, you surprise me,” and
the host, with the rest of us, took it as a signal to rise from table
and rejoin the ladies in the drawing-room. Of course nothing came of
it.
Toombs was as much a humorist as an extremist. I have ridden with him
under fire and heard him crack jokes with Minié balls flying
uncomfortably about. Some one spoke kindly of him to old Ben Wade.
“Yes, yes,” said Wade; “I never did believe in the doctrine of total
depravity.”
But I am running ahead in advance of events.
VI
There came in 1853 to the Thirty-third Congress a youngish, dapper and
graceful man notable as the only Democrat in the Massachusetts
delegation. It was said that he had been a dancing master, his wife a
work girl. They brought with them a baby in arms with the wife’s sister
for its nurse—a mis-step which was quickly corrected. I cannot now tell
just how I came to be very intimate with them except that they lived at
Willard’s Hotel. His name had a pretty sound to it—Nathaniel Prentiss
Banks.
A schoolmate of mine and myself, greatly to the mirth of those about
us, undertook Mr. Banks’ career. We were going to elect him Speaker of
the next House and then President of the United States. This was
particularly laughable to my mother and Mrs. Linn Boyd, the wife of the
contemporary Speaker, who had very solid presidential aspirations of
his own.
The suggestion perhaps originated with Mrs. Banks, to whom we two were
ardently devoted. I have not seen her since those days, more than sixty
years ago. But her beauty, which then charmed me, still lingers in my
memory—a gentle, sweet creature who made much of us boys—and two years
later when Mr. Banks was actually elected Speaker I was greatly elated
and took some of the credit to myself. Twenty years afterwards General
Banks and I had our seats close together in the Forty-fourth Congress,
and he did not recall me at all or the episode of 1853. Nevertheless I
warmed to him, and when during Cleveland’s first term he came to me
with a hard-luck story I was glad to throw myself into the breach. He
had been a Speaker of the House, a general in the field and a Governor
of Massachusetts, but was a faded old man, very commonplace, and except
for the little post he held under Government pitiably helpless.
Colonel George Walton was one of my father’s intimates and an imposing
and familiar figure about Washington. He was the son of a signer of the
Declaration of Independence, a distinction in those days, had been
mayor of Mobile and was an unending raconteur. To my childish mind he
appeared to know everything that ever had been or ever would be. He
would tell me stories by the hour and send me to buy him lottery
tickets. I afterward learned that that form of gambling was his mania.
I also learned that many of his stories were apocryphal or very highly
colored.
One of these stories especially took me. It related how when he was on
a yachting cruise in the Gulf of Mexico the boat was overhauled by
pirates, and how he being the likeliest of the company was tied up and
whipped to make him disgorge, or tell where the treasure was.
“Colonel Walton,” said I, “did the whipping hurt you much?”
“Sir,” he replied, as if I were a grown-up, “they whipped me until I
was perfectly disgusted.”
An old lady in Philadelphia, whilst I was at school, heard me mention
Colonel Walton—a most distinguished, religious old lady—and said to me,
“Henry, my son, you should be ashamed to speak of that old villain or
confess that you ever knew him,” proceeding to give me his awful,
blood-curdling history.
It was mainly a figment of her fancy and prejudice, and I repeated it
to Colonel Walton the next time I went to the hotel where he was then
living—I have since learned, with a lady not his wife, though he was
then three score and ten—and he cried, “That old hag! Good Lord! Don’t
they ever die!”
Seeing every day the most distinguished public men of the country, and
with many of them brought into direct acquaintance by the easy
intercourse of hotel life, destroyed any reverence I might have
acquired for official station. Familiarity may not always breed
contempt, but it is a veritable eye opener. To me no divinity hedged
the brow of a senator. I knew the White House too well to be impressed
by its architectural grandeur without and rather bizarre furnishments
within.
VII
I have declaimed not a little in my time about the ignoble trade of
politics, the collective dishonesty of parties and the vulgarities of
the self-exploiting professional office hunters. Parties are parties.
Professional politics and politicians are probably neither worse nor
better—barring their pretensions—than other lines of human endeavor.
The play actor must be agreeable on the stage of the playhouse; the
politician on the highways and the hustings, which constitute his
playhouse—all the world a stage—neither to be seriously blamed for the
dissimulation which, being an asset, becomes, as it were, a second
nature.
The men who between 1850 and 1861 might have saved the Union and
averted the War of Sections were on either side professional
politicians, with here and there an unselfish, far-seeing, patriotic
man, whose admonitions were not heeded by the people ranging on
opposing sides of party lines. The two most potential of the party
leaders were Mr. Davis and Mr. Seward. The South might have seen and
known that the one hope of the institution of slavery lay in the Union.
However it ended, disunion led to abolition. The world—the whole trend
of modern thought—was set against slavery. But politics, based on party
feeling, is a game of blindman’s buff. And then—here I show myself a
son of Scotland—there is a destiny. “What is to be,” says the
predestinarian Mother Goose, “will be, though it never come to pass.”
That was surely the logic of the irrepressible conflict—only it did
come to pass—and for four years millions of people, the most
homogeneous, practical and intelligent, fought to a finish a fight over
a quiddity; both devoted to liberty, order and law, neither seeking any
real change in the character of its organic contract.
Human nature remains ever the same. These days are very like those
days. We have had fifty years of a restored Union. The sectional fires
have quite gone out. Yet behold the schemes of revolution claiming the
regenerative. Most of them call themselves the “uplift!”
Let us agree at once that all government is more or less a failure;
society as fraudulent as the satirists describe it; yet, when we turn
to the uplift—particularly the professional uplift—what do we find but
the same old tunes, hypocrisy and empiricism posing as “friends of the
people,” preaching the pussy gospel of “sweetness and light?”
“Words, words, words,” says Hamlet. Even as veteran writers for the
press have come through disheartening experience to a realizing sense
of the futility of printer’s ink must our academic pundits begin to
suspect the futility of art and letters. Words however cleverly writ on
paper are after all but words. “In a nation of blind men,” we are told,
“the one-eyed man is king.” In a nation of undiscriminating voters the
noise of the agitator is apt to drown the voice of the statesman. We
have been teaching everybody to read, nobody to think; and as a
consequence—the rule of numbers the law of the land, partyism in the
saddle—legislation, state and Federal, becomes largely a matter of
riding to hounds and horns. All this, which was true in the fifties, is
true to-day.
Under the pretense of “liberalizing” the Government the politicians are
sacrificing its organic character to whimsical experimentation; its
checks and balances wisely designed to promote and protect liberty are
being loosened by schemes of reform more or less visionary; while
nowhere do we find intelligence enlightened by experience, and
conviction supported by self-control, interposing to save the
representative system of the Constitution from the onward march of the
proletariat.
One cynic tells us that “A statesman is a politician who is dead,” and
another cynic varies the epigram to read “A politician out of a job.”
Patriotism cries “God give us men,” but the parties say “Give us votes
and offices,” and Congress proceeds to create a commission. Thus
responsibilities are shirked and places are multiplied.
Assuming, since many do, that the life of nations is mortal even as is
the life of man—in all things of growth and decline assimilating—has
not our world reached the top of the acclivity, and pausing for a
moment may it not be about to take the downward course into another
abyss of collapse and oblivion?
The miracles of electricity the last word of science, what is left for
man to do? With wireless telegraphy, the airplane and the automobile
annihilating time and space, what else? Turning from the material to
the ethical it seems of the very nature of the human species to meddle
and muddle. On every hand we see the organization of societies for
making men and women over again according to certain fantastic images
existing in the minds of the promoters. “_Mon Dieu_!” exclaimed the
visiting Frenchman. “Fifty religions and only one soup!” Since then
both the soups and the religions have multiplied until there is scarce
a culinary or moral conception which has not some sect or club to
represent it. The uplift is the keynote of these.
Chapter the Third
The Inauguration of Lincoln—I Quit Washington and Return to Tennessee—A
Run-a-bout with Forest—Through the Federal Lines and a Dangerous
Adventure—Good Luck at Memphis
I
It may have been Louis the Fifteenth, or it may have been Madame de
Pompadour, who said, “After me the deluge;” but whichever it was, very
much that thought was in Mr. Buchanan’s mind in 1861 as the time for
his exit from the White House approached. At the North there had been a
political ground-swell; at the South, secession, half accomplished by
the Gulf States, yawned in the Border States. Curiously enough, very
few believed that war was imminent.
As a reporter for the States I met Mr. Lincoln immediately on his
arrival in Washington. He came in unexpectedly ahead of the hour
announced, to escape, as was given out, a well-laid plan to assassinate
him as he passed through Baltimore. I did not believe at the time, and
I do not believe now, that there was any real ground for this
apprehension.
All through that winter there had been a deal of wild talk. One story
had it that Mr. Buchanan was to be kidnapped and made off with so that
Vice President Breckenridge might succeed and, acting as _de facto_
President, throw the country into confusion and revolution, defeating
the inauguration of Lincoln and the coming in of the Republicans. It
was a figment of drink and fancy. There was never any such scheme. If
there had been Breckenridge would not have consented to be party to it.
He was a man of unusual mental as well as personal dignity and both
temperamentally and intellectually a thorough conservative.
I had been engaged by Mr. L.A. Gobright, the agent of what became later
the Associated Press, to help with the report of the inauguration
ceremonies the 4th of March, 1861, and in the discharge of this duty I
kept as close to Mr. Lincoln as I could get, following after him from
the senate chamber to the east portico of the capitol and standing by
his side whilst he delivered his inaugural address.
Perhaps I shall not be deemed prolix if I dwell with some particularity
upon an occasion so historic. I had first encountered the newly elected
President the afternoon of the day in the early morning of which he had
arrived in Washington. It was a Saturday, I think. He came to the
capitol under the escort of Mr. Seward, and among the rest I was
presented to him. His appearance did not impress me as fantastically as
it had impressed some others. I was familiar with the Western type, and
whilst Mr. Lincoln was not an Adonis, even after prairie ideals, there
was about him a dignity that commanded respect.
I met him again the next Monday forenoon in his apartment at Willard’s
Hotel as he was preparing to start to his inauguration, and was struck
by his unaffected kindness, for I came with a matter requiring his
attention. This was, in point of fact, to get from him a copy of the
inauguration speech for the Associated Press. I turned it over to Ben
Perley Poore, who, like myself, was assisting Mr. Gobright. The
President that was about to be seemed entirely self-possessed; not a
sign of nervousness, and very obliging. As I have said, I accompanied
the cortège that passed from the senate chamber to the east portico.
When Mr. Lincoln removed his hat to face the vast throng in front and
below, I extended my hand to take it, but Judge Douglas, just behind
me, reached over my outstretched arm and received it, holding it during
the delivery of the address. I stood just near enough the speaker’s
elbow not to obstruct any gestures he might make, though he made but
few; and then I began to get a suspicion of the power of the man.
He delivered that inaugural address as if he had been delivering
inaugural addresses all his life. Firm, resonant, earnest, it announced
the coming of a man, of a leader of men; and in its tone and style the
gentlemen whom he had invited to become members of his political
family—each of whom thought himself a bigger man than his chief—might
have heard the voice and seen the hand of one born to rule. Whether
they did or not, they very soon ascertained the fact. From the hour
Abraham Lincoln crossed the threshold of the White House to the hour he
went thence to his death, there was not a moment when he did not
dominate the political and military situation and his official
subordinates. The idea that he was overtopped at any time by anybody is
contradicted by all that actually happened.
I was a young Democrat and of course not in sympathy with Mr. Lincoln
or his opinions. Judge Douglas, however, had taken the edge off my
hostility. He had said to me upon his return in triumph to Washington
after the famous Illinois campaign of 1868: “Lincoln is a good man; in
fact, a great man, and by far the ablest debater I have ever met,” and
now the newcomer began to verify this opinion both in his private
conversation and in his public attitude.
II
I had been an undoubting Union boy. Neither then nor afterward could I
be fairly classified as a Secessionist. Circumstance rather than
conviction or predilection threw me into the Confederate service, and,
being in, I went through with it.
The secession leaders I held in distrust; especially Yancey, Mason,
Slidell, Benjamin and Iverson, Jefferson Davis and Isham G. Harris were
not favorites of mine. Later along I came into familiar association
with most of them, and relations were established which may be
described as confidential and affectionate. Lamar and I were brought
together oddly enough in 1869 by Carl Schurz, and thenceforward we were
the most devoted friends. Harris and I fell together in 1862 in the
field, first with Forrest and later with Johnston and Hood, and we
remained as brothers to the end, when he closed a great career in the
upper house of Congress, and by Republican votes, though he was a
Democrat, as president of the Senate.
He continued in the Governorship of Tennessee through the war. He at no
time lost touch with the Tennessee troops, and though not always in the
field, never missed a forward movement. In the early spring of 1864,
just before the famous Johnston-Sherman campaign opened, General
Johnston asked him to go around among the boys and “stir ’em up a bit.”
The Governor invited me to ride with him. Together we visited every
sector in the army. Threading the woods of North Georgia on this round,
if I heard it once I heard it fifty times shouted from a distant
clearing: “Here comes Gov-ner Harris, fellows; g’wine to be a fight.”
His appearance at the front had always preceded and been long ago taken
as a signal for battle.
[Illustration: John Bell of Tennessee—In 1860 Presidential Candidate
“Union Party”—“Bell and Everett” Ticket]
My being a Washington correspondent of the Philadelphia Press and
having lived since childhood at Willard’s Hotel, where the Camerons
also lived, will furnish the key to my becoming an actual and active
rebel. A few days after the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln, Colonel Forney
came to my quarters and, having passed the time of day, said: “The
Secretary of War wishes you to be at the department to-morrow morning
as near nine o’clock as you can make it.”
“What does he want, Colonel Forney?” I asked.
“He is going to offer you the position of private secretary to the
Secretary of War, with the rank of lieutenant colonel, and I am very
desirous that you accept it.”
He went away leaving me rather upset. I did not sleep very soundly that
night. “So,” I argued to myself, “it has come to this, that Forney and
Cameron, lifelong enemies, have made friends and are going to rob the
Government—one clerk of the House, the other Secretary of War—and I, a
mutual choice, am to be the confidential middle man.” I still had a
home in Tennessee and I rose from my bed, resolved to go there.
