Part 44

That chance gathering of heedless persons, stirred by the bombast of self-exploiting orators eager for notoriety or display—loose mobs of local nondescripts led by pension sharks so aptly described by the gallant General Bragg, of Wisconsin, as coffee coolers and camp followers—should tear their passion to tatters with the thought that Virginia, exercising an indisputable right and violating no reasonable sensibility, should elect to send memorials of Washington and Lee for the Hall of Statues in the nation’s Capitol, came in the accustomed way of bloody-shirt agitation. It merely proved how easily men are led when taken in droves and stirred by partyism. Such men either bore no part in the fighting when fighting was the order of the time, or else they were too ignorant and therefore too unpatriotic to comprehend the meaning of the intervening years and the glory these had brought with the expanse of national progress and prowess. In spite of their lack of representative character it was not easy to repress impatience at ebullitions of misguided zeal so ignoble; and of course it was not possible to dissuade or placate them.

All the while never a people more eager to get together than the people of the United States after the War of Sections, as never a people so averse to getting into that war. A very small group of extremists and doctrinaires had in the beginning made a War of Sections possible. Enough of these survived in the days of Cleveland and McKinley to keep sectionalism alive.

It was mainly sectional clamor out for partisan advantage. But it made the presidential campaigns lurid in certain quarters. There was no end of objurgation, though it would seem that even the most embittered Northerner and ultra Republican who could couple the names of Robert E. Lee and Benedict Arnold, as was often done in campaign lingo, would not hesitate, if his passions were roused or if he fancied he saw in it some profit to himself or his party, to liken George Washington to Judas Iscariot.

The placing of Lee’s statue in the Capitol at Washington made the occasion for this.

It is true that long before Confederate officers had sat in both Houses of Congress and in Republican and Democratic cabinets and upon the bench of the Supreme Court, and had served as ambassadors and envoys extraordinary in foreign lands. But McKinley’s doing was the crowning stroke of union and peace.

There had been a weary and varied interim. Sectionalism proved a sturdy plant. It died hard. We may waive the reconstruction period as ancient history. There followed it intense party spirit. Yet, in spite of extremists and malignants on both sides of the line, the South rallied equally with the North to the nation’s drumbeat after the Maine went down in the harbor of Havana. It fought as bravely and as loyally at Santiago and Manila. Finally, by the vote of the North, there came into the Chief Magistracy one who gloried in the circumstance that on the maternal side he came of fighting Southern stock; who, amid universal applause, declared that no Southerner could be prouder than he of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, apotheosizing an uncle, his mother’s brother, who had stood at the head of the Confederate naval establishment in Europe and had fitted out the Confederate cruisers, as the noblest and purest man he had ever known, a composite of Colonel Newcome and Henry Esmond.

Meanwhile the process of oblivion had gone on. The graven effigy of Jefferson Davis at length appeared upon the silver service of an American battleship. This told the Mississippi’s guests, wherever and whenever they might meet round her hospitable board, of national unification and peace, giving the lie to sectional malignancy. In the most famous and conspicuous of the national cemeteries now stands the monument of a Confederate general not only placed there by consent of the Government, but dedicated with fitting ceremonies supervised by the Department of War, which sent as its official representative the son of Grant, himself an army officer of rank and distinction.

The world has looked on, incredulous and amazed, whilst our country has risen to each successive act in the drama of reconciliation with increasing enthusiasm.

I have been all my life a Constitutional Nationalist; first the nation and then the state. The episode of the Confederacy seems already far away. It was an interlude, even as matters stood in the Sixties and Seventies, and now he who would thwart the unification of the country on the lines of oblivion, of mutual and reciprocal forgiveness, throws himself across the highway of his country’s future, and is a traitor equally to the essential principles of free government and the spirit of the age.

If sectionalism be not dead it should have no place in popular consideration. The country seems happily at last one with itself. The South, like the East and the West, has come to be the merest geographic expression. Each of its states is in the Union, precisely like the states of the East and the West, all in one and one in all. Interchanges of every sort exist.

These exchanges underlie and interlace our social, domestic and business fabric. That the arrangement and relation after half a century of strife thus established should continue through all time is the hope and prayer of every thoughtful, patriotic American. There is no greater dissonance to that sentiment in the South than in the North. To what end, therefore, except ignominious recrimination and ruinous dissension, could a revival of old sectional and partisan passions—if it were possible—be expected to reach?

Humor has played no small part in our politics. It was Col. Mulberry Sellers, Mark Twain’s hero, who gave currency to the conceit and enunciated the principle of “the old flag and an appropriation.” He did not claim the formula as his own, however. He got it, he said, of Senator Dillworthy, his patriotic file leader and ideal of Christian statesmanship.

