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Marse Henry (Vol. 1)

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




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

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

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

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



IV


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

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

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

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

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

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

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



V


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toombs was as much a humorist as an extremist. I have ridden with him under
fire and heard him crack jokes with Minié balls flying uncomfortably about.
Some one spoke kindly of him to old Ben Wade. "Yes, yes," said Wade; "I
never did believe in the doctrine of total depravity."

But I am running ahead in advance of events.



VI


There came in 1853 to the Thirty-third Congress a youngish, dapper and
graceful man notable as the only Democrat in the Massachusetts delegation.
It was said that he had been a dancing master, his wife a work girl. They
brought with them a baby in arms with the wife's sister for its nurse--a
mis-step which was quickly corrected. I cannot now tell just how I came to
be very intimate with them except that they lived at Willard's Hotel. His
name had a pretty sound to it--Nathaniel Prentiss Banks.

A schoolmate of mine and myself, greatly to the mirth of those about us,
undertook Mr. Banks' career. We were going to elect him Speaker of the
next House and then President of the United States. This was particularly
laughable to my mother and Mrs. Linn Boyd, the wife of the contemporary
Speaker, who had very solid presidential aspirations of his own.

The suggestion perhaps originated with Mrs. Banks, to whom we two were
ardently devoted. I have not seen her since those days, more than sixty
years ago. But her beauty, which then charmed me, still lingers in my
memory--a gentle, sweet creature who made much of us boys--and two years
later when Mr. Banks was actually elected Speaker I was greatly elated and
took some of the credit to myself. Twenty years afterwards General Banks
and I had our seats close together in the Forty-fourth Congress, and he did
not recall me at all or the episode of 1853. Nevertheless I warmed to him,
and when during Cleveland's first term he came to me with a hard-luck story
I was glad to throw myself into the breach. He had been a Speaker of the
House, a general in the field and a Governor of Massachusetts, but was a
faded old man, very commonplace, and except for the little post he held
under Government pitiably helpless.

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

One of these stories especially took me. It related how when he was on a
yachting cruise in the Gulf of Mexico the boat was overhauled by pirates,
and how he being the likeliest of the company was tied up and whipped to
make him disgorge, or tell where the treasure was.

"Colonel Walton," said I, "did the whipping hurt you much?"

"Sir," he replied, as if I were a grown-up, "they whipped me until I was
perfectly disgusted."

An old lady in Philadelphia, whilst I was at school, heard me mention
Colonel Walton--a most distinguished, religious old lady--and said to me,
"Henry, my son, you should be ashamed to speak of that old villain
or confess that you ever knew him," proceeding to give me his awful,
blood-curdling history.

It was mainly a figment of her fancy and prejudice, and I repeated it
to Colonel Walton the next time I went to the hotel where he was then
living--I have since learned, with a lady not his wife, though he was then
three score and ten--and he cried, "That old hag! Good Lord! Don't they
ever die!"

Seeing every day the most distinguished public men of the country, and with
many of them brought into direct acquaintance by the easy intercourse of
hotel life, destroyed any reverence I might have acquired for official
station. Familiarity may not always breed contempt, but it is a veritable
eye opener. To me no divinity hedged the brow of a senator. I knew the
White House too well to be impressed by its architectural grandeur without
and rather bizarre furnishments within.



VII


I have declaimed not a little in my time about the ignoble trade of
politics, the collective dishonesty of parties and the vulgarities of
the self-exploiting professional office hunters. Parties are parties.
Professional politics and politicians are probably neither worse nor
better--barring their pretensions--than other lines of human endeavor. The
play actor must be agreeable on the stage of the playhouse; the politician
on the highways and the hustings, which constitute his playhouse--all the
world a stage--neither to be seriously blamed for the dissimulation which,
being an asset, becomes, as it were, a second nature.

The men who between 1850 and 1861 might have saved the Union and averted
the War of Sections were on either side professional politicians, with here
and there an unselfish, far-seeing, patriotic man, whose admonitions were
not heeded by the people ranging on opposing sides of party lines. The two
most potential of the party leaders were Mr. Davis and Mr. Seward. The
South might have seen and known that the one hope of the institution of
slavery lay in the Union. However it ended, disunion led to abolition. The
world--the whole trend of modern thought--was set against slavery. But
politics, based on party feeling, is a game of blindman's buff. And
then--here I show myself a son of Scotland--there is a destiny. "What is to
be," says the predestinarian Mother Goose, "will be, though it never come
to pass."

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

Human nature remains ever the same. These days are very like those days. We
have had fifty years of a restored Union. The sectional fires have quite
gone out. Yet behold the schemes of revolution claiming the regenerative.
Most of them call themselves the "uplift!"

Let us agree at once that all government is more or less a failure; society
as fraudulent as the satirists describe it; yet, when we turn to the
uplift--particularly the professional uplift--what do we find but the same
old tunes, hypocrisy and empiricism posing as "friends of the people,"
preaching the pussy gospel of "sweetness and light?"

"Words, words, words," says Hamlet. Even as veteran writers for the press
have come through disheartening experience to a realizing sense of the
futility of printer's ink must our academic pundits begin to suspect the
futility of art and letters. Words however cleverly writ on paper are after
all but words. "In a nation of blind men," we are told, "the one-eyed man
is king." In a nation of undiscriminating voters the noise of the agitator
is apt to drown the voice of the statesman. We have been teaching everybody
to read, nobody to think; and as a consequence--the rule of numbers the
law of the land, partyism in the saddle--legislation, state and Federal,
becomes largely a matter of riding to hounds and horns. All this, which was
true in the fifties, is true to-day.