I did not keep the proposed appointment for next day. As soon as I
could make arrangements I quitted Washington and went to Tennessee,
still unchanged in my preconceptions. I may add, since they were
verified by events, that I have not modified them from that day to
this.
I could not wholly believe with either extreme. I had perpetrated no
wrong, but in my small way had done my best for the Union and against
secession. I would go back to my books and my literary ambitions and
let the storm blow over. It could not last very long; the odds against
the South were too great. Vain hope! As well expect a chip on the
surface of the ocean to lie quiet as a lad of twenty-one in those days
to keep out of one or the other camp. On reaching home I found myself
alone. The boys were all gone to the front. The girls were—well, they
were all crazy. My native country was about to be invaded. Propinquity.
Sympathy. So, casting opinions to the winds in I went on feeling. And
that is how I became a rebel, a case of “first endure and then
embrace,” because I soon got to be a pretty good rebel and went the
limit, changing my coat as it were, though not my better judgment, for
with a gray jacket on my back and ready to do or die, I retained my
belief that secession was treason, that disunion was the height of
folly and that the South was bound to go down in the unequal strife.
I think now, as an academic proposition, that, in the doctrine of
secession, the secession leaders had a debatable, if not a logical
case; but I also think that if the Gulf States had been allowed to go
out by tacit consent they would very soon have been back again seeking
readmission to the Union.
Man proposes and God disposes. The ways of Deity to man are indeed past
finding out. Why, the long and dreadful struggle of a kindred people,
the awful bloodshed and havoc of four weary years, leaving us at the
close measurably where we were at the beginning, is one of the
mysteries which should prove to us that there is a world hereafter,
since no great creative principle could produce one with so dire, with
so short a span and nothing beyond.
III
The change of parties wrought by the presidential election of 1860 and
completed by the coming in of the Republicans in 1861 was indeed
revolutionary. When Mr. Lincoln had finished his inaugural address and
the crowd on the east portico began to disperse, I reentered the
rotunda between Mr. Reverdy Johnson, of Maryland, and Mr. John Bell, of
Tennessee, two old friends of my family, and for a little we sat upon a
bench, they discussing the speech we had just heard.
Both were sure there would be no war. All would be well, they thought,
each speaking kindly of Mr. Lincoln. They were among the most eminent
men of the time, I a boy of twenty-one; but to me war seemed a
certainty. Recalling the episode, I have often realized how the
intuitions of youth outwit the wisdom and baffle the experience of age.
I at once resigned my snug sinecure in the Interior Department and,
closing my accounts of every sort, was presently ready to turn my back
upon Washington and seek adventures elsewhere.
They met me halfway and came in plenty. I tried staff duty with General
Polk, who was making an expedition into Western Kentucky. In a few
weeks illness drove me into Nashville, where I passed the next winter
in desultory newspaper work. Then Nashville fell, and, as I was making
my way out of town afoot and trudging the Murfreesboro pike, Forrest,
with his squadron just escaped from Fort Donelson, came thundering by,
and I leaped into an empty saddle. A few days later Forrest, promoted
to brigadier general, attached me to his staff, and the next six months
it was mainly guerilla service, very much to my liking. But Fate, if
not Nature, had decided that I was a better writer than fighter, and
the Bank of Tennessee having bought a newspaper outfit at Chattanooga,
I was sent there to edit The Rebel—my own naming—established as the
organ of the Tennessee state government. I made it the organ of the
army.
It is not the purpose of these pages to retell the well-known story of
the war. My life became a series of ups and downs—mainly downs—the word
being from day to day to fire and fall back; in the Johnston-Sherman
campaign, I served as chief of scouts; then as an aid to General Hood
through the siege of Atlanta, sharing the beginning of the chapter of
disasters that befell that gallant soldier and his army. I was spared
the last and worst of these by a curious piece of special duty, taking
me elsewhere, to which I was assigned in the autumn of 1864 by the
Confederate government.
This involved a foreign journey. It was no less than to go to England
to sell to English buyers some hundred thousand bales of designated
cotton to be thus rescued from spoliation, acting under the supervision
and indeed the orders of the Confederate fiscal agency at Liverpool.
Of course I was ripe for this; but it proved a bigger job than I had
conceived or dreamed. The initial step was to get out of the country.
But how? That was the question. To run the blockade had been easy
enough a few months earlier. All our ports were now sealed by Federal
cruisers and gunboats. There was nothing for it but to slip through the
North and to get either a New York or a Canadian boat. This involved
chances and disguises.
IV
In West Tennessee, not far from Memphis, lived an aunt of mine. Thither
I repaired. My plan was to get on a Mississippi steamer calling at one
of the landings for wood. This proved impracticable. I wandered many
days and nights, rather ill mounted, in search of some kind—any kind—of
exit, when one afternoon, quite worn out, I sat by a log heap in a
comfortable farmhouse. It seemed that I was at the end of my tether; I
did not know what to do.
Presently there was an arrival—a brisk gentleman right out of Memphis,
which I then learned was only ten miles distant—bringing with him a
morning paper. In this I saw appended to various army orders the name
of “N.B. Dana, General Commanding.”
That set me to thinking. Was not Dana the name of a certain captain, a
stepson of Congressman Peaslee, of New Hampshire, who had lived with us
at Willard’s Hotel—and were there not two children, Charley and Mamie,
and a dear little mother, and—I had been listening to the talk of the
newcomer. He was a licensed cotton buyer with a pass to come and go at
will through the lines, and was returning next day.
“I want to get into Memphis—I am a nephew of Mrs. General Dana. Can you
take me in?” I said to this person.
After some hesitation he consented to try, it being agreed that my
mount and outfit should be his if he got me through; no trade if he
failed.
Clearly the way ahead was brightening. I soon ascertained that I was
with friends, loyal Confederates. Then I told them who I was, and all
became excitement for the next day’s adventure.
We drove down to the Federal outpost. Crenshaw—that was the name of the
cotton buyer—showed his pass to the officer in command, who then turned
to me. “Captain,” I said, “I have no pass, but I am a nephew of Mrs.
General Dana. Can you not pass me in without a pass?” He was very
polite. It was a chain picket, he said; his orders were very strict,
and so on.
“Well,” I said, “suppose I were a member of your own command and were
run in here by guerillas. What do you think would it be your duty to
do?”
“In that case,” he answered, “I should send you to headquarters with a
guard.”
“Good!” said I. “Can’t you send me to headquarters with a guard?”
He thought a moment. Then he called a cavalryman from the outpost.
“Britton,” he said, “show this gentleman in to General Dana’s
headquarters.”
Crenshaw lashed his horse and away we went. “That boy thinks he is a
guide, not a guard,” said he. “You are all right. We can easily get rid
of him.”
This proved true. We stopped by a saloon and bought a bottle of whisky.
When we reached headquarters the lad said, “Do you gentlemen want me
any more?” We did not. Then we gave him the bottle of whisky and he
disappeared round the corner. “Now you are safe,” said Crenshaw. “Make
tracks.”
But as I turned away and out of sight I began to consider the
situation. Suppose that picket on the outpost reported to the provost
marshal general that he had passed a relative of Mrs. Dana? What then?
Provost guard. Drumhead court-martial. Shot at daylight. It seemed best
to play out the hand as I had dealt it. After all, I could make a case
if I faced it out.
The guard at the door refused me access to General Dana. Driven by a
nearby hackman to the General’s residence, and, boldly asking for Mrs.
Dana, I was more successful. I introduced myself as a teacher of music
seeking to return to my friends in the North, working in a word about
the old Washington days, not forgetting “Charley” and “Mamie.” The dear
little woman was heartily responsive. Both were there, including a
pretty girl from Philadelphia, and she called them down. “Here is your
old friend, Henry Waterman,” she joyfully exclaimed. Then guests began
to arrive. It was a reception evening. My hope fell. Some one would
surely recognize me. Presently a gentleman entered, and Mrs. Dana said:
“Colonel Meehan, this is my particular friend, Henry Waterman, who has
been teaching music out in the country, and wants to go up the river.
You will give him a pass, I am sure.” It was the provost marshal, who
answered, “certainly.” Now was my time for disappearing. But Mrs. Dana
would not listen to this. General Dana would never forgive her if she
let me go. Besides, there was to be a supper and a dance. I sat down
again very much disconcerted. The situation was becoming awkward. Then
Mrs. Dana spoke. “You say you have been teaching music. What is your
instrument?” Saved! “The piano,” I answered. The girls escorted me to
the rear drawing-room. It was a new Steinway Grand, just set up, and I
played for my life. If the black bombazine covering my gray uniform did
not break, all would be well. I was having a delightfully good time,
the girls on either hand, when Mrs. Dana, still enthusiastic, ran in
and said, “General Dana is here. Remembers you perfectly. Come and see
him.”
He stood by a table, tall, sardonic, and as I approached he put out his
hand and said: “You have grown a bit, Henry, my boy, since I saw you
last. How did you leave my friend Forrest?”
I was about making some awkward reply, when, the room already filling
up, he said:
“We have some friends for supper. I am glad you are here. Mamie, my
daughter, take Mr. Watterson to the table!”
Lord! That supper! Canvasback! Terrapin! Champagne! The general had
seated me at his right. Somewhere toward the close those expressive
gray eyes looked at me keenly, and across his wine glass he said:
“I think I understand this. You want to get up the river. You want to
see your mother. Have you money enough to carry you through? If you
have not don’t hesitate, for whatever you need I will gladly let you
have.”
I thanked him. I had quite enough. All was well. We had more music and
some dancing. At a late hour he called the provost marshal.
“Meehan,” said he, “take this dangerous young rebel round to the hotel,
register him as Smith, Brown, or something, and send him with a pass up
the river by the first steamer.” I was in luck, was I not?
But I made no impression on those girls. Many years after, meeting
Mamie Dana, as the wife of an army officer at Fortress Monroe, I
related the Memphis incident. She did not in the least recall it.
V
I had one other adventure during the war that may be worth telling. It
was in 1862. Forrest took it into his inexperienced fighting head to
make a cavalry attack upon a Federal stockade, and, repulsed with
considerable loss, the command had to disperse—there were not more than
two hundred of us—in order to escape capture by the newly-arrived
reinforcements that swarmed about. We were to rendezvous later at a
certain point. Having some time to spare, and being near the family
homestead at Beech Grove, I put in there.
It was midnight when I reached my destination. I had been erroneously
informed that the Union Army was on the retreat—quite gone from the
neighborhood; and next day, believing the coast was clear, I donned a
summer suit and with a neighbor boy who had been wounded at Shiloh and
invalided home, rode over to visit some young ladies. We had scarcely
been welcomed and were taking a glass of wine when, looking across the
lawn, we saw that the place was being surrounded by a body of
blue-coats. The story of their departure had been a mistake. They were
not all gone.
There was no chance of escape. We were placed in a hollow square and
marched across country into camp. Before we got there I had ascertained
that they were Indianians, and I was further led rightly to surmise
what we called in 1860 Douglas Democrats.
My companion, a husky fellow, who looked and was every inch a soldier,
was first questioned by the colonel in command. His examination was
brief. He said he was as good a rebel as lived, that he was only
waiting for his wound to heal to get back into the Confederate Army,
and that if they wanted to hang him for a spy to go ahead.
I was aghast. It was not he that was in danger of hanging, but myself,
a soldier in citizen’s apparel within the enemy’s lines. The colonel
turned to me. With what I took for a sneer he said:
“I suppose you are a good Union man?” This offered me a chance.
“That depends upon what you call a good Union man,” I answered. “I used
to be a very good Union man—a Douglas Democrat—and I am not conscious
of having changed my political opinions.”
That softened him and we had an old-fashioned, friendly talk about the
situation, in which I kept the Douglas Democratic end of it well to the
fore. He, too, had been a Douglas Democrat. I soon saw that it was my
companion and not myself whom they were after. Presently Colonel Shook,
that being the commandant’s name, went into the adjacent stockade and
the boys about began to be hearty and sympathetic. I made them a
regular Douglas Democratic speech. They brought some “red licker” and I
asked for some sugar for a toddy, not failing to cite the familiar Sut
Lovingood saying that “there were about seventeen round the door who
said they’d take sugar in their’n.” The drink warmed me to my work,
making me quicker, if not bolder, in invention. Then the colonel not
reappearing as soon as I hoped he would, for all along my fear was the
wires, I went to him.
“Colonel Shook,” I said, “you need not bother about this friend of
mine. He has no real idea of returning to the Confederate service. He
is teaching school over here at Beech Grove and engaged to be married
to one of the—girls. If you carry him off a prisoner he will be
exchanged back into the fighting line, and we make nothing by it. There
is a hot luncheon waiting for us at the ——’s. Leave him to me and I
will be answerable.” Then I left him.
Directly he came out and said: “I may be doing wrong, and don’t feel
entirely sure of my ground, but I am going to let you gentlemen go.”
We thanked him and made off amid the cheery good-bys of the assembled
blue-coats.
No lunch for us. We got to our horses, rode away, and that night I was
at our rendezvous to tell the tale to those of my comrades who had
arrived before me.
Colonel Shook and I met after the war at a Grand Army reunion where I
was billed to speak and to which he introduced me, relating the
incident and saying, among other things: “I do believe that when he
told me near Wartrace that day twenty years ago that he was a good
Union man he told at least half the truth.”
Chapter the Fourth
I Go to London—Am Introduced to a Notable Set—Huxley, Spencer, Mill and
Tyndall—Artemus Ward Comes to Town—The Savage Club
I
The fall of Atlanta after a siege of nearly two months was, in the
opinion of thoughtful people, the sure precursor of the fall of the
doomed Confederacy. I had an affectionate regard for General Hood, but
it was my belief that neither he nor any other soldier could save the
day, and being out of commission and having no mind for what I
conceived aimless campaigning through another winter—especially an
advance into Tennessee upon Nashville—I wrote to an old friend of mine,
who owned the Montgomery Mail, asking for a job. He answered that if I
would come right along and take the editorship of the paper he would
make me a present of half of it—a proposal so opportune and tempting
that forty-eight hours later saw me in the capital of Alabama.
