Part 25

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

Chapter the Eleventh

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

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

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

With cannon, mortar and petard We tender you our Beauregard—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Though many of those proposing the new movement were familiar acquaintances—some of them personal friends—the scheme was in the air, as it were. Its three newspaper bellwethers—Samuel Bowles, Horace White and Murat Halstead—were especially well known to me; so were Horace Greeley, Carl Schurz and Charles Sumner, Stanley Matthews being my kinsman, George Hoadley and Cassius M. Clay next-door neighbors. But they were not the men I had trained with—not my “crowd”—and it was a question how far I might be able to reconcile myself, not to mention my political associates, to such company, even conceding that they proceeded under good fortune with a good plan, offering the South extrication from its woes and the Democratic Party an entering wedge into a solid and hitherto irresistible North.

Nevertheless, I resolved to go a little in advance to Cincinnati, to have a look at the stalking horse there to be displayed, free to take it or leave it as I liked, my bridges and lines of communication quite open and intact.

III

A livelier and more variegated omnium-gatherum was never assembled. They had already begun to straggle in when I arrived. There were long-haired and spectacled doctrinaires from New England, spliced by short-haired and stumpy emissaries from New York—mostly friends of Horace Greeley, as it turned out. There were brisk Westerners from Chicago and St. Louis. If Whitelaw Reid, who had come as Greeley’s personal representative, had his retinue, so had Horace White and Carl Schurz. There were a few rather overdressed persons from New Orleans brought up by Governor Warmouth, and a motely array of Southerners of every sort, who were ready to clutch at any straw that promised relief to intolerable conditions. The full contingent of Washington correspondents was there, of course, with sharpened eyes and pens to make the most of what they had already begun to christen a conclave of cranks.

Bowles and Halstead met me at the station, and we drove to the St. Nicholas Hotel, where Schurz and White were awaiting us. Then and there was organized a fellowship which in the succeeding campaign cut a considerable figure and went by the name of the Quadrilateral. We resolved to limit the Presidential nominations of the convention to Charles Francis Adams, Bowles’ candidate, and Lyman Trumbull, White’s candidate, omitting altogether, because of specific reasons urged by White, the candidacy of B. Gratz Brown, who because of his Kentucky connections had better suited my purpose.

The very next day the secret was abroad, and Whitelaw Reid came to me to ask why in a newspaper combine of this sort the New York Tribune had been left out.

To my mind it seemed preposterous that it had been or should be, and I stated as much to my new colleagues. They offered objection which to me appeared perverse if not childish. They did not like Reid, to begin with. He was not a principal like the rest of us, but a subordinate. Greeley was this, that and the other. He could never be relied upon in any coherent practical plan of campaign. To talk about him as a candidate was ridiculous.

I listened rather impatiently and finally I said: “Now, gentlemen, in this movement we shall need the New York Tribune. If we admit Reid we clinch it. You will all agree that Greeley has no chance of a nomination, and so by taking him in we both eat our cake and have it.”

On this view of the case Reid was invited to join us, and that very night he sat with us at the St. Nicholas, where from night to night until the end we convened and went over the performances and developments of the day and concerted plans for the morrow.

As I recall these symposiums some amusing and some plaintive memories rise before me.

The first serious business that engaged us was the killing of the boom for Judge David Davis, of the Supreme Court, which was assuming definite and formidable proportions. The preceding winter it had been incubating at Washington under the ministration of some of the most astute politicians of the time, mainly, however, Democratic members of Congress.