Marse Henry, Complete
by
Henry Watterson

Part 1 out of 4







Produced by Curtis A. Weyant, David Widger
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team




[Illustration: Henry Watterson (About 1908)]


"Marse Henry"

An Autobiography

By

Henry Watterson




TO MY FRIEND
ALEXANDER KONTA
WITH AFFECTIONATE SALUTATION

"Mansfield,"
1919


A mound of earth a little higher graded:
Perhaps upon a stone a chiselled name:
A dab of printer's ink soon blurred and faded--
And then oblivion--that--that is fame!

--HENRY WATTERSON




Contents



Chapter the First

I Am Born and Begin to Take Notice--John Quincy Adams and Andrew
Jackson--James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce--Jack Dade and "Beau
Hickman"--Old Times in Washington

Chapter the Second

Slavery the Trouble-Maker--Break-Up of the Whig Party and Rise of the
Republican--The Key--Sickle's Tragedy--Brooks and Sumner--Life at
Washington in the Fifties

Chapter the Third

The Inauguration of Lincoln--I Quit Washington and Return to
Tennessee--A Run-a-bout with Forest--Through the Federal Lines and a
Dangerous Adventure--Good Luck at Memphis

Chapter the Fourth

I Go to London--Am Introduced to a Notable Set--Huxley, Spencer, Mill
and Tyndall--Artemus Ward Comes to Town--The Savage Club

Chapter the Fifth

Mark Twain--The Original of Colonel Mulberry Sellers--The "Earl of
Durham"--Some Noctes Ambrosianae--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 Doellinger, 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 couarge. 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 altogethr 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
Washnigton 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 regle_; 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 proprly describe them--Jack Dade, who signed himself "the
Honorable John W. Dade, of Virginia;" and Beau Hickman, who hailed from
nowhere and acquired the pseudonym through sheer impudence. In one way and
another they lived by their wits, the one all dignity, the other all cheek.
Hickman fell very early in his career of sponge and beggar, but Dade lived
long and died in office--indeed, toward the close an office was actually
created for him.

Dade had been a schoolmate of John Tyler--so intimate they were that at
college they were called "the two Jacks"--and when the death of Harrison
made Tyler President, the "off Jack," as he dubbed himself, went up to the
White House and said: "Jack Tyler, you've had luck and I haven't. You must
do something for me and do it quick. I'm hard up and I want an office."

"You old reprobate," said Tyler, "what office on earth do you think you are
fit to fill?"

"Well," said Dade, "I have heard them talking round here of a place they
call a sine-cu-ree--big pay and no work--and if there is one of them left
and lying about loose I think I could fill it to a T."

"All right," said the President good naturedly, "I'll see what can be done.
Come up to-morrow."

The next day "Col. John W. Dade, of Virginia," was appointed keeper of
the Federal prison of the District of Columbia. He assumed his post with
_empressement_, called the prisoners before him and made them an
address.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said he; "I have been chosen by my friend, the
President of the United States, as superintendent of this eleemosynary
institution. It is my intention to treat you all as a Virginia gentleman
should treat a body of American ladies and gentlemen gathered here from all
parts of our beloved Union, and I shall expect the same consideration
in return. Otherwise I will turn you all out upon the cold mercies of a
heartless world and you will have to work for your living."

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

Presently McConnell arrived. It was his custom when he entered a saloon to
ask the entire roomful, no matter how many, "to come up and licker," and,
of course, he invited the solitary stranger.

When the glasses were filled Dade pompously said: "With whom have I the
honor of drinking?"

"My name," answered McConnell, "is Felix Grundy McConnell, begad! I am a
member of Congress from Alabama. My mother is a justice of the peace, my
aunt keeps a livery stable, and my grandmother commanded a company in the
Revolution and fit the British, gol darn their souls!"

Dade pushed his glass aside.

"Sir," said he, "I am a man of high aspirations and peregrinations and can
have nothing to do with such low-down scopangers as yourself. Good morning,
sir!"

It may be presumed that both spoke in jest, because they became inseparable
companions and the best of friends.

McConnell had a tragic ending. In James K. Polk's diary I find two entries
under the dates, respectively, of September 8 and September 10, 1846. The
first of these reads as follows: "Hon. Felix G. McConnell, a representative
in Congress from Alabama called. He looked very badly and as though he had
just recovered from a fit of intoxication. He was sober, but was pale, his
countenance haggard and his system nervous. He applied to me to borrow one
hundred dollars and said he would return it to me in ten days.