I was accompanied by my fidus Achates, Albert Roberts. The morning
after our arrival, by chance I came across a printed line which
advertised a room and board for two “single gentlemen,” with the
curious affix for those times, “references will be given and required.”
This latter caught me. When I rang the visitors’ bell of a pretty
dwelling upon one of the nearby streets a distinguished gentleman in
uniform came to the door, and, acquainted with my business, he said,
“Ah, that is an affair of my wife,” and invited me within.
He was obviously English. Presently there appeared a beautiful lady,
likewise English and as obviously a gentlewoman, and an hour later my
friend Roberts and I moved in. The incident proved in many ways
fateful. The military gentleman proved to be Doctor Scott, the post
surgeon. He was, when we came to know him, the most interesting of men,
a son of that Captain Scott who commanded Byron’s flagship at
Missolonghi in 1823; had as a lad attended the poet and he in his last
illness and been in at the death, seeing the club foot when the body
was prepared for burial. His wife was adorable. There were two girls
and two boys. To make a long story short, Albert Roberts married one of
the daughters, his brother the other; the lads growing up to be
successful and distinguished men—one a naval admiral, the other a
railway president. When, just after the war, I was going abroad, Mrs.
Scott said: “I have a brother living in London to whom I will be glad
to give you a letter.”
II
Upon the deck of the steamer bound from New York to London direct, as
we, my wife and I newly married, were taking a last look at the
receding American shore, there appeared a gentleman who seemed by the
cut of his jib startlingly French. We had under our escort a French
governess returning to Paris. In a twinkle she and this gentleman had
struck up an acquaintance, and much to my displeasure she introduced
him to me as “Monsieur Mahoney.” I was somewhat mollified when later we
were made acquainted with Madame Mahoney.
I was not at all preconceived in his favor, nor did Monsieur Mahoney,
upon nearer approach, conciliate my simple taste. In person, manners
and apparel he was quite beyond me. Mrs. Mahoney, however, as we soon
called her, was a dear, whole-souled, traveled, unaffected New England
woman. But Monsieur! Lord! There was no holding him at arm’s length. He
brooked not resistance. I was wearing a full beard. He said it would
never do, carried me perforce below, and cut it as I have worn it ever
since. The day before we were to dock he took me aside and said:
“Mee young friend”—he had a brogue which thirty years in Algiers, where
he had been consul, and a dozen in Paris as a gentleman of leisure, had
not wholly spoiled—“Mee young friend, I observe that you are shy of
strangers, but my wife and I have taken a shine to you and the
‘Princess’,” as he called Mrs. Watterson, “and if you will allow us, we
can be of some sarvis to you when we get to town.”
Certainly there was no help for it. I was too ill of the long crossing
to oppose him. At Blackwall we took the High Level for Fenchurch
Street, at Fenchurch Street a cab for the West End—Mr. Mahoney bossing
the job—and finally, in most comfortable and inexpensive lodgings, we
were settled in Jermyn Street. The Mahoneys were visiting Lady Elmore,
widow of a famous surgeon and mother of the President of the Royal
Academy. Thus we were introduced to quite a distinguished artistic set.
It was great. It was glorious. At last we were in London—the dream of
my literary ambitions. I have since lived much in this wondrous city
and in many parts of it between Hyde Park Corner, the heart of May
Fair, to the east end of Bloomsbury under the very sound of Bow Bells.
All the way as it were from Tyburn Tree that was, and the Marble Arch
that is, to Charing Cross and the Hay Market. This were not to mention
casual sojourns along Piccadilly and the Strand.
In childhood I was obsessed by the immensity, the atmosphere and the
mystery of London. Its nomenclature embedded itself in my fancy;
Hounsditch and Shoreditch, Billingsgate and Blackfriars; Bishopgate,
within, and Bishopgate, without; Threadneedle Street and
Wapping-Old-Stairs; the Inns of Court where Jarndyce struggled with
Jarndyce, and the taverns where the Mark Tapleys, the Captain Costigans
and the Dolly Vardens consorted.
Alike in winter fog and summer haze, I grew to know and love it, and
those that may be called its dramatis personae, especially its
tatterdemalions, the long procession led by Jack Sheppard, Dick Turpin
and Jonathan Wild the Great. Inevitably I sought their haunts—and they
were not all gone in those days; the Bull-and-Gate in Holborn, whither
Mr. Tom Jones repaired on his arrival in town, and the White Hart
Tavern, where Mr. Pickwick fell in with Mr. Sam Weller; the regions
about Leicester Fields and Russell Square sacred to the memory of
Captain Booth and the lovely Amelia and Becky Sharp; where Garrick
drank tea with Dr. Johnson and Henry Esmond tippled with Sir Richard
Steele. There was yet a Pump Court, and many places along Oxford Street
where Mantalini and De Quincy loitered: and Covent Garden and Drury
Lane. Evans’ Coffee House, or shall I say the Cave of Harmony, and The
Cock and the Cheshire Cheese were near at hand for refreshment in the
agreeable society of Daniel Defoe and Joseph Addison, with Oliver
Goldsmith and Dick Swiveller and Colonel Newcome to clink ghostly
glasses amid the punch fumes and tobacco smoke. In short I knew London
when it was still Old London—the knowledge of Temple Bar and
Cheapside—before the vandal horde of progress and the pickaxe of the
builder had got in their nefarious work.
III
Not long after we began our sojourn in London, I recurred—by chance, I
am ashamed to say—to Mrs. Scott’s letter of introduction to her
brother. The address read “Mr. Thomas H. Huxley, School of Mines,
Jermyn Street.” Why, it was but two or three blocks away, and being so
near I called, not knowing just who Mr. Thomas H. Huxley might be.
I was conducted to a dark, stuffy little room. The gentleman who met me
was exceedingly handsome and very agreeable. He greeted me cordially
and we had some talk about his relatives in America. Of course my wife
and I were invited at once to dinner. I was a little perplexed. There
was no one to tell me about Huxley, or in what way he might be
connected with the School of Mines.
It was a good dinner. There sat at table a gentleman by the name of
Tyndall and another by the name of Mill—of neither I had ever heard—but
there was still another of the name of Spencer, whom I fancied must be
a literary man, for I recalled having reviewed a clever book on
Education some four years agone by a writer of that name; a certain
Herbert Spencer, whom I rightly judged might he be.
The dinner, I repeat, was a very good dinner indeed—the Huxleys, I took
it, must be well to do—the company agreeable; a bit pragmatic, however,
I thought. The gentleman by the name of Spencer said he loved music and
wished to hear Mrs. Watterson sing, especially Longfellow’s Rainy Day,
and left the others of us—Huxley, Mill, Tyndall and myself—at table.
Finding them a little off on the Irish question as well as American
affairs, I set them right as to both with much particularity and a
great deal of satisfaction to myself.
Whatever Huxley’s occupation, it turned out that he had at least one
book-publishing acquaintance, Mr. Alexander Macmillan, to whom he
introduced me next day, for I had brought with me a novel—the great
American romance—too good to be wasted on New York, Philadelphia or
Boston, but to appear simultaneously in England and the United States,
to be translated, of course, into French, Italian and German. This was
actually accepted. It was held for final revision.
We were to pass the winter in Italy. An event, however, called me
suddenly home. Politics and journalism knocked literature sky high, and
the novel—it was entitled “One Story’s Good Till Another Is Told”—was
laid by and quite forgotten. Some twenty years later, at a moment when
I was being lashed from one end of the line to the other, my wife said:
“Let us drop the nasty politics and get back to literature.” She had
preserved the old manuscript, two thousand pages of it.
“Fetch it,” I said.
She brought it with effulgent pride. Heavens! The stuff it was! Not a
gleam, never a radiance. I had been teaching myself to write—I had been
writing for the English market—perpendicular! The Lord has surely been
good to me. If the “boys” had ever got a peep at that novel, I had been
lost indeed!
IV
Yea, verily we were in London. Presently Artemus Ward and “the show”
arrived in town. He took a lodging over an apothecary’s just across the
way from Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, where he was to lecture. We had
been the best of friends, were near of an age, and only
round-the-corner apart we became from the first inseparable. I
introduced him to the distinguished scientific set into which chance
had thrown me, and he introduced me to a very different set that made a
revel of life at the Savage Club.
I find by reference to some notes jotted down at the time that the last
I saw of him was the evening of the 21st of December, 1866. He had
dined with my wife and myself, and, accompanied by Arthur Sketchley,
who had dropped in after dinner, he bade us good-by and went for his
nightly grind, as he called it. We were booked to take our departure
the next morning. His condition was pitiable. He was too feeble to walk
alone, and was continually struggling to breathe freely. His surgeon
had forbidden the use of wine or liquor of any sort. Instead he drank
quantities of water, eating little and taking no exercise at all.
Nevertheless, he stuck to his lecture and contrived to keep up
appearances before the crowds that flocked to hear him, and even in
London his critical state of health was not suspected.
Early in September, when I had parted from him to go to Paris, I left
him methodically and industriously arranging for his début. He had
brought some letters, mainly to newspaper people, and was already
making progress toward what might be called the interior circles of the
press, which are so essential to the success of a newcomer in London.
Charles Reade and Andrew Haliday became zealous friends. It was to the
latter that he owed his introduction to the Savage Club. Here he soon
made himself at home. His manners, even his voice, were half English,
albeit he possessed a most engaging disposition—a ready tact and keen
discernment, very un-English,—and these won him an efficient corps of
claquers and backers throughout the newspapers and periodicals of the
metropolis. Thus his success was assured from the first.
The raw November evening when he opened at Egyptian Hall the room was
crowded with an audience of literary men and women, great and small,
from Swinburne and Edmund Yates to the trumpeters and reporters of the
morning papers. The next day most of these contained glowing accounts.
The Times was silent, but four days later The Thunderer, seeing how the
wind blew, came out with a column of eulogy, and from this onward, each
evening proved a kind of ovation. Seats were engaged for a week in
advance. Up and down Piccadilly, from St. James Church to St. James
Street, carriages bearing the first arms in the kingdom were parked
night after night; and the evening of the 21st of December, six weeks
after, there was no falling off. The success was complete. As to an
American, London had never seen the like.
All this while the poor author of the sport was slowly dying. The
demands upon his animal spirits at the Savage Club, the bodily fatigue
of “getting himself up to it,” the “damnable iteration” of the lecture
itself, wore him out. George, his valet, whom he had brought from
America, had finally to lift him about his bedroom like a child. His
quarters in Picadilly, as I have said, were just opposite the Hall, but
he could not go backward and forward without assistance. It was painful
in the extreme to see the man who was undergoing tortures behind the
curtain step lightly before the audience amid a burst of merriment, and
for more than an hour sustain the part of jester, tossing his cap and
jingling his bells, a painted death’s head, for he had to rouge his
face to hide the pallor.
His buoyancy forsook him. He was occasionally nervous and fretful. The
fog, he declared, felt like a winding sheet, enwrapping and strangling
him. At one of his entertainments he made a grim, serio-comic allusion
to this. “But,” cried he as he came off the stage, “that was not a hit,
was it? The English are scary about death. I’ll have to cut it out.”
He had become a contributor to Punch, a lucky rather than smart
business stroke, for it was not of his own initiation. He did not
continue his contributions after he began to appear before the public,
and the discontinuance was made the occasion of some ill-natured
remarks in certain American papers, which very much wounded him. They
were largely circulated and credited at the time, the charge being that
Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, the publishers of the English charivari,
had broken with him because the English would not have him. The truth
is that their original proposal was made to him, not by him to them,
the price named being fifteen guineas a letter. He asked permission to
duplicate the arrangement with some New York periodical, so as to
secure an American copyright. This they refused. I read the
correspondence at the time. “Our aim,” they said, “in making the
engagement, had reference to our own circulation in the United States,
which exceeds twenty-seven thousand weekly.”
I suggested to Artemus that he enter his book, “Artemus Ward in
London,” in advance, and he did write to Oakey Hall, his New York
lawyer, to that effect. Before he received an answer from Hall he got
Carleton’s advertisement announcing the book. Considering this a
piratical design on the part of Carleton, he addressed that
enterprising publisher a savage letter, but the matter was ultimately
cleared up to his satisfaction, for he said just before we parted: “It
was all a mistake about Carleton. I did him an injustice and mean to
ask his pardon. He has behaved very handsomely to me.” Then the letters
reappeared in Punch.
V
Whatever may be thought of them on this side of the Atlantic, their
success in England was undeniable. They were more talked about than any
current literary matter; never a club gathering or dinner party at
which they were not discussed. There did seem something both audacious
and grotesque in this ruthless Yankee poking in among the revered
antiquities of Britain, so that the beef-eating British themselves
could not restrain their laughter. They took his jokes in excellent
part. The letters on the Tower and Chawsir were palpable hits, and it
was generally agreed that Punch had contained nothing better since the
days of Yellow-plush. This opinion was not confined to the man in the
street. It was shared by the high-brows of the reviews and the
appreciative of society, and gained Artemus the entrée wherever he
cared to go.
Invitations pursued him and he was even elected to two or three
fashionable clubs. But he had a preference for those which were less
conventional. His admission to the Garrick, which had been at first
“laid over,” affords an example of London club fastidiousness. The
gentleman who proposed him used his pseudonym, Artemus Ward, instead of
his own name, Charles F. Browne. I had the pleasure of introducing him
to Mr. Alexander Macmillan, the famous book publisher of Oxford and
Cambridge, a leading member of the Garrick. We dined together at the
Garrick clubhouse, when the matter was brought up and explained. The
result was that Charles F. Browne was elected at the next meeting,
where Artemus Ward, had been made to stand aside.
Before Christmas, Artemus received invitations from distinguished
people, nobility and gentry as well as men of letters, to spend the
week-end with them. But he declined them all. He needed his vacation,
he said, for rest. He had neither the strength nor the spirit for the
season.
Yet was he delighted with the English people and with English life. His
was one of those receptive natures which enjoy whatever is wholesome
and sunny. In spite of his bodily pain, he entertained a lively hope of
coming out of it in the spring, and did not realize his true condition.
