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Marse Henry (Vol. 1)

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




Wigfall survived but a few years. He was less a dreamer than Yancey. A man
big of brain and warm of heart he had gone from the ironclad provincialism
of South Carolina to the windswept vagaries of Texas. He believed wholly
the Yancey confession of faith; that secession was a constitutional right;
that African slavery was ordained of God; that the South was paramount,
the North inferior. Yet in worldly knowledge he had learned more than
Yancey--was an abler man than Jefferson Davis--and but for his affections
and generous habits he would have made a larger figure in the war, having
led the South's exit from the Senate.



VI


I do not think that either Hammond or Chestnut, the Senators from
South Carolina, both men of parts, had at bottom much belief in the
practicability of the Confederate movement. Neither had the Senators from
Arkansas and Alabama, nor Brown, of Mississippi, the colleague of Jefferson
Davis. Mason, of Virginia, a dogged old donkey, and Iverson, of Georgia,
another, were the kind of men whom Wigfall dominated.

One of the least confident of those who looked on and afterward fell in
line was the Vice President, John C. Breckenridge, of Kentucky. He was the
Beau Sabreur among statesmen as Albert Sidney Johnston, among soldiers.
Never man handsomer in person or more winning in manners. Sprung from a
race of political aristocrats, he was born to early and shining success
in public life. Of moderate opinions, winning and prudent, wherever he
appeared he carried his audience with him. He had been elected on the
ticket with Buchanan to the second office under the Government, when he was
but five and thirty years of age. There was nothing for him to gain from
a division of the Union; the Presidency, perhaps, if the Union continued
undivided. But he could not resist the onrush of disunionism, went with
the South, which he served first in the field and later as Confederate
Secretary of War, and after a few years of self-imposed exile in Europe
returned to Kentucky to die at four and fifty, a defeated and disappointed
old man.

The adjoining state of Tennessee was represented in the Senate by one of
the most problematic characters in American history. With my father, who
remained his friend through life, he had entered the state legislature in
1835, and having served ten years in the lower House of Congress, and
four years as governor of Tennessee he came back in 1857 to the National
Capital, a member of the Upper House. He was Andrew Johnson.

I knew him from my childhood. Thrice that I can recall I saw him weep;
never did I see him laugh. Life had been very serious, albeit very
successful, to him. Of unknown parentage, the wife he had married before he
was one and twenty had taught him to read. Yet at six and twenty he was in
the Tennessee General Assembly and at four and thirty in Congress.

There was from first to last not a little about him to baffle conjecture.
I should call him a cross between Jack Cade and Aaron Burr. His sympathies
were easily stirred by rags in distress. But he was uncompromising in his
detestation of the rich. It was said that he hated "a biled shirt." He
would have nothing to do "with people who wore broadcloth," though he
carefully dressed himself. When, as governor of Tennessee, he came to
Nashville he refused many invitations to take his first New Year's dinner
with a party of toughs at the house of a river roustabout.

There was nothing of the tough about him, however. His language was careful
and exact. I never heard him utter an oath or tell a risqué story. He
passed quite fifteen years in Washington, a total abstainer from the use of
intoxicants. He fell into the occasional-drink habit during the dark days
of the War. But after some costly experience he dropped it and continued a
total abstainer to the end of his days.

He had, indeed, admirable self-control. I do not believe a more
conscientious man ever lived. His judgments were sometimes peculiar, but
they were upright and sincere, having reasons, which he could give with
power and effect, behind them. Yet was he a born politician, crafty to a
degree, and always successful, relying upon a popular following which never
failed him.

In 1860 he supported the quasi-secession Breckenridge and Lane Presidential
ticket, but in 1861 he stood true to the Union, retaining his seat in the
Senate until he was appointed military governor of Tennessee. Nominated for
Vice President on the ticket with Lincoln, in 1864, he was elected, and
upon the assassination of Lincoln succeeded to the Presidency. Having
served out his term as President he returned to Tennessee to engage in
the hottest kind of politics, and though at the outset defeated finally
regained his seat in the Senate of the United States.

He hated Grant with a holy hate. His first act on reëntering the Senate was
to deliver an implacably bitter speech against the President. It was his
last public appearance. He went thence to his home in East Tennessee,
gratified and happy, to die in a few weeks.



