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Marse Henry (Vol. 2)

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"Marse Henry"

An Autobiography

By

Henry Watterson




Volume II

Illustrated




Contents



Chapter the Thirteenth

Charles Eames and Charles Sumner-Schurzand Lamar--I Go to Congress--A
Heroic Kentuckian--Stephen Foster and His Songs--Music and Theodore
Thomas

Chapter the Fourteenth

Henry Adams and the Adams Family--John Hay and Frank Mason--The Three
_Mousquetaires_ of Culture--Paris--"The Frenchman"--The South of
France

Chapter the Fifteenth

Still the Gay Capital of France--Its Environs--Walewska and De
Morny--Thackeray in Paris--A _Pension_ Adventure

Chapter the Sixteenth

Monte Carlo--The European Shrine of Sport and Fashion--Apocryphal
Gambling Stories--Leopold, King of the Belgians--An Able and
Picturesque Man of Business

Chapter the Seventeenth

A Parisian _Pension_--The Widow of Walewska--Napoleon's
Daughter-in-Law--The Changeless--A Moral and Orderly City

Chapter the Eighteenth

The Grover Cleveland Period--President Arthur and Mr. Blaine--John
Chamberlin--The Decrees of Destiny

Chapter the Nineteenth

Mr. Cleveland in the White House--Mr. Bayard in the Department of
State--Queer Appointments to Office--The One-Party Power--The End of
North and South Sectionalism

Chapter the Twentieth

The Real Grover Cleveland--Two Clevelands Before and After Marriage--A
Correspondence and a Break of Personal Relations

Chapter the Twenty-First

Stephen Foster, the Song-Writer--A Friend Comes to the Rescu
His Originality--"My Old Kentucky Home" and the "Old Folks at
Home"--General Sherman and "Marching Through Georgia"

Chapter the Twenty-Second

Theodore Roosevelt--His Problematic Character--He Offers Me an
Appointment--His _Bonhomie_ and Chivalry--Proud of His Rebel Kin

Chapter the Twenty-Third

The Actor and the Journalist--The Newspaper and the State--Joseph
Jefferson--His Personal and Artistic Career--Modest Character and
Religious Belief

Chapter the Twenty-Fourth

The Writing of Memoirs--Some Characteristics of Carl Shurz--Sam
Bowles--Horace White and the Mugwumps

Chapter the Twenty-Fifth

Every Trade Has Its Tricks--I Play One on William McKinley--Far Away
Party Politics and Political Issues

Chapter the Twenty-Sixth

A Libel on Mr. Cleveland--His Fondness for Cards--Some Poker
Stories--The "Senate Game"--Tom Ochiltree, Senator Allison and General
Schenck

Chapter the Twenty-Seventh

The Profession of Journalism--Newspapers and Editors in
America--Bennett, Greeley and Raymond--Forney and Dana--The Education
of a Journalist

Chapter the Twenty-Eighth

Bullies and Braggarts--Some Kentucky Illustrations--The Old Galt
House--The Throckmortons--A Famous Sugeon--"Old Hell's Delight"

Chapter the Twenty-Ninth

About Political Conventions, State and National--"Old Ben Butler"--His
Appearance as a Trouble-Maker in the Democratic National Convention of
1892--Tarifa and the Tariff--Spain as a Frightful Example

Chapter the Thirtieth

The Makers of the Republic--Lincoln, Jefferson, Clay and Webster--The
Proposed League of Nations--The Wilsonian Incertitude--The "New
Freedom"

Chapter the Thirty-First

The Age of Miracles--A Story of Franklin Pierce--Simon Suggs
Billy Sunday--Jefferson Davis and Aaron Burr--Certain Constitutional
Shortcomings

Chapter the Thirty-Second

A War Episode--I Meet my Fater--I Marry and Make a Home--The Ups and
Downs of Life Lead to a Happy Old Age




Illustrations



Henry Watterson--Fifty Years Ago

Henry Woodfire Grady--One of Mr. Watterson's "Boys"

Mr. Watterson's Library at "Mansfield"

A Corner of "Mansfield"--Home of Mr. Watterson

Henry Watterson (Photograph Taken in Florida)

Henry Watterson. From a painting by Louis Mark in the Manhattan Club, New
York





"MARSE HENRY"




Chapter the Thirteenth

Charles Eames and Charles Sumner-Schurzand Lamar--I Go to Congress--A
Heroic Kentuckian--Stephen Foster and His Songs--Music and Theodore
Thomas



I


Swift's definition of "conversation" did not preside over or direct the
daily intercourse between Charles Sumner, Charles Eames and Robert J.
Walker in the old days in the National Capital. They did not converse. They
discoursed. They talked sententiously in portentous essays and learned
dissertations. I used to think it great, though I nursed no little dislike
of Sumner.