He merely said, “I have overworked myself, and must lay by or I shall
break down altogether.” He meant to remain in London as long as his
welcome lasted, and when he perceived a falling off in his audience,
would close his season and go to the continent. His receipts averaged
about three hundred dollars a night, whilst his expenses were not fifty
dollars. “This, mind you,” he used to say, “is in very hard cash, an
article altogether superior to that of my friend Charles Reade.”
[Illustration: Artemus Ward]
His idea was to set aside out of his earnings enough to make him
independent, and then to give up “this mountebank business,” as he
called it. He had a great respect for scholarly culture and personal
respectability, and thought that if he could get time and health he
might do something “in the genteel comedy line.” He had a humorous
novel in view, and a series of more aspiring comic essays than any he
had attempted.
Often he alluded to the opening for an American magazine, “not quite so
highfalutin as the Atlantic nor so popular as Harper’s.” His mind was
beginning to soar above the showman and merrymaker. His manners had
always been captivating. Except for the nervous worry of ill-health, he
was the kind-hearted, unaffected Artemus of old, loving as a girl and
liberal as a prince. He once showed me his daybook in which were noted
down over five hundred dollars lent out in small sums to indigent
Americans.
“Why,” said I, “you will never get half of it back.”
“Of course not,” he said, “but do you think I can afford to have a lot
of loose fellows black-guarding me at home because I wouldn’t let them
have a sovereign or so over here?”
There was no lack of independence, however, about him. The benefit
which he gave Mrs. Jefferson Davis in New Orleans, which was denounced
at the North as toadying to the Rebels, proceeded from a wholly
different motive. He took a kindly interest in the case because it was
represented to him as one of suffering, and knew very well at the time
that his bounty would meet with detraction.
He used to relate with gusto an interview he once had with Murat
Halstead, who had printed a tart paragraph about him. He went into the
office of the Cincinnati editor, and began in his usual jocose way to
ask for the needful correction. Halstead resented the proffered
familiarity, when Artemus told him flatly, suddenly changing front,
that he “didn’t care a d—n for the Commercial, and the whole
establishment might go to hell.” Next day the paper appeared with a
handsome amende, and the two became excellent friends. “I have no
doubt,” said Artemus, “that if I had whined or begged, I should have
disgusted Halstead, and he would have put it to me tighter. As it was,
he concluded that I was not a sneak, and treated me like a gentleman.”
Artemus received many tempting offers from book publishers in London.
Several of the Annuals for 1866-67 contain sketches, some of them
anonymous, written by him, for all of which he was well paid. He wrote
for Fun—the editor of which, Mr. Tom Hood, son of the great humorist,
was an intimate friend—as well as for Punch; his contributions to the
former being printed without his signature. If he had been permitted to
remain until the close of his season, he would have earned enough, with
what he had already, to attain the independence which was his aim and
hope. His best friends in London were Charles Reade, Tom Hood, Tom
Robertson, the dramatist, Charles Mathews, the comedian, Tom Taylor and
Arthur Sketchley. He did not meet Mr. Dickens, though Mr. Andrew
Haliday, Dickens’ familiar, was also his intimate. He was much
persecuted by lion hunters, and therefore had to keep his lodgings
something of a mystery.
So little is known of Artemus Ward that some biographic particulars may
not in this connection be out of place or lacking in interest.
Charles F. Browne was born at Waterford, Maine, the 15th of July, 1833.
His father was a state senator, a probate judge, and at one time a
wealthy citizen; but at his death, when his famous son was yet a lad,
left his family little or no property. Charles apprenticed himself to a
printer, and served out his time, first in Springfield and then in
Boston. In the latter city he made the acquaintance of Shilaber, Ben
Perley Poore, Halpine, and others, and tried his hand as a “sketchist”
for a volume edited by Mrs. Partington. His early effusions bore the
signature of “Chub.” From the Hub he emigrated to the West. At Toledo,
Ohio, he worked as a “typo” and later as a “local” on a Toledo
newspaper. Then he went to Cleveland, where as city editor of the Plain
Dealer he began the peculiar vein from which still later he worked so
successfully.
The soubriquet “Artemus Ward,” was not taken from the Revolutionary
general. It was suggested by an actual personality. In an adjoining
town to Cleveland there was a snake charmer who called himself Artemus
Ward, an ignorant witling or half-wit, the laughing stock of the
countryside. Browne’s first communication over the signature of Artemus
Ward purported to emanate from this person, and it succeeded so well
that he kept it up. He widened the conception as he progressed. It was
not long before his sketches began to be copied and he became a
newspaper favorite. He remained in Cleveland from 1857 to 1860, when he
was called to New York to take the editorship of a venture called
Vanity Fair. This died soon after. But he did not die with it. A year
later, in the fall of 1861, he made his appearance as a lecturer at New
London, and met with encouragement. Then he set out _en tour_, returned
to the metropolis, hired a hall and opened with “the show.” Thence
onward all went well.
The first money he made was applied to the purchase of the old family
homestead in Maine, which he presented to his mother. The payments on
this being completed, he bought himself a little nest on the Hudson,
meaning, as he said, to settle down and perhaps to marry. But his
dreams were not destined to be fulfilled.
Thus, at the outset of a career from which much was to be expected, a
man, possessed of rare and original qualities of head and heart, sank
out of the sphere in which at that time he was the most prominent
figure. There was then no Mark Twain or Bret Harte. His rivals were
such humorists as Orpheus C. Kerr, Nasby, Asa Hartz, The Fat
Contributor, John Happy, Mrs. Partington, Bill Arp and the like, who
are now mostly forgotten.
Artemus Ward wrote little, but he made good and left his mark. Along
with the queer John Phoenix his writings survived the deluge that
followed them. He poured out the wine of life in a limpid stream. It
may be fairly said that he did much to give permanency and
respectability to the style of literature of which he was at once a
brilliant illustrator and illustration. His was a short life indeed,
though a merry one, and a sad death. In a strange land, yet surrounded
by admiring friends, about to reach the coveted independence he had
looked forward to so long, he sank to rest, his dust mingling with that
of the great Thomas Hood, alongside of whom he was laid in Kensal
Green.
Chapter the Fifth
Mark Twain—The Original of Colonel Mulberry Sellers—The “Earl of
Durham”—Some Noctes Ambrosianæ—A Joke on Murat Halstead
I
Mark Twain came down to the footlights long after Artemus Ward had
passed from the scene; but as an American humorist with whom during
half a century I was closely intimate and round whom many of my London
experiences revolve, it may be apropos to speak of him next after his
elder. There was not lacking a certain likeness between them.
Samuel L. Clemens and I were connected by a domestic tie, though before
either of us were born the two families on the maternal side had been
neighbors and friends. An uncle of his married an aunt of mine—the
children of this marriage cousins in common to us—albeit, this apart,
we were life-time cronies. He always contended that we were “bloodkin.”
Notwithstanding that when Mark Twain appeared east of the Alleghanies
and north of the Blue Ridge he showed the weather-beating of the west,
the bizarre alike of the pilot house and the mining camp very much in
evidence, he came of decent people on both sides of the house. The
Clemens and the Lamptons were of good old English stock. Toward the
middle of the eighteenth century three younger scions of the Manor of
Durham migrated from the County of Durham to Virginia and thence
branched out into Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri.
His mother was the loveliest old aristocrat with a taking drawl, a
drawl that was high-bred and patrician, not rustic and plebeian, which
her famous son inherited. All the women of that ilk were gentlewomen.
The literary and artistic instinct which attained its fruition in him
had percolated through the veins of a long line of silent singers, of
poets and painters, unborn to the world of expression till he arrived
upon the scene.
These joint cousins of ours embraced an exceedingly large, varied and
picturesque assortment. Their idiosyncrasies were a constant source of
amusement to us. Just after the successful production of his play, The
Gilded Age, and the uproarious hit of the comedian, Raymond, in the
leading role, I received a letter from him in which he told me he had
made in Colonel Mulberry Sellers a close study of one of these kinsmen
and thought he had drawn him to the life. “But for the love o’ God,” he
said, “don’t whisper it, for he would never understand or forgive me,
if he did not thrash me on sight.”
The pathos of the part, and not its comic aspects, had most impressed
him. He designed and wrote it for Edwin Booth. From the first and
always he was disgusted by the Raymond portrayal. Except for its
popularity and money-making, he would have withdrawn it from the stage
as, in a fit of pique, Raymond himself did while it was still packing
the theaters.
The original Sellers had partly brought him up and had been very good
to him. A second Don Quixote in appearance and not unlike the knight of
La Mancha in character, it would have been safe for nobody to laugh at
James Lampton, or by the slightest intimation, look or gesture to treat
him with inconsideration, or any proposal of his, however preposterous,
with levity.
He once came to visit me upon a public occasion and during a function.
I knew that I must introduce him, and with all possible ceremony, to my
colleagues. He was very queer; tall and peaked, wearing a black,
swallow-tailed suit, shiny with age, and a silk hat, bound with black
crepe to conceal its rustiness, not to indicate a recent death; but his
linen as spotless as new-fallen snow. I had my fears. Happily the
company, quite dazed by the apparition, proved decorous to solemnity,
and the kind old gentleman, pleased with himself and proud of his
“distinguished young kinsman,” went away highly gratified.
Not long after this one of his daughters—pretty girls they were, too,
and in charm altogether worthy of their Cousin Sam Clemens—was to be
married, and Sellers wrote me a stately summons, all-embracing, though
stiff and formal, such as a baron of the Middle Ages might have indited
to his noble relative, the field marshal, bidding him bring his good
lady and his retinue and abide within the castle until the festivities
were ended, though in this instance the castle was a suburban cottage
scarcely big enough to accommodate the bridal couple. I showed the
bombastic but hospitable and genuine invitation to the actor Raymond,
who chanced to be playing in Louisville when it reached me. He read it
through with care and reread it.
“Do you know,” said he, “it makes me want to cry. That is not the man I
am trying to impersonate at all.”
Be sure it was not; for there was nothing funny about the spiritual
being of Mark Twain’s Colonel Mulberry Sellers; he was as brave as a
lion and as upright as Sam Clemens himself.
When a very young man, living in a woodland cabin down in the Pennyrile
region of Kentucky, with a wife he adored and two or three small
children, he was so carried away by an unexpected windfall that he
lingered overlong in the nearby village, dispensing a royal
hospitality; in point of fact, he “got on a spree.” Two or three days
passed before he regained possession of himself. When at last he
reached home, he found his wife ill in bed and the children nearly
starved for lack of food. He said never a word, but walked out of the
cabin, tied himself to a tree, and was wildly horsewhipping himself
when the cries of the frightened family summoned the neighbors and he
was brought to reason. He never touched an intoxicating drop from that
day to his death.
II
Another one of our fantastic mutual cousins was the “Earl of Durham.” I
ought to say that Mark Twain and I grew up on old wives’ tales of
estates and titles, which, maybe due to a kindred sense of humor in
both of us, we treated with shocking irreverence. It happened some
fifty years ago that there turned up, first upon the plains and
afterward in New York and Washington, a lineal descendant of the oldest
of the Virginia Lamptons—he had somehow gotten hold of or had
fabricated a bundle of documents—who was what a certain famous American
would have called a “corker.” He wore a sombrero with a rattlesnake for
a band, and a belt with a couple of six-shooters, and described himself
and claimed to be the Earl of Durham.
“He touched me for a tenner the first time I ever saw him,” drawled
Mark to me, “and I coughed it up and have been coughing them up,
whenever he’s around, with punctuality and regularity.”
The “Earl” was indeed a terror, especially when he had been drinking.
His belief in his peerage was as absolute as Colonel Sellers’ in his
millions. All he wanted was money enough “to get over there” and “state
his case.” During the Tichborne trial Mark Twain and I were in London,
and one day he said to me:
“I have investigated this Durham business down at the Herald’s office.
There’s nothing to it. The Lamptons passed out of the Demesne of Durham
a hundred years ago. They had long before dissipated the estates.
Whatever the title, it lapsed. The present earldom is a new creation,
not the same family at all. But, I tell you what, if you’ll put up five
hundred dollars I’ll put up five hundred more, we’ll fetch our chap
across and set him in as a claimant, and, my word for it, Kenealy’s fat
boy won’t be a marker to him!”
He was so pleased with his conceit that later along he wrote a novel
and called it The Claimant. It is the only one of his books, though I
never told him so, that I could not enjoy. Many years after, I happened
to see upon a hotel register in Rome these entries: “The Earl of
Durham,” and in the same handwriting just below it, “Lady Anne Lambton”
and “The Hon. Reginald Lambton.” So the Lambtons—they spelled it with a
b instead of a p—were yet in the peerage. A Lambton was Earl of Durham.
The next time I saw Mark I rated him on his deception. He did not
defend himself, said something about its being necessary to perfect the
joke.
“Did you ever meet this present peer and possible usurper?” I asked.
“No,” he answered, “I never did, but if he had called on me, I would
have had him come up.”
III
His mind turned ever to the droll. Once in London I was living with my
family at 103 Mount Street. Between 103 and 102 there was the parochial
workhouse, quite a long and imposing edifice. One evening, upon coming
in from an outing, I found a letter he had written on the sitting-room
table. He had left it with his card. He spoke of the shock he had
received upon finding that next to 102—presumably 103—was the
workhouse. He had loved me, but had always feared that I would end by
disgracing the family—being hanged or something—but the “work’us,” that
was beyond him; he had not thought it would come to that. And so on
through pages of horseplay; his relief on ascertaining the truth and
learning his mistake, his regret at not finding me at home, closing
with a dinner invitation.
It was at Geneva, Switzerland, that I received a long, overflowing
letter, full of flamboyant oddities, written from London. Two or three
hours later came a telegram. “Burn letter. Blot it from your memory.
Susie is dead.”
How much of melancholy lay hidden behind the mask of his humour it
would be hard to say. His griefs were tempered by a vein of stoicism.
He was a medley of contradictions. Unconventional to the point of
eccentricity, his sense of his proper dignity was sound and sufficient.
Though lavish in the use of money, he had a full realization of its
value and made close contracts for his work. Like Sellers, his mind
soared when it sailed financial currents. He lacked acute business
judgment in the larger things, while an excellent economist in the
lesser.
