Part 15

He had married for his second wife the reigning belle of the National Capital, a great-niece of Mrs. Madison, whose very natural ambitions quickened and spurred his own.

It was fated otherwise. Like Clay, Webster, Calhoun and Blaine he was to be denied the Presidency. The White House was barred to him. He was not yet fifty when he died.

Tidings of his death took the country by surprise. But already the sectional battle was on and it produced only a momentary impression, to be soon forgotten amid the overwhelming tumult of events. He has lain in his grave now nearly sixty years. Upon the legislation of his time his name was writ first in water and then in blood. He received less than his desert in life and the historic record has scarcely done justice to his merit. He was as great a party leader as Clay. He could hold his own in debate with Webster and Calhoun. He died a very poor man, though his opportunity for enrichment by perfectly legitimate means were many. It is enough to say that he lacked the business instinct and set no value upon money; scrupulously upright in his official dealing; holding his senatorial duties above all price and beyond the suspicion of dirt.

Touching a matter which involved a certain outlay in the winter of 1861, he laughingly said to me: "I haven't the wherewithal to pay for a bottle of whisky and shall have to borrow of Arnold Harris the wherewithal to take me home."

His wife was a glorious creature. Early one morning calling at their home to see Judge Douglas I was ushered into the library, where she was engaged setting things to rights. My entrance took her by surprise. I had often seen her in full ballroom regalia and in becoming out-of-door costume, but as, in gingham gown and white apron, she turned, a little startled by my sudden appearance, smiles and blushes in spite of herself, I thought I had never seen any woman so beautiful before. She married again--the lover whom gossip said she had thrown over to marry Judge Douglas--and the story went that her second marriage was not very happy.

In the midsummer of 1859 the burning question among the newsmen of Washington was the Central American Mission. England and France had displayed activity in that quarter and it was deemed important that the United States should sit up and take notice. An Isthmian canal was being considered.

Speculation was rife whom Mr. Buchanan would send to represent us. The press gang of the National Capital was all at sea. There was scarcely a Democratic leader of national prominence whose name was not mentioned in that connection, though speculation from day to day eddied round Mr. James S. Rollins, of Missouri, an especial friend of the President and a most accomplished public man.

At the height of excitement I happened to be in the library of the State Department. I was on a step-ladder in quest of a book when I heard a messenger say to the librarian: "The President is in the Secretary's room and wants to have Mr. Dimitry come there right away." An inspiration shot through me like a flash. They had chosen Alexander Dimitry for the Central American Mission.

He was the official translator of the Department of State. Though an able and learned man he was not in the line of preferment. He was without political standing or backing of any sort. At first blush a more unlikely, impossible appointment could hardly be suggested. But--so on the instant I reasoned--he was peculiarly fitted in his own person for the post in question. Though of Greek origin he looked like a Spaniard. He spoke the Spanish language fluently. He had the procedure of the State Department at his finger's ends. He was the head of a charming domestic fabric--his daughters the prettiest girls in Washington. Why not?

I climbed down from my stepladder and made tracks for the office of the afternoon newspaper for which I was doing all-round work. I was barely on time, the last forms being locked when I got there. I had the editorial page opened and inserted at the top of the leading column a double-leaded paragraph announcing that the agony was over--that the Gordian knot was cut--that Alexander Dimitry had been selected as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Central American States.

It proved a veritable sensation as well as a notable scoop. To increase my glory the correspondents of the New York dailies scouted it. But in a day or two it was officially confirmed. General Cass, the Secretary of State, sent for me, having learned that I had been in the department about the time of the consultation between the President, himself and Mr. Dimitry.

"How did you get this?" he asked rather sharply.

"Out of my inner consciousness," I answered with flippant familiarity. "Didn't you know that I have what they call second sight?"

The old gentleman laughed amiably. "It would seem so," he said, and sent me about my business without further inquiry.

In the National Capital the winter of 1860-61 was both stormy and nebulous. Parties were at sea. The Northerners in Congress had learned the trick of bullying from the Southerners. In the Senate, Chandler was a match for Toombs; and in the House, Thaddeus Stevens for Keitt and Lamar. All of them, more or less, were playing a game. If sectional war, which was incessantly threatened by the two extremes, had been keenly realized and seriously considered it might have been averted. Very few believed that it would come to actual war.

A convention of Border State men, over which ex-President John Tyler presided, was held in Washington. It might as well have been held at the North Pole. Moderate men were brushed aside, their counsels whistled down the wind. There was a group of Senators, headed by Wigfall of Texas, who meant disunion and war, and another group, headed by Seward, Hale and Chase, who had been goaded up to this. Reading contemporary history and, seeing the high-mightiness with which the Germans began what we conceive their raid upon humanity, we are wont to regard it as evidence of incredible stupidity, whereas it was, in point of fact, rather a miscalculation of forces. That was the error of the secession leaders. They refused to count the cost. Yancey firmly believed that England would be forced to intervene. The mills of Lancashire he thought could not get on without Southern cotton. He was sent abroad. He found Europe solid against slavery and therefore set against the Confederacy. He came home with what is called a broken heart--the dreams of a lifetime shattered--and, in a kind of dazed stupor, laid himself down to die. With Richmond in flames and the exultant shouts of the detested yet victorious Yankees in his ears, he did die.