VII


There used to be a story about Raleigh, in North Carolina, where Andrew
Johnson was born, which whispered that he was a natural son of William
Ruffin, an eminent jurist in the earlier years of the nineteenth century.
It was analogous to the story that Lincoln was the natural son of various
paternities from time to time assigned to him. I had my share in running
that calumny to cover. It was a lie out of whole cloth with nothing
whatever to support or excuse it. I reached the bottom of it to discover
proof of its baselessness abundant and conclusive. In Johnson's case I take
it that the story had nothing other to rest on than the obscurity of his
birth and the quality of his talents. Late in life Johnson went to Raleigh
and caused to be erected a modest tablet over the spot pointed out as the
grave of his progenitor, saying, I was told by persons claiming to have
been present, "I place this stone over the last earthly abode of my alleged
father."

Johnson, in the saying of the countryside, "out-married himself." His wife
was a plain woman, but came of good family. One day, when a child, so the
legend ran, she saw passing through the Greenville street in which her
people lived, a woman, a boy and a cow, the boy carrying a pack over his
shoulder. They were obviously weary and hungry. Extreme poverty could
present no sadder picture. "Mother," cried the girl, "there goes the man I
am going to marry." She was thought to be in jest. But a few years later
she made her banter good and lived to see her husband President of the
United States and with him to occupy the White House at Washington.

Much has been written of the humble birth and iron fortune of Abraham
Lincoln. He had no such obstacles to overcome as either Andrew Jackson
or Andrew Johnson. Jackson, a prisoner of war, was liberated, a lad of
sixteen, from the British pen at Charleston, without a relative, a friend
or a dollar in the world, having to make his way upward through the most
aristocratic community of the country and the time. Johnson, equally
friendless and penniless, started as a poor tailor in a rustic village.
Lincoln must therefore, take third place among our self-made Presidents.
The Hanks family were not paupers. He had a wise and helpful stepmother. He
was scarcely worse off than most young fellows of his neighborhood, first
in Indiana and then in Illinois. On this side justice has never been
rendered to Jackson and Johnson. In the case of Jackson the circumstance
was forgotten, while Johnson too often dwelt upon it and made capital out
of it.

Under date of the 23rd of May, 1919, the Hon. Josephus Daniels, Secretary
of the Navy, writes me the following letter, which I violate no confidence
in reproducing in this connection:

MY DEAR MARSE HENRY:--

I can't tell you how much delight and pleasure your reminiscences in the
Saturday Evening Post have given me, as well as the many others who have
followed them, and I suppose you will put them in a volume when they are
finished, so that we may have the pleasure of reading them in connected
order.

As you know, I live in Raleigh and I was very much interested in your
article in the issue of April 5, 1919, with reference to Andrew Johnson, in
which you quote a story that "used to be current in Raleigh, that he was
the son of William Ruffin, an eminent jurist of the ninetenth century." I
had never heard this story, but the story that was gossiped there was that
he was the son of a certain Senator Haywood. I ran that story down and
found that it had no foundation whatever, because if he had been the son of
the Senator reputed to be his father, the Senator was of the age of twelve
years when Andrew Johnson was born.

My own information is, for I have made some investigation of it, that the
story about Andrew Johnson's having a father other than the husband of his
mother, is as wanting in foundation as the story about Abraham Lincoln.
You did a great service in running that down and exposing it, and I trust
before you finish your book that you will make further investigation and
be able to do a like service in repudiating the unjust, idle gossip with
reference to Andrew Johnson. In your article you say that persons who claim
to have been present when Johnson came to Raleigh and erected a monument
over the grave of his father, declare that Johnson said he placed this
stone over the last earthly abode of "my alleged father." That is one phase
of the gossip, and the other is that he said "my reputed father," both
equally false.

The late Mr. Pulaski Cowper, who was private secretary to Governor Bragg,
of our State, just prior to the war, and who was afterwards president of
our leading life insurance company, a gentleman of high character, and of
the best memory, was present at the time that Johnson made the address from
which you quote the rumor. Mr. Cowper wrote an article for The News and
Observer, giving the story and relating that Johnson said that "he was glad
to come to Raleigh to erect a tablet to his father." The truth is that
while his father was a man of little or no education, he held the position
of janitor at the State Capitol, and he was not wanting in qualities which
made him superior to his humble position. If he had been living in this day
he would have been given a lifesaving medal, for upon the occasion of a
picnic near Raleigh when the cry came that children were drowning he was
the first to leap in and endanger his life to save them.