His marriage was the most brilliant stroke of his life. He got the
woman of all the world he most needed, a truly lovely and wise
helpmate, who kept him in bounds and headed him straight and right
while she lived. She was the best of housewives and mothers, and the
safest of counsellors and critics. She knew his worth; she appreciated
his genius; she understood his limitations and angles. Her death was a
grievous disaster as well as a staggering blow. He never wholly
recovered from it.
IV
It was in the early seventies that Mark Twain dropped into New York,
where there was already gathered a congenial group to meet and greet
him. John Hay, quoting old Jack Dade’s description of himself, was wont
to speak of this group as “of high aspirations and peregrinations.” It
radiated between Franklin Square, where Joseph W. Harper—“Joe
Brooklyn,” we called him—reigned in place of his uncle, Fletcher
Harper, the man of genius among the original Harper Brothers, and the
Lotos Club, then in Irving Place, and Delmonico’s, at the corner of
Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, with Sutherland’s in Liberty Street
for a downtown place of luncheon resort, not to forget Dorlon’s in
Fulton Market.
[Illustration: General Leonidas Polk—Lieutenant General C.S.A.—Killed
in Georgia June 14, 1864—P.E. Bishop of Louisiana]
The Harper contingent, beside its chief, embraced Tom Nast and William
A. Seaver, whom John Russell Young named “Papa Pendennis,” and pictured
as “a man of letters among men of the world and a man of the world
among men of letters,” a very apt phrase appropriated from Doctor
Johnson, and Major Constable, a giant, who looked like a dragoon and
not a bookman, yet had known Sir Walter Scott and was sprung from the
family of Edinburgh publishers. Bret Harte had but newly arrived from
California. Whitelaw Reid, though still subordinate to Greeley, was
beginning to make himself felt in journalism. John Hay played high
priest to the revels. Occasionally I made a pious pilgrimage to the
delightful shrine.
Truth to tell, it emulated rather the gods than the graces, though all
of us had literary leanings of one sort and another, especially late at
night; and Sam Bowles would come over from Springfield and Murat
Halstead from Cincinnati to join us. Howells, always something of a
prig, living in Boston, held himself at too high account; but often we
had Joseph Jefferson, then in the heyday of his career, with once in a
while Edwin Booth, who could not quite trust himself to go our gait.
The fine fellows we caught from oversea were innumerable, from the
elder Sothern and Sala and Yates to Lord Dufferin and Lord Houghton.
Times went very well those days, and whilst some looked on askance,
notably Curtis and, rather oddly, Stedman, and thought we were wasting
time and convivializing more than was good for us, we were mostly young
and hearty, ranging from thirty to five and forty years of age, with
amazing capabilities both for work and play, and I cannot recall that
any hurt to any of us came of it.
Although robustious, our fribbles were harmless enough—ebullitions of
animal spirit, sometimes perhaps of gaiety unguarded—though each shade,
treading the Celestian way, as most of them do, and recurring to those
Noctes Ambrosianæ, might e’en repeat to the other the words on a
memorable occasion addressed by Curran to Lord Avonmore:
_“We spent them not in toys or lust or wine; But search of deep
philosophy, Wit, eloquence and poesy— Arts which I loved, for they, my
friend, were thine.”_
V
Mark Twain was the life of every company and all occasions. I remember
a practical joke of his suggestion played upon Murat Halstead. A party
of us were supping after the theater at the old Brevoort House. A card
was brought to me from a reporter of the World. I was about to deny
myself, when Mark Twain said:
“Give it to me, I’ll fix it,” and left the table.
Presently he came to the door and beckoned me out.
“I represented myself as your secretary and told this man,” said he,
“that you were not here, but that if Mr. Halstead would answer just as
well I would fetch him. The fellow is as innocent as a lamb and doesn’t
know either of you. I am going to introduce you as Halstead and we’ll
have some fun.”
No sooner said than done. The reporter proved to be a little
bald-headed cherub newly arrived from the isle of dreams, and I lined
out to him a column or more of very hot stuff, reversing Halstead in
every opinion. I declared him in favor of paying the national debt in
greenbacks. Touching the sectional question, which was then the burning
issue of the time, I made the mock Halstead say: “The ‘bloody shirt’ is
only a kind of Pickwickian battle cry. It is convenient during
political campaigns and on election day. Perhaps you do not know that I
am myself of dyed-in-the-wool Southern and secession stock. My father
and grandfather came to Ohio from South Carolina just before I was
born. Naturally I have no sectional prejudices, but I live in
Cincinnati and I am a Republican.”
There was not a little more of the same sort. Just how it passed
through the World office I know not; but it actually appeared. On
returning to the table I told the company what Mark Twain and I had
done. They thought I was joking. Without a word to any of us, next day
Halstead wrote a note to the World repudiating the interview, and the
World printed his disclaimer with a line which said: “When Mr. Halstead
conversed with our reporter he had dined.” It was too good to keep. A
day or two later, John Hay wrote an amusing story for the Tribune,
which set Halstead right.
Mark Twain’s place in literature is not for me to fix. Some one has
called him “The Lincoln of letters.” That is striking, suggestive and
apposite. The genius of Clemens and the genius of Lincoln possessed a
kinship outside the circumstances of their early lives; the common lack
of tools to work with; the privations and hardships to be endured and
to overcome; the way ahead through an unblazed and trackless forest;
every footstep over a stumbling block and each effort saddled with a
handicap. But they got there, both of them, they got there, and mayhap
somewhere beyond the stars the light of their eyes is shining down upon
us even as, amid the thunders of a world tempest, we are not wholly
forgetful of them.
Chapter the Sixth
Houston and Wigfall of Texas—Stephen A. Douglas—The Twaddle about
Puritans and Cavaliers—Andrew Johnson and John C. Breckenridge
I
The National Capitol—old men’s fancies fondly turn to thoughts of
youth—was picturesque in its personalities if not in its architecture.
By no means the least striking of these was General and Senator Sam
Houston, of Texas. In his life of adventure truth proved very much
stranger than fiction.
The handsomest of men, tall and stately, he could pass no way without
attracting attention; strangers in the Senate gallery first asked to
have him pointed out to them, and seeing him to all appearance idling
his time with his jacknife and bits of soft wood which he whittled into
various shapes of hearts and anchors for distribution among his lady
acquaintances, they usually went away thinking him a queer old man. So
inded he was; yet on his feet and in action singularly impressive, and,
when he chose, altogether the statesman and orator.
There united in him the spirits of the troubadour and the spearman.
Ivanhoe was not more gallant nor Bois-Guilbert fiercer. But the valor
and the prowess were tempered by humor. Below the surging subterranean
flood that stirred and lifted him to high attempt, he was a comedian
who had tales to tell, and told them wondrous well. On a lazy summer
afternoon on the shady side of Willard’s Hotel—the Senate not in
session—he might be seen, an admiring group about him, spinning these
yarns, mostly of personal experience—rarely if ever repeating
himself—and in tone, gesture and grimace reproducing the drolleries of
the backwoods, which from boyhood had been his home.
He spared not himself. According to his own account he had been in the
early days of his Texas career a drunkard. “Everybody got drunk,” I
once heard him say, referring to the beginning of the Texas revolution,
as he gave a side-splitting picture of that bloody episode, “and I
realized that somebody must get sober and keep sober.”
From the hour of that realization, when he “swore off,” to the hour of
his death he never touched intoxicants of any sort.
He had fought under Jackson, had served two terms in Congress and had
been elected governor of Tennessee before he was forty. Then he fell in
love. The young lady was a beautiful girl, well-born and highly
educated, a schoolmate of my mother’s elder sister. She was persuaded
by her family to throw over an obscure young man whom she preferred,
and to marry a young man so eligible and distinguished.
He took her to Nashville, the state capital. There were rounds of
gayety. Three months passed. Of a sudden the little town woke to the
startling rumor, which proved to be true, that the brilliant young
couple had come to a parting of the ways. The wife had returned to her
people. The husband had resigned his office and was gone, no one knew
where.
A few years later Mrs. Houston applied for a divorce, which in those
days had to be granted by the state legislature. Inevitably reports
derogatory to her had got abroad. Almost the first tidings of Governor
Houston’s whereabouts were contained in a letter he wrote from
somewhere in the Indian country to my father, a member of the
legislature to whom Mrs. Houston had applied, in which he said that
these reports had come to his ears. “They are,” he wrote, “as false as
hell. If they be not stopped I will return to Tennessee and have the
heart’s blood of him who repeats them. A nobler, purer woman never
lived. She should be promptly given the divorce she asks. I alone am to
blame.”
She married again, though not the lover she had discarded. I knew her
in her old age—a gentle, placid lady, in whose face I used to fancy I
could read lines of sorrow and regret. He, to close this chapter,
likewise married again a wise and womanly woman who bore him many
children and with whom he lived happy ever after. Meanwhile, however,
he had dwelt with the Indians and had become an Indian chief. “Big
Drunk, they called me,” he said to his familiars. His enemies averred
that he brought into the world a whole tribe of half-breeds.
II
Houston was a rare performer before a popular audience. His speech
abounded with argumentative appeal and bristled with illustrative
anecdote, and, when occasion required, with apt repartee.
Once an Irishman in the crowd bawled out, “ye were goin’ to sell Texas
to England.”
Houston paused long enough to center attention upon the quibble and
then said: “My friend, I first tried, unsuccessfully, to have the
United States take Texas as a gift. Not until I threatened to turn
Texas over to England did I finally succeed. There may be within the
sound of my voice some who have knowledge of sheep culture. They have
doubtless seen a motherless lamb put to the breast of a cross old ewe
who refused it suck. Then the wise shepherd calls his dog and there is
no further trouble. My friend, England was my dog.”
He was inveighing against the New York Tribune. Having described Horace
Greeley as the sum of all villainy—“whose hair is white, whose skin is
white, whose eyes are white, whose clothes are white, and whose liver
is in my opinion of the same color”—he continued: “The assistant editor
of the Try-bune is Robinson—Solon Robinson. He is an Irishman, an
Orange Irishman, a redhaired Irishman!” Casting his eye over the
audience and seeing quite a sprinkling of redheads, and realizing that
he had perpetrated a slip of tongue, he added: “Fellow citizens, when I
say that Robinson is a red-haired Irishman I mean no disrespect to
persons whose hair is of that color. I have been a close observer of
men and women for thirty years, and I never knew a red-haired man who
was not an honest man, nor a red-headed woman who was not a virtuous
woman; and I give it you as my candid opinion that had it not been for
Robinson’s red hair he would have been hanged long ago.”
His pathos was not far behind his humor—though he used it sparingly. At
a certain town in Texas there lived a desperado who had threatened to
kill him on sight. The town was not on the route of his speaking dates
but he went out of his way to include it. A great concourse assembled
to hear him. He spoke in the open air and, as he began, observed his
man leaning against a tree armed to the teeth and waiting for him to
finish. After a few opening remarks, he dropped into the
reminiscential. He talked of the old times in Texas. He told in
thrilling terms of the Alamo and of Goliad. There was not a dry eye in
earshot. Then he grew personal.
“I see Tom Gilligan over yonder. A braver man never lived than Tom
Gilligan. He fought by my side at San Jacinto. Together we buried poor
Bill Holman. But for his skill and courage I should not be here to-day.
He—”
There was a stir in front. Gilligan had thrown away his knife and gun
and was rushing unarmed through the crowd, tears streaming down his
face.
“For God’s sake, Houston,” he cried, “don’t say another word and
forgive me my cowardly intention.”
From that time to his death Tom Gilligan was Houston’s devoted friend.
General Houston voted against the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and as a
consequence lost his seat in the Senate. It was thought, and freely
said, that for good and all he was down and out. He went home and
announced himself a candidate for governor of Texas.
The campaign that followed was of unexampled bitterness. The secession
wave was already mounting high. Houston was an uncompromising Unionist.
His defeat was generally expected. But there was no beating such a man
in a fair and square contest before the people. When the votes were
counted he led his competitor by a big majority. As governor he refused
two years later to sign the ordinance of secession and was deposed from
office by force. He died before the end of the war which so signally
vindicated his wisdom and verified his forecast.
III
Stephen Arnold Douglas was the Charles James Fox of American politics.
He was not a gambler as Fox was. But he went the other gaits and was
possessed of a sweetness of disposition which made him, like Fox, loved
where he was personally known. No one could resist the _bonhomie_ of
Douglas.
They are not all Puritans in New England. Catch a Yankee off his base,
quite away from home, and he can be as gay as anybody. Boston and
Charleston were in high party times nearest alike of any two American
cities.
Douglas was a Green Mountain boy. He was born in Vermont. As Seargent
Prentiss had done he migrated beyond the Alleghanies before he came of
age, settling in Illinois as Prentiss had settled in Mississippi, to
grow into a typical Westerner as Prentiss into a typical Southerner.
There was never a more absurd theory than that, begot of sectional aims
and the sectional spirit, which proposed a geographic alignment of
Cavalier and Puritan. When sectionalism had brought a kindred people to
blows over the institution of African slavery there were Puritans who
fought on the Southern side and Cavaliers who fought on the Northern
side. What was Stonewall Jackson but a Puritan? What were Custer,
Stoneman and Kearny but Cavaliers? Wadsworth was as absolute an
aristocrat as Hampton.
In the old days before the war of sections the South was full of
typical Southerners of Northern birth. John A. Quitman, who went from
New York, and Robert J. Walker, who went from Pennsylvania to
Mississippi; James H. Hammond, whose father, a teacher, went from
Massachusetts to South Carolina. John Slidell, born and bred in New
York, was thirty years old when he went to Louisiana. Albert Sidney
Johnston, the rose and expectancy of the young Confederacy—the most
typical of rebel soldiers—had not a drop of Southern blood in his
veins, born in Kentucky a few months after his father and mother had
arrived there from Connecticut. The list might be extended
indefinitely.
Climate, which has something to do with temperament, has not so much to
do with character as is often imagined. All of us are more or less the
creatures of environment. In the South after a fashion the duello
flourished. Because it had not flourished in the North there rose a
notion that the Northerners would not fight. It proved to those who
thought it a costly mistake.