Wigfall survived but a few years. He was less a dreamer than Yancey. A man big of brain and warm of heart he had gone from the ironclad provincialism of South Carolina to the windswept vagaries of Texas. He believed wholly the Yancey confession of faith; that secession was a constitutional right; that African slavery was ordained of God; that the South was paramount, the North inferior. Yet in worldly knowledge he had learned more than Yancey--was an abler man than Jefferson Davis--and but for his affections and generous habits he would have made a larger figure in the war, having led the South's exit from the Senate.

I do not think that either Hammond or Chestnut, the Senators from South Carolina, both men of parts, had at bottom much belief in the practicability of the Confederate movement. Neither had the Senators from Arkansas and Alabama, nor Brown, of Mississippi, the colleague of Jefferson Davis. Mason, of Virginia, a dogged old donkey, and Iverson, of Georgia, another, were the kind of men whom Wigfall dominated.

One of the least confident of those who looked on and afterward fell in line was the Vice President, John C. Breckenridge, of Kentucky. He was the Beau Sabreur among statesmen as Albert Sidney Johnston, among soldiers. Never man handsomer in person or more winning in manners. Sprung from a race of political aristocrats, he was born to early and shining success in public life. Of moderate opinions, winning and prudent, wherever he appeared he carried his audience with him. He had been elected on the ticket with Buchanan to the second office under the Government, when he was but five and thirty years of age. There was nothing for him to gain from a division of the Union; the Presidency, perhaps, if the Union continued undivided. But he could not resist the onrush of disunionism, went with the South, which he served first in the field and later as Confederate Secretary of War, and after a few years of self-imposed exile in Europe returned to Kentucky to die at four and fifty, a defeated and disappointed old man.

The adjoining state of Tennessee was represented in the Senate by one of the most problematic characters in American history. With my father, who remained his friend through life, he had entered the state legislature in 1835, and having served ten years in the lower House of Congress, and four years as governor of Tennessee he came back in 1857 to the National Capital, a member of the Upper House. He was Andrew Johnson.

I knew him from my childhood. Thrice that I can recall I saw him weep; never did I see him laugh. Life had been very serious, albeit very successful, to him. Of unknown parentage, the wife he had married before he was one and twenty had taught him to read. Yet at six and twenty he was in the Tennessee General Assembly and at four and thirty in Congress.

There was from first to last not a little about him to baffle conjecture. I should call him a cross between Jack Cade and Aaron Burr. His sympathies were easily stirred by rags in distress. But he was uncompromising in his detestation of the rich. It was said that he hated "a biled shirt." He would have nothing to do "with people who wore broadcloth," though he carefully dressed himself. When, as governor of Tennessee, he came to Nashville he refused many invitations to take his first New Year's dinner with a party of toughs at the house of a river roustabout.

There was nothing of the tough about him, however. His language was careful and exact. I never heard him utter an oath or tell a risqué story. He passed quite fifteen years in Washington, a total abstainer from the use of intoxicants. He fell into the occasional-drink habit during the dark days of the War. But after some costly experience he dropped it and continued a total abstainer to the end of his days.

He had, indeed, admirable self-control. I do not believe a more conscientious man ever lived. His judgments were sometimes peculiar, but they were upright and sincere, having reasons, which he could give with power and effect, behind them. Yet was he a born politician, crafty to a degree, and always successful, relying upon a popular following which never failed him.

In 1860 he supported the quasi-secession Breckenridge and Lane Presidential ticket, but in 1861 he stood true to the Union, retaining his seat in the Senate until he was appointed military governor of Tennessee. Nominated for Vice President on the ticket with Lincoln, in 1864, he was elected, and upon the assassination of Lincoln succeeded to the Presidency. Having served out his term as President he returned to Tennessee to engage in the hottest kind of politics, and though at the outset defeated finally regained his seat in the Senate of the United States.

He hated Grant with a holy hate. His first act on reëntering the Senate was to deliver an implacably bitter speech against the President. It was his last public appearance. He went thence to his home in East Tennessee, gratified and happy, to die in a few weeks.

VII

There used to be a story about Raleigh, in North Carolina, where Andrew Johnson was born, which whispered that he was a natural son of William Ruffin, an eminent jurist in the earlier years of the nineteenth century. It was analogous to the story that Lincoln was the natural son of various paternities from time to time assigned to him. I had my share in running that calumny to cover. It was a lie out of whole cloth with nothing whatever to support or excuse it. I reached the bottom of it to discover proof of its baselessness abundant and conclusive. In Johnson's case I take it that the story had nothing other to rest on than the obscurity of his birth and the quality of his talents. Late in life Johnson went to Raleigh and caused to be erected a modest tablet over the spot pointed out as the grave of his progenitor, saying, I was told by persons claiming to have been present, "I place this stone over the last earthly abode of my alleged father."