Under the pretense of "liberalizing" the Government the politicians are
sacrificing its organic character to whimsical experimentation; its checks
and balances wisely designed to promote and protect liberty are being
loosened by schemes of reform more or less visionary; while nowhere do we
find intelligence enlightened by experience, and conviction supported by
self-control, interposing to save the representative system of the
Constitution from the onward march of the proletariat.

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

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

The miracles of electricity the last word of science, what is left for
man to do? With wireless telegraphy, the airplane and the automobile
annihilating time and space, what else? Turning from the material to the
ethical it seems of the very nature of the human species to meddle and
muddle. On every hand we see the organization of societies for making men
and women over again according to certain fantastic images existing in
the minds of the promoters. "_Mon Dieu_!" exclaimed the visiting
Frenchman. "Fifty religions and only one soup!" Since then both the soups
and the religions have multiplied until there is scarce a culinary or moral
conception which has not some sect or club to represent it. The uplift is
the keynote of these.




Chapter the Third

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



I


It may have been Louis the Fifteenth, or it may have been Madame de
Pompadour, who said, "After me the deluge;" but whichever it was, very much
that thought was in Mr. Buchanan's mind in 1861 as the time for his exit
from the White House approached. At the North there had been a political
ground-swell; at the South, secession, half accomplished by the Gulf
States, yawned in the Border States. Curiously enough, very few believed
that war was imminent.

As a reporter for the States I met Mr. Lincoln immediately on his arrival
in Washington. He came in unexpectedly ahead of the hour announced, to
escape, as was given out, a well-laid plan to assassinate him as he passed
through Baltimore. I did not believe at the time, and I do not believe now,
that there was any real ground for this apprehension.

All through that winter there had been a deal of wild talk. One story had
it that Mr. Buchanan was to be kidnapped and made off with so that Vice
President Breckenridge might succeed and, acting as _de facto_
President, throw the country into confusion and revolution, defeating the
inauguration of Lincoln and the coming in of the Republicans. It was a
figment of drink and fancy. There was never any such scheme. If there had
been Breckenridge would not have consented to be party to it. He was a man
of unusual mental as well as personal dignity and both temperamentally and
intellectually a thorough conservative.

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

Perhaps I shall not be deemed prolix if I dwell with some particularity
upon an occasion so historic. I had first encountered the newly elected
President the afternoon of the day in the early morning of which he had
arrived in Washington. It was a Saturday, I think. He came to the capitol
under the escort of Mr. Seward, and among the rest I was presented to him.
His appearance did not impress me as fantastically as it had impressed some
others. I was familiar with the Western type, and whilst Mr. Lincoln was
not an Adonis, even after prairie ideals, there was about him a dignity
that commanded respect.

I met him again the next Monday forenoon in his apartment at Willard's
Hotel as he was preparing to start to his inauguration, and was struck by
his unaffected kindness, for I came with a matter requiring his attention.
This was, in point of fact, to get from him a copy of the inauguration
speech for the Associated Press. I turned it over to Ben Perley Poore, who,
like myself, was assisting Mr. Gobright. The President that was about to
be seemed entirely self-possessed; not a sign of nervousness, and very
obliging. As I have said, I accompanied the cortège that passed from the
senate chamber to the east portico. When Mr. Lincoln removed his hat to
face the vast throng in front and below, I extended my hand to take it,
but Judge Douglas, just behind me, reached over my outstretched arm and
received it, holding it during the delivery of the address. I stood just
near enough the speaker's elbow not to obstruct any gestures he might make,
though he made but few; and then I began to get a suspicion of the power of
the man.

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

I was a young Democrat and of course not in sympathy with Mr. Lincoln or
his opinions. Judge Douglas, however, had taken the edge off my hostility.
He had said to me upon his return in triumph to Washington after the famous
Illinois campaign of 1868: "Lincoln is a good man; in fact, a great man,
and by far the ablest debater I have ever met," and now the newcomer began
to verify this opinion both in his private conversation and in his public
attitude.



II


I had been an undoubting Union boy. Neither then nor afterward could I be
fairly classified as a Secessionist. Circumstance rather than conviction or
predilection threw me into the Confederate service, and, being in, I went
through with it.

The secession leaders I held in distrust; especially Yancey, Mason,
Slidell, Benjamin and Iverson, Jefferson Davis and Isham G. Harris were not
favorites of mine. Later along I came into familiar association with
most of them, and relations were established which may be described as
confidential and affectionate. Lamar and I were brought together oddly
enough in 1869 by Carl Schurz, and thenceforward we were the most devoted
friends. Harris and I fell together in 1862 in the field, first with
Forrest and later with Johnston and Hood, and we remained as brothers to
the end, when he closed a great career in the upper house of Congress, and
by Republican votes, though he was a Democrat, as president of the Senate.

He continued in the Governorship of Tennessee through the war. He at no
time lost touch with the Tennessee troops, and though not always in the
field, never missed a forward movement. In the early spring of 1864, just
before the famous Johnston-Sherman campaign opened, General Johnston asked
him to go around among the boys and "stir 'em up a bit." The Governor
invited me to ride with him. Together we visited every sector in the army.
Threading the woods of North Georgia on this round, if I heard it once I
heard it fifty times shouted from a distant clearing: "Here comes Gov-ner
Harris, fellows; g'wine to be a fight." His appearance at the front had
always preceded and been long ago taken as a signal for battle.

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