Down to the actual secession of 1860-61 the issue of issues—the issue
behind all issues—was the preservation of the Union. Between 1820 and
1850, by a series of compromises, largely the work of Mr. Clay, its
threatened disruption had been averted. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill put a
sore strain upon conservative elements North and South. The Whig Party
went to pieces. Mr. Clay passed from the scene. Had he lived until the
presidential election of 1852 he would have given his support to
Franklin Pierce, as Daniel Webster did. Mr. Buchanan was not a General
Jackson. Judge Douglas, who sought to play the rôle of Mr. Clay, was
too late. The secession leaders held the whip hand in the Gulf States.
South Carolina was to have her will at last. Crash came the shot in
Charleston Harbor and the fall of Sumter. Curiously enough two persons
of Kentucky birth—Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis—led the rival
hosts of war into which an untenable and indefensible system of slave
labor, for which the two sections were equally responsible, had
precipitated an unwilling people.
Had Judge Douglas lived he would have been Mr. Lincoln’s main reliance
in Congress. As a debater his resources and prowess were rarely equaled
and never surpassed. His personality, whether in debate or private
conversation, was attractive in the highest degree. He possessed a
full, melodious voice, convincing fervor and ready wit.
He had married for his second wife the reigning belle of the National
Capital, a great-niece of Mrs. Madison, whose very natural ambitions
quickened and spurred his own.
It was fated otherwise. Like Clay, Webster, Calhoun and Blaine he was
to be denied the Presidency. The White House was barred to him. He was
not yet fifty when he died.
Tidings of his death took the country by surprise. But already the
sectional battle was on and it produced only a momentary impression, to
be soon forgotten amid the overwhelming tumult of events. He has lain
in his grave now nearly sixty years. Upon the legislation of his time
his name was writ first in water and then in blood. He received less
than his desert in life and the historic record has scarcely done
justice to his merit. He was as great a party leader as Clay. He could
hold his own in debate with Webster and Calhoun. He died a very poor
man, though his opportunity for enrichment by perfectly legitimate
means were many. It is enough to say that he lacked the business
instinct and set no value upon money; scrupulously upright in his
official dealing; holding his senatorial duties above all price and
beyond the suspicion of dirt.
Touching a matter which involved a certain outlay in the winter of
1861, he laughingly said to me: “I haven’t the wherewithal to pay for a
bottle of whisky and shall have to borrow of Arnold Harris the
wherewithal to take me home.”
His wife was a glorious creature. Early one morning calling at their
home to see Judge Douglas I was ushered into the library, where she was
engaged setting things to rights. My entrance took her by surprise. I
had often seen her in full ballroom regalia and in becoming out-of-door
costume, but as, in gingham gown and white apron, she turned, a little
startled by my sudden appearance, smiles and blushes in spite of
herself, I thought I had never seen any woman so beautiful before. She
married again—the lover whom gossip said she had thrown over to marry
Judge Douglas—and the story went that her second marriage was not very
happy.
IV
In the midsummer of 1859 the burning question among the newsmen of
Washington was the Central American Mission. England and France had
displayed activity in that quarter and it was deemed important that the
United States should sit up and take notice. An Isthmian canal was
being considered.
Speculation was rife whom Mr. Buchanan would send to represent us. The
press gang of the National Capital was all at sea. There was scarcely a
Democratic leader of national prominence whose name was not mentioned
in that connection, though speculation from day to day eddied round Mr.
James S. Rollins, of Missouri, an especial friend of the President and
a most accomplished public man.
At the height of excitement I happened to be in the library of the
State Department. I was on a step-ladder in quest of a book when I
heard a messenger say to the librarian: “The President is in the
Secretary’s room and wants to have Mr. Dimitry come there right away.”
An inspiration shot through me like a flash. They had chosen Alexander
Dimitry for the Central American Mission.
He was the official translator of the Department of State. Though an
able and learned man he was not in the line of preferment. He was
without political standing or backing of any sort. At first blush a
more unlikely, impossible appointment could hardly be suggested. But—so
on the instant I reasoned—he was peculiarly fitted in his own person
for the post in question. Though of Greek origin he looked like a
Spaniard. He spoke the Spanish language fluently. He had the procedure
of the State Department at his finger’s ends. He was the head of a
charming domestic fabric—his daughters the prettiest girls in
Washington. Why not?
I climbed down from my stepladder and made tracks for the office of the
afternoon newspaper for which I was doing all-round work. I was barely
on time, the last forms being locked when I got there. I had the
editorial page opened and inserted at the top of the leading column a
double-leaded paragraph announcing that the agony was over—that the
Gordian knot was cut—that Alexander Dimitry had been selected as Envoy
Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Central American
States.
It proved a veritable sensation as well as a notable scoop. To increase
my glory the correspondents of the New York dailies scouted it. But in
a day or two it was officially confirmed. General Cass, the Secretary
of State, sent for me, having learned that I had been in the department
about the time of the consultation between the President, himself and
Mr. Dimitry.
“How did you get this?” he asked rather sharply.
“Out of my inner consciousness,” I answered with flippant familiarity.
“Didn’t you know that I have what they call second sight?”
The old gentleman laughed amiably. “It would seem so,” he said, and
sent me about my business without further inquiry.
V
In the National Capital the winter of 1860-61 was both stormy and
nebulous. Parties were at sea. The Northerners in Congress had learned
the trick of bullying from the Southerners. In the Senate, Chandler was
a match for Toombs; and in the House, Thaddeus Stevens for Keitt and
Lamar. All of them, more or less, were playing a game. If sectional
war, which was incessantly threatened by the two extremes, had been
keenly realized and seriously considered it might have been averted.
Very few believed that it would come to actual war. A convention of
Border State men, over which ex-President John Tyler presided, was held
in Washington. It might as well have been held at the North Pole.
Moderate men were brushed aside, their counsels whistled down the wind.
There was a group of Senators, headed by Wigfall of Texas, who meant
disunion and war, and another group, headed by Seward, Hale and Chase,
who had been goaded up to this. Reading contemporary history and,
seeing the high-mightiness with which the Germans began what we
conceive their raid upon humanity, we are wont to regard it as evidence
of incredible stupidity, whereas it was, in point of fact, rather a
miscalculation of forces. That was the error of the secession leaders.
They refused to count the cost. Yancey firmly believed that England
would be forced to intervene. The mills of Lancashire he thought could
not get on without Southern cotton. He was sent abroad. He found Europe
solid against slavery and therefore set against the Confederacy. He
came home with what is called a broken heart—the dreams of a lifetime
shattered—and, in a kind of dazed stupor, laid himself down to die.
With Richmond in flames and the exultant shouts of the detested yet
victorious Yankees in his ears, he did die.
Wigfall survived but a few years. He was less a dreamer than Yancey. A
man big of brain and warm of heart he had gone from the ironclad
provincialism of South Carolina to the windswept vagaries of Texas. He
believed wholly the Yancey confession of faith; that secession was a
constitutional right; that African slavery was ordained of God; that
the South was paramount, the North inferior. Yet in worldly knowledge
he had learned more than Yancey—was an abler man than Jefferson
Davis—and but for his affections and generous habits he would have made
a larger figure in the war, having led the South’s exit from the
Senate.
VI
I do not think that either Hammond or Chestnut, the Senators from South
Carolina, both men of parts, had at bottom much belief in the
practicability of the Confederate movement. Neither had the Senators
from Arkansas and Alabama, nor Brown, of Mississippi, the colleague of
Jefferson Davis. Mason, of Virginia, a dogged old donkey, and Iverson,
of Georgia, another, were the kind of men whom Wigfall dominated.
One of the least confident of those who looked on and afterward fell in
line was the Vice President, John C. Breckenridge, of Kentucky. He was
the Beau Sabreur among statesmen as Albert Sidney Johnston, among
soldiers. Never man handsomer in person or more winning in manners.
Sprung from a race of political aristocrats, he was born to early and
shining success in public life. Of moderate opinions, winning and
prudent, wherever he appeared he carried his audience with him. He had
been elected on the ticket with Buchanan to the second office under the
Government, when he was but five and thirty years of age. There was
nothing for him to gain from a division of the Union; the Presidency,
perhaps, if the Union continued undivided. But he could not resist the
onrush of disunionism, went with the South, which he served first in
the field and later as Confederate Secretary of War, and after a few
years of self-imposed exile in Europe returned to Kentucky to die at
four and fifty, a defeated and disappointed old man.
The adjoining state of Tennessee was represented in the Senate by one
of the most problematic characters in American history. With my father,
who remained his friend through life, he had entered the state
legislature in 1835, and having served ten years in the lower House of
Congress, and four years as governor of Tennessee he came back in 1857
to the National Capital, a member of the Upper House. He was Andrew
Johnson.
I knew him from my childhood. Thrice that I can recall I saw him weep;
never did I see him laugh. Life had been very serious, albeit very
successful, to him. Of unknown parentage, the wife he had married
before he was one and twenty had taught him to read. Yet at six and
twenty he was in the Tennessee General Assembly and at four and thirty
in Congress.
There was from first to last not a little about him to baffle
conjecture. I should call him a cross between Jack Cade and Aaron Burr.
His sympathies were easily stirred by rags in distress. But he was
uncompromising in his detestation of the rich. It was said that he
hated “a biled shirt.” He would have nothing to do “with people who
wore broadcloth,” though he carefully dressed himself. When, as
governor of Tennessee, he came to Nashville he refused many invitations
to take his first New Year’s dinner with a party of toughs at the house
of a river roustabout.
There was nothing of the tough about him, however. His language was
careful and exact. I never heard him utter an oath or tell a risqué
story. He passed quite fifteen years in Washington, a total abstainer
from the use of intoxicants. He fell into the occasional-drink habit
during the dark days of the War. But after some costly experience he
dropped it and continued a total abstainer to the end of his days.
He had, indeed, admirable self-control. I do not believe a more
conscientious man ever lived. His judgments were sometimes peculiar,
but they were upright and sincere, having reasons, which he could give
with power and effect, behind them. Yet was he a born politician,
crafty to a degree, and always successful, relying upon a popular
following which never failed him.
In 1860 he supported the quasi-secession Breckenridge and Lane
Presidential ticket, but in 1861 he stood true to the Union, retaining
his seat in the Senate until he was appointed military governor of
Tennessee. Nominated for Vice President on the ticket with Lincoln, in
1864, he was elected, and upon the assassination of Lincoln succeeded
to the Presidency. Having served out his term as President he returned
to Tennessee to engage in the hottest kind of politics, and though at
the outset defeated finally regained his seat in the Senate of the
United States.
He hated Grant with a holy hate. His first act on reëntering the Senate
was to deliver an implacably bitter speech against the President. It
was his last public appearance. He went thence to his home in East
Tennessee, gratified and happy, to die in a few weeks.
VII
There used to be a story about Raleigh, in North Carolina, where Andrew
Johnson was born, which whispered that he was a natural son of William
Ruffin, an eminent jurist in the earlier years of the nineteenth
century. It was analogous to the story that Lincoln was the natural son
of various paternities from time to time assigned to him. I had my
share in running that calumny to cover. It was a lie out of whole cloth
with nothing whatever to support or excuse it. I reached the bottom of
it to discover proof of its baselessness abundant and conclusive. In
Johnson’s case I take it that the story had nothing other to rest on
than the obscurity of his birth and the quality of his talents. Late in
life Johnson went to Raleigh and caused to be erected a modest tablet
over the spot pointed out as the grave of his progenitor, saying, I was
told by persons claiming to have been present, “I place this stone over
the last earthly abode of my alleged father.”
Johnson, in the saying of the countryside, “out-married himself.” His
wife was a plain woman, but came of good family. One day, when a child,
so the legend ran, she saw passing through the Greenville street in
which her people lived, a woman, a boy and a cow, the boy carrying a
pack over his shoulder. They were obviously weary and hungry. Extreme
poverty could present no sadder picture. “Mother,” cried the girl,
“there goes the man I am going to marry.” She was thought to be in
jest. But a few years later she made her banter good and lived to see
her husband President of the United States and with him to occupy the
White House at Washington.
Much has been written of the humble birth and iron fortune of Abraham
Lincoln. He had no such obstacles to overcome as either Andrew Jackson
or Andrew Johnson. Jackson, a prisoner of war, was liberated, a lad of
sixteen, from the British pen at Charleston, without a relative, a
friend or a dollar in the world, having to make his way upward through
the most aristocratic community of the country and the time. Johnson,
equally friendless and penniless, started as a poor tailor in a rustic
village. Lincoln must therefore, take third place among our self-made
Presidents. The Hanks family were not paupers. He had a wise and
helpful stepmother. He was scarcely worse off than most young fellows
of his neighborhood, first in Indiana and then in Illinois. On this
side justice has never been rendered to Jackson and Johnson. In the
case of Jackson the circumstance was forgotten, while Johnson too often
dwelt upon it and made capital out of it.
Under date of the 23rd of May, 1919, the Hon. Josephus Daniels,
Secretary of the Navy, writes me the following letter, which I violate
no confidence in reproducing in this connection:
MY DEAR MARSE HENRY:—
I can’t tell you how much delight and pleasure your reminiscences in
the Saturday Evening Post have given me, as well as the many others who
have followed them, and I suppose you will put them in a volume when
they are finished, so that we may have the pleasure of reading them in
connected order.
As you know, I live in Raleigh and I was very much interested in your
article in the issue of April 5, 1919, with reference to Andrew
Johnson, in which you quote a story that “used to be current in
Raleigh, that he was the son of William Ruffin, an eminent jurist of
the ninetenth century.” I had never heard this story, but the story
that was gossiped there was that he was the son of a certain Senator
Haywood. I ran that story down and found that it had no foundation
whatever, because if he had been the son of the Senator reputed to be
his father, the Senator was of the age of twelve years when Andrew
Johnson was born.
My own information is, for I have made some investigation of it, that
the story about Andrew Johnson’s having a father other than the husband
of his mother, is as wanting in foundation as the story about Abraham
Lincoln. You did a great service in running that down and exposing it,
and I trust before you finish your book that you will make further
investigation and be able to do a like service in repudiating the
unjust, idle gossip with reference to Andrew Johnson. In your article
you say that persons who claim to have been present when Johnson came
to Raleigh and erected a monument over the grave of his father, declare
that Johnson said he placed this stone over the last earthly abode of
“my alleged father.” That is one phase of the gossip, and the other is
that he said “my reputed father,” both equally false.
