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Marse Henry (Vol. 1)

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




There is another witness--Mr. Buchanan, afterward President--who tells how
he took a distinguished English lady to the White House when Old Hickory
was President; how he went up to the general's private apartment, where he
found him in a ragged _robe-de-chambre_, smoking his pipe; how, when
he intimated that the President might before coming down slick himself a
bit, he received the half-laughing rebuke: "Buchanan, I once knew a man in
Virginia who made himself independently rich by minding his own business";
how, when he did come down, he was _en règle_; and finally how, after
a half hour of delightful talk, the English lady as they regained the
street broke forth with enthusiasm, using almost the selfsame words of Mrs.
Claiborne: "He is the finest gentleman I ever met in the whole course of my
life."



VI


The Presidential campaign of 1848--and the concurrent return of the Mexican
soldiers--seems but yesterday. We were in Nashville, where the camp fires
of the two parties burned fiercely day and night, Tennessee a debatable,
even a pivotal state. I was an enthusiastic politician on the Cass and
Butler side, and was correspondingly disappointed when the election went
against us for Taylor and Fillmore, though a little mollified when, on his
way to Washington, General Taylor grasping his old comrade, my grandfather,
by the hand, called him "Billy," and paternally stroked my curls.

Though the next winter we passed in Washington I never saw him in the White
House. He died in July, 1850, and was succeeded by Millard Fillmore. It is
common to speak of Old Rough and Ready as an ignoramus. I don't think this.
He may not have been very courtly, but he was a gentleman.

Later in life I came to know Millard Fillmore well and to esteem him
highly. Once he told me that Daniel Webster had said to him: "Fillmore, I
like Clay--I like Clay very much--but he rides rough, sir; damned rough!"

I was fond of going to the Capitol and of playing amateur page in the
House, of which my father had been a member and where he had many friends,
though I was never officially a page. There was in particular a little old
bald-headed gentleman who was good to me and would put his arm about me and
stroll with me across the rotunda to the Library of Congress and get
me books to read. I was not so young as not to know that he was an
ex-President of the United States, and to realize the meaning of it. He had
been the oldest member of the House when my father was the youngest. He was
John Quincy Adams. By chance I was on the floor of the House when he fell
in his place, and followed the excited and tearful throng when they bore
him into the Speaker's Room, kneeling by the side of the sofa with an
improvised fan and crying as if my heart would break.

One day in the spring of 1851 my father took me to a little hotel on
Pennsylvania Avenue near the Capitol and into a stuffy room, where a snuffy
old man wearing an ill-fitting wig was busying himself over a pile of
documents. He turned about and was very hearty.

"Aha, you've brought the boy," said he.

And my father said: "My son, you wanted to see General Cass, and here he
is."

My enthusiasm over the Cass and Butler campaign had not subsided.
Inevitably General Cass was to me the greatest of heroes. My father had
been and always remained his close friend. Later along we dwelt together at
Willard's Hotel, my mother a chaperon for Miss Belle Cass, afterward Madame
Von Limbourg, and I came into familiar intercourse with the family.

The general made me something of a pet and never ceased to be a hero to me.
I still think he was one of the foremost statesmen of his time and treasure
a birthday present he made me when I was just entering my teens.

The hour I passed with him that afternoon I shall never forget.

As we were about taking our leave my father said: "Well, my son, you have
seen General Cass; what do you think of him?"

And the general patting me affectionately on the head laughingly said: "He
thinks he has seen a pretty good-looking old fogy--that is what he thinks!"



VII


There flourished in the village life of Washington two old blokes--no
other word can 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.

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