Part 14

The handsomest of men, tall and stately, he could pass no way without attracting attention; strangers in the Senate gallery first asked to have him pointed out to them, and seeing him to all appearance idling his time with his jacknife and bits of soft wood which he whittled into various shapes of hearts and anchors for distribution among his lady acquaintances, they usually went away thinking him a queer old man. So inded he was; yet on his feet and in action singularly impressive, and, when he chose, altogether the statesman and orator.

There united in him the spirits of the troubadour and the spearman. Ivanhoe was not more gallant nor Bois-Guilbert fiercer. But the valor and the prowess were tempered by humor. Below the surging subterranean flood that stirred and lifted him to high attempt, he was a comedian who had tales to tell, and told them wondrous well. On a lazy summer afternoon on the shady side of Willard's Hotel--the Senate not in session--he might be seen, an admiring group about him, spinning these yarns, mostly of personal experience--rarely if ever repeating himself--and in tone, gesture and grimace reproducing the drolleries of the backwoods, which from boyhood had been his home.

He spared not himself. According to his own account he had been in the early days of his Texas career a drunkard. "Everybody got drunk," I once heard him say, referring to the beginning of the Texas revolution, as he gave a side-splitting picture of that bloody episode, "and I realized that somebody must get sober and keep sober."

From the hour of that realization, when he "swore off," to the hour of his death he never touched intoxicants of any sort.

He had fought under Jackson, had served two terms in Congress and had been elected governor of Tennessee before he was forty. Then he fell in love. The young lady was a beautiful girl, well-born and highly educated, a schoolmate of my mother's elder sister. She was persuaded by her family to throw over an obscure young man whom she preferred, and to marry a young man so eligible and distinguished.

He took her to Nashville, the state capital. There were rounds of gayety. Three months passed. Of a sudden the little town woke to the startling rumor, which proved to be true, that the brilliant young couple had come to a parting of the ways. The wife had returned to her people. The husband had resigned his office and was gone, no one knew where.

A few years later Mrs. Houston applied for a divorce, which in those days had to be granted by the state legislature. Inevitably reports derogatory to her had got abroad. Almost the first tidings of Governor Houston's whereabouts were contained in a letter he wrote from somewhere in the Indian country to my father, a member of the legislature to whom Mrs. Houston had applied, in which he said that these reports had come to his ears. "They are," he wrote, "as false as hell. If they be not stopped I will return to Tennessee and have the heart's blood of him who repeats them. A nobler, purer woman never lived. She should be promptly given the divorce she asks. I alone am to blame."

She married again, though not the lover she had discarded. I knew her in her old age--a gentle, placid lady, in whose face I used to fancy I could read lines of sorrow and regret. He, to close this chapter, likewise married again a wise and womanly woman who bore him many children and with whom he lived happy ever after. Meanwhile, however, he had dwelt with the Indians and had become an Indian chief. "Big Drunk, they called me," he said to his familiars. His enemies averred that he brought into the world a whole tribe of half-breeds.

Houston was a rare performer before a popular audience. His speech abounded with argumentative appeal and bristled with illustrative anecdote, and, when occasion required, with apt repartee.

Once an Irishman in the crowd bawled out, "ye were goin' to sell Texas to England."

Houston paused long enough to center attention upon the quibble and then said: "My friend, I first tried, unsuccessfully, to have the United States take Texas as a gift. Not until I threatened to turn Texas over to England did I finally succeed. There may be within the sound of my voice some who have knowledge of sheep culture. They have doubtless seen a motherless lamb put to the breast of a cross old ewe who refused it suck. Then the wise shepherd calls his dog and there is no further trouble. My friend, England was my dog."

He was inveighing against the New York Tribune. Having described Horace Greeley as the sum of all villainy--"whose hair is white, whose skin is white, whose eyes are white, whose clothes are white, and whose liver is in my opinion of the same color"--he continued: "The assistant editor of the Try-bune is Robinson--Solon Robinson. He is an Irishman, an Orange Irishman, a redhaired Irishman!" Casting his eye over the audience and seeing quite a sprinkling of redheads, and realizing that he had perpetrated a slip of tongue, he added: "Fellow citizens, when I say that Robinson is a red-haired Irishman I mean no disrespect to persons whose hair is of that color. I have been a close observer of men and women for thirty years, and I never knew a red-haired man who was not an honest man, nor a red-headed woman who was not a virtuous woman; and I give it you as my candid opinion that had it not been for Robinson's red hair he would have been hanged long ago."