Charles Eames was at the outset of his career a ne'er-do-well New
Englander--a Yankee Jack-of-all-trades--kept at the front by an exceedingly
clever wife. Through the favor she enjoyed at court he received from Pierce
and Buchanan unimportant diplomatic appointments. During their sojourns in
Washington their home was a kind of political and literary headquarters.
Mrs. Eames had established a salon--the first attempt of the kind made
there; and it was altogether a success. Her Sundays evenings were notable,
indeed. Whoever was worth seeing, if in town, might usually be found there.
Charles Sumner led the procession. He was a most imposing person. Both
handsome and distinguished in appearance, he possessed in an eminent degree
the Harvard pragmatism--or, shall I say, affectation?--and seemed never
happy except on exhibition. He had made a profitable political and personal
issue of the Preston Brooks attack. Brooks was an exceeding light weight,
but he did for Sumner more than Sumner could ever have done for himself.

In the Charles Eames days Sumner was exceedingly disagreeable to me. Many
people, indeed, thought him so. Many years later, in the Greeley campaign
of 1872, Schurz brought us together--they had become as very brothers in
the Senate--and I found him the reverse of my boyish ill conceptions.

He was a great old man. He was a delightful old man, every inch a
statesman, much of a scholar, and something of a hero. I grew in time to be
actually fond of him, passed with him entire afternoons and evenings in his
library, mourned sincerely when he died, and went with Schurz to Boston, on
the occasion when that great German-American delivered the memorial address
in honor of the dead Abolitionist.

Of all the public men of that period Carl Schurz most captivated me. When
we first came into personal relations, at the Liberal Convention, which
assembled at Cincinnati and nominated Greeley and Brown as a presidential
ticket, he was just turned forty-three; I, two and thirty. The closest
intimacy followed. Our tastes were much alike. Both of us had been educated
in music. He played the piano with intelligence and feeling--especially
Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, neither of us ever having quite reached
the "high jinks" of Wagner.

To me his oratory was wonderful. He spoke to an audience of five or ten
thousand as he would have talked to a party of three or six. His style was
simple, natural, unstrained; the lucid statement and cogent argument now
and again irradiated by a salient passage of satire or a burst of not too
eloquent rhetoric.

He was quite knocked out by the nomination of Horace Greeley. For a long
time he could not reconcile himself to support the ticket. Horace White and
I addressed ourselves to the task of "fetching him into camp"--there being
in point of fact nowhere else for him to go--though we had to get up what
was called The Fifth Avenue Conference to make a bridge.

Truth to say, Schurz never wholly adjusted himself to political conditions
in the United States. He once said to me in one of the querulous moods that
sometimes overcame him: "If I should live a hundred years my enemies would
still call me a--Dutchman!"

It was Schurz, as I have said, who brought Lamar and me together. The
Mississippian had been a Secession Member of Congress when I was a Unionist
scribe in the reporters' gallery. I was a furious partisan in those
days and disliked the Secessionists intensely. Of them, Lamar was most
aggressive. I later learned that he was very many-sided and accomplished,
the most interesting and lovable of men. He and Schurz "froze together,"
as, brought together by Schurz, he and I "froze together." On one side he
was a sentimentalist and on the other a philosopher, but on all sides a
fighter.

They called him a dreamer. He sprang from a race of chevaliers and
scholars. Oddly enough, albeit in his moods a recluse, he was a man of
the world; a favorite in society; very much at home in European courts,
especially in that of England; the friend of Thackeray, at whose house,
when in London, he made his abode. Lady Ritchie--Anne Thackeray--told me
many amusing stories of his whimsies. He was a man among brainy men and a
lion among clever women.

We had already come to be good friends and constant comrades when the
whirligig of time threw us together for a little while in the lower house
of Congress. One day he beckoned me over to his seat. He was leaning
backward with his hands crossed behind his head.

As I stood in front of him he said: "On the eighth of February, 1858, Mrs.
Gwin, of California, gave a fancy dress ball. Mr. Lamar, of Mississippi,
a member of Congress, was there. Also a glorious young woman--a vision of
beauty and grace--with whom the handsome and distinguished young statesman
danced--danced once, twice, thrice, taking her likewise down to supper.
He went to bed, turned his face to the wall and dreamed of her. That was
twenty years ago. To-day this same Mr. Lamar, after an obscure interregnum,
was with Mrs. Lamar looking over Washington for an apartment. In quest of
cheap lodging they came to a mean house in a mean quarter, where a poor,
wizened, ill-clad woman showed them through the meanly furnished rooms. Of
course they would not suffice.

