A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

Marse Henry (Vol. 1)

H >> Henry Watterson >> Marse Henry (Vol. 1)




"Why," he replied, "the case is as simple as A, B, C. Let me show you."

Then, with a pencil he traced the Second Bull Run battlefield, the location
of troops, both Federal and Confederate, and the exact passage in the
action which had compromised General Porter.

"If Porter had done what he was ordered to do," he went on, "Pope and his
army would have been annihilated. In point of fact Porter saved Pope's
Army." Then he paused and added: "I did not at the outset know this. I
was for a time of a different opinion and on the other side. It was
Longstreet's testimony--which had not been before the first Court of
Inquiry that convicted Porter--which vindicated him and convinced me."




Chapter the Tenth

Of Liars and Lying--Woman Suffrage and Feminism--The Professional
Female--Parties, Politics, and Politicians in America



I


All is fair in love and war, the saying hath it. "Lord!" cried the most
delightful of liars, "How this world is given to lying." Yea, and how
exigency quickens invention and promotes deceit.

Just after the war of sections I was riding in a train with Samuel Bowles,
who took a great interest in things Southern. He had been impressed by a
newspaper known as The Chattanooga Rebel and, as I had been its editor, put
innumerable questions to me about it and its affairs. Among these he asked
how great had been its circulation. Without explaining that often an entire
company, in some cases an entire regiment, subscribed for a few copies, or
a single copy, I answered: "I don't know precisely, but somewhere near a
hundred thousand, I take it." Then he said: "Where did you get your press
power?"

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

"You should tell that in your dinner speech tonight," he said. "If you tell
it as you have just told it to me, it will make a hit," and I did.

I give it as the opinion of a long life of experience and observation that
the newspaper press, whatever its delinquencies, is not a common liar, but
the most habitual of truth tellers. It is growing on its editorial page I
fear a little vapid and colorless. But there is a general and ever-present
purpose to print the facts and give the public the opportunity to reach its
own conclusions.

There are liars and liars, lying and lying. It is, with a single exception,
the most universal and venial of human frailties. We have at least three
kinds of lying and species, or types, of liars--first, the common,
ordinary, everyday liar, who lies without rime or reason, rule or compass,
aim, intent or interest, in whose mind the partition between truth and
falsehood has fallen down; then the sensational, imaginative liar, who has
a tale to tell; and, finally, the mean, malicious liar, who would injure
his neighbor.

This last is, indeed, but rare. Human nature is at its base amicable,
because if nothing hinders it wants to please. All of us, however, are more
or less its unconscious victims.

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

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



II


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

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

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

Thus he resembles the auctioneer. But it is the mock auctioneer whom he
resembles; his stock in trade being largely, if not altogether, fraudulent.
The success which at the outset of party welfare attended this legalized
confidence game drew into it more and more players. For a long time they
deceived themselves almost as much as the voters. They had not become
professional. They were amateur. Many of them played for sheer love of
the gamble. There were rules to regulate the play. But as time passed and
voters multiplied, the popular preoccupation increased the temptations and
opportunities for gain, inviting the enterprising, the skillful and the
corrupt to reconstitute patriotism into a commodity and to organize public
opinion into a bill of lading. Thus politics as a trade, parties as
trademarks, the politicians, like harlots, plying their vocation.

Now and again an able, honest and brave man, who aims at better things,
appears. In the event that fortune favors him and he attains high station,
he finds himself surrounded and thwarted by men less able and courageous,
who, however equal to discovering right from wrong, yet wear the party
collar, owe fealty to the party machine, are sometimes actual slaves of the
party boss. In the larger towns we hear of the City Hall ring; out in the
counties of the Court House ring. We rarely anywhere encounter clean,
responsible administration and pure, disinterested, public service.

The taxpayers are robbed before their eyes. The evil grows greater as we
near the centers of population. But there is scarcely a village or hamlet
where graft does not grow like weeds, the voters as gullible and helpless
as the infatuated victims of bunko tricks, ingeniously contrived by
professional crooks to separate the fool and his money. Is self-government
a failure?

None of us would allow the votaries of the divine right of kings to tell
us so, albeit we are ready enough to admit the imperfections of universal
suffrage, too often committing affairs of pith and moment, even of life and
death, to the arbitrament of the mob, and costing more in cash outlay than
royal establishments.

The quadrennial period in American politics, set apart and dedicated to
the election of presidents, magnifies these evil features in an otherwise
admirable system of government. That the whipper-snappers of the vicinage
should indulge their propensities comes as the order of their nature.
But the party leaders are not far behind them. Each side construes every
occurrence as an argument in its favor, assuring it certain victory. Take,
for example, the latest state election anywhere. In point of fact, it
foretold nothing. It threw no light upon coming events, not even upon
current events. It leaves the future as hazy as before. Yet the managers of
either party affect to be equally confident that it presages the triumph of
their ticket in the next national election. The wonder is that so many of
the voters will believe and be influenced by such transparent subterfuge.