His pathos was not far behind his humor--though he used it sparingly. At a certain town in Texas there lived a desperado who had threatened to kill him on sight. The town was not on the route of his speaking dates but he went out of his way to include it. A great concourse assembled to hear him. He spoke in the open air and, as he began, observed his man leaning against a tree armed to the teeth and waiting for him to finish. After a few opening remarks, he dropped into the reminiscential. He talked of the old times in Texas. He told in thrilling terms of the Alamo and of Goliad. There was not a dry eye in earshot. Then he grew personal.

"I see Tom Gilligan over yonder. A braver man never lived than Tom Gilligan. He fought by my side at San Jacinto. Together we buried poor Bill Holman. But for his skill and courage I should not be here to-day. He--"

There was a stir in front. Gilligan had thrown away his knife and gun and was rushing unarmed through the crowd, tears streaming down his face.

"For God's sake, Houston," he cried, "don't say another word and forgive me my cowardly intention."

From that time to his death Tom Gilligan was Houston's devoted friend.

General Houston voted against the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and as a consequence lost his seat in the Senate. It was thought, and freely said, that for good and all he was down and out. He went home and announced himself a candidate for governor of Texas.

The campaign that followed was of unexampled bitterness. The secession wave was already mounting high. Houston was an uncompromising Unionist. His defeat was generally expected. But there was no beating such a man in a fair and square contest before the people. When the votes were counted he led his competitor by a big majority. As governor he refused two years later to sign the ordinance of secession and was deposed from office by force. He died before the end of the war which so signally vindicated his wisdom and verified his forecast.

III

Stephen Arnold Douglas was the Charles James Fox of American politics. He was not a gambler as Fox was. But he went the other gaits and was possessed of a sweetness of disposition which made him, like Fox, loved where he was personally known. No one could resist the bonhomie of Douglas.

They are not all Puritans in New England. Catch a Yankee off his base, quite away from home, and he can be as gay as anybody. Boston and Charleston were in high party times nearest alike of any two American cities.

Douglas was a Green Mountain boy. He was born in Vermont. As Seargent Prentiss had done he migrated beyond the Alleghanies before he came of age, settling in Illinois as Prentiss had settled in Mississippi, to grow into a typical Westerner as Prentiss into a typical Southerner.

There was never a more absurd theory than that, begot of sectional aims and the sectional spirit, which proposed a geographic alignment of Cavalier and Puritan. When sectionalism had brought a kindred people to blows over the institution of African slavery there were Puritans who fought on the Southern side and Cavaliers who fought on the Northern side. What was Stonewall Jackson but a Puritan? What were Custer, Stoneman and Kearny but Cavaliers? Wadsworth was as absolute an aristocrat as Hampton.

In the old days before the war of sections the South was full of typical Southerners of Northern birth. John A. Quitman, who went from New York, and Robert J. Walker, who went from Pennsylvania to Mississippi; James H. Hammond, whose father, a teacher, went from Massachusetts to South Carolina. John Slidell, born and bred in New York, was thirty years old when he went to Louisiana. Albert Sidney Johnston, the rose and expectancy of the young Confederacy--the most typical of rebel soldiers--had not a drop of Southern blood in his veins, born in Kentucky a few months after his father and mother had arrived there from Connecticut. The list might be extended indefinitely.

Climate, which has something to do with temperament, has not so much to do with character as is often imagined. All of us are more or less the creatures of environment. In the South after a fashion the duello flourished. Because it had not flourished in the North there rose a notion that the Northerners would not fight. It proved to those who thought it a costly mistake.

Down to the actual secession of 1860-61 the issue of issues--the issue behind all issues--was the preservation of the Union. Between 1820 and 1850, by a series of compromises, largely the work of Mr. Clay, its threatened disruption had been averted. The Kansas-Nebraska Bill put a sore strain upon conservative elements North and South. The Whig Party went to pieces. Mr. Clay passed from the scene. Had he lived until the presidential election of 1852 he would have given his support to Franklin Pierce, as Daniel Webster did. Mr. Buchanan was not a General Jackson. Judge Douglas, who sought to play the rôle of Mr. Clay, was too late. The secession leaders held the whip hand in the Gulf States. South Carolina was to have her will at last. Crash came the shot in Charleston Harbor and the fall of Sumter. Curiously enough two persons of Kentucky birth--Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis--led the rival hosts of war into which an untenable and indefensible system of slave labor, for which the two sections were equally responsible, had precipitated an unwilling people.

Had Judge Douglas lived he would have been Mr. Lincoln's main reliance in Congress. As a debater his resources and prowess were rarely equaled and never surpassed. His personality, whether in debate or private conversation, was attractive in the highest degree. He possessed a full, melodious voice, convincing fervor and ready wit.