"As they were coming away the great Mr. Lamar said to the poor landlady,
'Madam, have you lived long in Washington?' She said all her life. 'Madam,'
he continued, 'were you at a fancy dress ball given by Mrs. Senator Gwin
of California, the eighth of February, 1858?' She said she was. 'Do you
remember,' the statesman, soldier and orator continued, 'a young and
handsome Mississippian, a member of Congress, by the name of Lamar?' She
said she didn't."

I rather think that Lamar was the biggest brained of all the men I have met
in Washington. He possessed the courage of his convictions. A doctrinaire,
there was nothing of the typical doctrinaire, or theorist, about him. He
really believed that cotton was king and would compel England to espouse
the cause of the South.

Despite his wealth of experience and travel he was not overmuch of a
raconteur, but he once told me a good story about his friend Thackeray. The
two were driving to a banquet of the Literary Fund, where Dickens was to
preside. "Lamar," said Thackeray, "they say I can't speak. But if I want to
I can speak. I can speak every bit as good as Dickens, and I am going to
show you to-night that I can speak almost as good as you." When the moment
arrived Thackeray said never a word. Returning in the cab, both silent,
Thackeray suddenly broke forth. "Lamar," he exclaimed, "don't you think you
have heard the greatest speech to-night that was never delivered?"



II


Holding office, especially going to Congress, had never entered any wish
or scheme of mine. Office seemed to me ever a badge of bondage. I knew too
much of the national capital to be allured by its evanescent and lightsome
honors. When the opportunity sought me out none of its illusions appealed
to me. But after a long uphill fight for personal and political recognition
in Kentucky an election put a kind of seal upon the victory I had won and
enabled me in a way to triumph over my enemies. I knew that if I accepted
the nomination offered me I would get a big popular vote--as I did--and so,
one full term, and half a term, incident to the death of the sitting member
for the Louisville district being open to me, I took the short term,
refusing the long term.

Though it was midsummer and Congress was about to adjourn I went to
Washington and was sworn in. A friend of mine, Col. Wake Holman, had made
a bet with one of our pals I would be under arrest before I had been
twenty-four hours in town, and won it. It happened in this wise: The night
of the day when I took my seat there was an all-night session. I knew too
well what that meant, and, just from a long tiresome journey, I went to bed
and slept soundly till sunrise. Just as I was up and dressing for a stroll
about the old, familiar, dearly loved quarter of the town there came an
imperative rap upon the door and a voice said: "Get up, colonel, quick!
This is a sergeant at arms. There has been a call of the House and I am
after you. Everybody is drunk, more or less, and they are noisy to have
some fun with you."

It was even as he said. Everybody, more or less, was drunk--especially the
provisional speaker whom Mr. Randall had placed in the chair--and when we
arrived and I was led a prisoner down the center aisle pandemonium broke
loose.

They had all sorts of fun with me, such as it was. It was moved that I
be fined the full amount of my mileage. Then a resolution was offered
suspending my membership and sending me under guard to the old Capitol
prison. Finally two or three of my friends rescued me and business was
allowed to proceed. It was the last day of a very long session and those
who were not drunk were worn out.

When I returned home there was a celebration in honor of the bet Wake
Holman had won at my expense. Wake was the most attractive and lovable of
men, by nature a hero, by profession a "filibuster" and soldier of fortune.
At two and twenty he was a private in Col. Humphrey Marshall's Regiment
of Kentucky Riflemen, which reached the scene of hostilities upon the Rio
Grande in the midsummer of 1846. He had enlisted from Owen county--"Sweet
Owen," as it used to be called--and came of good stock, his father, Col.
Harry Holman, in the days of aboriginal fighting and journalism, a frontier
celebrity. Wake's company, out on a scout, was picked off by the Mexicans,
and the distinction between United States soldiers and Texan rebels not
being yet clearly established, a drumhead court-martial ordered "the
decimation."

This was a decree that one of every ten of the Yankee captives should be
shot. There being a hundred of Marshall's men, one hundred beans--ninety
white and ten black--were put in a hat. Then the company was mustered as on
dress parade. Whoso drew a white bean was to be held prisoner of war; whoso
drew a black bean was to die.