"Though I had no idea that he would do so I had a sympathy for him even in
his dissipation. I had known him in his youth and had not the moral courage
to refuse. I gave him the one hundred dollars in gold and took his note.
His hand was so tremulous that he could scarcely write his name to the note
legibly. I think it probable that he will never pay me. He informed me he
was detained at Washington attending to some business in the Indian Office.
I supposed he had returned home at the adjournment of Congress until he
called to-day. I doubt whether he has any business in Washington, but fear
he has been detained by dissipation."

The second of Mr. Polk's entries is a corollary of the first and reads:
"About dark this evening I learned from Mr. Voorhies, who is acting as my
private secretary during the absence of J. Knox Walker, that Hon. Felix
G. McConnell, a representative in Congress from the state of Alabama,
had committed suicide this afternoon at the St. Charles Hotel, where he
boarded. On Tuesday last Mr. McConnell called on me and I loaned him one
hundred dollars. [See this diary of that day.] I learn that but a short
time before the horrid deed was committed he was in the barroom of the St.
Charles Hotel handling gold pieces and stating that he had received them
from me, and that he loaned thirty-five dollars of them to the barkeeper,
that shortly afterward he had attempted to write something, but what I have
not learned, but he had not written much when he said he would go to his
room.

"In the course of the morning I learn he went into the city and paid a
hackman a small amount which he owed him. He had locked his room door,
and when found he was stretched out on his back with his hands extended,
weltering in his blood. He had three wounds in the abdomen and his throat
was cut. A hawkbill knife was found near him. A jury of inquest was held
and found a verdict that he had destroyed himself. It was a melancholy
instance of the effects of intemperance. Mr. McConnell when a youth resided
at Fayetteville in my congressional district. Shortly after he grew up to
manhood he was at my instance appointed postmaster of that town. He was a
true Democrat and a sincere friend of mine.

"His family in Tennessee are highly respectable and quite numerous. The
information as to the manner and particulars of his death I learned from
Mr. Voorhies, who reported it to me as he had heard it in the streets. Mr.
McConnell removed from Tennessee to Alabama some years ago, and I learn he
has left a wife and three or four children."

Poor Felix Grundy McConnell! At a school in Tennessee he was a roommate of
my father, who related that one night Felix awakened with a scream from a
bad dream he had, the dream being that he had cut his own throat.

"Old Jack Dade," as he was always called, lived on, from hand to mouth, I
dare say--for he lost his job as keeper of the district prison--yet never
wholly out-at-heel, scrupulously neat in his person no matter how seedy the
attire. On the completion of the new wings of the Capitol and the removal
of the House to its more commodious quarters he was made custodian of the
old Hall of Representatives, a post he held until he died.



VIII


Between the idiot and the man of sense, the lunatic and the man of genius,
there are degrees--streaks--of idiocy and lunacy. How many expectant
politicians elected to Congress have entered Washington all hope, eager to
dare and do, to come away broken in health, fame and fortune, happy to get
back home--sometimes unable to get away, to linger on in obscurity and
poverty to a squalid and wretched old age.

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

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

The great man listened and replied: "I have noticed you scattering your
means round here pretty freely but you haven't said 'turkey' to me."

Surprised but glad and unabashed the claimant said "I was coming to that,"
produced a thousand-dollar bank roll and entered into an understanding as
to what was to be done next day, when the bill was due on the calendar.

The great man took the money, repaired to a gambling house, had an
extraordinary run of luck, won heavily, and playing all night, forgetting
about his engagement, went to bed at daylight, not appearing in the House
at all. The bill was called, and there being nobody to represent it, under
the rule it went over and to the bottom of the calendar, killed for that
session at least.

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

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

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

Another memory of those days has to do with music. This was the coming of
Jenny Lind to America. It seemed an event. When she reached Washington Mr.
Barnum asked at the office of my father's newspaper for a smart lad to sell
the programs of the concert--a new thing in artistic showmanry. "I don't
want a paper carrier, or a newsboy," said he, "but a young gentleman, three
or four young gentlemen." I was sent to him. We readily agreed upon the
commission to be received--five cents on each twenty-five cent program--the
oldest of old men do not forget such transactions. But, as an extra
percentage for "organizing the force," I demanded a concert seat. Choice
seats were going at a fabulous figure and Barnum at first demurred. But
I told him I was a musical student, stood my ground, and, perhaps seeing
something unusual in the eager spirit of a little boy, he gave in and the
bargain was struck.

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

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

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

One of my earliest yearnings was for a home. I cannot recall the time when
I was not sick and tired of our migrations between Washington City and the
two grand-paternal homesteads in Tennessee. The travel counted for much of
my aversion to the nomadic life we led. The stage-coach is happier in the
contemplation than in the actuality. Even when the railways arrived there
were no sleeping cars, the time of transit three or four days and nights.
In the earlier journeys it had been ten or twelve days.