Andrew Johnson's mother was related to the Chappell family, of which there
are a number of citizens of standing and character near Raleigh, several of
them having been ministers of the Gospel, and one at least having gained
distinction as a missionary in China.

I am writing you because I know that your story will be read and accepted
and I thought you would be glad to have this story, based upon a study and
investigation and personal knowledge of Mr. Cowper, whose character and
competency are well known in North Carolina.




Chapter the Seventh

An Old Newspaper Rookery--Reactionary Sectionalism in Cincinnati and
Louisville--_The Courier-Journal_



I


My dream of wealth through my commission on the Confederate cotton I was to
sell to English buyers was quickly shattered. The cotton was burned and I
found myself in the early spring of 1865 in the little village of Glendale,
a suburb of Cincinnati, where the future Justice Stanley Matthews had his
home. His wife was a younger sister of my mother. My grandmother was still
alive and lived with her daughter and son-in-law.

I was received with open arms. A few days later the dear old lady said to
me: "I suppose, my son, you are rather a picked bird after your adventures
in the South. You certainly need better clothing. I have some money in bank
and it is freely yours."

I knew that my Uncle Stanley had put her up to this, and out of sheer
curiosity I asked her how much she could let me have. She named what seemed
to me a stupendous sum. I thanked her, told her I had quite a sufficiency
for the time being, slipped into town and pawned my watch; that is, as I
made light of it afterward in order to escape the humiliation of borrowing
from an uncle whose politics I did not approve, I went with my collateral
to an uncle who had no politics at all and got fifty dollars on it! Before
the money was gone I had found, through Judge Matthews, congenial work.

There was in Cincinnati but one afternoon newspaper--the Evening
Times--owned by Calvin W. Starbuck. He had been a practical printer but was
grown very rich. He received me kindly, said the editorial force was quite
full--must always be, on a daily newspaper--"but," he added, "my brother,
Alexander Starbuck, who has been running the amusements, wants to go
a-fishing in Canada--to be gone a month--and, if you wish, you can during
his absence sub for him."

It was just to my hand and liking. Before Alexander Starbuck returned the
leading editor of the paper fell from a ferryboat crossing the Ohio River
and was drowned. The next day General Starbuck sent for me and offered me
the vacant place.

"Why, general," I said, "I am an outlawed man: I do not agree with your
politics. I do not see how I can undertake a place so conspicuous and
responsible."

He replied: "I propose to engage you as an editorial manager. It is as
if building a house you should be head carpenter, I the architect. The
difference in salary will be seventy-five dollars a week against fifteen
dollars a week."

I took the place.




II


The office of the Evening Times was a queer old curiosity shop. I set to
and turned it inside out. I had very pronounced journalistic notions of my
own and applied them in every department of the sleepy old money-maker. One
afternoon a week later I put forth a paper whose oldest reader could not
have recognized it. The next morning's Cincinnati Commercial contained a
flock of paragraphs to which the Chattanooga-Cincinnati-Rebel Evening Times
furnished the keynote.

They made funny reading, but they threw a dangerous flare upon my "past"
and put me at a serious disadvantage. It happened that when Artemus Ward
had been in town a fortnight before he gave me a dinner and had some of his
friends to meet me. Among these was a young fellow of the name of Halstead,
who, I was told, was the coming man on the Commercial.

Round to the Commercial office I sped, and being conducted to this person,
who received me very blandly, I said: "Mr. Halstead, I am a journeyman day
laborer in your city--the merest bird of passage, with my watch at the
pawnbroker's. As soon as I am able to get out of town I mean to go--and
I came to ask if you can think the personal allusions to me in to-day's
paper, which may lose me my job but can nowise hurt the Times, are quite
fair--even--since I am without defense--quite manly."

He looked at me with that quizzical, serio-comic stare which so became him,
and with great heartiness replied: "No--they were damned mean--though I
did not realize how mean. The mark was so obvious and tempting I could not
resist, but--there shall be no more of them. Come, let us go and have a
drink."