Is there any remedy for all this? I much fear that there is not.
Government, like all else, is impossible of perfection. It is as man
is--good, bad and indifferent; which is but another way of saying we live
in a world of cross purposes. We in America prefer republicanism. But would
despotism be so demurrable under a wise unselfish despot?



III


Contemplating the contrasts between foreign life and foreign history with
our own one cannot help reflecting upon the yet more startling contrasts of
ancient and modern religion and government. I have wandered not a little
over Europe at irregular intervals for more than fifty years. Always a
devotee to American institutions, I have been strengthened in my beliefs by
what I have encountered.

The mood in our countrymen has been overmuch to belittle things American.
The commercial spirit in the United States, which affects to be
nationalistic, is in reality cosmopolitan. Money being its god, French
money, English money, anything that calls itself money, is wealth to it. It
has no time to waste on theories or to think of generics. "Put money in thy
purse" has become its motto. Money constitutes the reason of its being.
The organic law of the land is Greek to it, as are those laws of God which
obstruct it. It is too busy with its greed and gain to think, or to feel,
on any abstract subject. That which does not appeal to it in the concrete
is of no interest at all.

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

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



IV


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

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

That which is true of material things is truer yet of spiritual things. The
ideal about which we hear so much, is as unattained as the fabled bag of
gold at the end of the rainbow. Nor is the doctrine of perfectability
anywhere one with itself. It speaks in diverse tongues. Its processes and
objects are variant. It seems but an iridescent dream which lends itself
equally to the fancies of the impracticable and the scheming of the
self-seeking, breeding visionaries and pretenders.

Easily assumed and asserted, too often it becomes tyrannous, dealing with
things outer and visible while taking little if any account of the inner
lights of the soul. Thus it imposes upon credulity and ignorance; makes
fakers of some and fanatics of others; in politics where not an engine of
oppression, a corrupt influence; in religion where not a zealot, a promoter
of cant. In short the self-appointed apostle of uplift, who disregarding
individual character would make virtue a matter of statute law and ordain
uniformity of conduct by act of conventicle or assembly, is likelier to
produce moral chaos than to reach the sublime state he claims to seek.

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

The levity of the men is recruited by the folly of the women. The leaders
of feminism would abolish sex. To what end? The pessimist answers what
easier than the demolition of a sexless world gone entirely mad? How simple
the engineries of destruction. Civil war in America; universal hara-kiri
in Europe; the dry rot of wealth wasting itself in self-indulgence. Then a
thousand years of total eclipse. Finally Macaulay's Australian surveying
the ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral from a broken parapet of London Bridge;
and a Moslem conqueror of America looking from the hill of the Capitol at
Washington upon the desolation of what was once the District of Columbia.
Shall the end be an Oriental renaissance with the philosophies of Buddha,
Mohammed and Confucius welded into a new religion describing itself as the
last word of science, reason and common sense?

Alas, and alack the day! In those places where the suffering rich most do
congregate the words of Watts' hymn have constant application:

_For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do._

When they have not gone skylarking or grown tired of bridge they devote
their leisure to organizing clubs other than those of the uplift. There
are all sorts, from the Society for the Abrogation of Bathing Suits at the
seaside resorts to the League at Mewville for the Care of Disabled Cats.
Most of these clubs are all officers and no privates. That is what many of
them are got up for. Do they advance the world in grace? One who surveys
the scene can scarcely think so.

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

Is this rank pessimism or merely the vagaries of an old man dropping back
into second childhood, who does not see that the world is wiser and better
than ever it was, mankind and womankind, surely on the way to perfection?



V


One thing is certain: We are not standing still. Since "Adam delved and Eve
span"--if they ever did--in the Garden of Eden, "somewhere in Asia," to the
"goings on" in the Garden of the Gods directly under Pike's Peak--the earth
we inhabit has at no time and nowhere wanted for liveliness--but surely
it was never livelier than it now is; as the space-writer says, more
"dramatic"; indeed, to quote the guidebooks, quite so "picturesque and
interesting."

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

We know not, and there is none to tell us. That which is actually happening
were unbelievable if we did not see it, from hour to hour, from day to day.
Horror succeeding horror has in some sort blunted our sensibilities. Not
only are our sympathies numbed by the immensity of the slaughter and the
sorrow, but patriotism itself is chilled by the selfish thought that,
having thus far measurably escaped, we may pull through without paying our
share. This will account for a certain indifferentism we now and again
encounter.

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

The bells that rang out in Petrograd and Moscow sounded, we are told, the
death knell of autocracy in Berlin and Vienna. The clarion tones that
echoed through the Crimea and Siberia, albeit to the ear of the masses
muffled in the Schwarzwald and along the shores of the North Sea, and up
and down the Danube and the Rhine, yet conveyed a whispered message which
may presently break into song; the glad song of freedom with it glorious
refrain: "The Romanoffs gone! Perdition having reached the Hohenzollerns
and the Hapsburgs, all will be well!"

