Mr. Cleveland in the White House—Mr. Bayard in the Department of State—Queer Appointments to Office—The One-Party Power—The End of North and South Sectionalism

I

The futility of political as well as of other human reckoning was set forth by the result of the presidential election of 1884. With a kind of prescience, as I have related, Mr. Blaine had foreseen it. He was a sagacious as well as a lovable and brilliant man. He looked back affectionately upon the days he had passed in Kentucky, when a poor school-teacher, and was especially cordial to the Kentuckians. In the House he and Beck were sworn friends, and they continued their friendship when both of them had reached the Senate.

I inherited Mr. Blaine’s desk in the Ways and Means Committee room. In one of the drawers of this he had left a parcel of forgotten papers, which I returned to him. He made a joke of the secrets they covered and the fortunate circumstance that they had fallen into the hands of a friend and not of an enemy.

No man of his time could hold a candle to Mr. Blaine in what we call magnetism—that is, in manly charm, supported by facility and brain power. Clay and Douglas had set the standard of party leadership before his time. He made a good third to them. I never knew Mr. Clay, but with Judge Douglas I was well acquainted, and the difference between him and Mr. Blaine in leadership might be called negligible.

Both were intellectually aggressive and individually amiable. They at least seemed to love their fellow men. Each had been tried by many adventures. Each had gone, as it were, “through the flint mill.” Born to good conditions—Mr. Blaine sprang from aristocratic forebears—each knew by early albeit brief experience the seamy side of life; as each, like Clay, nursed a consuming passion for the presidency. Neither had been made for a subaltern, and they chafed under the subaltern yoke to which fate had condemned them.

II

In Grover Cleveland a total stranger had arrived at the front of affairs. The Democrats, after a rule of more than half a century, had been out of power twenty-four years. They could scarce realize at first that they were again in power. The new chieftain proved more of an unknown quantity than had been suspected. William Dorsheimer, a life-long crony, had brought the two of us together before Cleveland’s election to the governorship of the Empire State as one of a group of attractive Buffalo men, most of whom might be said to have been cronies of mine, Buffalo being a delightful halfway stop-over in my frequent migrations between Kentucky and the Eastern seaboard. As in the end we came to a parting of the ways I want to write of Mr. Cleveland as a historian and not as a critic.

He said to Mr. Carlisle after one of our occasional tiffs: “Henry will never like me until God makes me over again.” The next time we met, referring to this, I said: “Mr. President, I like you very much—very much indeed—but sometimes I don’t like some of your ways.”

There were in point of fact two Clevelands—before marriage and after marriage—the intermediate Cleveland rather unequal and indeterminate. Assuredly no one of his predecessors had entered the White House so wholly ignorant of public men and national affairs. Stories used to be told assigning to Zachary Taylor this equivocal distinction. But General Taylor had grown up in the army and advanced in the military service to a chief command, was more or less familiar with the party leaders of his time, and was by heredity a gentleman. The same was measurably true of Grant. Cleveland confessed himself to have had no social training, and he literally knew nobody.

Five or six weeks after his inauguration I went to Washington to ask a diplomatic appointment for my friend, Boyd Winchester. Ill health had cut short a promising career in Congress, but Mr. Winchester was now well on to recovery, and there seemed no reason why he should not and did not stand in the line of preferment. My experience may be worth recording because it is illustrative.

In my quest I had not thought of going beyond Mr. Bayard, the new Secretary of State. I did go to him, but the matter seemed to make no headway. There appeared a hitch somewhere. It had not crossed my mind that it might be the President himself. What did the President know or care about foreign appointments?

He said to me on a Saturday when I was introducing a party of Kentucky friends: “Come up to-morrow for luncheon. Come early, for Rose”—his sister, for the time being mistress of the White House—“will be at church and we can have an old-fashioned talk-it-out.”

The next day we passed the forenoon together. He was full of homely and often whimsical talk. He told me he had not yet realized what had happened to him.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I wake at night and rub my eyes and wonder if it is not all a dream.”