That was the beginning of a friendship which brought happiness to both of
us and lasted nearly half a century, to the hour of his death, when, going
from Louisville to Cincinnati, I helped to lay him away in Spring Grove
Cemetery.

I had no thought of remaining in Cincinnati. My objective was Nashville,
where the young woman who was to become my wife, and whom I had not seen
for nearly two years, was living with her family. During the summer Mr.
Francisco, the business manager of the Evening Times, had a scheme to buy
the Toledo Commercial, in conjunction with Mr. Comly, of Columbus, and to
engage me as editor conjointly with Mr. Harrison Gray Otis as publisher. It
looked very good. Toledo threatened Cleveland and Detroit as a lake port.
But nothing could divert me. As soon as Parson Brownlow, who was governor
of Tennessee and making things lively for the returning rebels, would
allow, I was going to Nashville.

About the time the way was cleared my two pals, or bunkies, of the
Confederacy, Albert Roberts and George Purvis, friends from boyhood, put
in an appearance. They were on their way to the capital of Tennessee. The
father of Albert Roberts was chief owner of the Republican Banner, an old
and highly respectable newspaper, which had for nearly four years lain in a
state of suspension. Their plan now was to revive its publication, Purvis
to be business manager, and Albert and I to be editors. We had no cash.
Nobody on our side of the line had any cash. But John Roberts owned a farm
he could mortgage for money enough to start us. What had I to say?

Less than a week later saw us back at home winnowing the town for
subscribers and advertising. We divided it into districts, each taking a
specified territory. The way we boys hustled was a sight to see. But the
way the community warmed to us was another. When the familiar headline,
The Republican Banner, made its apearance there was a popular hallelujah,
albeit there were five other dailies ahead of us. A year later there was
only one, and it was nowise a competitor.

Albert Roberts had left his girl, Edith Scott, the niece of Huxley, whom I
have before mentioned, in Montgomery, Alabama. Purvis' girl, Sophie Searcy,
was in Selma. Their hope was to have enough money by Christmas each to
pay a visit to those distant places. My girl was on the spot, and we had
resolved, money or no money, to be married without delay. Before New Year's
the three of us were wedded and comfortably settled, with funds galore, for
the paper had thrived consumingly. It had thrived so consumingly that after
a little I was able to achieve the wish of my heart and to go to London,
taking my wife and my "great American novel" with me. I have related
elsewhere what came of this and what happened to me.




III


That bread cast upon the waters--"'dough' put out at usance," as Joseph
Jefferson used to phrase it--shall return after many days has been I dare
say discovered by most persons who have perpetrated acts of kindness,
conscious or unconscious. There was a poor, broken-down English actor with
a passion for Chaucer, whom I was wont to encounter in the Library of
Congress. His voice was quite gone. Now and again I had him join me in a
square meal. Once in a while I paid his room rent. I was loath to leave him
when the break came in 1861, though he declared he had "expectations," and
made sure he would not starve.

I was passing through Regent Street in London, when a smart brougham drove
up to the curb and a wheezy voice called after me. It was my old friend,
Newton. His "expectations" had not failed him, he had come into a property
and was living in affluence.

He knew London as only a Bohemian native and to the manner born could know
it. His sense of bygone obligation knew no bounds. Between him and John
Mahoney and Artemus Ward I was made at home in what might be called the
mysteries and eccentricities of differing phases of life in the British
metropolis not commonly accessible to the foreign casual. In many after
visits this familiar knowledge has served me well. But Newton did not live
to know of some good fortune that came to me and to feel my gratitude to
him, as dear old John Mahoney did. When I was next in London he was gone.

It was not, however, the actor, Newton, whom I had in mind in offering a
bread-upon-the-water moral, but a certain John Hatcher, the memory of whom
in my case illustrates it much better. He was a wit and a poet. He had been
State Librarian of Tennessee. Nothing could keep him out of the service,
though he was a sad cripple and wholly unequal to its requirements. He fell
ill. I had the opportunity to care for him. When the war was over his old
friend, George D. Prentice, called him to Louisville to take an editorial
place on the Journal.