Anyhow, freedom; self-government; for whilst a scrutinizing and solicitous
pessimism, observing and considering many abuses, administrative and
political, federal and local, in our republican system--abuses which being
very visible are most lamentable--may sometimes move us to lose heart of
hope in democracy, we know of none better. So, let us stand by it; pray for
it; fight for it. Let us by our example show the Russians how to attain it.
Let us by the same token show the Germans how to attain it when they come
to see, if they ever do, the havoc autocracy has made for Germany. That
should constitute the bed rock of our politics and our religion. It is the
true religion. Love of country is love of God. Patriotism is religion.

It is also Christianity. The pacifist, let me parenthetically observe,
is scarcely a Christian. There be technical Christians and there be
Christians. The technical Christian sees nothing but the blurred letter of
the law, which he misconstrues. The Christian, animated by its holy spirit
and led by its rightful interpretation, serves the Lord alike of heaven and
hosts when he flies the flag of his country and smites its enemies hip and
thigh!




Chapter the Eleventh

Andrew Johnson--The Liberal Convention in 1872--Carl Schurz--The
"Quadrilateral"--Sam Bowles, Horace White and Murat Halstead--A Queer
Composite of Incongruities



I


Among the many misconceptions and mischances that befell the slavery
agitation in the United States and finally led a kindred people into actual
war the idea that got afloat after this war that every Confederate was a
Secessionist best served the ends of the radicalism which sought to reduce
the South to a conquered province, and as such to reconstruct it by hostile
legislation supported wherever needed by force.

Andrew Johnson very well understood that a great majority of the men who
were arrayed on the Southern side had taken the field against their better
judgment through pressure of circumstance. They were Union men who had
opposed secession and clung to the old order. Not merely in the Border
States did this class rule but in the Gulf States it held a respectable
minority until the shot fired upon Sumter drew the call for troops from
Lincoln. The Secession leaders, who had staked their all upon the hazard,
knew that to save their movement from collapse it was necessary that blood
be sprinkled in the faces of the people. Hence the message from Charleston:

_With cannon, mortar and petard
We tender you our Beauregard_--

with the response from Washington precipitating the conflict of theories
into a combat of arms for which neither party was prepared.

The debate ended, battle at hand, Southern men had to choose between the
North and the South, between their convictions and predilections on one
side and expatriation on the other side--resistance to invasion, not
secession, the issue. But four years later, when in 1865 all that they had
believed and feared in 1861 had come to pass, these men required no drastic
measures to bring them to terms. Events more potent than acts of Congress
had already reconstructed them. Lincoln with a forecast of this had shaped
his ends accordingly. Johnson, himself a Southern man, understood it even
better than Lincoln, and backed by the legacy of Lincoln he proceeded not
very skillfully to build upon it.

The assassination of Lincoln, however, had played directly into the hands
of the radicals, led by Ben Wade in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens in the
House. Prior to that baleful night they had fallen behind the marching
van. The mad act of Booth put them upon their feet and brought them to the
front. They were implacable men, politicians equally of resolution and
ability. Events quickly succeeding favored them and their plans. It was not
alone Johnson's lack of temper and tact that gave them the whip hand. His
removal from office would have opened the door of the White House to Wade,
so that strategically Johnson's position was from the beginning beleaguered
and came perilously near before the close to being untenable.

Grant, a political nondescript, not Wade, the uncompromising extremist,
came after; and inevitably four years of Grant had again divided the
triumphant Republicans. This was the situation during the winter of
1871-72, when the approaching Presidential election brought the country
face to face with a most extraordinary state of affairs. The South was in
irons. The North was growing restive. Thinking people everywhere felt
that conditions so anomalous to our institutions could not and should not
endure.



II


Johnson had made a bungling attempt to carry out the policies of Lincoln
and had gone down in the strife. The Democratic Party had reached the ebb
tide of its disastrous fortunes.

It seemed the merest reactionary. A group of influential Republicans,
dissatisfied for one cause and another with Grant, held a caucus and issued
a call for what they described as a Liberal Republican Convention to
assemble in Cincinnati May 1, 1872.

A Southern man and a Confederate soldier, a Democrat by conviction and
inheritance, I had been making in Kentucky an uphill fight for the
acceptance of the inevitable. The line of cleavage between the old and the
new South I had placed upon the last three amendments to the Constitution,
naming them the Treaty of Peace between the Sections. The negro must be
invested with the rights conferred upon him by these amendments, however
mistaken and injudicious the South might think them. The obsolete Black
Laws instituted during the slave régime must be removed from the statute
books. The negro, like Mohammed's coffin, swung in midair. He was neither
fish, flesh nor fowl, nor good red herring. For our own sake we must
habilitate him, educate and elevate him, make him, if possible, a contented
and useful citizen. Failing of this, free government itself might be
imperiled.

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.