In the early part of the drawing Wake drew a white bean. Toward the close
the turn of a neighbor and comrade from Owen county who had left a wife and
baby at home was called. He and Wake were standing together, Holman brushed
him aside, walked out in his place and drew his bean. It turned out to be a
white one. Twice within the half hour death had looked him in the eye and
found no blinking there.

I have seen quite a deal of hardihood, endurance, suffering, in both women
and men; splendid courage on the field of action; perfect self-possession
in the face of danger; but I rather think that Wake Holman's exploit that
day--next to actually dying for a friend, what can be nobler than being
willing to die for him?--is the bravest thing I know or have ever been told
of mortal man.

Wake Holman went to Cuba in the Lopez Rebellion of 1851, and fought under
Pickett at the Battle of Cardenas. In 1855-56 he was in Nicaragua, with
Walker. He commanded a Kentucky regiment of cavalry on the Union side in
our War of Sections. After the war he lived the life of a hunter and fisher
at his home in Kentucky; a cheery, unambitious, big-brained and big-hearted
cherub, whom it would not do to "projeck" with, albeit with entire safety
you could pick his pocket; the soul of simplicity and amiability.

To have known him was an education in primal manhood. To sit at his
hospitable board, with him at the head of the table, was an inspiration in
the genius of life and the art of living. One of his familiars started the
joke that when Wake drew the second white bean "he got a peep." He took
it kindly; though in my intimacy with him, extending over thirty years, I
never heard him refer to any of his adventures as a soldier.

It was not possible that such a man should provide for his old age. He had
little forecast. He knew not the value of money. He had humor, affection
and courage. I held him in real love and honor. When the Mexican War
Pension Act was passed by Congress I took his papers to General Black, the
Commissioner of Pensions, and related this story.

"I have promised Gen. Cerro Gordo Williams," said General Black, referring
to the then senior United States Senator from Kentucky, "that his name
shall go first on the roll of these Mexican pensioners. But"--and the
General looked beamingly in my face, a bit tearful, and says he: "Wake
Holman's name shall come right after." And there it is.



III


I was very carefully and for those times not ignorantly taught in music.
Schell, his name was, and they called him "Professor." He lived over in
Georgetown, where he had organized a little group of Prussian refugees into
a German club, and from my tenth to my fifteenth year--at first regularly,
and then in a desultory way as I came back to Washington City from my
school in Philadelphia, he hammered Bach and Handel and Mozart--nothing so
modern as Mendelssohn--into my not unwilling nor unreceptive mind, for my
bent was in the beginning to compose dramas, and in the end operas.

Adelina Patti was among my child companions. Once in the national capital,
when I was 12 years old and Adelina 9, we played together at a charity
concert. She had sung "The Last Rose of Summer," and I had played her
brother-in-law's variation upon "Home, Sweet Home." The audience was
enthusiastic. We were called out again and again. Then we came on the stage
together, and the applause increasing I sat down at the keyboard and played
an accompaniment with my own interpolations upon "Old Folks At Home," which
I had taught Adelina, and she sang the words. Then they fairly took the
roof off.

Once during a sojourn in Paris I was thrown with Christine Nilsson. She was
in the heyday of her success at the Theater Lyrique under the patronage of
Madame Miolan-Carvalho. One day I said to her: "The time may come when you
will be giving concerts." She was indignant. "Nevertheless," I continued,
"let me teach you a sure encore." I played her Stephen Foster's immortal
ditty. She was delighted. The sequel was that it served her even a better
turn than it had served Adelina Patti.

I played and transposed for the piano most of the melodies of Foster as
they were published, they being first produced in public by Christy's
Minstrels.



IV


Stephen Foster was the ne'er-do-well of a good Pennsylvania family. A
sister of his had married a brother of James Buchanan. There were two
daughters of this marriage, nieces of the President, and when they were
visiting the White House we had--shall I dare write it?--high jinks with
our nigger-minstrel concerts on the sly.

Will S. Hays, the rival of Foster as a song writer and one of my reporters
on the Courier-Journal, told me this story: "Foster," said he, "was a good
deal of what you might call a barroom loafer. He possessed a sweet tenor
voice before it was spoiled by drink, and was fond of music, though
technically he knew nothing about it. He had a German friend who when
he died left him a musical scrapbook, of all sorts of odds and ends of
original text. There is where Foster got his melodies. When the scrapbook
gave out he gave out."

I took it as merely the spleen of a rival composer. But many years after
in Vienna I heard a concert given over exclusively to the performance of
certain posthumous manuscripts of Schubert. Among the rest were selections
from an unfinished opera--"Rosemonde," I think it was called--in which the
whole rhythm and movements and parts of the score of Old Folks at Home were
the feature.