Chapter the Second

Slavery the Trouble-Maker--Break-Up of the Whig Party and Rise of the
Republican--The Key--Sickle's Tragedy--Brooks and Sumner--Life at
Washington in the Fifties



I


Whether the War of Sections--as it should be called, because, except in
Eastern Tennessee and in three of the Border States, Maryland, Kentucky
and Missouri, it was nowise a civil war--could have been averted must ever
remain a question of useless speculation. In recognizing the institution of
African slavery, with no provision for its ultimate removal, the Federal
Union set out embodying the seeds of certain trouble. The wiser heads of
the Constitutional Convention perceived this plainly enough; its dissonance
to the logic of their movement; on the sentimental side its repugnancy; on
the practical side its doubtful economy; and but for the tobacco growers
and the cotton planters it had gone by the board. The North soon found
slave labor unprofitable and rid itself of slavery. Thus, restricted to the
South, it came to represent in the Southern mind a "right" which the South
was bound to defend.

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

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

Thus do imaginings become theories, and theories resolve themselves
into claims; and interests, however mistaken, rise to the dignity of
prerogatives.



II


The fathers had rather a hazy view of the future. I was witness to the
decline and fall of the old Whig Party and the rise of the Republican
Party. There was a brief lull in sectional excitement after the Compromise
Measures of 1850, but the overwhelming defeat of the Whigs in 1852 and the
dominancy of Mr. Jefferson Davis in the cabinet of Mr. Pierce brought the
agitation back again. Mr. Davis was a follower of Mr. Calhoun--though it
may be doubted whether Mr. Calhoun would ever have been willing to go to
the length of secession--and Mr. Pierce being by temperament a Southerner
as well as in opinions a pro-slavery Democrat, his Administration
fell under the spell of the ultra Southern wing of the party. The
Kansas-Nebraska Bill was originaly harmless enough, but the repeal of the
Missouri Compromise, which on Mr. Davis' insistence was made a part of it,
let slip the dogs of war.

In Stephen A. Douglas was found an able and pliant instrument. Like Clay,
Webster and Calhoun before him, Judge Douglas had the presidential bee in
his bonnet. He thought the South would, as it could, nominate and elect him
President.

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

"I like Douglas and am for him," said Buck Stone, a member of Congress and
delegate to the National Democratic Convention from Kentucky, "though
I consider him a good deal of a damn fool." Pressed for a reason he
continued; "Why, think of a man wanting to be President at forty years of
age, and obliged to behave himself for the rest of his life! I wouldn't
take the job on any such terms."

The proposed repeal of the Missouri Compromise opened up the slavery debate
anew and gave it increased vitality. Hell literally broke loose among the
political elements. The issues which had divided Whigs and Democrats went
to the rear, while this one paramount issue took possession of the stage.
It was welcomed by the extremists of both sections, a very godsend to the
beaten politicians led by Mr. Seward. Rampant sectionalism was at first
kept a little in the background. There were on either side concealments and
reserves. Many patriotic men put the Union above slavery or antislavery.
But the two sets of rival extremists had their will at last, and in seven
short years deepened and embittered the contention to the degree that
disunion and war seemed, certainly proved, the only way out of it.

The extravagance of the debates of those years amazes the modern reader.
Occasionally when I have occasion to recur to them I am myself nonplussed,
for they did not sound so terrible at the time. My father was a leader
of the Union wing of the Democratic Party--headed in 1860 the Douglas
presidential ticket in Tennessee--and remained a Unionist during the War of
Sections. He broke away from Pierce and retired from the editorship of the
Washiongton Union upon the issue of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise,
to which he was opposed, refusing the appointment of Governor of Oregon,
with which the President sought to placate him, though it meant his return
to the Senate of the United States in a year or two, when he and Oregon's
delegate in Congress, Gen. Joseph Lane--the Lane of the Breckenridge and
Lane ticket of 1860--had brought the territory of Oregon in as a state.

I have often thought just where I would have come in and what might have
happened to me if he had accepted the appointment and I had grown
to manhood on the Pacific Coast. As it was I attended a school in
Philadelphia--the Protestant Episcopal Academy--came home to Tennessee
in 1856, and after a season with private tutors found myself back in the
national capital in 1858.