About the same time Mr. Walter Haldeman returned from the South and resumed
the suspended publication of the Louisville Courier. He was in the prime of
life, a man of surpassing energy, enterprise and industry, and had with
him the popular sympathy. Mr. Prentice was nearly three score and ten. The
stream had passed him by. The Journal was not only beginning to feel the
strain but was losing ground. In this emergency Hatcher came to the rescue.
I was just back from London and was doing noticeable work on the Nashville
Banner.

"Here is your man," said Hatcher to Mr. Prentice and Mr. Henderson, the
owners of the Journal; and I was invited to come to Louisville.

After I had looked over the field and inspected the Journal's books I was
satisfied that a union with the Courier was the wisest solution of the
newspaper situation, and told them so. Meanwhile Mr. Haldeman, whom I had
known in the Confederacy, sent for me. He offered me the same terms for
part ownership and sole editorship of the Courier, which the Journal people
had offered me. This I could not accept, but proposed as an alternative the
consolidation of the two on an equal basis. He was willing enough for the
consolidation, but not on equal terms. There was nothing for it but a
fight. I took the Journal and began to hammer the Courier.

A dead summer was before us, but Mr. Henderson had plenty of money and was
willing to spend it. During the contest not an unkind word was printed on
either side. After stripping the Journal to its heels it had very little
to go on or to show for what had once been a prosperous business. But
circulation flowed in. From eighteen hundred daily it quickly mounted to
ten thousand; from fifteen hundred weekly to fifty thousand. The middle of
October it looked as if we had a straight road before us.

But I knew better. I had discovered that the field, no matter how worked,
was not big enough to support two rival dailies. There was toward the last
of October on the edge of town a real-estate sale which Mr. Haldeman and I
attended. Here was my chance for a play. I must have bid up to a hundred
thousand dollars and did actually buy nearly ten thousand dollars of the
lots put up at auction, relying upon some money presently coming to my
wife.

I could see that it made an impression on Mr. Haldeman. Returning in the
carriage which had brought us out I said: "Mr. Haldeman, I am going to ruin
you. But I am going to run up a money obligation to Isham Henderson I shall
never be able to discharge. You need an editor. I need a publisher. Let
us put these two newspapers together, buy the Democrat, and, instead of
cutting one another's throats, go after Cincinnati and St. Louis. You will
recall that I proposed this to you in the beginning. What is the matter
with it now?"

Nothing was the matter with it. He agreed at once. The details were soon
adjusted. Ten days later there appeared upon the doorsteps of the city in
place of the three familiar visitors, a double-headed stranger, calling
itself the Courier-Journal. Our exclusive possession of the field thus
acquired lasted two years. At the end of these we found that at least the
appearance of competition was indispensable and willingly acepted an offer
from a proposed Republican organ for a division of the Press dispatches
which we controlled. Then and there the real prosperity of the
Courier-Journal began, the paper having made no money out of its monopoly.



IV


Reconstruction, as it was called--ruin were a fitter name for it--had just
begun. The South was imprisoned, awaiting the executioner. The Constitution
of the United States hung in the balance. The Federal Union faced the
threat of sectional despotism. The spirit of the time was martial law. The
gospel of proscription ruled in Congress. Radicalism, vitalized by the
murder of Abraham Lincoln and inflamed by the inadequate effort of Andrew
Johnson to carry out the policies of Lincoln, was in the saddle riding
furiously toward a carpetbag Poland and a negroized Ireland.

The Democratic Party, which, had it been stronger, might have interposed,
lay helpless. It, too, was crushed to earth. Even the Border States, which
had not been embraced by the military agencies and federalized machinery
erected over the Gulf States, were seriously menaced. Never did newspaper
enterprise set out under gloomier auspices.

There was a party of reaction in Kentucky, claiming to be Democratic,
playing to the lead of the party of repression at the North. It refused to
admit that the head of the South was in the lion's mouth and that the first
essential was to get it out. The Courier-Journal proposed to stroke the
mane, not twist the tail of the lion. Thus it stood between two fires.
There arose a not unnatural distrust of the journalistic monopoly created
by the consolidation of the three former dailies into a single newspaper,
carrying an unfamiliar hyphenated headline. Touching its policy of
sectional conciliation it picked its way perilously through the cross
currents of public opinion. There was scarcely a sinister purpose that was
not alleged against it by its enemies; scarcely a hostile device that was
not undertaken to put it down and drive it out.

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