He asked an infinite number of questions about this, that and the other Democratic politician. He was having trouble with the Kentucky Congressmen. He had appointed a most unlikely scion of a well-known family to a foreign mission, and another young Kentuckian, the son of a New York magnate, to a leading consul generalship, without consultation with any one. He asked me about these. In a way one of them was one of my boys, and I was glad to see him get what he wanted, though he aspired to nothing so high. He was indeed all sorts of a boy, and his elevation to such a post was so grotesque that the nomination, like that of his mate, was rejected by the Senate. I gave the President a serio-comic but kindly account, at which he laughed heartily, and ended by my asking how he had chanced to make two such appointments.

“Hewitt came over here,” he answered, “and then Dorsheimer. The father is the only Democrat we have in that great corporation. As to the other, he struck me as a likely fellow. It seemed good politics to gratify them and their friends.”

I suggested that such backing was far afield and not very safe to go by, when suddenly he said: “I have been told over and over again by you and by others that you will not take office. Too much of a lady, I suppose! What are you hanging round Washington for anyhow? What do you want?”

Here was my opportunity to speak of Winchester, and I did so.

When I had finished he said: “What are you doing about Winchester?”

“Relying on the Secretary of State, who served in Congress with him and knows him well.”

Then he asked: “What do you want for Winchester?”

I answered: “Belgium or Switzerland.”

He said: “I promised Switzerland for a friend of Corning’s. He brought him over here yesterday and he is an out-and-out Republican who voted for Blaine, and I shall not appoint him. If you want the place for Winchester, Winchester it is.”

Next day, much to Mr. Bayard’s surprise, the commission was made out.

Mr. Cleveland had a way of sudden fancies to new and sometimes queer people. Many of his appointments were eccentric and fell like bombshells upon the Senate, taking the appointee’s home people completely by surprise.

The recommendation of influential politicians seemed to have little if any weight with him.

There came to Washington from Richmond a gentleman by the name of Keiley, backed by the Virginia delegation for a minor consulship. The President at once fell in love with him.

Mr. Watterson’s Library at “Mansfield”

“Consul be damned,” he said. “He is worth more than that,” and named him Ambassador to Vienna.

It turned out that Mrs. Keiley was a Jewess and would not be received at court. Then he named him Ambassador to Italy, when it appeared that Keiley was an intense Roman Catholic, who had made at least one ultramontane speech, and would be persona non grata at the Quirinal. Then Cleveland dropped him. Meanwhile poor Keiley had closed out bag and baggage at Richmond and was at his wit’s end. After much ado the President was brought to a realizing sense and a place was found for Keiley as consul general and diplomatic agent at Cairo, whither he repaired. At the end of the four years he came to Paris and one day, crossing the Place de la Concorde, he was run over by a truck and killed. He deserved a longer career and a better fate, for he was a man of real capacity.

III

Taken to task by thick and thin Democratic partisans for my criticism of the only two Democratic Presidents we have had since the War of Sections, Cleveland and Wilson, I have answered by asserting the right and duty of the journalist to talk out in meeting, flatly repudiating the claims as well as the obligations of the organ grinder they had sought to put upon me, and closing with the knife grinder’s retort—

Things have come to a hell of a pass
When a man can’t wallop his own jackass.

In the case of Mr. Cleveland the break had come over the tariff issue. Reading me his first message to Congress the day before he sent it in, he had said: “I know nothing about the tariff, and I thought I had best leave it where you and Morrison had put it in the platform.”

We had indeed had a time in the Platform Committee of the Chicago convention of 1884. After an unbroken session of fifty hours a straddle was all that the committee could be brought to agree upon. The leading recalcitrant had been General Butler, who was there to make trouble and who later along bolted the ticket and ran as an independent candidate.

One aim of the Democrats was to get away from the bloody shirt as an issue. Yet, as the sequel proved, it was long after Cleveland’s day before the bloody shirt was laid finally to rest. It required a patriot and a hero like William McKinley to do this. When he signed the commissions of Joseph Wheeler and Fitzhugh Lee, Confederate generals and graduates of the West Point Military Academy, to be generals in the Army of the United States, he made official announcement that the War of Sections was over and gave complete amnesty to the people and the soldiers of the South.

Yet the bloody shirt lingered long as a troublemaker, and was invoked by both parties.

IV

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?

V

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!