It was something to have grown up contemporary, as it were, with these
songs. Many of them were written in the old Rowan homestead, just outside
of Bardstown, Ky., where Louis Philippe lived and taught, and for a season
Talleyrand made his abode. The Rowans were notable people. John Rowan,
the elder, head of the house, was a famous lawyer, who divided oratorical
honors with Henry Clay, and like Clay, was a Senator in Congress; his son,
"young John," as he was called, Stephen Foster's pal, went as minister to
Naples, and fought duels, and was as Bob Acres wanted to be, "a devil of a
fellow." He once told me he had been intimate with Thackeray when they were
wild young men in Paris, and that they had both of them known the woman
whom Thackeray had taken for the original of Becky Sharp.

The Foster songs quite captivated my boyhood. I could sing a little, as
well as play, and learned each of them--especially Old Folks at Home and
My Old Kentucky Home--as they appeared. Their contemporary vogue was
tremendous. Nothing has since rivalled the popular impression they made,
except perhaps the Arthur Sullivan melodies.

Among my ambitions to be a great historian, dramatist, soldier and writer
of romance I desired also to be a great musician, especially a great
pianist. The bone-felon did the business for this later. But all my life I
have been able to thumb the keyboard at least for the children to dance,
and it has been a recourse and solace sometimes during intervals of
embittered journalism and unprosperous statesmanship.



V


Theodore Thomas and I used to play duos together. He was a master of the
violin before he took to orchestration. We remained the best of friends to
the end of his days.

On the slightest provocation, or none, we passed entire nights together.
Once after a concert he suddenly exclaimed: "Don't you think Wagner was a
---- fraud?"

A little surprised even by one of his outbreaks, I said: "Wagner may have
written some trick music but I hardly think that he was a fraud."

He reflected a moment. "Well," he continued, "it may not lie in my mouth to
say it--and perhaps I ought not to say it--I know I am most responsible for
the Wagner craze--but I consider him a ---- fraud."

He had just come from a long "classic entertainment," was worn out with
travel and worry, and meant nothing of the sort.

After a very tiresome concert when he was railing at the hard lines of a
peripatetic musician I said: "Come with me and I will give you a soothing
quail and as dry a glass of champagne as you ever had in your life."

The wine was poured out and he took a sip.

"I don't call that dry wine," he crossly said, and took another sip. "My
God," without a pause he continued, "isn't that great?"

Of course he was impulsive, even impetuous. Beneath his seeming cold
exterior and admirable self-control--the discipline of the master
artist--lay the moods and tenses of the musical temperament. He knew little
or nothing outside of music and did not care to learn. I tried to interest
him in politics. It was of no use. First he laughed my suggestions to scorn
and then swore like a trooper. German he was, through and through. It
was well that he passed away before the world war. Pat Gilmore--"Patrick
Sarsfield," we always called him--was a born politician, and if he had not
been a musician he would have been a statesman. I kept the peace between
him and Theodore Thomas by an ingenious system of telling all kinds of kind
things each had said of the other, my "repetitions" being pure inventions
of my own.




Chapter the Fourteenth

Henry Adams and the Adams Family--John Hay and Frank Mason--The Three
_Mousquetaires_ of Culture--Paris--"The Frenchman"--The South of
France



I


I have been of late reading The Education of Henry Adams, and it recalls
many persons and incidents belonging to the period about which I am now
writing. I knew Henry Adams well; first in London, then in Boston and
finally throughout his prolonged residence in Washington City. He was an
Adams; very definitely an Adams, but, though his ghost may revisit the
glimpses of the moon and chide me for saying so, with an English "cut to
his jib."

No three brothers could be more unlike than Charles Francis, John Quincy
and Henry Adams. Brooks Adams I did not know. They represented the fourth
generation of the brainiest pedigree--that is in continuous line--known to
our family history. Henry thought he was a philosopher and tried to be one.
He thought he was a man of the world and wanted to be one. He was, in spite
of himself, a provincial.

Provincialism is not necessarily rustic, even suburban. There is no
provincial quite so provincial as he who has passed his life in great
cities. The Parisian boulevardier taken away from the asphalt, the cockney
a little off Clapham Common and the Strand, is lost. Henry Adams knew
his London and his Paris, his Boston and his Quincy--we must not forget
Quincy--well. But he had been born, and had grown up, between the lids of
history, and for all his learning and travel he never got very far outside
them.

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