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



III


I take it that the early steps of every man to get a footing may be of
interest when fairly told. I sought work in New York with indifferent
success. Mr. Raymond of the Times, hearing me play the piano at which from
childhood I had received careful instruction, gave me a job as "musical
critic" during the absence of Mr. Seymour, the regular critic. I must have
done my work acceptably, since I was not fired. It included a report of the
debut of my boy-and-girl companion, Adelina Patti, when she made her first
appearance in opera at the Academy of Music. But, as the saying is, I did
not "catch on." There might be a more promising opening in Washington, and
thither I repaired.

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

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

Back of Colonel Mann as a leader writer on the States was a remarkable
woman. She was Mrs. Jane Casneau, the wife of Gen. George Casneau, of
Texas, who had a claim before Congress. Though she was unknown to fame,
Thomas A. Benton used to say that she had more to do with making and ending
the Mexican War than anybody else.

Somewhere in the early thirties she had gone with her newly wedded husband,
an adventurous Yankee by the name of Storm, to the Rio Grande and started
a settlement they called Eagle Pass. Storm died, the Texas outbreak began,
and the young widow was driven back to San Antonio, where she met and
married Casneau, one of Houston's lieutenants, like herself a New Yorker.
She was sent by Polk with Pillow and Trist to the City of Mexico and
actually wrote the final treaty. It was she who dubbed William Walker
"the little gray-eyed man of destiny," and put the nickname "Old Fuss and
Feathers" on General Scott, whom she heartily disliked.

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

A braver, more intellectual woman never lived. She must have been a beauty
in her youth; was still very comely at fifty; but a born insurrecto and
a terror with her pen. God made and equipped her for a filibuster. She
possessed infinite knowledge of Spanish-American affairs, looked like a
Spanish woman, and wrote and spoke the Spanish language fluently. Her
obsession was the bringing of Central America into the Federal Union. But
she was not without literary aspirations and had some literary friends.
Among these was Mrs. Southworth, the novelist, who had a lovely home in
Georgetown, and, whatever may be said of her works and articles, was a
lovely woman. She used to take me to visit this lady. With Major Heiss she
divided my newspaper education, her part of it being the writing part.
Whatever I may have attained in that line I largely owe to her. She took
great pains with me and mothered me in the absence of my own mother, who
had long been her very dear friend. To get rid of her, or rather her pen,
Mr. Buchanan gave General Casneau, when the Douglas schism was breaking
out, a Central American mission, and she and he were lost by shipwreck on
their way to this post, somewhere in Caribbean waters.

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

Between John Savage and Mrs. Casneau I had the constant spur of
commendation and assistance as well as affection. I passed all my spare
time in the Library of Congress and knew its arrangements at least as well
as Mr. Meehan, the librarian, and Robert Kearon, the assistant, much to the
surprise of Mr. Spofford, who in 1861 succeeded Mr. Meehan as librarian.

Not long after my return to Washington Col. John W. Forney picked me up,
and I was employed in addition to my not very arduous duties on the States
to write occasional letters from Washington to the Philadelphia Press.
Good fortune like ill fortune rarely comes singly. Without anybody's
interposition I was appointed to a clerkship, a real "sinecure," in the
Interior Department by Jacob Thompson, the secretary, my father's old
colleague in Congress. When the troubles of 1860-61 rose I was literally
doing "a land-office business," with money galore and to spare. Somehow, I
don't know how, I contrived to spend it, though I had no vices, and worked
like a hired man upon my literary hopes and newspaper obligations.

Life in Washington under these conditions was delightful. I did not know
how my heart was wrapped up in it until I had to part from it. My father
stood high in public esteem. My mother was a leader in society. All doors
were open to me. I had many friends. Going back to Tennessee in the
midsummer of 1861, via Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, there happened a railway
break and a halt of several hours at a village on the Ohio. I strolled
down to the river and sat myself upon the brink, almost despairing--nigh
heartbroken--when I began to feel an irresistible fascination about the
swift-flowing stream. I leaped to my feet and ran away; and that is the
only thought of suicide that I can recall.



IV


Mrs. Clay, of Alabama, in her "Belle of the Fifties" has given a graphic
picture of life in the national capital during the administrations of
Pierce and Buchanan. The South was very much in the saddle. Pierce, as I
have said, was Southern in temperament, and Buchanan, who to those he did
not like or approve had, as Arnold Harris said, "a winning way of making
himself hateful," was an aristocrat under Southern and feminine influence.

I was fond of Mr. Pierce, but I could never endure Mr. Buchanan. His very
voice gave offense to me. Directed by a periodical publication to make a
sketch of him to accompany an engraving, I did my best on it.

Jacob Thompson, the Secretary of the Interior, said to me: "Now, Henry,
here's your chance for a foreign appointment."