The late Mr. Pulaski Cowper, who was private secretary to Governor
Bragg, of our State, just prior to the war, and who was afterwards
president of our leading life insurance company, a gentleman of high
character, and of the best memory, was present at the time that Johnson
made the address from which you quote the rumor. Mr. Cowper wrote an
article for The News and Observer, giving the story and relating that
Johnson said that “he was glad to come to Raleigh to erect a tablet to
his father.” The truth is that while his father was a man of little or
no education, he held the position of janitor at the State Capitol, and
he was not wanting in qualities which made him superior to his humble
position. If he had been living in this day he would have been given a
lifesaving medal, for upon the occasion of a picnic near Raleigh when
the cry came that children were drowning he was the first to leap in
and endanger his life to save them.
Andrew Johnson’s mother was related to the Chappell family, of which
there are a number of citizens of standing and character near Raleigh,
several of them having been ministers of the Gospel, and one at least
having gained distinction as a missionary in China.
I am writing you because I know that your story will be read and
accepted and I thought you would be glad to have this story, based upon
a study and investigation and personal knowledge of Mr. Cowper, whose
character and competency are well known in North Carolina.
Chapter the Seventh
An Old Newspaper Rookery—Reactionary Sectionalism in Cincinnati and
Louisville—_The Courier-Journal_
I
My dream of wealth through my commission on the Confederate cotton I
was to sell to English buyers was quickly shattered. The cotton was
burned and I found myself in the early spring of 1865 in the little
village of Glendale, a suburb of Cincinnati, where the future Justice
Stanley Matthews had his home. His wife was a younger sister of my
mother. My grandmother was still alive and lived with her daughter and
son-in-law.
I was received with open arms. A few days later the dear old lady said
to me: “I suppose, my son, you are rather a picked bird after your
adventures in the South. You certainly need better clothing. I have
some money in bank and it is freely yours.”
I knew that my Uncle Stanley had put her up to this, and out of sheer
curiosity I asked her how much she could let me have. She named what
seemed to me a stupendous sum. I thanked her, told her I had quite a
sufficiency for the time being, slipped into town and pawned my watch;
that is, as I made light of it afterward in order to escape the
humiliation of borrowing from an uncle whose politics I did not
approve, I went with my collateral to an uncle who had no politics at
all and got fifty dollars on it! Before the money was gone I had found,
through Judge Matthews, congenial work.
There was in Cincinnati but one afternoon newspaper—the Evening
Times—owned by Calvin W. Starbuck. He had been a practical printer but
was grown very rich. He received me kindly, said the editorial force
was quite full—must always be, on a daily newspaper—“but,” he added,
“my brother, Alexander Starbuck, who has been running the amusements,
wants to go a-fishing in Canada—to be gone a month—and, if you wish,
you can during his absence sub for him.”
It was just to my hand and liking. Before Alexander Starbuck returned
the leading editor of the paper fell from a ferryboat crossing the Ohio
River and was drowned. The next day General Starbuck sent for me and
offered me the vacant place.
“Why, general,” I said, “I am an outlawed man: I do not agree with your
politics. I do not see how I can undertake a place so conspicuous and
responsible.”
He replied: “I propose to engage you as an editorial manager. It is as
if building a house you should be head carpenter, I the architect. The
difference in salary will be seventy-five dollars a week against
fifteen dollars a week.”
I took the place.
II
The office of the Evening Times was a queer old curiosity shop. I set
to and turned it inside out. I had very pronounced journalistic notions
of my own and applied them in every department of the sleepy old
money-maker. One afternoon a week later I put forth a paper whose
oldest reader could not have recognized it. The next morning’s
Cincinnati Commercial contained a flock of paragraphs to which the
Chattanooga-Cincinnati-Rebel Evening Times furnished the keynote.
They made funny reading, but they threw a dangerous flare upon my
“past” and put me at a serious disadvantage. It happened that when
Artemus Ward had been in town a fortnight before he gave me a dinner
and had some of his friends to meet me. Among these was a young fellow
of the name of Halstead, who, I was told, was the coming man on the
Commercial.
Round to the Commercial office I sped, and being conducted to this
person, who received me very blandly, I said: “Mr. Halstead, I am a
journeyman day laborer in your city—the merest bird of passage, with my
watch at the pawnbroker’s. As soon as I am able to get out of town I
mean to go—and I came to ask if you can think the personal allusions to
me in to-day’s paper, which may lose me my job but can nowise hurt the
Times, are quite fair—even—since I am without defense—quite manly.”
He looked at me with that quizzical, serio-comic stare which so became
him, and with great heartiness replied: “No—they were damned
mean—though I did not realize how mean. The mark was so obvious and
tempting I could not resist, but—there shall be no more of them. Come,
let us go and have a drink.”
That was the beginning of a friendship which brought happiness to both
of us and lasted nearly half a century, to the hour of his death, when,
going from Louisville to Cincinnati, I helped to lay him away in Spring
Grove Cemetery.
I had no thought of remaining in Cincinnati. My objective was
Nashville, where the young woman who was to become my wife, and whom I
had not seen for nearly two years, was living with her family. During
the summer Mr. Francisco, the business manager of the Evening Times,
had a scheme to buy the Toledo Commercial, in conjunction with Mr.
Comly, of Columbus, and to engage me as editor conjointly with Mr.
Harrison Gray Otis as publisher. It looked very good. Toledo threatened
Cleveland and Detroit as a lake port. But nothing could divert me. As
soon as Parson Brownlow, who was governor of Tennessee and making
things lively for the returning rebels, would allow, I was going to
Nashville.
About the time the way was cleared my two pals, or bunkies, of the
Confederacy, Albert Roberts and George Purvis, friends from boyhood,
put in an appearance. They were on their way to the capital of
Tennessee. The father of Albert Roberts was chief owner of the
Republican Banner, an old and highly respectable newspaper, which had
for nearly four years lain in a state of suspension. Their plan now was
to revive its publication, Purvis to be business manager, and Albert
and I to be editors. We had no cash. Nobody on our side of the line had
any cash. But John Roberts owned a farm he could mortgage for money
enough to start us. What had I to say?
Less than a week later saw us back at home winnowing the town for
subscribers and advertising. We divided it into districts, each taking
a specified territory. The way we boys hustled was a sight to see. But
the way the community warmed to us was another. When the familiar
headline, The Republican Banner, made its appearance there was a
popular hallelujah, albeit there were five other dailies ahead of us. A
year later there was only one, and it was nowise a competitor.
Albert Roberts had left his girl, Edith Scott, the niece of Huxley,
whom I have before mentioned, in Montgomery, Alabama. Purvis’ girl,
Sophie Searcy, was in Selma. Their hope was to have enough money by
Christmas each to pay a visit to those distant places. My girl was on
the spot, and we had resolved, money or no money, to be married without
delay. Before New Year’s the three of us were wedded and comfortably
settled, with funds galore, for the paper had thrived consumingly. It
had thrived so consumingly that after a little I was able to achieve
the wish of my heart and to go to London, taking my wife and my “great
American novel” with me. I have related elsewhere what came of this and
what happened to me.
III
That bread cast upon the waters—“‘dough’ put out at usance,” as Joseph
Jefferson used to phrase it—shall return after many days has been I
dare say discovered by most persons who have perpetrated acts of
kindness, conscious or unconscious. There was a poor, broken-down
English actor with a passion for Chaucer, whom I was wont to encounter
in the Library of Congress. His voice was quite gone. Now and again I
had him join me in a square meal. Once in a while I paid his room rent.
I was loath to leave him when the break came in 1861, though he
declared he had “expectations,” and made sure he would not starve.
I was passing through Regent Street in London, when a smart brougham
drove up to the curb and a wheezy voice called after me. It was my old
friend, Newton. His “expectations” had not failed him, he had come into
a property and was living in affluence.
He knew London as only a Bohemian native and to the manner born could
know it. His sense of bygone obligation knew no bounds. Between him and
John Mahoney and Artemus Ward I was made at home in what might be
called the mysteries and eccentricities of differing phases of life in
the British metropolis not commonly accessible to the foreign casual.
In many after visits this familiar knowledge has served me well. But
Newton did not live to know of some good fortune that came to me and to
feel my gratitude to him, as dear old John Mahoney did. When I was next
in London he was gone.
It was not, however, the actor, Newton, whom I had in mind in offering
a bread-upon-the-water moral, but a certain John Hatcher, the memory of
whom in my case illustrates it much better. He was a wit and a poet. He
had been State Librarian of Tennessee. Nothing could keep him out of
the service, though he was a sad cripple and wholly unequal to its
requirements. He fell ill. I had the opportunity to care for him. When
the war was over his old friend, George D. Prentice, called him to
Louisville to take an editorial place on the Journal.
About the same time Mr. Walter Haldeman returned from the South and
resumed the suspended publication of the Louisville Courier. He was in
the prime of life, a man of surpassing energy, enterprise and industry,
and had with him the popular sympathy. Mr. Prentice was nearly three
score and ten. The stream had passed him by. The Journal was not only
beginning to feel the strain but was losing ground. In this emergency
Hatcher came to the rescue. I was just back from London and was doing
noticeable work on the Nashville Banner.
“Here is your man,” said Hatcher to Mr. Prentice and Mr. Henderson, the
owners of the Journal; and I was invited to come to Louisville.
After I had looked over the field and inspected the Journal’s books I
was satisfied that a union with the Courier was the wisest solution of
the newspaper situation, and told them so. Meanwhile Mr. Haldeman, whom
I had known in the Confederacy, sent for me. He offered me the same
terms for part ownership and sole editorship of the Courier, which the
Journal people had offered me. This I could not accept, but proposed as
an alternative the consolidation of the two on an equal basis. He was
willing enough for the consolidation, but not on equal terms. There was
nothing for it but a fight. I took the Journal and began to hammer the
Courier.
A dead summer was before us, but Mr. Henderson had plenty of money and
was willing to spend it. During the contest not an unkind word was
printed on either side. After stripping the Journal to its heels it had
very little to go on or to show for what had once been a prosperous
business. But circulation flowed in. From eighteen hundred daily it
quickly mounted to ten thousand; from fifteen hundred weekly to fifty
thousand. The middle of October it looked as if we had a straight road
before us.
But I knew better. I had discovered that the field, no matter how
worked, was not big enough to support two rival dailies. There was
toward the last of October on the edge of town a real-estate sale which
Mr. Haldeman and I attended. Here was my chance for a play. I must have
bid up to a hundred thousand dollars and did actually buy nearly ten
thousand dollars of the lots put up at auction, relying upon some money
presently coming to my wife.
I could see that it made an impression on Mr. Haldeman. Returning in
the carriage which had brought us out I said: “Mr. Haldeman, I am going
to ruin you. But I am going to run up a money obligation to Isham
Henderson I shall never be able to discharge. You need an editor. I
need a publisher. Let us put these two newspapers together, buy the
Democrat, and, instead of cutting one another’s throats, go after
Cincinnati and St. Louis. You will recall that I proposed this to you
in the beginning. What is the matter with it now?”
Nothing was the matter with it. He agreed at once. The details were
soon adjusted. Ten days later there appeared upon the doorsteps of the
city in place of the three familiar visitors, a double-headed stranger,
calling itself the Courier-Journal. Our exclusive possession of the
field thus acquired lasted two years. At the end of these we found that
at least the appearance of competition was indispensable and willingly
accepted an offer from a proposed Republican organ for a division of
the Press dispatches which we controlled. Then and there the real
prosperity of the Courier-Journal began, the paper having made no money
out of its monopoly.
IV
Reconstruction, as it was called—ruin were a fitter name for it—had
just begun. The South was imprisoned, awaiting the executioner. The
Constitution of the United States hung in the balance. The Federal
Union faced the threat of sectional despotism. The spirit of the time
was martial law. The gospel of proscription ruled in Congress.
Radicalism, vitalized by the murder of Abraham Lincoln and inflamed by
the inadequate effort of Andrew Johnson to carry out the policies of
Lincoln, was in the saddle riding furiously toward a carpetbag Poland
and a negroized Ireland.
The Democratic Party, which, had it been stronger, might have
interposed, lay helpless. It, too, was crushed to earth. Even the
Border States, which had not been embraced by the military agencies and
federalized machinery erected over the Gulf States, were seriously
menaced. Never did newspaper enterprise set out under gloomier
auspices.
There was a party of reaction in Kentucky, claiming to be Democratic,
playing to the lead of the party of repression at the North. It refused
to admit that the head of the South was in the lion’s mouth and that
the first essential was to get it out. The Courier-Journal proposed to
stroke the mane, not twist the tail of the lion. Thus it stood between
two fires. There arose a not unnatural distrust of the journalistic
monopoly created by the consolidation of the three former dailies into
a single newspaper, carrying an unfamiliar hyphenated headline.
Touching its policy of sectional conciliation it picked its way
perilously through the cross currents of public opinion. There was
scarcely a sinister purpose that was not alleged against it by its
enemies; scarcely a hostile device that was not undertaken to put it
down and drive it out.
Its constituency represented an unknown quantity. In any event it had
to be created. Meanwhile, it must rely upon its own resources,
sustained by the courage of the venture, by the integrity of its
convictions and aims, and by faith in the future of the city, the state
and the country.
Still, to be precise, it was the morning of Sunday, November 8,1868.
The night before the good people of Louisville had gone to bed
expecting nothing unusual to happen. They awoke to encounter an
uninvited guest arrived a little before the dawn. No hint of its coming
had got abroad; and thus the surprise was the greater. Truth to say, it
was not a pleased surprise, because, as it flared before the eye of the
startled citizen in big Gothic letters, The Courier-Journal, there
issued thence an aggressive self-confidence which affronted the _amour
propre_ of the sleepy villagers. They were used to a very different
style of newspaper approach.
Nor was the absence of a timorous demeanor its only offense. The
Courier had its partisans, the Journal and the Democrat had their
friends. The trio stood as ancient landmarks, as recognized and
familiar institutions. Here was a double-headed monster which, without
saying “by your leave” or “blast your eyes” or any other politeness,
had taken possession of each man’s doorstep, looking very like it had
brought its knitting and was come to stay.