The original of Senator Dillworthy was recognized the country over as Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, “Old Pom,” as he had come to be called, whose oleaginous piety and noisy patriotism, adjusting themselves with equal facility to the purloining of subsidies and the roasting of rebels, to prayer and land grants, had impressed themselves upon the Satirist of the Gilded Age as upon his immediate colleagues in Congress. He was a ruffle-shirted Pharisee, who affected the airs of a bishop, and resembled Cruikshank’s pictures of Pecksniff.

There have not been many “Old Poms” in our public life; or, for that matter Aaron Burrs either, and but one Benedict Arnold. That the chosen people of God did not dwell amid the twilight of the ages and in far-away Judea, but were reserved to a later time, and a region then undiscovered of men, and that the American republic was ordained of God to illustrate upon the theater of the New World the possibilities of free government in contrast with the failures and tyrannies and corruptions of the Old, I do truly believe. That is the first article in my confession of faith. And the second is like unto it, that Washington was raised up by God to create it, and that Lincoln was raised up by God to save it; else why the militia colonel of Virginia and the rail splitter of Illinois, for no reason that was obvious at the time, before all other men? God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform. The star of the sublime destiny that hung over the manager of our blessed Savior hung over the cradle of our blessed Union.

Thus far it has weathered each historic danger which has gone before to mark the decline and fall of nations; the struggle for existence; the foreign invasion; the internecine strife; the disputed succession; religious bigotry and racial conflict. One other peril confronts it—the demoralization of wealth and luxury; too great prosperity; the concentration and the abuse of power. Shall we survive the lures with which the spirit of evil, playing upon our self-love, seeks to trip our wayward footsteps, purse-pride and party spirit, mistaken zeal and perverted religion, fanaticism seeking to abridge liberty and liberty running to license, greed masquerading as a patriot and ambition making a commodity of glory—or under the process of a divine evolution shall we be able to mount and ride the waves which swallowed the tribes of Israel, which engulfed the phalanxes of Greece and the legions of Rome, and which still beat the sides and sweep the decks of Europe?

The one-party power we have escaped; the one-man power we have escaped. The stars in their courses fight for us; the virtue and intelligence of the people are still watchful and alert. Truth is mightier than ever, and justice, mounting guard even in the Hall of Statues, walks everywhere the battlements of freedom!

Chapter the Twentieth

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

There were, as I have said, two Grover Clevelands—before and after marriage—and, it might be added, between his defeat in 1888 and his election in 1892. He was so sure of his election in 1888 that he could not be induced to see the danger of the situation in his own State of New York, where David Bennett Hill, who had succeeded him in the governorship, was a candidate for reelection, and whom he personally detested, had become the ruling party force. He lost the State, and with it the election, while Hill won, and thereby arose an ugly faction fight.

I did not believe as the quadrennial period approached in 1892 that Mr. Cleveland could be elected. I still think he owed his election, and Harrison his defeat, to the Homestead riots of the midsummer, which transferred the labor vote bodily from the Republicans to the Democrats. Mainly on account of this belief I opposed his nomination that year.

In the Kentucky State Convention I made my opposition resonant, if not effective. “I understand,” I said in an address to the assembled delegates, “that you are all for Grover Cleveland?”

There came an affirmative roar.

“Well,” I continued, “I am not, and if you send me to the National Convention I will not vote for his nomination, if his be the only name presented, because I firmly believe that his nomination will mean the marching through a slaughter-house to an open grave, and I refuse to be party to such a folly.”

The answer of the convention was my appointment by acclamation, but it was many a day before I heard the last of my unlucky figure of speech.

Notwithstanding this splendid indorsement, I went to the National Convention feeling very like the traditional “poor boy at a frolic.” All seemed to me lost save honor and conviction. I had become the embodiment of my own epigram, “a tariff for revenue only.” Mr. Cleveland, in the beginning very much taken by it, had grown first lukewarm and then frightened. His “Free Trade” message of 1887 had been regarded by the party as an answering voice. But I knew better.

In the national platform, over the protest of Whitney, his organizer, and Vilas, his spokesman, I had forced him to stand on that gospel. He flew into a rage and threatened to modify, if not to repudiate, the plank in his letter of acceptance. We were still on friendly terms and, upon reaching home, I wrote him the following letter. It reads like ancient history, but, as the quarrel which followed cut a certain figure in the political chronicle of the time, the correspondence may not be historically out of date, or biographically uninteresting:

MR. WATTERSON TO MR. CLEVELAND

Courier-Journal Office, Louisville, July 9, 1892.—My Dear Mr. President: I inclose you two editorial articles from the Courier-Journal, and, that their spirit and purpose may not be misunderstood by you, I wish to add a word or two of a kind directly and entirely personal.