I now know that my writing was clumsy enough and my attempt to play the
courtier clumsier still. Nevertheless, as a friend of my father and mother
"Old Buck" might have been a little more considerate than he was with a
lad trying to please and do him honor. I came away from the White House my
_amour propre_ wounded, and though I had not far to go went straight
into the Douglas camp.

Taking nearly sixty years to think it over I have reached the conclusion
that Mr. Buchanan was the victim of both personal and historic injustice.
With secession in sight his one aim was to get out of the White House
before the scrap began. He was of course on terms of intimacy with all the
secession leaders, especially Mr. Slidell, of Louisiana, like himself
a Northerner by birth, and Mr. Mason, a thick-skulled, ruffle-shirted
Virginian. It was not in him or in Mr. Pierce, with their antecedents and
associations, to be uncompromising Federalists. There was no clear law to
go on. Moderate men were in a muck of doubt just what to do. With Horace
Greeley Mr. Buchanan was ready to say "Let the erring sisters go." This
indeed was the extent of Mr. Pierce's pacifism during the War of Sections.

A new party risen upon the remains of the Whig Party--the Republican
Party--was at the door and coming into power. Lifelong pro-slavery
Democrats could not look on with equanimity, still less with complaisance,
and doubtless Pierce and Buchanan to the end of their days thought less
of the Republicans than of the Confederates. As a consequence Republican
writers have given quarter to neither of them.

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



V


In 1858 a wonderful affair came to pass. It was Mrs. Senator Gwin's fancy
dress ball, written of, talked of, far and wide. I did not get to attend
this. My costume was prepared--a Spanish cavalier, Mrs. Casneau's
doing--when I fell ill and had with bitter disappointment to read about
it next day in the papers. I was living at Willard's Hotel, and one of my
volunteer nurses was Mrs. Daniel E. Sickles, a pretty young thing who was
soon to become the victim of a murder and world scandal. Her husband was a
member of the House from New York, and during his frequent absences I used
to take her to dinner. Mr. Sickles had been Mr. Buchanan's Secretary of
Legation in London, and both she and he were at home in the White House.

She was an innocent child. She never knew what she was doing, and when a
year later Sickles, having killed her seducer--a handsome, unscrupulous
fellow who understood how to take advantage of a husband's neglect--forgave
her and brought her home in the face of much obloquy, in my heart of hearts
I did homage to his courage and generosity, for she was then as he and I
both knew a dying woman. She did die but a few months later. He was by no
means a politician after my fancy or approval, but to the end of his days I
was his friend and could never bring myself to join in the repeated public
outcries against him.

Early in the fifties Willard's Hotel became a kind of headquarters for the
two political extremes. During a long time their social intercourse
was unrestrained--often joyous. They were too far apart, figuratively
speaking, to come to blows. Truth to say, their aims were after all not
so far apart. They played to one another's lead. Many a time have I seen
Keitt, of South Carolina, and Burlingame, of Massachusetts, hobnob in the
liveliest manner and most public places.

It is certainly true that Brooks was not himself when he attacked Sumner.
The Northern radicals were wont to say, "Let the South go," the more
profane among them interjecting "to hell!" The Secessionists liked to prod
the New Englanders with what the South was going to do when they got to
Boston. None of them really meant it--not even Toombs when he talked about
calling the muster roll of his slaves beneath Bunker Hill Monument; nor
Hammond, the son of a New England schoolmaster, when he spoke of the
"mudsills of the North," meaning to illustrate what he was saying by the
underpinning of a house built on marshy ground, and not the Northern work
people.

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

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

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

The result was a most agreeable hour and an invitation to dinner. Not
long after this at the hospitable board of a Confederate general, then an
American senator, Toombs began to prod Lamar about his speech in the House
upon the occasion of the death of Charles Sumner. Lamar was not quick to
quarrel, though when aroused a man of devilish temper and courage. The
subject had become distasteful to him. He was growing obviously restive
under Toombs' banter. The ladies of the household apprehending what was
coming left the table.

Then Lamar broke forth. He put Toombs' visit to Grant, "crawling at the
seat of power," against his eulogy of a dead enemy. I have never heard
such a scoring from one man to another. It was magisterial in its dignity,
deadly in its diction. Nothing short of a duel could have settled it in the
olden time. But when Lamar, white with rage, had finished, Toombs without a
ruffle said, "Lamar, you surprise me," and the host, with the rest of
us, took it as a signal to rise from table and rejoin the ladies in the
drawing-room. Of course nothing came of it.

Toombs was as much a humorist as an extremist. I have ridden with him under
fire and heard him crack jokes with Minie 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 cortege 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


 


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