The Journal established by Mr. Prentice, the Courier by Mr. Haldeman
and the Democrat by Mr. Harney, had been according to the standards of
those days successful newspapers. But the War of Sections had made many
changes. At its close new conditions appeared on every side. A
revolution had come into the business and the spirit of American
journalism.
In Louisville three daily newspapers had for a generation struggled for
the right of way. Yet Louisville was a city of the tenth or twelfth
class, having hardly enough patronage to sustain one daily newspaper of
the first or second class. The idea of consolidating the three thus
contending to divide a patronage so insufficient, naturally suggested
itself during the years immediately succeeding the war. But it did not
take definite shape until 1868.
Mr. Haldeman had returned from a somewhat picturesque and not
altogether profitable pursuit of his “rights in the territories” and
had resumed the suspended publication of the Courier with encouraging
prospects. I had succeeded Mr. Prentice in the editorship and part
ownership of the Journal. Both Mr. Haldeman and I were newspaper men to
the manner born and bred; old and good friends; and after our rivalry
of six months maintained with activity on both sides, but without the
publication of an unkind word on either, a union of forces seemed
exigent. To practical men the need of this was not a debatable
question. All that was required was an adjustment of the details.
Beginning with the simple project of joining the Courier and the
Journal, it ended by the purchase of the Democrat, which it did not
seem safe to leave outside.
V
The political conditions in Kentucky were anomalous. The Republican
Party had not yet definitely taken root. Many of the rich old Whigs,
who had held to the Government—to save their slaves—resenting Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation, had turned Democrats. Most of the
before-the-war Democrats had gone with the Confederacy. The party in
power called itself Democratic, but was in fact a body of reactionary
nondescripts claiming to be Unionists and clinging, or pretending to
cling, to the hard-and-fast prejudices of other days.
The situation may be the better understood when I add that “negro
testimony”—the introduction to the courts of law of the newly made
freedmen as witnesses—barred by the state constitution, was the burning
issue. A murder committed in the presence of a thousand negroes could
not be lawfully proved in court. Everything from a toothbrush to a cake
of soap might be cited before a jury, but not a human being if his skin
happened to be black.
[Illustration: Mr. Watterson’s Editorial Staff in 1868 When the Three
Daily Newspapers of Louisville Were United into the _Courier-Journal_.
Mr. George D. Prentice and Mr. Watterson Are in the Center]
To my mind this was monstrous. From my cradle I had detested slavery.
The North will never know how many people at the South did so. I could
not go with the Republican Party, however, because after the death of
Abraham Lincoln it had intrenched itself in the proscription of
Southern men. The attempt to form a third party had shown no strength
and had broken down. There was nothing for me, and the Confederates who
were with me, but the ancient label of a Democracy worn by a riffraff
of opportunists, Jeffersonian principles having quite gone to seed. But
I proposed to lead and reform it, not to follow and fall in behind the
selfish and short-sighted time servers who thought the people had
learned nothing and forgot nothing; and instant upon finding myself in
the saddle I sought to ride down the mass of ignorance which was at
least for the time being mainly what I had to look to for a
constituency.
Mr. Prentice, who knew the lay of the ground better than I did, advised
against it. The personal risk counted for something. Very early in the
action I made a direct fighting issue, which—the combat
interdicted—gave me the opportunity to declare—with something of the
bully in the tone—that I might not be able to hit a barn door at ten
paces, but could shoot with any man in Kentucky across a pocket
handkerchief, holding myself at all times answerable and accessible. I
had a fairly good fighting record in the army and it was not doubted
that I meant what I said.
But it proved a bitter, hard, uphill struggle, for a long while against
odds, before negro testimony was carried. A generation of politicians
were sent to the rear. Finally, in 1876, a Democratic State Convention
put its mark upon me as a Democrat by appointing me a Delegate at large
to the National Democratic Convention of that year called to meet at
St. Louis to put a Presidential ticket in the field.
The Courier-Journal having come to represent all three of the English
dailies of the city the public began to rebel. It could not see that
instead of three newspapers of the third or fourth class Louisville was
given one newspaper of the first class; that instead of dividing the
local patronage in three inadequate portions, wasted upon a triple
competition, this patronage was combined, enabling the one newspaper to
engage in a more equal competition with the newspapers of such rival
and larger cities as Cincinnati and St. Louis; and that one of the
contracting parties needing an editor, the other a publisher, in coming
together the two were able to put their trained faculties to the best
account.
Nevertheless, during thirty-five years Mr. Haldeman and I labored side
by side, not the least difference having arisen between us. The attacks
to which we were subjected from time to time drew us together the
closer. These attacks were sometimes irritating and sometimes comical,
but they had one characteristic feature: Each started out apparently
under a high state of excitement. Each seemed to have some profound
cause of grief, to be animated by implacable hate and to aim at nothing
short of annihilation. Frequently the assailants would lie in wait to
see how the Courier-Journal’s cat was going to jump, in order that they
might take the other side; and invariably, even if the Courier-Journal
stood for the reforms they affected to stand for, they began a system
of misrepresentation and abuse. In no instance did they attain any
success.
Only once, during the Free Silver craze of 1896, and the dark and
tragic days that followed it the three or four succeeding years, the
paper having stood, as it had stood during the Greenback craze, for
sound money, was the property in danger. It cost more of labor and
patience to save it from destruction than it had cost to create it
thirty years before. Happily Mr. Haldeman lived to see the rescue
complete, the tide turned and the future safe.
VI
A newspaper, like a woman, must not only be honest, but must seem to be
honest; acts of levity, loose unbecoming expressions or behavior—though
never so innocent—tending in the one and in the other to lower
reputation and discredit character. During my career I have proceeded
under a confident belief in this principle of newspaper ethics and an
unfailing recognition of its mandates. I truly believe that next after
business integrity in newspaper management comes disinterestedness in
the public service, and next after disinterestedness come moderation
and intelligence, cleanliness and good feeling, in dealing with affairs
and its readers.
From that blessed Sunday morning, November 8, 1868, to this good day, I
have known no other life and had no other aim. Those were indeed
parlous times. It was an era of transition. Upon the field of battle,
after four years of deadly but unequal combat, the North had vanquished
the South. The victor stood like a giant, with blood aflame, eyes
dilate and hands uplifted again to strike. The victim lay prostrate.
Save self-respect and manhood all was lost. Clasping its memories to
its bosom the South sank helpless amid the wreck of its fortunes,
whilst the North, the benign influence of the great Lincoln withdrawn,
proceeded to decide its fate. To this ghastly end had come slavery and
secession, and all the pomp, pride and circumstance of the Confederacy.
To this bitter end had come the soldiership of Lee and Jackson and
Johnston and the myriads of brave men who followed them.
The single Constitutional barrier that had stood between the people of
the stricken section and political extinction was about to be removed
by the exit of Andrew Johnson from the White House. In his place a man
of blood and iron—for such was the estimate at that time placed upon
Grant—had been elected President. The Republicans in Congress, checked
for a time by Johnson, were at length to have entire sway under
Thaddeus Stevens. Reconstruction was to be thorough and merciless. To
meet these conditions was the first requirement of the Courier-Journal,
a newspaper conducted by outlawed rebels and published on the sectional
border line. The task was not an easy one.
There is never a cause so weak that it does not stir into ill-timed
activity some wild, unpractical zealots who imagine it strong. There is
never a cause so just but that the malevolent and the mercenary will
seek to trade upon it. The South was helpless; the one thing needful
was to get it on its feet, and though the bravest and the wisest saw
this plainly enough there came to the front—particularly in Kentucky—a
small but noisy body of politicians who had only worked themselves into
a state of war when it was too late, and who with more or less of
aggression, insisted that “the states lately in rebellion” still had
rights, which they were able to maintain and which the North could be
forced to respect.
I was of a different opinion. It seemed to me that whatever of right
might exist the South was at the mercy of the North; that the radical
party led by Stevens and Wade dominated the North and could dictate its
own terms; and that the shortest way round lay in that course which was
best calculated to disarm radicalism by an intelligent appeal to the
business interests and conservative elements of Northern society,
supported by a domestic policy of justice alike to whites and blacks.
Though the institution of African slavery was gone the negro continued
the subject of savage contention. I urged that he be taken out of the
arena of agitation, and my way of taking him out was to concede him his
legal and civil rights. The lately ratified Constitutional Amendments,
I contended, were the real Treaty of Peace between the North and South.
The recognition of these Amendments in good faith by the white people
of the South was indispensable to that perfect peace which was desired
by the best people of both sections. The political emancipation of the
blacks was essential to the moral emancipation of the whites. With the
disappearance of the negro question as cause of agitation, I argued,
radicalism of the intense, proscriptive sort would die out; the
liberty-loving, patriotic people of the North would assert themselves;
and, this one obstacle to a better understanding removed, the
restoration of Constitutional Government would follow, being a matter
of momentous concern to the body of the people both North and South.
Such a policy of conciliation suited the Southern extremists as little
as it suited the Northern extremists. It took from the politicians
their best card. South no less than North, “the bloody shirt” was
trumps. It could always be played. It was easy to play it and it never
failed to catch the unthinking and to arouse the excitable. What cared
the perennial candidate so he got votes enough? What cared the
professional agitator so his appeals to passion brought him his
audience?
It is a fact that until Lamar delivered his eulogy on Sumner not a
Southern man of prominence used language calculated to placate the
North, and between Lamar and Grady there was an interval of fifteen
years. There was not a Democratic press worthy the name either North or
South. During those evil days the Courier-Journal stood alone, having
no party or organized following. At length it was joined on the
Northern side by Greeley. Then Schurz raised his mighty voice. Then
came the great liberal movement of 1871-72, with its brilliant but
ill-starred campaign and its tragic finale; and then there set in what,
for a season, seemed the deluge.
But the cause of Constitutional Government was not dead. It had been
merely dormant. Champions began to appear in unexpected quarters. New
men spoke up, North and South. In spite of the Republican landslide of
1872, in 1874 the Democrats swept the Empire State. They carried the
popular branch of Congress by an overwhelming majority. In the Senate
they had a respectable minority, with Thurman and Bayard to lead it. In
the House Randall and Kerr and Cox, Lamar, Beck and Knott were about to
be reënforced by Hill and Tucker and Mills and Gibson. The logic of
events was at length subduing the rodomontade of soap-box oratory.
Empty rant was to yield to reason. For all its mischances and
melancholy ending the Greeley campaign had shortened the distance
across the bloody chasm.
Chapter the Eighth
Feminism and Woman Suffrage—The Adventures in Politics and Society—A
Real Heroine
I
It would not be the writer of this narrative if he did not interject
certain opinions of his own which parties and politicians, even his
newspaper colleagues, have been wont to regard as peculiar. By common
repute he has been an all-round old-line Democrat of the regulation
sort. Yet on the three leading national questions of the last fifty
years—the Negro question, the Greenback question and the Free Silver
question—he has challenged and antagonized the general direction of
that party. He takes some pride to himself that in each instance the
result vindicated alike his forecast and his insubordination.
To one who witnessed the break-up of the Whig party in 1853 and of the
Democratic Party in 1860 the plight in which parties find themselves at
this time may be described as at least, suggestive. The feeling is at
once to laugh and to whistle. Too much “fuss and feathers” in Winfield
Scott did the business for the Whigs. Too much “bearded lady” in
Charles Evans Hughes perhaps cooked the goose of the Republicans. Too
much Wilson—but let me not fall into _lèse majesté_. The Whigs went
into Know-Nothingism and Free Soilism. Will the Democrats go into
Prohibition and paternalism? And the Republicans—
The old sectional alignment of North and South has been changed to East
and West.
For the time being the politicians of both parties are in something of
a funk. It is the nature of parties thus situate to fancy that there is
no hereafter, riding in their dire confusion headlong for a fall.
Little other than the labels being left, nobody can tell what will
happen to either.
Progressivism seems the cant of the indifferent. Accentuated by the
indecisive vote in the elections and heralded by an ambitious President
who writes Humanity bigger than he writes the United States, and is
accused of aspiring to world leadership, democracy unterrified and
undefiled—the democracy of Jefferson, Jackson and Tilden ancient
history—has become a back number. Yet our officials still swear to a
Constitution. We have not eliminated state lines. State rights are not
wholly dead.
The fight between capital and labor is on. No one can predict where it
will end. Shall it prove another irrepressible conflict? Are its issues
irreconcilable? Must the alternative of the future lie between
Socialism and Civil War, or both? Progress! Progress! Shall there be no
stability in either actualities or principles? And—and—what about the
Bolsheviki?
II
Parties, like men, have their ups and downs. Like machines they get out
of whack and line. First it was the Federalists, then the Whigs, and
then the Democrats. Then came the Republicans. And then, after a long
interruption, the Democrats again. English political experience repeats
itself in America.
A taking label is as valuable to a party as it is to a nostrum. It
becomes in time an asset. We are told that a fool is born every minute,
and, the average man being something of a fool, the label easily
catches him. Hence the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
The old Whig Party went to pieces on the rocks of sectionalism. The
institution of African slavery arrived upon the scene at length as the
paramount political issue. The North, which brought the Africans here
in its ships, finding slave labor unprofitable, sold its slaves to the
South at a good price, and turned pious. The South took the bait and
went crazy.
Finally, we had a pretty kettle of fish. Just as the Prohibitionists
are going to convert mortals into angels overnight by act of
assembly—or still better, by Constitutional amendment—were the
short-haired women and the long-haired men of Boston going to make a
white man out of the black man by Abolition. The Southern Whigs could
not see it and would not stand for it. So they fell in behind the
Democrats. The Northern Whigs, having nowhere else to go, joined the
Republicans.
The wise men of both sections saw danger ahead. The North was warned
that the South would fight, the South, that if it did it went against
incredible odds. Neither would take the warning. Party spirit ran wild.
Extremism had its fling. Thus a long, bloody and costly War of
Sections—a fraternal war if ever there was one—brought on by
alternating intolerance, the politicians of both sides gambling upon
the credulity and ignorance of the people.
Hindsight is readier, certainly surer, than foresight. It comes easier
an
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