Part 9

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

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.